Hey, I'm Heather Larson with a special, very special edition of Radio Detox.
First of all, if you're watching Radio Detox, you get the full treat, right?
I'm wearing my Geyser shirt to celebrate the fact that you, Radio Detox listeners,
made sure Ivy Looney's campaign on Geyser Fund got funded.
The whole thing.
If you missed the last few episodes, let me catch you up.
So the Geyser Fund campaign, they're all or nothing campaigns right now.
So for example, with Ivy Loomy, I spent a little bit of sats to get a Nostra badge for her new EP, Love is the Cure.
So if it hadn't gotten funded, I would have gotten my sats back, which I don't want that.
I want Ivy to succeed and I want her Geyser fund to succeed.
And it did.
She's like way up over the top.
So that's why I'm wearing the Geyser shirt.
This is a little great.
Radio Detox fans, Geyser fans, Ivy Loomy fans, thank you for listening to the podcast.
We also had Mick from Geyser on a few episodes back.
So it's working, right?
The Bitcoin circular economy, it's working.
So I'm wearing the Geyser shirt to do the intro for this week's very special episode of Radio Detox, which is coming to you from Washington, D.C.
So what I did is I handed the reins of the podcast over to all of my friends in D.C.
Shout out to Trey Musgrave with the Bitcoin District Initiative onboarding so many square merchants this year to taking Bitcoin payments.
He's on track.
Q1 is about to end and he's got about 24, 25 people signed up.
The goal is 100 this year.
So the podcast is going to start with you listening to Trey talking about what Bitcoin District Initiative is doing.
I had to cut out a couple parts of the podcast due to some bad audio from the live setup.
So you're going to hear the best audio that we have from the live setup.
And shout out to my friend, David Tarr.
You know David Tarr as a pretty solid Bitcoiner and Nostra guy and great music that you can find on Fountain and Wavelake.
He dropped his new EP last week, performed his brand new music for the first time at our event,
the Runster District 5K After Party at PubKey on Sunday, March 15th, and handed him the reins for Radio Detox.
And so he hosted the podcast.
He interviewed Trey.
He interviewed our Runster founder, Dakota.
Dakota Brown.
That was the part that the audio was kind of bad.
I had to cut it out.
So sorry, boss man.
I cut you out.
But the audio was not worthy of all the great things you had to say.
So shout out to Dakota.
Shout out to the Costellos.
Jim, Ainsley, Julie for putting the show on, running the whole AV and everything.
launching the Epic Music app. That's epicmusic.xyz. And a huge shout out to Ella Huff from,
you know her from Strategy, from Cornell. She is a great Gen Z Bitcoiner. And shout out to Catherine,
who's also a Gen Z Bitcoiner, somebody who I've had on the podcast in detail. You've gotten to
follow the Catherine journey with a very special episode here on season two, where we follow how
she got into this space with us, began to put her music on Fountain when we did Sats by Southwest
at my God, the end of 2024. So like we've been doing the same for a couple of years.
And I think that this podcast episode with all of the details from everybody talking to David
Tarr live in DC, when he took over my first artist takeover, Radio Detox, you get to kind
of hear about the journey and some of the people that we've been working with, the places we've
gone. We've been trying to get music plus Bitcoin, independent music and independent money linked
together, trying to get it to the people who can benefit from it. Musicians, artists, creators,
you know, we're concentrating on music here. We're concentrating on fitness with Renster,
you know, Bitcoiners, we love wellness. We love fitness. We love healthy food. Because once you
adopt sound money, once you fix the broken money, you start to fix the world. You start to see every,
When you detox off the fiat, you start to see everything that is wrong with the fiat world.
And some of that is food.
Some of that is fitness.
That's why with Runster, we have a privacy-focused fitness app that's not going to dox your location.
We don't see who you are.
We don't have your data with Runster.
So this ethos runs deep, right?
It's about everything from privacy, health, fitness, sovereignty, to maybe there's a better way for artists to make money.
Well, obviously there is.
I mean, who wants to put their music out into the world and then receive a 30 cent check from Spotify?
You know, performance rights organization like, you know, it's just it's not working for a lot of artists.
They can't even get the attention of the record labels.
I mean, if you really want to get technical.
So we dive into this.
You're going to hear from Trey Musgrave and Bitcoin Adoption in the D.C. area.
You're going to hear from Jim Costello.
He's Ainsley's dad.
That's his claim to fame.
But also he's talking about how Julie built, vibe coded the Epic Music app.
It can live stream music.
It's a music discovery app.
And that's part we've kind of been lacking in whatever you want to call this space.
I don't think there's an official name to it.
I'm not going to police the name of it.
I'm not going to police the language of it.
It's people having a new way for their music to be discovered and monetized.
A new way to interact with fans.
A new way to take payments.
There are options for payments under the Epic Music app.
You can pay in fiat.
You can pay in Bitcoin.
And this is coming from a place where we've done music events for two years now with a variety of technology in a variety of cities, a variety of music in different events.
Everything from HODLween, which was in Atlanta, to doing a show here with Sarah Jade, who's played Professor Phoenix.
She's played in Vegas.
Like we have done all of these things.
We've, I think, learned from mistakes and success as well over the last two years.
Hopefully that comes through in this episode of Radio Detox.
And hopefully you get something out of this.
And the thing that I want you to get the most out of is that you can just do this.
I think that this is mentioned a couple of times in the podcast that you can just do this.
You can just create a music movement that's monetized in Bitcoin and also fiat to make it easier for new people to understand, to make it less jargony, to make it less exclusive and more inclusive.
Because one of the things that has been not cool in the space is that it's become very, very male, very people who will browbeat you about the tech.
It's become very, very much like a country club for male dorks.
And it's left the women out of it.
And I aim to change that because I'm tired of it.
And so we have a Gen Z women in Bitcoin panel.
You know, that's the other thing.
It doesn't have to be my voice.
I want to amplify other voices.
And that's the only thing I think that's going to work for adoption for anything, Bitcoin or an Oster.
People need to see people like them doing it.
And I think, you know, these Gen Z folks, they are on fire.
