Rev (00:01)
All right, local Bitcoiners, Rev Hodel here. We're back again. And tonight we have Spencer of KC Bitcoiners in Kansas City, Missouri in Bowl After Bowl podcast. And before we get into the discussion with Spencer, we're going to continue on with our tradition in telling a meetup story or talking about ⁓ upcoming meetup. And so...

last Wednesday or this Wednesday, most recently, ⁓ this most recent meetup I went to here was at Bottle Theory in Elmhurst, Illinois. And that's on the last Wednesday of the month. And I'd started going to this meetup this year. It's a new one for me. And it was a cool one. I brought some eggs to sell and this is the second month that I brought eggs for sale there. And this time people were

expecting me to have eggs, which was cool. so instead of just buying one dozen, they were prepared to buy a few. And that was, ⁓ that's kind of the name of the game here is when you can get people to count on, ⁓ the produce shown up and now their grocery trip is also the meetup, at least for eggs in this case. And it was really cool too, because I met some guys, that came from, ⁓ Northwest Indiana, which is kind of halfway between me and, ⁓ Elmhurst and

So I was like, Hey man, I also do this ⁓ South Bend meetup. And actually our South Bend meetup is at Lang lab on May 7th at 6 30 PM. And they're like, ⁓ man, that's cool. We'll come check it out. And so there's going to be hopefully two new people that are going to cross pollinate to the South Bend meetup because of my interactions over there in Elmhurst. And the really nice thing, man, and I won't, I won't dox the guy, but

⁓ I met a guy there that was the first time we went to this meetup and we were having dinner together, eating a burger. And I was getting pretty deep and specific about how I was interacting with Bitcoin and how I was using the meetups and how I use miners to buy Bitcoin, no KYC. So I don't actually have to touch any of the KYC stuff. And he ended up ⁓ buying my dinner and drinks. And I was like, wow.

Talk about some value for value. He said, I got a lot out of our conversation, so I wanted to buy you dinner. Thanks, man. So I really appreciate it, dude. You know who you are. ⁓ so the other thing I wanted to mention is I stopped going to the meetup in Grand Rapids at the factory, at this coworking space. That is also the last Wednesday of the month. And so I kind of had to make this trade-off where there's too many choices for me to go to.

And since Grand Rapids has two meetups, now I just go to their social meetup at the the brewery. anyways, you should also check out if you don't know about it, the meetup in Grand Rapids at the factory on the last Wednesday of the month as well. Reid, how about you? You got any cool meetup adventures? What's coming up?

Reed (03:05)
Yeah, man, good problem to have you got there. Having too many meetups to go to. You got to prioritize and pick the best ones. ⁓ I don't have that problem around me. ⁓ I haven't been to a meetup since our last... Now that we're recording, like every week it seems. Our next meetup still is coming up May 17th, 6 o'clock at the new venue. It'll be our second time there, the Heavy Culture Cooperative in East Hampton.

So I think last time I talked, so I have done a few things for the meetup in between. So the first thing I did is I posted all of our meetups, all of our upcoming meetups to Nostr. So you'd think that by now I would have done that because we've talked about it so much. finding the right app is challenging, right? You always have to go to another place and you got to find a way to log in and you got to get your...

⁓ Our NSEC for our meetup was not very well used, so I had to go dig out the NSEC and all this other stuff. But now that that's out and those are all posted to NOSTER, I'm hoping that now that I've got a good login method, maybe we're going to start posting some actual content here. And ⁓ then the other thing is I haven't started yet, but the solution, I started talking about it a little bit last time, but...

I said that ⁓ my meetup kind of tasked me with trying to figure out how, well, how are we going to do this? Like if people want to sell stuff at the meetup, like if we're going to do the circular economy stuff, you know, how are we going to let people know what we have for sale? ⁓ And so I was like, man, that's such a good question because that's like the hardest part. So I think what we're going to do is I'm going to have, we usually have ⁓ like not every single meetup.

But very frequently we'll have like little workshop sessions. So I think what we're going to do is we're going to try to get everybody on Nostr. And that's how we're going to do it. We're going to have people when you're ready to post whatever you got to post, you're going to post it. And I'm going to collect everybody's end pubs and we're going to host just our meetup people. Just the, if I, if you're in the meetup, I'll get your end pub. And then we're going to have a page on the website and only those end pubs are going to be there. It'll be like a little micro client.

that only shows the things for sale from the people from our meetup. And so they don't have to go onto Primal. They don't have to get Amethyst. They don't have to do any of that. All they have to do is come to the website and they'll be able to see all their stuff, like all the stuff that's for sale from the people at our meetup. So yeah, so we'll see how it goes. I'm sure it will be more challenging than I want it to be when we're there live in person trying to get everybody onboarded to Nostr.

live when everybody's just got their phones and stuff, but it ⁓ should be good adventure. I think that people will like the, I think they're going to like the result. Like once I get the website cooking and we get kind of everything organized the way that we want to. So don't have an adventure yet ⁓ since the last time, but I am still thinking about it. So we'll get something going here.

Rev (06:22)
Hey,

I got something to add to that. The idea of having like a Noster workshop is great. ⁓ and it's cause I did this Noster workshop, at Lake Satoshi. ⁓ maybe it was two years ago now. I don't think it was. This was not this winter, but last winter. And so, ⁓ like

what I ended up like just getting everyone on Noster and then making sure that they can zap like right away that their wallet is connected and everything. ⁓ They these these folks have stuck around, you know, they're still on Noster interacting. And so this is kind of when you can really as a group get in there and start zapping each other and getting excited. Then you when you're alone, right, you get on Noster and you're kind of it's like a wasteland and you don't really know. ⁓ It's hard to stick around.

But when you're in this, when you get in with a group together like that, the people have stuck around. And I think the biggest point of this all is that we've been playing around with a lot of this value for value concept and just getting these splits going and everything. And so what I did ⁓ is I actually took a picture, know, whoever wanted to have their face in it, whatever, you know, we took a picture of all the people, we tagged all the end pubs in that picture. I made a note ⁓ and then I put splits in for all the people.

And so since they had their wallet set up, was like, Hey, welcome all these folks to Noster. We're at this Noster workshop and boom, they started getting zaps right away. And there was people that they could follow and interact with. ⁓ and, and it, like I said, it was a really, really, ⁓ successful thing and popular. So definitely, I think it'll be a good time if you run that workshop. and the last little piece of advice that I'll give is that some people will have iOS. Some people have Android. It's likely that someone at the workshop will already be on Noster and know what's going on.

Reed (07:50)
Sick.

Rev (08:09)
So can set people up into groups if this is a big meetup and there's more than like five or six people, you know, can split them into groups based on which kind of ⁓ OS they're running on their phone and then like elect somebody to help guide. And so that way it's not so overwhelming as one organizer or something.

Reed (08:27)
Great advice. Yeah, I hadn't thought through the details yet, but that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, we'll see. Nostr onboarding. It's been a long time since I've onboarded to Nostr, so we'll see. It's gotten a lot better. I think I onboarded with astral.ninja, which was, I don't know, not a very good experience. So I think it's gotten better, but I'm not 100 % sure.

All right. Well, we got Spence with us here. ⁓ Spence is from ⁓ Kansas City Meetup. ⁓ Welcome to the show and thank you for coming on. Yeah, the floor is yours if you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your meetup.

Spencer (09:10)
Thanks, fellas. Yeah. Appreciate you guys having me on. So I'm Spencer and I go to the Kansas City ⁓ Casey Bitcoiners, we call ourselves, the Casey Bitcoiners meetups. Been going for like four or five years now somewhere in there, probably four. And it was just part of this whole podcast back into podcasting, then back into Bitcoin journey.

that I had around that time, around four to five years ago. So ⁓ we do the show bowl after bowl, ⁓ my wife, Lorraine and I, every Tuesday night. We've had like every Tuesday, but one of them for the last five years now. So that's me in a nutshell.

Reed (10:01)
One of the reasons we're really glad to have you on is, as you've heard, and because I know you're a listener of the show, ⁓ we've been talking a lot about value for value stuff. I ⁓ can't remember if we've really made any kind of a big deal about this. Not that it's necessarily a big deal, but Rev and I are both like we're rookie podcasters. We've been on podcasts before.

Spencer (10:08)
Yes.

That's right. Yep.

Reed (10:30)
But this is our first time having our own podcast and lining up the guests. We're doing a lot of learning and we're both big Noster guys. We're big into making sure these apps are going to be flowing and we wanted to make sure we were integrating Noster and we were trying to do a lot of the value for value stuff. As we dove in and we started getting our hands dirty and we started learning how all this stuff works, we're getting all these ideas about how to connect stuff together.

Spencer (10:30)
Sure.

Yeah.

Reed (10:59)
You're definitely one of the people that has been giving us feedback. You're critiquing us and telling us, hey, here's some other ideas or here's what other people are doing. And so we're really glad to have you on. And I think we're hoping to dive into some of the value for value stuff and we get to talk a little bit more about what we're doing and we'd love to hear what you're doing and just about, I don't know, the podcasting 2.0 kind of crowd, which we're not exactly...

Spencer (11:11)
Yeah.

Sure.

Reed (11:27)
you know, in tune with, and I think that you maybe are. So we'd love to hear more about that too.

Spencer (11:32)
Yeah, absolutely. I think all those things are great. think talking a little bit about the music side of things too is ⁓ maybe in the cards eventually. yeah, this whole value for value concept, I mean, we came from the really the no agenda side of things, if you want to trace it all the way back to the origin. ⁓ This week's Tuesday show, which happened to accidentally fall on a Wednesday, kind of.

Reed (11:42)
Yeah, I'd love to talk about that.

Spencer (12:02)
⁓ It explored in the first time I ever topic, the first time I ever ⁓ gave value for value. And we kind of talked about how we all got pulled into it originally. But for us, it was the no agenda show, Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak, who kind of pioneered, ⁓ you know, people argue about this stuff all the time, but the concept as called that way, value for value. So.

It's just that, it's just the pitch of, we put this out here as a labor of love, evaluate it. If you get value from it, then give that back in some form, you know, and just kind of opening up the floor for whatever value, you know, it's tough because you don't really know, A, like who's receiving value and B, like what's the most valuable, unless you kind of open the floor for feedback like that. So.

Yeah, it kind of removes the floor and the ceiling of participation, we kind of found. There's no, like, paywall, so that's not like, this is the minimum to participate. So you're not cutting everybody out, because Curry usually talks about, like, maybe 4 % of your audience, based on his experience, will really do the value for value thing. ⁓ So if that's the case, you know, you don't want to put a floor in and kick

96 % of your potential listeners out because there's still value in that right? But then it also removes the ceiling so if you're setting up the patreon model or the By a coffee, you know, you're just begging like please please just five dollars a month. It's all it takes Then you put this kind of like five dollar ceiling on Where if people wanted to participate at a deeper level, there's no There's not even a way to do that. Let alone the suggestion of doing that, you know

Value for value just kind of opens everything up, the whole world of possibilities.

Rev (14:05)
Well, the first time that I ever kind of come across this idea was the Radiohead album. I think it was in Rainbows. They just put that out there and said, pay what you want and you could download it for free or whatever. And I think that they did pretty well with that concept, but they were starting with an existing massive audience base and reputation behind their music. ⁓ so like, and the other thing too is like no agenda.

Spencer (14:12)
Yeah, in rainbows, yep.

Certainly.

Rev (14:33)
those guys have been doing this for a long ass time to the point where they have ⁓ enough of a listener base. There's enough people to actually do no agenda meetups. You know what I mean? Like they built a community around that podcast so big that there can be no agenda meetups. I know that there's one in Indiana near me and I'm like thinking I should just go to that and kind of turn it in. Maybe it's a Bitcoin meetup. I don't even know. Maybe these people are all talking about Bitcoin over there and stuff. ⁓ Anyway, so the idea that like

Spencer (14:36)
That's right.

Right.

Rev (15:03)
This value for value stuff, it creates such a ⁓ strong enough community, a sense of community that people are willing to go and meet up just based around their love of that show.

Spencer (15:16)
Yeah, I mean, that's the two meetups I've really ever been involved in, at least on a meaningful level. I'm sure I've gone to like meetups that were outside of that, but like never more than twice so far, So, yeah, the No Agenda meetups were the first meetups I ever went to and it was just because I organized one, you know, and this might be helpful for your local bit or yeah, the local Bitcoiners meetups in general, this idea.

