Welcome to Pleb Chain Radio, a live show brought to you by Plebs for Plebs, which focuses
on the intersection of NOSTER and Bitcoin protocols.
Join QW and Avi as they run down the weekly news and developments, breaking down the current
thing and the future frontier with the foundation of decentralization, the builders, thinkers,
doers, and plebs.
All right, we are live.
Welcome, gentle plebs, to the Lightning Laced Airwaves. Today is Friday the 1st of August and it is 4.59pm on the East Coast of the United States.
At the time of recording, this is episode 123 of Pleb Chain Radio and we have a fun one in store for you today.
Zach Mahoney, creator of IndieHub, the lightning pay-per-view platform, joins us to talk about film and much, much more.
And a reminder, folks, if you are listening to this episode on Apple or Spotify, first of all, thank you for listening.
But I would urge you to hit pause and switch over to the Fountain Podcasting app, where you can earn some sats and support the value-for-value revolution as you listen.
And while you're there, we would appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button.
The subscription will open up access to bonus episodes for you.
This show is streamed live on zap.stream and any other Noster client that supports streaming such as Amethyst and Noster.
And QW, you've been paying attention to Bitcoin and Noster culture in the last week.
What have you witnessed?
I was just thinking when you're talking about those other platforms that you can listen on, and I was thinking there's going to come a time when we're just submitting our own faces and verifications just to listen.
I think Spotify is starting to mess with that, some sort of proof of self or something, digitizing the door to even just listening to or consuming music or podcasts.
So one day, Avi, and I wonder if Fountain would be under that scrutiny one day with the way the UK or the EU is kind of moving that dial.
It's something to consider, Avi.
We might be, you know, on the run again one day.
You never know.
But truly, it's not like we actually live there.
It's just where our RSS feed goes and they're currently our hosts.
So kind of we live there right now, huh, Avi?
Well, you talk about the age verification because I'm 69.42 years old.
But it's that dial.
I mean, the Overton just keeps moving, right?
So it's just getting weirder and weirder.
So it's, I don't know how social media platforms can even keep up with all of these different jurisdictions and the Orwellian, just authoritarian, you know, digital ID crap that's starting to manifest or mature.
So it's something that, I don't know, it's, if it was 20 years ago and they'd said something like this is going to happen, I'd be like, no way, that's crazy.
But here we are and no one cares.
So it just seems like there's a niche part of the little shadowy area of the internet that even cares about it.
And at one point, do you just wake up?
I don't know.
We'll see.
And I did do a show with Ghost about privacy on our layer two this week, just a couple days ago.
Just fun.
I mean, it's a fun show to do because it's a very interesting topic.
But I think one thing I wanted to kind of hit home is in privacy is everyone has their own risk assessment, their own necessity.
And it can be very overbearing to try to pretend like you're completely, I don't know, anon.
so it's more about minimizing your exposure
just kind of separating distributing your
the amount of information you're providing
the world these days and with AI it seems like you're just
if you give them an inch they'll take a mile with what they can kind of
connect together so I don't know anyways that's
kind of what's going on in the culture it seems like privacy is a big thing right now
especially with the samurai going down the, the, the hack,
the leak of the T app where all those girls that were submitting their faces
well, all their information,
all their faces is now on the internet and it seems like it's a weekly
occurrence. So meanwhile, the, yeah, go ahead.
On the T app. Do you remember?
I'm sorry to hear that too, Avi. I know.
Yeah. No, no. Do you remember my cross dress?
my stark warnings about all these people who are absolutely giddy about vibe coding and thinking
everyone's a dev now yeah most likely the t app was vibe coded and i you know i think i've said
this a few times on the show is by all means knock yourselves out try new things but please
for the love of the Lord,
do not put personal information on a vibe-coded app.
Right.
Well, there was something.
Was it the person that developed it?
Or was it someone just vibe-coded the hack?
Or I don't know.
There was something about vibe-coding in between there.
It seemed like it was very likely
that the app itself was vibe-coded.
But don't you feel like that's going to...
So the creator of that, obviously,
is not necessarily the creator.
He's the prompter of that, right?
He or she.
And this is the world we're kind of moving towards where everything is, oh, it was vibe
coded.
I don't know, man.
Not my liability, not my problem type of thing.
Kind of like when the Waymo almost ran me off the road one day.
I tried to make a phone call into Waymo and it's just computers.
It's just, you're in a circle of automation.
How many times is Claude going to go to jail, QW?
And that's it.
I mean, the way the liability is these days, you can just pawn it off on the robot.
And that's it.
So that's something.
Another thing that happened was Jack.
He just launched Purple today, the Purple version of BitChat.
And what that does is Nostra integration.
So have you looked into that, Avi?
I believe it introduces NIP 17.
um i downloaded the regular bit chat once it was available on the app store
unfortunately i couldn't find anyone on my local network probably because my wife and son have not
downloaded bit wait so you're not a bit chat influencer yet we when bit chat podcast
but it was interesting because i was like oh cool like it's you know you can bring nostril
and you can do your bit chat.
And then I like download it.
I install it.
I go look.
I'm like, oh, wait, I still need to have real life friends around me
to initiate the chat.
Then you can use relays and expand beyond that initial close by initiation,
I suppose.
By the way, on that, I saw something funny.
There was a guy who posted on X of all places today that, hey,
I finally was able to use BitChat and turns out he's sitting at PubKey,
BitChatting with the dude next to him at the bar.
Yeah. Yeah. I think Will, with Thomas mentioned, you know,
this chat's so cool at this meetup and I'm like, you know, your,
your voices too. But at the same time, like,
I think that extension portion of it is cool.
I like where it's all going. The tech is, is, is neat. I mean, if you were,
if you, if the internet went down,
you could still be chatting some, some, some former or another.
I don't know. I think there's a bigger picture there,
but we're starting to see it. So I think that's, no, there is.
But I was, I was kind of thinking it was going to be white noise that was
integrated, but I think it was just the NIP 17.
And I don't know if I it's, I think maybe it was just,
I don't know the easiest one for now, but who knows?
So that happened. Lake Satoshi started today, Avi.
Are you, uh, got your camping gear?
Yeah, I'm ready to go right after this.
As you know, we are going to have a show next week with Rev Hoddle.
So we're going to do a little recap of Lake Satoshi.
I'm really interested.
I've, I've already been seeing pictures of, of the grills fired up and Rev Hoddle's lamb
getting cooked.
Uh, I've seen beef jerky packs.
I've seen all the circular economy, pleb-like products that you would normally see in, I don't know, upstate or Midland, Michigan.
It seems like some fertile land up there.
So lots of good stuff there.
I'm looking forward to that show next Friday.
And then, dude, we totally didn't even mention WhatFest.
and I don't know if it was because maybe it just wasn't in my face as much.
Why didn't we mention WhatFest, Avi?
I don't know, man. Culture Corner is your thing, so you goofed up.
Well, I vibe-coded Culture Corner that week, so it's clearly the code's fault.
No, but WhatFest.
I like the approach.
It was a standard, just a normal music festival in the middle of Wyoming.
Wyoming. And it just, it was an attempt at purple and orange pilling people,
meeting them where they're at. So going to not a Bitcoin event, but actually a music festival,
setting up a, you know, a picture, a Toonster, I don't know, a backdrop and just kind of live
streaming, talking, talking to people and handing out some sats. So they brought the Primal 2100
sat cards. So I just like where it's all going. I think it's neat. I'm not sure how well it was
received. I saw a few new ostriches that were introduced, some musicians, but you know what?
You just got to keep trying, right? That is for sure. Any update on your episode, Avi?
You know, it's, you're talking about the one that I'm funding for Paragoy?
The funding, because I think it's important we talk about it every time until it's plump full.
Yeah, I'm at 82% funded for the Paraguay episode.
So folks, if you're listening, we'll have the link for the Angor fundraiser in the show notes.
Do check it out.
It is a cool new platform built on Bitcoin script and Noster, fully sovereign, self-custodial funding platform.
and help me get over the line so that I can film episode three of Finding Home in Paraguay this September Please
And with that, QW, before we bring our guest on...
That does bring our culture corner to Anand Avi.
And I do want to understand, what is the sermon today?
Because I think this one's near and dear to your heart.
This one is indeed dear to my heart.
And I suspect to our guest's heart before we bring him on.
Independent cinema is the unruly heartbeat of culture.
The place where a thrift store lamp can outshine a million dollar CGI sun and a single whispered line hits harder than a stadium's worth of explosions.
Yet, without a marquee, these stories drift in the algorithmic dark held hostage by platform taxes, payout delays and the dreaded account under review.
What we need is an always open theatre whose tickets can't be torn up by middlemen.
