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

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

Executive Producer (top booster from last episode): ToneWrecker

Links

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

In this episode of Plebchain Radio, Avi sits down with Coach Carbon for a wide-ranging conversation that treats football as a laboratory for truth: you can talk your way through many professions, but you can’t talk your way into elite performance. The pitch keeps receipts.

They dig into the idea of “proof of workout” and why athletic consistency is the purest anti-fiat mechanism: no bailouts, no narrative dressing, no marketing varnish. Just reps, recovery, and results. From there, the discussion moves into building a culture where players and creators can be rewarded directly, without gatekeepers, ads, or permission slips, using value-for-value mechanics.

Coach Carbon shares the story behind his clothing line: wearable statements timestamped to the chain via block heights, turning apparel into both message and breadcrumb trail. Even better, the “spotted in the wild” concept flips merch into an onboarding funnel, rewarding people in sats when they post proof they’re wearing it, making education part of the exchange.

The conversation also sketches a near-future vision for football broadcasts where fans can stream sats to players in real time based on performance, with experiments already hinting at what’s possible: QR codes per player and live sats streaming during a match.

Links

• Coach Carbon Life
• Coach on nostr
• Coach on X
• Avi's New Book – July 18
• Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]
• Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)

In Episode 2 of Say WoT?, Avi sits down with Gzuuus to “debug the intersection of AI and the Web of Trust,” tracing his build path through DVMCP, ContextVM, and his latest project, Relatr, with the goal of engineering machine intelligence that amplifies human reputation instead of harvesting it.

Gzuuus explains why ContextVM evolved from an earlier “kitchen sink” approach into a cleaner design that lives at the transport layer, using Nostr keys for authentication/authorization, and leaning into ephemeral events plus a single kind for communications to keep things minimal and composable.

Then the conversation drops into Relatr: a fully open-source, self-hostable Web-of-Trust service designed to run “anywhere” (even on a Raspberry Pi), with real-world performance on a cheap VPS and fast search response times. Relatr supports two complementary interfaces: ContextVM’s request/response pattern (needed for things like search) and NIP-85 Trusted Assertions (a more native produce/consume model that’s easier for clients to integrate).

On scoring, Gzuuus describes a tunable weighted formula that outputs a float from 0 to 1, anchored by social graph distance (hops) mapped through a decay function, with weights configurable by anyone running an instance. Finally, they explore practical client UX (like Amethyst consuming trusted assertions for spam mitigation) and the broader interoperability headaches haunting secure messaging, including MLS complexity and the risk of siloed implementations.

Links

• ContextVM
• Relatr
• Gzuus Github | ContextVM Github
• Enemies of Nostr Article

Avi and guest OpenMike riff on the weird gap between “real-world popularity” and how few followers some incredible musicians have on Nostr, then use that as a springboard into what it looks like to actually build culture: paying creators directly, making venues more resilient, and turning community into infrastructure.

The conversation detours into Tunestr and OpenMike’s search for a true “home base” venue, landing on Maggie Mae’s on 6th Street in Austin, right across from Rogan’s Comedy Club, as a potential flagship location to revitalize a legendary (and struggling) music corridor with Bitcoin/Nostr-native tooling.

Near the end, they preview a Value-for-Value music fest in Belgrade (week after BTC Prague), with a floating-club venue on the Danube called Zappa, plus a mix of independent and bigger acts.

Executive Producer (top booster from last episode): Rod Palmer

Find today's artists on nostr:

• Doomtree (Lazerbeak)
• Theo Katzman
• Sam Means
• Henry Invisible
• Suzanne Santo

Avi opens Episode 147 with “The Return of the Local Oracle,” a sermon on outsourced knowing, supply-chain truth, and rebuilding trust through people you can look in the eye: ranchers, butchers, and neighbors with gardens.

Tom Taber returns to unpack his work with the Beef Initiative, arguing that ranching culture runs on integrity, “cowboy code,” and accountability in a world he frames as increasingly Truman Show-ish.

They dig into the initiative’s mission: connecting consumers to ranchers (via beefmaps.com) while building something bigger. Tom explains that Texas Slim acquired beef.com, positioning it as a “digital ranch” with privacy protections and a marketplace for ranching trade beyond just beef.

The conversation turns to rebuilding independent micro-processing centers, and why Bitcoin capital can fund real-world infrastructure that saves ranches.

Links

• Beef Initiative on X
• Tom Taber on X
• Tom on nostr
• Avi's New Book – July 18
• Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]
• Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)

Sunday Brunch is your lightning-laced decompression chamber: no sermon, no prepared questions, just coffee, a record player, and a guest DJ, with Value-for-Value splits (90% of boosts/streams during songs go to the artist; talk-time splits go to the guest + show).

This episode’s guest is Rod Palmer (Bitcoin Bugle), spinning a playlist that sparks a wide-ranging riff on staying sovereign through the noise: “the remnant will subscribe,” waves of normie dilution, and why the frontier always keeps a core that survives every cycle.

Between tracks, Avi and Rod go from “slop culture” (AI-generated everything and the new “hurdle rate” for art) to modern “glazing” as a social currency, plus a youth-perspective detour via E-Cash Sailor, broccoli haircuts, and peak timeline absurdity.

Links

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

Avi opens with a sermon on “embracing the outsider” and argues that the real mission isn’t winning debates, but building a parallel city, with art as core infrastructure and Bitcoiners as the new patrons.

Guest Dion Wilson, former professional dancer (including the touring cast of Disney’s The Lion King), shares his path from the demanding Broadway ecosystem into Bitcoin and launches Bitcoin for the Arts, a 501(c)(3) designed to support artists, institutions, and nonprofits with Bitcoin microgrants plus practical education on living and creating on a Bitcoin standard.

They talk NYC’s cultural cycles, fiat’s squeeze on artists (rising costs, stagnant artist pay), and a hopeful vision of a Bitcoin-driven Harlem renaissance.

Bitcoin For The Arts

Avi's New Book – July 18

Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]

Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)

Say WoT? with host Avi Burra kicks off by staking the claim that Nostr’s “exit ramp” from addictive, black-box feeds is Web of Trust, and then immediately drops into the engine room with Vitor Pamplona (Amethyst), Derek Ross (Soapbox), and David Strayhorn (NosFabrica).

The trio breaks down NIP-85 trusted assertions as a simple delivery mechanism for portable, personalized trust scores (clients shouldn’t compute them), and tackles the “is this a social credit score?” fear head-on: the key difference is user-chosen providers + user-specific perspective, not a single global, centralized rating. They close by mapping real use-cases: spam/scam suppression (especially in notifications), better sorting and discovery, and the longer arc toward contextual trust (different signals and scores depending on what you’re trying to find).

Links

• NosFabrica
• Soapbox
• Amethyst