Hey!
Are you listening?
Good.
Now that we have your attention, welcome to...
Drumroll, please.
The Snap!
A podcast by me, your host, Katie.
And me, your host, Ainsley.
Just two girls in their 20s here to bring you a female-centric girl math tone to the
Bitcoin, Noster, and value-for-value music space.
As artists living in Nashville, we got tired of screaming into the void and tiptoeing around
a broken music industry.
Looking for a new way forward, we came across this space.
And thought, why not give it a try?
In this podcast, we'll deconstruct what traditional success in the music industry has looked like so far.
How that definition is changing.
And where the space comes in.
We'll break down all of the big happenings in both the music and Bitcoin worlds, how they mix.
We'll fangirl over our favorite music in the value-verse, as well as prop up amazing voices that have yet to be heard.
We're so glad you're here.
So let's get to it.
Hello.
Hello, everyone. We're back.
We're back.
You almost us.
I know you did.
I'm like the three people listen to us that aren't our moms.
Shout out, you guys.
We love you very much.
Shout out.
Shout out, you guys.
What was your week?
My week was good.
A little bit eventful.
I've been working a lot.
And then because of working a lot and kind of just doing a lot of things,
spreading myself a tiny bit too thin, I got sick.
um and i i haven't been that sick in a while like i'm the type of person that gets very sick
once or twice a year and like i'll have allergies but otherwise nothing really puts me out yeah um
this time i was on the couch for like three days real which yowzas and then nobody could cover my
shift and so I tried to go in got sent home early um it wasn't as easy as that but here we are
um and then I am moving into a new place so exciting yeah it's beautiful so I've been moving
boxes and I got all of my clothes put in trash bags and got it all over there so like hot pink
trash bags too I want to see these trash bags that you keep talking about you know um it looked
like I was taking out like just a huge pile of trash and um to my car that I was lugging in my
Uline little dolly um wagon uh thing that I've had since freshman year of college that has lasted
no she she really comes in handy oh my gosh um yeah so I got all those trash bags very hot thing
trash bags on that load I was very much trying to get the wagon out of my door so I live in an
apartment complex and my wagon is as wide as my door and my hallway is just a little bit wider
so getting the wagon full out of my door into the hallway turned to go to the elevator is a feat
six point turn it is it is a six point sometimes ten point turn it is it's a fun one and in that
process I was very consumed with getting it out the door that I got out the door yay no keys
that'll do it um so because my apartment system works with a fob and not like a regular key
i have to leave my dolly full of clothes in front of my apartment door and walk
well ride the elevator all the way down to the bottom get somebody and say hey
I locked myself out could you please unlock the door for me and then ride the elevator up
I get let in get my keys and then I can bring all my stuff to my car
that adds like a whole 10 minutes to this process to which I'm already like annoyed with
I would be annoyed too and because I've been moving that whole day and there's a different
thing with getting into the new place and so all in all the joys of moving and that's really the
thing that has consumed me for the past few days exactly have you ever been locked out before
yes I've been locked out it's happened once or twice kind of same sort of thing I was carrying
in groceries and I went down to get another load got down there and realized that I didn't have my
keys it's like and not only do i not have my apartment key or my car key because they're all
on the same key chain um so then i have to go back down and go back up to my apartment
get my keys for my car go back down to my car to get the next load yeah so it's always a time
yeah and like there's been another time where i got locked out on the way back from work and it
is like 11 p.m and technically they're supposed to charge you if it's after like 8 p.m like 100
bucks we're getting locked out yeah because then you've quote unquote technically lost your key
or it's like a let in fee oh um but i've always been pretty chill with the guys downstairs so i'm
like hey so we're talking me how's it going what's up team you know the girl that gives you a slider
every once in a while can I can I ring those in I saw this video um the other day I was talking
about how it was a video of like a couple of oh you remember how 90s kids used to get locked out
of their houses and you had to like slide in through some weird little crevice I was like
that wasn't even 90s kids yeah I remember one time I walked home from school when I was in middle
school and okay to a couple of different facets to this I had gotten locked out and I don't even
really remember how I did it but I had to climb onto the roof go and nobody was home I had to
climb onto the roof sneak over the balcony and go in through my parents balcony door that like I
kind of forgotten that this happened to me until I saw that video the other day I was like oh but
the thing is I felt so cool and crazy because I was so not allowed to go on the roof I did it
anyways that was literally the only rebellious thing I ever did in my life and the only reason
it was like really rebellious was because at the time my dad was in fall protection he was like you
are not going up there without a harness I'm like watch me I need to get back in I really have to go
to the I did I really had to go to the bathroom and I was like I my parents aren't gonna be home
for a while the front door is locked the back door is locked the studio is locked I am getting up like
I think what I did was we had a wooden door fence that went from our house to like the next door neighbors.
So I think I climbed up on the tiny little ledge of the fence and then went all the way around and, you know, snuck in.
Oh, my gosh.
So, yeah.
But I haven't gotten locked up.
The adventures.
You didn't have like an extra key under a rock or?
I don't think so.
Gotcha.
And I think it was before it was, I think it was right around when we'd moved into that
house.
And so we hadn't gotten it changed to the electric ones where it was the number where
you could just get in.
I think that's why I had to, I had to get in.
Yeah.
That's, that was like in the deep recesses of my memory.
Like, you know how you get those memories sometimes and you're like, oh, I haven't thought
about that in years.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
Oh my.
I was talking to my mom.
We were, cause we've had different landlines growing up.
You still have landlines?
So, technically, yes.
My parents' house in Vermont still has a landline phone.
