Plebchain Radio

Plebchain Radio Ep. 156 is part sermon, part game-theory lab, part cultural weather report. Avi opens with “The Price of a Voice,” using Primal’s new zap polls to explore a bigger idea: when voting has a real cost, consensus stops being cheap theater and starts becoming an economy of conviction. In the context of Maxi Madness, that means last-minute snipes, whale zaps, coalition strategy, and a genuinely new social dynamic where intensity beats duplication and every move leaves a receipt.

Richard Greaser of The Bitcoin Bugle joins to unpack how the tournament has evolved from a fun bracke...

Sunday Brunch #10 is a classic “table, coffee, record player” decompression chamber with Aza (Şelale, “waterfall”) as guest-DJ, running on the Value-for-Value house rule: stream during songs and 90% goes straight to the artist; boost during conversation and you’re buying a round for the table.

Aza shares updates on her newest culture node, Amplified Tunes: a European-leaning hub designed to connect independent musicians with fans through Nostr + Lightning, with a focus on making discovery and artist connection feel human (including only listing artists who have active Nostr accounts for direct audience connection). She also previews a physical magazine component...

Episode 155 opens with Avi’s sermon “Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls”: permissionless networks don’t remove gravity. They remove gatekeepers and then demand competence: slow proof-of-work, deep roots, and the brutal honesty of output.

UTXO the Webmaster returns and the convo starts in familiar territory: why the most recent “politician + Wall Street” Bitcoin cycle felt dirty, and why Bitcoin can’t survive as only a mainstream asset proxy. They both argue the cypherpunk ethos is fading and that the “Bitcoin as money” vision needs defending.

From there, it’s full Nostr dev shop talk. UTXO explains...

Sunday Brunch #9 is a classic “coffee + record player” decompression session with Budtender (Hash Power Music) as guest-DJ, running on the house rule: 90% of sats streamed during songs goes straight to the artist, and boosts during conversation keep the table stocked.

Budtender shares how a chain of Nostr serendipities pulled him from a “silent Bitcoiner” life into hands-on music onboarding. He revisits Nostrville 2023 as a hinge moment, including the funny full-circle detail that a Plebchain Radio shirt photo ended up embedded in an album context, tying his early V4V journey to the first song Avi ever played on the s...

Episode 154 opens with Avi’s sermon “Weaponized Escapism”: in an attention-extraction world, the urge to flee is rational, but the kind of escape matters. Numbing out through feeds, outrage, and dopamine loops keeps you tethered to the machine. The real exit is constructive escapism: retreat into craft, build tools, make art, write code, and turn flight into creation.

Sourcenode returns and immediately pushes the theme deeper: escaping “fiat” isn’t just dropping a currency, it’s unwinding layers in the psyche and social fabric. That leads into why he’s stayed on Nostr and off X: the nervous-system d...

Avi is joined by Mark Suman (CEO of Maple AI, former Apple engineer) for a technical dive into the intersection of AI privacy, confidential computing, and Web-of-Trust as the internet shifts toward an agentic future.

Mark explains Maple’s core design: privacy-first by default, where each user starts with a private encryption key, data is encrypted locally, and then processed in the cloud using secure enclaves/confidential computing so the company only ever sees encrypted blobs.

The conversation contrasts this with “AI proxy” services (VPN-like shared accounts) that may reduce identity linkage but still send sensit...

Avi’s guest in this serving of Sunday Brunch is Ivy Lumi, a singer-songwriter and Bitcoin-industry native who began writing songs in late 2023 and spent about a year and a half getting her first five tracks produced, eventually releasing under the Ivy Lumi name starting May 2025.

Ivy shares her creative process: she “hears” melodies first and uses a mobile songwriting app (Demo) to quickly capture chord progressions, arrange instruments, and record vocal ideas before moving into fuller production workflows.

The conversation weaves through love, presence, and emotional honesty as Ivy explains the thesis at the core o...

Episode 153 opens with Avi’s sermon “Fix Yourself to Fix the World”: Bitcoin can be a flawless instrument, but it doesn’t magically heal the operator. The call is to audit the inner ledger with the same seriousness we bring to the timechain, because sovereign networks demand sovereign people.

Red Tail Hawk then shares a raw origin story shaped by the 2008 financial crisis. After graduating with an applied mathematics degree in 2007, he gets hit by the post-crash job-market catch-22, sliding into a stretch of extreme austerity and homelessness before eventually rebuilding stability. That experience becomes the gateway into mon...

