Philip Charter, fiction writer, prose editor, the man behind totallyhumanwriter.com and the editor of the 21 Futures Bitcoin fiction anthologies, joins Avi for a conversation about storytelling, the slow craft of prose, and the gap between the two that most people don't see until they try to cross it.

The thread that runs through the hour: Bitcoin is not the story. People don't care about Bitcoin, they care about the impact it has on their own lives, and the work the space is sleeping on is the work of showing those impacts in human terms. They argue that Bitcoin-centric fiction faces an almost impossible bind: Bitcoiners treat fiction as frivolous, and non-Bitcoiners read anything orange-tinted as a scam. The more interesting territory is stories where Bitcoin lives quietly in the plot rather than wearing laser eyes on the cover.

From there the conversation moves into the long apprenticeship of prose, the chasm between a great oral storyteller and a workable sentence on the page, and the unmistakable tells of AI fiction – the stacked adjectives, the spectral humming, the silences that stretch, the quiet everything. Avi shares his own experience using AI for the first pass of July 18 and the horror of recognizing those tics. Philip's defence of the short story form follows: it is a snapshot of change where the reader writes the ending – meaning living between the words and after the full stop, which is precisely the territory LLMs cannot reach.

They close on Bitcoin's culture funding problem, the case for patrons and guilds (Bitcoin for the Arts, the artist guild forming around BTC Prague), and the affliction that keeps artists making things whether anyone pays for it or not. Plus Philip's nearly-finished fantasy novel about a husband chasing mythical islands across an alternate-world ocean while his wife tries to find his trail home.

Links

• Philip on Nostr
• Totally Human Writer
• 21 Futures
• Bitcoin For The Arts
• Finding Home Episode 4 [Discount code: PIONEER21]
• Revolution.Rocks
• BTC Prague Discount code (15%) – NOSTR

What does it mean to be human online? In an age of AI agents posting, interacting, and transacting across the network, the question has stopped being philosophical and started being structural. Avi is joined by David Strayhorn (Brainstorm) and Nathan Day to dig into proof of personhood and why your social graph might be the most non-intrusive way to solve it.

On Nostr, bots are first-class citizens. The problem isn't that they exist, it's that we have no native way to tell who is who they claim to be. Nathan traces his path from BTC Map's proof of place to the attestation primitives that grew out of that work, and now to the Person NIP he's preparing to publish. David comes at the same problem from the other side: tags and decentralized lists, community-curated structures where web-of-trust scoring filters the spam by default. The two approaches turn out to be complementary.

The conversation maps the natural progression – proof of person, then proof of profession, then proof of competence – and lands on the inversion underneath it all: first-person credentials, issued by sovereign individuals and verified by the people who actually know them. Music discovery becomes the worked example. Spotify surfaces the popular. So does ChatGPT. But a Brainstorm-style service operating on social proof can finally surface the Joe Martins of the world. Timeline: Nathan says weeks. David says definitely this year.

Links

• Attestr
• Brainstorm.world
• NosFabrica

A man who travelled to 42 countries was asked to then go as far as he could travel. He found the farthest journey was the one within himself.

Paco of Run with Bitcoin returns after two years off the grid to talk about where he disappeared to. After finishing his 42-country journey at the end of 2023, the road ran out. An ankle injury ended his running. The conference circuit blurred into late nights and lost purpose. A wake-up call in Prague sent him to the Himalayas, where he traded the road for yoga, silence, and a notebook.

What followed was the inner journey that no map could chart. The AWS reset (not what you think it is). Three months of writing that produced 700 pages of blabber. Six months chasing the wrong tools and the wrong editors. The slow lessons in patience and humility. And eventually, the way back to the community through grassroots work with the 256 Foundation, the BitAxe assembly project, and India's quietly thriving Bitcoin scene.

Avi and Paco also dig into the upcoming book, "Proof of Work" or possibly, "Around the World with Two Bitcoins," and the Geyser all-or-nothing fundraise that ends Friday May 9th. With six and a half million sats to go and five days left, the man who traveled the world is asking the village to help fund the song he wants to sing in the next one.

Links

• Paco's Geyser Campaign
• Paco on Nostr
• Finding Home Episode 4 [Discount code: PIONEER21]
• Revolution.Rocks
• BTC Prague Discount code (15%) – NOSTR

Henrik Flyman joins Sunday Brunch for a wide-ranging conversation on his musical journey from Sweden to Denmark, the highs and hardships of life in bands, and the evolution of his solo “shadow music” project. Along the way, he and Avi dig into awakening, sovereignty, creativity, and the strange beauty of becoming who you really are, with Henrik sharing a set of songs that reflect both darkness and resilience, plus a nod to the value-for-value world through Matt Finlay’s “Copenhagen Time.

Guest host Aaron of Essex takes the Sunday Brunch wheel again and welcomes Nat Cole for a lively, music-first conversation about building a “new music economy” on a Bitcoin standard. Nat frames the idea carefully: not just another platform or “ecosystem,” but a permissionless economic layer where artists can participate without gatekeepers, own more of their rails, and connect more directly with listeners.

From there, the episode opens into Nat’s origin story: a childhood split between music and computing, with a Jamaican sound-system lineage on one side, early internet tinkering on the other, and formative years spent around studios, sound engineering, youth projects, pirate-tech curiosity, and anti-establishment energy that made Bitcoin’s freedom ethos click hard once he finally understood it.

A big center of gravity is 2140 Music, Nat’s culture-maxi bridge between legacy music and Bitcoin rails. He describes it as part education hub, part events engine, part curation/bookings layer, built to help artists understand the tools, perform live, and find real opportunities in Bitcoin-adjacent spaces rather than just getting dumped into the deep ocean of Spotify-style discovery. The recurring theme is that the goal is not simply to preach “leave Spotify,” but to help artists add sovereign tools to their stack and gradually own more of their infrastructure.