Love.
And the only way that I can get in touch with them when they're in Vermont is the landline phone.
Or I call, because...
Do their cell phones not work when they're there?
Their cell phones work, but...
Bad reception.
Cell reception is few and far between.
And it's just not reliable at the house.
So it's not, it's just way easier to call on a landline.
And whenever they go back to Vermont,
it's normally because they're going back to go to the company
that they used to work for in and around to like answer questions
if there's a big job, like all of that sort of things.
and so I know when they go back they're either in one of two places they're at home or they're at
work yeah and because I've been calling there since I was seven years old I just call the
number and I go like whoever answers I'm like hey can I talk to Brian is Sandra in the office
can I speak to the manager well and every now and then somebody knew would answer the phone
oh really and I would say hi can I speak to blank and they'd say well no they're busy right now and
I was like well they're not going to be busy for me and they would be like well no they're they're
pretty busy and I was like okay can I talk to and I would say like a different manager they'd say well
how do you know them and I was like can I just can I just talk to them please and and I would
finally get through to them and then they would patch me to my parents and they the person would
never get in trouble obviously because they don't know that i'm their daughter like and how would
you expect them to know like that's such a 2000s boss ass movie thing and so then i would go in
and i would recognize the name and see that person and i'd be like hi hello and just wave it's me um
but on the subject of landlines that my adhd is wild right now guys i'm so sorry um i'm entertained
by it but i'm glad somebody else oh i'm here i'm here for the side tangents but on the subject of
landlines that was i've had landlines memorized from a very young age i've had my parents
numbers memorized from a very young age yeah my parents numbers are the only two numbers besides
my own that i know off the top of my head right but i still i still have my childhood friends
landline number memorized because we called each other on landlines oh that's so cute yeah and we
and it was always the same number like the pattern is stuck in my head yeah but be a good like bank
password right I mean and my my old school's lunch number from you do that too yeah I have my in
Florida we called it the end numbers so I have my end number that and my pin number that I still
remember which like I'm not telling any y'all what that is no I'm like that that thing is old
yeah old as old as me public school in vermont bad thing has been with me for a while yeah um but
i remember the rhythm of mine too because it was always just so easy to remember like
yeah yeah so i mean we always had to memorize numbers um all of that is to come to my boss child i was talking to her and i was like you don have your parents numbers memorized and she was like no they
were just added as a contact that is gonna get you in trouble somewhere rewind pause also your
parents never made you memorize their phone number yeah how are you gonna get in touch with them
well they've had a phone since they were five true but what happens when the apocalypse happens
or if your phone dies there's no nope then you're on your own like survival skills of a cucumber like
i i don't what so that's something that i'm seeing lately with a lot of younger kids is like they
don't know their parents numbers they've been added as a contact since they were three four
or five years old yeah they've never had to memorize that yeah I should ask my my cousins
that my cousins are um like they're kind of they're in middle school um like 12 13 so like
significantly younger than I am right now and they've had you know phones since they were
however young and I'm gonna see them in a couple weeks I'm gonna ask them that I'm like do you know
what your mother's phone number is yeah that's because that is that's gonna give me existential
dread when people say well huh right scary what yeah like what do you mean you don't huh i think
that's also potentially because it's only child the only child right so those are our people our
only people in the world right that's why you memorize those right so it could also be that
we didn't have a sibling that was picking us up from school yeah or a sibling that went to the
same school as us or did the same sports or was doing the same sort of extracurriculars so there
wasn't somebody close to our age that we could just kind of run to or grab yeah so therefore we
always had to have our parents numbers memorized so i mean that's also something to think about
absolutely no and it makes a ton of sense weird but we had a crazy week in the world
yeah this week i mean speaking of memes and different things there are so many things this
week that i saw that i was so confident were ai yeah until i looked it up and i was like
oh shit which that's another thing that like makes me kind of fearful for like the future
of technology right now because up until this point we've been able to kind of like tell our
parents or our grandparents no that's ai yeah and now it's getting to the point that we can't
even recognize what ai is sometimes that's scary the theory that i love what if we could never tell
in the first place and ai was put out to kind of oh we're getting better scary scary terrifying um
i don't know just those oddball things but which like nepal yeah crazy what's going on there
in four days in four days did people our age overthrow a government make sure that his disabled
wife was taken to a hospital cleared the streets elected a new official over discord
and a female official by the way and reinstituted the country in four days are you what and we can't
even get our shit together over here like four days yeah that's wild also the videos have you
seen the video of a tourist bus going through a tourist bus going through nepal no i haven't so
there was a video of i don't want to say what type of nationality because i don't want to be wrong
um but there was a tourist group going through nepal that
was literally driving by as they're writing the capitol building and the protester whoa the
protesters stopped let the bus pass as the bus is passing the tourists are giving all the protesters
thumbs up the protesters let the bus pass fold right back in behind it and go back about the
business but they stopped while the tourist bus was going through to let it pass safely
i know i didn't see that wow isn't that crazy that's wild because it's like we don't have any
problems with you we don't have any qualms with what y'all are doing yeah we have problems with
them and i just thought that was such a good metaphor also like like the world right now
um trump being in britain oh my and all nobody gives a single truck about the windsor castle
merch crazy did you see that they projected an entire like a whole picture of them together
did you see that they put that same picture out on the front lawn they're my heroes they are my