Avi opens the episode with a sermon on “the compromised substrate”: when public idols crack, the scavengers try to smear the entire network with the sins of a few. Bitcoin is not its loudest humans, and the protocol shouldn’t inherit anyone’s moral debt by association.

Then Ben Justman returns, bringing it back to earth with the reality of shipping bottles, licensing, and the awkward border where Bitcoin-native trade meets heavily regulated goods such as wine. They riff on the dream of resilient “Denim Road” style trade routes and courier networks, but Ben explains why alcohol law keeps hi...

Guest host Aaron of Essex takes the Sunday Brunch wheel and welcomes Longy for a laid-back, music-first hang: five Longy tracks get spun, boosted, and dissected in real time, with the chat and sats flowing as part of the show’s “participation layer.”

Between songs, Longy rewinds the tape to his early influences (from childhood sparks to teenage band chaos) and makes the case for live performance as the ultimate truth serum: the stage doesn’t care about hype, it only cares what you can actually do when the lights hit.

The conversation keeps one foot in...

In episode 3 of Say Wot?, guest host David Strayhorn sits down with Matthias DeBernardini, a software developer and “agentic engineering” tinkerer who’s just joined NosFabrica to help build open-source Web of Trust tooling on Nostr.

They trace Matthias’ path from materials engineering into Bitcoin (including an early “$90 BTC is too expensive” family moment), then into graph theory, Lightning experiments, and Rust-heavy open-source work (Fedimint, AnchorWatch). From there, the convo zooms into the core question: can we build decentralized recommendation systems without recreating the extractive, centralized incentives of Big Tech?

They unpack why today’s large-scale AI...

Ryan Cooper from Bitcoin Ranch joins Avi for a boots-on-the-ground conversation about rebuilding real-world resilience: food, trade, and community. Ryan shares his path from Detroit childhood roots and a fiercely independent, homeschool-led upbringing to managing a Chevy dealership, then getting “pandemic orange-pilled” into realizing how fragile modern supply chains really are.

That wake-up call turns into a local “milk route,” hands-on support for nearby farmers, and the broader Bitcoin Ranch vision: a decentralized farm incubator built around relationships, volunteer labor, and a growing network of producers and consumers who want clean food and direct-to-consumer markets.

They dig...

Guest host OpenMike takes the wheel for a laid-back, music-first Sunday Brunch with Tatum Turn Up, kicking off with some classic Nostr “we’re live … are we live?” chaos across Primal/Damus before settling into the vibe of Value for Value radio: sats flow to artists during tracks, and to the show during the chat.

Tatum shares an origin story that feels like pure internet destiny: getting orange-pilled after time in Pomp’s “crypto academy,” then accidentally DM-ing his way into filming with Anthony Pompliano, which launched Between Two ASICs and a run of heavyweight guests.

The conversa...

In episode 150, Avi Burra welcomes Auggie from the “Meshtadel” world to talk regenerative farming, circular Bitcoin economies, and what it looks like to build a parallel system from the dirt up. Avi opens with a “soil is the original protocol” sermon: real resilience comes from base layers (trust, attention, relationships, values), not glossy interfaces or top-of-stack hype.

Auggie, a DevOps engineer turned farmer, shares how he’s regenerating 99 acres in Missouri with management-intensive rotational grazing, raising sheep, pigs, and a small but growing cattle herd. He frames “Meshtadel” as both literal mesh networking and a broader metaphor: local “citadel...

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 me...

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...

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 coun...

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 per...

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 in...

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.

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 ranc...

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 “h...

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

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

They talk NYC’s cultural cycles, fi...

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

The trio breaks down NIP-85 trusted assertions as a simple delivery mechanism for portable, personalized trust scores (clients shouldn’t compute them), and tackles the “is this a social credit score?” fear head-on: the key difference is user-chosen providers + user-specific perspective, not a single global, centralized rating. They close by mapping real use-cases: spam/scam su...

Welcome to the inaugural serving of Sunday Brunch – a new weekly format from Plebchain Radio designed to be your decompression chamber after a long week in the fiat mines. No roadmap grilling, no deep-dive technicals, just coffee, conversation, and a curated playlist of independent Value-for-Value music.

