My favorite search engine embraces my favorite protocol! Christmas came early :) 🌲 𓅦 ⚡️
If you have ideas around how Kagi can best serve nostr users, let them know here!
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Max
max@nostr.com
npub18lzl...ugm3
Helping entrepreneurs build the hivemind ⚡️
[New Pod] Complexity Rules Everything Around Me with @Lyn Alden
Fountain:
Apple:
YouTube:
Substack:
This was a fun and fascinating conversation with Lyn Alden! We discuss a number of topics about which she’s not typically asked. One common thread throughout the conversation is how best to understand and invest around complex systems. Please note that while Lyn and I discuss some biohacking/energy boosting stuff, we’re definitely not doctors, so do your own research ;)
Here are a few of the topics we cover:
Energy Hacks
- Lyn’s favorite energy boosting hacks, including: magnesium, sardines, vitamin K2, vitamin A, cold plunges, and sprinting
Complexity and Permaculture
- Lyn’s fascination with permaculture and the application of permaculture principles to our information diets
- How Lyn builds a brand around being open and intellectually honest to avoid group think and audience capture
- Top down vs. bottom up (Communism vs. Capitalism) is the big story of the 20th century that continues today
Nostr
- The promise of Nostr as a new substrate for re-wilding the web and its ultimate TAM
- Evaluating Nostr vs. other systems/protocols attempting to build a decentralized identity/data system
- NOSTR project requests from Lyn and Max
Big Tech and AI
- Lyn’s take that AI is a continuation of the cloud computing wave, which means it’s centralizing in the medium term
- BUT these big companies are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by restricting and closing off their products, which leaves an opening for tech that’s a year or so behind but actually open and less neutered
- Lyn is less bullish on AGI; the biggest breakthroughs are likely to come out of left field like trillion dollar health care companies
- Lyn is also less bullish on robotics because it’s energy intensive and more complex; software often goes faster than you think and hardware often goes slower than you think
Open Source Software and Companies
- The big winners from open source software are platform aggregators (e.g. AWS) and users
- Lyn analogizes companies built on open source software to ETFs - products with trillions of dollars under management but companies like Black Rock, State Street, and Invesco, which are big but not massive. BlackRock is a $160B company and only half of that is ETFs. Big but not Google or Apple. ETF businesses are worth a couple hundred billion for an industry worth >$10 trillion; the true winners here are the users as margins race to the bottom
MicroStrategy
- Can $MSTR sustain its premium trading 3x to NAV ?
- $MSTR advantages: founder control and growing liquidity network effects (e.g. MSTR options markets); very few ETFs and companies will achieve sufficient liquidity in their options markets
Bitcoin and Energy
- Bitcoin is energy backed money - external entropy is what makes the Bitcoin system not circular logic (like proof of state) and a truly autonomous system
- Both Lyn and Max track energy price/density models for Bitcoin
- Lyn also uses MVRV Z-Score for tracking fair Bitcoin price
Hivemind: Ideas from the Edge • Complexity Rules Everything Around Me with Lyn Alden • Listen on Fountain
This was a fun and fascinating conversation with Lyn Alden! We discuss a number of topics about which she’s not typically asked. One common threa...
Apple Podcasts
Complexity Rules Everything Around Me with Lyn Alden
Podcast Episode · Hivemind: Ideas from the Edge · 11/01/2024 · 1h 41m

Complexity Rules Everything Around Me with Lyn Alden
This was a fun and fascinating conversation with Lyn Alden!
This was a fun one! Bullish on nostr and nostr startups
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[New Pod] Designing @jack's favorite shirt, Creating an open music library, and Growing an indie music empire with @npub1eequ...at9s (Founder, lightning.store and @Wavlake)
Fountain: https://fountain.fm/episode/x3v4yu6AuXsmYvdljKZe
YT:
Apple:
Substack:
SN:
I sit down with Sam Means, founder of lightning.store and Wavlake for a fascinating conversation about the future of the music industry!
Here are a few topics we discuss:
The genesis of lightning.store
Parallels between Bitcoin and the punk/DIY scenes
Max’s dad - indie artist who made some cool trippy nostr shirts (which Max is wearing during interview)
Sam’s NOFX Nostr shirt (which Max wears frequently)
How Sam decides what shirts to make
Making Jack’s favorite shirt, seeing it on the Super Bowl, and stress testing Sam’s Lightning node + btcpayserver setup
Sam needs a Lightning Shopify app that works (opportunity for listeners!)
Sam got started making a first website and forum for the Weezer fan club
Sam is the consummate entrepreneur: he just does the things that need to be done
Sam’s education was coming up in bands and working venues
Pinkerton - the Weezer album changed the course of Sam’s life
Can a band be big and not suck?