actual heroes like oh like truly i love a comment that i saw because i've seen those videos too a
comment that i saw and it was like thank you so much for having our back sorry about the tea
no tea's on us next time
like whoa the history nerd yeah crazy crazy um or like the paul revere beams of everything that's
going on yeah sound the alarms yeah um what else there's so much going on france having a no
confidence vote having a government collapse like is every government ever like on the verge
collapse right now um meetings in doha because israel keeps on striking everyone
not just palestine anymore venezuela declaring war on the u.s yeah like it's exhausting to
be a human and see all of this bad shit happening and the worst part is we're such an
unserious generation yeah that when talking about it like the venezuela war quote unquote
the comments that i'm seeing are like guys read the room this isn't the time right now
or um or come on really or
pinky flick like bro i mean i get humor as a coping mechanism like the red like the next person does
but or i mean speaking of memes how a famous political figure was shot and one of the bullet
casings read if you read this you're gay lmao crazy like god like this is what type of simulation
is this i i had a thought the other day and this is a hot take and people aren't gonna like this one
if jesus comes back that is my confirmation that it's a simulation because
i'm walking because walk with me here as somebody who didn't grow up religious i'm walking with and
we could cut this because this could be a little bit too out there but because in in what in what
way are we told from a young age oh my gosh beware of the rapture blah blah blah like all these
things and then grow up in such a polarizing world with all these different ideals and then
all of these things happen and everything always gonna come always gonna come
how did we just happen to be the generation that all of this is happening around yeah happening to
i have this big existential question that i ask a lot of the time i've asked it in therapy i've
asked it to my parents like are we truly living through unprecedented times or has the world
always been like this and we are now just waking up as a generation and understanding that the
world is like this it's probably a mix of both i mean mix of both it's the theory of like
there wasn't if a tree falls in the woods and nobody saw it happen did it fall in the woods
yeah like that the principle of if there was nobody there to cover it did it happen
so like i can see like because i've heard the same thing yeah but i don't know i mean
historically it's not uncommon to go to war it's not uncommon to have differences
I'm not saying it's right just fair or good I'm just saying that it historically has happened
multiple times when a generation of 17 to you know 25 year olds is at this critical time in
their lives where their frontal lobes are not developed and they are seeing all of these massive
things about the country and the world I mean really I feel like I'm really losing my mind
sometimes I because I can't tell am I just overreacting to all of this this is like affecting
me in ways that I can't just like shake off right well and yeah how do you go about documenting this
in a way that is accurate to what's going on is true to what you feel and isn't biased to what
you grow up with or thought you knew so i feel like everybody's learning how to deal with that
in their own way yeah um but it doesn't feel like this type of polarization is normal no very much
not and i mean historically the pattern that i see is like this type of polarization was
in the 1960s yeah in the 50s the tension between civil war era between all of the different
things like men and women the equality white and black equality all of those different things
happening yeah coming to a head it seems like we're going through a similar pattern right now
yeah and it scary because like we always think good guys win but yeah the ones who win write the history books so were they actually good yeah exactly like so and how do you talk about these things in a way that you know unbiased and isn going to offend anyone because
definitely we live in a world today where it seems like even just talking about pure facts about what's
happening can offend someone right and it's just exhausting like I walked in here I'm not going to
like tell you guys what Katie and I were talking about earlier but I walked in here I had to ask
Katie her opinion on something because I was like I don't I can't tell am I crazy am I overthinking
this or is this something that like maybe I should be worried about and she was like you're
overthinking it it's good to be aware and conscious of it and also this is a symptom of the time that
we live in um and yeah it's just like as a young woman who just grew up and like wants to play music
on a stage in front of people and you know with the week we had last week you know we had a major
world event happen on a wednesday and i had a show later that night and i was really affected
that whole day and I was like oh okay I'm gonna I'm gonna go get up on stage and sing about the
things that I believe in and and also we live in Tennessee oh here let me tell you something so
I remember the day that um Roe v. Wade got overturned I had a show that day in rural Tennessee
and I remember being like this is this is a place where you know I I don't necessarily feel
safe like saying hey I believe in abortion right hey I believe in all of the beliefs that I believe
in um and I remember I wore these little blue um feminist sparkly icon earrings because I was like
if nothing else today this is what I can do to you know say I hate this but I'm with everybody
who's affected by this and I remember my mom and I had like a big long conversation and I was it
was a three-hour cover gig this wasn't like me playing to a stadium of people who were going to
critique my every mood or everything but my mom and I had a serious conversation about whether or
not I should wear the feminist icon earrings to a cover gig and that was three years ago four years
ago and look at where we are now like I remember I had a show um on election day and my mom and I
had a conversation about whether I should sing change your mind or not yeah there's
yeah so anyways it's such a it's such an interesting world that we live in
let's talk about some yeah i'm like i don't i don't know what words to say to that truly
so let me piggyback off of so a minute ago we were talking about oh we're getting to a point
now where you know our generation is having a hard time distinguishing between what's ai and real
so over our break i collected some some headlines about the music industry and the bitcoin world
and I want to read some of them to you just kind of you know get your opinion
Daniel Ek spends 600 million dollars investing in an AI military company called Helsing
what do you think about that
I've got lots of opinions holy wow okay um presumably this is a good chunk of money that
came from his share of Spotify, which is famous for not paying artists and songwriters?
