Rev (00:02)
Hey, local Bitcoiners, we're back. Rev Hodel here. I'm here with Reed. And tonight we're talking with Augie from the Kansas City, Missouri Bitcoin Meetup. But before we get into it, I want to tell a little story from my latest Meetup adventures and talk about the South Bend, Indiana Meetup a little bit. And so the last Meetup I went to was in Southwest Michigan, Benton Harbor. That's the third Thursday of every month at Dwellers Co-working Space. And this is my, this is the first Meetup that I ever went to. It's my

favorite meetup, I love it even more than my very own South Bend meetup. And this is the meetup that really showcases this circular economy that everyone's so hungry to get after. And so as usual, I was able to pick up a pretty nice haul. I ended up with a couple quarts of yogurt, a few pounds of ground beef, some collagen powder, a month's supply of coffee. And I did have a little bit of syrup to sell, but.

I've been going to this meetup for so long and selling syrup to these guys for so long that a lot of them still have a decent stockpile. So I didn't need to really ⁓ sell them anymore. ⁓ And at that meetup, we really, the focus was since we do so much buying and selling stuff to each other, there's a little bit of a, when we're promoting what we have for sale in the group chat beforehand, there's a little bit of a discrepancy on how we're doing our pricing. Some people,

are pricing in dollars. Like I like to price in dollars. Some people price in sats. ⁓ Some people, know, it's so we, lot of the good portion of the meetup was just kind of discussing ⁓ the pros and cons of ⁓ pricing in sats versus pricing in dollars. And if you're passing the purity tests, you know, ⁓ by pricing in dollars and so on and so forth, there was a great meetup. ⁓ I love that meetup. If anyone can ever make their way out to Southwest Michigan,

I do want to mention this. don't know if I've ever mentioned it on the podcast before, but I have a yurt and a tiny house that I've built and I do make those available for half price on the night of the Southwest Michigan meetup and the night of the South Bend, Indiana meetup. So if you want to come, go to the meetup, hang out with me, see my homestead, stay in a really cool thing that I built that's available. Reid, how was your meetup adventures since the last time we spoke?

Reed (02:20)
Yeah, nice hearing about that. I kind of forgot about that yurt you got. So good to hear a reminder there. Yeah, so my last meetup was great. I think I talked about it. I think we hadn't had it yet since the last pod. So ⁓ we had a great turnout. Our January meetup was a little bit down in numbers, but then our last two have been up significantly. We had 16 people at the last one, which is a great turnout for us. ⁓

We talked about a bunch of stuff. We talked about, I think I mentioned on the last time we did a history of Taproot. That was one of the things, but then ⁓ we talked about a bunch of other stuff. We talked about AI, ⁓ hit some news topics, did a little bit of Bitcoin education stuff. ⁓ And I think maybe one of the highlights for me was that I was finally able to drum up a little bit of sales. So I do ⁓ laser engraved glasses ⁓ along with some other cool stuff.

⁓ which I've never actually ⁓ shilled this on the pod before, but bitcoinengraving.com. You can go check out the products I have for sale. ⁓ They're all for sale on Noster, but you can check them out at that website. And I was finally able to get a few folks to ⁓ buy some glasses for me. So I got a little bit of stats flowing at the last meetup. And then ⁓ I just wanted to mention real quick, so our next meetup is on ⁓ April 12th.

And I'm really close. I'm really getting close to locking in a new venue. And I'm really hoping I can have more information about it the next time on the next pod. But it's going to be a huge upgrade for us. yeah, definitely looking forward to hopefully sharing a lot more information about a new location that I've been working on for a little while that I think we can finally get for this April meetup and then hopefully going forward.

So yeah, looking forward to that. then, ⁓ so like you were saying at the beginning, Rev, we've got Augie with us today. And ⁓ so Augie, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us about your next meetup you got coming up.

AU9913 (04:31)
My name is Augie. I'm a software engineer by day, a farmer. The rest of the day, I have a couple of kids and a wife and a homestead here in just about 45 minutes outside of Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas. We have a meetup coming up on Friday the 27th. It is a skating family skating night at a roller rink.

in on the Kansas side of the border, ⁓ 6 6 PM in Miriam, Kansas. We're having meetup.com. ⁓ And we also have Casey Bitcoiners.com that we ⁓ have our calendar mirrored from there and the Nostra events go on that calendar as well. We usually also have like Friday, Friday coffees and

Tuesdays the first Tuesday of the month we usually have like a circular economy event and that We just don't have anything on the calendar for April yet. So I need to ⁓ Go do q2 scheduling stuff as soon as I can

Reed (05:50)
Nice. Yeah, that's awesome, dude. ⁓ I'll be honest. So we were talking a little bit before the show that this is kind of our first time to chat with each other. I know you and Rev maybe go back a little bit, but this is our first time chatting. But I did happen to catch ⁓ one of the pods that you've been on recently and I was enjoying listening to all ⁓ the different stuff you have going on when it comes to circular economies. ⁓ So I want to ask you about that. But before I do...

Dude, what a great idea to have it at like a roller rink like that. We actually have one of those near us and it's kind of getting me thinking that that could be a great idea for our meetup too. Have you done anything like that before?

AU9913 (06:34)
⁓ we do like, ⁓ a block party in the summers, like, ⁓ it's kind of like speakers and stuff. I don't think we've, we've done bowling events. ⁓ Spencer, the Wolf of Gaines City is runs a bowl after bowl podcast is one of our members. this, this event is actually planned by, Adam Semecka, the Manowallet guy that the Bugle Boys always, ⁓ talk smack on.

⁓ our meetup is a little different than some of the other ones because we don't necessarily have like, this is this guy's meetup. Like everybody kind of chips in and we've been working on that a lot over the past year. But, the family events are key because a lot of people have like a lot of kids. ⁓ if you've watched bowl after bowl, ⁓ there's always a part of his litter.

that's in the room or running around sometimes in those podcasts. Adam has a litter of his own and it's just a good time because everyone like getting beers is fun and all, just like number go up talk, sometimes we just need a new change of scenery.

Reed (07:55)
Yeah, great idea.

Rev (07:58)
So have you always been involved with the Kansas City meetup culture? How did you find it or how did you get going with it?

AU9913 (08:07)
So, ⁓ I think whenever I originally moved here after college and I didn't really get involved with it then. I think once I moved back home during, like I moved back to the other side of the state, I'm from St. Louis originally. I was in the telegram or something like that. And, ⁓ as a software engineer, I kind of kept getting in arguments with them about being maxis and.

Stuff like that. So I, ⁓ kept in touch and then, ⁓ my wife now she was my girlfriend and then we were doing long distance. so I kept in touch with those guys. And then when I moved back, I hop back in, ⁓ more because of like the mesh that out group and just everybody there was so involved, ⁓ in, in stuff that I wanted to, you know, do my part and figure out what was going on. and I,

You know, had to put in some time before I ⁓ start organizing some of my own events. And ⁓ I really wanted to push the group to do more than just get together, have beers. ⁓ And, you know, it seemed like a lot of the talk was price talk and I really just wasn't vibing with that. wasn't in Bitcoin for the price. ⁓ And so ⁓ kept nagging people about, hey, we should like

⁓ have committees we should, ⁓ try to like, you know, allow more people to be admins of the group chat and stuff like that. we should, I started, I started selling stuff like a lot of stuff, ⁓ because I'm a farmer and I started my farm to try and, cause I could not find high quality, like regeneratively produced goods.

for Bitcoin, so I was like, I guess I'm gonna have to be the one that does this. ⁓ And so after that, like, now there's a lady that sells ⁓ salsa at them. She's about to pick up my milk route that I've been bringing. ⁓ just, there's a distillery that is probably five minutes away from us and they're closing their doors, not because of they're bad, but they just are moving on.

So I went and scooped up a bunch of like $800 worth of liquor that I've been selling, like whiskey and like handmade liquors. ⁓ What else do I got? Honey, soap. I'm the original deodorant, like animal based deodorant sales guy on Nostre. And for me, was just like Bitcoin is money. Like Oshie's notes say Bitcoin is money. We should use it as such.

I really just wanted to transact. didn't just want to just keep stacking. I wanted to buy other stuff for Bitcoin. ⁓ And I had to sell stuff to do that. ⁓ so we've got more ⁓ of a circular economy starting to ⁓ happen here ⁓ locally over the past year and a half or so.

Rev (11:29)
So how did that really all play out? It's, I mean, obviously the circular economy starts at zero tip, at least in my experience, when I see there's either, you know, people are meeting up with typically the meetups don't start off with, know, developing a circular economy as the main goal, but, ⁓ and, meetups can be a lot of different things, right? They can be for education, they can be for social. but now it seems like a big talking point is like, how can we make our meetup into a circular economy? And so,

When he first showed up, like, was it just you who had one thing and then another, somebody else started bringing stuff or was it more of a coordinated effort where you guys were trying to talk to each other about what was missing and what people wanted? How did it all play out?

AU9913 (12:13)
Yeah, so at first it was just like I would load up a like tiny little cooler, like a little lunch box sized one with whatever meat I could shove in there and I would go and ⁓ I'd always sell more pork than I would lamb. So that just kind of, I just started bringing more pork and the pork seems like people are more fans of pork. And then what happened? I

figured that people would want like some sort of, I wanted to make some sort of a product with the lard that I had from my pigs and made soap and people bought that. Then I was thinking more and more like, okay, I think at that point, her name is Hoddle, her name is, and she started bringing salsa, I think just like.

When there's one person selling stuff, makes people more comfortable. Otherwise people don't want to like just give money. And I just figured these littler items like my wife's pepper jelly and this deodorant sticks and soaps and ⁓ we're good ways to get people used to like transacting in Bitcoin, like giving an get like as part of our relationship was like an economic, there was an economic relationship involved in that.

⁓ so that way, whenever I have like these bigger, like a half, like getting a half a hog or a whole hog or half a cow or a whole lamb, these like hundreds of dollars purchases that I have a better relationship built up with these people. And they're used to, you know, exchanging money at this place for goods. And then they started asking, Hey, do you have milk? I know you have cows. And I was like, no. And so then I asked my raw milk guy, Hey, can I like get way more?