Enter the lightning network
Where sats streak across the globe
Like a ticket stub tossed through the projection beam
Landing in the filmmaker's wallet
Before the opening credits fade
No chargebacks, no borders
No sudden demonetization
A fan in Lagos, La Paz or Louisville
Can zap mid-scene
And the next frame gets funded in real time
This isn't a fantasy
The rails are already there for micro-rentals
Pay-per-view premieres and tip-jar finales
When 90% of the box office stays with the artist
All it takes is courage
Filmmakers uploading their work without fear
Viewers trading a few thousand sats for a night of human truth
Builders refining open-source payvolts
so the projector never stutters.
Art is a timestamp on the human condition,
and it deserves money that shares its independence.
Let's engrave our stories on a ledger guarded
not by suits, but by math.
The revolution will be subtitled,
lightning-powered, and gloriously uncensored.
And with that, QW,
I think this is an apropos moment
to bring on our guest, Zach Mahoney.
Welcome, sir, to Plep Chain Radio.
Well, thank you for having me, you guys.
Avi, that was spectacular.
I need a recording of this.
I'm going to put that one in the archives.
Well done.
Super stoked to be here.
Thank you guys for the invite.
Love it.
So, Zach, we start every show with a burning question,
and this one will be no different.
The question is, when IndieHub's House of Cards, and by that I mean House of Cards was the first big budget show ever backed by a streaming platform, Netflix.
So when Lightning Netflix first House of Cards?
Oh man, this is like trading predictions, right?
You always want to give a direction but never a time frame.
Man, realistically, I would say we're a few years out.
You know, we are, you know, I got into this, I got into the crypto game, the Bitcoin world in 2017.
And it feels like yesterday, but it's been a minute.
And there are still, I mean, I think more often than ever, I kind of meander around and I go, man, we're so early.
Like we're still so early. Um, and I say that because, you know, when I first started envisioning
this platform, when I first started thinking about IndieHub and, um, what it could be and what it
could do, this was 2000, probably 17, 18. And even then I would get like just kind of brutal panic
attacks in my office at the time. Like, fuck, somebody's going to do this. Like, I don't,
I don't have time. I'm not a developer. Like, you know, ah, um, this would be dope. And,
and time went by and time went by and, you know, there were little stabs at it and there's been
little stabs at it here and there, but, um, I just, what's that quote? There's a quote from a VC.
It's like, you know, founders are just always so much earlier than they think they are. Um,
So, all of that's to say that I would say we're a few years out. If we're talking like blockbuster level house of cards stuff, we're a ways out. But I do think that we're closer than anybody thinks to actually starting to fund some shows.
Avi, I know you're doing this right now with finding home and, you know, plugging those stakeholders into a cap table like on IndieHub and sharing some of that revenue.
I think that we're actually fairly close to that.
And that's going to be a Bitcoin story.
I think the Bitcoiners are the most incentivized to do that and technically proficient enough to do that.
So it's really, this new world, this new system is going to be built by Bitcoiners, initially for Bitcoiners, but then it will take off after that and sort of expand out into the more traditional market.
And I think I was thinking about this yesterday. You know, we get so I do this. I'm talking for myself here. Like I get so into the tech and I get so into Bitcoin. I get so into the cool new shit that's happening. But at the end of the day, you know, and I get like behind the scenes stuff, too, just as a filmmaker, like my career has been in film and TV. And I love all the technical shit, man. Like I love it all. I love like talking about all of it from camera stuff to blocking to editing to literally whatever you name it.
We'll talk about it. But at the end of the day, what matters is that this technology brings about the opportunity to tell much, much better stories than are being told by Hollywood right now.
And to highlight and illuminate and propel the most talented storytellers among us.
And that's what this technology is here to do.
And people are going to celebrate great stories told beautifully.
So it's going to be a process.
we're in that process
we need the Bitcoin or support to do it
but once that engine
gets going and we start to see
the market unleashed
with
respect to visual storytelling
and sort of
traditional filmmaking in general
man I think it's I'm bullish
I'm bullish that's me so
long answer to a very
short question but I would say we're still a few
years out
you hear that qw i think i might uh i might be able to close out my paraguay fundraiser
zach said he's got me i was just thinking founders are
much earlier than they think and i was just thinking about our podcast opi
uh and that's fantastic what'd you say 82 percent yeah 82 percent funded that's fantastic
like let's fucking go dude yeah you can get 80 percent 82 percent of the flight there obi and
then you can walk the rest. That's right. So what brought you to Bitcoin? Or maybe what are
some of the ethos or what connected where you're just like, wow, this is me. I might be a pleb.
Definitely a pleb. Side question. Did you guys know there's a difference between a pleb and a
plebe? Plebeian, I would say, is kind of the word for it. Pleb. Yeah, go ahead and give us a little
edumacation there, Zach. I'll probably fuck this up, but I was... Best education. You know, somebody
says pleb, somebody says plebe, and I'm like, okay, is this just a pronunciation difference or
what's going on here? And a plebe, from what I was reading, is actually like a military cadet,
like somebody out of West Point, something like that. I might be messing it up. But, you know,
pleb is pleb. You think like normal schmo citizen. But plebe is actually kind of a reference to
like a very low ranking officer. So it's sort of the same vibe. But anyway, you guys can look that
up. Fact check me later. Argue about it. Whatever you want to do. So what got me in? Okay. So I,
this is going to sound maybe contrary to what a lot of people think about actors and filmmaking,
but I started my career as an actor in my mid-teens, like 13, 14, started working professionally
around that age, started auditioning and started booking work 15, 16.
And for the first half of my career, I was just staunchly an artist. I had zero respect for
business. I had zero respect for money, negative respect, probably, um, in retrospect. And, uh,
I was just totally focused on the art. And then 2008 hit, uh, and it very similar, uh, sort of
similar in vibe to what's happening now, at least as far as the film industry is concerned. Um,
back then there was a writer's strike. There were, there were major labor strikes. There was an
economic crisis, and Canon had just released the 5D Mark II. So technology, politics, and economics
sort of all converged on the film industry to sort of demolish it in 2008. And I say the 5D Mark II,
really what I'm talking about is technology, technological improvement made production
significantly cheaper and easier to do for, you know, non-studio independent types. And,
you know, this is the birth of YouTube basically and Netflix. Um, and so the industry was kind of
in disarray at that point as well. Uh, nobody really knew where the money was going to come
from. Nobody knew where it was going. The whole industry was kind of working backwards back then.
The industry was a lot more structured than it is now. Um, and there was a pretty clear ladder,
labor ladder on the way up, whether you were a technician or you were in front of the camera,
behind the camera, whatever, there's generally speaking kind of a way of advancing your career
that everybody kind of followed. And in 2008, everything sort of went backwards. So I
had started, you know, early in my career, I was in a lot of big rooms and I was going on a lot of
big stuff and I was booking work consistently. And then everything kind of shifted and changed
in 2008. And so the, I say this, you know, uh, sort of bluntly, but like the pile of shit at the
bottom got really, really big. And as budgets were constrained at the studio level and the whole
industry started to rewire itself and Netflix took over over the, the following 15 years,
um, I just got really sick of the stuff that I was going out on as an actor. Like it was just not
what I moved to LA to do. And so I, I started my own, I started doing production. I started
shooting stuff I wanted to start doing movies that I came down here to do tell the type of stories that I was interested in that I thought were meaningful and sort of worth the time
And so all of this is to say that that sort of forced me into the business side of things.
And I had to do like a little 10-year detour, just learning the basics of running a business and the basics of finance and bookkeeping.
And that sort of led me, that was like my own little personal renaissance. And that sort of led me into stumbling across Bitcoin and crypto. And I was like early 2017. And literally it wasn't, it wasn't some crazy thing. Literally a buddy of mine had been interested in Ethereum. He was like mining Ethereum or something. And he had like mentioned it to me a few times.
And, um, I happened to have it finally, you know, it was like months had gone by and I
finally had a day where I didn't have anything to do.
And I was sitting at my desk and he called me and he's like, dude, I'm bugging you about
this Ethereum thing.
You need to check it out.
I was like, oh, okay, shit.
All right.
I got a day.
Like, what is it?
Send me to a website.
And, you know, he sent me to CoinMarketCap and, uh, I was somewhat familiar with stocks
at that point, you know, like I was familiar with, you know, market caps and outstanding
shares and, you know, share price and price up, down kind of thing.
And so I saw this landing page of all these coins and all these prices.
And I was like, oh, shit.
Like, this is, oh, wow, this is a lot.
So these are like stocks or something.
And I would, no exaggeration, I would say probably within about 30 minutes, I read some description about Bitcoin or whichever technology.
And basically, it was like, you know, you can transfer money without a centralized counterparty, without a bank.
And I had had some run-ins with banks up to that point and I had no love lost for banks. I was like fucking completely sick of that entire system. And the whole thing just seemed ridiculous to me. And so within, I mean that day, within 45 minutes, I was like, oh, people can start sending money to each other and there's not a bank involved.
I don't know what any of this is. I don't know how any of this works, but that sounds like that's a big fucking deal. And that pretty much started an obsessive, compelled journey that continues to this day.