Um, first off, I want my 0.00000001% of that 600 million.
yes please um but not jokes aside i mean that's wild that
he had 600 million dollars to donate first off just laying around um because who has 600 million
dollars that they can give away and if you give said money away
what your first jump is military and also i think it's an ai military defense company
so and that's also just disturbing yeah so ai military
so that would mean
sorry i'm just at a loss so you're gonna have ai and all of that potentially
manning tanks doing everything i don't know what that would mean for military
but all i know is 600 million that's gonna make dance monkey dance yeah so that's gonna
from spotify that's crazy so here are my thoughts number one 600 million dollars
that do you know how much aid that could bring to the gaza strip right now i mean yeah do you know
how many homeless people in america we could feed with that money i mean not even like yeah
with all the different humanitarian aid so that's one thing but now if we get back really into the
more like thing that makes like my music business degree struggling artist hat just like right burn
i think this is so hypocritical and let me just say this with my whole chest i am daniel x biggest
hater if daniel like has no haters then i'm dead sorry um it is so hypocritical that he donated
600 million dollars to an ai military defense company when he is cracking down on small artist
songs getting put onto automated ai playlists and then shutting those artists down saying you can't
put songs on spotify anymore you will not see any money from this when a lot of the time artists
don't control what playlist plural their music gets put on and then also the fact that spotify
is letting ai artists like velvet sundown which was a big thing do you remember that over the
the summer no oh it was an ai band that got a shit ton of traction um and you could hear it
like it was ai automated ai written when bands and ai artists like velvet sundown are taking
a big revenue chunk because of course people it's like um clickbait or rage bait oh i don't like
ai artists so i'm gonna click on this and then you get a million people who click on it it makes a
shit ton of money and then so cracking down on small artists well donating donating money for
the military yeah i i didn't know the piece about cracking down on artists for ai i hadn't read that
yet and like and it's not even that artists are getting put onto ai playlists it's more of like
bot activity like and how ai is now becoming kind of synonymous with the word bot and how
you know when artists put songs out we sign up for playlisting companies where we're like hey
small indie music blog will you put my my song on your playlist and then you know it gets streamed
amount of times and then spotify goes these aren't real goodbye we're not taking this song
and then also here's another thing over the break i was like i don't i think i was getting ready for
a show or something and i you know just put my music on shuffle and it wasn't velvet sundown
band um it was another ai artist where like the artist was literally called like ai tunes or
something oh my gosh and there wasn't even a way that you could report it and say this is ai i don't
want to listen to music made by a robot that's crazy so i mean spotify you have some explaining
to do there's a lot of companies and a lot of different industries that need to catch up with
ai like and i think
they're the music industry specifically i can speak to that because i know it
I know that there's a lot of companies that are behind on working with AI because they're trying to figure out how to best use it to their advantage.
Obviously, that's what every business is going to do.
Duh.
But in trying to use it to their best advantage, they're allowing all of these things to happen before because there's nothing set in place.
There's no precedent.
There's no laws.
there's nothing that's stopping all these things from happening before they've gotten their shit
together yeah so in doing their due diligence waiting to make sure this is what's best for
that company or different industry blah blah you're allowing all of these things to happen before
and i don't know what that's going to mean in the next few years because i don't know how fast
people are going to respond but it's crazy going back to like how this started it's crazy that
somebody isn't going to be such a hypocrite and on such a large stage and if we really wanted to get
you know really into the weeds about it artists could make the claim and make the argument that
that 600 million dollars that he's investing is our money yeah that we never got paid out for
and i mean i saw that there were some people like um i think i need to like look this up real quick
but i think there's this band called um king gizzard and the lizard wizard which like great
name by the way yeah um i think they in response to something like that they were pulling their
music off spotify yeah here's a here's a headline from vice king gizzard and the lizard wizard
leaving spotify frontman student mckenzie says they don't expect danielek to pay attention like
no artist is happy with spotify right now except for maybe their top performers right
All day and all night
I guess I've always been this way my whole life
Worrying from sundown to sunrise
I function like a halogen light burning up inside I stumble through the day blacking out sometimes worrying is hijacking my mind
We are now at the end of the road
We are now at Masougatville, right away from the railroaduto statement of Ayodongu intersection with a V начинаic
High speed chases where I am both criminal and cop
I run myself in circles around what I'm not
Worrying about problems that I've got
Cause I love you take the wheel
Then you drive me crazy, made me feel the way you feel
Now I'm all mixed up and stranded
And I don't know what's real
And I'm worried about if I'm gonna heal
Am I gonna heal?
Cause I let you take the wheel
Then you drove me crazy, made me feel the way you feel
Now I'm all mixed up and stranded
And I don't know what's real
And I'm worried about if I'm gonna heal
Am I gonna heal?
Time for tea
So here's another Spotify headline, which I didn't know.
i was just kind of researching i would have you know said oh we should talk about this when we
first started the podcast of like february or something spotify hosted
made a hundred and fifty thousand dollar donation to the ceremony while apple and amazon each
donated a million dollars to the inauguration i knew that apple and amazon had donated
I didn't know that Spotify had.
Yikes.
Yeah.
Again, more of our money being used to platform a wannabe dictator, an authoritarian, like...
Right.
I mean, we shouldn't even give him airspace.
but that's crazy to me because spotify you've gotten so many different bad headlines and bad
raps for how many years and how many years are people still using spotify like ridiculous
absolutely ridiculous um not to be that person but i've always been an apple music
person hey love which i mean apple music does pay for that they do pay artists slightly better
slightly but not great so i mean it's like the azkab bmi yeah exactly and so i mean i think when
we talk about spotify in these kind of segments where we talk about like big music industry stuff
i think we could even kind of use spotify as an overarching like streaming platforms in general
kind of using it interchangeably with all of the the big ones um okay I've got some other things
that I would like to run past you real quick this one okay so there's this thing called bundle gate
that I think Spotify is is doing I need to like read over this really quickly because this was a
I saw this maybe a month or so ago. Hold on. Okay, so I'm going to quote this article from
Song Sleuth. By, quote, changes, they were referring to their reclassification of their
premium tiers from a standalone music subscription to a bundle due to the fact that they are now
including 15 hours of audiobooks as part of the premium subscribers plans, an estimated 85% of
total Spotify subscribers. This new classification means that Spotify will be able to pay a
lower, lower than it already is, mechanical royalty rate to songwriters.
