0:00 Nick, welcome back to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Nice to have you here. Thanks for having me. Great. You're the fountain guy. And what is fountain? Like, I mean, it was quite a while ago we last recorded, I believe, like two years or something, right? Something like that. So I guess people, enough time has passed to motivate another introduction. So please introduce yourself, TLDR on who you are and what you do. yeah so i'm nick i'm the co-founder of fountain if you don't know what fountain is the person who orange-pilled you didn't do a very good job uh we're a podcast app that is powered by bitcoin so we launched the app back in when was it i'd say 2001 and yeah we gave podcasts a a really simple solution just to claim their podcast on our app and allowed their listeners to pay payments in lightning and so you can find every podcast on fountain and we also have other features we've built on top of nostor so things like comments and chats and different social features and we have a feed very much like primal or damas you can see all the activity from people you follow so people who support podcasts it's a great way to discover new shows and last year we launched hosting as well so you can also now publish and distribute your podcast through fountain obviously bitcoin infinity shows is one of our customers so that's nice and then also music i haven't mentioned so as well as podcasts we also have a collection of music from emerging artists who are publishing

1:33 their music in a self-sovereign way to rss feeds and all of the interactions you would take with the podcast i.e zapping or streaming sats or commenting or sharing you can do all those things with music as well Yes, fantastic. Yeah, I'm multitasking here because I'm opening Fountain in another tab. But I absolutely love Fountain, as you know, and we're on Fountain. We're using a lot of their services. My upcoming music album will also be released on Fountain, of course. The idea of zapping and being able to promote or to contribute to artists and pod creators directly is very compelling to me, the whole value for value model.

2:22 How is that working legally? Has there been a legal pushback? Because I know politicians and bureaucrats hate good solutions to things and want to destroy everything good in the world. So how is that working out for you? To be honest, we haven't had too many problems. I guess there's two areas where we could encounter issues. First of all would be the payments layer. So people trying to block users using Bitcoin for certain things on certain apps. Part of that conversation also involves the app stores, particularly the Apple app store. I know that some apps that have integrated Lightning Payments have had issues with getting approved by app stores. We luckily didn't have any problems there.

3:04 And I guess the second area would be music copyright. right. You know, in theory, there's nothing preventing somebody from ripping, you know, in the splits and trying to monetize somebody else's creative work. But we haven't seen that. Maybe people just haven't figured that one out yet. But I suppose that would be treated in the same way as it would anywhere else. You know, if you'd done that on Patreon or any other platform that allows you to monetize creative work, you know, that there is a formal takedown process and think that we would follow. But luckily, we haven't seen that yet. Now, there's a lot to be said about that. And I'd like to pick your brain about this, because I view copyright laws and intellectual property laws as a product of the 20th century.

3:50 They weren't really needed before the 20th century, because it was hard to make copies out of things before the 20th century. And they aren't really needed after the 20th century, because it's now trivial to make copies out of anything. And the recipe for a thing is not the thing. Therefore, and you can't really own information. Therefore, copyright laws are very destructive, in my opinion. There's a guy from the Mises Institute called Stefan Kinsella that has written extensively about this and how much damage these laws really do. because if you think of an artist back in the 19th century and before that, the only way they could monetize playing music for people, for instance, is by touring and maybe selling merch when they're touring.

4:43 A bard in the Middle Ages would go around and play music for people and get paid to do that. And it's only during the 20th century that records are a thing where you can sell music and sell physical vinyl records and physical CDs and cassette tapes and whatnot. And now after the 20th century, that doesn't work anymore because everyone knows what a file is in a computer and it can just be trivially copied in an infinite amount of time. So the need for copyright for music sort of disappears anyway. I think Fountain and similar things are a very good solution to this because it's now up to the creator to fire up a Fountain account whenever they create something.

5:31 And if you don't, then, yeah, you don't get a piece of this specific pie. But if you do, you can make much more than you would have had you only been on more centralized platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music and whatnot. What are your thoughts around copyright and such? Do you have any deeper philosophical thoughts about this? No, I think it's become increasingly murky. Copyright, particularly in music, served a purpose for a certain era in music history. And I think that era has kind of come to an end. As you were speaking, I was just thinking about Ed Sheeran's recent legal battle.

6:13 I think it was maybe last year or year before. I think the estate of Marvin Gaye were trying to sue him for a track Thinking Out Loud because of the chord sequences he used and stuff and in the end he won that legal battle and it was you know decided that the music that he produced was decidedly different from the original thing that it was claimed that he copied but it's it seems crazy to think that you can copyright a chord sequence you know EADG who's to say that somebody can own those four chords in that order and that no other songs can be written following that same chord structure. That seems wild to me. And I think also with the advent of AI and generative AI music, it becomes even more confusing, you know.

6:58 You can see how easy it is just to generate music just by saying, hey, give me this song in Marvin Gaye's style or do me a cover of this song in my own style or whatever. And then how does copyright work there? because really there should be some sort of trace of the original work that's coming through and how is that scanned and then identified and what does that mean for rights holders. So I think that a lot of these laws are going to be challenged in the next few years as they kind of be revealed to be slightly outdated for the times we're in. I think in AI music, the AIs are good at detecting other AIs. So an AI can detect if something is AI-generated and that AI is influenced or took its inspiration from, say, Marvin Gaye or an original work, and that they then AIs go around and prosecute or sue people for copyright infringement.

