Welcome back to another episode of this intellectual Silk Road edition of the Pew
Weekly Bitcoin podcast. Today is a special interview. We are with the champ, the winner
of the inaugural Maxi Madness Noster edition.
Now, before Maxi Madness really kicked into the later,
the final four, the championship round,
I said that Noster, because of the zap structure of the vote,
where you can vote with your zaps instead of one man, one vote,
one end pub, one vote,
I said that this was social capital price discovery.
And that's exactly what it turned out to be.
Because the social capitalist, Rev Hoddle, is joining us today.
He's proven that the Maxi Madness can be and was a smashing success.
Thank you to the primal developers, to Mijan, Paul Keating, all the guys over there who made this possible.
Rev, how's it going?
Are you still feeling the afterglow of your win?
I saw you had a corny chat last night in the winner's circle.
How's it been since last week when you took home all the glory?
Oh, well, I'm still recovering.
You know, it's good to be able to talk about it while it's still fresh.
But, yeah, it takes a lot of work to participate in Maxi Madness.
If anyone listened to the Twitter spaces with Aaron and Casey, it sounds like they had spent quite a bit of time participating as well.
And I think that's just what it takes in order to win.
You have to really prove that you're the one having the most fun, you know.
So I had a little bit of fun last night kind of just explaining my strategy and how I used permaculture, the lens through which to view the competition.
And I think that's how I came up with the winning strategy.
But I was by no means doing it by myself.
Like you said, the social capital was the key component in pulling it all together.
Can you explain what you mean by it?
Because you talked about this in Corny Chat last night about permaculture
and how it relates to Maxi Madness and your path to victory
over you you beat a very hot person in the championship uh an international sensation
just got off tour with sabaton in europe singing and you you soundly defeated noah
so can you explain how this works and why you think that you this permaculture phenomenon
is what vaulted you to the championship.
Well, in permaculture, there's three ethics,
earth care, people care,
and the third ethic I call non-extraction.
And the non-extraction ethic is a big component of this,
especially when you tie in the game theory
of the prediction markets, the predix market.
In addition to that, permaculture operates
with this viewpoint of systems succeeding
from one phase to the next.
And so in order to, in the instance of Maxi Madness, the whole tournament is a series of rounds.
In each round, as you win, you succeed into the next round.
But each round is different than the round before it.
So a new strategy must be employed in order to take that round down.
And so in permaculture, we also talk about these mixtures of plants working together in ecosystem.
We call that a polyculture.
And so when you look at the social capital that I employed in order to take down the whole thing, I viewed the different, I guess, pools of social capital that I had built up either through Noster, through these group chats, or through the meetups that I go to as different plants, you could say, in this ecosystem of like a food forest.
And so it was a whole thought process of how and when to utilize each pool of social capital, each plant in this polyculture system, and choose when to deploy those to glean the yields from that based on what process of succession, what part of the succession in the tournament it was.
it's very cool uh it was fun to to watch it you know from behind the scenes and and just see it
all play out i was very active in the group chats you were very active in the group chats now
the question i have for you do you feel like you spent all your social capital
did you gain social capital do you have to refill your social capital
what's the you know kind of the process of next steps for you after this victory
well so and a big part of my strategy was to create incentives for people to participate and
you know the Mestadel really won this thing um the Mestadel was the group chat that took down
Odell in the semifinals but they were there right with me the whole time I mean if you go back and
look at the results you see these names from the Mestadel they were boosting big without me
sort of asking for any favors the whole time.
But, you know, I did have to eventually say,
look, if I'm going to win,
I need to, you know, sweeten the deal a little bit.
And so I offered up to the Mestradel,
like if you vote, max vote,
you can get a jar of maple syrup from me,
a pack of my cannabis seeds,
a free ticket to Lake Satoshi,
a bag of Otis Bickmeyer coffee.
And these are items that we have already been exchanging
in the Mestradel anyways.
And so it's not, this comes back to the whole non-extraction thing.
I could have chosen to extract from my social capital base.
And like you said, then I would be in a deficit and I would have to replenish it.
But instead, I created a more of a holistic approach where now, the way I was thinking about it is I was basically selling these items and then donating the sats to the Bugle through their vote.
and then we get to participate in this tournament
and everybody sort of wins all through across the board.
Very cool.
How's your wife feel about your victory?
Well, she doesn't have much to say about it, unfortunately.
She's not that excited.
You don't feel like you have bragging rights?
It hasn't changed any of the home dynamics of, you know,
her looking at you differently?
well you know the the glitter in my eye is is uh definitely a little brighter now that i'm the
champion and she does recognize that but uh you know i don't think she attributes it to maxi
madness she just looks at me and says oh maybe something's a little different today
but you mentioned this polyculture and i assume that does not mean multiple sexual partners
you're still a loyal uh you know husband this is polyculture just means different
different logos different types of call like different meetups what does this explain this
a little bit more uh thoroughly so a polyculture in a food forest for example is when you have um
There's seven layers to a forest, right?
You got your ground cover layer, which would be something like strawberries.
And then you've got the herbaceous layer, which would be something like comfrey or rhubarb or horseradish.
And then you've got your shrub layer, which would be something like currants or gooseberries.
And then you got your understory layer, which might be something like hazelnuts.
And then in my food forest, the overstory layer is the fruit tree.
And so these plants can all grow together cooperatively because they take up a different size and shape of that understory beneath the tree.
So they're not inherently competing with each other.
They're all working cooperatively.
And so this is how you can pack a lot of yields into a small footprint.
And so the same can be true of your social capital, right?