Like, I want to plant this idea out there, because I found it true. We were listening to No Agenda and getting really back into it in like 2016, 2017. And we would always listen for the Meetup segment and listen to them rattle off the upcoming Meetups. Here's one over here in Cleveland. Here's one in Philly. The San Francisco No Agenda Meetup is this one.

Michigan, local, whatever, Local 33, that one is like huge, right? I'm like, someday someone's gonna say Kansas City, because I hear Kansas City in the donations all the time. So like, you know, I'll hear Kansas City eventually. We're listening for weeks and weeks and weeks. And one day, like, I look over at Laurien and I'm like, you know, until we make one, they're never gonna say Kansas City. Like, we gotta make it and put it on the meetup site.

And that's why you got to do you just fill out a form and pick a place and a time and then show up there then. I was like, we got to just do one or they'll never say Kansas City. then so we like just organized the first one with this bar downtown and yeah, the rest is history. like if you're a Bitcoiner out there listening to podcasts about Bitcoin meetups and just thinking, yeah, somebody, somebody in my area will do that someday. Not just do that one. Just do it. Just put it out there. Make the post.

and then people will show up. It's kind of crazy, but true.

Reed (17:18)
Yeah, we've been trying to come up with all kinds of, you know, one of the big things that we're trying to do with Value for Value is we're trying to like Rev, think, kind of came up with this idea of the value chain. And ⁓ really what we're trying to do is what we're saying, like, look, Sats are coming in to the show and like we're so grateful, right? Like we very much appreciate all our donors. And so what do we want to do? We want to take some of those and make sure we're pushing them back.

and make sure that when the sats are coming in, that they're simultaneously flowing back out to the people that make the show possible, to our guests, but also to the meetups. If you send us a boost, we want to boost your meetup. We want to talk about your meetup. You're going to get onto our Nostr feed. We're going to be talking about you the most that we can. I know we're going to get into it a little bit later, but we keep playing with all these different, like, how do we make this more persistent? How do we give back?

more value because we feel like the more value that we're giving out, the more people are going to value what we're doing, right? And the more value that's going to come in. And so it's all just kind of like a ⁓ way for us to try to get the sats flowing. ⁓ And so, mean, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Rev.

Spencer (18:18)
Sure.

That's absolutely it.

Rev (18:36)
Well, and a lot of what we're doing

too is we're playing around, in some earlier episodes we talk about like, what are the incentives at the meetup to keep people coming back? To take your meetup from just a hangout to a true community asset. Like how do you create the incentives and everything to build this into a community asset? And this value for value mindset, I think we can learn a lot from playing around with value for value on the internet.

Spencer (18:54)
Sure.

Rev (19:04)
and take some of the stuff that we've learned and apply that value for value mindset and culture to the physical in-person meetup culture.

Spencer (19:14)
Yeah, I totally agree. just being useful in general, think that Reid was talking about making the local marketplace. ⁓ Augie just put one on the Casey Bitcoiners website, too, ⁓ that people can utilize for that purpose at our meetups. ⁓ just having useful stuff will keep people coming back. Having interesting people and useful stuff, know? ⁓

I think that it is important to kind of do something beyond the hang, but I also think that like, because that's true, we also lose sight of the importance of the hang. And it's not like a zero sum or a binary proposition at all. Like the hang is also crucial and literally is what keeps groups like that alive when you have nothing else, you know, is just like, well, the camaraderie though, like I'm invested in these people now and they're invested in me and we.

You there's not that many people that, you know, you've got the general population and then you've got the people interested in crypto in general, right? And then within a sliver of that, a little slice of that pie, there you'll find the Bitcoiners, right? So it's, because it's that niche, it also, ⁓

just make it forces you to meet people who are pretty much pre-filtered for a lot of things, let's say.

Reed (20:49)
Yeah, 100%. Definitely. and the cool thing about

Spencer (20:51)
I mean,

the normies of that slice of pie are like very interesting normies, you know?

Reed (21:00)
Yeah. And I feel like every meetup basically starts as a hang. You got to start somewhere. And certainly that's how we started. We were that for over a year. And I was always kind of saying, well, we need to get the people before we... We can't start doing educational topics and doing the circular economy with three people. it was, how do we get people in? And I've said it before on the show, but our biggest...

Spencer (21:04)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Reed (21:30)
platform to bring people into the meetup is word of mouth. And so that's one of the things I try to bring that up almost every meetup. I send out actually an email now, I started an email list and in the email every month right before the meetup, it's like, hey, by the way, our biggest source of new members is word of mouth. So if you have a friend who's interested in Bitcoin or wants to see what we got going on, bring them to the meetup, right?

have a chat, like it's okay if you're brand new. We try to make sure that we have space for kind of everybody.

Spencer (22:09)
Totally, yeah, that's important.

Rev (22:13)
So podcasting takes work. Starting a meetup takes work, Like it's, you know, when you make a podcast, you're thinking, okay, I've got some information that I want to share. want to ⁓ engage and build an audience. You know, want people to listen to you and everything. You put some work into it. And the same thing's true. You don't want to go to the start a meetup and just sit there at the bar by yourself. You want, you got to put some work in to get some people to come and hang out with you and share intellectual, experiential capital together.

Spencer (22:13)
It's.

Yeah.

Rev (22:42)
And so like a lot of meetups talk about maybe getting sponsors. I think back like, ⁓ when Bitcoin mag like maybe, maybe this was like 2021, 2020 Bitcoin magazine was like sponsoring meetups and their bit refill was sponsoring meetups and you could get your meetup sponsored. And I'm, and I'm sure people have had offers, to get, think Reed you've had an offer for your meetup to be sponsored, right?

Spencer (22:54)
Yeah.

Cold card, cold kite, whatever. Yeah.

Reed (23:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did. It didn't turn out really to be what we were hoping for. But yeah, we had at least one company offer to give us a little bit of help.

Rev (23:17)
But right, like if you can get some help, like sponsors is one way to do it. And podcasts go for sponsors a lot of times, but at the same time, like a different choice is the value for value, right? ⁓ But when you're just getting started podcasting or meetup or otherwise, it's probably there, these, this value for value flow, takes a little while to get the gears turning. And so like in, your experience, you've been doing this value for value podcast from the beginning, right? I'm assuming that you've never considered doing sponsors and anything like that.

Spencer (23:24)
Sure.

Rev (23:47)
And so what was it like getting that flow, getting that the gears actually turning in the, in the system.

Spencer (23:47)
Yeah.

Well, you know, kind of were helped a lot by just being in a vibrant community of creatives. It was really the show Hog Story that got us back on the horn, which is on a hiatus currently. But Hog Story, we were guests on there. I want to say the summer of 2020 or something.

And then came back ourselves like a week later because we sat down at all of this equipment and we were like, well, we have the soundboard. We have all the stuff, the mics, the software. Like, why don't we just bring the show back? We had been on a break since, you know, we did a show in 2014 and 2015. Born out of just being cannabis activists in the state legalization movement. So the show was pretty focused on that in the early days.

And it was much shorter and it was of much poorer audio quality. Almost no sound effects. What are you gonna do? ⁓ But yeah, they got us to come back and then from there it was just kind of like we were participants in this online community that already had a great idea of how this all worked anyway. And we were in the same milieu, we all shared the same kind of memes and

taste and humor and stuff like that. So getting back in, just waltzed in with a few other shows that were adjacent to the No Agenda community and all started doing weekly content for their running stream too. So it was just one of those things where we had that built in and

You know, maybe that's a lesson to be learned. Like there are adjacent communities out there that overlap and there's no reason not to marry this stuff. You know what mean? We have already plenty of enemies. Like we need to find more of our allies. I feel like a lot of people just like do panicked purity tests and stuff and like isolate from one another a lot of the time. ⁓ and then some people just have like weird ego trips where they've got to be the guy calling the shots all the time.

⁓ But I think most people just want to have a shared experience where it's not all on their shoulders, but they will like shoulder their load, you know, but they don't like nobody really wants to be the head boss honcho of the Bitcoin group. You know what I mean? Like a lot of people aren't interested in. Like following or having like a head leader guy, you know. ⁓ But I think that's why we're perfect for

experimenting with other communities and absorbing and bouncing in and out of them, you know, like ⁓ Nostra and podcasting 2.0 is a perfect example. ⁓ We in the Casey Bitcoiners have had some really frequent core members that showed up that are just part of the local agarism group. And then they invited us to a few meetups and came to our meetups, and then they came and sold some soaps and other things that are.

block party and stuff like that. So just other semi-aligned ⁓ hobbyists, communities, etc. can give you that community that's already pre-baked in kind of. They're already ready for what you're putting down. So takes a lot less work. The last place you want to be is like out there convincing Normies Bitcoin is cool so that they'll come to your Bitcoin meetup. You know what I mean? You're like...

You're so far out of the sale potential that it's crazy. Whereas if you go to an agorism meetup and you go, hey, what about a money that the government doesn't just get to print endlessly, but is actually hard limited? The agorists are like, yeah, I'm already ready for that. you must be talking about Bitcoin. Yeah, I like that. They're already ready.

Reed (28:16)
So wanted to ask you something because it's funny that, so I heard you talking about it a little bit on your podcast, but it also came up in our last episode with the Bitcoin Bay folks is that it's hard, I guess I'll just put it this way. I feel like when I'm...

on this podcast, for example, or when I put a note out on Noster, or when I'm at my Bitcoin meetup, I feel like I am giving freely. And I understand that that's, you know, I guess for me, when I say I'm giving freely, I think of it more like I'm not expecting a monetary return. However, there are other forms of capital. And this is something I know Rev likes to talk about a lot.

Spencer (29:13)
Sure.

Reed (29:13)
And so

a lot of times like when I'm at my meetup, know, I do mention from, you know, we put every single meetup, I put up the donation link at the end. Um, I started bringing pizza. Now we got this new location. So I bring in pizza and I say, look, that's not for sale, but, know, it costs like 40 bucks. So, you know, if you want to like throw down some money, that would be cool. And, know, we did it, you know, people don't have, they don't care. They'll give five bucks for a slice of pizza. No, no, no big deal. Um,

But I'm thinking of it also like there are other, I'm gaining capital in other ways, right? Like I'm building a community that I'm benefiting from this community too. And so I don't think of it as much like I like demand payment for my wonderful service that I'm providing by, I don't know, like you get to, well, hear all of my thoughts about Bitcoin meetups on this podcast. So like you have to throw us some sats. I guess I don't really think about it that way.

⁓ But again, there's something in the title of our last episode was sustainability and running the podcast is free. And so we have costs and expenses and things like that. And so it sure would be nice if we could at least break even. so ⁓ I don't know. So I guess I haven't really asked you a question yet. So the question kind of is, how do you think about that?

Spencer (30:30)
Absolutely.

Reed (30:37)
Like how do you approach it? Because some of the feedback I think that you were saying before is like, you kind of have to. Like the ask is part of it. And so yeah, any kind of advice you have on that, I'd love to hear it.

Spencer (30:49)
Absolutely. ⁓ One thing that's very nice that we do do is talk about subscriptions a lot. ⁓ Because it's not just Bitcoin on our show and it never started that way. Like we were only PayPal for years because that was kind of like your option. You know, that's kind of like the only thing you really had unless you had some money to set something else up. ⁓

But the subscriptions there, we always just kind of point out, you know, the servers are auto-paid. All the bills are hooked up to that too. So, you know, it flows in and out of there. ⁓

We typically do break even on stuff like that and stuff like the node side of things. People say that running a lightning node and opening and closing the channels and all that costs, I haven't had to cost for a very long time just because channels when they open, they cost very little and they stay open for a long time, like a year at least. So I don't know.

⁓ keeping your costs down and also I guess pitching the the idea because it's true I guess it's teaching more than pitching really ⁓ teaching that that value cycle is the show it is the community like the more everyone puts in the more everyone gets out so you know we can

do studio upgrades on the show, can do different things like that when the account allows us to, you ⁓

Rev (32:36)
Well, and if you're showing that, you know, when, you do put in more value than you think, like, like, let's say Reed got this pizza, right? And someone's like, here's 20 bucks for the pizza. And everyone else is still giving $5. So now Reed actually got more than $40 back for the pizza that he brought to the meetup. Well, if, if you're a considerate with that, with that extra capital, you would want to reinvest it to make the meetup better, to make the podcast better. ⁓

Spencer (32:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Well.