I really have no business being interested in the stuff that I was interested in with respect to Bitcoin, but it answered so many questions and illuminated so many things for me that I just didn't understand about why things were going the way they were going globally and in the film business and otherwise.
And it just opened up that door for me of like, oh, wow, this is actually how the world works. This is how things are going. And I did the full deep dive. I mean, I was into like crazy obscure books about central banking in the 1800s and like Warren Mosler books, like just random, random shit.
And I was compelled. I was absolutely compelled. And I think tying it back to the point is contrary to most people's opinions about acting, acting is actually not lying. Good actors are not good at lying. They're good at telling the truth, which is why they're paid a fuckload of money.
So the best definition of acting I've ever heard is that your job is to behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances
And the reality is that most people in our day-to-day lives
We're taught to lie and we're taught to lie to ourselves and ignore our own feelings about certain situations
And ignore our own instincts and certainly ignore our impulses because they're inconvenient to other people
And so we stuff those down and we make a habit of doing this over our lifetime
and uh so i you know kind of realized there's like one of usually one of three reasons people
act like to tell the truth to be seen and for cathartic reasons um and i was very compelled
to the art form to tell the truth i wanted to i wanted to have a truthful uh exchange with
another human being that's what lit me up and uh so the truthful component that's always been a
guiding light of mine. And so the truthful component of Bitcoin, um, as I was, I think like
right before I had learned all that, I had sort of just taught myself about bookkeeping. And that
was like, like oddly, this like sort of borderline spiritual experience where I was like, holy fuck,
like you can't, you can't lie in this thing. Like this fucking literally everything is here. Like
it has to, like, you can lie about what the category was, but, but you know what it was like,
there's no leave. Like if you want to see yourself naked, like check out your, your books, if you
keep them, you know? So, you know, then, then we get to Bitcoin triple entry accounting and I'm
like, this is just, this is just, this is just un, you know, this is just the truth. This is
just the truth that cannot be fucked with. Like, my God, this is incredible. Um, so again, short
answer, long story. I would say, um, the truthiness of it is what really drew me to the technology.
exactly i gotta say when he when he when his first initial reaction when he opened up coin
market cap uh was oh shit he was about 99.99999 percent correct
little did i know
you know zach there's a lot to uh a lot of directions we can take but that was a great
answer by the way many ways we could take this but there's one thing that i want to
talk about, which is you said people think actors are lying, are good at lying. I've actually never
heard that before. Is that a common perception that actors are good at lying? The most common,
absolutely. I could agree with that. I mean, that's like something where, well, he's paid to
act, you know? So you would just assume, you know, even if they're telling the truth, they might be
paid to say that i don't know it's it's it's i can see how that can kind of coincide but if you
just throw it for what little i know of theater and i'm sure this applies to film as well zach
if you look at uh the stanislavsky method or the grotowski method any of i mean there is such a
deep psychological study of the human condition yep to to be an actor right you that i mean there's
things like emotional memory and all of those things that you need to understand. So, I mean,
it's so, I would never think of it as lying. I would just think of it as a deep understanding,
deep and sometimes dangerous understanding of the human condition.
But if you even have heard the name Stanislavski, then you're probably, you don't qualify for the...
I'm thinking like, Avi, you like to watch soccer, aka football.
when they hurt their leg and the guy comes out with a spray they're rolling around and you know
they're they're acting for a red flag that's bad aren't they trying to get that card out that card
i mean it you know if you go there's different layers of it if you go into any any acting any
acting class or studio or method in my this is my opinion this isn't ubiquitously true but
But, you know, especially true with like Meisner work.
Like the words are fucking irrelevant.
Like the script is completely irrelevant.
Like forget the script.
Like the words seriously don't matter.
There's an entire behavioral tennis match happening underneath the words.
And that's really what the actors are doing is you're behaving correctly, you know, in line with the script.
You're doing it truthfully.
So it's, of course, believable.
and more importantly that the audience relates to what's going on.
But this is why you can go watch a great play.
Like if you watch a bunch of amateurs or people who have never done acting before
or early in their acting career just don't really know what they're doing,
they can go – you can pick up a great playwright, screen playwright, whatever.
It doesn't matter.
You can do Mamet.
You can do Shakespeare.
And if you're an audience member, you're watching like newbie actors do great –
I mean, we're talking some of the best writing ever.
You actually will have trouble following what the fuck is going on.
You'll be like, I don't even know what the fuck is going on in this script.
And it's because the actors don't understand what the behavioral tennis match is
even going on in the script and what the stakes are in the scene.
They're just saying the words.
So it's like we get hung up.
We're like, you know, society is very left brain these days.
We get hung up on the words.
But like what the great acting really has nothing to do with the words.
The words make it so our brain can follow along.
and there's exposition in a storyline. But what we're really drawn to is the behavior. And that's
where the truthiness comes in. That's what the training is all about, is to remove these barriers,
to retrain your entire body to start telling the truth again, right? Like one of the things we do
is like the most important thing, what are they doing? How do I feel about it? What are they doing?
How do I feel about it? It's just constantly this back and forth. And so if you get really good
actors, they're usually the worst liars in the room. Just, but, but you have to take words out
of it, you know, like it's just the behavior that they're, they're there to, this is why they're,
you know, attractive and electric when they're really good at what they do, because they're just
so in the moment. And, you know, Kiddaby, the other thing, the other theme in Jack's,
in Zach's earlier answer, we've seen this with all the music shows that we've done,
is it's a very similar arc, right?
It's like you're going through the fiat system.
I mean, Open Mic has talked about this.
Yeah, yeah.
And I was thinking the same thing,
kind of the performance side of things,
the hijacked, I mean,
the music industry is very similar
with the movie industry
in regards to how it's kind of a top-heavy juggernaut.
And yeah, I thought the same thing, Avi.
And Zach, when you're talking about being a good actor versus writer,
I just, my mind instantly went to Bryan Cranston and Vince Gilligan.
And some of those scenes from Breaking Bad where I'm not, I mean, that was great writing.
It was great acting.
They collided and it was perfect, like the crawl space scene.
but those I can see where if maybe it got me thinking well was the writing even that good
was Brian that great of an actor you know what I mean you had me kind of reflecting
I would say a great deal of that was Cranston in their relationship you know the the circumstances
they they drew up on Breaking Bad were great I think the pilot of Breaking Bad is like
one of the better episodes ever produced in TV, like definitely top 1%. The pilot was so well
written, you know, but as these shows crank on, like they really, they really just have to keep
coming up with crazy shit, you know? And you, you really rely heavily towards the latter half of
shows on these, these developed characters that these actors have, have, you know, Game of Thrones
was similar, right? Like you just, you're so invested in the characters at that point, the
writing you're just like i don't know but like god i'll just love watching them yeah i mean
obvi and i we're 123 shows in now i mean we're now we have you on the show so we're into the
crazy shit now digging deep dude dude i i wanted to not to obvi please tell me to shut the fuck up but you guys said something earlier on your uh on your intro that really fucking blew my mind I was like you said created versus prompted in the context of AI
and just like human beings in general right now.
Man, like that is such a profound,
that literally blew my mind.
I was like, holy fuck.
Because I kind of want to get your spin on this, actually.
I get really, I'm not a fan of the word creator.
I really dislike it.
And there's a number of reasons for that.
But at the end of the day, like none of us,
none of us are actually, like to get really obnoxious about it,
none of us actually, we're not capable of creating,
like everything that already exists is already here.
we can at best we can rearrange shit that is already here in more interesting ways
you know but like we can't create energy we can't destroy energy we can just transmute it which is
a wonderful power to have but it's not creation itself and it got me thinking like created versus
prompted like are we just is that like all we're really doing are we just prompting like is that
that's not all we've ever been doing like that totally blew my mind yeah well it's the whole
like discovering Bitcoin versus creating.
Yes, yes.
And then so much so like where if you're a pleb,
you discover Bitcoin in yourself.
So it's all, it's, yeah.
I mean, essentially it's already there.
So the prompting is, what are your thoughts, Avi?
By the way, Avi's going to take the V out of his name.
He's so into AI.
It's just a matter of time.
It's funny.
I've actually, even for, I'm vibe filmmaking at this point.
I took the transcript.
Let's go.
From, there was a, so basically I filmed seven hours of Finding Home in Prague,
the episode two that's going to be released in a month or so.
Nice.
I took the transcript and put it into AI just to see if I can get some themes out of it.
Anyway, my view, I was starting from a boring answer to what you said, Zach,
which is, I think that's semantics to say no one's a creator.
It really depends on, yes, you're assembling things that already exist,
but at the same time, you're using a certain intuition
or a spark that no one else had and you had
to assemble things in a certain way,
to MacGyver it in that particular order or whatever it is.
and that brought into being something that didn't exist before
and therefore you are a creator, right?
So I think...
Versus just putting a puzzle together
and saying I created this puzzle?
Well, it depends on the puzzle, right?
Or unless you're talking about something very specific.
No, I'm just saying, I mean, they're all tools, right?