I looked at the social capital that I had in the Mastodal as one part of that layer of the food forest, of the social capital forest.
and then my local connections,
the hyper-local stuff from everyone that I knew
going to the meetups was another layer.
And then the Noster community
that I participate in was another layer.
And so I had access to all these different layers.
They're all kind of intersecting and working together
and connected together in one way or another,
but they do come,
they form this holistic viewpoint,
which is Bitcoin culture.
What is the optimal stack
in a seven-layer salad
of the forest.
I think I would want
strawberries,
rebarb,
feast berries,
hazelnuts.
How would you finish out that stack?
Tobacco.
Where is tobacco?
Which layer is the tobacco?
I think tobacco is probably
somewhere between
the herbaceous layer
and the shrub layer.
It grows pretty big,
but it is an annual.
Mmm.
that's a good that's that's important to know it's that's hard to keep up with if you're playing
annuals and so you know if you look at like um if you take something like tobacco and you try and equate it to uh Bitcoin culture right It something that everybody wants but isn necessarily coming to every meetup
you know what I mean? Or not always active in the group chat, but like tobacco is the plant that
just says like, Hey, I've been head down vibe coding and I just made this new app and boom,
here you go. And the addiction is on, right? And everyone wants more of what tobacco has to offer,
but it's not there perennially, right?
It's only there, you have to cultivate the tobacco.
Whereas these other plants are perennial,
so they just are, as long as you participate with them
and you interact with them, they're around
and they're there to, and in the lens of the social capital
like we've been talking about,
that social capital continues to liquidate
amongst the whole polyculture, right?
Everyone's trading between themselves.
the one of the user experience hurdles that the maxi madness nostril tournament had to overcome
and had to have some playoff rounds playing you know to to make up for is primal has a
web of trust and a web of trust can filter out some people who are maybe just creating
endpubs to zap more than once or something to kind of create like a civil attack sort of um
give the impression of such anyways um but thinking about a web of trust on nostr where
that is much more customizable than it is on some a platform like x and it kind of relates to these
communities these permaculture type of situations that you're developing have you
explored kind of this this customization or this optimization on on nostra or your group chats with
this web of trust where you have layers of group chats for example with like the mesh del and some
of your other more trusted confidants and then it layers out from there where like a new person
coming into your your space or your sphere so to speak kind of has to go through these layers of
the web of trust before it gets down into your most cherished group chats well sure yeah absolutely
and and through the lens of the the tournament let's say through through the lens of maxi madness
This is how I chose to when to tap, right, when to utilize my social capital in which particular circle. I knew that I needed to save my local homies until the very end because that once I didn't even really tell anyone locally that this thing was going on until I was in the finals.
So now when I'm in the finals, I present, look, I'm in the finals.
If you want to take me across the finish line, here's how we do it.
And people got excited about that.
If I had let them know that I was in the tournament right from the beginning,
I might have expended that social capital too soon.
And so, yeah, there's just different relationships that you have,
and it does filter on down through for sure.
Absolutely.
what what was your impression of how did how did nostor receive maxi madness
i think that it was uh about as uh 50 50 as you could have expected um a lot of people were excited
about it and and having fun with it and a lot of people wanted to like found it to be incredibly
annoying and how to get it to go away and you know when i was like hey dude this is going to
be happening for, you know, the next week or something, they're just like, oh, God, how do I,
do I have to mute you? You know, it's like, well, you can, but I'm going to be posting about this,
you know, because I think, as you guys say, it's the most important election, right? It is important.
And it's a distillation. It's a way of anecdotally assessing what a particular community sees as
valuable. Whether you want to say that the results were gamed or not or whatever, right?
It is ultimately like the Twitter championship. That shows that people do value data on chain,
right? To me, anecdotally, that's what the result of that tournament suggests. Like,
the Bitcoin culture right now appreciates that shit. And they don't care about BIP110 and they
don't care about podconf and swan or whatever right and the no stir tournament showed that
people care about people interacting in this grassroots level running meetups doing podcasting
uh focusing on building circular economies right absolutely i mean the the two individuals in the
championship were neither of them were podconf affiliated uh and i would consider your matchup
against Odell in the final four as a referendum against Podcoff.
Would you agree?
Well, yeah, and so this kind of gets back into this whole
non-extraction principle, right?
And where it wasn't me versus Odell.
It was me versus Predix, right?
So I knew that there was some people with money on the line over on Predix,
and I think that they had a cakewalk, dude.
I think that they were expecting that, you know,
all they they however someone had figured out i'm not going to say who right but i think someone
knew how to get by the this web of trust system that primal had put up and they could influence
the votes right they could juice it up with some some some nent pumps that they spun up
and so once i realized that i was like okay this is who i'm competing against i'm not competing
against Matt Odell.
I'm here to prove that, like,
you have no idea
when some dude who's connected
in the community,
if they unleash their social capital,
that you're going to have a hard time,
you know,
pushing the results
of this prediction market
to your favor.
And we accomplished that.
Domestadol totally shut
that prediction market down,
proved it wrong.
Absolutely.
You know, you paid attention
to the Twitter maxi madness.
is the dynamics were incredibly different the mechanisms were incredibly different
what what do you what was your perspective on that of of the happenings on twitter
versus the happenings on nostr like how how do you see the dynamics as different
i think that like the just the fact that people have to put sats on the line
in Noster sort of changes the way that people are participating.
Because you can, so a lot of the, if you want to win, right,
you have to have a community rallying around you.
And so in Twitter, you have to have a large community, right?
You could have a small community of very dedicated fans, right?
And they're all going to vote for you every time.
But their vote doesn't have much weight because somebody else can just access their larger user base or fan base or whatever.
They have a larger form of social capital where everyone can just click one button for free and vote.