Rev (33:05)
And

then the people will recognize the listeners of the show will recognize that the attendees at the meetup will recognize that the meetup gets better. And maybe the, think you've talked about it too, like some people they've got the financial capital to throw down and they're happy to do that. And they actually may be more than makeup for the people that don't. And then the people that don't, because they're seeing that there's effort going into this thing, then they're like, Hey, I want to try and contribute to, and it creates a culture around.

Spencer (33:22)
Exactly.

Rev (33:35)
this participation and it like increases the velocity of capital exchange of participation and interaction to the point where the thing builds itself after a while because the community is strong, the culture is strong.

Spencer (33:48)
Yeah. Yeah, totally. ⁓ That's a big aspect of it is just like letting people find and fill their roles. Like some people also don't really know their value or they discount it. You know, they're like kind of blind to it. They've been lied to by other people who say that they don't have value or they've been lied to in the opposite way and been told that like something they do is more valuable than it is. know, so like, I don't know, people have a

I think kind of a warped sense of value in modern society just as a general statement. ⁓ So when you kind of try to force them to reevaluate that, you what are you spending your money on? What are you spending your time and attention on currently? Is it giving you value back or is it like part of your stress? You know, like people who watch the ⁓ nightly news every single night, like, is that informing you or like adding to your stress, you know? ⁓

those kind of questions. Also seeing value outside of monetary ⁓ value at all, for us, going to the no agenda meetups and connecting with this online community means that when I go out east to visit family, ⁓

out in Bridgewater, by the way. We go there every year or two. I've got places to stay along the way each night, so I'm not having to go and pay $150, $200 for a hotel that night and the next night. That kind of value adds up too. It's nothing that shows up on record books or on the end of the year report, but...

It's still a huge value, you know, like you're saving that expenditure and you're also meeting in real life with these people who you interact with online all the time. You know, like you do actually know each other. You do form relationships with people like that. And so it's nice to meet them in person and just spend that little pocket of time with one another. You know, it gives you more reference. Once you're back home, you still interact with them online, but it just strengthens, strengthens that bond and friendship and connection.

which is huge value too. So you gain social capital, you save expending fiat capital, and that's a huge value boost. without that mentality, if you have a scarcity mentality and you're just running numbers, then all you're doing is like crashing out that like not enough boosts and not enough PayPal donations and stuff are coming in. You always have to account for that wider ⁓ value action.

Reed (36:38)
Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, let's face it, you know, this is a Bitcoin podcast after all. And, you know, and we talk about money here and money is, you know, a very useful form of capital because you can use it in so many different ways. ⁓ And so I guess, you know, especially being on Nostra for so much time and, you know, now being, you know, podcasting, you know, it just goes out onto the RSS.

There's not like, we don't have paywalls here. It's just we're broadcasting out to the world. And I think I've made the point on some other episodes, maybe at least one other episode, that it's like ideas are very hard to contain. Like words, speech, ideas, like these things, they just want to get out. And there's a reason for that, right? Like this is like built into like how humans evolved. Like we're really good at seeing what other people are doing.

and the things that are working and then just start copying them because the good ideas stick around and the good ideas are free. Everybody gives all these good ideas freely and when people get, like when humanity as a whole gets to like benefit from that, like it elevates kind of all of society. And so especially like, so the modern internet was basically built on, you know,

Like how did all the internet companies get to be valuable? Well, they built all these like walled gardens, right? And then there's paywalls and there's ads and they collect data and they sell data. And it's just really honestly, people are finally maybe waking up to how horrendously terrible of an experience that is online. And I guess my hope, and it's kind of one of the reasons I feel like that Rev and I are playing around so much with all these value for value tools.

Spencer (38:24)
Yeah.

Reed (38:33)
There's going to have to be a shift. And it's going to take some mental... There are some big mental barriers for everybody because this is how we've all been processed. Our whole lives have been lived where nothing's free. And so if you're giving me something free, you must be actually trying to rip me off somehow. And I just haven't figured out how yet. And so it's like when something's actually genuinely free...

There really is, if you can actually sense it and feel it, that this is just a cool thing. And yeah, of course I want to give back to that. That feeling, that's going to have to be something that people start getting more often. I think that's the only way. If we're going to say value for value is what's going to be the financial foundation of the free and open internet, like a real free and open internet. And so yeah, I don't think that...

were there yet. Like, I think you said, so you said 4%, right? I think that was a number you threw around a little bit.

Spencer (39:37)
That's what Adam Curry usually cites when he talks about it,

Reed (39:41)
So I went back and after I heard, cause I heard you said also on your podcast and I was like, I wonder what our numbers are. And so, know, I look, it's just number of downloads, which we can argue if that's accurate or not. Number of downloads and the number of unique boosters, right? And we're at like 6%. So not a whole, it's right in that mix. And so it'll be really interesting to see if we can, because

Spencer (39:53)
Sure.

Mm-hmm.

So that's right in there, yeah.

Reed (40:10)
So the Nostra community, I feel like, is more primed for this. ⁓ Definitely smaller numbers. 21SATs is not exactly generational wealth yet, but I don't know. mean, we'll see. we're... Yeah.

Spencer (40:24)
Sure.

It's more like a shave off of a coin.

It's just like one coin shaving, 20 cents.

Reed (40:35)
Right.

Spencer (40:37)
Rev, I'm not able to hear you.

Rev (40:40)
So I think the reason why the 6 % number is what it is, is because in the past there was so much friction in creating velocity. And so now with this Noster Wallet Connect, with Lightning, everything, it becomes much easier to just give small amounts of value frequently, much more frequently. If you're doing the value for value with zaps, with boosts, with sats.

So it's just not a like I'm trying to, I'm actually, you know, having to like train myself to getting used to that. Like, Hey man, yeah, this person's giving me value all the time. I'm going to make sure every time I'm zapping them something that I'm pushing these sets through. Because if you add it up, like, all right, so David Bennett with the Bitcoin and podcast, right? He releases like several episodes ⁓ a week, right? And so you start to think, okay, so if I,

Spencer (41:22)
Yeah.

Rev (41:36)
You you add it like kind of start to think financially like, okay, if I zap this dude, my normal amount, like every single episode, that's going to end up to be ⁓ a pretty more substantial than the value that I'm getting. But if I just for that, you know, for that guy, just every time hundreds, just over time, just keep doing these small amounts and do that with everything. Then ⁓ if a lot of people start acting this way, then this dude does, no one needs big, big zaps, right? A bunch of little zaps from a higher percentage.

of the audience because the culture is there creates it so that it evens out, you know? And it's just like Reed was saying, it's a hard mindset to get into because it's so new. it's never been so easy, but you're just not used to it. So you have to like train yourself to just, yeah, fucking zap, zap, zap, zap, zap.

Spencer (42:10)
Yeah.

Totally.

Yeah,

I think really a big hole that needs to be filled that I've had these kind of ideas for a long time. And it's only in the past, I don't know, maybe month that I've been executing and ⁓ finalizing some of this stuff like the website rebuild and adding features to that and stuff like that. So I think the hole that exists right now is just kind of gamifying it in a way where people feel like they're getting something back out because

⁓ It is kind of small and early, relatively speaking, for sure. And I know people a lot of times will get in and then they'll like find that out, even though we talk about it a lot, they'll like find it out for themselves and it's like real for the first time. And then, you know, they just, a lot of people can't get that long-term mindset established, you know?

It's funny, I see that a lot in the music side of things. ⁓ When we put Stay Awhile out in Christmas of 2021, was Christmas Eve, 2021, we were the first to sit down and write music and plan from a business point of things the whole album just for the V for V on lightning rails. And that's it. And established the.

Contract between the musicians and the artists and everybody on the project in the RSS feed like the RSS feed was the agreement essentially, right? And so when we released that there was like other music on RSS feeds, but You know some of it was just kind of like DJ sets. Some of it was people reposting their albums over there Dave Jones put His kids band on there

pretty early on as like a test case, you ⁓ It was very quiet and very crickets, but we still had our dedicated people in our dedicated core and we got boosts and we got support, you know what I mean? And we have gotten boosts regularly on that album ever since, so it's out there forever, still kind of collecting that stuff. You we haven't worked on it since then, and it still is out there. People play it on music shows. People continue to send value that way.

So watching it from, you know, it'll be five years this Christmas Eve. Like the music side of stuff, the music side of value for value has exploded and kind of ⁓ has a few different arms even, I would say that have come off of where it originated. ⁓ And in all of those little pockets, people get in and then they like crash out about how few things are going on, how few people are going on, how difficult everything is, all of these

problems to where from my perspective it's like dude there's more people than ever it's been increasing there's more ways to do it than ever it's actually really easy do you remember back when you had to do all of this shit so ⁓ it's like you've got to be mentally prepared to settle in for the long haul you know like we're not looking for two million people tomorrow we're looking for

keeping what we've got going and improving on it with like, you know, a lot of people get them lost in the metrics as though that's the only sign of success or failure and where to steer, you know, and really value as an aggregate is that value as an aggregate is where you should be putting more attention, less attention, et cetera. Like if you're losing

If you're putting a lot of energy, time and value into a certain spot of it and you're not getting a lot out, it's just frustrating. You know, maybe drop it or maybe drop it for a while and pick it back up. think gamifying it in a way like I, as a simple idea, like having a 50-50 raffle every time, you know, that way there's some winner, but then the meetup always wins. ⁓ That's kind of fun. ⁓

best gamification that no agenda ever did was their nighting and their peerage program, you know, so you can kind of have a social flex baked into your lifetime support and your lifetime value of the show. Stuff like that is, think, where we should push if we really need to up the money side of things, you know, the monetary ⁓ stuff, because I agree with you that that could use a boost up, but

It's also, we're still in such a building phase that I hate to really like lean on that fully as the, you know, the metric.

Rev (47:21)
Well, it's it's a process

of, of succession, right? And it's like, well, first of all, it's, it's so, it's so new and there's, there's not, like you said, the community is relatively small. And so to have like this full robust culture, ⁓ that, that does just, there's enough capital creation that the value can flow and people can really truly be supported is, ⁓ romantic at best, right? Right now what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure this shit out and create some, some good structure around.

Spencer (47:25)
Absolutely.

Rev (47:51)
some good ways to do this. And gamification is the way that you can create, ⁓ that now people can play, right? Let's just play. Here's some ideas we're playing now and nobody's expecting, you know, we don't have like the expected expectations are not, that I'm going to be, like you said, pay my electric bill with this shit. The point is to see how much capital we can create, how, how can this value chain react and flow and

Spencer (47:59)
Yeah. Yep.

Rev (48:20)
and how can we ⁓ figure stuff out, learn.

Spencer (48:23)
Yeah, even simple feedback for participation to is ⁓ like more valuable to the participant than people realize. You know, the not only the thank yous, but the different, you know, you guys heard the bowling pins crash earlier is because Chad F boosted in. So he sent three thirty three from Castamatic saying we live. And so he's listening live. And then that like turns the disco ball on above my head. Like all of that kind of stuff, too, is

gamification and feedback and value. Like if you set it up once and then that's always happening. Like people like to just do that. Like they know that they can light the thing up and so they boost in or they know that they can send a message directly into the chat automatically. And then, you know, comes with a number that means something. It comes with extra weight, you know, the idea of a super chat is probably the most familiar free

free will value exchange right now in internet culture, know, the super chat. Like even just normies, no Bitcoin, no nothing, I understand that.

Reed (49:35)
Yeah, I was thinking about this week, how this whole V for V movement scales. Because I was starting to think about it like... So we started from zero, right? It's not like we came with some big audience and we started doing the V for V stuff. We started from zero ⁓ because we're brand new podcasts and that's just how goes. ⁓

As we start rolling out all these cool tools, and I really feel like you're setting us up here for... I can't wait to start talking about the leaderboards and all this cool stuff because we have other ideas too, and I kind of want to get your feedback on some of that stuff. So ⁓ let's hold that. ⁓ But I just imagine, take the super chats. Great example. Because some of these YouTube...

people with the super chats, they make pretty good money. are millions of views and all these people with the super chats and most of them don't even read them out on the air. Some of them do, like the big ones, they'll be like, ⁓ thanks for the $100 super chats. my God. I just try to think about if those people knew that there were all these other tools.

Spencer (50:36)
Sure.

Mm-hmm.

Sure.

Reed (51:01)
and all these other feedback mechanisms that they could tap into that didn't require them in the middle of their live stream to be like calling out like right in the middle of their thought, thanks for the super chat, you know? And how many of those went by while they were like deep in thought or in the middle of their point that they didn't say anything to because they were distracted or whatever. And so that's why I really like some of the bots and stuff that we're doing. And I know you have bot for your podcast too, but...