Why the music biz generally sucks for bands
The magic of finding a new band that “flips your lid” (Sam’s new favorite phrase)
The magic of David Bowie and artists who can reinvent themselves
Finding the weirdest 10cc record in Japan
A history of the interplay between music and technology from pre Internet to p2p file sharing to streaming to what’s coming next
Scott Joplin and piano rolls (artists were getting screwed from day 0)
Lars from Metallica will forever be known as the guy who wants to put 12 yo music fans in jail
Music Like Water (2005, Forbes) - early article explaining how to charge for music like a utility
The monthly subscription fee for everything was the first step to a new idea
~97% of artists on Spotify make approximately nothing. If this market can make anything somewhere else they’re likely to try it
Bitcoin is the real occupy Wall Street; Wavlake is the real occupy Spotify
Even though big artists are making money, they’re still leaving a lot on the table with all the middlemen
Wavlake is changing incentives so super fans can give uncapped support for the value they receive
We jumped into the internet super fast. Now Nostr is helping us rearchitect the web by letting people travel through the Internet and bring their social graph with them
Now Wavlake and Value4Value is doing this for Music; the industry was almost completely uprooted in the last wave, but ultimately failed; now we have another shot
The role of the curator in the new more p2p internet world
Wavlake’s grand plan: it’s not a music player with zaps, but rather an open music catalogue that disrupts all of music distribution
Bandcamp and SoundCloud are examples of building a new library from the ground up
Wavlake is following their example with the key difference that their library is not confined to one app but open to anyone (e.g. Fountain)
How does Wavlake compete with Spotify - they don’t
The magic of interoperable networks and instant payments (good clip around 1:10)
Artist still only had to upload track once but the potential for where that track can live and get monetized is unlimited
The negotiations between all parties is transparent unlike current opaque set of deals
We’re making podcasting for music (another good clip around 1:14)
Wavlake’s open music catalogue is inspired by thePodcasting 2.0 spec
Developer splits incentivizes developers to try adding and monetizing music in new ways
Now music can live in all kinds of different experiences (good clip around 1:16)
Interoperability means your social graph and comments follow you to any app you use! A comment in Wavlake shows up in Fountain
LN Beats and RSS Blue also working interoperably
Sam is not afraid of competition, in fact he’s paying to incentivize it
One artist monetizing via bitcoin and value4value will start the tsunami
Check out the Forbes article on Value4Value
Ainsley Costello might already be the first big artist. She had made about $750 over years across Spotify 60+ other services. In one year, she’s made >$12k on Wavlake, Fountain, and other Lightning V4V apps. She was the first artist to earn >1M sats
If 97% of artists can make enough to do music full time in value4value land, it’s game over for traditional music industry. And if they can do well, imagine how well the big artists can eventually do when they cut out the middle men
Superstars like Kanye, Snoop Dogg, and James Blake are just as pissed about the current state of extractive music industry
Average people may not understand exactly how they’re getting fucked, but they know they’re getting fucked with the current monetary and business system - largely because every system lacks transparency
In an open world, companies like Wavlake will need to add valuable services (e.g. licensing) on top of their library to compete and win
ASCAP (what a name lol) fails to live up to their promise to monitor song uage and pay artist royalties
Maxs ideas for nostr business models: #1 remix economy - stemstr for everything and #2 rise of the curator or DJs for everything - getting curators paid for their good taste
Wavlake’s plan to build split marketplaces for music and live radio shows where hosts get paid
Value4Value music podcasts are taking off on Wavlake and Fountain
Sam owns several successful businesses around the music industry (lightning.store, merch, label, venue, zine, wavlake). Each business feeds into this growing indie empire
Wastoids is crazy cool video zine; Sam and his colleagues interview cool indie bands like People Under the Stairs and Red Cross
Check out his pods like Click Vortex, a crazy show called Midnight Music Review in the Attic with an Argentinian dude dressed like a wolf presenting new music in his attic, and a Friday music show inspired by MTV News
Sam starts experiments that could feed into each other and scales them as they work
His buddy works at Aquarium Drunkard and gets major indie darlings to come on show
Goal is for Wavlake to become one of the channels on DistroKid that will catch artists’ attention when they wonder why they made $700 on Wavlake and only 9 cents everywhere else; Wavlake already has simple onboarding for artists, now just needs a simple onboarding for fans
Open library is already 10k+ tracks and growing, that’ll just keep getting better
Sam’s team of 28 pitches in all over his indie music empire
Sam’s secret: he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he just does what needs to be done! His intent was never to run a business, he just wanted to be in a band haha
Sam’s been doing Value4Value at HelloMerch for 17 years. He doesn’t make a penny until something sells; Wavlake will scale in a similar fashion
Apple Podcasts
Hivemind: Ideas from the Edge
Technology Podcast · Notes on the hivemind and other ideas from the edge
hivemindvc.substack.com

Designing Jack's favorite shirt, Creating an open music library, and Growing an indie music empire with Sam Means (Founder, lightning.store and Wavlake)
The genesis of lightning.store
Stacker News
[New Pod] Designing Jack's fav shirt & Creating open music library w/ Sam Means \ stacker news ~ideasfromtheedge
I sit down with Sam Means, founder of lightning.store and Wavlake for a fascinating conversation about the future of the music industry! Listen on ...