I love me some Ainsley, Ella Huff and Catherine.
You got to hear from these folks.
And again, big, big thank you for David Tarr for hosting Radio Detox and for hearing his new music on the live stream.
Just you can't ask for a better guy to like take over your podcast.
I want to do a lot more artist takeovers on the Radio Detox in the future.
My brain is already spinning, trying to figure out who wants to do this next.
Where will we do this next?
You know, do we go back to D.C.?
I don't know.
Also, what's the best Bitcoin city?
I haven't decided.
I've been to Austin.
I've been to Nashville.
Here in Phoenix, we got our own thing going in the Phoenix-Castell area.
Maybe ultimately it's not that.
Maybe ultimately it's not a Bitcoin city because Bitcoin gets adopted everywhere.
How about that?
So I've been talking long enough.
Listen to my friends and what they did on my podcast live from Washington, D.C.
I just don't think that's fair.
I don't think Visa or MasterCard earned 3, 2, 3, 4 plus percent of these businesses and when every transaction.
I don't think it's fair.
So I think Bitcoin helps solve that.
It's an open permissionless network.
And we want to see more of that.
And the other effect that businesses accepting Bitcoin has is when people see a Bitcoin accepted here sign at a merchant,
that sort of unlocks this like psychological thing
where it takes this magic internet money idea
or this scam that's on the internet into the real world.
And it changes the narrative into something that,
all right, this small business that I maybe visit every week
and I get coffee or a bagel or whatever,
if they value this thing as money,
then that kind of unlocks like a psychological thing
with normal people in the community.
So I want to see Bitcoin accepted here signs all over the place.
So you said the goal is to onboard 100 businesses this year.
What's the count up to?
I think we're at like 24, 25.
That's pretty good.
If I do the math, it's March.
I feel like we're on track.
Are we on track?
Do you have any like good success stories from onboarding anyone?
Yeah, a couple of success stories.
Out of those 25, a few of them, so most of them are Square merchants.
Square made it really easy to turn on Bitcoin payments.
So if you see a Square merchant, ask them if they accept Bitcoin.
They probably don't.
Even if they say no, it's like a, you know, kind of a reinforcing thing.
If they see enough people willing to pay with Bitcoin, maybe they'll turn it on.
But I would say a couple of stories is like, yeah, some of those merchants who've turned it on, they end up, Square has another feature where you can convert a portion of your normal sales into Bitcoin.
So I think a really cool thing about accepting Bitcoin payments is once the business starts learning more about Bitcoin, they want to start to stack more Bitcoin.
So they'll switch from being to just accepting it as payments to actually actively stacking Bitcoin with all of their normal credit card transactions.
So that's happened a few times.
And I imagine every vendor that you talk to, it's just an immediate yes.
They always get it right away.
Is that right?
Now, the success rate there is very low. So of those, let's say I have about 25 businesses that turned on the feature, I probably talked to 100, 150 merchants. So maybe like 10% success rate there, maybe 20%.
Do you have any not so success stories? Like any funny, anything gone on when you've tried to get a vendor on board and they've, I don't know, shooed you out or anything like that?
I mean, that definitely happens. I've talked to enough people where I can kind of read the room, you know, if I'm getting very cold pushback. Maybe they have a particular idea that Bitcoin is this, like, it has some political connotation or that it's like super right wing thing. And then, you know, they might have a certain view on it. But like, Bitcoin doesn't have politics. Bitcoin doesn't care about who you are, where you're from. It doesn't care about, you know, who you voted for. Bitcoin is just Bitcoin.
And actually bringing it back to the community piece, a good friend of mine just posted something this morning and I thought it was a really good quote.
He said, Bitcoin isn't a community.
And I think he's right.
It's not.
But Bitcoin is a community.
What was the word?
It's something that brings the people together.
We are the community.
Bitcoin is just Bitcoin.
I think one of my favorite sayings is Bitcoin is money for enemies.
You don't have to get along with anybody else that's using it.
None of that matters.
Like you said, it's just it is what it is.
and there's no other affiliation that needs to be worried about.
For anybody who's local, I think we've done a good job of highlighting how they can get involved here.
If anybody out there is not from D.C. and they don't know how to get plugged in in their own community,
what would you recommend that they do?
Just Google Bitcoin meetup near me.
If there isn't one near you, if you're in a big urban area, I guarantee you there's some Bitcoin meetup around you.
If not, start your own. It's really that easy.
Go to meetup.com, create a meetup, and then just post it and see who comes.
There might be one person that comes the first, you know, one, two, three months.
But that's how you start.
And then you meet people.
And then they have ideas.
And then you bring more people in.
And it's just this snowball effect.
And that's how communities like here in D.C., that's how it started.
So it's just meet people.
You can just do things.
Yeah, you can just do things.
It reminds me of the, you know, you and I did one in Maryland that we weren't sure if one person was going to come, you know, and the very first one that we did, we ended up having to move tables because people kept showing up.
It was like 20 people.
Before you know it, we had 20 brand new people that we had never talked to before.
So you never know what kind of success you might have in starting one in your local communities.
What else should people know about you?
What about the Bitcoin District Initiative?
So I would say I want to plug an event that we're partnering with a local nonprofit called the Washington, D.C. Table Tournament.
Table Tennis.
Triple T, as I like to say.
Washington, D.C. Table Tennis.
So it's an organization that it's up near Tacoma Park, and they have a nonprofit program.
It's called they have a WDCTT Academy.
So we're partnering with them.
It's a nonprofit.
They do really, really good programs, community programs where they're doing like after school, table tennis, ping pong programs for young kids, seniors, people with like neurodivergent stuff going on.
So we partnered with them and we're going to host a tournament, table tennis tournament, 36 players like bracket style.
We'll start off with some round robin friendly play.
But the ticket sales and the proceeds are going to go to seeding a Bitcoin treasury for their nonprofit.
I think Bitcoin has amazing long-term wealth-building effects for individuals, for families, for companies, for nation-states.