And he's like, yeah, and I have cheese too. So then I started bringing that and, ⁓ then I was like, ⁓ I think I can get honey from this other farmer. That's right down the road from me. And so like, bought a five gallon bucket of honey, and then I just have people bring their own jars and I have my little scale there and, ⁓ weigh it out for him on the spot, whatever size jar they got. And, ⁓ they just get, you know, honey and

That's also like good ⁓ market research for our farm too, because like my wife wants to do bees and has all the equipment. just ⁓ with the twins that we had last October hasn't had time to get everything set up. So ⁓ we've sold that pretty fast. So that was a good idea for us. And it made us realize like we don't necessarily want to get a milk cow because you got to move that so fast. ⁓

We're so far outside the city that it was just be difficult to ⁓ move that much product that fast and not be just spending all of our money in gas. ⁓ But we have tried sheep's milk in the past month or two and that's back on the radar since that's definitely a supply that we could get there. So ⁓ what else happened?

How do I see that developed? Yeah, other people asking me for more stuff makes me at like find people in my community because I live in the rural place and they live in the city to try to sell more things. ⁓ And I think for me, my passion about the circular economy is like specifically raw materials and ⁓ like consumables.

Rev (16:01)
You know what, that's something that we actually talked about at the Southwest Michigan meetup, because it's at that meetup. there are a lot of people with livestock and so like one dude's raising hogs and other guy, gets feeder lambs from me. Everybody's got chickens. ⁓ and so we're kind of like all getting feed from different places and we all have pretty high standards for what we want to feed our animals and everything. And so we're kind of thinking like, well, wait a second.

Would it be way more convenient if one dude, if we found like the dude who has access to the primo feed, just go take his trailer and take orders and pick up feed for everyone. And then we just go get the feed from him and pay him in Bitcoin. And now he's got a way to, instead of having to mine the Bitcoin or get it whatever way, he just, you know, can throw up, you know, $5,000 in fiat, get the feed, and then he's getting a $500 to $1,000 in Bitcoin for it. And then everyone's got

access to this like higher quality feed. Cause we're ultimately eating the food. We're all selling this food to each other. So we want to be knowing like what everybody's, you know, feeding the animals to it. It just kind of really closes the loop when you can create, when you can get down to that like base input level, but it takes a certain type of ⁓ culture, right? This doesn't obviously make sense a lot of places because the meetup doesn't necessarily have all these people that are already farming and growing food. ⁓ what, what, what do you think like,

are some of those base ⁓ items that people would be wanting to cooperate together to get access to.

AU9913 (17:38)
well like now, like a lot more like eggs. ⁓ there's two people at our meetup. I don't raise chickens anymore because it's just too, I have cows, sheep and hogs to look after and they're breeding. And then the guard dogs had puppies this winter as well. ⁓ I just don't have time for chickens and I had, ⁓ rabbits as well. And just, it's too much, too much work. So

⁓ eggs is something like the city folk that are there that have that live in a place where they can do it. They can provide those and that's like a really good thing. think, ⁓ eggs milk. I really wish we had somebody doing, ⁓ sourdough cheese has been a huge hit. Like, ⁓ the guy who was making the cheese, like his, he got a divorce and like,

has been going through a tough time and I haven't had cheese in like three or four months. And everyone is like, when is the cheese coming back? ⁓ So like that has been a really big thing. ⁓ Jams, everyone can make their own jam. Salsas, canned foods is like huge. ⁓ If you, like my wife can cook really, really well. ⁓ And we...

like can a lot of stuff. So I've been bringing when we have like a ton of extras of certain things. those are like huge, huge sellers, the littler stuff. ⁓ Honey, like maple syrup, like you said, ⁓ we got, know, this is who I buy my coffee from, but that's just because I can't find somebody locally to roast and let me buy it for Bitcoin. ⁓

I think we're about to have that changed because of the square terminal stuff. ⁓ I do think that these like base layer materials are like huge, ⁓ way to start doing that. But a lot of people, I think like art, if you do art and you just bring it to the Bitcoin meetup, you might not make like a ton of sales, but like just be persistent with it. ⁓ cause we,

⁓ for a while had a lady coming that was doing, what was she doing? Like burnt wood type art projects and like doing Bitcoin stuff. And then some people would commission her. There was this, there's a lady from like a libertarian meetup that comes occasionally that makes soaps. ⁓ these are huge things. Like I would, I've, whenever me and you were talking, ⁓ one time you brought up something like a

we need a box that somebody can just like bring into their bathroom and unload. And I went down a rabbit hole of how could I make a toothbrush? Like I already have, I have wood all over my property and I have pigs and my toothbrush is made of wood and boars hair. How could I produce this toothbrush myself? ⁓ Feed is like something that I'm really trying to get you like every time I find us like, okay.

Every time I try to, find a good, I'm in a good spot that I'm like, okay, now how can I make my inputs from Bitcoin? like, okay, I have a good feed guy. Now how do I like orange pill him and that way, okay, I can take this non GMO corn. I'm going to buy this still from the distillery. If I can get my neighbor to convert my Polaris to run on ethanol, then I can like have my pig feed double as my fuel for my

farm vehicles and then I can probably, I'll have to probably get a grinder to do that and then to make the mash. And then the people who have chickens could use that as their feed. And then Adam and I were talking about, ⁓ I have a ton of, I have access to basically unlimited spent brewers grains as well. And that's like high protein, but the problem is when you have too much of it, goes like half of it will just mold. So we're talking about.

⁓ I have a box in my driveway that I need to cut a hole in and then get it over to his house to try to see if we can like dry that out so that it could be used, like dried out by a miner, a Bitcoin miner and then used to feed our chickens. He wants to try the same experiment with all the duckweed that's on my pond, which is high protein feed that ⁓ is just difficult to harvest. ⁓

every time I just find some spot. mean, people who have chickens could be breeding chickens. Like the food avenue is endless. I feel like.

Rev (22:34)
Yeah, we've actually hatched some chickens and ⁓ sold either the pullets or the chicks for Bitcoin. So it's like you can take the eggs and get ⁓ an incubator, right? And now you've got like a live animal production facility at a small scale. Reed, were you going to jump in there with something?

Reed (22:55)
Yeah. mean, listening to you guys talk about this, I mean, it's so funny to me. And you even mentioned the square terminal thing. And I was thinking about that too, because I feel like there's so many Bitcoiners out there who are like, ⁓ man, like it'd be so great if I could go to my local farmer's market where everybody's got their square terminals and start paying for stuff in Bitcoin. it sounds like, I mean, you guys just flip that whole thing right on its head and you're just like the Bitcoin meetup is now a farmer's market.

And we don't need the square terminals. You know what I mean? Like we're just going to do anybody who like, just, our meetup is now like the farmer's market. Like we're just going to bring anything that you could get there. You can get here. And that's just the way it goes. I don't know. That's, that's, that's what it makes me think of. You guys are really far down that, that, that route. ⁓ it sounds amazing.

AU9913 (23:23)
Yeah

Yeah, somebody, I don't know.

Rev (23:48)
It's like dude, at the

Southwest meetup... Go ahead, Augie.

AU9913 (23:53)
I don't know who said this, ⁓ I'm not just trying to orange pill farmers. I'm trying to farm pill Bitcoiners. You know, I want more people growing their stuff because like something could happen at my place and now I can't raise pigs. ⁓ Some like I maybe I need to get out of some lease that I'm in and I need to call a bunch of my herd. So the more like, and then also the more competition that I have.

⁓ the benefit is like, okay, the feed that I have for my pigs, I have such a high standard. It's like so difficult to find. But if, if there's somebody raising 60 hogs that also comes next to me and I'm raising, ⁓ 60 hogs, then we can go to a farmer and be like, Hey, instead of just doing corn and soy, do you want to try peas? Like get, we can get contracts with these people if we haven't, if we reach.

like a certain scale that is more ⁓ attractive to them to do these types of things. But we have to like get more people buying more stuff to then be able to take those risks.

Rev (25:08)
Yeah, so it's like, as far as bringing the farmers market to the Bitcoin meetup, like somebody could actually just go to the farmers market and buy a bunch of tomatoes and like, okay, the tomatoes are going to go bad, but everybody's got a kitchen. Turn it into tomato sauce, right? Liquidate that farmer at the farmers market, all this shit that they got left over, take that produce home, whether it's berries or whatever, value add the product.

into a shelf stable thing and now you can start bringing it to the meetup and you don't necessarily need to be producing the thing yourself. That's something that I try and hammer home over and over again is like, have to just like, Augie, it sounds like you've done a great job of assessing when you go to the meetup, like here's some pork and then you pay attention when people say, well, what else do you got? And you're like, well, I don't have that, but maybe I can find a way to procure the things ⁓ you found the milk person and you're like, well, you got cheese? Let me see if I can also bring this cheese.

And you provide market access. ⁓ One other thing that I keep thinking about is like, why is the food stuff so popular with the Bitcoiners at the Bitcoin meetups? one thing, well, food as somebody who's homesteading and producing this stuff, it's a great product because it's something that people need on a regular basis. They consume it and they want more. so you always have like, read in your example, you sell everyone a glass at the meetup that's got the thing on there. And then, you know,

You're kind of saturated the market with your product. but the other, besides the continuous, ⁓ need for purchasing the stuff, it's also, ⁓ I think like, I'll give what you're saying is if I start, if I lose my ability to produce pork, I want to have a relationship with somebody else who I can now make up that loss in my food production from. And so if you want to be a sovereign individual, you got to have sovereign relationship. Like you have to have a relationship with a sovereign food producer.

instead of relying on the grocery store. And so that's why I think it's so attractive that people want to build these relationships with food producers at the meetups.

Reed (27:12)
Yeah, and guess one thing I've been thinking about, and this certainly applies to the circular economy stuff that you guys are doing. ⁓ I think it applies to, let's say, maybe my meetup is more focused on the Bitcoin education piece, although I do want to get some circular economy stuff going. And also just kind of hearing stories from other meetups, ⁓ at least some of the other meetups that are around me. And I feel like...

If I think back a little bit about the evolution of meetups, let's say over the last five or six years, like let's say post COVID or post lockdowns, ⁓ there was in the beginning, like when meetups were thriving, it was like everyone was just so happy to get out and to go hang out with other Bitcoiners. Like that was the big thing. Why do I want to go to meetup? it's because hanging out with Bitcoiners is awesome. And like that's still true today.