7:55 I've heard of that. I haven't done a deep dive in it, but I think the attacks are getting increasingly AI-powered as well. and I don't know what the solution to this is and how to guard against it because AI music, there's nothing original in it. Everything you hear in an AI song is a product of all the other songs that are on the internet, let's say. So the AI uses whatever, it can never come up with something completely novel. And maybe you could argue that humans can't do that either because we are influenced by everything else. we're influenced by the song of a bird or by everything a piston engine who knows So you could say that a human isn original either So where do you draw the line I find these things fascinating to think about but it's hard for an autistic first principles guy such as myself to think of it as anything else than theft, to copyright stuff that is inherently infinitely copyable.

9:02 I mean, I think that that's what makes the Satoshi special, a bitcoin is not copyable not because of something on the internet because but because it's a secret we keep from each other it's in our heads really whereas a song is not in our heads it's actually on the internet in in the form of ones and zeros so yeah any further thoughts yeah well just one recent example there's there's a company who they basically make it very very easy to produce ai generated podcasts and you can literally churn out you know thousands of episodes it's what's it called an inflection point ai or something and there was a story recently about so what they'd done is they'd found like the top 50 shows in like history or arts or politics or whatever and they'd created these clones of them so the artwork was pretty much the same that the title was i think actually exactly the same and things like the description were the same and if you go and listen to the episodes, the content is heavily inspired by them. It crosses a line from like, you know, they've used that as a reference to they've just basically taken it and reworded, restructured, like added like another 10%. And they're producing thousands of these episodes, and they're trying to monetize them through ads. And the thinking is, is that somebody who opens Fountain or Apple Podcasts or whatever app they're using, is they're going to be searching for that show they're going to see that show in the search results and they might actually click on that one

10:35 instead of the the original one like the actual one and when they listen to it obviously that counts as an impression they get paid by the advertiser and they're able to then monetize that and there's a lot of debate happening right now in podcasting about how these shows that use ai to some extent should be labeled and what we can do to like prevent users from being you know it's fraud essentially you know you're you're kind of stealing the podcast identity passing it off as your own mimicking them and actually monetizing their content without their their permission so there's just a lot of interesting stuff happening in this area and i think the next few years are going to be decisive in like building a proper legal framework both for things like copyright but also even just down to the the sort of ground level of which apps you're using and how we uh how we label things how we organize things and how we put guards in front of people who are you know accidentally encountering this stuff without realizing and being you know being deceived Yeah, the legal framework is one thing, but the other avenue to fight it is a pure technical one, where we write programs and bots to detect AI and fight it or label it, as you say.

11:45 So how is Fountain doing that? How is Fountain making sure that everything is not just AI slop? I know there's a small paywall. So if you're a creator on Fountain, you have to pay like a dollar a year or whatever it is. I mean, that helps to a certain extent, I guess. But what other measures are you taking to prevent AI slop? yeah so there's there's certain things that we are doing and there's certain things that are happening within the ecosystem so the things that we're doing like you mentioned to you know if you want to use fountain for hosting publish your podcast distribute it out to all the different apps there's no free account some of these other companies like inception point ai which i mentioned even some of the main hosting providers give you a free trial and that gives you a window opportunity to be able to generate some downloads monetize the podcast before the free trial ends And then obviously, once you're making money, you can afford to extend it and start paying for it.

12:39 So whether you're a podcaster, you know, if you're a podcaster, our cheapest plan is $25 a month. If you're an artist, the plan is actually only a dollar a month. But even just having a dollar there that you have to pay makes it more difficult for agents to be able to create accounts and publish music, you know, fraudulently using AI, using different scripts, etc. It doesn't make it impossible, but it definitely makes it harder. So that's one thing, like having a paywall as being the protection layer. The other is, so how it works behind on the back end is there's, you know, millions of podcasts, right? Probably 400,000 active podcasts up until, well, very early on, because it was really Apple that put podcasting into the mainstream, right?

13:21 And they had their own index of podcasts. And what happened was certain other podcast apps like Overcast, et cetera, evolved, developed, came to market, and they started using Apple's index. And then after a while, Apple decided, hey, this episode over here is against our content policy. We're going to take it down. So not only did that episode come down from Apple, but it also came down from Overcast and any of the other apps that use that same index as well. Which was a problem because it means that Apple was kind of setting the rules for other people's apps. So what happened a few years ago is the podcast index was created. So it's an open index of podcasts that any app developer can use. And Adam Curry and Dave Jones, the guys behind Podcast Index, have spent a lot of time in the last 6 to 12 months building protections because you have these companies like Inception Point AI who are just literally churning out AI-generated content, which is not labeled in any way.