So I think the more of the local, small, great organizations like this that can start to stack Bitcoin,
as everyone else starts to catch on to this thing as other nations start to stack Bitcoin as big companies start to stack Bitcoin it helps them too So that the whole goal of the Bitcoin District Initiative is to do that local community outreach teach these organizations about Bitcoin And then ultimately the more Bitcoin that they
start stacking now, they're going to be able to carry forward their mission for years to come.
I think a lot of nonprofits really have to spend a lot of their time fundraising. But I think the
sort of wealth or the price appreciation, the long-term value of Bitcoin, I think can help
sort of, I don't know, take some of that pressure off so that nonprofits aren't just focused on
fundraising. They're actually focused more on doing the good mission that they were created,
that they were created to do. So I think that's where we're trying to weave in Bitcoin into our
local communities because I really want to see my own backyard to succeed. I think that's something
everybody can identify with. Any last words before we... Yeah, a couple other things. So if
If you're in the area, we're doing a couple of events here at PubKey a month.
I know PubKey does weekly Bitcoin programming every Wednesday around 6 p.m.
Shout out to PubKey.
We partner with them to host some monthly events.
So the back half of the month, we'll have local Bitcoin programming.
So different topics every week or every month.
So if you're interested in that, go to PubKey's website.
You can go to Bitcoin District.
BitcoinDistrict.org is the community.
BitcoinDistrictInitiative.org is a nonprofit.
You'll find the event links there.
So subscribe to the Luma calendars and I hope to see you there.
Thank you very much, Trey.
Thank you, David.
Give it up for Trey.
Thank you very much.
All right.
I was handed a note that we are switching things up a little bit from the original programming.
We are going to move the Gen Z Women in Bitcoin panel to right now.
So if I could please welcome to the stage, Catherine Ainsley and Ella.
Yes.
Ella, it's so nice to meet you.
Ladies.
Hello.
Hi.
How are you, David?
Oh, I'm so good.
I'm so good. I keep drinking, but I'm just parched at the moment, but that is all right.
I think that everybody in the room and watching is probably aware of all three of you in a little
bit different capacities. So maybe let's start with you, Ainsley, and just give a quick intro.
Who are you? What do you do? And maybe how long you've been in and around Bitcoin?
Yeah, well, my name is Ainsley Costello. I'm a 21-year-old singer-songwriter based in Nashville,
Tennessee. And if you're in the Bitcoin space, you may have forcibly against your will at
some point in time heard a song that I wrote about cherries. Long story short, a couple of years ago,
down in Nashville, there's a place called Bitcoin Park. And I went to a demo of this brand new
streaming company called Wave Lake. And afterwards, sitting in on the demo, I thought it was a really
cool opportunity. And then I went home and I uploaded one song called Cherry on Top. And it
was the first song to apparently ever earn a million sats in this space, which just like
still completely blows my mind. And truly, it led to me sitting here with all of you today.
So I think I'm going to pass it off to my lovely friend, Catherine.
Hi, my name is Catherine.
I'm a 24-year-old songwriter from Nashville as well.
And I was introduced to the space by Ainsley and the whole Costello crew.
I had met them at an event in Nashville, and I was like, how do I get involved?
Where do I donate?
And they were like, so you have no clue what's going on.
And then I learned more about Bitcoin and this whole space and was like, okay, this is actually really cool.
It's doing very good for artists.
So I do R&B music and it's been doing pretty well out there.
If you see a black cover, that's probably me.
But thank you guys so much for being here.
Well, I am.
Yes, please.
Hi, everyone.
My name is Ella Huff.
I am nowhere near as talented as Ainsley and Catherine are.
So everyone, please go listen to their music.
I am really fortunate when I was a senior in high school.
So about five, six years ago, I had a professor who taught a class called blockchain technologies.
That was my first exposure to hearing the word Bitcoin in that class.
And to be honest, it went over my head a little bit, but kept learning on the side.
And ever since then, when I then went to college, I really wanted to talk about Bitcoin with my peers.
And I wanted to study Bitcoin.
And my academic director said Bitcoin sounded more like a hard rock, heavy metal band than anything actually worthwhile to pursue.
So I started a Bitcoin club.
I think that's when I got to meet Ainsley.
It grew into a larger nonprofit around 70 countries now.
Along the way, I also got to eventually get my major approved and got to help work on the first Bitcoin adoption study.
And so we're looking at how are people using adopting Bitcoin across 25 countries.
All that will be out this May.
So all the data will be open source so people can go and use it.
But now my full-time role is I get to lead Bitcoin advocacy at Strategy.
And so focus on a lot of activities under that.
So thank you all.
Very cool.
You're so cool.
So cool.
What have I been telling you?
So I made the joke earlier that I'm the obvious choice to talk Gen Z women in Bitcoin.
So my goal is to ask some open-ended questions and have the three of you run with it.
Ella, I'd actually love to start with you.
Sort of business, Bitcoin, music.
All three of them, either rightfully or wrongfully, have a reputation, again, whether it's correct
or not, of being a bit of a boys club, right?
And with that in mind, I'd love to understand as you talk about like your degree or getting into not exactly a low profile Bitcoin company at strategy.
I would love to understand like what your expectations were as you were entering into the space and then maybe what you got wrong or what the reality was.
Yeah, no, it's a great question.
And I think as what Trey and a common theme I've gathered from this morning is that you can just do things.
You can just do things.
And so, you know, I think I had a couple of factors that helped me along the journey and maybe shape some of the perspective.
One, I grew up going to an all-girls school.
So I think that conditioned me to raise your hand or it's you have a voice, you can use it.
And then also when I was first learning about Bitcoin, I was really grateful that there were women like Natalie Brunel, for instance, who had a big platform who were saying communicating.
And so I think that's a lot of what probably we all do is be a door, be a bridge or a pathway for more Gen Z, more women to come into the space and kind of show, no, you can do this.
There's a place for here.
Your voice is valued.
So to your question of was there anything that shocked me or was different?
I think I was grateful for those touch points.
And looking now, I knew it was going to be mainly a lot of men when I walked into a room.
But I just conditioned myself to know that and deal with it.
So I'm sorry, maybe not directly the answer you're looking for.
I was like, this is the way it is.