But it's also kind of like, okay, what else can you provide? Because I'm starting to think that meetups really are a community asset, right? These are places where we all come together. ⁓ We're already all in the same place together. And I think that if you're just doing the same thing over and over and over again, maybe it's not, maybe not bored of it, but they got other stuff going on. Like if there's something else that's demanding their attention.

They're probably going to do that maybe instead of coming to the meetup. And so the more things that you can start adding to the meetup, they give people a reason to come out. You know, that's why, you know, I've commented before about doing like the family night, which is a fantastic idea, right? Like give people a reason to come out. ⁓ doing the farmer's market stuff, doing the circular economy stuff. Like that's a reason to come out. It's like, yeah, well, I got to go to the meetup. You know, that's, I got to go get my eggs or I got to go get my cheese or my honey or all the stuff that I want to.

buy from the meetup, that's a reason to go out. and ⁓ Rev, like on some of our other episodes, right? We've talked about everybody is starting to come up with these other ideas, like these other things that they can add on. And really what you're doing is you're adding value to the community. And the question is, why do you come to the meetup? And it's like, well, because I get an insane amount of value for going to the meetup. That's why I go to the meetup. Like, of course, hanging out with Bitcoiners is the best and...

We can all hang out and talk about all the cool stuff that we consume from podcasts or from Nostr or like what's going on in the news or like whatever else we want to talk about. And we're all kind of on the same page and that's great. But you know, at the same time, anything we can do, I think to add value back to the community is really going to get people to start attending the meetups.

AU9913 (30:01)
⁓ I think one other point about the food is

Because these products are something that like one person can produce. ⁓ I think it really resonates with a lot of people because like you said, rev sovereignty is something that ⁓ a lot of the Bitcoin community values and like individualism. And these are products that like one guy goes and does this thing. And now he has something to show for it. And here's his proof of work right in front of you.

It's like the same as okay. I want to buy that because I know that that is a scarce asset like it's different especially if it's different than what they can buy at the store like that nobody raises pigs like pigs like me or sheep like me or Or cattle like me in the area and I can talk to that person The relationship building is definitely definitely something but I think the real proof of work in these ⁓ things like I think I read

I bought Fundamentals book and I was like, I don't really think this is for me, but like the fact that a dude like wrote a book and like did this thing himself. think like a lot of the times I just buy stuff from the Bitcoiners to be like, hell yeah. Like there's your proof of work. Like I find value just in you produced something by yourself, not with like a manager telling you what to do. ⁓

I think that's a huge part of it too.

Rev (31:42)
So it's kind of there's a funny story in that. ⁓ So I don't know if this is true or not, but ⁓ I heard for Maxi Madness, the bugle guys kind of riffing on Adam Semecka about ⁓ convincing the shake and stake. Yeah, the stake and shake to like they and the local stake and shake would not accept the Bitcoin. They weren't like following with the program. And he like bitched at him enough to finally accept his Bitcoin.

And so he spent, you he did this Bitcoin transaction, but I kind of live by this heuristic because when you, when you go to a place like Steak and Shake and you spend your Bitcoin, you're never getting that Bitcoin is essentially leaving your economy and going into the Steak and Shake coffers and it's never coming back to circulate around in the community. so you're essentially Steak and Shake is like extracting Bitcoin out of the local economy in a weird way.

AU9913 (32:29)
Mmm.

Rev (32:35)
All of these big, and the same is true of the dollar, right? The big chain stores, this is how they destroyed the local businesses is they out competed on the prices of everything. Everyone started going there. The value, the money stopped circulating locally and it just went somewhere else. And that starved all the local businesses. And so this heuristic that I kind of am starting to try and live by is that I want to spend my Bitcoin with the people with the highest probability of me earning it back from them someday. And so this creates a huge incentive when somebody's got a book and you're like,

I don't, I'm going to buy this book. I don't know if I'm going to read it or if it's even a book that I, you know, it's not really in my wheelhouse of something for me. I would never buy this book otherwise, but I know you. And so I'm going to support you because I'm, when I give you my Bitcoin, when I spend the Bitcoin with you, I know that there's a high probability of if I provide value to you, I will get the Bitcoin back someday.

Reed (33:29)
There's also like a... It kind of makes me think of this and take the story for what it's worth. ⁓ I hurt my neck last summer. ⁓ I actually herniated a disc in my neck and it was pretty terrible for a little while, but getting over it, mostly with a lot of physical therapy. So there's a guy I see for physical therapy and a few months back, I finally got him to start taking Bitcoin.

AU9913 (33:29)
Definitely.

Reed (33:59)
I was like, it'd be a huge difference for me if I could start paying you in Bitcoin. And so I got him set up with a wallet, all this stuff. And then a couple of weeks goes by and he's like, I'm getting ready to pay him. And he's like, oh, actually, can we just deposit straight into my exchange account? He had a Robinhood account. And I was kind of like, I'd rather not.

I I'm trying to explain to the guy, what I'm paying you, this isn't just dollars that people don't really care about. I'm paying you with money. That means a lot to me. This is all stuff that I earned on the side, and that's what I'm paying you with. It's like, I'm giving you a part of me, in a way. And I don't know how I feel about giving that straight to Robin Hood.

You know what I mean? I'd rather give it to you. You're the person I want to have the sats. And it was kind of blowing his mind a little bit, but I felt like it was a good conversation to have with him. ⁓ So he let me, he's like, okay, all right, fine. We'll put it in the regular wallet or whatever. But I don't think that, there's so many people out there, I feel like that just don't really think about it that way. But I think with Bitcoin, there's almost like a respect thing. It's like you have a respect for the money.

And so many people just don't have that with like the fiat money because who the hell wants to... That's the whole thing with fiat money. Of course you don't respect it. It's obviously trash. Like everybody wants to just get rid of it the second that they touch it. And with Bitcoin, it should be like, know, hey, I'm giving you this and I'd like for you to respect it a little bit. And so, I don't know, maybe trying to get some people over that hurdle.

Rev (35:58)
Do you have a lot of people at the meetup, especially like when you first started bringing your products, pulling like a $20 bill out of their pocket to buy the pork or whatever, and you're like, hey, that's not the point here. Was the culture already built up so people got it? Like, all right, we're trying to move this Bitcoin around and not just have a place for you to buy my pork with dollars.

AU9913 (36:23)
Yeah, the only time I've been actually offered dollars was when I went to one of the other meetups in the state and I just like was like.

Blown away. I was kind of flabbergasted because the guy was talking about how long he had been in Bitcoin and all of this. And then he goes to pay me and he doesn't have a lightning wallet. I'm like, dude, I'm not going to take $6 in on-chain transaction. Like I don't want the mental burden of having to manage my UTXOs. do you not have a lightning wallet if you've been in Bitcoin for over five years now? And it was just.

I was like, I took the money I didn't put in my wallet. just like threw it in my little suitcase of goods and chuckled the next time I saw it. was, it was funny, but no, everyone pretty much uses it. We, have little debates about, ⁓ Spencer loves lightning and I just heavy on, ⁓ I just use many bits all the time. And then once it gets to an uncomfortable, you know, amount, then I send it back to my, the node that I run myself because

I don't want to sit there for five minutes waiting for Tor to load my wallet balance so I can make an invoice. But yeah, no, didn't have, we don't really have that cash problem.

Rev (37:51)
Are a lot of people try... Does pretty much everyone use lightning ubiquitously or are there a lot of people that want to try and pay on chain?

AU9913 (38:01)
Nobody's really, no. ⁓ I think because Mana, like because Adam is developing Mana, like he kind of onboarded a lot of people to that. then Strike is pretty ubiquitous. So everybody, it's custodial and all that, but, and you know, Mana's liquid with the lightning conversion stuff. So slightly higher fees and whatnot, but still way below credit card ⁓ layer. But no, everyone's pretty much.

between striking mana and then the few who use ecash pretty well covered.

Rev (38:40)
And are people, ⁓ you know, know Spencer, he's totally doing Lightning nodes, you know, on the ball with it. Are a lot of other people running nodes or are they using somebody else's node when it comes to Lightning?

AU9913 (38:54)
Yeah, I feel like we're probably 50 50 because Spencer like does this presentation about running lightning nodes and how easy it is and then gets rings of fire together occasionally just to get more people the liquidity that they need. Like I need to get in another one because for whatever reason the someone that I

Was in the last ring of fire. Their nodes been offline for awhile. So don't have that, um, extra liquidity that I need right now, but, uh, we also had a guy at one point that was selling some hardware for people to DIY start nine nodes or umbral nodes. forget which one he uses in those presentations, but yeah, I mean, with that, with those two pieces of software, it's there's really no excuse anymore. Like we have a guy who

He's in financial services, like ⁓ one of the usual guys who will run your 401k, you're one those big companies. And he like runs a node now and he's probably in his fifties. ⁓ And he runs a node and

be learned so it's not something you can't learn if you don't. If you want to, you'll learn.

Reed (40:17)
And I can just say too, so I run my own node and we're fortunate for, I feel like it's a great asset to have. It sort of opens up a lot of possibilities ⁓ that you maybe don't have. ⁓ What I was going to bring up is that all the sats from the show, like if somebody boosts a sats, I feel confident knowing that that's going straight to my own node that I hold the keys for.

It's on my hardware. ⁓ And so I heard you say, you're running a node. And certainly, I did the same as you and struggled with the Tor connection, is a real... ⁓ Especially if you're going to try to do point of sale stuff, the last thing you want to do is open up your wallet and wait literally 15, 20 seconds for the thing to load up and do the whole map thing and all this other stuff. But...

I have been, like my personal experience, I've been having a huge amount of success. right now I'm running an LND node with AlbiHub. And the reason I went with AlbiHub is because they've got NWC. So with NostraWallet Connect, like I just run, like my go-to Lightning wallet right now is just AlbiGo and it's linked to my home node. And I pull it out and it's almost instant. It's virtually as fast as one of the custodial Lightning wallets.

And I've been trying to convince people too, like as I get the pushback a lot, know, running a Lightning Note is really hard and all this stuff and you know, getting liquidity is a real challenge. But again, getting liquidity is only really important if you're receiving a lot of Sats, which of course you are. And we are too, right? For the pod and stuff like that. ⁓ But honestly, it's not like we're not getting millions of Sats.