How much lower, you may ask?
Well, according to Billboard, this semantic issue could mean between $150 million to $180 million less dollars
to songwriters and publishers in the first year alone.
And I quoted that directly from Song Sleuth.
So you're telling me.
I want to know more about the CEO.
Is he new to Spotify?
danielek yeah no danielek is like the main founder he created it in a basement somewhere
because to me
this gives somebody came in like a mergers and acquisitions type and said your company has not
had a profitable year in how long yeah they've only had like two or three profitable quarters
in their whole 20 plus year existence.
Yes.
It sounds like acquisitions came in and said,
you haven't had a profitable quarter.
This is what you need to do.
You need to do X, Y, and Z and you will be profitable.
Yeah.
And he said, okay, cool.
And just instituted it.
Like that's to me what it gives is that he just kind of,
not blindly, but essentially just took a plan and ran with it.
Because when you do something like that, like when you're looking for a loophole,
it's because you're not making money.
Yeah.
And you can't afford to lose more money than you're already losing.
Mm-hmm.
So I don't know what else other than he's not doing well.
Yeah.
So karma is obviously getting them in one way.
But there needs to be a better way to stop CEOs from doing things like that.
Yeah.
Where the company has had no profitable quarter, but somehow you have $600 million lying around.
Yeah.
How does that make sense?
Where's the IRS?
Yeah.
Where?
so on that level of things i mean there's a new girl that's in charge of monopolies
and she's cracking them down girl what's her name i don't i don't know um i don't know if i know who
you're talking about um is it a government person yes there's a new girl that's gone directly against
um apple or microsoft um i think her name lena khan maybe yes i haven't heard about her tell me
is an american legal scholar who was the chair of the who was the federal chair of the federal
trade commission from 2021 to 2025 she was an associate professor at columbia law school
She was a student at Yale Law School and became known for her work in antitrust and competition laws in the United States after publishing the essay Amazon's Antitrust Paradox.
She went after Amazon.
Yeah.
And won.
Yeah.
That's exciting.
she was
nominated
by Joe Biden
in 2021 after a
confirmation and she was the youngest FDC
chair even in June of
2021 that's women in
STEM right there
can we get her to
go after Spotify
she I mean
it sounds like she was
funny enough like a lot
of things in politics and are good in the world right now she fired was fired january 20th of
2025 for what oh never mind yep i get it right yep yep yep um so anybody who was fired by the
trump administration i'm automatically like can we be friends right i'm like hey um i'm trying to
see if she was fired or if she left um because it says it was until january 20th 2025
yeah she won against microsoft as well that is awesome women in stem
um and she stepped in between kroger and albertson's merger
which two big grocery stores yeah it would have been a monopoly
Oh wait, no, that's Kroger and Fred Meyer are kind of the same.
Ooh, she went again, Lockheed Martin's attempt of the acquisition of Aerojet, two big military sponsors merging that would have become a different monopoly.
Yeah.
So Lena, if you want to come on the podcast, we'd love to have you.
Despite early bipartisan support of her continuing in her role as chairman under President Donald Trump, including positive comments in 2024 from Republican Vice President candidate J.D. Vance and former Trump advisor Steve Fannin, Ken was replaced by Andrew N. Ferguson.
in 2025. So she was fired and replaced by, you guessed it, a white man.
Sure you make me cry but you give one hell of a high
I would give all of my base for one more night
I'm feeling myself the way you're feeling on my body
My body, uh-uh
So good as criminal, you going down like John Gotti
You got me, uh-uh
I will take the pain
The screaming fights to go and am I
I'm crying while dancing
Cause I love to be your collateral damage
You're supplying serotonin to my brain
But when I'm coming down I feel insane
You got me staying up, you got me losing me
You got me losing hope that you'll be what I need
You got me on the edge, you got me on my knees
You're so convincing
I slam the door but I can't stay away
I block your number every other day
And you always know just what to say
You're so conflicted
Sure you make me cry but you give one hell of a high
I would give all of my pace for one more night
I'm feeling myself through where you're feeling on my body
My body
So good as screaming, I know you're going down like John Gotti
You got me
I will take the pain
The screaming fights to go in M.I.A.
But I'm crying while dancing
Cause I love to be your collateral damage
Do I deserve it?
All this hurting?
Or am I flirting with the enemy?
Does he deserve me?
Or feel me dirty?
Should I worry?
I mean, I know my worth, but sometimes I go on sale.
I'm feeling myself the way you're feeling on my body
My body
So good as criminal, you're going down like John God
You got me
I will take the pain
The screaming fights get going
Am I
I'm crying while dancing
Cause I love to be
Your collateral damage
So yeah
I've got one other headline that I would like to read to you before we maybe move on to something that plays into, you know, all of this.
So there was an article that came out in March or so that was talking about the term streaming 2.0 and, you know, potentially what it is.
And so my notes on this article were that Streaming 2.0 at its basic core is basically creating yet another tier of exclusivity.