And let's do things to change this.
Yeah, that's wonderful.
To sort of ask the same question in the music world, maybe Catherine, I'd start with you.
What was your expectation?
Because you were introduced by Ainsley, right?
So maybe what was your expectation of Bitcoin or maybe even, dare I say, crypto more broadly
as you were entering in and being introduced?
And then what did you learn along the way?
Well, I was never really a big like tech, crypto, Bitcoin, really didn't hear the words.
I was a little bit jaded, honestly, because I had lost a little bit of money in the NFTs thing.
And I was like, great.
OK, that's cool.
So I didn't really go back to it.
And then when I found Ainsley and this whole thing, I was trying to explain to my producers like, hey, so I'm doing something a little bit different.
The splits are going to be a tiny bit different.
And if you just give me a thumbs up, it'll be cool.
And that didn't really go over very well.
So kind of having those talks with them and kind of saying like, this is the space, this is the way of the future.
And either you're going to be there or you're not.
And when putting it that way, it's kind of, okay, yeah, I need to put myself out there and do this.
But I really had no expectations.
I had no clue what I was getting into at all.
But I could not be more grateful for the introduction.
And how's it been since getting in?
It's been good.
You're now involved in Bitcoin panels that are being live streamed.
So you're obviously an expert now, right?
Oh, yeah, completely an expert.
I've only been doing this for a year.
It is a long time.
I would say it's a lot different.
It would be if I were entering the Internet when it just started and you see everything on the Internet and it's like five pages and you're looking around and you're like, OK, well, that one's popping up and that one's popping up and that.
It's just constant new things and technology, which is really cool, but harder to navigate than the normal world that you would expect.
Sure, and I think you even bring up a good point where you don't have to know every little intricacy of the network to use it, to transact with it, to put a song up on Wavelake or host a podcast on Fountain.
We don't have to run a node necessarily to understand the network.
network. I guess I'd love to ask you the same question. I guess I'm familiar with the story
of how you were introduced to it. Maybe you could give a brief reminder of your introduction and
just sort of what your expectations were versus reality. Yeah. I mean, when I got into this space
two and a half, almost three years ago now, you know, I think I'd had this like past connotation
with Bitcoin. Like I hadn't really done my research into it. So I'd kind of, you know,
had the scene, like the stigma from afar that like, this is this like dark internet, dark web
thing that you don't want to touch, but only like loosely and vaguely, because still when I had the
opportunity to go down to Bitcoin Park in Nashville, I was intrigued. Right. And I think
coming from the music industry, you already have to be so open-minded in everything that you do
that when an opportunity comes along to monetize your music or anything that you're creating in
any way, shape or form, you're like, yeah, absolutely. And I think my experience, at least
getting other friends down in Nashville, like Katie into this space is like artists have the
same kind of like gut reaction to it. It's like, oh yeah, sign me up. Of course I want to make money
off of my music because historically the music industry has a pretty bad track record of not
paying artists fairly. And I'm a really firm believer that artists can and should be paid
for the art that we create because at the end of the day, music, film, books, it's culture. It is a
good, it's a service. And so, yeah, just coming into this space, I just saw a really cool opportunity
to mesh technology and culture because I, you know, one of the other big things that I always
say when it comes to this space is music is, has always been this like big historical cultural
connector. We all come together, everyone from different walks of life, no matter like what your
morals are, your political beliefs are, we can all come together over music. And I think
that we have such a cool opportunity to bring Bitcoin to the masses, not even just with music.
Like there are a lot of great people in this space, like Indie Hub, which is kind of making
like Netflix for filmmakers with Bitcoin and Fountain, which is doing the same thing for
podcasting. But yeah, I think even going back to what Ella said, when you come into this space,
I definitely had this notion that it was going to be a very like male oriented, which like,
again, coming from the music industry, you already learn to expect. But I think where I come from in
this space, whenever I kind of feel like, oh, I wish there were more women is just be the
representation that you want to see. Because I think if more young women see a panel of just
like three young women who like two of us are in music, one of them is just like super smart person
like went and did all the things. They'll be like, oh my gosh, this is an option. This is something
that is viable. And maybe if I'm interested in this, I can explore this a little bit more. But
Yeah, I mean, be the representation that you want to see. We just have a really exciting opportunity to mesh technology and culture.
Yeah, you touched on a question I was going to bring up later, but it was a nice transition point. If Bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, what problem are we still working to solve? And we can talk about it more broadly than the music industry, but maybe I'll start with you in the music industry because you touched on artists getting 0.01% of the money for the thing that they created, which is wild, and you just don't see that in really any other industry.
So if Bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, what is that problem that we're trying to solve?
Maybe specifically to you, and I can go down the line with that question as well.
Yeah, I think in the music industry, if you kind of imagine this stream of money,
say that a song makes $20 in royalties, it's going to take about six to eight months,
granted, for that $20 to work its way back to the artist,
but not before it has gone through the pockets of about six to seven different middlemen who are all taking a really large chunk of that $20.
And so by the time that it gets back to the artist, like there's not even enough for, you know, you to go and buy like a Starbucks on.
And so even to put it a little bit more into perspective, in five years putting my music on the traditional streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music,
I only made about $750 over 20 plus songs that I had put out.
And in Nashville, that's not even enough to cover the going rate of one song, the production costs of creating one song.
And so I think it's the money flow is broken.
We have so many gatekeepers all trying to take a cut of music that they did not create and that they did not help to create.
I mean, sure, you know, there are parts of the music industry where you can see that they set out to do the right thing, you know, however many years ago.
But, you know, I think it just got a little bit lost in translation.
But Bitcoin fixes the money flow.
So it fixes the splits.
It fixes collaborators fairly getting paid and being able to then either take it out and pay their bills or being able to invest it in their music more.
Catherine, I don't know if you've had a similar experience with this sort of thing.
Yeah, I mean, so I really work closely with my producer.
We went to college together and we kind of a few years ago came up with this brainchild of he really does like trap music, rap, and I do R&B and melodic stuff.