14:13 It's entering into all these apps, including Fountain, and people are being misled. particularly if you think about how that could work in fountain it's it's not even just they're able to monetize the the the kind of the ai content through the downloads they're generating through the ad impressions but they're also able to then claim that show in fountain and start start receiving lightning payments for people so they're not just taking money from advertisers but they could potentially also be taking money from genuine listeners who want to just support a podcast so they have a system now to tag ai generated content it's exactly that it's using AI to identify AI. And we're able to then label those episodes as such, or those feeds as such. And then those can be, you know, retracted from the index and not displayed in the apps. So again, that's not something we're directly doing. But as part of the ecosystem, we're all trying to work together to figure out this, figure out this problem together, because it's kind of too big for one single person or company to solve on their own, it has to kind of be done at a protocol or system level. Yeah, makes sense. So how does Fountain work? I know in the beginning, you could just start up the app and you would get one set per minute or something streamed to you when you listen to an episode. How does it work now? And what features are the new cool ones and so on and so forth? Yeah, things have changed a little bit over the years. So I think it was maybe the summer of 2022 when we launched the listen to earn feature which completely went down the storm people realized that they could earn bitcoin just for listening to any podcast and the way that it

15:47 would work is that you would be given a rate at random every single day sometimes that rate would be zero we can't afford to pay everyone every single day and you would so yeah you say you know you'd open the app you'd listen to whatever podcast you were going to choose to listen to and then it would say you're going to earn 10 sats a minute for the next hour and then we pay that out back to the listeners lightning wallet so fountain has a built-in lightning wallet and the way that we were funding that is that we were basically just taking you know when you support a podcast on fountain by sending his app or streaming there's fees that are paid on top of that we just pull those fees and pay those back to users very early on the amount we were paying out was super high like there were people who were getting a thousand sats per minute for like a whole hour or something and people posting about it on x being like this is the best thing ever and then And I guess over time, you know, we had to become more sophisticated as a business and really think about the model.

16:38 And that quickly became unsustainable, but it also created problems for us. You know, we were becoming an app where people just go to earn free money and there's no business model in that. But also it kind of dilutes the quality of the overall user base and really takes the focus away from actually the things that we want you to do, which is to create clips or leave comments or share things or build playlists. So over the time, we basically brought the reward payouts down a little. And then recently, we've actually made the decision that we're not paying out rewards at all anymore, which is, you know, certainly going to be a shame for some people who came to rely on that. And maybe that was the main reason they were using Fountain But I like to think that still as an app we offer something as good or you know better or certainly a very different experience to what you would maybe get through Apple or Spotify So the things I mentioned is, you know, you can, when you download the app, you have a built-in Lightning wallet. You can also create a NOSTA profile or connect an existing NOSTA profile.

17:35 So you can bring your followers from NOSTA with you and you then have the feed. Anyone who sends a zap or leaves a comment on an episode, I can see that in my feed. I can click through, I can go listen to the episode and I can zap the episode or I can stream stats per minute. And we also incorporated things like live streams. We have also been working on this group chat feature whereby you can have a group chat for a show. So it's almost like a signal or telegram style experience for the podcast. So there's lots that we're doing to enrich the overall quality, but less of a focus on just paying out rewards to listeners where if anything, we're more focused on like how can we increase the revenue of the podcasters who are using the platform and building useful tools to support that goal. yeah and what's on the roadmap what's what's coming up ahead what are some upcoming features what can we look forward to in the future yeah so like i said we we launched the fountain fountain for podcasters which is our hosting products last year and that's going pretty well we're we're extending that all the time so one recent thing that we added is support for video well actually we had support for video very early on we just add the video to your rss feed it means that listeners on fountain and other apps that read the rss feed for video can play video but now we also support video distribution to apple podcast as well soon we also have hope to add support for spotify and also youtube as well because like my role in the company i spend a lot of time speaking to to podcasters just trying to understand what problems are they up against like where are things challenging in terms of like the amount of

19:08 time or how repetitive they are how fiddly they are like basically freeing up more time and energy resources for them to be creative and actually work on the podcast rather than in the podcast on the detail on the admin and actually you know second to editing and production which is like the biggest number one time sink like the second one is actually publishing stuff and then also repurposing content clipping any efforts you make to sort of grow the podcast so actually publishing directly to YouTube just from, you know, uploading once to Fountain, but also having the video going to everywhere else you'd want the video to be is a massive time saver. Other things we're looking at, and yeah, this has really come out of both my conversations with podcasters, but also my own experience just working on Fountain and just getting work done is everybody is completely enamored with the idea of AI agents at the moment. I remember back in January when OpenClaw first came out I installed it on like a virtual computer started using that for admin work for fountain there was a massive learning curve but very quickly I sort of figured out okay I can actually do some basic stuff which is really useful and I tried to give it more complicated tasks and thought actually it's handling this quite well so I just kept giving it stuff and now I've kind of become so dependent on it for so many things it is so different from just like opening up a chat gpt window and asking a question i can actually schedule tasks and organize stuff and it has all the memory i need to be able to just do anything whenever and so yeah a lot of podcasters are now using these ai agents increasingly on their podcast i think maybe first through like a

20:41 personal or a work lens but then now they're seeing how these things could be applied to their podcast so we're actually looking at how we can be become slightly more api first in in the product that we offer for podcasters and actually have an mcp so you can connect fountain to claude or codex or chat gpt or whatever ai chat agent you have and use that to work on your podcast and i've found in my own experience that you know i've just been working in codex and claude code on like test podcasts asking it to do things like find me the best clips from this episode or you know analyze my data on past performance of these episodes and compare it to this or maybe every day suggest me like suggest three things we can do to grow the podcast today like a an article we could write a post we can put out or whatever and i found that there's there's certain limitations there's certain things that these ai agents can do but there's also lots of things they can't do just because they weren't really designed to be podcast native they're they're kind of good all-rounder generalist tools but they're not really built for podcasting so yeah we've spent a lot of time just exploring this area without the pressure of having to launch something just really trying to understand what's going on getting into the mind of the podcaster who is using these tools what challenges they're coming up against and developing things that are just going to save them time but like i said also free up time for them to to work on the actual podcast rather than the admin behind the scenes stuff. Yeah, and how much stats do you have on your users and their profiles? Like, how big a

22:18 chunk of the fountain users are also on Noster, for instance, like a percentage? I mean, educated guests will do as an answer. It's been a while since I last checked the data. From memory, I would say maybe 25% of fountain users has a Noster profile. I wouldn't be able to tell you how many of those people are actually active on Nostra. When you download Fountain and start using the app, we ask you just to complete your profile. And when you do that, we actually create a Nostra profile for you. So a lot of people have one without necessarily using it. A lot of people just use Fountain just to listen to podcasts in the regular way. They're not really doing anything else.