Whereas on Noster, it shows like how much people are willing to put down for you, like how much they really appreciate you, right?
And what you represent for Bitcoin.
you know because like right at the beginning I knew that I was pretty popular on Noster right I
participate on Noster I've been doing it for several years I went to the first Nosterville
and you know right off the bat I against Jack Dorsey I didn't try to do anything right I just
this is another permaculture principle right observe and interact I just wanted to see what
would happen round one and just watch that play out now I eked it out by about 200 sats maybe 250
sats that was a super close round but that was just purely um the noster community saying like
yeah dude you're around and you're participating in noster where did jack dorsey go you know why
would i put my sats down for that guy um he you know so yeah it's the the difference is that
the someone's audience or their their social capital base can uh really show how much they
care. One vote can mean a lot. One person can do a lot more on Twitter than on, or on NOSTER than
on Twitter. Yeah, I'm excited. I like that there is, there's more options with NOSTER.
And the big thing that I want to try and do for next year that, you know, I'll, I don't have
confirmed that they'll do it, but one of the things I really like to do is to do splits in the polls.
for the individuals participating.
So there's a little bit more of an incentive
for them to participate,
to try and earn zaps, essentially.
So the way I think it would be is like,
you know, the Beagle would get a portion
and both of the participants would.
And so the incentive is to continue to compete
until the finals to be able to earn more zaps.
And I think that'd be fun.
i think that would get people's buy-in a little bit more and that'd be a cool function that this
one was you know it all happened so last minute like the the primal team pushed this update allowing
us to do these polls i think maybe a few days if not a week prior So there wasn a ton of thinking into the mechanics of how it worked
It was very experimental.
Yeah, there's some interesting, it's really hard to think about what's going to happen, right?
And I'm sure you guys had no idea how it was going to play out,
how big people are going to zap, what was really going to go down.
And if you start to filter some of that, so this comes back into permaculture.
Once again, there's self-regulate, accept, and apply feedback.
And if you put the zap split in there, now you've got a feedback loop going, right?
So if someone wins and now they've got a whole bunch of sats, right,
now they can essentially offer these incentives like what I was doing for free.
And so you give each round kind of snowballs, has this potential snowballing effect.
As the participant, you have to make the choice. Do I keep the sats or do I use the sats to continue to create incentives for my social cap, my base of voters, right, or people who are participating to keep zapping big?
do you think that democracy should be run more like maxi madness do you think that
every november for one week we should have a bracket of 64 politicians and they have to go
through each round until we finally get down to the last two and that's who we both were for
president and we can vote do you think we should do that like with one man one vote or we should do
with zaps like on the roster i think like what maxi madness shows is that you know this is what
the new government looks like when democracy fail like when when fiat system breaks down and all the
hits the fan uh this is how we organize right because like jason lorie right the whole idea of
power projection through bitcoin like that was the meshadel right there you know the meshadel was
like look we we've got a dedicated group willing to project power uh through this tournament and
and win you know and so there was no violence right but in the end of the day there was some
serious power projection going on there i mean what was it uh almost a million sats or over a
million sats on that semi-final round that's uh not that's that's generational wealth right
so are you saying that the match to dell declared soft war on maxi madness and what
i'm saying that the that uh you know the whole maxi madness thing is software
war right and this is how uh you project power that's an interesting way to frame it and i
didn't think about it prior to the beginning of maxi madness but a few rounds in i realized holy
shit this is we are in the middle of you know software one there's going to be future softwares
and I don't know if it's going to be 10 years from now, Maxi Manus, but this was the first
soft war and there was almost as many casualties in soft war one as world war one.
The amount of crash outs, the amount of crash outs in the trenches, the amount of crash
outs on the time.
It was, you've heard of the book, All's Quiet on the Western Front.
It was kind of the opposite.
All is crazy.
All is chaotic on the timeline front during Maxi Madness, during Software 1,
because people were crashing out left and right.
It was like a machine gun.
A guy in one of those pillboxes just mowing down plebs,
and they were just crashing out.
And I saw the crash outs, the huge amount of crash outs on Twitter.
I saw some on Noster.
I didn't see them all.
But my assessment about you saying it was about 50-50 was roughly accurate based on my observations.
And do you think that that contributes to the success of Maxi Madness?
Having a sell side and a buy side, people who are buying in and people who are like, fade this noise.
I hate this.
And their annoyance, their crashing out, brings more attention, brings more eyes and realizes, holy shit, there's a lot of social capital on the line.
I have to pay attention to this.
I have to put my bets in on the prediction markets.
I have to be involved in this somehow.
I thought it was stupid, but now I'm realizing that there's a situation going on and it is in my best interest to be monitoring it very closely.
Well, and you know, there's other people that are going to be monitoring who voted for it.
So the beautiful thing about the Nostra polls, too, is that the votes were public, right?
So I could go back and see like, oh, this dude voted against me.
Why?
You know, it brings up questions, right?
Where I could see that, oh, this person's really involved in the culture, but they didn't participate at all.
Why?