And we're like, well, we just put our brains together.
it work So we split our music 50 always Now you get 0 cents on the dollar per stream less than a penny So we were splitting less than a penny per every stream that we were getting And I threw out this idea to put music out there And he was like I mean we not making money anyway so there nothing to lose And we put music out there
And with two songs, and I think in a few months, we made like $180. And that was one of those,
yeah, it was one of those big moments of like, okay, I can see some money from this,
I can go buy like a guitar strap, you know, but it's been an interesting route.
What really kind of changed my mind was I was sitting in Austin with Derek Ross,
Laura Larson, Ainsley Costello, Mike.
There were a lot of people in the room and we were doing a live stream kind of fountain
music playlisting thing.
And Ainsley was deciding the music.
She was putting her friends on the screen.
And then I could sit next to Ainsley in the same room, scan the QR code, pay the artist that was playing, and then they could listen to my song and pay me back in seconds.
And it was the first time of like, oh, I don't have to go through ASCAP.
I don't have to go through a different company.
I don't have to go through anybody else but me to you.
And that's the first time I had ever seen it.
And I was sold ever since.
That's awesome.
Ella, I'd love to get your insight here on what, I mean, maybe more broadly, you know, you talked about like starting the club.
And, you know, like, how do you how do you think about like the problems that you're that we're solving?
Yeah. I mean, you said it in your question broadly, and I think speaks to the entire gathering of this panel and what we're doing is everyone sees a problem and a solution that Bitcoin can help provide to fix that problem.
I think for myself, like what is my why or what is the problem that first came to me is if Bitcoin were gone to your question, we would be left with inferior ways to preserve our agency and dignity and freedom.
When I mentioned I was in that high school class, Bitcoin didn't click.
Then I went to the Human Rights Foundation, who we all talk to have an Oslo Freedom Forum.
It's a gathering of human rights activists around the world.
And it was the first year they did a Bitcoin kind of sidetrack panel.
And I was sitting in the dark room kind of like this.
And there were all of these really brave activists on the stage talking about how their rights were suppressed when they didn't have private property rights.
when they could no longer own their money, control their money.
And that's when I started to go down the rabbit hole when the story started to click.
So for me, wake up each day, help people pursue what brings them joy.
I think Bitcoin's the best tool for agency and flourishing and freedom and dignity that we've been talking about.
Fine. But I think everyone has a different one and everyone is working towards a solution.
I think Ella should constantly speak.
No, no.
I'd love to sort of expand upon that because I think that, you know, everybody in this room, we're all, we live in a Western culture.
It's not as immediately obvious to everyone growing up here that there is things like money suppression.
There are places in the world where you can't just buy whatever you want.
You can't just send, you know, transact with whoever you want, whenever you want.
Forgive me if I'm going down a path that you're less familiar with, but what have you learned?
You talked about the Oslo Freedom Forum. Do you often go to events like that? Is this something that you can speak on more broadly?
Happy to. I mean, the best place is they live stream it all. So if anyone's interested, you can go back and watch all the past ones.
Actually, shout out PubKey. Maybe two Wednesdays ago, I want to say, they had a Freedom-themed panel.
So right behind us, they had six different human rights activists, opposition leaders up here on the stage.
So that recording is also out recently.
I mentioned the Bitcoin Students Network.
My co-founder, Arsh Malu, works at the Human Rights Foundation, have been able to go to Oslo a couple times since then, a variety of their different events.
But maybe, I mean, there's so much to learn is maybe a specific question or area that can best address it towards.
Other than those resources you already named, like what should people know?
What should people look out for?
Maybe how can people get involved?
So I know everyone, some people like videos, books, podcasts.
Two books that Alex Gladstein, who's the chief strategy officer at HRF, he's written two books.
Actually, Check Your Financial Privilege was the first kind of Bitcoin book that I read.
The other one was The Price of Tomorrow.
And I think Alex does a really great job in that book because he gives kind of an overview of maybe some of the technical sides of Bitcoin or, you know, just kind of setting the ground layer.
And then he tells lots of different stories.
And then the second one is called Hidden Repression, How the IMF Basically Sells Exploitation as Development.
That one is chocker block full of different statistics and facts.
So those, I think, are very good resources as well to look towards.
That's awesome. Thank you.
Maybe to bring the panel back to Gen Z women, got off track a little bit.
No, that was great.
What do you find that your generation, and maybe we'll keep with you for a moment, Ella,
what do you find that your generation immediately does get?
Or maybe they still have some misconceptions about Bitcoin.
And as you're having conversations with people who wouldn't consider themselves a Bitcoiner,
what sort of conversations are you having?
What sort of pushback do you get, maybe?
Yeah, and I would be very curious for Ainsley and Catherine as well. So just speaking from the Bitcoin clubs, you know, this is this maybe is obvious in reflection, but a lot of our assets or items as Gen Z is already digital. Like, I don't know, your text messages, your photos, your music, you know, having physical copies of all of that is not something many of us do. And so the idea that Bitcoin is digital and you can't touch it, I think is something that, you know, just you get.
The biggest, and this is really easy to fix, is the whole concept of Satoshis and that you don't need to buy a whole Bitcoin.
Pying in something from the adoption study.
Actually, maybe we'll poll the audience.
I know it's a little dark, so can't exactly see everyone out there.
But maybe you can just shout out, how many people do you think around the world know that there's a 21 million supply cap?
That Bitcoin is finite.
Maybe you can just shout if you have an idea what percentage.
Probably not many.
You are really almost exactly right.
So it's like 13% that actually know that Bitcoin is finite.
So knowing it's, you know, the benefits of a finite monetary system, and then as well that it can be subdivided, I think, are areas that need to be clarified as well.
Yeah, I'd love to open up the same question to either of you who might have some insight.
Yeah, I think one thing, and especially coming up against this in the music industry, like a lot of our friends in Nashville, like historically, the music industry and the greater entertainment industry is a little bit more left leaning. And I think a lot of my friends in Nashville, they kind of think that it is Bitcoin is just like only affiliated with like one political party, orange man, orange coin.