We use them, we put them together
and then some people just put them together
a lot more elaborate and that would be genius.
that creation, um, in, in that way, using those tools is an art form, I suppose.
Yeah. This is pretty deep, man. You know, it, it's like, it really came from, and I totally,
like, I'm not, I'm certainly not going to die on that hill and I understand what people say.
Um, I understand what people mean. And I certainly used to call myself a creative.
Um, there's a lot of ego in that, that bothers me because when you, at a certain point, like,
and again I'm not taking away the amount of work
like I get it it's really more just to have
the conversation but
there's something to be said for when you've
put in a tremendous amount of work and you've
you know like from an acting perspective like a lot
of the work you have to do is really to just get the fuck out of your
own way like you just have to like
remove a lot of the shit that's
been put in into your life that's getting
in the way of you channeling a great
performance and
a lot of you know a lot of the
quote unquote creative people whether they're
artists or scientists, you know, it's like, there's a, there's an element of saying like,
Hey, that performance, like really that something came through me. Like I was able to simply channel
something from another place. And I was just the conduit through which that thing kind of came into
this realm. And that's a pretty common theme around people, especially the really prolific ones.
And you, and you sort of get out of that, like top of mind learning how to do something and you
get into that like subconscious um you know that unconscious competence level of master the flow
state i've heard about the flow state yeah yep so it's kind of interesting it's the rob the rob
brendan show right yeah so anyway just food for thought really i don't have an end point on it
other than uh it's the the prompted versus created is interesting right because you're
you're, you know, even as filmmakers, as actors, like your job as an artist really is to be as
specific as you can. I mean, in filmmaking, that's especially important. Um, general, general choices,
middle of the road choices don't really work out that well. I mean, Will Smith made an entire career
off of this, right? Like he, his characters make the wrong choice, but with a hundred percent
commitment, you know, like he goes the wrong way with a hundred percent conviction, which is
hilarious like all the time. And so, you know, being specific is really, really important. And
as I started, I've really kind of started the AI journey recently, like within the last few months,
and I just realized, oh man, like the level of specificity required in prompting is really the
level of specificity that we should see in screenwriting that we've lost over the last 15
years. So I don't know, are we all just prompters and God created everything beforehand and we just
get to prompt the protocol.
I'm definitely vibing through life.
Let's bring this from the sublime, Zach, to planet Earth.
Done.
And talk about the beginnings of IndieHub.
So you were an actor.
That was your passion.
You saw the fiat nonsense that the industry was suffering from.
So you held your nose and you learned about the business side of things and found that you actually liked it.
And then at some point IndieHub happened.
What was the story there?
What was the motivation?
Man, it really wasn't, it wasn't, it was really pretty practical.
I mean, as I was learning, you know, I was as I was on my my crypto journey in my crypto adventure, you know, it really it was kind of practical.
Like once the idea of streaming value, you know, I started to realize, like, OK, this is how we stream data.
Like this is how TCP IP works. Like, OK, we could break up. We break up data in packets.
Why can't we break up value in packets? You know, and certain chains have been working on that for a long time.
And I was like, man, if you could stream, if you could just stream payments while you're
watching a movie, that would be dope.
Like that would, that would be cool.
And then the next logical conclusion is, okay, well, what about fundraising?
Like, why can't you just distribute that revenue to whoever's on the cap table?
And why can't you fundraise that way as well?
And, you know, having been in front of him behind the camera, having tried to fundraise
and produce and execute and sell. I saw, I just saw a world where the, you know,
when, you know, independent film is, I mean, all filmmaking is just, is crazy. It's a miracle any
of it ever really works, but especially independence, man, you are, it is an extremely
entrepreneurial mindset to be an independent filmmaker. And most of them aren't super
business-minded, but really it's super, super entrepreneurial. And what you recognize pretty
quickly is that the people who are taking the most risk are getting the least reward in the way that
the current system is set up. And it has gotten worse and worse and worse and worse over the last
20 years that I've been in the business. And certainly you could make the case way before that.
so really what I saw was the ability to rewire the risk reward schema you know and if you could
do that and you believed in in the power of free markets and you believed in the power of
people to go produce dope shit then it just kind of made sense and said okay well then let's just
let's just try to reconnect risk and reward and let's try to get the people out of the way that
are that are sucking all of the energy out of the room and the you know we all know this we're all
bitcoiners right but like the difference between art and propaganda is whoever's writing the check
and as studios have have consolidated particularly since 2008 you know down the street uh it the
building used to say universal, and then it was NBC universal, and now it's Comcast, NBC,
universal. And so as all of these publicly traded companies fold in on themselves,
you start to realize that the money that they're using to produce these shows is essentially coming
from Wall Street. I mean, I'm grossly oversimplifying it, but that's basically what's
happening. And so then at a certain point you realize, well, Wall Street's captured. And so
this is just propaganda. This shit that's being produced, this is not the market responding to
an artist's risk-taking and skill level. And so I just, I saw the payments and I said, if we can
just reconnect, if we can, you know, recalibrate risk and reward, uh, we might have a chance to
save this art form. That's pretty much it. When did you launch IndieHub?
I mean, we're, we're kind of in this like super early, you know, demo beta version of it right
now, but, um, I would say as it exists right now, it's been a few months. Um, you know, as far as
the features go, it's been a few months, but, um, I would say like our first, you know, Bitcoin
film fest 2024 was probably like our first public foray into anything. And we just helped them, uh,
do some VOD. We just helped them host the VOD side of things and distributed some payments to
filmmakers who had their films on there. And, you know, we didn't, we haven't marketed anything.
We have done zero marketing at this point. And I'm really just trying to hammer out some of the
technical stuff and, uh, and then go do a little raise and make stuff a little bit more public.
But, you know, it's been in various iterations for, you know, the last 18 months. Um, and, uh,
we're kind of finally at that MVP stage where we can really start to onboard some films and
filmmakers with the features that they would expect as professionals.
So Zach, that was the first time I heard about IndieHub when I was at the Film Fest in Warsaw
last year, 2024. But, you know, we've been talking about IndieHub. Maybe for folks who are not
familiar with what it is, do you want to give the pitch? What is IndieHub? What can people expect
as users, what can people expect as drumroll creators on it?
You'll notice that we use the word filmmakers.
We do not use the word creators.
So basically, IndieHub.studio at the moment is an independent film exhibition platform.
and we pay filmmakers per second watched.
So for every second that their movie's being watched,
we're distributing that revenue,
and they can split that revenue on their cap table
however they'd like.
So, you know, for short films and independent film,
it's much easier to tell a cinematographer
or an actor or an editor,
hey, I'll give you five points,
and we'll just bake it into IndieHub,
and you'll get paid whenever it gets watched,
and we can sort of walk away from the books.
and you know we have basically we have two primary roles we have audience members we have filmmakers
if you're an audience member you're there to watch movies and basically it's you know it's pretty
simple not groundbreaking there you know subscribe we have kind of two ways you can do it you can rent
a project if a filmmaker enables rentals or you can subscribe to indie hub and have unlimited access
to the platform and with unlimited access basically we calculate every second that you're watching
something and we distribute that payment to the filmmaker. So there's no weird licensing deals.
If you're watching it, they're getting paid. If you're not watching it, they're not getting paid.
It's pretty simple. And for the filmmaker side of things, you can create a free account. You can
upload your projects. We're currently, we're hosting cinematic stuff. So narrative documentary,
short or long form or episodic. And that's really what we're looking for. We also have music videos,
but we're not looking for YouTube stuff. It's not like cat videos and whatnot.
You know, properly shot cinematic stuff, storytelling. And that's, that's it for the
moment. That's kind of the simple, the simple pitch for the moment. It's obviously, it's,
of course it's built on lightning. So if you're a filmmaker, you're familiar with Bitcoin,
just put your LNURL in there and decide what frequency withdrawal you want to make and bada
bing bada boom there you go so so is that split with lnurl like zap splits yeah yeah like interesting
because i have i've seen that applied uh real time uh for like live shows on fountain uh or streaming
uh from you know from the music side of things but i have not seen it i mean even our our our you
know club chain radio we have our splits and it's just instant it's it's trustless it's it's it's
It's a great, from what I've heard, you know, from full bands or people involved, like I've even been in part of a live split when we did a live show in Vegas.
It's just really powerful.
That's such a powerful feature.
And to kind of, like you said, step away from the books.
Yeah.
Is that something that just came about?
I mean, how did you discover that and how quick were you to implement it?
So truth be told, the first, the very first proof of concept I built on this, um, was before
lightning was as viable as it is now.
This was probably like three or four years ago.
Um, and so we built it on a platform.
I don't even know if it's still, it's not even platform.
It's really protocol, I guess.