You know what I mean? It's not that hard to free up a little bit of liquidity and to, yeah, okay, there's a little bit of channel management, ⁓ but I'm trying to convince people that it's not as ⁓ big of a barrier as they think it might be. I guess I'm sort of wondering what your experience has been running the Lightning node and talking to people about the pros and cons of doing that versus, I think you said you do the eCache thing too.

AU9913 (42:41)
Yeah, I have ⁓ mixed feelings. Like I think because I'm like a DevOps engineer by day, I don't want to get home and like have to manage stuff. So I didn't self-host shit until I found out about Start9. So it's definitely great. ⁓

And I say that and then as soon as I got one, I started ⁓ developing ⁓ applications or packaging applications for it in my spare time. I've just been slightly annoyed at the timeline of this clear net stuff, but it is what it is. think.

My opinion is that if you're a business, you definitely have to run one. If you're going to be selling stuff, you definitely have to run one. But I'm not such a node Maxi like Spencer that like everyone should run their own node. I just think it's a good, it's something that you should do if you ⁓ are trying to like pay, get paid in Bitcoin a lot.

⁓ and then I would also say like, I think we're on the cusp of like mints. I haven't played with the one that's on start nine, but I do think that, ⁓ probably somebody should run a mint at meetups. because then you, and like, it should be the person who like you trust the most. Like I probably wouldn't trust them if I haven't been to their house type thing. ⁓ like I've had multiple probably.

a third of our meetup to my house. So I was considering doing that. I just have taken on other projects lately that do not have the time to dig into that. But I do think that that technology is somewhere where I think we're probably ready for that. I'm a huge fan of Cashew protocol and I haven't really played with the, what's the other one? Cytomint. But I think that that

could open up a lot of stuff for meetups because then when people come, like I had this idea once where what if you start a, if you had a mint at the meetup and you like have an event where there's tickets ⁓ and you know, people have to pay like 25 bucks to get in, but you give them a five bucks back or let's say it's 50 and you give them 25 bucks back ⁓ in eCash there. like then they can.

spend that at the vendors that are there. like you're kind of up charging the cost of your tickets, but then those people who probably just had it on Coinbase or in Robinhood and just came because they're interested to learn. Now they have like sats and then they have the argument is defeated immediately whenever there's somebody there with coffee or

honey or cheese that they can buy stuff from because everyone always like a lot of normies still say well what can you buy with your bitcoin and it's like what can't i buy really it's just how long do i want to wait for the shipping

Rev (46:08)
Well, and this is an idea that I've had. kind of call it the Bitcoin Bazaar. And I think this is where eCash can really shine, ⁓ especially because like, yeah, you got to trust the person running the mint, right? But if you only have to trust the person running the mint for the evening at the meetup, then that's not such a big deal because everybody's going to get rugged during the time of that. You everyone's going to know, hey, it's you who rugged us all. Yeah, we're going to get you.

AU9913 (46:37)
Hahaha!

Rev (46:37)
⁓ for my 20 bucks

or whatever. And, but the idea is that you would, you would get the e-cash in advance. And this is a privacy enhancement too, because like, I think a lot of the, when you run your own node and you're using these both, ⁓ is it bolt 11 or bolt 12? I don't know which one, but the one that revealed the private key node, right? Now you're, you're sacrificing for privacy. But if you just sacrifice the privacy for swapping into the e-cash with one person, you know,

And now you can transact the whole night with everyone totally privately. And then at the end of the night, you just withdraw whatever you have left over. Now you've, you've only risked your, your sats for that few hours. And, there's a good reason to do that because you're going there with the intention of spending some Bitcoin. And I think this is a really cool use case, but it just doesn't really, there's not a whole lot of opportunities to try it out because there's not a lot of Bitcoin bazaars happening right now. Right.

AU9913 (47:34)
Sounds like we need to do that at Lake Satoshi this year.

Reed (47:43)
So Lake ⁓ Satoshi is actually something I wanted to bring up with you guys. ⁓ And I guess I'll bring it up in a little bit of a different context maybe. ⁓ One of the things that I've been thinking about too, as Rev and I continue to get the opportunity to talk with more more Bitcoin Meetup organizers, and I'm starting to pay a little bit closer attention to where is the culture of Bitcoin Meetups at today.

versus maybe a few years ago and things like that. I've been finding it really interesting that ⁓ it seems like there's a bunch of these, ⁓ you can call them, I don't know, meetup collaboration groups or regional events. ⁓ Maybe Lake Satoshi isn't exactly a regional event because it's open to everybody, but ⁓ it certainly seems like the majority of attendees are from more or less the local area.

And I think there's a bunch of things like that, like around the country, maybe around the world. ⁓ I ⁓ guess some of the ones on my list maybe aren't exactly regional, but there are these other collaboration groups like the Meshadel, which I think you guys already mentioned is kind of like a cool collaboration group. It's not exactly all Bitcoin meetups, but there's certainly a bunch in there. ⁓ Like BitDevs.

BitDevs have a whole, they sort of collaborate with each other. There's the Bitcoin veterans groups. ⁓ So, and I heard you, Augie, talking on one of the other podcasts about, ⁓ I don't know if, I guess I'm not really sure exactly what it is, ⁓ but ⁓ could you remind me what it was called? Like ⁓ something Motown or Nakamoto or, yeah, could you tell us a little bit more about that and...

AU9913 (49:34)
Nakamoto Town? Yeah, Nakamoto Town.

Reed (49:40)
Yeah. How would you, would you call that maybe like one of these regional events?

AU9913 (49:40)
Yeah.

Yeah. So basically the, like I went to Lake Satoshi last year. I was trying to go the year before, but I think that has to happen to everyone. have to try to go one year and fail. And then the next year you'll go, ⁓ just to see the vibe. And I was so like blown away and stoked about the atmosphere and the people, like it was so family friendly, but also like,

deep conversations, like adult topics, and then like, you know, 50 yards away, there's kids swimming in the lake or whatever. And I like have ponds on my property and stuff like that. I'm trying to do this thing, ⁓ Nakamoto town, ⁓ first weekend in October on my farm. It'll probably be small since this is the first year, but really just trying to replicate the same vibes as, ⁓ Lake Satoshi. I'd like to add an element.

a more of like a, like some sort of Amish demonstration type thing where we like, I don't know, make a compost toilet or a butcher, a lamb or whatever, or, ⁓ it would be really sick to have like ren fair type thing where we could get like, if we get orange pill, somebody who's a blacksmith and like, or teach us how to weld. Like I think some people in the Michigan meetups did that where it's like a physical skill that you can walk away with, but.

still have that, ⁓ like that little market and maybe a couple of talks, but more just like longer timeframe that we can, ⁓ get together and cross pollinate these ideas with, ⁓ people from further away. Like I think the guys from Farmington, ⁓ that I meet with that's four hours away, the other things, total other side of the state. they're planning to come out. We're going to go to an event that they're having, ⁓ in May.

That's like a homesteader conference with a Bitcoin twist to it. I went to one that they had last year. ⁓ And I think what we really need to do is like we've got these Bitcoin meetups, but we need to go to like a lot like in the next the next layer up like in the US, you know, we have the federal government and we have the state government and we have the city, the counties and the cities. And I think like Bitcoin needs to try to grow at the opposite direction, like starting

It starts at the individual layer and then, okay, this individual branches out and finds this meetup of like-minded people. then these meetups find each other and they once a quarter or whatever, get together. then, ⁓ those, those events have like some regional yearly, yearly thing. And I'm just, I think we need more of those, ⁓ quarterly and yearly events. ⁓ because that will show that we have.

people who are, ⁓ one, willing to collaborate with each other, but also can plan something more than the five to 25 people that they can reach out to and touch ⁓ regularly. And that is, I think that's really huge and really powerful ⁓ for the community.

Rev (53:06)
So Lake Satoshi, it started off as this, ⁓ just basically like a cool party for people that were attending maybe the mid Michigan meetup, which is in Lansing and the Grand Rapids meetup and the Detroit meetup, pretty regionally, very local, right? And then the next year it grew and then more people, it essentially year after year has grown until basically now it's become like a powwow of, if you go to a meetup in Michigan,

And you can go to Lake Satoshi, you're going to get, you're going to be there, right? You're going to know about it. You're going to say, yeah, this is a place where I can go and cross pollinate with everybody else in the whole Michigan meetup culture. And then additionally, all people come from now everywhere. I kind of maybe, I'm by no means a historian and I'm probably romanticizing this idea, but I imagine these native American tribes when they'd come and have these powwows, right? They would prepare ⁓ to trade as well. And so it's like,

There's only so much liquidity amongst the local tribes. But like when you go to this powwow, you know that like, okay, we can get a bunch of our good shit together and have it ready to go and trade there. And so like, kind of did ⁓ an experiment last Lake Satoshi where I had bought some candles from a guy wholesale who was coming from Maryland and I had paid for shipping and everything to get these candles and try and sell them at the meetups and everything. Well, now it's like, okay, I know you're coming to the Lake Satoshi meetup. Bring two cases of candles for me. I'll buy them from you there.

And then I'll start to wholesale them. So this became a good trade opportunity for people to sort of bring a good volume of stuff and wholesale it to other Bitcoiners who then go and distribute it out. ⁓ And so yeah, these regional events, they're like a way to unify all of the different meetup cultures in an area and also create opportunities, like kind of what you were getting at earlier, Auggie, with like, if I can cooperate with another farmer growing pork,

Now, how do we, we can, we can go make that deal to go ⁓ source the feed from another guy locally, but then how do we liquidate all the pork? You know, cause there's only so much demand in the local area for all this pork that we're producing. Well, it's like, if you have this yearly regional event, that's like where everyone places their orders and then you go distribute the pork there.

AU9913 (55:26)
Yes.

Yes. Like, I, what did I say? I think that once you have, once you like figure out Bitcoin, need to, you need to focus on getting to one Bitcoin. And then once you get one Bitcoin, you need to get a deep freezer. And then once you get a deep freezer, you need to get a generator. then from there, I can't give you any more advice about your purchasing, but those things are like your path to sovereignty and

Like once you have that deep freezer, then you can have a relationship. ⁓ like you don't need to buy a half cow every week at your meetup and it's just inefficient, ⁓ and kind of, ⁓ ex extractive to, I only eat, you know, this cut of steak or whatever. If you go and get a half cow, you're going to eat so much more parts of that animal. And you just have like, it's just way better.

in being more in touch with nature and how, ⁓ how you should be eating those, those animals. And yeah, you don't, you don't need to, let's say like you're talking about natives. kept thinking like, they're like bringing their best blankets and the teepee guy is from the tribe over. makes like the tightest teepees and this guy can make a stove that is so light.

then you can have that specialization on those bigger ticket items. And it's super cool what could come from that type of specialization.