And I understand the misconceptions around that because when I came into this, I kind of had that same thing. But even to kind of go back to the human rights aspect of this, something that really made Bitcoin kind of click further for me, just as like a person who uses it, not even an artist who's utilizing it for my business.
A couple months ago, I got to see this awesome film called Unbanked, where it really clicked for me that Bitcoin is being used to help people in marginalized communities in third world countries who, again, like never had really any solid access to money, being able to buy things, you know, without permission for the first time.
And knowing that like if someone in Ukraine or in Palestine has a Bitcoin wallet and I can send them Bitcoin and that can help, you know, buy them food in the middle of this massive humanitarian crisis.
I was so thrilled by that.
And so I think if we are able to highlight that element of it, it's really going to help to get a lot more, especially women our age, invested in why Bitcoin is a really incredible thing.
Catherine, I don't know if you have any additional thoughts here.
I mean, not too much to add. I think whenever I kind of broach the subject, I don't want to make like a generalization. But the producers that I talk to, I'll say like, oh, yeah, like, this is what we're doing. And they'll be like, I have crypto and like all these things. I don't really care. I'm like, okay, well, if I were to explain it to you, you might a little bit more, but that's okay, because you don't want to know. And that's okay. But saying something like that, too. It's like, well, what don't I know? What do you mean?
So just being able to have a conversation with somebody and kind of knowing what to say and how is really the key for our generation, too.
Yeah. And I don't know if you if the three of you get this, like, you know, you mentioned Bitcoin to somebody and they go, oh, yeah, I have a few different kinds of Bitcoin.
Or, you know, you get sort of that response. It's like, OK, you know, that's definitely another big misconception that I think I see that, you know, Bitcoin is used as this like interchangeable term for all crypto.
But Bitcoin is not crypto and crypto is not Bitcoin.
Yeah. And I think that sort of ties in with what we were talking about before. And I think that maybe this panel is a good example of it is that you don't need to understand the inner workings of it to use it on an everyday basis. I don't know if anybody has any experience with trying to get somebody involved and they sort of brush it off as being all that, you know, I'm not technical enough for that.
Yeah. So actually in the so I was at school in New York, which has the bit license, which just makes it very hard to kind of use any Bitcoin financial services.
But what we would use is Primal. And that is how everyone we would start like experiencing, you know, zapping people to kind of experience sending sats.
And very quickly, it's like this is not that hard.
I've done a poor job of incorporating Nostra into these conversations.
You mentioned Primal. I don't know if you'd want to give like a quick Nostra overview.
again apologies if i'm sending you down i mean i can but i think we should give ainsley who's our
you know most please i can try to explain nostr so nostr is um a really cool up and coming social
protocol actually can we get a show of hands is there anyone in here who is not on nostr okay so
there's a couple people so if you are not familiar what nostr is nostr is an up and coming social
protocol where the in the way that i always explain it and i remember explaining it to katie
like this the first time. So you know when you have to go and post a picture on Instagram, but
then it doesn't automatically go to like, oh, okay, now I have to go and resize this for TikTok. Now I
have to go and resize this for Twitter or whatever. With Noster, you post, it's a social protocol
where all of these apps are technically keyed into it. So if I post something on Primal, that same
post is going to show up in every single Noster-enabled client. But then also the really
revolutionary part of it is that it has built-in lightning payments. So instead of likes and loves
that are basically just ones and zeros sitting on a computer somewhere in Silicon Valley,
you can send instant monetary value. And if Nostra goes away tomorrow, like Bitcoin,
that whole conversation, that money that maybe I sent Ella for an awesome poem where she explained
something incredibly, it's still going to stay in her wallet, even if Nostra goes away tomorrow.
And so it's really efficient just for like the social posting aspect of it,
But also it's real tangible value instead of just like a little heart that really is just a vanity metric.
Yeah. So almost like we've been talking about with like podcasting 2.0 or streaming on Wave Lake, you know, and if you want to show support to those artists or content creators in Austria, you can get paid for just having a banger tweet.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's pretty great.
So maybe just one final question that I'll ask each of you as we talk about onboarding more people your age and, you know, specifically women or maybe not.
What is something that you, maybe I'll start with you, Ella.
What is something that you would say to somebody your age, maybe even younger, who's maybe watching this on a live stream and they're Bitcoin curious, but they think it's not for them.
They think it's out of their reach in some way.
I mean, I think start with your own interests.
Like one of the first articles I read was Brandon Quittum's Bitcoin as mycelium.
There's so many different lenses.
Actually, there's a new paper, the Bitcoin Lens, that just came out to look at Bitcoin at.
And so keep your existing interests.
You don't need to change anything about yourself or your interests to be interested in Bitcoin.
So start there.
You can just start looking over.
Take it step by step.
I think it's important to do your own research to gain conviction for yourself why you want to own Bitcoin.
And then reach out to people.
I love getting to talk to people every day of the week.
So you can reach out to me, anyone else on stage, and just start there.
I think Bitcoin, as Trey was mentioning, really is about community and people.
And so go find your people.
Find that local meetup.
Find that person in person to go through this journey with you.
I was really lucky that I also had my mom to go through this journey with.
From all this un-ledged.
I don't know that part of your story.
Is that something we should get into?
Who's your mom?
She's a legend I just learned.
Well, yeah, she's always been a legend for me.
But yeah, so we found it, same time, different paths.
And she's done a lot of work on kind of the Bitcoin mining space.
She's worked at Custodia, Unchained, a variety of other Bitcoin companies.
And yeah, she's awesome.
Her name is Lisa Puff, same last name.
One of the original reasons that Ellen and I connected, too,
is because we're both like mother-daughter duos within the Bitcoin realm.
I love it. I love it.
Shout out, Julie.
Yeah, so I think, you know, Bitcoin in the white, yes, shout out, Julie.
Bitcoin in the white paper, it's peer-to-peer, you know, electronic cash systems.
So go find your peers in this network.
I love it. I'd love to open up.
I couldn't say it better.
If I'm talking to young women our age, I would challenge you to think about the fact that Bitcoin is not for, you know, one archetype, one stereotype of person.
It is, sure, there are some awesome kind of like TradFi Bitcoin bros.