It was called, um, Interledger.
and Interledger was kind of written up and coded by this dude, Stefan Thomas, who used to be one of
the executives at Ripple. And so they were using, so like the XRP Ledger, even years ago,
like even as early as 2017, I think 2018, maybe before that, I don't know, I wasn't around, but
they had this feature on the XRP Ledger called payment channels. And so it was very similar to
the way lightning works now, where you just open up a private channel with another node or another
user on the network, and you can just zip like an unlimited amount of payments back and forth,
super, super fast. And whenever you're done, you close it and settle out. Um, so the very first,
uh, the POC we built was on interledger and the idea behind interledger, it wasn't ripple. That
wasn't XRP ledger. It was like its own protocol thing. Um, but the idea was that it was currency
agnostic. So, uh, you know, if banks had like plugged into this, then it would exchange whatever
dollars, euros, Bitcoin, ETH, you know, like Euro XRP, like literally it was currency agnostic.
It didn't care. It didn't have a token that ran on it or anything like that. And so that was the
easiest one to implement because lightning was still not nearly as developed as it is now. And
I just wanted to see if it would work. Um, and it did, it did on that. So that's kind of how it
like just that like quick value streaming sort of came into my, into my mind and we implemented
on that. And then, um, as, as lightning got more advanced and sophisticated and like ready for,
uh, a customer like me to plug into it. Like, I don't want to run a lightning node. I'm not a
money transmitting business. I, I'm not going to get licensed for that. It's never going to happen.
So I kind of had to wait until, uh, lightning companies were able to onboard businesses like me
and they provide the lightning services.
So that's part of what took a little bit of time
was just kind of waiting on lightning to evolve and develop.
And we have just kind of been building on it ever since.
So you guys are doing splits on here, right?
So you guys are using RSS 2.0?
That's right.
Yeah.
So we actually have been working with those guys.
We actually have the ability for filmmakers
to publish a movie over RSS 2.0 as well.
So you could actually watch a movie in that podcast app
and do the same thing.
Streamsats, tip, do the whole thing.
But instead of just audio, it's video only.
And we actually have the ability to publish that
over an RSS feed for filmmakers if they wanted that,
which is kind of cool, kind of fun.
When you say RSS 2.0,
are you talking about podcasting 2.0?
Because we're using RSS Blue,
which is the back end of Fountain as of a few months ago.
Yeah, exactly.
So they're all using basically the 2.0 RSS spec.
Yeah.
And yeah, that spec actually can go with videos as well.
Nobody really uses it for that,
but we're like one of the first people
that would allow you to publish a movie over an RSS feed,
which is kind of dope.
Got it.
So let's talk about the mechanics of this.
as a user, as a consumer of content,
you sign up for an IndieHub account
and you have the option of
either upgrading to a membership
or just being a free user
who then looks for films
that the filmmakers listed at a price
and then you can just rent those, right?
By paying either in Lightning or,
and I believe there's a fiat option as well, correct?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So basically the free option is create an account.
You can browse everything that's on the platform.
You can watch the trailers.
You can look at the cast and crew who are involved.
And so that's if you don't want to pay a monthly.
And then if a filmmaker has a movie for rent, then we basically keep track of your rentals.
And you can rent something for 48 hours and watch it and be good to go.
And how much today, how much is the monthly subscription?
So our lowest tier is $10 a month, and we go from $10 to $15 to $25.
And the primary difference, the only difference between those tiers is how much do you want to pay a filmmaker.
So if you want to pay a filmmaker more money, you just pay more monthly, and we make a larger distribution on your behalf, basically.
So we have a $10, $15, and $25, and the payout is $0.25, $0.50, and $1 an hour of watch time.
I see.
So really from a filmmaker's perspective, it makes a lot more sense to target the free users of IndieHub, right?
Because if you talk about a one-hour movie, the maximum they're going to make is $2 from the subscribers, right?
From the highest tier, correct?
Yeah.
Whereas if you list it for $10 rental and a free user just sort of scans the QR code and lighting code and buys it, you make a lot more.
Exactly.
So what we were trying to do there is get sort of both customers.
So you've got the kind of economy of scale.
So if you get more people who are just subscribed and they'll run across your thing and watch it for free or not an upcharge, you're just going to have more eyeballs on that as our audience base grows.
But for the people who don't want to pay, you're going to have a higher margin but lower amount of renters, basically.
So you kind of can attack both markets if you want.
Gotcha.
Alvi, is your book on – your book is not audio yet, so you don't have – do you have a digital copy?
I'm just curious.
I'm trying to equate buying a tangible book versus renting a book versus listening to an audio book.
If there's kind of the margins there or what the author kind of gets in that scenario too.
But I don't know if we know enough to talk about it.
But there's certainly models out there that are there for the taking.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, for a digital book, the margins are close to 100%, right?
Or it should be anyway.
because it's but but but but if you take like your am let's say i have uh uh like a whatever
the hell the book uh the digital book uh app is on apple uh you know if i have credits then
it's like a different you get paid differently for like your your monthly credits uh if i buy a book
with credits so there's there's something a little suspect about the way apple does it but i
Yeah, then you can draw the comparison to the way Spotify pays musicians for the number of streams.
I mean, the fiat chicanery there is...
As someone who, as a filmmaker or as a songwriter, whatever it might be,
you see that, Zach? I'm intentionally dancing around the word creator there.
Artist, artist.
But that's right. Are you a musician? Are you a filmmaker?
Like, what is that?
You know, because people are like, I'm a creator.
And it's like, bro, you sell ads for Pepsi.
Like, you're in the advertising business.
You know, like I...
No, but that said, you know, all of these artists, they get nothing.
They get skinned alive by these fiat platforms, right?
Which is where something like an indie hub where it's at least, or a fountain, or a wave
lake, or whatever it is, right?
These platforms built on the sovereign stack, if you will.
they're a much better deal because first of all you pretty much cut out the platform rent seeking
and you go direct to customer and obviously Wavelake is a platform in some sense Indie Hub
is or it's a venue anyway where the content is hosted Indie Hub 2 is a venue where content is
hosted, but it feels like a lot thinner layer than the fat fiat venues that we have.
Yes. Yes. Much thinner. Much thinner.
Who would you view as your fiat competition that you want to take down here Is it Netflix Is it Hulu Amazon Prime video Which one I would say probably more like a little more like Amazon Prime a little more
like Vimeo. And to some extent, Rumble, but that's really only because they're publicly traded.
You know, part of the chicanery that we're experiencing is because these companies are
available to trade on public markets. And that adds to a significant amount of the nonsense.
Like we're going to borrow against our balance sheet, uh, and, you know, create this show that
nobody really wanted or nobody really rooted for or paid for, you know, like what did, like,
what did Netflix do for Michelle Obama's, uh, or maybe it was just the Obama's rights to their
doc or something. It was like, I'm going to mess this up, but the numbers were just
ridiculously high. You know, it's like $300 million. And you're like, I mean, is that money
laundering though? You know, like, I, you know, I don't know, man. Um, so, but I would say, I would
say, uh, Amazon a little more because it's more, a little bit more infrastructural than Netflix.
Um, Netflix is, uh, I think, you know, this, this is, you know, kind of comical coming from, uh,
just a random pleb here talking shit on the sidelines. But like, you know, I think Netflix's
big problem is they're going to have to decide whether they want to, uh, you're going to have
to pick a lane between infrastructure or, or movie production. Um, cause they're two totally
different businesses and they're both really hard. They're both very challenging. Um, and I think
that the market over time is going to compress everybody into forcing them to that decision.
There's going to be really good infrastructure providers and there's going to be really,
really good storytellers and they probably shouldn't be crossing over the way that they do
now. And the only reason they do now is because Netflix was the first company to stream movies on
the internet. So that makes sense. But we're in like bottom of the third here as far as the internet
changing all commerce, but especially the film business, you know, really hasn't been that long.
So I think of Netflix as more of a production company. They're more of a, you know, distributor.
uh amazon is more infrastructure vimeo is a little bit more infrastructure um rumble's a
little bit more infrastructure so i would say like those interesting what sub stack just just
just because i'm curious and i like the network uh what are your thoughts on angel studios um
okay so i'm not as intimately familiar with their model um but i think i think they're
they're also going in a similar direction um you know they've got their they've got this really
interesting thing with the guild where they figured out a way to get people to pay them to
do their job for them yeah like subscribe to the guild and and but the the guild votes so like we
had a bitcoin shooter on and he was trying to get no more inflation uh possibly to he basically you
submit the video and then the guild votes yes or no and uh it's kind of a democracy democracy of uh
what's up next yeah um but yeah and then the tuttle twins same thing they they have to i guess
submit episodes and they get voted or ideas get voted something like that but it's it's interesting
but that's it i don't know i don't know if that would be considered a studio or an infrastructure
maybe both because i think they do have some angel studio studio movies too but i i think i would i
would consider them more on the studio model of things um and i don't uh you know what here's what
I'm trying to solve for. What I'm trying to solve for is that the risk takers get the commensurate
reward. And so I'm trying to provide the infrastructure for talented filmmakers to
put their movie to market and see if the market responds. Right now, there's no real efficient way
to do that. And that's all anybody's really asking for is a fair shot. I think that Angel Studios
is I think they're going to run into issues as far as as filmmakers get sick of the deal. Like,
I don't think that they're that the filmmakers are getting the commensurate reward in that setup.