And so this definitely adds a whole other layer of, you know, when it comes down to it.
talk about crash outs and everything you kind of like if you don't participate now it's it's
clear that you didn't and that's like a crash out in itself right what was your favorite crash out
that you saw oh that's a good question i mean it's got to be uh my homie uh kid warp so kid
warp is uh he's he's local kind of to me and uh i i know him personally and he was just like dude
this is so fucking annoying man and he was like when is this going to end and he he he it wasn't
like he couldn't let it go right he wanted to continue to post about not liking it and so that
is it's like dude when you don't like something that much that you can't stop you realize that
you're feeding the beast here you know you got to just if you don't like it you can't say anything
about it otherwise other people are gonna be what's going on and they're gonna start getting
riled up into it and so he had the opposite effect of what i think he was hoping for was that
he wanted everyone to boycott it or something or just stop talking about it but in reality
him saying something really stoked the flames of it all what do you think his protest was i mean
ron and i were speculating about this on the last episode you know nostril users aren't really used to
any sort of real activity on the platform right like they're used to like
occasional good morning posts you know very light farting around on the app
you think it was just over stimulating for them or what what was the the issue that they saw with
it that people were getting zaps or it wasn't them well yeah it's just like somebody came and
take over it's just like you know you got your your neighborhood right and and like someone's
rolling through with the boom truck right with the boom trunk fucking playing their music fucking
And forcing everyone to look at them as they roll by.
It's like, out of nowhere, I don't think anyone was ready for it.
And it was unavoidable.
Anywhere you look, you're going to see something about Maxi Madness while it's going on.
So what do you think we should do in the future?
Should we put PSAs out before to shelter in place for the week if they aren't excited about it?
Or go on vacation or something?
Yeah, the war is imminent.
I don't know if it's good to keep on the Jason Lurie software meme here, but, like, it is, you got to prepare Noster for this shit because they clearly weren't prepared.
I think a good strategy would be, there's no, this is a software, but if we map it to real world physical conflict, kinetic warfare,
There is no military more competent and skilled at what they do than the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF.
And what they do in Gaza and in Lebanon and these other places is they they give everybody a 10 minute warning where they they send in these these precision guided projectiles that basically dump really hard.
And they say, hey, you have X amount of time to get out of here because we're killing terrorists if you don't.
And giving Noster kind of like the IDF courtesy announcement that, hey, Maxi Madness is about to start and it's going to go for a week.
Get out of it.
Go to Blue Sky.
Go to Reddit.
Go to, you know, don't go to X.
Go to Facebook.
Go somewhere else and shelter in place.
Or take cover in the group chats.
And I think maybe that's the answer is people need to just bunker down in the group chats during Maxi Madness to keep their sanity.
Because if you isolate yourself or you get stuck on Facebook with a bunch of boomers freaking out about some AI slot that they fell for, you're going to probably crash out over there, too.
The place where you're least likely to crash out is the group chats.
Yeah, maybe the best way to go about it would be to take the committee and start to, as they're making their picks, sort of tease that a little bit, right?
And you don't release the whole bracket right away, but you put some spoilers out there.
you know like Odell's back you know he's gonna and so that's a way to ease into maxi madness get
some awareness about it the bracket slowly builds up over time and that leads into the actual
tournament. Interesting you know there's a lot of dynamics to uh you know explore here you know for
the for the individuals that you know were very unhappy with what you said with us taking over
their neighborhood for a week do you suggest that they do something like they form NOSTA HOAs
and set guidelines of what's allowed in their neighborhood?
Or how do you think they create a peace of mind for themselves?
Well and this is the direction that Nostra heading in man is that I think every website will be a Nostra client If you going to participate in Noster you going to stop going to websites You just going to go to this one niche client after another to get to filter the information on Noster the way you want to see
it. And so for that week, everyone can go to the no Maxi Madness client or whatever. Someone can
spin that up and just filter all that shit out. Everyone can go on these relay browsing clients
and everyone can choose to go on a relay where no one's posting the Maxi Madness notes or whatever, right?
So there is definitely ways to – you can't hide from it on Twitter, right?
I mean, it's impossible.
But on Noster, there's these little nooks and crannies everyone can shelter in place for if they choose to.
So, like, they switch over to Domus for the week or something like that.
They're not an amethyst or primal.
yeah i mean especially like i think that other people found that frustrating too
was that so this uh the nip that allowed for the zap votes was not in the vast majority of the
clients and so um people were seeing it and then maybe they decided that they wanted to participate
but then they couldn't and so that made it even more frustrating right now i got your you're
twisting my arm to go get amethyst or primal um and i have to use a client that i don't like
in order to finally break down and submit, is that my vote, right?
So do you think that some people believe there's a conspiracy
that Primal got involved with Maxi Madness
because they just wanted the marketing,
they wanted people to download and use Primal.
Do you think there's some evidence for that?
I mean, why not?
Yeah, if I was Primal, I would definitely do that.
There's a lot.
happy right it's like paul keating is hot and he's walking around half naked all the time in
costa rica and there's videos of him but apparently that only gets you so far like keep only only so
many people are using primal and want to live free based on thinking that paul keating is hot
they needed something fresher something more controversial more dynamic and they leaned into
the max they even changed their logo for maxi madness they made it blue just like the maxi
Madness branding, which I thought was interesting as well.
They should have turned the Primal logo.
They should have made it like a little basketball too,
instead of like a little Firefox ripoff.
Well, I think didn't, so all this lined up with Primal
introducing the new Spark-based wallet, right?
The no KYC wallet and all that.
And I think so many people got into Maxi Madness
and started to use the wallet and turn it over
that it actually overloaded their infrastructure.
However they had it set up, right, they had to fix that shit.
And so, yeah, it turned out that Primal made a good choice
in implementing the SNP just for Maxi Madness.
I don't know if they did it just for Maxi Madness.
I don't really, but the fact that they did it on time was very poignant.