22:59 So I'm not sure how many of those accounts will actually be active on Nostra. And I mean, how many of the accounts never zap anyone anything or don't even use Bitcoin at all? yeah probably probably the majority but i think that's that's really what's powerful about this whole thing is that you can also like use this reframe this as like the percentage of people on fountain who are zapping or using nostril or whatever but you can also look at that through the lens of a single podcast let's say if you had you know a thousand regular listeners you only really need you know five ten percent of those people to be active to actually want to support you and be on the app that allows them to do that it's you can't expect everyone and everyone in your listener base to be able to have that desire but also take those steps to actually go out of their way to use a different app learn a new skill try out a different routine which is to listen to a podcast leave a comment send a boost really engage with the community side of the podcast because that's not most people just want to like press play and then put their phone back in their pocket or start driving, you know?

24:03 Yeah, I guess most people don't boost on YouTube with fiat and such either. The feature is there. It's just that most people don't get over the hurdle. I mean, the hurdle is in a way higher with Bitcoin because you sort of need to know what a Satoshi is. But it really isn't. If you just automatically get all the tools you need by signing up for Fountain, then it's really a no-brainer. But yeah, we can hope we get into more of that as we proceed into the future. I sometimes call Noster the most beautiful clusterfuck on the internet, because there's a lot of things that are broken or that were...

24:46 People started building something and then never followed up on it and stuff like that. It's kind of clumsy. What's the word? Yeah, clusterfuck is a good word for it. Like it's not the smoothest experience to fire up a Nostra profile. And none of the Nostra apps really work smoothly yet, I'd say. Then again, I love the idea and I love the idea of the unstoppableness of it and all of this. Of course I do. It's a great life raft. What are your thoughts on Nostra in general? Where do you see it going like in the coming decade? i think that you know i'm not a technical person i think that i know a lot of developers look at the nostra specification and they're like wow like the simplicity of the different primitives that you have there for things like payments identity allow you to build really powerful tools and it's very very flexible and we've found that you know certain problems that we've had to try and solve with NOSTA have been solved.

25:50 So one of these things was cross-app comments. How can I comment on a podcast episode in this app and have the comment appear in the other app and someone reply to me from there uh you know these things they weren trivial before and now they are the challenge is like really trying to get other developers to build on that ecosystem and it's very hard because i think any protocol like that or any ecosystem like that reached reaches some kind of critical mass where it achieves some level of sorry someone's at the door mate i've got to pause for a second i'll be back in two minutes no problem i'll take your question from the top again yeah what was i saying i was talking about nostr as the most beautiful clusterfuck on the internet yeah how do you see what are your thoughts on it how do you see how do you see nostr evolving over the next 10 years yeah so i'm i'm not a technical person i'm not a developer but i know that a lot of developers look at the protocol, they look at the specification and they really admire its simplicity. You have some really powerful primitives there that allow you to build amazing software that is interoperable and it's very, very flexible. And we found it to be really, really positive for solving problems that were, you know, not trivial a couple of years ago, things like cross app comments. So being able to comment on an episode in one podcast app, being able to reply to that episode in another one. I mean, anyone who uses NOSTA just knows this is like basic, right? This is what NOSTA is for,

27:22 but this is something that people in the podcasting world have been trying to solve for many, many years. And so, you know, we came to the podcast ecosystem with a solution and said, hey, look, you guys should build on NOSTA. We've already built this out. Here's the documentation. Here's what you need to do. Here's how it works. Come join us. You know, very difficult for people to sign up to something that hasn't reached that kind of critical mass where the protocol, the ecosystem has reached that point whereby any new person who encounters it is like okay this has serious credibility i can see that app a b and c are using this it has certain number of users that makes it feel like it's you know going to stick around and it's solid and it's robust and so it's been very difficult to get that early traction and i think that that applies both on the developer level in terms of getting certain apps or engineers or builders to build useful products on top of NOSTA because I think a lot of the stuff that I've seen recently has been, you know, it's been kind of small vibe-coded projects, maybe things that are half finished or started and then kind of abandoned. You have things like, you know, the thing that Jack Dorsey was working on, Divine, like the Vine reboot. That, you know, I thought maybe might give some additional credibility to the NOSTA network. It's like, okay, here's somebody very renowned in the tech world investing a lot of time and energy into building something on this ecosystem. And I haven't really seen it yet translate. I'd really love it to if it could. But it also applies on the personal level when you see certain notable people or profiles or accounts joining NOSTA, people like Edward