Along the way, Aaron and Nat spin a five-track set from the 2140 orbit, including music from Air Klipz, Andy Prince, G-O-L-D, Sites, and Acme, using each song as a doorway into the artists, the camp, and the wider mission. One highlight is “Buffalo Gals,” which Nat describes as the unofficial mascot track for 2140 Music, anchored by the refrain that they “came to change the game.”

The closing stretch turns practical and forward-looking: Nat previews Bitcoin Graffiti Jam in Brixton/Stockwell, more intimate education/community events, and a continued push to build new bridges from the fiat music world into an uncapturable network where artists can actually own the relationship with their audience.

Links

• 2140 Art
• Nat on Nostr
• New Music Nudge Unit
• Aaron on Nostr

Episode 157 opens with Avi’s sermon “The Forgotten Forge,” a meditation on what happens when a civilization outsources the making of the things that keep it alive. The frame is applied directly to Bitcoin: early on, acquiring BTC and producing it were effectively the same act, but convenience split buyers from builders, and the network has been living with that fracture ever since.

Kent Halliburton, CEO of Saz Mining, joins to argue that this split is one of Bitcoin’s under-discussed fault lines. He traces his own path from a decade in the solar industry, through burnout and a Portugal walkabout, into Bitcoin and eventually mining, where he came to see mining as the “hashpunk” counterpart to the ledger’s cypherpunk side. His core mission with Saz Mining is to make sat-based acquisition through mining accessible to normal people rather than leaving production to specialists and institutions.

A big chunk of the episode is devoted to Kent’s “hidden history” thesis: the 2013 combination of ASIC specialization and Coinbase convenience created a fork in how people acquire Bitcoin. One path led to buyers, the other to producers, and over time those became culturally separate worlds. Kent argues that Bitcoiners failed to think through the downstream consequences of surrendering majority hashrate, while the mining industry failed to earn the trust of Bitcoin-native users with products that felt sovereign, legible, and easy to use.

From there the conversation gets practical: Saz’s hosted-ownership model, mining pool payout tradeoffs, the meaning of “wild sats” mined straight from the network, and the dangers of pool concentration, especially with Foundry and Antpool commanding an outsized share of global hashpower. Kent’s answer is simple but demanding: more proof of work from actual Bitcoiners, and less passive dependence on fiat-native public mining companies.

There is also a rich side-thread through the geopolitics of energy and place: solar incentives and greenwashing, hydro-powered mining in Paraguay, Norway, and Ethiopia, plus reflections on Portugal, Peru, and the cultural textures of life on a Bitcoin standard outside the U.S. orbit.

Executive Producer: Richard Greaser

Links

• Sazming
• Kent on Nostr
• Avi's New Book – July 18
• Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]
• Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)

Sunday Brunch #11 is a relaxed, music-first decompression chamber with Buttercup Roberts at the table: coffee poured, no sermon, no script, and the Value-for-Value house rule intact, where 90% of sats streamed during songs goes directly to the artist. Buttercup brings a playlist built through deep dives on WaveLake and Nostr, using the episode to reflect on how direct zaps can create a real feeling of connection between listener and musician in a world usually clogged with intermediaries.

The conversation ranges across Buttercup’s wider creative world. She shares her film background, her love of storytelling’s emotional power, and her growing disenchantment with the modern film industry’s shift from immersive movies toward disposable “content.” That opens naturally into talk about The Bridge, her parallel Nostr project using comics, characters, and visual storytelling to make privacy, censorship, data rights, and digital freedom more legible to everyday people.

A big middle section focuses on discovery, onboarding, and the UX challenge in open music ecosystems. Avi and Buttercup compare WaveLake and Fountain, discuss how hard it still is for normal people to browse music intuitively, and zoom out to the broader Nostr problem: how do you onboard artists and non-Bitcoiners into a network that is still culturally dominated by Bitcoin-native conversation? Their answer is less about hiding the ethos and more about building compelling creative entry points around art, identity, and sovereignty.

That leads into Bitcoin for the Arts, where Buttercup discusses the initiative’s mission to fund artists across disciplines, not necessarily for explicitly “Bitcoin” art, but for work that carries the ethos into culture through story, symbolism, and emotional resonance. The episode closes in a playful, ambitious place: imagining grants, murals, scavenger hunts, and global artistic treasure maps as ways to make the parallel culture feel alive, participatory, and worth showing up for.

Links

• The Bridge on Nostr
• Today's Playlist

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 bracket into a live experiment in Bitcoin-native participation. He talks through why they kept the wide zap range, how unpredictability is part of the magic, and why Nostr’s version feels more wholesome and sportsmanlike than the more politically charged version on Twitter. The bigger theme is that having fun is not a distraction from the mission, it’s part of how movements stay alive.

Mid-episode, the conversation shifts into music and culture-building. Richard explains how the new “Maxi Madness” song, written by him and performed by Noa Grumman, came together, and why collaborations like that matter as markers of a maturing Bitcoin-native creative scene. That opens into a passionate discussion of Revolution Rocks, the upcoming Belgrade festival, and the need to build music ecosystems where artists are actually paid, not merely offered “exposure.”

The closing stretch zooms out again to the mood of the moment: podcast boosts are down, people feel psychologically squeezed, and the wider world is radiating bear-market fatigue. Richard’s answer is not pity but purpose. Hard times, he argues, are not proof that the signal failed. They are the proving ground that reveals whether people can turn struggle into meaning instead of despair.

Executive Producer: Brandon Karpeles (plebiANON)

Links

• Maxi Madness Video
• Richard on Nostr
• Avi's New Book – July 18
• Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]
• Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)