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

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

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

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

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

Links

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

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

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

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

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

Links

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

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

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

Executive Producer (top booster from last episode): ToneWrecker

Links

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

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)