Rev (57:12)
So you're a permaculture guy. I'm a permaculture guy. I can't help myself, but think about the way that these systems are developing through this lens of permaculture. I see ⁓ the meetups as a successional system, right? Where it sounds like a lot of people start off, and this sounds like it was your experience, right? Where it was just a drinking club. Everyone's going to the bar. They're having some beers.

And then once you get build the relationship up, you're like, okay, well, what's the next step? And this kind of gets into the point of Reed's perspective of the meetup being a community asset, right? Where now it's like, okay, we know each other, what more can we do? And so then the next phase of the system might be education. Let's start to make sure we share the knowledge, the intellectual capital that we have with each other and bring more people in ⁓ to learn more easily, grow that cultural capital.

And then the next phase of succession is like, well, now how can we start to transact with each other? And then after that, it's like, well, how can we transact with the people that are at the meetup an hour, two hours, three hours, four hours away? And these regional events, I think are the glue that helps bridge the gap between that. ⁓ Like you said, it doesn't have to happen every month. If you know that it's happening, you can prepare for it and plan accordingly. I hope that people start to plan accordingly, right? Even just at the local meetup.

⁓ They don't buy eggs from the grocery store because they know that when they go to the meetup, they can buy eggs for me or for somebody else,

AU9913 (58:49)
Yeah, you're, you're thinking on permaculture is like, feel like why we've had a good relationship. You're much further down that path. ⁓ and your analysis is always like, I seek it out so much. ⁓ whenever I get a chance to hop on a call with you while you're having a couple of beers, walking around your farm. And I'm probably doing the same on the other side of the signal chat. ⁓ cause you're, you're like,

Your observations at that level are so much more, I guess, wise. They're detailed. I'm still at the like.

Got to focus on these trees. I need to cut these trees down. And you're thinking at the system level so much and ⁓ it always is good to pull back on that view. And I think it's why we graduate away from the beers and price talk into like education is us kind of trying to figure out what

Well, what values do we share more so than just, I want to buy this thing that's going to make me rich. ⁓ And then, okay, now maybe this community, like what we're talking about, the people we're talking about value transacting in Bitcoin. Maybe there's like, Reed, brought up like the BitDevs. They're talking about the technical sides of things. Then we also have like, ⁓ Nostra meetups starting to pop up and people talking about that. And I see that as

quite tightly coupled to ⁓ Bitcoin's journey. So these groups will pop up and have their own individual cultures around whatever shared values they have. I just hope that that over time, that depth is, it seems to be yielding such great, great things ⁓ to hear, to hear from all these people on, your podcast, on ⁓ all these other different podcasts that we listen to, that I listened to ⁓ what, what people are actually

doing to make ⁓ the system that we live in obsolete just by building a parallel one.

Reed (1:01:08)
So before we get, we're about an hour in, but before we start transitioning here, ⁓ there was definitely another thing that ⁓ I wanted to start asking you about. you sort of, when you did your introduction of yourself, you said you're ⁓ like ⁓ a ⁓ developer by day and also a farmer by day at the same time. And so, I think I've heard about like some of the projects that you have going on.

⁓ But yeah, are you working on anything cool in the Bitcoin or the Nostra space? ⁓ Rev's been telling me, I think some stories about some website tools and things like that that you're trying to roll out. Is there anything you'd care to ⁓ share or explain about what you got going on in your other day job, like your software sort of life?

AU9913 (1:02:00)
Yeah. So my regular day job is not interesting. ⁓ it's just fiat mining. ⁓ really I, I have been doing some open source stuff lately. I think the main project that would be interesting to the little listeners here is when we're calling boat arc, which is, ⁓ the native American word for sage orange. ⁓ just because like the way that that tree grows is from.

⁓ suckers coming out of the ground. And I see that as how like Bitcoin meetups, ⁓ like new Bitcoin meetups start from somebody at an old one being like, I want to start this one in because it's closer to me. Or I see a need like that. And Bitcoin meetups growing like suckers ⁓ from a tree root. And also it happens to be orange wood and native to Missouri. So

⁓ on KC Bitcoiners.com, we basically nostrified, ⁓ our website and so on there, we have like a Nostra calendar, and just kind of whitelist the people who are allowed to like make events on it. And then we just kind of mirror over, ⁓ what's called the, meetup.com ones. probably only looks like, like the difference is just, there's a purple event if it is coming from.

from Nostr. So I think there was one event on there this month that was purple and then two coffee meetups from that. And so that just makes it so that we don't have to like rely on meetup.com's calendar. I added like a shop feature, which I'm trying to collaborate with. I can't think of the guy's name. The Bitcoin Maps guy, btcmap.com or .org, whatever it is.

to make it so that we can have like an individualized map of our local area where Bitcoin's accepted. ⁓ Then I have, I think somebody broke the pipeline to deploy because I had ZapRaisers built into it, which would allow us to like.

just have a monitor open at the meetup and be like, Hey, we're going to try to raise like 250 bucks tonight and then use that to like, maybe go get a better venue and then pay for some beers. Because like, if you, if you have money beforehand, you can like get discounts and things like that on stuff and start to build a local treasury. and this runs in a way that, ⁓ like a static website.

So it's just on an S3 bucket, but you can put it on GitHub pages. Or if you know how to use ⁓ Nsite, it's just like ⁓ GitHub pages, but it's hosted on Blossom server. So you can host it super cheaply. You don't have to be super technical. ⁓ I've got that. There's another meetup. I think it's a Denver or Boulder guys ⁓ are running it for their meetup. I don't remember their link. But then I've also forked it.

for not just Bitcoin meetups, ⁓ like any group really can use this. So my local Republican party reached out to me to build a website for them. And so ⁓ that's pushing me to develop it further. Like I have an educational ⁓ page on there and like all the stuff I'm talking about is like NOSTER events. like, if there's like a podcast that your people at your meetup think is like, Hey, this is like super important educational material that we should.

put on the site for newbies, then that person could just sign an event and then it adds it to the list. And so we can start to have this list of ⁓ educational materials to point newbies at. ⁓

What else? like the committees that I talked about before, like, ⁓ I didn't think to put it on our website, but the Republican party really wanted that. So now I have like a fork that I'm trying to push in the next week or two that would have like the ability to have like a contact card as an Oscar event. And then that would display as like a list in the, the, committee. So, ⁓ I know you had made some website for your.

your event, ⁓ your Bitcoin meetup too. So I actually wanted to get the link to the GitHub for that as well.

Reed (1:06:37)
Yeah, so that's what I was going to ask, right? So I pulled up your website while you were talking so I could sort of take a look at some of the features that you were talking about. ⁓ Like the calendar view, I mean, that's great. So you're saying your stuff is all hosted on GitHub as well. So this is theoretically something I could just steal this, right? I could just take this and add this to my website. ⁓

I don't know, is that kind of how you're thinking about, like how you're developing this stuff as open source tools? hey, as long as it's free and open source, like I'm just hoping other people will grab it. Or are you thinking, are there other things that you're thinking about to try to make it easier for meetups to come grab or sort of copy like the approach that you're taking here?

AU9913 (1:07:27)
Yeah, you should be able to fork it and then just like replace maybe like one or two images and then the little blurbs. It's like there's a config file that just makes it like you fork it and you change, you know, 10 or so lines and they're not code lines. They're like configuration lines, but, um, that's all, that's all you should have to do.

Reed (1:07:53)
Yeah, like some of that, like, so, just, just, just to be clear here, because, ⁓ I think I can't remember which episode I was talking about it on. maybe it was the last one. You know, I, I am not, ⁓ a developer, like in any sense of the word. ⁓ I am a tinkerer. I, you know, I have, I got the start nine and stuff like that going. ⁓ you know, I can follow instructions, you know, to like set stuff up. ⁓ but I'm, you know, until.

recently, like until like whatever the, like the latest cloud things came out, I was not building websites. This is not a thing that I did. And so like when you're saying, you know, you could take the GitHub repo and fork it and do all these things. Like I'm mostly thinking like my flow right now for building a website is I make a folder on my computer and I open up cloud code and I say, Hey,

I made this new repo. Here's the type of website I want. You know, please build it for me. And so like for something like this, like what I would probably do is I would tell my little agent guy that, you know, Hey, I really liked this calendar feature. Could you make, you know, take what he's got here for code and just bring it over to my website and add a page for it. And then, you know, I I'm assuming it would just come over because there's not even a whole lot that the agent would have to do.

to make that happen.

AU9913 (1:09:25)
Yeah, that's like how the boulder guys, ⁓ they pretty much just ripped a bunch of the assets from the code that does like we were when we were building this. So I built this with ⁓ Hazard's help. He's the no shuttle developer. Me and him kind of went back and he, he mostly kind of advise advises me on like, ⁓ we should, you know, make a new kinds for this or that. ⁓ but then, ⁓ so like,

Well, when you're talking, what we're talking about it is like the non-developer person should be able to spin up a website for a meetup. Like a dude who's just interested in Bitcoin because they're like a freedom lover. They shouldn't have to develop. So that's like the main person. They should be able to fork this. And what I want to do for that is the same way how Derek Ross for Podster has just like a prompt that you can just copy paste into Claude and then it will just

Like I did it for the podcast that I'm doing locally. ⁓ and it just worked. So I think I should do something like that so that people can just, they don't have to know what a fork is. They don't have to know anything else. They should just be able to copy paste this prompt into their agent and then be done. And then there's like the mid tier, which is like the people who are just ripping off the assets from it, which is awesome as well. I am just.

trying to build stuff for more meetups to be able to like publish their stuff. ⁓ and then also, ⁓ then there's the heights here, the advanced here. They're not going to use this. They're going to build their own thing anyways. So it's not really the audience. So, ⁓ and I think like the next big point that I want to get on there is like getting the, I think it's NIP 91, something like the, the, ⁓ marketplace guys are doing.

And so that way we can have like marketplaces that are like the different things that are offered at this meetup. then when we talk about like A to B with the stuff that Shadrack's doing, we have like a way to go, like we don't just word of mouth, you know, okay, the guys in Cincinnati have ⁓ beef and then the guys down over in Portland have ⁓ bricks. And then the people in Chicago have wood.