And, you know, they got a lot more people participating in NOSTER because of it,
and that's a good thing in my mind.
so hell yeah one of the conspiracy theories that i've been hearing periodically is there there are
a lot of individuals that said that noster was a social attack on the bitcoin ecosystem taking
people away from bitcoin twitter like uh you know aaron redwing the the runner-up in the the twitter
one she was very she turned her nose up to nostor a couple times uh what what are your thoughts on
that theory is would you consider nostor a social attack on the you know the pleb slot bitcoin
twitter industrial complex or um is it something else well it certainly is it is an attack on the
pleb slot man because the the algo there's no feeding the algo right now on nostor and so yeah
you have an option to go it's a i have this this saying it's a diy or gfy like do it yourself or go
fuck yourself right and so um on nostril you can do that you can you can build your own experience
and if you don't like it it's totally your responsibility to fix that right and uh on
twitter you're kind of stuck with whatever the hell is going on over there and so yeah it is it's
it's an attack in a sense that like dude we over here on nostril we just do whatever we want like
we do our own thing. On Twitter, you're subjugated to whatever Twitter wants. They can shadow ban you.
You have to bend over and do whatever you need to do to get your exposure, get your, what do they
call it, impressions or some shit. On Noster, you just build your social capital and participate.
And the more you do that, the better it becomes for you. What about people who they love to monitor
the situation? It's very hard to monitor the situation on Noster. Like, I don't know if Noster
realizes we've invaded, that we've attacked
Iran yet, like they're still
kind of waiting on some of that, the
news cycle to make it
over there. Is it, is
there an opportunity or is there
a solution
for people who like to monitor a situation
if they were to go only on
to Noster?
Would, would they be able to do that?
Well, so
I think Noster is for
participants, not for observers, right?
If you want to just consume, once again, this comes back into the permaculture principle of non-extraction, right?
If you just want to extract information from a platform and for only your benefit, then Twitter is the place for you.
But if you try and do that on Noster, there's some work that you have to do in order to get what you want out of it.
And so you have to actually participate.
Extraction doesn't work on Noster, right?
You have to actually be part of the community.
and so that's what I think about it.
You're a meetup organizer.
You're a prolific meetup organizer.
You're very active on the ground
in the heartland of America.
You know, the sentiment online is very bearish.
What do you see the sentiment on the ground
looking like at the moment
as you're interacting with people
that are interacting with Bitcoin?
It's, well, I don't know if this correlates with this podcast that I recently just started called Local Bitcoiners.
It's a podcast about Bitcoin meetups, right?
We just interview and talk to Bitcoin meetup organizers, talk about meetups, talk about the power of meetups.
And so this kind of lined up us starting this podcast, Reid and I, my co-host Reid, with this bear market.
But ever since that podcast has been going on, maybe it's because I'm so involved in this region, the Chicagoland, Great Lakes, Michiana, Michigan region, right?
But a lot of people are listening to the podcast and there's a huge buzz going on right now.
The meetups are good.
People are showing up with items to participate in the circular economy.
in Chicago. They just launched, and this also coincided with the beginning of this podcast,
was the Chicago Bitcoin Collective, which is a dedicated Bitcoin space, fork and coin restaurant.
They're going to be doing bit devs there. They're going to be doing meetups there. They're going to
be doing all this stuff. There's a huge buzz going on around that. And so it's very much the
bear market is for building vibes, right? Everyone's just coming out of the woodwork
and really participating right now.
And the meetups have gotten really good recently.
Yeah, they're great.
Why do you think there's such a difference
between the sentiment online
and the sentiment that you're seeing in meetups?
Where's the disconnect?
I think that, so there are some people
that come to the meetups
and they want to talk about number go up, right?
And they're very concerned about the quantum FUD,
Not because of the reality of the quantum FUD, right, that it could actually be dangerous for people losing their, getting their Bitcoin sniped away from them from some weird quantum computer somewhere, but more about how the idea of this affects the price.
And when you're participating in Bitcoin and you're earning Bitcoin, you're spending Bitcoin, the price doesn't really matter, right?
You get Bitcoin in, Bitcoin goes out, the price might fluctuate a few percent in that exchange, but the price isn't the important thing.
It's the freedom and it's the culture and the community and the ability to build resilience and build sovereignty to operate in a thermodynamically sound lifestyle.
Right. And so that's where the meetups, the people like that are going to the meetups, the people who want to live sovereign.
They want to operate with good thermodynamics.
You know, if you're just looking on Twitter, you know, you're basically just looking for the next reason for the price to go up or down and make your decisions on that.
that's my opinion. I don't really know, but you know, that's what I think.
It's an interesting perspective. I mean, uh, yeah, I don't know. It's, I, I've been wondering
this for a while and, uh, you know, I, I talked to Avi Burra pretty frequently and he says, um,
he said Noster's even had kind of a bear market, which I, I would have figured Noster would be
more of a reflection of you know what's actually happening on the ground but maybe not so
well so these are all just i mean we we talk about the bitcoin as a tool noster as a tool
um but you know when it comes to the the actual meetups and you get together
in person you know these people they're part of your life um it's not a tool anymore man it's a
community asset. And so this is the big difference is like when you actually take things into the
meat space in reality, there's a whole different set of incentives and a dynamic that goes on.
And I think it does reveal the truth, right? That, okay, price is down. Nobody's really
chit-chatting, gossiping about this or that on these socials. But the group chats, still good.
Right. And the meetups are still good. And that's where the signal is, you know. Podcasts too, right? That's, has there been a bear market in podcasting? Hell no, dude. There's a new fucking podcast spinning up every day about Bitcoin.
So you've got to look at the real sovereign shit, like podcasting, uncensorable way to promote and propagate cultural capital.
Bitcoin meetups, real sovereign way, unstoppable way to promote and propagate cultural capital.