⁓ some of the stuff that you can do to give back. And I wonder if they tapped into those, what their numbers would actually look like. They might be significantly better than what they're doing today. ⁓ But we won't really know until maybe we find a way to bring some of those people over and let them experience the value for value side with like, come in with an existing massive audience and see what you can do over here.

Spencer (51:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, I always wonder about that. ⁓ And I don't know, it's kind of like, also think, and you said earlier, like there needs to be a shift to this idea. I'm ⁓ open-minded to the possibility that it won't ever mainstream, or at least not in our time, or that it won't ever, you know, like that huge ⁓ streamers with, let's say, a Twitch,

count or let's say a rumble or whatever they found that is a platform, these platformed guys will probably not, I think they'd be staying pretty comfortable on their platforms once they blowed out inside of them. I don't know, I think that it's easy to spin wheels and lose energy on.

like the hypotheticals and like the what if we landed a really big guy or what if we you know that stuff will happen over time but it's kind of like

I don't know, it's weird. I always feel like that's on God's timeline. ⁓ What's an example? Like, Rite Said Fred came into the Nostra space really recently and everybody's hyped on that. ⁓ There's a few guys that getting it that are bigger names lately. And that'll just happen naturally. I think that it's gonna take a belief from them too.

I think that if you really did, let's say, orange and purple pill in one drunken night, like, I don't know, a guy like Shia Labeouf or something, but let's pick somebody that's like, ⁓ you know, maybe unpredictable. A guy like Kanye. ⁓ And you like convinced him of the thing one night and then it flipped over. And then what, like?

I don't even know if a massive audience is ready for something like that. Because if you get a bunch of people getting in there and seeing the level of dysfunction that we become accustomed to and used to, you know, and the level of like technical pain that we are kind of just like calloused to and like rarely even notice a lot of times, ⁓ you know, people are going to get a taste in their mouth that they'll just never.

come back, you know, I think that you will, if you just let it be organic and people get it when they're supposed to get it, then it can fill up over time, nice and gradually. And then you've got people that are helping build at the right points too. But a big rush all of the sudden, like worst case scenario, you get like actual capture and we're just under the same slave masters as before, you know.

Like Spotify comes in here and sets up a new Spotify thing that you can send lightning through, you know, but it tracks you and it makes you use their wallet and it, you know, does all the things that we are trying to kind of build away from and get away from. Like, I think I just always see those kinds of end games in the mass adoption sparkly eyed ⁓ dreams. think that like more adoption is always better.

But it's not the goal, you know what I mean? I think the goal should be more practical. The goal should be like, I want this particular feature. The goal should be like, this needs to be redesigned in a way that is understandable when I first look at it, you know? ⁓ All that kind of stuff.

Rev (55:49)
Well, and

I don't think it's necessarily about ⁓ numbers per se. And I said this before on the, think on even the last episode, I might say it every episode. Maybe this is just a common thing I'll say, but it's not the numbers that build the gravity. It's the cultural capital that builds the gravity. And at the same time, like if you increase the velocity, right? If it is true that in any exchange of value, each person received more, like,

They got the good side of the deal, right? That's why you did the exchange. ⁓ If you increase the velocity, that means that there's incredible amounts of capital creation. And once again, this capital creation doesn't necessarily have to be financial capital, okay? And so if you increase the velocity of exchange, then that increases the capital, right? And so then that increases the cultural capital ultimately, and that creates the gravity. And so you don't necessarily need numbers, you just need people to actually cooperate.

frequently and continuously be exchanging.

And I think that the podcast is like the funnel, right? That can slow, like you said, bring the slow trickle in. People hear the podcast outside of the whole ecosystem. And as they listen to this and as they become aware, they might just start to dip their toes in. that's, ⁓ as the capital grows, there's more room for more entrance, right? For more new people to come as well.

Spencer (57:16)
Absolutely. ⁓ Another thing that gets, I think, discounted a lot in the value for value trials is, you know, your producers, like as they show up and as they start to produce value for you. Like we mentioned the different bots that go on. There's an army of bots in the IRC. ⁓ There are Nostr bots, et cetera. All of these things are built by

our producers, know, like ⁓ Cotton Gin, Chad F, Eric PP, these guys that are in the chats, Servo, ⁓ they're the ones putting the things together and putting them out there, you know, so ⁓ as your audience grows and as you start to find those finer-tuned values, you'll start to find people who will do those things that are harder for you to keep up with, things like promotion, things like

additional tools. ⁓ Some people might turn you on to tools that you never even heard of or thought of before and they're already ready to go. You just add your show to it or whatever. Spin a lounge IRC instance up, those kind of things. ⁓ There's a lot of value that people can just give if you let them. I've seen a lot of people get like... ⁓

really hung up on creative control and like everything control, know? And so like if they didn't do it directly, the whole thing top to bottom, then it's not like good enough to put on their show or have like a contribute. And it's like, all right, I'm a little, you know, I'm gonna have a little humility and accept the value coming in. The value is real, the value is like happening, you know? ⁓

Reed (59:12)
So I didn't want to miss my opportunity completely. I sort of let it go by because I wanted to make a different point. But you started talking a little bit about the V for V music stuff, which I keep calling it V for V music. And I think maybe it's not called that. I think maybe it's called D-MU, which I didn't even know that. ⁓ But the reason why I wanted to circle back to this, so you may have heard. So this new venue that I'm at for my Bitcoin meetup, it's a music venue.

where it's just a small community thing. ⁓ It's a heavy metal band place. And on Sunday nights, they don't have shows. But they have a bar and the bar is open. so they've got this whole, ⁓ it's not big. This is not like a big, there's no seating or anything, right? It's just a small venue. ⁓ But it's like perfect size for our meetup. And it's bigger than we need. Like we could grow into this place. And so the first, I'm not gonna lie.

Spencer (59:44)
Share.

Reed (1:00:10)
I was so excited about landing this place. And they're letting us use it for free because we bring people to the bar. at this point, that's really what they're interested in is how do we get people into this place? You want to come? Come on in. We're not using the room anyway. Look, I'm not going to be the Bitcoin guy.

Spencer (1:00:23)
Sure, of course. Yep.

Yeah.

Reed (1:00:37)
brand new to your venue and it's nice to meet you and you must accept Bitcoin today at the bar. Like, look, we'll get there. Okay? Like I'm not going to be like throwing this right in their face right away. I'm just happy to be there for right now. ⁓ But I can't help but think like at some point, this would be a great opportunity to start talking to artists and stuff about how do you monetize? Like, are there other ways that you can do this? Because if you want, like maybe we could do an experiment here.

Spencer (1:00:42)
Right.

Reed (1:01:05)
and see how have a V for V music concert or like a Toonster event or something like that. And now I don't know what I'm doing. I learned pretty quickly though. I didn't know what I was doing with podcasting. I didn't know what I was doing with Nostra. I didn't know what I was doing when I started Lightning Node. You just kind of learn stuff as you go. So I'm certainly open to learn. But yeah, so I've put out a call multiple times for...

Spencer (1:01:20)
Sure.

Reed (1:01:34)
If people have ideas for me or like maybe there's a podcast out there that I should go listen to that's like all about the best ways to approach this. Like, hey, if you know artists, like this is how you talk to them about this. ⁓ So yeah, if you have any, because I know that you've been a little bit involved in that scene. So any kind of advice that you'd like to share here, I'd love to hear it.

Spencer (1:01:36)
share.

Yeah.

Totally, yeah, it's the same exact question. It's the same chestnut, isn't it? It's the, how do you pill? How do you orange and purple pill? How do you explain to someone who doesn't have the framework to get it yet? How do you make them get it? And the answer, the uncomfortable answer is that you do not ever a single time do that. It doesn't work. They will get it though, but they have to.

It's one of those things. So what you can do is a thousand things. What you can do is tell them about it excitedly, of course, which you always do anyway, because you can't help it. ⁓ What you do is you can rib them over time. You you make fun of them because they're actually the crazy one. And like they see you as the crazy guy with too much money in this Bitcoin thing. He's going to go to zero and he's going to like, then I'll get him, you know, you know.

You just keep doing these sort of things over time and over years, right? Like the artist that's going to be interested in doing a spot at your bar is the one that already is a Bitcoiner and happens to be an artist. So you just have to find that guy. You're not convincing any guy. You got to find the guy that's already convinced or is ready to be convinced. So what that means is you talk to a lot of people and you keep talking about this. Yeah, but

There's no guide or step book or anything like that because nothing works. Nothing is that thing that makes people get it. know, like people just show up once they do get it. And often for many of us, especially that believe a little more deeply, it's just going through some pain, going through some pain of misunderstanding and doing it the wrong way and learning, whether that's a

Reed (1:03:51)
But

there are things that… I mean, you're correct, of course. First of all, I totally agree. ⁓ And there was a period in my Bitcoin rabbit hole where I decided I was going to go crazy and tell everybody everything about all this stuff that I'm so excited about. And of course, that didn't work. Right. Of course, that didn't work. However, and I don't do that anymore.

Spencer (1:04:08)
Yeah. Well, you owe it to them, right? Like, you love them, you care about them, right? So of course you would have to tell them. Of course.

Reed (1:04:21)
I do and I still do frequently, I'll have like one-liners, right? Just like stuff you sneak into a conversation. Well, you know, obviously this other thing, whatever the, you know, pick your thing. like, for example, like the one after we got this venue, I went back and I was trying to find some stuff. And one of the things I found was of Ainsley Cassello was talking at a, it was like a lead up to some sort of a Toonster event.

Spencer (1:04:26)
Yes.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Reed (1:04:51)
It might have been one of the Sats by Southwest events. I actually can't remember. But it was a really simple pitch. It was like, I made over like 10 years of Spotify, I made like 700 bucks and I made like three grand off of one song in this other V for V platform. If I'm a local artist who is used to making like tens of dollars per show or whatever,

or like doing my shows just to get free drinks or something like that. And I hear that, hey, I could make a couple hundred bucks. I mean, I'm listening. And so those are the kinds of arguments that I, that's the kind of stuff I was wondering if you had little tidbits like that, that I could start dropping on people.

Spencer (1:05:28)
Now, yeah.

Sure.

Well, it's one of those lurk more situations, because the more you lurk, the more you'll just absorb. And like nobody can, ⁓ I don't know. It changes over time. It's like this shifting thing. But the more that you hang around and cross-reference, the more you'll have that little gotcha one-liner at a certain point, you know?

I think that the problem of those good arguments is that they're not one size fits all, right? Like it might work for a musician, but then like, let's say, you you take Ainsley as one of the ⁓ examples that I would say is an extreme example in the space, right? And then you say, well, just do what she did. And you know, she comes built in with the audience and the community and people who are ready to fire those up.

people who already know what the zaps and boosts are and are invested in pumping up the participation and the value. And if an artist just comes in and goes, well, fuck it, we'll give it a shot, roll the dice. And then that doesn't replicate. They don't get that same result. You might have just sullied them not only from ever trying it again, but then they are anti-ambassadors out there telling other artists, yeah, I tried those.

weirdos over there and it wrecked, know, like ⁓ didn't get nothing. It was, it was a bust, you know? So like it, it very much, it is almost effortless to surpass the Spotify coin shavings that they give you, right? But the, ⁓ the way to do it is to participate and lurk more in the community and absorb those kinds of things to, ⁓

I don't know, find and resonate with the part of the audience that gets it, you know.

Rev (1:07:35)
Where do you think is a good place to lurk? Homegrown hits?

Spencer (1:07:40)
I'm going to hit this great place to lurk. IRC chats like that. ⁓ All of the Bitcoin meetups, know, your nearest Bitcoin meetup is ⁓ spot central for lurking. ⁓ Of course, there are little Noster communities. I don't really know. I'm kind of like a Noster unk for sure. Like, I've been on it for a long time, but it always just made me feel like a boomer, frankly.

I'm always like, why are the ears so slow? It never loads the in-pub. That kind of shit, you know? Like, I find value in it, but it's like, I'm not running out saying, all of my people I care about, you gotta get on Nostra with me, we'll have fun over there. Like, it's just not been there yet for me. And social in general, it's like, I'm just a little old for that kind of stuff.

like being the being in the forefront, you know what I mean? So it sucks because like I lose a lot of connections that way. You know, you lose human capital if you let that slip. But I just feel like an old man sometimes with the social stuff. It's like the online social stuff, I should say.