It's like, okay, we can go to the website and like, we know. so we could like make orders and then integrate that with A to B. So I think that would be like in the next big thing to do. ⁓ also Rev gave me some idea, which would be like a super site of all of these. If there would be some way to like, after you have enroll, after you've like deployed your meetup site, some way to have a map of like.

Kansas City meetup, St. Louis meetup, like links to their websites and stuff like BTC map, but it's not where Bitcoin's accepted. It's where Bitcoin's talked about on a regular basis. That would be really great because then people who are nomadic and traveling could, oh, I'm in Chicago this weekend. I'm going to go to the meetup in Dallas that weekend. Oh, they have this event. I'm going to go to that. And I think it would be way cool to be able to find those events more easy.

Rev (1:12:48)
So I actually had someone reach out to me recently, ⁓ who's going on a trip and they're like, dude, how can I, I want to do some Bitcoin shit on this road trip that I'm doing. Like, how can I find out the meetups and like kind of, she wanted to, you know, schedule her trip around the meetups a little bit and be able to hit some. And it's like, yeah, I don't really, I can connect you directly with the organizers and stuff.

The listings and the calendars are all kind of spread out and there's no real one place to kind of do this research to do something like that. I, soon as Noster came around, I realized very quickly, like every website is going to be a Noster client that's just going to have ⁓ a silo to ⁓ keep, you know, silo for like the audience that is really using that client. And then at the same time, it's still, it's still like,

tangentially connected to all the other Noster shit. ⁓ and so like this meetup stuff is like a perfect, use case for it where it's like, you can have this website, you fork, you do all of the stuff, ⁓ it's all Noster. And then when somebody else forks it, like when they, if the kinds are correct and the tags are right, then you know, you've got access to see everybody else's stuff in that particular Noster client, but you can

customize it for your own meetup branding and turn the knobs to like, okay, we have more of a circular economy thing. We want to put the marketplace upfront or so on and so forth. Right. So you customize the client to meet the local demands, but at the same time, the clients, all the, everything's using Noster. So it's like the information is still there across all of them. ⁓ Like I don't, I am like way further back in this development stuff than even read with the,

AU9913 (1:14:26)
Yeah.

Rev (1:14:44)
The AI shit, like I can't even, fuck, all I can do is have ideas at this point and hope somebody with more chops can create them. But I just see this as like a natural progression. Once again, like a successional process, right? Where it starts off as, all right, you create this meetup website for your own local community. And because it's on Nostra, it makes it so much easier to like integrate that in with the rest of them as time goes on.

AU9913 (1:15:11)
Yeah, we don't even need somebody with more chops. just need somebody with tokens and time at this point. It would not take very long to throw that together. If, if, ⁓ somebody had some extra tokens to throw around and really wanted to build it. Cause it's just the same. It's just like four plectos, add a map and filter based on these tags. Like, these are Bitcoin meetup events. So we're only going to show.

those like it would be real, real, real easy for someone with an agent to do that.

Reed (1:15:52)
Yeah, know, Rev, it makes me think too that like you and I got, I think, thrown into a group chat recently as well where it was like, I can't even count how many times people have tried to like go and aggregate like all the Bitcoin meetups around the, let's say, world or even the country. It's like impossible because everybody does it a different way. Everybody's using a different platform.

Some have meetups scheduled out for months and months and months, and some meetups don't even put it on the calendar until the day before. And then a whole bunch of meetups started one way and changed and then changed again and then changed again. And it's literally impossible. It would be a full-time job just to keep bothering the Bitcoin meetup organizers and half the time they don't even know because we haven't decided yet.

Bringing up Gnoster too, it's like, we don't have to tell anybody anything. You don't have to go try to fetch all this information from all these different places. If we could just say, let's gather around Gnoster. If you're posting your events on your website, why don't you just integrate a little Gnoster client, mini client into it so that when you add it to your website, it just creates it as a Gnoster event.

AU9913 (1:17:14)
Mm-hmm.

Reed (1:17:17)
Like that is like not a hard thing to do. ⁓ And like we've been having more people start talking about like SatLantis. And it's like, well, SatLantis is great, but it's also a Nostra client. So if you've posted your meetup anywhere on any of these other Nostra clients that do events, you're already in SatLantis. And so it's like, don't have to, all we have, you don't have to agree that, okay, all the meetup, we're all going to move to SatLantis. Well, maybe you like it or maybe you don't like it.

But if you can somehow just find a way to say, I'm going to do whatever I'm doing now and post an Ostr event. Well, now you're everywhere. And if we could all start rallying around that, all these aggregation tools and trying to build out these maps and things like that, all that stuff becomes way more feasible if we can just come to an agreement on... We've already all agreed on one free and open source protocol, which is Bitcoin.

Let's just all agree on a second open source protocol, is, is NOSTER. ⁓ I don't know. The more I think about it, the more I think that that's just got to be the way that we all start coordinating. If that's the type of stuff that people want to see aggregated, I think it's got to be NOSTER.

Rev (1:18:34)
This is how you build a mesh to Dell, man. Is, you gotta have a way to have that, have the mesh, right? And so Bitcoin is the mesh in the, in the money, but we need the mesh in the communications in order to, unify all of the, beautiful thing about the meetups is that it is so decentralized and so chaotic. ⁓ that anybody can just do it. There's no barriers to entry. Really. You just start doing it. And the thing is, is if you can,

tap into the mesh, gets so much better. and Augie, think like what you guys are doing down there in Kansas city does sound like you've got all the makings of a mesh today. Right. You've got, you've, you've, you've blossomed into from just drinking beers into like having the meetup at the roller skate rink, family friendly events. There's educational events. There's these block party events. There's circular economy things going on. You're going out and, ⁓ trying to connect with.

the other meetups that are within your range a few hours away, trying to aggregate the trade between them. And now with the Nakamoto town creating the regional event. so it's like, in addition to like building the, the Nostrified like website clients and shit. Right. And so I don't know, is that kind of, is the Meshadel concept, the way you've been kind of approaching your interactions with all this?

AU9913 (1:19:59)
Yeah, yeah, I think just starting local and building out from there, ⁓ like you brought up talking to the other Bitcoin meetups, like I'm trying to go to the one in Jeff City, which is in the middle of the state and St. Louis on the other side of the state ⁓ once a quarter to do this, that trade aggregation. And I think just like. It starts out once a quarter, if at some point in time we get like big enough or the Bitcoin economy becomes.

like saturated that like I could be making that once a quarter, but if we have 30 people making that same trip once a quarter, then you know, we have every week in that, ⁓ like we would be able to get all of the goods that we'd need, even if somebody locally doesn't produce them for Bitcoin. ⁓ and just, have to start very, very small and just

Grind it out and build slowly until you have a truck full of pork or lamb or bricks or wood.

Rev (1:21:08)
Well, that's the trade off, right? We're so used to ⁓ the convenience of everything. And like, I could just go on Amazon and get what I need and it'll be at my doorstep in two days or whatever. But when you try and do it with Bitcoin, it's very difficult to source all the stuff. And so you're trading off convenience for sovereign connections and then ⁓ also this participation in something you believe in, which is the Bitcoin economy and Bitcoin culture.

And, ⁓ just taking the steps to, to start, like once again, it's a successional process. It doesn't happen immediately, but it, I've, I've noticed it's just like, if there's a one or two passionate people in a community who lead the way, then there's the momentum grows and it, and it builds. It leads to something. And the, think that that's the only way to.

move forward is we just got to keep following our own personal incentives, the incentive to earn Bitcoin, to participate, to grow, ⁓ hyper Bitcoinization, like live in a hyper Bitcoinized world, one that you created yourself, and open, hold the door open and let other people join you if they want.

AU9913 (1:22:29)
Pre-trez.

Rev (1:22:32)
Sorry, yeah. I was hoping that you'd follow up on it a little bit, but ⁓ I don't know. Do you have anything else you want to say before we get into the boosts?

AU9913 (1:22:45)
No, man, ⁓ think we could go on all night and maybe we'll have to have a post chat on CornyChat. But no, I think we covered all the goodies that the listeners will want to hear.

Rev (1:23:06)
Alright Reed, did you have any key takeaways before we get into the boosts?

Reed (1:23:06)
Yeah, I'm good. No, I'm good. I don't like.

Well, if we're going key takeaways now, ⁓ I think for me, the key takeaway is how many of different ideas that we just got on this episode. for everybody who's thinking that their meetup isn't a good fit for ⁓ doing peer-to-peer ⁓ transactions or starting their own circular economy because they don't have anything to sell, well, I think we...

this episode alone gave like, I don't know, at least 20 different ideas of things that you could be doing yourself to either add value or to go find, you know, what do people want to buy at the meetup and go try to source that yourself. you know, one thing I guess we didn't really touch on, but we have talked about in other episodes is if you get the opportunity to buy something in with your fiat money and then go to the meetup and sell it for Sats.

you just got yourself some KYC-free Bitcoin. So if there are meetup groups out there listening to this episode who are thinking about starting these circular economies, I would strongly encourage it. And also keep in mind too that ⁓ it gives your meetup attendees another reason to come out. It adds another layer to your...

what we called in this episode, your Bitcoin Meetup community asset.

Rev (1:24:45)
Augie, do you got any key takeaways, man? Anything that resonated with you?

AU9913 (1:24:51)
I just need more time to sit down and code man. There's so much to build that I want to do for this larger group outside of just my individual meetup and I just gotta chase sheep instead sometimes.

Rev (1:25:11)
Yeah, go out there on Noster and zap Augie. ⁓ You know, it might not necessarily like let him quit his day job, but it'll, it'll let you know that you, ⁓ you want to see more stuff from him. It'll, it'll light a fire under his ass. All right. So with that, let's get into the boosts. And so we got. Man, once again, that I'm just so, ⁓ excited and happy that people are willing to participate in this value for value.