To kick things off, Avi is joined by Oscar Merry, the creator of Fountain, to spin tracks, discuss the state of the Open Music ecosystem, and chat about everything from the rise of Arsenal FC to the surprising resilience of London's food scene.

In this episode:

This week, I strip it back. No interviews. No sermon. Just signal.

I explore the philosophy of the Exit. Why fighting the system is a trap, why building alternatives is the only winning move, and how to navigate the inevitable friction this creates with the people we love.

I perform a reading of four essential essays by Max Hillebrand, woven together with a custom musical score to help the signal land.

The Program:

In the first Plebchain Radio episode of 2026, Avi is joined by Noa Gruman (lead singer of Scardust) and Lahav, for a conversation ranging from Scardust’s Bitcoin-adjacent music lore (including the “RIP” video) to the reality that “Bitcoin is definitely metal” … and prog.

Noa shares highlights from Sabaton’s Legendary Orchestra project, a massive arena-scale production where she both conducts and performs lead vocals.

The conversation digs into the “fiat loop” musicians get trapped in, plus how value-for-value and Lightning splits could offer a more direct path between listeners and artists (and how labels might react).

Fin...

In this episode, Chad F joins the show to dismantle the false dichotomy between the "ancient scrolls" of RSS and the high-speed relays of Nostr. As a longtime Podcasting 2.0 + V4V operator (and “welcoming committee” booster), Chad traces the arc from No Agenda’s time-talent-treasure model through the Alex Jones deplatforming moment that helped catalyze Podcast Index, and onward into Lightning-powered media.

The conversation dives deep into the practical challenges of this union, specifically regarding music curation and the decentralized "discovery problem". Chad and Avi explore the concept of a "Contextual Web of Trust" to replace algorithmic feeds...

Episode 142 is a Nostr year-in-review roundtable with Avi, QW, Vitor Pamplona, and Corndalorian. They reflect on the mid-year “Nostr bear market” in engagement and argue it wasn’t a death spiral, it was infrastructure season: fewer tourists, more plumbers, deeper roots.

Vitor breaks down why user drop-off is normal at this stage, and why 2025 felt like “working on the pipes,” with Nostr expanding beyond Twitter-style clients into a richer set of social shapes (chat, Instagram/TikTok-like experiences, etc.).

The group riffs on Nostr’s culture of resisting ad-driven incentives, celebrates experimentation (like Jumble forks), and spotlights h...

In this episode, Avi sits down with de-commerce builder Eric FJ, creator of Conduit Market, to explore how Nostr and Bitcoin can rebuild the old-school bazaar in protocol form. They dig into NIP-99 product listings, NIP-17 DM-based order flows, and the emerging “infinite product pool” that multiple marketplaces like Shopstr, Plebian Market, and Conduit can all share and filter in their own ways. Along the way, they tackle price discovery vs discovery distortion on Amazon-style platforms, local artisans thriving in a monoculture world, and how web-of-trust, reputation and privacy-preserving messaging could solve the “who do I trust with my addres...

In this episode of Plebchain Radio, Avi sits down with Aaron of Essex, the Bitcoiner, hairdresser, and music superfan behind Bitcoin Essex and the New Music Nudge Unit.

Aaron shares his 90s-era origin story, from Napster and CDs to discovering Bitcoin and realizing he could help working musicians build parallel rails for their art. He explains how the New Music Nudge Unit works in practice: self-hosting tracks, publishing them once via RSS to dozens of Podcasting 2.0 apps, and routing sats straight to artists through value-for-value. Along the way, he tells onboarding stories of artists like Longy, Fable...

In this episode of Plebchain Radio, Avi sits down with London-based bitcoiner, artist and playwright Psyfer, caretaker of the legendary Cyphermunk House in Bloomsbury. They trace the unlikely origin of the house back to a 10-day Vipassana retreat in rural India, where Psyfer was flooded with images of fiat collapse and Bitcoin art, eventually leading him to turn a four-story Victorian building into a living Bitcoin sanctuary. He describes Cyphermunk as an ever-shifting gallery, bar and salon where sats flow, incense burns, random locals wander in off the street, and culture quietly onboards the curious. The conversation ranges from...

In this episode of Plebchain Radio, QW interviews Sam Means (aka Lightning Store, Wavlake), a musician, father, and entrepreneur, discussing his various projects and perspectives on the music, his band The Format and much more.