28:56 Snowden, for example, that lends legitimacy to the network and invites more people to join. I guess, yeah, I guess I've been a little disappointed. NOSTA came with so many promises and I still think that all that's good about NOSTA is still true. That hasn't changed at all. It's just that you know and we've done our best to really really invest in nostr and put it front of everything we do and trying to like push things forward with the type of products experiences we're building on it but it hasn't reached that point yet and yeah i just i wonder if you know there's certainly ux challenges technical challenges that we we all know about right it's the the whole key management thing for example is very complicated even just for somebody completely new to it to get your head around how it all works and the fact that it's not just one app and one platform it's an ecosystem of different things and you have a profile and it follows you and you can take it with you you know these aren't simple things for for many people to understand somehow so yeah i i don't know i think we just haven't really got to the point yet where people are you you have to be in a desperate situation to force some kind of change you know and we haven't we haven't had that urgency or that impetus for people to seek out an alternative yet particularly since you know Well, according to most people, at least, Elon Musk is doing a great job on X.

30:14 And now suddenly everyone over on X is having a great time again. And everything's working and they have all this stuff working. Yeah. And I think it's also interesting to see like, you know, Jack Dorsey's BitChat projects. Whenever in a developing country there is, you know, the government has closed off access to the internet or there's a power outage or whatever. People are flocking to BitChat to use that as a messaging tool. That comes out of a need or an urgency, right? I have to use this product because there is nothing else. The thing I depended on before doesn't serve me anymore. And we haven't been able to see that yet in Nostra. There's not enough impetus for people to either try Nostra or leave their existing social media apps that they use and just go all in on Nostra yet.

30:59 I think this is the crux of the problem, if you can even call it a problem. because as long as, as you say, Elon Musk is doing a good job with X, you don't really need Noster. So I think many people like myself use it more as a lifeboat. And you can even see like an exodus of Bitcoiners from Noster back to X because they're not getting, because Noster is not like growing fast enough or like giving them the returns, not only financial returns, but like engagement returns that they were looking for. it's sort of stalled in a way I guess and as you say the truths about its promises are still true and we just have to get people building on it I think Fountain is like a great Noster gateway drug we have other things such as Atlantis for instance another cool thing app that has Noster inherently integrated into the whole thing and I mean there's tons of Noster apps of course you can go to the zap store and find out more about Nostra apps.

32:10 Yeah, I think just one thing on Nostra is that just because it hasn't met our expectations so far in terms of scale, growth and adoption, it doesn't mean that that's not going to happen in the future. As much as it's a challenge, it's more actually an opportunity. And we at Fountain, we're not giving up on Nostra. We're still putting it at the heart of everything we're doing. I mean, everything we've ever done at Fountain always has to be put through the lens of interoperability. If it only works on Fountain, then it's probably not worth building. So everything's been designed in that way. But I'm sure there are examples of other protocols that have been developed very many years ago that didn't succeed at first. And they had maybe an initial surge, they flatlined for years, and then they were picked up again later and rediscovered. And then that's when they took off don't press me to tell you what what those what those protocols are i wouldn't be able to tell you but i'm sure there are examples of that so the the work that has been put into nostr both by the contributors at the protocol level but also the developers who are building on it like that work has not been wasted like this is still in play and really it's up to us in the same way that it's up to us as bitcoin as you know if we really really believe in this thing we can't just give up on it when the price goes down like we can't just give up on Nostra when we feel crap about you know new users or active users or the number of new apps and products being built on the ecosystem you know we have to to stay true to our beliefs and I think that if we do that the time will come I'm not sure when that's going to be but I'm I'm still bullish on I'm as bullish on Nostra as I am on Bitcoin I think that Bitcoin probably feels more inevitable

33:45 as a thing that's going to succeed in in the longer term but it's it's easy to say that now You know, would we have been saying this, you know, 12, 13 years ago? Maybe not. I'm not sure. Yeah. And I think another thing is just because Google and the Googles and Facebooks and Twitters of the world had this move fast and break things attitude and gained mass adoption very, very quickly, we sort of expect that to be the way things get adopted on the internet. But there's nothing, it's not a law of nature that things on the internet will have to have that is curve adoption and lead and have global reach. I mean, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think both Noster and Bitcoin are built for low time preference and they're built to be robust.

34:31 And that comes with trade-offs. And one of the trade-offs is convenience, which inherently means that adoption is slower than you'd expect from something that has compromised, you know, security and privacy and such things. And then for convenience, and then it's super convenient. And then all the sheep flock to it. Whereas most things built on Bitcoin and Nostra are more focused on the long term, providing the user with value long term, let's just say that. Yeah. And I think also, like, we just have to maybe revisit our expectations because as Bitcoiners, you know, When we first discovered Bitcoin, it was our goal that Bitcoin would become the unit of account globally, that it would be the global reserve currency, that a higher percentage of payments worldwide would be made in Bitcoin compared to fiat currencies.

35:27 I'm not sure if anyone would have, I'm not sure if many people would have kind of pegged that as this is the goal for Bitcoin. You know, that's obviously, that's the dream, that's the ambition. It would be great if that happened, but no one's really expecting that to happen. or at least you know certainly people in the early days of bitcoin they they weren't they weren't set on that happening and i think the same also can be said for nostr as well you know it's if our expectation is that nostr is going to surpass x and meta and all of these platforms as being the number one social media network maybe that's just disillusioned i mean and it maybe doesn't have to be that you know if if if nostr works for the few and not the many but the few who do enjoy it, absolutely love it, and it's an indispensable part of their lives and has added something that other platforms could never have provided, then I would say that's a success.