And so I think when when a platform offers a better reward for the response,
it's going to be a natural place for filmmakers to go. And I don't think that that place quite
exists yet. And I think part of the reason for that is we need to have like a reg CF. We need,
we need some securities clarification, particularly in the crypto world. And we need filmmakers to be
able to source funds from their fan base and have their fan base get rewarded for that risk,
which is still a little bit of a legal gray area that I want to attack. But I, the point I'm trying
to make is that I think that Angel has figured out a way to outsource a lot of the work that
they should be doing internally. And I think that they're kind of preying on filmmakers and artists
in a very similar way that studios currently do. And so I'm not sure it's super sustainable
long-term. I think it's an interesting idea, but the second that filmmakers can monetize in a fair
away on a fair platform and bring their audiences over and know that they're just getting paid for
what's being watched, that's my bet. I think that that will have the longevity.
You know, Zach, I want to go back to that fissure you're talking about that might happen
between an infrastructure provider and a content studio, like you say with Netflix. But I mean,
Prime isn't entirely out of that business, right? There are Prime original shows that you see every
now and then. Apple TV is a great example. Their infrastructure and they have original content.
Ted Lasso is a great example of that. Hulu, I believe, has their own original content,
their infrastructure too. So do you genuinely believe that over the course of the next few
years that this will become unsustainable for them and they'll have to make a choice, all of them?
it's going to take a long time but i think that we're over the next probably let's call it 15
years i know that's kind of a long time frame but i i think that 15 year cycles make sense um
you know hulu for example right hulu got hulu had their thing going and then they got bought by
disney it all just continues to get folded into larger and larger companies um you know amazon and
apple uh those are kind of lost leaders for them um you know they're not on the books making a
bunch of money with these, you know, building out the streaming and producing these giant shows that
have insane costs. They're using them kind of as marketing tools. So I think that over the years,
things will continue to consolidate and you'll start to see more decentralized, more independent
competitors pop up. And you'll see kind of like Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin's sort of a bottom-up
revolution. I think the same thing is going to happen as far as the monetization of arts are
concerned. And I think that it's going to continue to get less and less profitable to produce these
massive, massive shows. I mean, case in point, the reason that there was, the reason that the,
you know, there's been a massive slowdown, like things are not doing well for the film business
right now. Things are just kind of bleak and dark and just not, it's not going well. A lot of people
are out of work. A lot of people are having to leave their careers. It's been pretty bleak the
last couple of years. And a big part of that is that interest rates went up. So it's really easy
for studios to pump out an insane amount of content when interest rates are at zero. But
the second you saw interest rates go from zero to 5%, all of a sudden there's a writer's strike
and they have to cancel other shows. It's because they can't afford to actually produce these shows
when interest rates are at 5%. Why is that? What is the relationship between interest rates
and profitability of studios?
Well, they're not profitable.
You know, the media arms of these places on paper
are not profitable.
They've all been losing an insane amount of money.
And so they can borrow the money.
Is it because they're not able to borrow at low rates?
It's all debt-based?
Is that what the cost of debt servicing is?
Okay, got it.
It's the same Fiat Ponzi and every other thing.
It's literally the same thing in art and film.
they have been uh producing garbage i might add um at zero percent at nothing interest rates for
however long and it's just been a race to the bottom and now that you know money's a little
more expensive all of a sudden you know most of the you know there's there's strikes and all these
shows are shut down and the whole industry is like you know in a black hole right now so i think a
few more cycles of that um and you'll see further consolidation and you'll see competitors at the
bottom start to pop up like they're popping up now. You know, Substack is going to be a really
interesting one. I think they've got a great platform and they've got great tools for publishers
and, you know, Rumble's doing their thing. They got the Tether Wallet. You got IndieHub coming up.
So I think you're going to see a lot of people nipping at the heels of the big studios.
The little ones will continue to get folded up into the big ones. And in 15 years or so,
it's going to be like, okay, well, are we doing infrastructure or are we making movies?
I think it's going to take a little while.
You know, on the one hand, saying that there will be a bottom-up decentralized revolution
in this sounds, I mean, it sounds very compelling, right, Zach?
But the way you're describing it, I almost read it as quality is going to go down because
there's not going to be enough funding for some of these high quality grander vision projects
and granted some of it came from cheap fiat money right at artificially low interest rates or
whatever it might be but but to make a grand work of art you do need to compensate a lot of people
fairly, right, which is where a lot of the money goes. If it is bottom up and you're relying on
the generosity of people like value for value or something like that, at least on initial evidence,
that doesn't look too promising, right, for raising a large amount of money and making
something grand. Yeah, I think you've nailed it. And I think that's why you've nailed it in the
short term. And that's why it's not going to be a short term thing. You know, similar to 2008,
when the whole industry collapsed,
it had to get rebuilt
and people needed to figure out
where the money was coming from.
A similar thing is going to happen here.
But the problem now
with the huge budget movie,
the quality has already gone down, right?
The quality of movies over the last 15 years
has gone down significantly.
The artistic integrity,
the artistic skill level,
just the quality of story overall,
the quality of filmmaking,
Everything has sort of gone down, gone down pretty dramatically.
And that is with increased budgets.
That's with Netflix having spent more than every other studio combined.
And so what I'm getting at is that like the budgets are inflated.
They're far overinflated and you have too many cooks in the kitchen and you have too
many people who are totally not involved in the artistic process at all making artistic
decisions.
And so what we need to see is not that the overall number goes up in the short term but the ROI goes up So if you can compress budgets and you can increase the quality and you can you know let say you do an indie for you know let say two three years from now you get somebody on IndieHub
It's like, hey, I'm going to do this indie.
I had a million dollar budget.
if they can go on IndyHub and make 20% or 30% or 40% or their money back at all,
that's a huge win compared to what's possible now. And so the overall, you're not going to see
$500, $600 million budget on IndyHub anytime soon, but what you're going to see is all these
independent producers saying, hey, I couldn't make anything at a $500,000 budget or a million
budget before I was losing money. If I can either lose less money or even make it somewhat slightly
profitable on this platform, now we can figure out how to rearrange the budgets and scale and
bring the audiences here and increase those numbers. But the most important thing is that ROI
number. And I think that that can start to go up because right now it's negative. It's bad. It's
super bad. You think Hollywood keeps redoing the same movies or let's say a movie from 20 years
ago and we're just going to remake it because there's already a cult following money's tight
so they can kind of guarantee the the story's good and uh they might have a just a baseline of
people that will absolutely see yeah because they can't uh so the analogy i use or the way that i
use the way that i describe this is that you you know filmmaking and art requires you know good
filmmaking good art requires a particular amount of risk you have to be willing to take huge risk
And this is what the old Hollywood moguls were kind of famous for.
You know, they put their names on the line.
They were hyper competitive and they took big risk.
But publicly traded companies are not the vehicle to take big risk on in the artistic realm.
The CEOs of publicly traded companies don't, they want to get their bonus.
And so they're just numbers oriented.
And so they're like, okay, cool.
well, if we just green light another Spider-Man 78, I'll get my, you know, kind of guaranteed
bonus here. We've run the numbers. We know this many people are going to see it. Cool. Pump it
out. They're not going to go say, hey, I'm going to go create this incredible new idea. I'm not
going to push the boundaries because I'm going to get my bonus. I'm going to get fired in two or
three years anyway. So publicly traded companies are not the right, they're not the appropriate
vehicle for the type of risk that filmmaking requires and filmmaking needs. So this is why
we see remake after remake after remake after remake, because all the CEOs of these publicly
traded companies don't want to take outside risk. And have you seen that show, The Studio?
I haven't. I haven't started it yet. I just watched a couple episodes. I'm like not that
into it, but it was just interesting how in the back of the day, how top heavy a lot of these
production studios were, meaning there was one person that was kind of running the show.
and I just, you know, he was green lighting or red lighting different ideas.
Do you see that anymore or is it more of a,
because now that these companies go public and they have boards,
I mean, who makes these decisions
and who makes these ultimate decisions to actually make movies, you know?
And in your situation, you're just basically,
people come to you, they want to show it,
and you're just open door.
But with the production side of things,
there's a lot of liability on the top there.
When they do Snow White again and it's a total flop,
that's millions and millions and millions of dollars.
So I don't know.
I mean, is there a hierarchy these days?
Yeah, there is, but I would say it's a...
It doesn't seem like anybody has a spine.
No, no, they don't.
They totally don't because why would they?
They don't, again, their risk reward system
is totally jacked. Um, they're rewarded for taking as little risk as possible and, you know,
great filmmaking should be like, you know, there's a, there's a lot more risk that you need to take.