The Format Live on Tonight Show : https://youtu.be/5i9GQzPM8G0

The Format Merch : https://www.theformat.com/home/#merch

Hello Merch : https://www.hellomerch.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoqOPiYjnUxxk3V9pPFrlG4gLtS1GLWI7swneEYPoE76NQCNS3VB

Avi's New Book – July 18

Finding Home Episode 2 [IndeeHub Code For 21% off: PIONEERCHAIN21 ]

Avi's First Book – 24

In this episode of Plebchain Radio, Avi talks with Swiss-German Bitcoin artist Yena, aka Lady Block Jane, about how vivid dreams and a forest vision pulled her into Bitcoin and birthed works like Dressed in Entropy and the mermaid piece I’ll Take Yours Too, who quietly stacks sats from our “boating accidents.” They get into the gritty reality of hauling physical Bitcoin art across borders, the birth of her A2B project in a Swiss tunnel, and the hilariously doomed “laser eyes” performance at a conference. The conversation closes with Yena’s reflections on taking the pressure off monetizing h...

Max Hillebrand returns to the show to map the cypherpunk “freedom stack” for real life. He digs into open source hardware and works up the stack to Nostr-native coordination (from relay hygiene to posting CoinJoin rounds). We talk private, scalable group communication – what’s missing, what’s promising, and how mixnets and layered encryption fit. Max makes the case for value-for-value as the funding rail that keeps builders sovereign and aligned with users.

Finding Home Episode 2 [IndeeHub Code For 21% off: PIONEERCHAIN21 ]

Avi Burra's Book 24

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This episode of Plebchain Radio features QW and Avi hosting Shadrach, a cypherpunk and Bitcoiner, to discuss Bitcoin, Nostr, A to B, Web of Trust, Meshtadel and building parallel societies.

A to B : https://atobitcoin.io/

Finding Home Episode 2 [IndeeHub Code For 21% off: PIONEERCHAIN21 ]

Avi Burra's Book 24

BitFest 10% Discount Code: plebchainradio

In this episode of Plebchain Radio, QW and Avi are joined by Ainsley Costello, Heather Larson & Open Mike live from Bitcoin Park in Nashville to discuss the intersection of Nostr and Bitcoin, including the latest developments on the live music front, Nostrrville 3.0, Nostr Shire, and Nostr Valley and more.

Finding Home Episode 2 [IndeeHub Code For 21% off: PIONEERCHAIN21 ]

Avi Burra's Book 24

BitFest 10% Discount Code: plebchainradio

Summary

David Strayhorn, creator of Brainstorm and Grapevine, joins the show to announce a major initiative to build a decentralized Web-of-Trust for Nostr. David explains his journey from neurologist to trust-protocol architect and details how NosFabrica pivoted from healthcare to tackling the foundational problem of trust that all Nostr applications face.

The discussion covers David's GrapeRank algorithm, a personalized scoring system that uses follows, mutes, and reports to effectively combat spam and impersonation, and how NIP-85 (Trusted Assertions) can deliver these scores to any client. The episode culminates in the official announcement of the "WoT-a-thon,"...

In this episode of Plebchain Radio, QW and Avi welcome back Rob Brinded, author of "Glitch," to discuss his new book, the reception it has received, and the underlying principles of understanding one's own mind.

Citadel Garden : https://citadel.garden/

Glitch Book : https://www.glitchthebook.co/

Rob Brinded : https://www.robbrinded.com/

Finding Home Episode 2 : https://indeehub.studio/film/finding-home/season/1/episode/2

Finding Home Discount code for IndeeHub (21% off): PIONEERCHAIN21

Avi Burra's Book 24 : https://www.amazon.com/24-Avi-Burra/dp/B0CN9NRNNB/ref=sr11?crid=27RW9P8...

In this episode of Plebchain Radio, QW and Avi interview Franzap, creator of Zap Store about Paraguay, Fran's work, La Crypta, Web of Trust, Nostr, Bitcoin and more.

Zap Store : https://zapstore.dev/

Avi Burra's Book 24 : https://www.amazon.com/24-Avi-Burra/dp/B0CN9NRNNB/ref=sr11?crid=27RW9P8JQ4YMV&keywords=avi+burra+24&qid=1700327391&sprefix=avi+burra+24%2Caps%2C122&sr=8-1