Rev (1:08:30)
Well, in that-

Well, there's a ⁓ principle in permaculture that's called catch and store energy. And we only have so much attention to give. And when there's friction in like, I'm like trying to participate and the friction is there, it gets really easy to just say, all right, well, I'm gonna move on to the next thing. But Joel Salatin, ⁓ he's kind of this regenerative farmer dude. He's got a saying,

Spencer (1:08:58)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we met him actually.

Rev (1:09:19)
you know, Joel Selton, sweet. Yes. So you,

Spencer (1:09:20)
Yeah, we met him on the way out to Massachusetts once.

Rev (1:09:24)
you may have heard this. says, if you want it, you got it. If you want it, you got to really want it, you know? And like, what we're doing is we really want it. All the people that are participating in all of these value for value ecosystems and all this stuff, we really want it. And so it's up to us. Like everyone once again has to just participate and that's how we make it work.

Spencer (1:09:35)
Yes.

Yeah.

Rev (1:09:47)
because there

Spencer (1:09:48)
Yeah.

Rev (1:09:48)
is friction right now. And that's what we're doing is we're figuring out how to remove the friction. like, I think that the, you know, when, it was just PayPal and everything like that, now that we've got Bitcoin and we've got Noster, we've got this whole, ⁓ extra layer, like in the past, the communications were, were attached to the, ⁓ the lightning payment, right?

Spencer (1:09:53)
Absolutely.

Yes.

Rev (1:10:15)
And

that's a friction point that's a limitation. And now with Noster, you can detach the communication and the payment. And that's a huge thing that we're trying to do with our website is like, you can boost the show ⁓ from our website and all of the information gets propagated through Noster. And because Noster is connected in with Fountain, now it propagates in Fountain. And so we're integrating in with Fountain through our website, through Noster.

Spencer (1:10:45)
Sure. Yeah, I think a lot of the overlap stuff when you find it is super crucial. I see Delorean sent a boost into the live tag there. ⁓ She's saying, abundance mentality, open source everything, V for V takes commitment and consistency, but goes so far beyond money. It demands responsibility of both value givers and receivers, but leads to limitless collaboration, community, and fun.

Those experiences can be evaluated in monetary terms if mentally necessary, despite being priceless and great memories. ⁓ Yeah, so just I like the openness, but also what she said about the commitment and consistency. Like those are the biggest things I've seen ⁓ in terms of value growing over time. You know, if you're on your regular schedule in your

putting things out with regularity, your routine can become other people's routines as well. You and you fall into this groove, like Tuesday nights being the bowl night for so long, like you can fall into this groove where the longer you have that echo going on, the more you'll even have people who were maybe man overboard for years and like wander back and go, ⁓ damn, here they still are like.

doing the show and this is where it's gone, this is where it's grown. ⁓ We've had sometimes ⁓ people come back like that with renewed energy and that value that you put in while they were away, sometimes they come back and it hits in a wave and they catch up on things or they have ⁓ even just seen your work of art from that time or your proof of work from that time.

There's a respect that goes along with that. There's a value in that that people can see inherently.

Rev (1:12:48)
The consistency

is very important. And I think that this rings true with the meetups too, right? Because like, you you run this meetup, you can, this is what Grand Rapids is actually going through this phase shift right now, where the like, the true leaders of the meetup are sort of changing hands. And it's cool to see it happen, man, to like, to know that we've got a strong enough culture now that the...

Spencer (1:12:53)
Absolutely.

Mm.

Yep.

Rev (1:13:17)
Previous meetup organizer who was really running the show is able to slowly step away and people are filling in the shoes and taking over and making it happen still.

Spencer (1:13:24)
Totally.

Rev (1:13:30)
I lost my train of thought there.

Reed (1:13:33)
I was going to bring up that same point about the consistency. That's something we say in the Bitcoin meetup circles. It's all the time. If you're not consistent, then your membership is not going to be consistent. It's almost like consistency is met with consistency back. And that so rings true in the value for value space. It's the same kind of core concept.

Spencer (1:13:49)
Mm-hmm.

It's-

Yeah.

Totally. Well, you have to be consistent. at the same time, it's funny because there's always a yin and a yang and there's always a balance, right? And the yang to the yin of consistency is variety, you know? So we found that sometimes if you have consistency and only consistency, then people get burnt out doing the same bar meetup every other Wednesday. ⁓

when it's just the same talk with the same people. So there's the consistency and then there's the variety that both have to come into play. It's a funny little battle and struggle. I feel like you're always in a constant state of flux and adjustment. know what I mean? Like you're always, you always need to address with your value input, like the part that's the most lacking today, the part that's the most lacking currently, wherever the most friction is, as Rev would have said, right? You want to be looking at where's the most friction.

I'm going to go in and address that while hopefully keeping my other things going, you know? And then you'll find a new spot of friction once you take that down, you know? Once you take, like now that I've relaunched my website, there's all these other considerations that I knew were on the back burner, but now they're in front because this website thing's out of the way of all the rest of that.

Rev (1:15:18)
Well, and so like in the last episode, we talked about this, like one of the value points of a 501 C3 is that people can have titles as part of the meetup, right? And it's like, maybe, so that meetup got to the point where people are contributing to the level where they're like, yeah, man, I would actually find value in having a title here as, my participation in this meetup. And the same is true of, the podcast, right? Once you get the audience, ⁓ built up to the point where there's a community that

the OGs kind of like would feel, would find a lot of value of being recognized as like, like in no agenda the night, that whole system that they have, right? And so you recognize that ⁓ your system is built, your community is built to the point where it's like, there's a new level of value to be unlocked. There's a different direction that you can go to provide.

Reed (1:16:13)
So one of the things, I guess, so I think we're kind of wrapping up a little bit here and maybe transition to the next part of the show, which is where we get into the value for value stuff. So that'll be a fun transition here. if I'm gonna ⁓ try to kind of summarize or maybe hit one of my key takeaways from today, ⁓ I actually, I had a couple other things in mind, but really, as soon as you said,

consistency versus variety, I was like, ⁓ man, like I had immediately just got out another little note here for myself because that's exactly what I think that ⁓ it's such a good point to bring it back to Bitcoin meetups, right? ⁓ Because I think we've made the point in the past that it's like,

If this really is a community asset, what are you doing to provide that? How are you getting value back out of that community asset? And I think, and so it's like, you should be doing maybe more than just a hangout. And then so it's like, okay, well, now you're doing more than a hangout. if you just transition to doing like only an educational meetup, it's like, well, maybe that's not the only thing. And so I think that's, I'm going to start keeping that in mind more.

at least for my meetup going forward. And yeah, trying to get the value for value concepts to bridge some of the stuff that we talked about, like for podcasting and for Noster and like the online stuff. How do we bridge some of that into the meetups? And so I'm to be thinking about that more going forward here.

Spencer (1:17:34)
Yeah, I think what

Sure.

I'm thinking about that for ours as well because I've kind of realized I need to put my piece in more. I need to take at least ownership of one regular thing that's happening and keep it going. ⁓ So we've had that concept. We're going to start it on Monday the 11th. So two Mondays from now, May 11th. And we're just going to do a meet up at a local KC Burger Joint, Westport Fleet.

Westport Flea Market and kids eat free on Mondays. So it'll be like a, ⁓ you know, bring your kids style event and we'll have some kind of a kid discussion and activity. And then I want to do that regularly because that also is where we're seriously totally untapped for the most part. mean, with few exceptions, we're totally untapped on the youth and the future.

when it comes to Bitcoiners. You know, I've heard plenty about how we're going to get mom and dad and grandma on, but the kids are actually the crucial ones that will carry the baton. You know, like the kids will be here when grandma's dad and mom's dad and we're dad, you know? So like, it's got to be, we've got to be doing, I think more outreach for kids and for youth to get in on this.

idea of sound money. We were told nothing about money growing up. We were told nothing about any of this stuff. And they've got us for 13 years of primary school. They never teach us a single thing about money except for who the guy's faces are on it sometimes.

Reed (1:19:42)
What you rev? You got the key takeaways?

Rev (1:19:45)
Yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of overlap in this whole permaculture framework that I practice here at the Homestead that we've been talking about tonight. And, you know, there's a permaculture principle called small and slow solutions. And what I've heard is like, you can't just bring bring Kanye in, right? And expect this to just blow up overnight. It's going to take us just working at it and building it.

in a sustainable way ⁓ over time. And the integration rather than segregation principle comes to light because we've got Podcast 2.0, we've got Noster, and they seem to be maybe at odds a little bit. But what we're trying to exemplify here is that if you can take the... The problem is the solution, right? You can marry the two together and neutralize a lot of the trade-offs of each. ⁓

Spencer (1:20:41)
Absolutely.

Rev (1:20:42)
And so then it comes into like this permaculture principle of ⁓ self-regulate and apply feedback, right? Like if you're getting started with this value for value concept and you're like, you start out, maybe you get a lot of enthusiasm at the beginning because you're a new show and there's a lot of boosts coming in and you feel like, yeah, I could just continue growing this and I'm gonna, the number only goes up. And then that drops down and then you start to say, hey, well, you can only pay me, just.

It's worth the coffee, isn't it? Come on, guys. You have to self-regulate there and just recognize like this is a journey. ⁓ you know, whether it's a meetup or a podcast or anything, when we're trying to you buy pizza and nobody pays you for the fucking pizza. It's like, all right, you know, next month, I'm going to show up again and just you got to get good at the ask, right?

Spencer (1:21:13)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, for sure. And I think ⁓ a lot of it too is participation. Like Rev, you're a shining example of that right now where you're out there boosting other shows and you're in there doing that in the crowd, you know? I mean, ⁓ it's a part of mob psychology that you need the leaders to do stuff first before you'll get any kind of

Followers to follow along right like followers need somebody to follow and those are leaders and so without taking a lead on ⁓ Shooting Booster grams around which you know I I used to do a lot more than I do now I'm kind of realizing that's a mistake that I should be boosting out a little bit more ⁓ Expecting it without doing it is kind of another crazy trap that people fall in a lot, you know, putting our money where our mouth is and

⁓ throwing that value back. That's a big part of it. I think part of it too is because I've just been in like away from so many shows ⁓ over the past year, know. ⁓ But putting it out there, just like you're telling your listeners that this is happening, it's true for you too, is that if you go and give value elsewhere, more value will come back.

It's not just a sit. You're not just sitting there as a receiver. You're also a participant.

Rev (1:22:54)
Well, yeah. ⁓

And I'm listening to the shows, dude. You know, like that's the thing is like, I'm, I'm, I'm out here working at the homestead. I'm listening to all this stuff and I'm, I'm learning a bunch of shit. And I'm like, getting it like, all right, we've got a culture here bubbling up and like, we need, I'm going to just act on it. Like this is, this is important. I feel it. It's happening. And that's what the show is all about is trying to not only bubble it up on Noster, but like bubble it up in person wherever you're at, you know, and, and get together.

Spencer (1:23:09)
Totally.

Yeah.

Rev (1:23:28)
And if we're cooperating in these small bubbles, there's a bubble probably not two to three hours away from you also doing it. And we can connect together through Noster, right? And now all of a sudden we've got this integration rather than segregation and like valuing diversity, right? We talk about a bunch of the different ways of approaching this.

Spencer (1:23:37)
Totally.

Absolutely.

Rev (1:23:54)
and all the different manifestations of a Bitcoin meetup and all the manifestations of a podcast that you can propagate this information from and provide value and create the cultural capital. ⁓ And then finally, like obtain a yield, right? It's about the ask. Like you have to remind people like, Hey, I am making an effort here to give you something, to give you some value. so we could talk about like freeloaders, right? If you like went at a meetup,

When the guy's got beers in a cooler and he's taking, you know, sat donations, I'm like, when I go to the beer, I make sure to be loud about it. Like, hey, pull out your wallet. I'm gonna zap you for the beer, you know? And so other people know that like, hey, I'm participating here. Kind of join in. And like I said, be the leader in it.

Spencer (1:24:39)
Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, that ties in perfectly back to what Reid was bringing up with what's the advice or what's the arguments. What's the, I think better than any kind of like red pill discussion you can have, because those are things that happen over a long period of time. It's better to just be an example. Just like be that guy out there doing those things that are working, that are returning you value, and then just talk about your abundance of value.

people will start to see it and start to see your actions. that's the best way to learn is just be like, be an example and try to get better. Like that's what we try to do. We just try to make the show better over time and, you know, evaluate where we're falling short and try to pick that part up.