Yes! @npub1stem...mul5 for everything
(Eg see
from @Alby)
I’m looking to support projects that make it easy to create, discover, remix, and share all forms of media (software, agents, music, art). I’m especially interested in hooking these systems up with open source agents and DVMs as well (ideally with python tooling). Hmu if you’re working on anything in this realm
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Pkgzap
Support open source projects with Bitcoin Lightning payments. PkgZap makes it easy to fund npm and package manager dependencies directly from your ...
I've been experimenting with fresh green juices the last couple days (spinach, celery, cucumber, lemon, ginger). Holy shit do I feel energized!! Like I feel amped beyond belief.
I'm wondering if I've been missing some crucial micronutrient before these juices. Has anyone else had a similar experience? Any best guess at which nutrient might be doing the trick?
[New Podcast] Ideas From the Edge: High Strangeness, Memetics, & the Open Source Insurgency w/ Jack Heart
This was a fun one! In most recent episodes, I’ve had conversations with builders from the Nostr/Bitcoin community about other rabbit holes they’re interested in. In today’s episode, I sat down with Jack Heart, a longtime blogger and veteran of high strangeness and esoteric rabbit holes galore.
Although we focus primarily on themes from Jack’s blog and recent book, we do spend some time discussing the principles of Nostr and how they align with Jack’s view of building an open source insurgency. I’m hoping to do more conversations with thinkers like Jack from communities philosophically adjacent to Nostr.
You can learn more about Jack’s work on his blog, Tekgnostics, and in his new book, Brave Noo World: A Guerrilla Ethnography of High Strangeness.
Here are some of the other topics we cover:
- High strangeness and the acceleration of technology, society, and novelty
- Tekgnostics - a balance of artifact and epiphany
- J. Allen Hynek - coined the term high strangeness
- The origin of "Foo Fighters" - UFOs
- Cosmic triggers - the atomic bomb - UFO craze after the war - term - UFO coined after lights over Mt. Ranier
- 2012 as omega point for Terence McKenna and the Mayans
- High strangeness going mainstream as dominant paradigm: politicians calling each other weird
- Synchronicity as meaningful coincidence
- Vernor Vinge’s singularity and the end of the human era
- Humor as the highest and most human form of intelligence and the great weapon against bureaucracy
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere as the omega point of human thought and the next layer of biosphere
- Humans will ultimately be all right because of our creativity
- Humans are tool and model builders
- Early internet was the first model of the hivemind
- Nostr and gnostic — a happy synchronicity ;)
- Digital evolution and DNA
- Philip K Dick’s view of DNA as a binary system of memory coils which gnosis allows us to read
- The workaround - humans’ core ability to adapt to whatever circumstances
- Jung and the ability to catch ideas from the noosphere
- The Buddha is in the Park
- Discordianism: seriousness vs humor - don’t take the world too seriously
- Humor is the highest form of intelligence; perhaps AI will struggle to mimic or understand humor
- “When I dress like a clown, the cops won’t hit me”
- The clown and jester archetype; the fool and the trickster (Prometheus , Krishna?)
- Meme magic and memetics as mind virus
- Memes are a big reason Trump won in 2016 (Pepe the frog)
- The open source / decentralized insurgency
- The ebb and flow of everything
- Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, chakras, and the 8 brain model of psychology
- Crowdfunding a billboard for Brazil all over nostr
- Nostr as the open source / decentralized insurgency against bureaucracy
- PKD and blows against the empire
- Bureaucracy lacks a sense of humor
- Gnosticism as the mystic arm of Christianity
- The great Yin/Yang, masculine/feminine, binary dichotomy of the universe
- Why something instead of nothing (manifest vs. unmanifest)?
- The mythology of Ancient Civilizations - civilizations rise and fall all the time
- Creating substrates for data redundancy and preventing human amnesia (Nostr/Project Alexandria)
Hivemind: Ideas from the Edge • High Strangeness, Memetics, and the Open Source Insurgency • Listen on Fountain
Apple Podcasts
High Strangeness, Memetics, and the Open Source Insurgency
Podcast Episode · Hivemind: Ideas from the Edge · 10/09/2024 · 1h 20m

High Strangeness, Memetics, and the Open Source Insurgency
This was a fun one!
Nostr vs. Bitcoin Github star history
Is this a fair comparison? What causes the next vertical phase? BTC bull market? Current apps get better? New apps/use cases emerge?
cc @miljan @PABLOF7z @npub1kuy0...kdj8 @brugeman @Oscar Merry @Melvin Carvalho @jb55 @bumi @Ben Arc @Martti Malmi @Vitor Pamplona @Stuart Bowman @gsovereignty
Is this a fair comparison? What causes the next vertical phase? BTC bull market? Current apps get better? New apps/use cases emerge?
cc @miljan @PABLOF7z @npub1kuy0...kdj8 @brugeman @Oscar Merry @Melvin Carvalho @jb55 @bumi @Ben Arc @Martti Malmi @Vitor Pamplona @Stuart Bowman @gsovereignty