Nostra to a degree is unstoppable, but it's just, it's more nebulous than these true relationships that you have.
i wonder one of the things that i've been thinking about is crashing out we've talked
about it a little bit but there's really very few ways to prove that you're not crashing out
if everybody else is saying you're crashing out if people were if there was like a crash out
civil attack right and all and all your followers everybody whether it's on nost or on x and they
said rev huddle is crashing out right now and you're like i'm not crashing out i'm totally normal
like mike brock is going through this right everybody's calling if you don't know who mike
brock is he's on that tray he was a former executive at block under jack dorsey and now
he is um he's an essayist everybody's accusing him of crashing out and he had to start a podcast
to prove that he wasn't crashing out are there any other methods are there any other ways you
can prove that you're not crashing out if everybody says you're crashing out other than
start a podcast is there like a certain amount of social capital that you can have where people are
like well he's got too much social capital to be crashing out he's just esoteric or something like
that uh or eccentric um is it is it just you have to start a podcast i well yeah to to crash out is
not uh it's not up to you right it your actions reveal if you're crashing out or not and you could
be uh in denial about it um i i actually had a i crashed out dude uh about a year ago um and i was
super hard, just like, fuck, I can't stand that everyone's talking about doing shit. No one's
actually doing shit. It's so hard. This was when the meetups did go. So Paper Bitcoin Summer
destroyed the meetups, basically. Everyone was talking about instead of price talk,
it's okay to talk about micro strategy and all this shit. And people just stopped coming. The
vibe just got killed by that. And I couldn't stand it. And I crashed out about it. And it got
so bad that the Mestradel had like an intervention with me where they got on a call and they like
talked me off the ledge, you know. And so, you know, at the time I didn't feel like I was crashing
out. I was in denial about it, but I, there was no way for me to prove that to them that I was,
it was a real serious, you know, it wasn't a crash out. And so, yeah, your, your crash out is,
it's not up to you. It's a, it's up to how the, the people that you're talking to perceive your
actions. So there's no, there's no like sovereign crash outs at this point. Like a crash out is
like a network effect phenomenon. I'd say so. Yeah. So from your experience of having a crash out,
it sounds like you, you had people around you that helped you pull out of it. You know,
there's a lot of people on the verge of crashing out. There's a lot of people that are crashing
out right now. What words of advice do you have for those crashing out?
You got to go to the to the group chats. You got to go to the meetup. You got to talk to the people
you know. And you got to you got to just basically confirm that it's going to be all right. You know
that this is just a moment in time that the volatility is everywhere. There's volatility in
Bitcoin. There's volatility in nature. And sometimes the volatility does not swing in your
direction. And don't worry, zoom out, right? Over enough, long enough time horizon, if you lower
your time preference, things will hit, will swing your way again. As a, you know, experienced meetup
organizer, you kind of talked about the disruption of the paper Bitcoiners showing up and wanting to
talk about their, you know, paper bitcoins being problematic to the meetup structure and
an organization, uh, you know, impacting members from, from coming people, you know, not being
interested in participating anymore, you know, for individuals that are problematic, what are
some strategies that you've learned at handling them? Do you like a torn feather them in the,
in the town square for talking about paper-baked calling or, you know, what are like the strategies
to prevent disruptive, unhelpful behavior in the meetup? Well, this is, you can take permaculture
once again and apply this to that kind of behavior. And so first you start off by observing and
interacting with the person, right? The next step is to accept, self-regulate, accept and apply the
feedback that that person is giving to you. And then from there, you're able to take a small and
slow solution in order to turn this into, in permaculture, we have a saying that's called
the problem is the solution, right? So how do you take this person that's kind of disrupting the
vibe of the meetup and running away with the meetup with this price talk and this paper Bitcoin
bullshit and turn it into an educational experience for everybody else to and you have to do it gracefully right Because the reason why people come to the meetups is to learn and to participate If you at the meetup you trying to participate There no reason to just poo someone and push them out and exclude them The purity test
thing is definitely not valuable in meetup culture, right? You don't need to pass all the purity
tests so you just have to find a way to make the problem a solution and and turn it into uh
a talk about privacy or a talk about um self uh uh holding your coins like uh cold storage right
these kinds of things so like if they're talking about paper bitcoin ngu you you try to change the
subject into paper bitcoin privacy strategies or what do you what do you mean yeah like how how are
you gonna you question you ask them questions right like how are you how are you maintaining
your privacy with your paper bitcoin right like how are you how are you uh self self-custodying
your paper bitcoin and um that leads to a lot of people that are doing that to think a little bit
deeper about how their strategies are to improve that makes sense interesting uh shifting the
conversation to a new topic here kind of off off kilter the united states just launched a manned
crew into outer space like a half hour ago and it's going to be the first uh the first crew to
fly around the moon in decades question for you do you believe this is real i mean a they did it
on april fool's day which could be a coincidence it could be part of the clues that they leave to
let us know that it's not real and be any video that they quote unquote like you know broadcast
back to the united states for us to watch on our screens could be ai slop there's no way for us to
know that the pictures and the video that they're going to be sending from their flight around the
moon in the next few days is real or AI slop. But I'm just curious, what is your reaction to
that we're going around the moon again? And it's going to be the first woman to fly around the moon.