It's creating or it's going to create more work and content creation for artists and more money for the labels and services and thus, quote, adapting monetization rates for artists based on their popularity.
so you know in layman's terms the smallest artists if you know this really goes into effect and
becomes a bigger thing the smallest artists if i don't know if this is going to be based on
you know popularity alone or whatever but it does look like all streaming companies are going to be
switching to the model of only paying after a thousand streams yet another thing that spotify
is just leading the charge on which like not a great thing that the smallest artists aren't
going to get paid anything which like it's not a huge change because already small artists don't
get paid anything but then the biggest artists are going to continue to get paid more but indie
artists make up 26 percent of an estimated 11 million artists on spotify and only 37.5 million
songs out of about 100 million meet the requirements to make any money at all
i mean to put it in perspective a thousand streams is not even one cent yeah so
i can understand from the company's perspective bro that's not even one cent what do you mean
that's still our money that is still something that somebody should pay to access yeah absolutely
and for you the company that's this big
i don't know that has enough money to go and go go and donate right
what's not even one cent to you yeah if there's a thousand of those oh my god you spent a dollar
whoop-de-doo like i don't i can understand it just seems like right now we're so much working
into a phase of like shaving everything off we're going into a recession and i mean for me
the other thing like with streaming 2.0 is that the way i basically read it is it would be
sort of a patreon type of platform within a streaming platform which is creating
more work for the artists yeah on top of all of the stuff that we already do on top of the artists
who already use patreon now you're saying that that's for a patreon type service now you're
saying we would have to implement that into streaming like right and then also you know
going back to you know daniel x spending 600 million dollars on ai that's also coming from
the man who said that the cost of and i quote like but and rightly so a bunch of people on twitter
went after him for this this is coming from the man who said that the cost of making good content
is close to zero when that is just not the case yeah it's that's like somebody saying
well it only takes 20 minutes to make cookies sure but that's a hard 20 minutes like there's
so much shit that goes into the cookies well right it takes 20 minutes to make the cookies but
it takes a half hour in gas money to get the groceries yeah it takes working a stable job
so that you have a house overhead so that you have the time to make those cookies exactly so
and those are just cookies yeah so just i you know me i love using logic to compare logic yes
but that how I view it when somebody says something like that No that a great way to look at it because you absolutely right I mean I don know I just feel upset and disgusted by Spotify a lot of the time
and you know all these other streaming companies that are switching to the model of only paying
after a thousand streams it's like you're following the most popular thing to do even if when it's not
the right thing to do like where is the morality where is the moral ground that we're standing on
which I think the answer is like there is you know solid ground right now in literally everything
the music industry in politics in world events yeah yeah so those were the Spotify headlines I
wanted to talk to you about because I was researching and I was just like what the actual
hell is going on here yeah i mean news in general yeah like if we move over to like bitcoin news
um i was looking up kind of just what's happening right now and it seems like a lot of
whales is what they call them yeah people who have a shit ton of bitcoin that are just kind
of hiding in the deep sea right yeah um these whales are starting to surface yeah they're
starting to move some money out of these really old accounts into new wallets into different
wallets yeah and people are starting to kind of go did they know something we don't yeah outside
of the old like antiquated tradition of traditional banking yeah so i'm curious to see what's going on
what the fed decides um and see how people respond to that yeah and you said something
right before we started recording as well about potentially the stock market yeah being token
yeah that's the right word i don't know if it's if it's the right word either this is the word
that you know came up a bunch when i was researching this so there's a piece of news
in the past couple of days that the stock market might start running on a tokenized
basis, which I think would technically mean, and again, I'm not the technical person behind Bitcoin.
Y'all know me. This is just my understanding of it, which means that I think the blockchain or
the stock market would technically run on blockchain technology, which would mean that
all of those transactions would be instant and frictionless and kind of um you know nullify
the the antiquated outdated but would also in a way be public yeah if it's yeah depending on if
it's on or off train could you okay work with me here yeah could you imagine if there were
if insider trading was essentially made obsolete because you know that a company's stocks is gonna
go through the roof yeah you buy some of it but now that's publicly out there which i think trades
are public knowledge but they're not as accessible yeah because i think they take two to three days
in a traditional system to you know but over the blockchain you would see x goes to x at this time
yeah and even though it's i mean you could have like a username yeah you would still have your
npub which is keyed directly to you yeah so solving crime finding crime for insider trading
white collar crime with any sort of monetary value oof you're out of a job my guy yeah which
is interesting because then imagine the stock market would change a bit yeah because if you're
no longer able to readily predict the market like you were used to or like you could manipulate it
like you used to yeah yikes yeah yeah so here's a um a quote that i found on um rooters or
Rudders.com? I don't know.
It was, I don't know how to pronounce it, but it was from Ruders.
Quote, if approved, the move would mark the first instance of tokenized securities
being allowed to trade on a major U.S. stock exchange
and also signify the most ambitious attempt yet by an exchange operator
to bring blockchain-based settlement into the national market system.
The filing comes days after the SEC unveiled its rulemaking agenda,
which included a potential amendment of its rules to allow for crypto to be traded on national securities exchanges and alternative trading systems.
Efficiency and automating the processes when, you know, the traditional banking system is so antiquated.
And yeah, I just thought that was really interesting.