AU9913 (1:25:19)
You

Rev (1:25:41)
podcast 2.0 stuff and boost and send their sats and promote their meetups. And so thank you to everyone for that. And first off, we've got Bitcoin is for Everyone. It says, Hey Rev and local Bitcoiners crew, Bitcoin is for Everyone 2026. Portland's biggest Bitcoin event is scheduled for May 22nd through 23rd. Bitcoin pizza day workshops on Friday, main conference at Revolution Hall on Saturday. All skills, no hype. Listeners get 20 per-

21 % off and so that ⁓ the rest of it's truncated. So if you want to find out how to get 21 % off, you're to have to go and click on the show and read the boost. Sorry. ⁓ Sorry, Bitcoin is for everyone. But yeah, I guess if you listen to the show, you can, you can get a discount over there in Portland. And ⁓ we've met the organizer of this ⁓ event at grassroots last year, and I'm going to assume that they will be there.

Grassroots is coming up what next month read or next week.

Reed (1:26:44)
Next week? Yeah, April 1st, April 2nd. Yep.

Rev (1:26:46)
Yeah.

So maybe by the time this is released, grassroots will be ⁓ imminent. but yeah, this, it just seemed like a really kick ass conference. I don't know. ⁓ if it's in the same place as a revolution hall, I don't know if that's the same place as they've done it before, but, ⁓ the venue, the venue, if the venue is the same or as good, it was just an amazing venue.

It looked like a really cool thing to go in. So if you're in the Portland area, I would vouch for it and say that this is a good event to go and check out. ⁓ Next, we got Matthew D, Ann Arbor, ⁓ Grand Rapids, another Michigan homie out here. And Matthew D has got a white paper soap company. And that's where I get all of my whipped tallow balm and my tallow based soaps locally. And he does...

sell that online. So white paper soap if you're if you're looking for soap. ⁓ And he's he says, days are getting longer. We're almost a spring solstice, which sunrises reconnect with nature through grounding. Great pod guys. ⁓ And I am definitely feeling that vibe right now. My life is absolutely in turmoil. ⁓ As winter switches into spring. The winter is hanging on. And the spring is starting at the same time. And I am just like running around in circles.

But thank you, Matthew D. You've been boosting every show and we really appreciate the support. Wartime. So Wartime just boosted. And actually, I forgot to mention the number of Sats. So Bitcoin is there for everyone. He put in 6902, 6902 Sats. Matthew D. 5,000 Sats. And Wartime 333 Palindrome boost, 3,333 Sats. And he's just got a beer's emoji chinking.

Wartime also, ⁓ he kind of did like a stream of consciousness response to the last ⁓ podcast that we did, which was entitled Cypherpunks Write Code. So if you listen to that and check that out, you can see Wartime's ⁓ a lot of really good insights and ⁓ comments on what we were talking about in that episode. Next we have Business Cat. So he says, or for 1,300,

37 sats business cat says, ⁓ flea Canadian tyranny settle on a Pennsylvania mountain top and start a local Bitcoin meetup. And so I think that he's speaking from experience here and a business cat is, is running a meetup in Pennsylvania over there. And a business cat also has, ⁓ he and fundamentals do the rock paper Bitcoin podcast, which is like in my top 10 of, ⁓ podcasts, like when, rock paper Bitcoin,

puts out a podcast, it's at the top of my queue. listen to it right away. I love that podcast. It's very unique. Very good entropy in your 40 hours per week if you're looking to add something new. Next we've got Mark. so with the thousand sats and Mark says, I used Shakespeare to vibe code my new meetup website. It has Nip 52 calendar events, links and a Nip 23 blog.

I'm considering adding a Nip15 merch store slash support page, but I haven't figured out all the details yet. I'll share it next week under a new end pub. so Mark has kind of been sharing his story with us throughout the pod the whole time. He started off being inspired by, I think the first episode saying like, I need to start a meetup and boosting every time. here Mark is.

He's got the website going. He's got the meetup going and he's making great strides. Keep it up, Mark. We really appreciate the support and everyone should be like Mark and just fucking go for it. Next we got for it. Yeah, dude, Mark is, you know, that is that is the whole reason why I'm doing this, man, is to, know, I feel like if we can inspire just one person, it's worth it. Right. This is this is the whole goal here is to just bring Bitcoin meetup culture into a new light.

Reed (1:30:40)
Hell yeah, love to hear those stories.

Rev (1:30:59)
getting everyone stoked about it again and people getting out there and starting meetups. So, and actually Mark's Mark has a little bit of a truncated. He yeah, something else is truncated. So if you want to see the rest of Mark's boost, have to click on it. Sorry. Fountain. I don't know, man. We can take a moment to just bitch about fountain because that seems to be every ⁓ podcasters favorite thing to do. Stop truncating.

Reed (1:31:23)
Well, I've

got something to talk... I'm going to let you finish the boosts, but before we break the episode, ⁓ I want to talk about that for a couple of minutes. But why don't you go ahead and continue.

Rev (1:31:32)
Breaking development,

all right, okay. We'll cover that at the end. Jare for 1000 Sats, another amazing inspiration. Keep building, many thanks. Thank you, Jare. Jare has been boosting ⁓ over and over again as well. Really appreciate the support. ⁓ Next, we've got an anonymous boost for 1000 Sats, and he says, please shout out my movie screening on April 24th at 6.30 p.m., Newtown Cinema in Massachusetts.

And then he's got an Avento link here and he says, Phil. And so I think, do you know anything about this, Reed? That sounds like it's in your neighborhood over there.

Reed (1:32:12)
Yep, yep, that's something that's coming up. ⁓ so Phil is actually, ⁓ he's gonna come out to my meetup and talk about that ⁓ documentary screening. And we've actually been trying to work with him to try to figure out better ways to get the word out. ⁓ Not just to the local meetup groups, but also like I think the title of the film I think is, ⁓ did it say what the title was? I actually can't remember off the top of my head, ⁓ but it's.

Rev (1:32:40)
No, there's no title

in here.

Reed (1:32:42)
The title of the film is something like, like no more inflation. I think that's what it might be. And so when you get a title like that, I think in our current age, like even if you're not a Bitcoiner, that's the type of title that can get people's attention because I feel like everybody's feeling the heat, right, of inflation. And so we've been talking about trying to figure out a way to get the message out, you know, beyond even just the local meetup scene and see if we can get some other people.

out to that event. So looking forward to working with Phil and looking for different ways to try to get people to attend that. So I think it's going to be a great time. It's a great ⁓ little theater. They've screened a couple other things there. So looking forward to it.

Rev (1:33:28)
Yeah, actually, I've seen that. That's a Bitcoin shooter. I think he's a shooter, you know, ⁓ but he I've seen that film. It's it's really good, inspirational, high production value, definitely worth ⁓ making the trip up to watch and then networking afterwards with whoever shows up. Next, we've got ⁓ anonymous says great pod. I hope I can run a meetup in my area soon. That's right. You can do it. Just start one.

If there ain't one in your area, start one. ⁓ We've got finally, God's Death with 237 sats. And he says, thank you, gentlemen. And thank you, God's Death, for keeping, boosting, and engaging with us. We appreciate the listen.

Reed (1:34:17)
All right. let me talk for a minute about the fountain boosts. So one of the things that I took on as a little weekend project that I think is going to work out here, it should be up and running right now, even though it was a little bit janky and took a little bit of testing. But basically it's just another podcasting boost bot. And so there was a couple of things that we wanted to solve.

Rev (1:34:17)
And so that's it.

Reed (1:34:47)
that Fountain is great and everything, but there's a couple things that it does. Like Rev, you were talking just a minute ago about the truncated messages, but there's another thing too, is that podcasting 2.0 does not mean fountain.fm. Podcasting 2.0 is another sort of open protocol. And when you boost a show, the information from your boost shows up on My Lightning node.

And so I actually have, you know, rather than looking on Phelan, I can look on my node and see all the same information. You know, it's just not in a way that like, you know, looks pretty, right? It's all encoded in all this information. It's kind of hard to pull out. So I, you know, took this weekend, you know, working with the AI tools at my fingertips here to build a little boost bot that I'm running on just a Linux machine in my office.

And what it's doing is it's every time a boost, it's checking every 10 minutes. And every time it sees a boot, a new boost from a show, it'll tag the show. It'll take, if the, if there's the person shared their end pub, it'll tag them and it will post a note on Doster. And so we started a, I think I called it a, a boost bot mega thread. And so we, started one, one primary note.

And then all the boosts that come into the show from here on forward are going to show up as Noster Notes underneath that first boost. And so it solved the truncation issue. So the full note is going to, you know, if you write us a nice boost, and I apologize that some of the ones that we read off tonight didn't get cut by the, a lot of this was still in production, so we didn't catch all those, but ⁓ it's live now. So if you boost the next show,

we should get the full message out on Gnoster. And also, if you boost from another platform that isn't fountain.fm, we'll be able to get those notes as well because they're all coming to my Lightning node. So I was pretty excited to get that up and running. I've been playing with some ideas about other things that we can do. Again, I think we talked about it this episode. It's just one of the extra little perks or benefits of having your own Lightning node that I have all this data.

and I can actually parse it myself. So that's one extra thing I wanted to bring up here before we break.

you're on mute there, Riff.

Rev (1:37:23)
integrate rather than segregate. is a big permaculture principle. This is one of the things that ⁓ I try and do with all of my systems is try and find a way to, when I do one action in a system, there's also cascading effects that happen that benefit other systems. And so by creating this boost bot, now when you boost the show, not only are we going to read that boost off, but on our Noster, ⁓

and put like the end pub for the show, that note is going to come out there and people will see your, your meetup on Noster as well. And so it's not just when the, cause what, what I, what I'm hoping that happens is that we, once again, I'll say it every episode, you know, that we get this flood of people just showcasing meetups everywhere. And this is the place you go to hear about, you know, what meetups are happening and where all over, ⁓ and on Noster too, right? You can see it.

And so it's really cool that you've been able to do it. And I think it solves kind of an issue, ⁓ because I think a lot of people in the mesh signal chat and everything are like, dude, I want to like boost the show, but I don't want to do it on fountain. Like, I don't want to, you know, give them my email and use their wallet and all this stuff. know, and so now you don't have to, right? Now you can use any of podcasting 2.0 things and ignore fountain and we'll see it just the same.

Reed (1:38:51)
Yep. And then ⁓ I guess, I know I already stole here the last few minutes of the episode, but I don't know, man. I sort of feel like it would be a real shame if we missed the opportunity to talk a little Maxi Madness. ⁓ Maxi Madness is getting pretty out of control on Nostr, especially for Mr. Rev Hottle. ⁓ We had some big drama over the weekend this past weekend. ⁓ Rev was a big...

had a big time upset here against Jack Dorsey and he is on a roll. So we're all, know, certainly I'm getting my votes in ⁓ for Rev Hottle here on the Nostra bracket. You know, in my eyes, the only bracket that really counts for anything, but ⁓ I don't know, Rev, I got to hear, you know, I want to hear your point of view on where everything's at with the Maxi Madness. How you feeling?