She's on board. Dr. Richard Harambe just tweeted that there's a Canadian astronaut on board, a man,
which means it's basically two women. So there's basically two women flying around the moon for
the first time. Is this real or fake? Well, I hope it's real because I want to see the pictures of
the other side of the moon, the dark side of the moon, the side of the moon that's so I don't know
if you guys know this, but on the on the dark side of the moon, there's a whole civilization
of people that are like 40 feet tall, and they're all hot. And like, dude, I want to see I don't
think why would you need clothes on the moon? So like, I want to see the pictures of these,
these 40 foot tall women, and their tits out, right? Like, that would be fucking amazing. And
so as soon as those pictures come out, I'll know it's real. Until then, I think that it's probably
bullshit should we have a maxi madness tournament for the hot naked aliens on the moon they're not
aliens they're just people they're just people like us that are just 40 feet tall they're not
even aliens they're just okay that's it i'm glad you brought that up because of this sort of off
topic again here but similar when they talk about aliens being real and there being alien technology
yada yada what does that mean because it kind of depends on your definition of alien so how
if somebody were to say to you rev huddle come come out from picking your your your deuce berries
on your homestead and come look at the tv right now because aliens are are being introduced by
the president what does it what does that mean are aliens from a different planet are they a
different life form instead of this carbon-based life form like us are they is it is it something
mental or spiritual that makes an alien what is if aliens exist let's just say the aliens exist
what does that mean what is an alien versus a human well there's a whole lot of different kinds
of aliens, in my opinion. And this comes down to like the way I think that the universe works.
It's all vibration, right? Everything is connected. And there's there is a vibrational force
creating volatility, creating entropy throughout the universe. And so I'm sure you guys have seen
these these videos of, you know, you put a plate on top of a speaker and you sprinkle some sand on
it and you play the different tones and the sand takes up all these different shapes. And so the
vibration of the universe forces form. And so the human form is dictated by the vibrations of the
universe. And so that means that there are aliens out there that are from outside the earth that
are people just like us, because that's the only way that the vibration of the universe can only
create human, right? And so then there's also the etheric form of alien, right? Where these
these trans-dimensional people or beings or entities, you could say, manifest.
And so that's kind of like the glitch in the matrix type of experience.
So there can be many different kinds of aliens,
but I think the aliens that people talk about the most are just people from somewhere else.
And I think they exist, personally.
Do you think any of them are on Noster?
Well, they should be.
And that's what I'm saying.
That's what I think.
Like, you know, if the aliens come, I want to have enough social capital and enough proof with my signatures, right, of these notes that I've signed and these Bitcoin transactions that I made, right?
It's a public ledger.
This is actually beneficial to us because when the aliens show up, they can see who the fuck's been participating in Bitcoin and Noster and who's not.
And they're going to want to come talk to me because I'm on the frontier here as a pioneer.
I'm trying to push the world forward into a positive place.
The aliens will know this and they'll the new politicians, right, are going to be the people not talking with aliens because of the reptilian bullshit fucking center of the earth stuff.
I'm going to be working with the the Palladians, right, who are coming with their beautiful blonde hair and their their voluptuous forms.
And they going to want to talk to me and not the people who are basically fiat Right Just the fiat system shit is over right Pleiadians are pretty hot
Did aliens crash out?
Of course.
You said that.
We're all subject to the same vibrations of the universe, right?
So you think that crash outs are a vibrational phenomenon and maxi madness was a vibration shift on the protocol that people were not prepared to handle.
The vibes freaked them out.
Well, so, all right, you can think about it like this, right?
When you drop a stone into a still pool, the ripples go out.
But when the ripples reach the end of the pool, they reflect back.
And so this creates, when the ripples start to intersect, now this creates distortion and feedback.
And so in the sense of maxi madness, right, that was the stone being dropped into the pool of Noster, which created ripples.
And as soon as the ripples bounced to the edge of the pool and started coming back, now the distortion comes.
And that feels uncomfortable, right?
You went from looking at a very pleasing waveform into something that turned into chaotic noise, right?
And that, if you want to pull the signal out of the noise, now you've got to put in some proof of work to determine what to do here.
That's uncomfortable.
What do you think the odds that Noah Groom is a Palladian is?
well i believe in this idea of uh soul groups and and that there are soul groups that uh have ties
to other extraterrestrial communities and so i mean judging by the way she looks man she could
definitely be a part of that palladian soul group and be here for a purpose you know uh her her soul
may have manifested on Earth
at the time that she did
to push Bitcoin forward.
Because I think there needs to be more music.
This DMU, the decentralized music culture,
is really growing on Noster.
And I think it's really important.
And the fact that she's putting so much work in,
participating in that,
doing the Zap streams and all the stuff,
suggests to me that, yeah,
it's very likely that she is from this
more benevolent
soul group outside
the earth.
I kind of agree. Yeah. I think there's a good
chance he's a play in for sure.
Well, yeah.
Looking at wrapping
this up, I mean, what do you see
for the rest of 2026?
What's got you excited?
Are you
thinking about your strategy next year
in Maxi Madness?
are you thinking that far ahead?
I mean, what's real important to you right now?
What's really important on your horizon ahead?
What are you excited about?
Well, I think that the most important thing for me
is just going to be continuing to,
winning the Maxi Madness was a signal to me
that I'm representing what Nostra culture appreciates,
what local Bitcoin culture appreciates,
and that people need to,
if the number's not going to go up, right,
if we're in a bear market,
you have to hyper-Bitcoinize your own life.
You have to figure out ways to interact
with your local Bitcoin community
and lean into that and get the freedom go up, right?
Increase the utility that the Bitcoin affords you
to build shit and access freedom.
And when we do that,
then when the price starts to go up,
we're that much more powerful where that's much more connected and we're that much more ready for
when the aliens show up for them to come talk to us instead of the the reptilian uh politicians right
absolutely well carl i gotta say you you are a true first turning uh pioneer one of the few out
there majority of people out there they're still living in the fourth turning crashing out you got
a very different perspective.
We'll have to do this again sometime.
Yeah, I'd be happy to.
You know, there's a lot going on
in the meetup culture here locally.