Rev (1:25:36)
And so yeah, the final principle that I want to exemplify is catch and store energy, right? This, this like kind of encapsulates it all, right? As we're exchanging value in this culture, in this community, that energy is circulating amongst us. This is the circular economy idea. And if the value stays and is, is it's contained within, we're catching and storing this energy and we're growing it. And so.

That's what it takes is increasing the velocity so that we can amplify this energy that we've got going on.

So I guess Spencer, do you have any other key takeaways before we get into the boosts and leaderboards and all that?

Spencer (1:26:21)
⁓ You know, I think that you guys really are starting off on a wonderful foot and, know, with Reid, I think I said this on Bowl After Bowl, but with Gigi as the guy that you kind of first studied V for V under, like, you have the foundation for how it works and the ideas. really just it's all about consistency. It's about doing it. You know, it's not a

There's not really a class or a school or anything. There's just kind of some of us with anecdotes of things that worked over time, but most of the, most of it, are just like living out the current example of what we've found the best practices to be so far, you know, and also improving and changing those moves. I also will say Eric PP hit 3333 on the boost right there. So.

That's coming in. He said, peeling people is just trying to sell them on an idea. I think it's better to live by example rather than a sales pitch. yeah. That is really kind of a, this is more of a lifestyle thing and a future thing, you know? So I don't get too wrapped up in the ideas of mass adoption or ideas of like convinced normies. ⁓ I...

kind of see is like I've got so much more work to do. That's how I look at V for V is like I look around and I go, man, I've got to build some more things that I've been thinking about that I want to see. I've got to make this easier for me. Once we make it easier for us, we can make it easier for those around us as well, you know, and it lifts us all up together.

Reed (1:28:10)
Yeah, building the tools is something that... This is almost kind of new for me in my sort Bitcoin journey, let's say, is I've been such a consumer of content. so getting to the point now where I've flipped and now I'm on the other side where I'm the one producing the content, it's really been a really cool transition for me. And so I like...

I think that's why I get hung up too on giving freely too is because I think about how much I've gained freely from everybody, all those content producers that I benefited from to get me to the point where I'm at today that I just feel like, I guess it's my turn. It's time for me to start building, start producing, instead of being just a consumer of content to be putting stuff out there and building. So yeah, it's been fun.

Spencer (1:28:47)
sure.

Reed (1:29:07)
It's learning the podcasting stuff has been cool. And of course the meetup stuff has been awesome as well.

Spencer (1:29:14)
totally. Yeah, I they go hand in hand and, ⁓ you know, just allow it to unfold, I would say. Like, if you're ⁓ paying attention and keeping your eyes and ears open over time, then, ⁓ you know, you'll just absorb it all like a sponge and like you already have, you know. ⁓ I would say just be open rather than closed, you know, like ⁓ that's kind of how we're all organically growing together, you know, like

everything just see the value in it. That's that abundance mentality over the scarcity mentality. know, a lot of guys ⁓ will get the tunnel vision on the money or they'll get the tunnel vision on the ⁓ certain aspect of the artistic part of the product or something. You know, they'll just get lost in one little aspect when there's so much value in so many facets. So just always have your eyes, ears and heart open to that that potential value.

Reed (1:30:16)
All right, Rev, you got the boost queued up. We're ready to transition.

Rev (1:30:19)
Yeah, well, I had the boost queued up on the website and then I hopped out of the website to post the live stream ⁓ to Noster. And then now when I click on it again, it didn't load. So now I'm in Primal and I'm scrolling back. Let's see. Not quite. So actually, this brings me to a pretty good point. Talk about velocity. ⁓ All the people that have been listening.

All you guys out there on Nostra and everywhere else that have boosted local Bitcoiners, there's a lot of boosts tonight, guys. And so it really means a lot that everyone is getting it and we're participating here. And hopefully this value chain is going to react tonight. All right. This is pretty cool. And so the first boost we got is ⁓ 3000 Sats from Fountain. It's Katie. And Katie actually boosted the last podcast too, and her end pub didn't render.

So I didn't read it off, but Katie also boosted less. ⁓ And she says, would love to find a teammate for starting Green Bay, Wisconsin area meetup. I have the venue secured that accepts Bitcoin. Contact all shook up Tavern or reach out to me Rev Hodel to connect us. And so it sounds like Katie's trying to start a meetup in the area.

If you're around there, around Green Bay, Wisconsin, and you want to get going on a meetup, ⁓ get a hold of me on Noster or find Katie and her end pub is ⁓ linked in this note. And you can find this in our boost bot. ⁓ It's just at Katie on Noster. Next up, we got a thousand sats from Fountain from Permanerd. And he says, just found your show. I really enjoy it.

Oshi and I are trying to sort out how to display a lightning wallet that will contain sats from an umjar. Any ideas? so Reed, we actually responded to Permanerd on Nostra because ⁓ this Boostbot does ⁓ post a note there and we were able to get a little conversation going with Permanerd. Permanerd has a podcast called ⁓ Yada. You are the algorithm. I've been listening to it. ⁓

And this is one of the newer ⁓ Noster podcasts that's come up. Permanerd and Oshi make different food products that they sell. think Permanerd does freeze dried stuff. Oshi does all kinds of different ⁓ butters, I guess. And so they've got a podcast, and this is cool, man. So they're building in this value for value component of this umjar.

And so anytime they say ⁓ or like or whatever on their show, then they have to contribute some sats to this jar. And so I think of it like a piggy bank where it's like, as this piggy bank builds up, ⁓ there's gotta be a condition to break the piggy bank through participation or something, And the easiest way to display the size of the piggy bank is just to zap a note. Like you just make a piggy bank note.

⁓ And then at the end of each show, you tally up the ums and likes, you zap the piggy bank. And at a certain point, there's a condition which breaks that piggy bank and you start a new piggy bank note and start zapping that one. But Reed, did you have any ideas around this umjar? Have you listened to the Yada podcast?

Reed (1:33:53)
I haven't caught it yet, but I saw the boost come in and I had some ideas and I think you and I actually talked about it and I really like your idea. ⁓ Zaps accumulate on the notes and so you can see on a specific note how many zaps hit that note. And so they can accumulate in any wallet that you want, ⁓ your wallet you have set up in Nostr is.

It's a good way to keep a tally. And so I really like your idea. so ⁓ yeah, Permanard, we got your message. And yeah, we've got ideas. If you want to kick some around, yeah, hit us up again. We'd love to chat.

Spencer (1:34:38)
Permanent is awesome. He's been around for a while ⁓ in our circles.

Rev (1:34:47)
Thanks, permenerde. We'll be boosting back and forth. Keep up with the podcast. It's good. I particularly like actually ⁓ on their last podcast, they did a mailbag with questions from the people that were listening. And it was really, there was a lot of great questions. They had a lot of great answers on that. So do check out the Yotta podcast. The most recent one with the mailbag was really good. ⁓ Next one we've got 6969 from podcast guru. It's Sir Spencer.

And he says,

Spencer (1:35:18)
69!

Rev (1:35:23)
Yeah. How many links can we put in the value chain? so ⁓ Spencer actually boosted, think, your own show, right? Because there was a value split in there from so ⁓ on bowl after bowl ⁓ to not this most recent episode, but the last episode, I think.

Spencer (1:35:42)
Yeah,

434.

Rev (1:35:45)
Yeah, Spencer, he actually listened to one of our podcasts and then played clips from it and gave us some feedback on some of our ideas and everything. And so he set up a value split in that show. So if you boosted, think at the time that timestamp that you were listening, then there was a split in there for us. And so 6969 came through that. Is that how this?

Spencer (1:36:11)
That's right. Yeah,

that was my initial test of it to make sure it was working too. So looks like your bot got it and you guys got it on your end. ⁓ Yeah, the right after the value for value segment, we usually do it up front right after like a recap of the previous week. We get into our value segment and then I kind of rolled right into it ended up being a little over an hour. I didn't plan for it to be that long, but we just started talking about value and got, you know, a lot to say, obviously. So but yeah, that whole value.

or that whole hour and a little bit of change. If you boost any time during that, not only can you give value to the level and local Bitcoiners, but you can also provide feedback in your message and both shows will receive that. It's like it's kind of like a two for one in terms of ⁓ value reach for that particular message. that's ⁓ it's kind of funny. can

use splits like that. I was thinking of a way to like use splits annoyingly and like give people just a little bit of money to like be bombarded with messages from a particular episode. Like you could put a hostile split in for somebody that you just want to send all that message to without them asking for it as long as you know their value tag. Yeah.

Rev (1:37:29)
that the zapvertising model where you just like split

in a bunch of people that you think should listen to the show, you just pay them one set.

Spencer (1:37:35)
Yeah. It's

like a reverse robbery.

Rev (1:37:41)
Well, yeah, it's just another example of the things that we can do to create this value chain where it is kind of programmatic in a way where you agree, like we didn't work out any, you're just like, hey man, I'm talking about your show. Maybe you should get a cut of what's going on here. And this, once again, these kinds of mechanisms are what help create velocity automatically, right?

Spencer (1:37:58)
Yeah.

Exactly. The permissionlessness

is part baked in and so in a permissionless environment, you should actually act like you don't need permission, you know, like, because that's how we're playing and that's how we're building. So the more you just kind of try stuff out, ⁓ as long as you're extra communicative, I think that's another thing that's really great about the split part is, you know, you're going to know when stats start coming to your wallet and there's these messages attached, like you're going to know, you're going to go look into that.

⁓ If you have some kind of issue, you're going to reach out and be like, hey, what is this all about? ⁓ OK. And then I don't know. I think it's a nice way to operate in a value sense. And then if you're both value for value guys, you can just assume, yeah, he'll get it. He'll get the split. We all kind of have this idea of working for splits. And that's another way that you can put on, take people's time and talent.

on an agreement of a split, right? Because maybe I don't have like a bunch of liquid capital set right aside to be able to pay you for tonight, tomorrow night, and the next night to work this event, right? But if we say, but there's a split for you, here it is, then that's something that you can say, okay, well, then the onus is partially on me to get people putting value into this thing. And then, you know, we're all trying to, we're all aligned to the same goal, you know, boost the show higher because we all have a

Rev (1:39:33)
It creates

Spencer (1:39:36)
transparent attachment of the value there.

Rev (1:39:39)
It creates incentives for participation, right? This is the idea. Like we're, we're trying to get everyone to start cooperating. Like we have to, we're a small group, but if we, but there's enough of us, man, if we all cooperate and we work together, we can do a lot of shit and it's going to be fucking cool. Um, next boost we got is 3,455 sets from fountain. And this comes from bugle news.

Spencer (1:39:42)
Exactly.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Rev (1:40:09)
They say great rip. so Bugle News, Bugle Weekly podcast, man, ⁓ they're a huge inspiration. They're one of the big reasons why I wanted to start a podcast. started smoking cigarettes again, thanks to Bugle News. You know, they, shed the light on the health benefits of tobacco and nicotine. And yeah, man, I just, I find them to be ⁓ in the same level of like,

Spencer (1:40:29)
Only based.

Rev (1:40:38)
working at this, trying to make this idea of the value for value thing work. ⁓ Really participating, doing a lot of shit. Great podcast. In one of the podcasts that like, as soon as they release an episode, I listened to it. So thank you, BugleMuse.

Reed (1:40:56)
Well,

they were a big inspiration for us too with the Maxi Madness and just seeing, especially seeing that hit Nostre, it was a completely different, like the gamification of it was what, it really got our gears turning about the possibilities, right? When you watched how that unfolded and how people participated, it was like, whoa, this is something.

Spencer (1:41:04)
Yeah.

Reed (1:41:25)
This is something that we can build on. Let's start coming up with some other ideas like this. So definitely a huge shout out to Google News.

Rev (1:41:37)
Okay, next up we got 500 Sats via Fountain from Travelite. So great to hear these success stories and brilliant meetup circular economy ideas. And that comes from, I guess I haven't been reading off the episode, but these have all been from local Bitcoiners making meetups fun and sustainable Bitcoin Bay episode eight. And yeah, Bitcoin Bay, sounds like they're really trying to build the circular economy.

from the merchant sense, you know, and it's just important to realize, like, if you got something and you're going to a Bitcoin meetup, just bring it along and try earn some Sats and see if anyone wants it, you know, and just get creative with it. There's a lot of fun stuff you can do. ⁓ And once again, if everyone just has this idea of like, what can I show up with and try and create this velocity, that's going to be good. Next, we got ⁓

Spencer (1:42:18)
Yeah.