36:16 If it's solved problems that closed platforms could have never solved, but an open protocol has, I think that's also a success. Absolutely. I mean, I don't like the expression Bitcoin is for everyone. I think Bitcoin is for anyone is much more accurate because you sort of have to do your homework to be able to use it. It's not for everyone. It's for everyone willing to do the work, anyone willing to do the work. And the same is true for Noster, I guess. However, if you zoom out and really long term, I think both of these projects are inevitable successes. They have to be because they are far superior to Bitcoin is far superior to fiat money in every single sense.

36:58 And Noster is far superior to centralized platforms on so many important metrics. I mean, it might be worse at fighting AI bots at the moment or something like that, and curating a feed. But people are working on these things, and the fundamentals are much, much better. So yeah, I think their success is inevitable as long as they keep existing. yeah i i think yeah the challenge really is that if if the if the goal is on a long-term horizon many companies can't operate on a long-term horizon and exactly the same for for bitcoin as well you know if you think about merchants and sellers and traders people who are exchanging or using bitcoin to sell products and services they have short-term challenges you know they have cash flow they have stock they have the realities of business and trading to make sure that they are turning a profit that they're able to stay in business and the question is if if these tools that we have like bitcoin and nostr are working well enough in the short term but not being used by enough people for it to really make sense for for a business then the reality is is that those companies or those traders those merchants are going to go out of business so we have to also So even though we have a long-term vision, we still also have to be grounded in the now and next month and the month after.

38:23 Yeah, there's a truth to that, a short-term truth to that. But if you zoom out and think about a hyper-Bitcoinized world, then a business is nothing but a signal group or something. It's a group of friends doing things together. It doesn't have to be. You don't have to have all the what we call lubrication companies like accountants and lawyers and tax lawyers and stuff because no one can do anything about what you're doing as a Bitcoin business. That's like sort of the whole end goal is to be sovereign and not have to give a shit about the rules the mafia sets for you or the government sets for you. But just Bitcoin actually being its own global ecosystem, business to business also, like everyone settles everything in sats, then all of those problems are solved. It's just that we're not there yet.

39:13 So we have these transit. All the problems described by like, yeah, you have to make profit, you have to make your business this and that. All of those problems are sort of tied to, they are fiat system problems. Bank accounts, for instance, and not having them frozen because you associate with Bitcoin. That's a fiat problem. It's not a Bitcoin problem. So I think it's It's important to call a spade a spade here and point out where the problem really lies because Bitcoin itself is the solution, not the problem. Yeah, no, I think I agree with that. So when are you going to be releasing your music on FountainCube?

39:55 That's a good question. There's been a little break. So I recorded some songs here in this room, playing that guitar behind me here that I've written over the past, say, five years. And then I gave them to my brother, who's a very good, first of all, very good musician and composer in his own right. And he's also got a handful of songs, so he's also planning on releasing his own stuff. But what he did to my stuff was add strings and harmonicas and flutes and whatnot to them, and some orchestrations to all the songs, very fitting ones. And also he's working on mixing and mastering the whole thing. So, so I'm looking forward to that.

40:38 It's sort of 85% done, I'd say, but he's sort of lost, lost his mojo for a while, but he's getting back into it here next week. I believe he he usually works on them when when working his Fiat job So so when he has spare time during his Fiat job so he he he works on on music stuff so so we see when i i don know exactly when it be done but i expect it to be done within a month maybe or or two and then we'll i'll we'll take it from there i'm wearing the geyser t-shirt today so i might set up a geyser fund for for pressing vinyls and stuff and releasing on Fountain, of course, and using all the other Noster and Bitcoin tools that are available. Because why wouldn't I? And just see how far. This is one of those throwing things at the wall and see what sticks kind of projects. I don't expect much from it other than to have fun using all the tools and figuring things out. And very much looking forward to sharing this with the world and see how it gets received. So yeah, looking forward to it a lot.

41:47 yeah i'm excited i'm excited for it too what was your experience in the past of uh if you have like releasing music and you know getting feedback on it or getting paid for it like what was that like well this is this is such a good question for me now now you're the interviewer and i'm the interviewer but tables have turned i mean i'm i'm an old fart i turned 50 this year so so i've been around quite long and trying to to trying to become an artist was was a a huge part of my life for a long time and it was the way i see it now is that it wasn't until it wasn't until i stopped trying that i actually became a rock star but if you can call it that sort of accidents accidental bitcoin well i wouldn't call it rock star but i'm playing at all these conferences now uh because of a fluke, basically. So we do this Satoshi Rakamoto gigs and I'm having fun doing those.

42:43 But my first experiences were recordings. We recorded on ADATs, if you remember those. So cassettes, literal cassettes. And then around the millennium, we pressed CDs with some local bands and tried to sell CDs, which was almost impossible if you didn't have a record deal and could sell them in record stores because only your close friends and family would buy them and the others were hard to sell and then of course like later on with i guess my the the the successful video i have is one called a song called driven by a band called you're out the beast which is a project it's 15 years old now the video i played in a band sort of grunge rock metal band that made a video for a single that was promoted by the pirate bay so so the the video was up on they called it the promo bay so the pirate bay were promoting local bands from all over the world and we were one of those bands and the video got a hundred thousand views in three days which was exhilarating of course because i sat by the computer and pressed f5 over and over again and refreshed the page just to see what had happened and it's like my first experience with something going viral on the internet or something getting a lot of attention fast.