You still have to be responsible, obviously it's still a business, but, um, it's become a little
bit more socialist. I mean, and by a little bit, I mean a lot bit, you know, like there's a lot of
this, it's, you know, it, one dude making decisions is kind of how movie sets are built,
you know, like a, like on a, on a proper movie set, like the director is God, the director should
be God. You know, you got the director, you got the producer and basically the buck stops with
them. Um, that's kind of how it should be because it's, it's one dude's vision and he has to make
sure that everybody's swimming in the same direction and everybody's on the same page.
Um, that doesn't mean that he's micromanaging everybody, but, but you have to have, there has
to be someone in charge of yes or no. Like the arguments and the discussions and the decisions
have to go to somebody who says yes or no. Now it's like, you've got a committee of people who
are like, oh, it'd be cool. I feel like it would be cool if this happened. And then somebody's like,
well, this would be cool if this happened. And I think you should change this line to that and
this script to that. And then like all of a sudden, like 15 people have an opinion about
something they probably shouldn't have an opinion about. And you get these really middle of the road
script. So unremarkable. Exactly. Bingo. Bingo. So, yeah. Are you, so how you're currently,
your focus obviously is the, I guess what I'm going to ask is, are you appealing to non-Bitcoin
filmmakers? And what, what reception has? Yeah. To be honest, that that's going to be our biggest
market because our primary customer filmmakers and, you know, the overwhelming majority of
Filmmakers are still really don't know anything about Bitcoin.
And so our goal right now is to onboard as many films and filmmakers as we can.
You know, there's a mountain of decent movies that have been sort of overlooked or festival quality movies that are just, you know, had their run and kind of aren't doing anything.
So we're trying to just do a little arbitrage and vacuum up as much of that stuff as we can.
And most of those filmmakers aren't familiar with Bitcoin.
Right. And I'm the goal for me was to not market this as a as a quote unquote crypto platform or we're just using the best technology to solve the problem.
And if people want to dive underneath that and figure out how it works, that's fantastic.
But you don't have to. You can just upload it and do your thing.
So, you know, I think probably from an audience side, you know, we'll have a lot of Bitcoiners.
We certainly want to get as many Bitcoin movies on here as we can.
I mean, there's a lot of Bitcoin movies on there already. But the biggest pile of movies is certainly non-Bitcoin. And most filmmakers, unfortunately, have not been orange-pilled yet, which is something I'm working on.
Is there any – go ahead.
And I was going to ask, you know, we talked about the non-Bitcoin filmmakers, obviously a venue for movies that may not have made the cut on, you know, or had a big break, right? That's the initial target, as you said, Zach. But what about non-Bitcoin users? Because it seems like the, you pay with lightning, right, is the option. I mean, there is a fiat option to rent. What about for memberships? Is there a fiat option?
as well?
Yeah, you can pay the subscription with a credit card
or with Lightning.
And the Lightning bit actually
is a really hard problem on Bitcoin to solve,
which Pierre Corbin over at Pay With Flash
has been working on. He's kind of the only
plug-and-play solution to do that right now. Shout out to him.
So,
that's only been
recently available. We've had Bitcoiners for
a number of months like, hey, I'd like to
do my subscription to Bitcoin. And I'm like, we can't yet.
It's like, not possible.
We're early.
But you can do Bitcoin, you can do fiat.
Totally up to you as an audience member.
It's hard because, well, the way Fountain solves it is they have an integrated wallet.
And you said you didn't want to do that, right?
You don't want to have an IndyHub wallet.
So this is something we've kind of been on the fence for a while about.
And when we started the design, I initially wanted them to have a wallet built in.
But this was pre-Trump and it was all very, very – things were very, very uncertain with regards to how the government was going to come down on that.
And so now that things are kind of opened up a little bit, believe it or not, the first person I reached out to help build this was – what is his name?
Oh my gosh.
I'm forgetting it.
Over at Breeze.
What's the team?
Reichenfeld?
That's exactly right. So right when, thank you. Sorry, Roy. That was a few years back,
but right when EgoDeath announced their raise with Breeze, I was like, oh, this is perfect
because we could have like a user integrated wallet and it would just be on their device.
And he, but he was building it in Rust at the time and our developer like just had no idea
what was going on with that. And so I was like, damn. So we started building it in a different
script. But anyway, all that's to say that I am not opposed at all to building in kind of a wallet
solution for people who want to do that. And integrating Nostra, that's something else that
I'd like to do, like a login with Nostra and have comments kind of like Fountain does. Totally fine
with all that. But, you know, it's still a small world and a small community. And to really convince
filmmakers that, you know, they can, they can have a little ROI and make their money back.
We have to, we have to make them onboarding their fan bases very, very easy. And so it needs to feel
really familiar, familiar to them as well. And Fountain uses a ZBD or Zebedee, which they're out
of LA. I believe Andrea's, I remember when they came to Nostra, all the Zebedee girls, Obby,
rockstar was laughing about that. Uh, I called Zebedee, but I think it's EBD. Uh, anyways,
that's, uh, and, and I think they're actually going to be launching a Noster client soon again,
round two. Uh, so that's, but, uh, it seems like everything's leaning to LNURL, Zaps, Noster. Uh,
and have you had any thoughts about leaning into Noster? Just at least this. Yeah, a hundred
100%. I want to do it. That's just a matter of time and engineering, figuring it out. We're in a little transition right now as far as engineers go, kind of in a downshift as we start to seek some angel rounds of funding.
so I have to get
engineering, I have to get them familiar
with all of that tech
kind of in the first place and
they've got to kind of wrap their heads around it
but I would say
probably the next couple of
major feature releases would be a full
blown login with Nostra integration
I know a guy
just give Avi one cigar
a bottle of wine and get him in front
of that computer
I was going to say, Kidabi, you sold my thunder
I was going to say, I know a guy, his name is Claude.
And he'll do it for you in a jiffy.
We're vibing, dude.
Let's go.
Yeah.
When everything when all the when we get tea you know what happened It was obby No but it is a fair point Zach because you know just so viewers know I think I mentioned this on the previous show or the one before
the Finding Home Pilot is on IndieHub. That's where people can watch it. And I have had people
reach out to me saying, hey, man, why do I have to put my email in? Why can't I sign in with Nostar?
So just a requirement request right there for you, Zach, that's coming through user feedback.
Yep, 100%. We're on it. Definitely no reason. I have no ideological reason, just economic and time. Just got to get it integrated and get them kind of educated and do it. I will say, though, that you can put whatever email you want in, in whatever name you want. It can be one of the fake emails from Simple Login or whatever. I don't care. I just need a way to track your behavior so I can pay the filmmakers.
we're not selling your your emails to advertisers i'll put it that way
it's it's like when fountain uh we see we see the statistics obby um for the most part and i think
they track it by because they pay per sat i i don't know it's uh because you you get paid when
you when you listen i mean it might be 10 sats but uh it's something about the incoming and
outgoing, uh, sats that, uh, that might add to the, to how they track it. Um, but that's interesting.
How, how do you track it? Um, and how do you track it? Well, so it's kind of interesting,
right? This is why RSS, the RSS 2.0 is really interesting. Um, and I, I kind of like it. It,
it's not, it's not going to have any, um, just wait till Nostra 10.0, uh, just completely
absorbs RSS.
Then we'll do that.
That'll piss some people off.
The problem is always like, okay, you can
put your movie for free. We could put your movie for free over RSS 2.0
and we could publish it over RSS and you could go on
whichever podcast app and watch the actual video of it.
What's the one that's really good? Is it Guru?
Yeah, Podcast Guru. Those guys have it really well integrated already, better than anybody I've seen, where you just, bam, video pops up, you can watch the movie. But the problem with that is that there's no paywall at all, so you have to be cool with somebody watching the movie completely for free.
the trade-off is that in that circumstance, the audience can tip you and stream sats to you,
and that payment routing has nothing to do with IndieHub at all. That totally goes through RSS
2.0 and the Lightning protocols. If the filmmaker chose or we said we force you to give us a 10%
of the split or whatever, we could do that. But as a matter of principle, it doesn't have to go
through IndieHub at all because we're just posting the RSS feed. And in that case, maybe
we're hosting the media. So then at that point, the cost is borne by whoever's paying the RSS
hosting fees. So ostensibly, the filmmaker would have to pay a ton of money because let's say you
want to do a 4K movie that's two hours long and you get even 50,000 people watch it. That's a lot
of bandwidth. That's going to cost a lot of money to push those pixels around. So the cost has to
get born by somebody. So you can do pay for the hosting monthly. And then the lightning routing
can just go through lightning and, and, and none of the payments have anything to do with that.
Okay. That's fine. Or you can kind of do what, what we're doing on IndyHub, which is
we've paywalled it. And we keep track of the payment. So we just have a database and says,
this user account was watching this movie and they watched this movie for X amount of seconds.
and we do a calculation every second that calculates a dollar value. And then when they
do the withdrawal, we do the conversion in sats. That's just a lot easier from an audience member
perspective if they just want to browse a bunch of movies and they're not on the RSS 2.0 thing,
and they don't have a lightning wallet, and they don't know how to tip, and they don't know how to
do any of this stuff. We're still early on all of that stuff. So we basically just have a database.