Totally.

Rev (1:42:37)
1,236 sats via Fountain from God's Death. And he just says, thank you, gentlemen. And so God's Death is going to show up again tonight on our leaderboards. God's Death is one of our most consistent and biggest boosters. So thanks, God's Death. Next week, we got 15,000 sats from Fountain. And this is an anonymous boost.

Reed (1:42:53)
Right it is. Yep.

Rev (1:43:04)
but it's from it's from BTC wrestle. He signs it at the end. So BTC wrestle, you can find him on Oster at that handle. And he says, thanks to all the folks out there boosting about thinking about starting a meetup. I would highly encourage you to take the leap and start one. It seems intimidating at first, but if you build it, they will come. You may be surprised that there are other Bitcoiners in your area. It's easier to get attendance in more populated areas.

Spencer (1:43:30)
Yeah, I mean that's a great thing to point out if you're a guy sitting around going, you know I hope somebody does a meetup around Here soon that I can go to there's a dozen other guys Right around you thinking that same thing and so, you know, it just takes it's just a matter of which one of you is gonna put something online and put something out there and Start meeting the other ones that are out there like they're already out there

Rev (1:43:59)
Next, we got 5,000 Sats, ⁓ anonymous boost. Thanks. You know who you are, I'm sure. ⁓ After that, we got 112 Sats via Fountain from Nostergang. And they say, what if meetups doubled as community fundraisers structured as nonprofit partnering with local businesses to host events benefiting from that community as a way to marry Bitcoin and community?

Reed (1:44:30)
That's a good idea.

Yeah, we talked about the nonprofits on the last episode. it's something I've thought about too, but I really feel like, especially once you get like those, I guess we talked about it in the last episode, but it's like you get those titles and then all of a sudden people feel like they're not just talking to some guy who runs a Bitcoin, like, what are you talking about on Meetup? What is that? You can say, I lead this whole not-for-profit.

Like we try to get back to the community, we provide educational services. It all of a sudden people start thinking about what you're doing in a little bit of a different way for sure. So I love the ideas about trying to use the non-for-profit angle to try to get more involved in the community.

Rev (1:45:23)
Yeah, it's one of those like, don't hate the player, hate the game. If you can use the system to your advantage and a nonprofit is one way you can leverage ⁓ something for yourself, why not take advantage of it and see what you can do? And the next boost is actually 100 Sats from Fountainvia Nostra, or from NostraGang again. And then they say, nevermind, I should have just kept listening. So if you actually go back to... ⁓

Making Meetups fun and sustainable again, episode eight, I guess we go over it. We covered it in there too. ⁓

Next we have 333 sets from Liz, who was on that last episode, Making Meat Ups fun and sustainable episode eight. ⁓ no, yeah, it's from Satoshi Chef, I'm sorry. And it's Liz is so articulate. So she's talking about Liz from the episode. Liz is so articulate and thoughtful.

Reed (1:46:12)
That one's from Alice A.

there you go.

Rev (1:46:28)
The feminine presence brought a lot to this episode. Don't forget to wear light blue blockers at the conference. The boot camp ideas, good, very good Wesley meetups could run it quarterly.

So Satoshi Chef is just letting us know some thoughts on.

that last episode. Next we got 2121 via Fountain. It seems like it's an anonymous boost. And it says, ⁓ it's from Barn Miner. He signs it at the end. It's from Barn Miner. So Barn Miner says, I cannot boost with Pod versus Boo. I had to go to Fountain's website. I think it's gay. Fountain's set up deal. He's not, I'm not an expert. Liz and Wes are good peeps. They make the space.

⁓ a better place. Much love, Barn. So, Barn's having some friction with his boosting process and hopefully we've fixed some friction for you, Barn, if ⁓ you log in with your Noster keys to our website. You can boost any episode now with whatever wallet you want and the message will still come through to Noster. And it'll still show up in Fountain as well. Reed, do you want to talk about that?

a little bit how that's all set up.

Spencer (1:47:50)
Yeah, I was actually curious read, you run a node, right, for this as part of the, and is it like a start nine node or? Have you checked, have you checked Halipad out at all on that node? Cool.

Reed (1:47:54)
Yes.

Yep. Yep. So it's L and D. Go ahead.

Yep. Yep. Yep.

We checked Howie Pat out. ⁓ And I think that's... It's not exactly where I started. And it might've been you that recommended that I check it out. so it's not like this is something I've been long accustomed to. It was more like when we started podcasting. so it's like... Yeah. So the way... And just to make it a little bit clear here, Rev may have slightly oversold it.

Spencer (1:48:21)
Sure. Sure.

Reed (1:48:32)
You can't necessarily log in and boost with any wallet you want. And honestly, for people who are wondering why that is, it has to do with the splits. So Zap splits are not an easy thing to do. Like if you want to just scan a QR code to pay your Lightning invoice, well, if there's a split, and especially on episode eight, it was like a five-way split. And so that means you got to pay five Lightning invoices. That's five QR codes that you got to scan and pay.

Spencer (1:48:43)
Sure.

Mm-hmm.

Reed (1:49:02)
if you want to do the split. And that's how we set it up because that's how the podcasting 2.0 streams work. And we want to have a first-class experience. We want to have the same treatment on the website as we do in the RSS. So we set it up with the Zap splits. so because of that trade-off, went NostraWallet Connect. Because then at least it's kind of happening kind of in the background. You're not having to assign every single note. You're not having to assign...

Spencer (1:49:11)
sure.

Yeah.

Reed (1:49:29)
I got to give 21 sats to this guy and 21 sats to this person and 21 sats here. Over and over again, your wallet kind of just does it in the background. So if you can connect with Nostral Wallet Connect, that's when you kind of unlock the ability to boost an actual episode. ⁓ If you don't want to do that, you can still do a show level boost. Like you can boost the website. There's a boost button up at the top. And ⁓ I don't have it hooked up yet, but got the feedback kind of today that going forward, I'll work on the bots here a little bit.

Spencer (1:49:42)
Yep.

Reed (1:49:58)
But going forward, if you boost the website, you'll end up on this list also. ⁓ Right now, it's not connected that way, but it will be. So coming soon.

Spencer (1:50:07)
Cool.

Yeah, that's kind of, it's funny on a protocol level, just to nerd out a tiny bit, the way that we've managed these payments from the very beginning on Podcasting 2.0 side has been keysend and just fewer and fewer wallets have supported or adopted or turned on keysend. ⁓ And the beauty of keysend is that you can just programmatically

rattle off several different payments. know, mean, plenty of guys in our circle, you know, behind the schemes, Boober, he's like the split, ⁓ the split crazy man, you know, he's put over 20 splits in a feed, for different shows and different things. like in our circle, we definitely need those splits. You know, it's like a bigger production. There's like more people involved in this thing. So I'm totally with you. Like the splits are

Reed (1:50:59)
Right.

Spencer (1:51:04)
Crucial, they're like a non-negotiable. It's gotta work. It's gotta be able to happen somehow. So I really think Keysend is very slept on ⁓ in the development side of things. Like for one reason or another, people have just said, nah, that's not worth the lift or we can't do it that way. So I don't know. ⁓ I hope to see more Keysend solutions.

Reed (1:51:06)
That's right.

Well, I know we're...

I realize we're slightly off track, ⁓ but ⁓ there is something, and Rev brought it up a little bit before, about like right now, in Podcasting 2.0 ⁓ and with the Keysend boost and stuff like that, we're using Lightning as the messaging platform. We're using a monetary transaction to communicate a text message.

And so the thought here is, hey, if we're going to be experimenting playing around, let's try to see if we can experiment with separating those two things and let the lightning payments be the lightning payments, ⁓ and then ⁓ let the notes live on Nostr. And so it's a little bit complicated under the hood. And it's very similar to Zaps. It's not quite the same thing that's going on. ⁓ But we don't have, there's no text data in our text.

lightning transactions. We sign a note because people are signed in with their end pub on the site. And so we just sign a note with the message and we pull the message in that way. ⁓ So anyway, it's something we're playing around with and trying to experiment with. And I don't think it's done. I'm not saying this is like a final product, but ⁓ it's been very educational for me at a minimum. So it's been cool.

Spencer (1:52:27)
Yep.

Rev (1:52:52)
And actually to get back to the very beginning, like, I don't know if we've had ⁓ a guest on the show that hasn't had an end pub Bitcoin meetup organizers use Noster. This is this is pretty common, right? Like it's hard to find a Bitcoin meetup organizer that doesn't use Noster. And so if you can do a Noster workshop and get the people that are coming to your meetups on Noster and then you can do your events on Noster and then you can interact with the post your event, let us

read out the show, because what we want to do, the goal here is to have a lot of, we want to promote meetups, you know, if you've got a meetup, get it in our information feed somehow and we'll blast it out there, you know. ⁓ And so the next one we got is 500 Sats. That's Anonymous Boost from Fountain. And that was actually on the grassroots episode, ⁓ episode six with fundamentals and Andrew.

Spencer (1:53:29)
Absolutely.

Rev (1:53:54)
And the next one we got is 500 Sats from Fountain. This is from ⁓ Battersea Bitcoiners. Love this series. Keep it up, guys, from London, UK. And so I've been seeing a lot of the Cypher Monk House stuff from London. And it seems like they've got a pretty cool meetup scene over there. know Shadrack's been there.

I just watched this episode of Finding Home from Avi Burra. He was hanging out with Roger9000 and they visited the Cyphermunk house and that was a pretty cool episode. You can find it on IndieHub. ⁓ But yeah, man, it sounds like there's a lot of cool shit going on in the UK actually, which is good to hear. But thanks for the boost Battersea Bitcoiners. Next we got... ⁓

2,100 sets from Fountain via Reed. And Reed says, this is a great episode, especially for anyone considering a 501C nonprofit for their meetup. And that's from the last episode, Making Meetups Fun and Sustainable, Bitcoin Bay episode eight. And so you're probably testing some of these new things that we're doing out. So now the next boost is testing. So I think that's it. We've been just testing the cool new

⁓ features we've been putting on the website now. So thanks everyone for putting that value out there. Hopefully we can continue to deliver. ⁓ Reed, do you want to go into the leaderboards and talk about that a little bit?

Reed (1:55:30)
Hell yeah. Yeah, let's do it. So we've got the three leaderboards. We introduced these in the last episode. I think what I'm going do is I'm just going to start running through them here. So we got our first one is our episode boost leaderboard. So these are our episodes that have received the highest number of stats over time. So in first place is episode five with Augie. Augie was in first place last time too. So still holding down the number one spot here with...

63,373 stats for that episode. And then in second place is still our...

Rev (1:56:08)
Well, so Augie

breaks down in that episode, like, cause Spencer's from KC Bitcoiners too. And so Augie's from KC Bitcoiners. And so like we've been kind of, we hadn't talked so much about KC Bitcoiners in this episode, but Augie really broke down what's going on over there in Kansas City. It's really cool. What they've got over there in Kansas City and the KC Bitcoiners is the making of a Meshadel. It's really happening.

Spencer (1:56:33)
Yep.

Rev (1:56:33)
there's

cross pollination going on, there's circular economy stuff going on, they're building their own shit, they're really doing it. ⁓ And so definitely check out that episode with Augie ⁓ to hear more about what's actually going down on the ground in Kansas City.

Spencer (1:56:49)
Yup, and KCBitcoiners.com if you want to get involved, whether you got something to sell or whether you want to make a meetup, you can make a meetup out there. Just reach out and get with us and we can hook you up and get your in-pub whitelisted and that kind of thing.

Reed (1:57:05)
Yeah, we're getting a lot of inspiration from the KCB Accounters website. Yeah, you guys are doing awesome.

⁓ So second place is still the pilot episode, episode one. So that was just Rev and I breaking down. That was kind of when we wanted to just talk about starting and growing meetups. ⁓ We go through a lot of best practices, lessons learned that we've had over the years. ⁓

Rev (1:57:30)
a lot of good fundamental

information in that episode. know, that's kind of the place if you're, if you're listening to this and you're like, I want to start a meetup, but I don't know, go listen to the first episode that that lays down like a lot of the just like fundamental stuff that you need to think about and get yourself off to the best foot forward there.