It is. I think right now there's a lot of change.
there's a lot of chaos there's a lot of unknown and it's cool and scary to be able to have a mic
in front of us at this time yeah absolutely take it with a lot of responsibility like hey kids
yeah no like when I saw this piece of news the other day I was at first I was like oh I don't
know if that's a good thing or not and then I thought about it a little bit more and I'm like
maybe maybe that could be cool and interesting well okay the the problem that you and i both have
is we both are very liberal women yes we very much are and when you read bitcoin news it's like
oh my god who which frat brother wrote this yeah i'm just trying to get to see if this will benefit
at me or if this yeah well not i don't i don't want to know about all that different hubbub
yeah just want to know just let me know this is good yeah truly and so reading through bitcoin news
as somebody who's not also maga yes is incredibly infuriating because i don't i don't want to read
about fox news stuff i just want to know if bitcoin is going up yay i want to know if these
policies are going to affect what i have in my wallet i don't care about the politics behind it
don't give me that technology in this technology should be neutral yes like which and that goes to
um another thing that i thought would be interesting um but also just kind of like my last
thing on the stock market thing i think the thing with that is like the word tokenizing has such a
weird connotation because token is like oh me you're downloading a jpeg as an nft okay what does
that mean and so like i think if i had read that and it was like um oh the stock market would just
be technically block chainified i would have been like oh interesting and i wouldn't have been so
like, I guess, turned off by it when I first read it.
So, yeah.
And when, like, all these little nicknames, like, token, crypto.
Yeah.
Satoshi.
Uh-huh.
It sounds like a Mario Kart game.
Yeah.
It's very gamified.
It sounds like a Nintendo Oh my gosh I just made some Satoshis Let me go throw a lemon peel Like I get it
Money cha-ching sound.
Money cha-ching.
So, yeah.
If there's any listeners that has a good resource of news that I don't even care if it swings biased.
i just want actual news in it yeah you know information information unbiased information
um okay so going off of what you said a minute ago so a couple weeks ago i got to go see the
unbanked film at the bitcoin museum in nashville which was so cool mr sky bravo and i uh may have
potentially premiered um the my episode of going and playing on top of his certain pink bus which
will be coming out sometime soon um but it was really cool night like we got to premiere that
and then we got to watch the unbanked film which oh my gosh the unbanked film was so inspiring
and it was not left-wing it was not right-wing it had a lot of great perspectives from a lot
of different people who probably disagree on a lot of like the main political stuff but
oh my gosh do yourself a favor and go watch the unbanked film I was reading a little bit more
about it last night um and Lauren Seekman the director of it which also love that it was like
directed by a woman yeah which when I went to the Bitcoin conference let me tell you how excited I
was when I met so many like smart and beautiful and elegant and sophisticated women who were like
yeah Bitcoin I was like yes it's not just the finance bros it's not just MAGA guys no literally
oh my god like what oh my gosh let me tell you i met no tino shit oh i met um the wonderful
um ella huff who like if you're in the bitcoin world you probably know um who she is she founded
the cornell bitcoin club and then she um just announced that she got a job at strategy which
is sailor's bitcoin company nice um like doing bitcoin advocacy and i got to meet her for the
first time and she was just so lovely and i met her mom too me and my mom and her and her mom we
had a good thing going on oh yeah like good vibes in the studio mother daughter uh duo is trying to
like bring bitcoin to the the zeitgeist um so yeah there were so many like smart takes on bitcoin
and the thing that i was going with it being directed by a woman was i love that it um it had
a different a different feel and an air to it i saw a quote she said about it we didn't make this film
to like for lack of a better term um and this is me paraphrasing we didn't make this film to like
evangelize you to go buy bitcoin we wanted it to pique your interest so you go and do more research
on it and so when it comes back to what you were saying a few minutes ago with like oh some of these
guys who are trying to do insider trading that might be out of a job if this thing happens um
so one of the um the takes that one of the guys i don't remember who it was in the unbanked film
said was and I'm going to use this anytime somebody you know tries to argue with me like
oh Bitcoin is just like all black market bad stuff he said yeah criminals use Bitcoin and
cryptocurrencies but you know what else criminals use cars and cell phones and they drink water and
eat food does that make all of those things inherently bad and I was like oh that is a great
argument no absolutely like it's technology it's the big question behind technology is the technology
itself the bad thing or is it the people who use it who influence it for better or for worse the
problem which yeah interesting interesting stuff going on in the house of bitcoin in the house of
commons and then one other of my big takeaways um from you know watching the unbanked film was like
how good if harnessed correctly bitcoin mining could be for the environment and for sustainability
i did a little bit more research into it this but i remember watching that part of the documentary
and it's been a couple weeks so i don't remember anything but like go and watch the unbanked film
everybody this isn't sponsored I promise please just watch the unbanked film it was awesome
um I remember watching the part where they were talking about how to um you know harness
unused energy to buy bitcoin and I remember thinking oh my gosh my best friend who goes
to school for like environmental studies and is like saving the uh planet which also shout out
the eco mind collective run by my bestie Anya y'all go check that out had to do a quick plug
I was like if she saw this she would get it she would be like oh my gosh absolutely bitcoin so
there's an awesome Forbes article about how why bitcoin mining might actually be great for
sustainability and here I am quoting again mining soaks up excess energy to prevent from
overloading a power grid companies are finding ways to capture vented methane on landfills
and then turning that methane into electricity.
They then use that electricity to mine Bitcoin.
This practice both reduces carbon emissions
and monetizes stranded energy by taking toxic fumes
and converting them into digital gold.
If the process can be scaled,
it could forever change the way that landfills operate.