44:02 And that was a great experience. I guess that played into why I started writing about Bitcoin and why I started seeing the internet as something that you could actually do something on. And there were ways of not being drowned out by everything else. You just need to be there and do the things. and playing with my brother again here and producing with my brother again is great fun too because around 20 years ago we recorded music together me and my two brothers under the banner Fleet of Clay which is also available on Spotify so if you're interested in that but yeah, I'm excited to do this again I haven't really put any effort into music for a long time. So I'm excited to get back into it. And I haven't used any AI and just the very basic effects and tools in the DAW. So it's my attempt at real stupidity trying to beat AI.

45:08 In an era where everyone uses AI for everything, I'm going the complete opposite direction and being the old fart I am and just being a stubborn old man. But trying to do something pure and convey something real and we'll see we'll see where it lands that's amazing yeah yeah it's so interesting that people still have this like really really deep kind of passion and desire to become an artist despite knowing like how challenging it is to be an artist if you think about you know what percentage of you know bands formed in schools around the world go on to become famous it's such a small amount but you know at the at the time because i was in bands and stuff at school as well like it it feels so it feels so real and it feels so possible and and beyond anything else it's really just a thrill it's the joy of spending time with your friends making music you know the possibility of having even just a few people listen to your music or maybe someone liking your music or someone buying you know seeing your show somewhere like it's it's it's these really small things and i think that i guess if you're an artist that you know, you're, you know, let's say you're a 16 year old girl and this is your opportunity.

46:26 You see that, okay, I want to become an artist. Like I know how hard it is to get paid for my music. I know how hard it is to get a record deal. I know that I have to have a million followers on TikTok to have any chance of even opening the door with some of these people in the music industry. People are still doing it despite that. And I don't know, I just, I just find that really interesting yeah i mean for me i sort sure i i wanted to be a rock star in my teens but but but say after 2025 somewhere i never thought i never had any disillusions but like i knew how impossible it was and i just wanted to to try to play and record music as well as i could and see how how how good of a product i could make that was always much more interesting to me to just test my own boundaries How good of a song can I write How well can I sing? How well can I play? How well can I produce something? And I've always been like that with everyone. If I do something, I want to challenge myself and see how far can I take it.

47:30 but but you know the idea of touring with a in a bus like it's awful i i'm doing about like last year i think i did 13 different bitcoin conferences and a handful of other bitcoin events and for most of them i i get paid to go there and i get my hotel and travel and flights for free so imagine not knowing if you're going to get paid for anything, which is true for bands who are not already famous, and they try to be famous by touring because it's the only way, and sitting on a bus every day, like it would suck.

48:12 It would suck so much. There's not even an included breakfast in the hotel deal. What are you talking about? And record companies nowadays, by the way, they're basically loan sharks. They force the artist to take out a huge mortgage to give everything to their dream. And then they do very little to make that happen. And the artist has to do everything themselves. And you can just hope for the best. And most of these artists are just indebted for the rest of their lives. And they never make it as artists in the first place. And this is what the record companies and such make profit from. So it's an awful business in that sense, the legacy stuff.

48:54 Then again, there are so many ways to make creative stuff, to be creative and create stuff nowadays by just using the tools available. It's, I mean, especially with AI and voiceovers and stuff, you could easily make a Hollywood quality movie from your bedroom. Like you just have to put in the effort and it's almost without cost. I mean, yeah, you need to pay for some subscription here and there. But if you compare it to the cost of a Hollywood movie, it's nothing. So I think the internet and making everything available to everyone is changing the landscape for sure. And you don't get phenomena such as rock stars and movie stars anymore.

49:36 I think that era is completely over. And I'm sort of glad it is because all it created really was entitled assholes. Sure, sure. I do appreciate people who devote their life to their art, like David Bowie or someone like that, that just makes their art their lives. But of course, you can still do that in a world without rock stars and movie stars. There's nothing hindering you from doing that. So I'm an optimist by nature and I'm optimistic about how, I mean, Hollywood can't die soon enough in my opinion and neither can commercial music.

50:18 I think most of it is just awful. Most commercial music and commercial movies are just goddamn awful and full of woke propaganda and bullshit. So I don't really like that stuff. So yeah. End of rant. what are your thoughts yeah i mean it's funny i i always wanted to be an artist when i was younger and i was actually i was in a band i think i was maybe 13 years old and uh we we'd started recording uh this guy's um studio it was near my parents house and uh this guy was maybe in his late 50s early 60s he was kind of like a he was he was he was a rock star he had his own little studio upstairs and we started making this record with him and a couple of months into the process he sadly passed away just out of nowhere and we were just so shocked and saddened by the whole thing and we felt like we owed it to him to like actually go and finish this record without him so we went to we went down to Tottenham Court Road in London which is where all the audio shops are we bought some some speakers a microphone a mixer all this stuff and we brought it back to my house and we we tried to finish the record there but halfway through that actually one of one of the members of our band got scouted by another local band who went on to become very very successful and i have i have no i have uh yeah i'm sure he has no regrets at all i have nothing against him for doing it it was the right decision but i was have you heard of bombay bicycle club no very famous in the uk uh but uh yeah so they uh