We got a lot of pioneers.
Otis Bitmeyer roasting his coffee.
The people in the Mestredel, man,
like you mentioned, Avi,
he's got how many different podcasts
going on, Fundamentals,
how many different podcasts
does he have going on?
And there are, we are a group of people who are recognizing that the frontier is, we're on the frontier.
And it's up to us to decide now that we're going to make the first turning happen.
We're doing it.
We're building our way into the, you know, strong men make good times.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. Well, go through, plug all the meetups that you're part of and the events that you're going to be part of.
You know, Lake Satoshi is coming up in Michigan.
Yeah, you can't miss Lake Satoshi. That's the first weekend in August, I believe.
I'm not sure about this, but I think it's Saturday, August 2nd is like the main day.
I could be wrong, but first weekend in August.
but you know in Michigan there's the Southwest Michigan meetup that's where you'll see all of
this homesteader really good circular economy around food then there's the Grand Rapids meetup
which has two meetups right there's the the educational meetup at the factory and then
there's the social meetup which is at two guys brewing and beyond that I run the South Bend
Indiana meetup. I go to the Chicago BitDevs meetup. There's a meetup in Elmhurst, Illinois
that I go to as well, the western suburbs of Chicago. I go to the Mid-Michigan meetup in
Lansing There a lot of I have to say that the Indianapolis meetup is really good The Cleveland meetup is really good Those are a little outside my range I might I only been to the Indianapolis meetup once
but you get the idea.
There's a meetup for you out there, right?
And if you don't have a meetup near you,
if you can't find one, you should start one.
Well said.
I've been seeing some chatter in the Messerdale chat.
It sounds like Jackie's going to bring some orange paint to Lake Satoshi this year to paint the lawn orange.
Will you be partaking in that?
Do some rallying with Jackie?
You know, if Jackie's on board and he's got the paint, you've got to build that social capital, man, and participate, right?
So I'm in.
Rod, are you in? Are you going to paint the lawn orange with us? I know I'm in.
Paint the town orange. Paint all orange.
Rod, you got any closing questions before we wrap this one up?
You said you've been to the Cleveland Bitcoin meetup.
I have not been to Cleveland, but I'm pretty close with the Cleveland organizers.
And they bring a huge crew to Lake Satoshi every year.
So I know the Cleveland group, I'm in their group chats and all that stuff.
I'll have to see if they can bring Phillip of Macedonia to Lake Satoshi this year.
We'll have to meet him in person.
He could maybe do a performance, a rap performance.
But he's a big listener to the podcast.
He's not very happy with us right now.
He's not happy with the bracket for Maxi Madness.
but I think that
it'd be great to hang out
in the Lake Satoshi
I bet you he would love painting the lawn red
or the orange
yeah Phil if you come to
Lake Satoshi you're gonna have a good time
you should do it
wear all your medals
wear all your medals from
grade school those are fucking
incredible swag
yeah just shout out
to Phillip
shout out to Phillip indeed
Rev Honnold, thank you for coming on.
This has been a pleasure.
I appreciate it.
Hey, you know what?
I'm really happy that you guys chose to get Maxi Madness over to Noster.
I do think that it is important.
This is important.
As much as people like to think that this is all just fun and games,
there's more to it than that.
And the only way you know that is if you listen to 40 hours of Bitcoin podcast per week
and that you listen to the Bugle and you understand the message that you guys are putting out.
Well, thank you, Rev Hoddle.
Folks, go give Rev Hoddle a follow on Noster.
If you're not following him yet, I don't know what's wrong with you.
You should reconsider your life decisions.
But People's Champ, it's been a great rip.
Folks, we'll see you on another episode of Intellectual Silk Road soon.
Tryna stay calm but I can feel it
Don't crash out, don't crash out That's what I keep telling myself now
Whole world watching, zoomed in close One wrong post and it's over, I know
Don't crash out, don't crash out But they love when you lose control now
Everybody say stay chill out loud
But they really wanna see you crash out
Politics turn into comment fights
Everyone swingin' for clips and likes
Economics in a viral thread
Expert take from a random head
G.O. News with a countdown clock
Every headline built to shock
You say one thing, they twist it fast
Now your name in a trending tag
They poke, they prod, they wait, they watch
They screenshot every little thought
You try to breathe, you try to pause
They spam, say more, they want it wrong
Don't crash out, don't crash out That's what I keep telling myself now
Whole world watching, zoomed in close One wrong post and it's over, I know
Don't crash out, don't crash out But they love when you lose control now
Everybody say stay chill out loud But they really wanna see you crash out
Corporate voice in a PR tone Please stay calm, but they egg it on
Faith debates in the common war Speak your truth and they ask for more
AI clips got it looking real You don't even know how you feel
Every take gotta escalate If it's not extreme, it don't penetrate
They build you up just to tear you down Turn your spiral into a sound
You try to log off, step away But the noise still echoes anyway
Don't crash out, don't crash out
That's what I keep telling myself now
Whole world watching, zoomed in close
One wrong post and it's over, I know
Don't crash out, don't crash out
But they love when you lose control now
Everybody say stay, chill out loud
But they really wanna see you crash out
Maybe it's me, maybe it's us
Maybe we all just feel too much
Too many odds, too many takes
Too many chances for one mistake
To become, but the timeline shakes
Every second's a higher stake
Stay cool, stay cool, don't lose it
Don't give them what they came for
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
Crash out, I might crash out
Tryna stay level but it's hard now
Everything built for the moment you break
Every reaction they can replay
Crash out, we all crash out
That's just the rhythm we live in now
If it's all pressure all the time
Then losing is just part of the design, yeah
Stay calm
But don't