We love you. You guys are doing great work.
but also we're up here on stage. If you know, like I say to some of my best friends who I grew up with,
if you know me and you know my beliefs and my morals and you just know what I stand for as a
person and you know that I'm into Bitcoin, can you trust that I've done my research on it? And I
really really truly think that it an incredible thing And also I think we have an opportunity to brand Bitcoin and make people see it the way we want to
Because, you know, for me, I think about it in terms of like,
you know, I love Pink, I love Sparkles,
I grew up on Taylor Swift, and I love Bitcoin.
They're not mutually exclusive groups.
I love that. I love that.
You know?
And I think that's probably a perfect way to close this panel.
Bitcoin is for everybody.
please give it up for these fine young ladies. Thank you. Well, we have something very exciting
to get into. Yeah. Don't we? But before we get into that, maybe let's just give everybody a
little intro. Who are you? What do you do? How does your life intersect with music and Bitcoin?
My name is Jim. I'm a Scorpio. I like long walks. I'm a big fan of presidential history.
You're in the right town. Yeah. My name is Jim Costello. Obviously, I'm Ainsley's dad,
Julie's husband, Women in STEM, by the way. Lovely. So yeah, when Ainsley posted her music
into this space two and a half years ago, Julie and I, who helped Ainsley with her career,
we looked at this like, okay, we have to understand everything about Bitcoin and all of these
podcasting platforms and RSS platforms and everything. We have to understand everything
about it that we possibly can to help protect Ainsley's intellectual property, right? Because
Julie and I have always been very active with Ainsley's career ever since from Seattle to when we moved to Nashville.
And I had been around the edges of Bitcoin for a long time.
And then thanks to the guys at Wavelake and Adam Curry promoted Ainsley's song on Boost to Grand Ball.
That really, Julie and I really had to jump in 100 percent and understand everything about it.
And that's when I really got absolutely hooked. And then Phantom Power, which is a company that I was using as a blog space in support of independent musicians, then that kind of morphed into a hub, educational hub for independent musicians in the Bitcoin space.
And we started doing live events around the country with Open Mic and had some great success in Minneapolis and Austin and Waco and Pennsylvania and live streaming events and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, yeah, we just kept on going.
I mean, this community has been so wonderful to my wife and daughter, and it's been instrumental in my daughter's success.
She's had more success over here than in the fiat world.
So it's been great.
So I hope that answers your question.
Yeah, absolutely.
It occurred to me while you were chatting that I'm now two for three on interviewing Costello's.
So, Julie, I'm coming for you next.
I'm coming for you next.
So let's dive into it.
What are we introducing today?
Well, we're introducing the Epic Music app.
And shout out to my wife, Julie.
My wife wrote this whole thing.
She vibe coded it.
She designed it.
Women in STEM.
My wife did this whole thing.
This under the hood, this is a ledger.
It's not a streaming app, but under the hood, it's a ledger, but it's a place where musicians and we are live streaming right now on epicmusic.xyz and you can boost and zap right away. Like I went back there and did it up through ZapRite. Boom, it was a piece of cake. It worked. Like we didn't really tell anybody we were going to do this today, but we've got a couple of people that are out there watching.
So Oscar and Dovidov and all the guys and Dave and Adam and all the guys in the podcasting 2.0 RSS world, huge shout out to Sam Means at Wavelake. We wanted to create something that was a little different, that was more geared towards the independent musician with respect to discovery and discovering artists.
And we still wanted it to be absolutely no middlemen, period.
Right.
The money, Julie, did a hell of a job finding a way to make this work with ZapRite.
So we don't touch it.
It doesn't come to us at all.
And that's so important for songwriters.
I obviously was a singer-songwriter in Los Angeles back in the day.
When my hair was down in the center of my back and I wore leather pants on tour for three weeks at a time.
It was fantastic.
I'm jealous of your hairline.
It's still doing.
You're still doing great.
Thank you.
But we really wanted to push something for independent musicians that was discovery based, that there is absolutely no middlemen, that the splits on the back end are instant.
Right.
Like if you guys don't know what splits are, like if you and I write a song together.
Right.
Like you wrote all the lyrics.
I wrote all the music.
You and I are 50.
Our buddy here did the producing.
He's like, hey, man, I want my cut.
Right.
So like we can put him in there.
You know, and then he's like, well, I, you know, my buddy engineered it and we got to give him 10.
Yeah, no worries. You can put all of that on the back end so that when he or Uncle Bob or Uncle Rico in Mexico is listening and they send 10 bucks, boom, everybody gets paid right away.
And there were just some hiccups that we saw, some things out there with the existing technology that we, that were, Julie and I were like, gosh, I think we can do this a little differently.
So this is discovery based.
This is a ledger under the hood, instant payments to everybody.
Yeah, it's not, you know, it's not necessarily podcasting 2.0.
There's a Noster side of it.
Like you can, you can definitely jump in and put your in pub in.
but it's uh yeah that's i hope that explains it like yeah it absolutely does i i would love to
maybe get into like the splits things makes a whole lot of sense it's been a theme of the day
the grubby middlemen getting their their nasty fingers off of it has been a talking point but
i'd love to maybe dive into what makes it different not only from the traditional streaming services
but maybe uh the other ones in the 2.0 realm if you will sort of the differences and and what you're
sort of focusing it on with Epic Music. Yeah, with a huge shout out to Dave and Adam and everybody
in the podcasting 2.0 world, the challenge there is that those apps are primarily podcasting-based,
podcasting 2.0, right? They're not necessarily musician-based. So we really wanted to have
something that was focused on music discovery. I've got stuff on Fountain. I know Ainsley's got
stuff over there. A lot of people we know have their stuff over there, but their focus is more
on the podcasting world. For them to really take on a Spotify or an iTunes or even a title for that
matter, excuse me, they would really have to make music discovery the primary thing, right? So that's
what we're trying to do here. And another part of the app, like let's say you're a singer-songwriter
and you've got an album coming out.
And for the first 30 days, for the first 60 days,
for the first 90 days,
you don't want to make it public per se,
but you want to make it available.