51:57 Yeah, they went on to become very successful. And I was left with all this music equipment. So I spent a lot of time. I used to produce music for bands in our school. I used to make my own productions, just making beats, sampling stuff. I guess with the background goal of maybe this could become something one day and maybe I can get paid for this one day. And I have posted all that. Some of the music from that era on Fountain, you can find it there. Awesome. But for me, it was all about just enjoying the craft and just enjoying the time alone actually just to spend time with these tools twiddling knobs pressing keys seeing where seeing where things went you know that the reality is is that actually making a living off that stuff or achieving any kind of acclaim for it was just so far from possible because it was never my number one priority i think you have to really live and breathe this stuff and put it before absolutely anything else if you have a single chance and of course these days there are other things that you have to have like followers on social media or whatever i was never going to put in the work and that dedication to do that but yeah i i hope that there's there's there are people out there who are maybe in the situation i found myself in 20 years ago who have these tools have that kind of momentum to go out and create something and find fountain and actually find a way to to make it work for them you know it would be incredible to have somebody you know earn you know tens hundred thousands of pounds on on fountain and become you know a success and we become the launch pad for their career you know that that would be incredible yeah let make that happen and let let that someone be me

53:30 please no jokes aside uh are you familiar with the band ray uh razor light yeah yeah they're friends of old friends of mine the the guitarist and the bassist yeah yeah i don't know johnny i never met him but they the bassist and the guitarist one of them went to school with my brother so so i've known them since since before they were famous and that was such a weird thing because they they became like super famous in a very short amount of time in in the uk alone basically i mean they were popular in some other countries but they were way more popular in the uk than anywhere else so these two guys they just moved to london and and answered an ad in the newspaper or something like guitarists and bassists wanted as like, let's give it a shot.

54:19 And they became pop stars. And it's been interesting to follow them and their careers after that, because they sort of, enemies stopped writing about them at some point, and then their careers sort of dissipated. So they were pop stars for a handful of years, but now they're on a quite successful reunion tour, I hear. So that's good to see. Yeah, I mean, they were massive back in, I think it was maybe 2005, 2006 was like peak laser light fame. Yeah, they were super massive. I remember seeing them live in Hyde Park. Yeah. Yeah, they were great. They headlined Glastonbury and stuff like that and played like Albert Hall and Wembley Stadium.

55:03 And so like really pinch your arm kind of things that normal people don't usually get to do. But yeah, they're interesting to know for sure. And I like them a lot, both of them. They're not Bitcoiners, but they're good old friends and good contacts to have. That's cool. Yeah, it's so interesting. Just the stories. I think the music industry generally, historically, has just been, it's had such a mystical sort of aura around it. Like some of the tales and the narratives. And recently I went on this sort of like rabbit hole of listening to audiobooks, autobiographies from famous rock stars. and just getting completely lost in that.

55:45 So I did Ozzy Osbourne, Eric Clapton, yeah, many others. And I just, I find it hard to believe that people are going to look back on this era of music history that we're living through now in the same way that we can look back on some of these artists that, you know, came out in the 60s and 70s and 80s. I just, I struggled to think about, you know, what Dua Lipa's autobiography is going to be like when it comes out in 2050 or Taylor Swift's autobiography? And were there people going to look back on this era with the same kind of like affection and sort of like rose-tinted view of the way that we do when we look back? Yeah, I mean, I've read a handful of those. I read Aussies too and Lemmies and Slashes.

56:28 I read Aussies one, yeah. Very funny. Yeah, I think Lemmies was the funniest one I've ever read. I should check it out. And Slashes one was good too, I guess. But yeah, I think there's something to the 90s. We weren't aware of how unique the 90s were when we lived through them. I mean, I don't know how old you are. I suspect you're younger than I am. Yeah, so you're quite a bit younger than I am. But I think a lot of the best movies ever and the best music ever is from just before the internet started taking off. And I think some of this has to do with notifications. Because in order to be creative, you need to not only not be interrupted, but also knowing that you're not going to be interrupted.

57:15 And I think after social media, the birth of social media, that is somewhat impossible because you're getting interrupted all the time by something. So the era just before that, I think a lot of things peaked. The craft of creating a movie or an album without any help from computers, that's a very fascinating era to me. Like that's the culmination of everything mechanical, if you will. Yeah, that's definitely it. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Any other things on your mind?

57:56 No, no, nothing. Yeah. Thanks for having me back on. It's been great chatting to you as always. Likewise. I'm looking forward to hearing your music come out and fountain soon. So am I. Let me know when you're ready and we'll boost it. We'll do everything we can to get it out there. And yeah, really hoping that it works out. And if not, at least it's a fun experience. Just like you say, playing with the tools that are available. Yeah. And my brother's coming over tonight. So maybe we'll, we have some things to do. We need to fire up a Noster profile for him and do all the things, signing up for all of these things that we will need here in a month or two. So yeah, looking forward to all of it.

58:37 And the greatest chat as always, fountain.fm. And for the extremely generous price of $5 per month, you can subscribe to the Bitcoin Infinity Show on Fountain and thereby get the episodes one day earlier than everyone else. I would appreciate that very much if you signed up for a subscription. I think it's a great deal. Definitely check out Fountain. Anywhere else on the internet you want to send our listeners, Nick? No, just go to fountain.fm. And to get the app, just search Fountain in the App Store. Yeah, get everything set up. Should only take a minute. Fantastic. Go do the things and like, subscribe and brush your teeth.

59:18 This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Thanks for listening. Thank you.