Bitcoin miners can tap into any energy source,
anytime, anywhere in the world,
and they are in constant search of low-cost energy,
which they increasingly find in underutilized renewable sources
such as hydro wind geothermal and solar so it's like so cool to see how like mining bitcoin might
be able to pay off climate debt like what yeah that's really cool it was so cool and like this
is also coming from someone which like y'all know me you if you've listened to this podcast y'all
know i'm an anxious girly i'm anxious about everything i'm anxious about people politics
the world climate change um and this is coming from like the daughter of somebody who got who
went back to school to get his MBA in sustainability and also my parents owned an organics company my
mom says it was hello fresh before it was hello fresh so like and we had this conversation a
couple months ago on the podcast about is it ethical and sustainable to be a pop star that
you know is emitting you know fuel and making shit tons amount of merch like just reading that
was so cool so go check out that um Forbes article let me see who was written by it was
written by Sam Lyman. That was a couple years ago, but I still thought it was so interesting to bring
up. No, that was very interesting. That would be really, really cool. I mean, have you seen the guy
that's trying to make fuel out of plastic? No, but I'm really encouraged by that.
You figured out a way to literally shred up the plastic from like plastic bottles, distill it,
and then make it into an oil and then from that oil like make it into a gasoline but he has this
whole machine that he's made and it worked that's incredible he made a car run and like i've been
secretly watching it on tiktok for like years because i saw this guy like a few years ago say
i can make gasoline for plastic and he held up like this little
but renewable things like that where you could tie the making of gas to the making of energy and
bitcoin that insane and that brings so much hope to the future yeah um The thing is scaling that and people giving money to that and believing in that right now
when their dollar is worth less than it was 10 years ago.
Even probably five years ago.
Five years ago.
A year ago.
It's going to be hard.
I mean, everything right now is just such a paradox.
Yeah, absolutely. But that, you know, that kid, you know, making plastic into fuel, that gives me hope. It's funny. It's kind of a side tangent, but kind of plays into it. My mom and I went to Big Lots yesterday, which like haven't been to Big Lots in a long time. But whenever I walk into one of those kinds of stores, I get so much dread about how much plastic there is.
And like this piece of plastic is going to outlive me by hundreds of years.
It's going to be on the planet far longer than I will be.
And we're, you know, creating all of this, these issues that are affecting climate change for the worse.
And I feel so helpless sometimes when I see that because I'm like, I don't I don't need all this plastic.
Why does everybody need all this plastic?
Why do we all need these things?
And so, I don't know, as a Pacific Northwestern hippie who really believes in reduce, reuse, and recycle, I was just really encouraged by that.
And I'm encouraged by this kid who's making plastic fuel.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
Some good news when we started pretty, you know, out there today.
Right.
I mean, it's always good to think about positive things when everything is going crazy.
Yeah.
Well, should we wrap it up by saying like a fun little positive thing?
Yeah.
I don't know what that would be, but.
What's going on around Nashville that's crazy?
Or something that, oh, I saw this video this morning.
And it was of like a spirit week for school.
Uh-huh.
and did you ever play that game where you're sitting on a chair you have a balloon in your lap
and then somebody's like trying to pop it and they're like sitting on you or like just trying
to pop a balloon so i remember they played this at high school and it was always funny because
they would always have like siblings or like teammates play it because the goal is that
teammate is just trying to pop the balloon whatever way possible yeah and in this video
you see this girl wearing a wig sitting on this chair has a balloon in her lap and this guy
just absolutely trucks her body slam like off the chair body slam onto her back she gets up without
a wig and gets a new balloon and the second time and she's already on the ground at this point
second time like jumps on her while she's on the ground and then runs away again and the third time
she's like still on the ground jumps on her again by the fourth time she's like up
and as her arms up to like stop him and she's like no no wait and you just and there's two
point of views and it flashes to the other point of view and you just see him like
absolutely through and it just reminded me of like a simpler time in high school for spirit week
and like all of these things that you would witness and just laugh at on unbeknownst to you
about all the different things that were going on in the world but i sent that video to my dad
yes because my dad and i are weird and we send weird videos to each other
like whenever whenever i see a video like that like i'll just send it to him because i know it'll
make him laugh and he he responds and he goes you're not normal
you can say a lot about high schoolers but you cannot say that they don't go hard
no literally okay let me tell you about um before we wrap up the the weird thing that I've been
sending my dad recently like my dad and I's TikTok DMs are just full of like exactly what you signed
up for you know yeah 15 years ago when you know hey this internet thing sounds cool it's just the
most random wacky shit you can ever imagine I've been sending him and like my dad and I are both
musicians so like there's a lot of musical humor in the things that we send to each other
and so I've been sending him these videos of the Wii Sports Resort like um characters or like the
um avatars playing the trumpet out of tune to popular songs oh my god let me wait I need to
see if I can find an example of it and I've been sending them back and forth and I think they are
so funny let's see oh wait where did it go yes
oh god
it's supposed to be the trombone
and um so we just send each other a bunch of stupid shit like that
and it's so fun oh yeah i sent my dad charlie the unicorn that that recircled on my um um
on my on my for you page oh my god so yeah
i'll play the video that i sent my dad yeah and i i want to see if you guys
you can hear it
like
just
with the classical music
absolutely
trucks her
i mean
second time
she's on the ground
oh
into the other people
oh
okay
other point of view
i just love the classical music
she's
she's on her stomach
and the guy literally
just jumps on her back.
Double opposite.
And then she gets up.
She's like...
Okay. Okay, this one,
it's the last one. She's like, no, don't do it.
Don't do it. Don't do it.
Completely just
checks her. She goes off the mat.
and what i love is that you can see like the football coach in the back just go
oh
like you didn't train him to do that sir where did that come from how is that on the field
right right where did that come up for for a game yeah come on
well we had many a conversation today about many a topic and there's nobody I would rather do it
with so there's nobody I would rather be here with yeah so this has been the snap with me your
host Ainsley and me your host Katie we'll catch you next time