Plebchain Radio

Paul Keating and DirectorHodl come on the show to talk about Hummingbird, the documentary they just released on IndeeHub. The film started life as a small video idea for Bitcoin Jungle and grew over a couple of years into a feature-length meditation on indigenous prophecy, the fiat system, and the strange gravitational pull of one small town in Costa Rica.

The philosophical spine of the film is the prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor, which is unpacked in some depth during the conversation. The eagle represents the engineering mind that builds and abstracts. The condor represents the body and its way of living in relation to the land. The prophecy holds that these were once in balance, then tipped toward the eagle after European contact around 1500, and that the current 500-year cycle is meant to bring them back together to birth a third bird called the Hummingbird, which carries both.

The film weaves that mythological frame together with the very grounded story of Estella, a Costa Rican farmer who lost money to a bank, fought off corporate pressure to take her land for monoculture planting, and through her daughter Kena became the connective tissue of what eventually grew into the Bitcoin Jungle community. She now has a sign at the farmers market reading La Abuelita del Bitcoin. The IMF loans, the structural adjustment programmes, the resource stripping all sit in the film as the practical machinery by which the eagle mindset extended its reach into the global south.

The rest of the hour wanders into the realities of making the film. Roughly twenty hours of footage. DirectorHodl editing essentially solo, watching the cut something like a hundred times, finishing only when he reached the right level of crazy. Paul talks about the strange productivity tax of living somewhere as beautiful as Uvita, where the days are short and the sun pulls you out of the chair. DirectorHodl suggests you visit, you pick up the energy, and you carry it home.

Hummingbird is on IndeeHub now, with a free YouTube release planned for the coming weeks, and it premieres at the Bitcoin Film Fest in Warsaw in early June.

Links

Hummingbird on IndeeHub

Finding Home Episode 4 [Discount code: PIONEER21]

Revolution.Rocks

BTC Prague Discount code (15%) – NOSTR

Joe Martin finally made it onto Sunday Brunch after a few months of being impossible to pin down, which turns out to be a good problem – his new album Alone in Valentine came out in May and he just wrapped an eight-date UK tour to go with it. The album was recorded in Nashville at Glen Campbell's old house with Cal Campbell and Cornelius Webb producing, cut in about a week of 12-hour days with most of the arrangements happening live on the floor. Joe describes it as made by humans for humans, finished before AI slop takes over the world and makes a pure record harder to come by.

We spend a good chunk of the hour in the weeds on craft – what mixing actually does, why mastering is a dark art that affects how a record feels more than how it sounds, why vinyl needs its own master because of the physics of a needle in a groove. From there the conversation drifts into territory that has been on Joe's mind: AI music and its uncanny perfection, the decline of grassroots venues as a downstream effect of cheap debt favouring the chains, why the kids are at stadium shows instead of small rooms, and what happens to culture when food and architecture and music all converge on the same shape of slop.

The second half gets into harder questions about value-for-value. Joe is honest about where he is on the thousand-true-fans curve, where Nostr is right now (his word: quiet), and what it's actually like trying to convince a fan to leave Spotify when even artists with their entire catalog deleted have crawled back to the legacy platforms. He thinks the path through is culture, not lectures – more events like Bitfest, more music at conferences, winning hearts before minds.

Joe brought five songs and not one of them was his own, which I had to overrule by playing Checkmate off the new album – his nod to Max Hillebrand's quiet exit, with Jeff Booth and Saylor quotes tucked into the bridge.

Links

Joe on Nostr

Joe's Music

Revolution Rocks

BTC Prague Discount code: NOSTR

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