So we call that an epic release.
And you can say, hey,
if you want to buy my whole record right now
before anybody can stream it, here you go.
There's a little gate on it.
It'll cost you 10 bucks.
It'll cost you 15 bucks.
Whatever the artist wants to do
before it becomes available to everybody.
Kind of like buying a CD.
because we are big proponents of artists getting paid for their work.
Every artist, I don't care if it's a visual artist, video artist, songwriter, former,
everybody's got to be paid for their work.
So much of this stuff is now just given away for free.
Or people think, well, I pay Spotify 20 bucks a month.
So why isn't Catherine getting $5 out of that?
If I listen to her, it doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work that way.
We're trying to put with the epic release, we wanted for people to have, for artists to have an exclusive way in which they could release their music.
Hey, you can buy the whole record now for 10 bucks and then July it'll be available for everybody else.
So that's something that's a little different than the other apps.
Also, as we have proven today, again, thanks to my wife, there's live streaming video on the app.
So that's great.
Excuse me.
I don't think Wavelake has that.
I know Fountain has it.
But yeah, I think the big thing is this is discovery based. It's not playlist based. You can put a gate on the time of when you want the record released and then back end splits, of course, which are.
Yeah, we touched on it a little bit with the panel earlier. Like we're talking about like what problem we're solving. Right. And, you know, I'm I would consider myself a fraction of of Ainsley or Catherine as far as like selling music, my music being streamed.
You know, something amazing happened when I discovered Wavelake and when you're getting more than 0.01% of the, you know, of the money that, you know, if you go the traditional route and just the, you know, sort of just how generous the Bitcoin space is, you know, I've made, and again, you know, I'm not paying my rent with it or anything like that.
But, you know, I think I've made $1.75 in the traditional music, you know, space.
And, you know, through Wavelake, through these sort of new technologies that, you know, we're introducing today through Epic Music, you know, people can pay you directly.
People can support you directly.
And I guess the support from this community has been overwhelming, you know, honestly.
Yeah, it's been great.
But another part of this app that we've put together, I mean, you can still stream payments every minute if that's what you want to do, or you can boost directly if that's what you want to do.
Half of the, actually more than half of the musicians that we run into all have Cash App, right?
Like the guys in Ainsley's band all have Cash App.
And this is integrated into the app as well.
And I think that's critical because we're able to sign up musicians and we're able to pay people directly, frankly, without ever saying the word Bitcoin, right?
I have had well over 100 conversations with musicians around the world trying to get them into this space.
Onboarding one musician into this space is like a three-hour conversation, right?
And it is still a very scary thing for a lot of people to kind of jump into this space, right?
So to have an app like the Epic Music app, that is Bitcoin enabled, but you don't really see it.
This is because it works fiat and Bitcoin.
Cash app.
I just stood back there, used ZapRite, used my debit card and did it that way.
Boom.
So for people who don't know anything about this or for people who are apprehensive about getting in the Bitcoin thing, this is like a nice way to kind of dip your toe in the water of it.
We've going back to the well over 100 conversations I've had with artists all around the world that I've onboarded.
The minute you bring up the B word, they freak because it's what is it?
It's early.
How many times have we all heard that?
It's it's early for every stage of this.
So that's another point where it's I think this one is a little different is is with ZapRite and Cash App.
And there's a huge fiat component to it for those who are apprehensive about doing it.
Yeah, it's almost like we were talking about with the panel. You don't have to know the intricacies of it necessarily to use the platform to get the benefits of using the platform, right? What would you tell an up-and-coming musician or an up-and-coming artist that is thinking of putting their music on Epic?
You have absolutely nothing to lose to try this. And that's an odd pitch, but that is the reality. You don't know who you're going to get in front of. As a musician, as a songwriter, as a band, you need to put your art out there in front of as many places as you possibly can. We know this works. Why? Because of people like Man Like Quex, an amazing rapper, Joe Martin, right? Ainsley. Nate Jonathan out of Michigan. The Trusted out of the UK. Marina Oshk, a brilliant jazz singer.
who I brought in from Iceland.
Abby Muir, brilliant pop singer
I brought in from Australia.
We know this works.
This is not a one-off thing of like,
hey, there's the girl who's had a million saps
with cherry on top.
No, this works.
There are dozens and dozens of artists in this space.
You have nothing to lose by trying this.
And if you go hard in the paint,
you're gonna have some good success in here.
Do you wanna keep screwing around
with TikTok and Instagram?
I mean, unfortunately, you kind of have to.
You still kind of have to play that game, but you need to put yourself in this space because you've got nothing to lose to try it.
And you're going to be amazed at the reception that you get.
You know, you probably put your music up on Bandcamp.
You probably put your music up on SoundCloud.
You got to put it out there.
You never know where you're going to get it from, the support from.
You never know where you're going to get your audience from.
So if you think about it that way and kind of throw your trepidations aside about Bitcoin, that's the first thing I think of.
Because I've tried leading with Bitcoin for the longest time, and they're like, they shut down.
They want nothing to do with it.
But you've got nothing to lose by trying this.
Yeah, well, and not to mention it's completely free to put your music on there.
you have a MP file and the wave file rather,
and it's up there and you can immediately start accepting a payment from a
potential fan who maybe you've never even met.
Yeah,
absolutely.
Well,
that's very exciting.
I think everybody should check out it's epic music dot X,
Y,
Z,
yep.
X,
Y,
Z for our Canadian friends.
Anything else that everybody should know about Epic music before we move on
with the rest of the live music portion of the day?
No,
we,
this is kind of a soft launch.
so you guys are seeing it live
right now there's a couple of people that were nice enough
to chime in and talk about it
but if you have
anybody who's got a singer songwriter friend
I don't care what genre
rap, country disco, sung in
Yiddish
Asian polka, I don't care
tell all your friends about this
we would love to help them out
I do love an Asian polka
so do I do, Mandarin
but my Asian polka's gotta be in Mandarin
of course, you have standards
Everybody, please thank Jim with me and check out epicmusic.xyz.
You can find Catherine's music there, Ainsley's music.
My music is up there as well.