Max's avatar
Max
max@nostr.com
npub18lzl...ugm3
Helping entrepreneurs build the hivemind ⚡️
Max's avatar
Max 1 year ago
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! View quoted note →
Max's avatar
Max 1 year ago
[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
Max's avatar
Max 1 year ago
[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
Max's avatar
Max 1 year ago
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 View quoted note →
Max's avatar
Max 1 year ago
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?
Max's avatar
Max 1 year ago
[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)