We keep track of everything. Filmmaker puts in their LNURL. We send the payments out that way.
yeah that is an interesting uh dilemma that that you run into because so for fountain obviously we
don't do video we just host our audio there but we have to pay for the hosting cost right um
and and so fountain then doesn't need to track anything because they don't need to worry about
the splits and and all of that stuff yeah in your case you're bearing the cost of the computer
and the storage and the transcoding
and all of that fun stuff that you need to do, right?
I mean, these are non-trivial tasks.
Yep.
You handle all of that.
And I guess the way you try and make that back up
is by taking a percentage in the split
when the payments come in.
For the rentals,
for the people who are doing the one-off rentals.
Exactly, exactly.
For the rentals,
because we still have to push all the data.
We have to push the pixels.
somebody watches it that's coming off our server we've done all the transcoding we're hosting your
profile page we're setting it all up for you yada yada exactly now if you if you do if this is
something you can answer zach uh or if you can't then you know just say so but which one is a better
margin for you the the percentage the split you take off the one-time rental purchase or
what, or from the monthly subscriptions? It's kind of a bell curve. It's a curve.
As things, if we get to scale, then it'll be subscriptions by far. But that requires a lot
of subscriptions monthly. And really the difference there, you know, and there's a lot of assumptions
there. I mean, this is just, I'm just putting this out here, but this is basically what it all
comes down to, if you think about it. It just comes down to user behavior, right? Netflix is
kind of a similar, in a similar boat. I mean, it's different because they're paying licensing
fees rather than just watch time. But at the end of the day, like the books kind of look similarly.
You have X amount of users that are watching X amount of hours and it's costing you X amount
of dollars to push those pixels into their living room. That's basically it. And so
we actually, on the subscription model, there's going to be users that we lose money on who watch
a ton of movies and a ton of content. And then there's going to be users who like, you know,
I've been on vacation. I didn't log in for two, three months. And that was our margin for them.
So there's going to be users like whatever they don't, the amount of time that they don't consume
is essentially what we're operating our margin on. And, um, you know, there's not going to be
the people on Netflix who really cost Netflix a ton of money are the people who binge watch shows
like 50 hours a week. Like they just don't stop watching long form shows over and over again.
But the person who watches like three, four, five hours of stuff, you know, that's no big deal. So
at scale, it's the subscription model. Um, in the short term, it's, uh, probably rentals,
but it depends, right? I mean, the math is weird. Like, let's say, you know, let's say you hosted
your project on IndieHub for the next, you know, 50 years and nobody rented it after tomorrow.
Like then I still have to pay to host all of that. I'm still paying for the storage. I'm still
paying for that to be on our servers. And so over time, I could actually lose all of them,
all of whatever profit or revenue was generated, whatever margin was there could be wiped out
based on how long I host it. So it's a bunch of really complicated math. Um, but essentially at
scale, it's subscriptions that would make us the best margin. But in fairness, the storage costs
are not as much compared to the compute costs, right? The biggest costs. Yeah. The biggest
Storage is relatively cheap.
The biggest cost is pushing the data to you by far.
Yeah.
So it won't be a tragedy for you if people don't watch it for 50 years and you're still hosting it.
I'll host it as long as we're around.
I promise you that.
As long as you don't unpublish it and IndieHub is still around, you'll be there.
so zach you know with the burning question you said maybe in a few years you you think about a
house of cards type scenario but but then as we were talking about it you were talking about this
potential bifurcation that could happen in the next 10 years between the studio and the
infrastructure so with i guess with those two in in some sense conflicting uh pieces in mind
Would you, do you have any plans for producing original content?
Fantastic question.
At this point, I don't precisely because they're just two different businesses.
And it's, the big stuff that the big studios are making are like, you know, they're struggling to find those profitability, to find profitability in those projects.
So really my main goal and the goal that I'm really laser focused on is to make IndieHub the best place for filmmakers from concept to exhibition. And if we can do that and we can make it profitable or at least increase margins for filmmakers to bring their work over to IndieHub, then I've done my job.
And I'll be really, really hyped if we can get some independent filmmakers to fund their projects in a decentralized way like you're doing Avi with Angor and maybe a company like Geyser or whatever these crowdfunding platforms are.
It would be fantastic to see some shows and some projects earn a return on IndieHub that's better than they would have made anywhere else.
And so I'd be happy with that.
And then the next phase really is that we need to build in the crowdfunding capabilities directly within IndieHub for filmmakers to go to their investors or their fan base and raise money.
That's going to take some time.
That's going to be an expensive lift just from a legal perspective.
But that's where the puck is going and that's where we're skating.
So if we can have a handful of projects that are able to fundraise in a more decentralized way and return capital in a more decentralized way in a successful way on IndyHub, I'll be happy about that.
Producing original content is a huge lift.
It's very complicated.
It's very challenging.
And it requires a tremendous amount of risk.
And for the foreseeable future, I would say five years or so, maybe more.
I don't see that happening because it's just a huge distraction.
And it's just challenging.
Making a good movie is hard enough as it is.
Yeah.
He's waiting on interest rates on.
Exactly.
We're waiting on those strike loans to go down to sub 3% and then I'll be...
He's going to remake Bitcoin Shooters, No More Inflation.
Mike, if you're listening to this,
just throw your movie up on IndieHub.
It's no problem.
It'll be fine.
The water's warm.
So what's next, man?
What's next for IndieHub?
Man, honestly, like a lot of this.
So I would say the phase we're in right now
is we're going to really start in earnest
trying to onboard films and filmmakers and artists,
podcasts, doing shows, getting the word out,
going to film festivals.
I've kind of been all over the place this summer
talking about it to people
and starting to onboard filmmakers.
And we're going to probably start our initial raise,
like an angel raise,
now that the MVP works.
And, you know, response has been great.
Honestly, the film, I think you asked that earlier, like what's the response from normal
filmmakers?
And they're generally ecstatic.
Like almost everybody I talked to about this is like, holy shit, that's fucking incredible.
Like what?
I get paid like as I'm watching it.
That's crazy.
Because that's not the reality they live in right now.
So the response there has been great.
Talking to filmmakers, do a little marketing for filmmakers, just to onboard filmmakers.
We're not, we're not marketing to audience members right now.
We need to build our library first and foremost.
um obviously projects that come in we'll market with them and and talk to their fans and promote
as best we can but we need to get we need to get content on there um and then we gonna do you know get the pitch deck ready to go and and we got an idea We going to market to like a very finite amount of people in the industry who have a vested interest in sort of keeping the art form alive and going uh independent filmmakers
successful ones that, that have a name and a little legacy. And, um, I want to go find a couple,
a couple angels and, uh, give us, you know, a few years of runway to really, really hit the ground
running with development.
So we can integrate things like Noster
and start to work on the investment side of things
and start to do a little bit of a marketing push
and hire some talented individuals
to bring them on board here.
That's kind of where we're at, man.
We're like early, early days here.
Angels, if you're listening,
you heard Zach.
Come on in and make the future
of independent cinema with Zach.
So Zach, any...
And get Avi's finding home over 100%.
Yes, let's go.
Come on, angels.
Let's do it.
Anything else you want to plug, Zach?
Man, I think you guys did a great job.
It was a fantastic conversation If you guys want to check out IndieHub IndieHub I
slash register.
Sign up as an audience member or filmmaker for free.
If you have any questions,
you can hit me up on Noster,
Zach at IndieHub.xyz
or IndieHub at IndieHub.studio.
I'm on Twitter at IndieHub.
And, you know, get in touch.
You're basically talking to me directly,
and we're just going to be out there trying to solve as many problems as we can
and get things going.
Avi's project's on here.
Finding Home, it's fantastic.
Thank you, Avi, for throwing it up here.
And I hope response has been good.
I'm not sure.
What are things that look like on your end?
Have people been checking it out?
It has been very positive, Zach, I'll say.
Yes.
It's been great.
overwhelming actually
that's fantastic
for sure
so Zach
appreciate you taking the time
educating us
on all the wonderful things you doing with independent film thank you for dishing Interledger and moving to Lightning I hope you stay We will We will
Anything else for me, QW?
No, just it was great meeting you.
I'm in Phoenix, so if you're ever in Phoenix, hit me up.
I'm not far from you.
It's a little hot right now, but, you know, I'll survive and just keep prompting.
just keep prompting, just keep prompting.
That's it. So thanks for coming on. I'll, all those, what,
what you rattled off, I'll put in the show notes. So all those links,
how to get in contact with Zach, Indie hub, register, all the above.
So that will be in the show notes and that's it.
and thank you for tuning in to Pleb Chain Radio.
If you appreciate us as much as we appreciate you,
listen on Fountain App and consider hitting the subscribe button.
Until next week, gentle plebs, farewell.
Goodbye.
Ciao.