Rev (1:39:47)
Well, I guess before I get into my opinions on it, I'm curious if Augie has any opinions on Maxi Madness and the bugle and what they're doing.

AU9913 (1:39:58)
Yeah, I just hope it's you versus Ben Waymirror, whatever his name is in the finals and you put him down. That's what I hope happens. I think it's awesome to watch this though.

Rev (1:40:15)
So Maxi Madness is ⁓ for those that don't listen to the Bugle and don't know what we're talking about. Bugle News is sort of what I consider to be the best Bitcoin culture podcast out there right now. And ⁓ for the past several years, they've done this event where they call it Maxi Madness. so without anyone's consent, they just choose these Bitcoin influencers or people who

have been participating a lot on the Bitcoin online, like on Twitter, on Noster, the people that are just saying a lot of shit. I guess I say a lot of shit. So, and so they pit 64 people against each other in sort of like a popularity contest where, know, ⁓ much like March Madness with the basketball tournament, they're just picking these 64 names from Bitcoin.

And saying like, okay, so in the first round, was, I was the number 16 seed in the builders region. So they had the builders region, the sloppers region, the hot region. And what was the fourth one? I can't remember. ⁓ pod conf. Yeah. Pod conf might've been the Twitter bracket. They have two different brackets, one for Twitter, one for Noster. And so I was the 16 seed, ⁓ against the number one seed in the builders region. So against Jack Dorsey.

Reed (1:41:21)
Like podconf maybe, or is that on the Twitter bracket? Yeah.

Rev (1:41:36)
⁓ and so I had to prove that, yes, I am more popular than Jack Dorsey. And the way I prove that is that I rally, ⁓ the people that I know to boost the bugle to basically donate sats to the bugle. ⁓ and if I get more sats than Jack Dorsey, then I move on to the next round. And so in the first round, I, I was, I was ahead for most of the, the time of the, the voting.

And then at the very last minute, someone sent in a big giant boost. actually it was, well, Rob Hamilton. Okay. It was Rob Hamilton. He, he boosted 21,000 sats. Yeah. And, and you know, it's, it's kind of, it's fun, right? It's, it reminds me of, yeah. Yeah. Right.

Reed (1:42:15)
Renaming names.

Well, you can see all the names. Like this is all public. Like we're not breaking any, you know, everybody can

see the names. We all know it was Rob Hamilton. Yeah.

Rev (1:42:30)
Yeah, it's, it's so like Rob was like, he wanted to, he wanted to have some fun. And I think maybe what he was intending to do was, was a closed the gap a little, a little bit and just didn't, he didn't want to let me run away with the wind there. But what it did is he closed the gap enough to where somebody at the last minute after him, ⁓ defeated me, where at least it looked like I was defeated. But because Noster is so fucked up, ⁓ the, what, what the bugle saw as the final poll was different than what other people saw.

as the final poll. And so they thought that Jack Dorsey won and other people were like, yo, I see that rev one. And so they contacted Primal about it and they're like, so why is Primal displaying this differently than these other clients? And apparently there was a bug and ⁓ they weren't honoring all of the boosts that they should have, the zaps they should have. ⁓ so Jack Dorsey was thus disqualified and here I am back in for a consolation round over the weekend.

And that was against Justin Moon. And I think because it was over the weekend, nobody was really paying attention. So I had the opportunity to just steamroll Justin Moon. I was able to generate a lot of sats for the bugle for that. And I'm happy to do it. Right. Like I think it's a lot of fun. And in a lot of ways, I feel like I'm making up for the value that I have not given the bugle. I get a lot of value out of that podcast. Right. And I should be boosting them more than I am.

And so in a lot of ways, I feel guilty for just like, ⁓ you know, not giving the value back that I'm getting out of their podcast. I think it's the best. And so now here's my opportunity to get them a little love and get them some sats. And so I think right now, so I won against Justin Moon and I don't know. think, yeah, then the next it was Calais. ⁓ Yeah, who made Cashew. I was like, wow, you know.

Reed (1:44:23)
You beat Cali. Yep.

Rev (1:44:28)
But once again, because of this weird thing, Cali, he thought he was just on Twitter. He didn't realize there was one on Noster. So he was like, I thought I was already defeated. And they're like, no, you were defeated on Twitter, but you're still in on Noster. And he was like, well, whatever. don't fucking care. I don't think he really tried to rally, to get the bugle, and he sat on Noster. But now I'm in, ⁓ we're in the final eight. Yeah, the final eight, the elite eight. ⁓

Reed (1:44:53)
Elite 8.

Rev (1:44:57)
And who am I, who am I pitted against right now? I don't even know. ⁓ shit. Anyways, Fiat Jeff, of course, of course. Yeah. The, the man who, who, ⁓ designed Noster in the first place. So, ⁓ if Fiat Jeff is, is willing to, to compete, he can rally his, his community around the bugle and get them some sats. But otherwise I'm going to, I'm going to take that down and I'm going to try and take a run for the whole thing, you know?

AU9913 (1:45:04)
Yeah, Jeff, the Gnostic creator.

Reed (1:45:07)
yeah, Jeff. Yeah. Sorry.

Rev (1:45:27)
and get the bugle lot of support in meantime.

Reed (1:45:33)
Yeah, mean, so if you I mean, this is pretty epic. Those are some pretty big names that we just rattled off. And so, it just kind of goes to show you that it doesn't always matter who you are or what you've done. It matters a lot what the community – if the community wants to rally behind you or not. And so, you talk a lot about all these different forms of capital.

And to me, I've just got to think that this is your cultural capital is really shining through here in a way that maybe some of these other guys didn't fully appreciate. And that's probably why you were a 16 seed. And maybe you're proving everybody wrong. Like, well, maybe my seed should have been a lot higher than that because I bring a lot of cultural capital or maybe some other form of capital to the table.

Rev (1:46:28)
Well, and so like, ⁓ Augie brought up Ben Wurman. And so Ben Wurman is, ⁓ I followed him for a while and he, he was posting a lot of really interesting outside the box, like conspiracy theories type stuff, a lot of flat earth stuff. And it got to the point where I was like, okay, you know, this is your brand and, ⁓ it's not for me. So I just stopped looking at what he was doing.

But at the same, what he's basically built is ⁓ a community of people that are like, we want to support you. We want everyone to know what you're doing here. And this Maxi Madness is an opportunity for his community to show him off and be like, look, we fucking love this guy. And we're willing to outbid, in form of sats to the bugle, whoever else is up against him. I think he's against, fuck, I can't remember the matchup some.

Reed (1:47:29)
I can't remember them off the of my head either.

Rev (1:47:29)
⁓

AU9913 (1:47:30)
Odell.

Rev (1:47:31)
any is he against Odell? was. Yeah. So so it's like Odell. And this kind of gets into there's a lot of interesting things going on here. ⁓ So Odell, right in the past, I think Odell would have been more involved and excited to just like, you know, try and stay humble, but can't help himself. And right now he has no choice to be humble because he ain't got time to fucking play around and like get his

AU9913 (1:47:31)
He's versus Odell right now. I got it in front of me.

Reed (1:47:33)
Is it ODell?

Okay.

Rev (1:47:58)
homies to like boost for maxi madness. Whereas like Ben Wurman is like, yeah, this is a fun thing. Let's go guys. And so his, his crew is boosting, the bugle hard and he's going to beat Odell. I'm pretty sure. And, ⁓ I'll give it like, yeah. And I think that I'll, he's on my side of the bracket. So I'm going to have to defeat Ben Wurman before I get to the finals, ⁓ to the championship or whatever.

Reed (1:48:15)
He was ahead the last time I looked.

Rev (1:48:29)
But the whole point is, that it's just very interesting how, yes, there is, there's a lot of value in community building and building relationships. And you can see it a lot more clearly on Noster than on Twitter, because on Twitter you just get one vote. And if you want to win, you have to just like get all these singular people voting. And so what people typically do is they just kind of fudge it with bots or spin up.

fake accounts and shit, like, if they want to really just win, they do that. And on Noster, it's like, well, I could spin up a bot account and boost 21k Sats over and over again, because the maximum vote is 21,000 Sats. But it's like, what's the point of that? It's kind of ridiculous. It's spending a lot of money. So really what you see is like how much ⁓

financial capital people are willing to put on the line as a support to the bugle to say like, I appreciate what this dude is doing for Bitcoin. ⁓ It's a pretty interesting dynamic on Noster versus Twitter.

Reed (1:49:44)
I love it. All right, guys, I know this is a long one. This will be our longest pod. We're coming up about an hour 50 here. So ⁓ I don't know, Rev, I gave my sort of key takeaways. What do you got? Any final thoughts or any final key takeaways from you?

Rev (1:50:03)
Well, I'd say that if so in Kansas city, they've got a lot of like bigger events going on, these block parties and everything else. ⁓ and hopefully we can all go to Nakamoto town. Cause that's the event that I really want to go to. ⁓ but I think what's happening there, ⁓ is truly an example of how you build out a mesh to dough. You start locally, you get the connections going. You got people.

who can help you run a lightning node, help you be sovereign in your food, so on and so forth, all of this stuff.

Just look at that as an example, you know, that they are really setting an example there. ⁓ and I'm happy to, to know Augie and learn from him and continuously like you have access to Augie and talk. We talk a lot. So I, I'm glad you were able to come on the pod tonight, Augie, and thanks for sitting through letting us chit chat after the boots and everything. kept you forever. know you're tired, man. Springtime at the homestead, dude.

Reed (1:51:06)
Yeah.

AU9913 (1:51:11)
It's all good guys. Thank you so much and I'm really loving loving the pod so keep it keep with it

Reed (1:51:20)
Yeah, and was really nice being able to actually talk to you over the computer, but talk to you nonetheless and get to know you a little bit better, Augie. So thanks again for coming on. And thanks, Rev. I think this is another great chat. All right. I think we can wrap it up there, boys.

Rev (1:51:40)
Roll the outro.

Reed (1:51:42)
All right. Talk to you guys later. Peace.