Reed (1:57:54)
Yeah, so, right, didn't read it off. So episode one's got 60,523 Sats accumulated, and these continue to grow over time, which is great to see. In third place is episode two. This was our episode with GC and James from Jersey City. Still one of our great episodes here. So holding down the number three slot with 47,071 Sats.

⁓ We had a lot of great clips from that episode. I think that was the episode that we really decided that we really needed to get some of our clips going on. And so we started clipping that episode and now we've got a clip bot too. So we keep some of this stuff fresh so people see it. ⁓ It's not just like it gets buried in the feed. These things will come back up over time. So another great episode.

Rev (1:58:42)
And

that's a great episode if you've started a meetup and you've got it going for a little while and you want to figure out the next step. That episode I think exemplified that process so well. How they describe transitioning from the barred thing to finding a better location and dealing with the scammers and all that stuff. Just some of these things when the meetup starts to grow and there's...

you know, some stuff that comes along with it, they really go over all of that pretty well.

Reed (1:59:17)
And then fourth place was ⁓ an episode with, that was another one with just Rev and I. And so that was, ⁓ I think that was our episode talking about V for V stuff. And here we are again, still talking about V for V stuff. ⁓ Always a great crossover here. Certainly Bitcoin meetups are providing a lot of value. lot of Bitcoin meetup organizers trying to think about how to get value back. And so this is, I'm going to guess going to be a consistent topic on our show.

So that was fourth place episode seven, 39,227 Sats total so far. And then in fifth place, rocketing up the leaderboards here. We only just had this episode last week. This is episode eight with Liz and ⁓ Wesley from Bitcoin Bay. So they're already up to 33,589 Sats and the boost keep coming in. So that was, you we talked about that episode a lot here tonight, but...

That was another great one. And so that's our first leaderboard.

Rev (2:00:21)
Yeah, I got a lot of

⁓ actual private message feedback on that episode that it was inspiring. Like a lot of the people that were, this is another one where people have been running a meetup for a while. And they're like, dude, we need to level up our game here. Look at what they're doing over there at Bitcoin Bay. Like they've got so much going on. And so they're seeing it as like a little bit of a push to do more, add more value.

to their meetup. that was a great episode. ⁓ And because it popped right on the leaderboard right away, you can see that.

Reed (2:00:58)
And so just to talk about, oh, just for a second before I go to the next leaderboard, just to talk about the gamification piece a little bit here, right? So that was our, so we've, you I suppose we've only had eight episodes so far. This will be episode nine. But, you know, so you see our top five here. Well, maybe your favorite episode's not in the top five. And so if your favorite episode's not in the top five, well, maybe it should be. And so you can always go back and boost more. Maybe you boosted 100 sats. Maybe you want to make it a thousand sats.

Maybe that would get you in the top five. ⁓ So yeah, just something to think about. And this is a list that we're going to be reading off here on the regular. So ⁓ we do have, we've got two other leaderboards. So our next leaderboard is what I like to call the Rider dies. So this is ⁓ the leaders, or this is the listeners who have boosted the most number of episodes. So it's not about the most number of sats. ⁓ It's more like,

These are people who show up and boost on the regular. And so again, we've only got eight episodes in the books here. So I think this list will get more interesting as we start getting into the higher numbers of episodes and we start seeing who can really have these, who can be our most consistent kind of ride or die listeners. So up at the top of the list, way out in front here, Matthew D with seven episodes, going strong Matthew D.

⁓ Yep, we hear from him on the regular for sure. ⁓

Rev (2:02:31)
Well, and so Matthew

D, he's kind of really participating in the Ann Arbor meetup here in Michigan. He's really kind of co-organizing, I would say. I mean, he's a big participant over there. And he's got this white paper soap company. I get my soap from him and everything else. But another thing that I'm noticing is like, with Matthew D's participation in our show, it's getting him stoked up in participating in

the different group chats in Michigan too. And Matthew D, I know you're listening, man. I really do recognize that and it's fucking awesome, dude, that you're starting to post links like, hey, the BISC thing happened where the BISC was compromised and they stopped trading and stuff, letting people know about that. That's good stuff to bring forward. And so the participation, once again, the velocity of this exchange is important. And Matthew D is really a...

showing that he's doing it. So thanks dude.

Reed (2:03:33)
So then we've got big ties here for second place and for third place. So second place, we've got a four-way tie here for second with four episodes piece. That's God's Death, ⁓ Mr. Rev Hottle, Shadrach, and War Time. Also, a solid group of writer dies there. ⁓ And then in our tie for third place with three episodes each is Mark, Otis Bittmeyer, Boomer, Reed, and Jer.

So thanks everybody for boosting in. We definitely appreciate the consistency and we will do our best to also be consistent back.

Rev (2:04:11)
And so.

Boomer has been on the show. Boomer is the first international guest we've had from Canada. Was Boomer episode three? I think he was episode three.

Reed (2:04:26)
That sounds right, yep.

Rev (2:04:27)
Yeah. And that one, I think is ⁓ kind of, if you like what we're talking about with the overlap of podcasting and the value for value stuff, ⁓ Boomer touches on the podcasting side of things a lot in that episode as well.

Reed (2:04:46)
So our last leaderboard here, ⁓ save kind of the best for last. That's in my opinion, I think this last one's the best. And one of the reasons why I think it's the best is because of kind of what it represents. So our last leaderboard here, these are our top five single biggest boosts ever sent to the show. Okay. So because we read this off every week, what this really means is that, you know, we don't run ads on this show. We don't have sponsors.

What we have is our listeners. And so if you have something that you'd like to show, well, if you get onto our top five list, we're going to reach out every week. This doesn't, it's no longer becomes a one-time boost. So what I'm going to do here is go over the top five and I'm going to reread off the boosts that they sent in that came with this, you know, this big tag on it. So the top two, first and second place are both.

Bitcoin is for Everyone, May 22nd, May 23rd. So let me read off those messages here real quick. So the first one is for 12,020 Sats from Fountain. Join us for the largest Bitcoin-only conference on the West Coast. Bitcoin is for Everyone, May 22nd, May 23rd. Pizza day weekend in Portland, Oregon. Bitcoinisforeveryone.com. Use discount code NOSTERINSIDER for 21 % off. And so that boost came in on our episode with Augie.

So episode five, ⁓ the meetup is the farmer's market. ⁓ And then I'm just going to jump right to the second one because second place is also Bitcoin is for everyone. ⁓ May 22nd, May 23rd. And this boost is the Portland Bitcoin Meetup Group ⁓ has meetups six times a month. Come and check us out. And that was also same episode with Augie episode five. So thank you again for Bitcoin is for everyone. You you've been

an early and often supportive of the show. We hope to have you on sometime soon. ⁓ And yeah, you got yourself, because you were our top booster of all time, you get yourself a recurring basically ad spot on the show. So thank you very much and we hope we're providing some value back to you.

Rev (2:06:59)
Well, and Bitcoin is for Everyone was down there in Las Vegas, know, ⁓ hanging out with Liz, working that meetup booth that they had down there. So this is a person, they've been to grassroots. I met them at grassroots two years ago. I know they were at grassroots this year. And so they're really into it. This Bitcoin is for Everyone conference is not just like another conference. It's going to have that vibe. This dude gets it.

how to make a meetup good and fun. It's gonna be a good time if you get over there.

Reed (2:07:36)
All right, third place, Otis Bittmeier, 10,420 sats way back on episode one. And so his message was, I'm thankful for the Southwest Michigan Meetup, where like-minded humans gathered downtown Benton Harbor on the third Thursday of every month for fellowship and meaningful conversation spanning many domains. I leave inspired to continue building the world I want to see. Come and join us if you're in the area.

So thank you, Otis Bittmeier. And if any of you don't know, Otis Bittmeier ⁓ has Otis Bittmeier Coffee. And so he roasts his own and packages it up and sends it out. And this is coffee you can buy for Sats. And it's some of the best coffee that you can buy, not just for Sats, but just some of the best coffee you can buy, period.

So thank you, Otis Pittmeyer.

All right, next up is fourth place, We All Eat, 10,020 Sats from episode five. Coming in strong for Augie's episode on episode five. ⁓ We All Eat, their message was, LFG, get ⁓ out and go to your local meetup. Find a meetup when you travel. Can't wait to see you fellas at Lake Satoshi in a few months. Well, thank you, We All Eat. And you are on our top five list for biggest boost of all time.

Rev (2:09:01)
Yeah, and we all eat is like, ⁓ well, I want to back up actually to Otis Bittmeyer. So Otis Bittmeyer is a true participant and he's an example of like, what happens when you go to the meetups consistently and you really connect with people. Because Otis Bittmeyer and I have like a pretty cool friendship and relationship now through like hanging out through the meetups. And like I've been over to his place. I helped him install solar panels on his roof.

Reed (2:09:01)
and

Rev (2:09:30)
He's been over to my place, helped me set up a new food forest at my homestead. You know, he helped me ⁓ actually finish some of the exterior siding on my tiny house. You know, we, we, we not only does he roast coffee, but he comes to the meetups and we work together and we build capital together, know, and Chet's the same way, you know, ⁓ we all eat. He, ⁓ he, he goes to Lake Satoshi days in advance to help them get set up.

He doesn't get paid to do that. He just goes there and gives all he has to that event. And if you meet him, you'll know that he's a very generous person. down. We all eat, you know, he's, down to ⁓ help push Bitcoin forward. so once again, the, the cultural capital creates the gravity here. And these guys are, are, you know, there are big, some of our biggest boosters and they're friends of mine and

they're definitely creating that gravity.

Reed (2:10:34)
So finally, fifth place, rounding out the top five, Matthew D. Matthew D, ride or die, first place overall on the other leaderboard, fifth place here, really holding down your spot here. 10,000 sets. And so his message was, in what episode was this? This is from, oh, from the grassroots recap episode, episode six. It says, after 20.

2023 to 2025, I have no idea how anyone can still be shitcoining. Imagine there's still any value there. Well, well said, Matthew D. And thank you again for all of your support for the show. We really appreciate it. And so like I was saying.

Rev (2:11:16)
Yeah, and if you go back

into that grassroots episode, you can hear Reed's shitcoin redemption story. Because that's what he's responding to. That was that is like it never happened. So go check that episode to hear that story.

Spencer (2:11:24)
Nice.

Reed (2:11:24)
That was a classic.

So that's our top five. So what does that mean? So that means that if you have a product, if you have a Bitcoin meetup, if you have an event coming up that you would like to get a recurring sort of ad spot for on our show, all you have to do is get into the top five, which means right now it means a boost greater than 10,000 sats. We'll get you in the top five and then you'll be on our leaderboard for the biggest boost of all time. So.

Rev (2:11:56)
And you can boost

that from any episode. can boost that from any ⁓ podcasting 2.0 app. And it sounds like you'd be able to be boosting. Right now you can boost it right from our website. And that's a way you can move the value chain, start the value chain reacting.

Reed (2:12:06)
You can also boost it from the website.

All right, well, I think that's all we got. We talked quite a bit about value for value today. ⁓ I don't know, Rev, we'll have to talk more about the structure of the episode here and how we get to all these messages. Like maybe they shouldn't end up at the very end. I don't know. Maybe we should open up the episode. We'll see. ⁓ But yeah, more to come and really looking forward to it. And Spence, thanks so much for coming on. ⁓ I think we're...

Spencer (2:12:49)
Absolutely.

Reed (2:12:53)
If you're offering advice or mentorship or guidance for us, we're going to take it because we want to learn more. I think there's a lot more that we can learn just about Podcasting 2.0 and just being podcasters and what it means to be in the space. So really looking forward to hanging out with you and learning more.

Spencer (2:13:11)
Absolutely.

I'm sure you guys have much to teach us as well, know, that's what I get the sense of already. So ⁓ it's been great and I appreciate all the stuff that you're building out too. So.

Rev (2:13:31)
Yeah, Bowl After Bowl is a great show, It covers a lot of bases. There's a Bitcoin segment in there. ⁓

Definitely check it out. If you want to learn how this value culture gets propagated, how you build a community through a podcast, bowl after bowl is a huge example of that. We are definitely following your lead, man.

Spencer (2:14:00)
Thank you. I just trying to ⁓ improve on it as I go and learn from mistakes of me in the past. know, that's ⁓ everybody listening. I hope you enjoy the journey of bull after bull dot com as it continues to evolve and get more features built out to it. Bull after bull dot com.

Reed (2:14:01)
percent.

All right, Rev, you got anything else?

Rev (2:14:28)
Roll the outro.