That's it, hot summer. That's it, open.
The signal is here. This is Bloodshed Radio.
Welcome, gentle pioneers, to the Lightning-Laced Airwaves.
This is episode 150 of Plep Chain Radio, and we have a fun one in store for you today.
Augie from the Mestadel is here, and we're going to talk about regenerative agriculture
and the parallel system that is being built, and you didn't even know about it.
If you are hearing my voice right now on Spotify or Apple, thank you for being here.
But understand this, you are tuned into the legacy feed.
It works, but it's a monologue.
It's a one-way street.
Over here on Fountain and Noster, we are building a two-way radio.
This is a Valley for Valley broadcast.
There are no corporate ads here because the producers of this show, that's you, keep the frequency clear.
If you're ready to upgrade your experience, earn sats while you listen and actually have a say in the direction of the show, then come join the Real Signal over on the V4V side.
Now, let's set the stage for the final word.
The role of executive producer for next week is currently up for grabs
As always, the top booster earns the title and the exclusive right to close out the show
But remember, this segment works best when there's friction
I'm not looking for an echo chamber
I'm looking for a peer review
In a moment, I'm going to get into the sermon
If I strike a nerve, or if you think I missed the mark entirely, use the boost to correct the record.
This is your chance to direct the show, not just support it.
The final word is yours to take, provided you're willing to back up your argument.
And that brings us to our sermon today.
The top of the stack, that's what drives today's obsession.
The interface, the aesthetic, the announcement, the brand, the overnight success story,
conveniently skipping the years of quiet work, the failures,
the compost pile of attempts that became nourishment for the next season.
But the question is, is reality built from the top down?
And the answer is no. Reality rises.
It rises the way a forest rises, from rot and microbes and unseen agreements between roots and fungi.
It rises the way a strong body rises, from sleep, repetition, and the boring consistency nobody wants to film.
It rises the way a real economy rises, from trust, proximity, and people who keep their word when it would be easier to disappear.
and it rises the way a healthy soil rises.
Soil is the original protocol.
It's a living network.
It turns death into fertility, chaos into structure, sunlight into food.
And when the soil is alive, the whole system becomes resilient.
Drought hits, you adapt.
Pests come, the ecology responds.
Seasons shift.
the land keeps breathing. But when the soil is dead you can still fake it for a while.
You can pour inputs on top, you can spray, you can subsidize, you can advertise, you can hold up
a perfect looking tomato that tastes like wet cardboard and pretend the system is fine.
That's the pattern everywhere right now
We're trying to solve deep living problems with shallow synthetic fixes
We want abundance without stewardship
We want community without commitment
We want sovereignty without responsibility
And we want fruit without the roots
Here's the uncomfortable truth
The top of the stack is always downstream from the soil
If your culture is sick
It's because the soil of relationships is depleted
If your mind is scattered
It's because the soil of attention has been strip mined
If your money feels cursed
It's because the soil of incentives has been captured
If your technology becomes a cage
it's because the soil of values never made it into the design.
So the work, the real work, is stripped of glamour.
It's regenerative.
It's rebuilding living systems at the base layer.
Better incentives, deeper trust, real fertility,
and roots strong enough to hold the weight of whatever grows above them.
Because once the soil is alive, everything above it becomes simpler.
The harvest becomes honest. The trade becomes direct. The tools become servants instead of
masters. The community becomes a place you can stand. And when someone is doing the work at that
base layer, you can feel it. It has a different texture. Less performance, more presence. Less
Less trust me, more look, it grows.
And tonight, let's talk about building stacks that start with soil.
Augie, welcome to Plep Chain Radio.
Hey, thank you. Happy to be here.
So Augie, you know, we've been chatting a little bit on Nostum.
um, um, you're part, we're part of the Mesh2Del, well, you're part of the Mesh2Del crew. Uh, I'm,
I'm just an observer and, uh, and, um, someone who claps, uh, from the sidelines, uh, for people
who are unfamiliar with you and your work, why don't you give us a quick background and I,
and also what in your mind the Mesh2Del actually is.
so i am a software developer by trade that's my day job i've been doing a little bit of open
source stuff in the past year or so but i'm still due to that but my main focus in my life right now
apart from my twin boys that were born in october is building this regenerative farm i have
I have 99 acres under my control and I'm doing management intensive rotational grazing.
I started with sheep, got some pigs and the latest addition is cattle.
And we've dabbled in some other animal species too, but this is the main species we've decided
to stick with for right now.
And just trying to figure out how to...
Heal the soil while building a citadel and trying to welcome as much people in as possible using avenues like the local Bitcoin meetup that we have in Kansas City to, you know, farm pill Bitcoiners and orange pill farmers.
I like that.
It's almost like the yin and yang.
two pills going in opposite directions
perfectly balancing each other out
in this Mesh Tadal
so Augie, you know, we've had folks
from the Mesh Tadal on the show
Rev Hoddle being the very first one
and he talks a lot about
well actually he talks about LAM
as well
but
for folks who are still scratching their heads
and saying, I keep hearing this term Mesh Tadal
you know, and I try
describing it as, and I do a terrible
terrible job of it. I tell them, yeah, it's like a portmanteau of mesh, mesh networks and Citadel.
So that meshed a deal. And they're like, great, play on words. What does it actually mean?
So why don't you sort of in simple terms, explain to folks what the meshed a deal is?
Yeah, I sure try to talk about it as much as possible in terms of like Bitcoin meetups.
I think like we need a Bitcoin meetup in every state and then we need Bitcoin meetup in every
county within every state and then what those bitcoin meetups will do depends on the needs of
that like local uh that locale so ours being in missouri is has a lot of agricultural stuff
but uh maybe there's other ones in beach towns or whatever that they're doing more
boating type things like fishing and things like that, surfing, whatever. But
building a citadel based on your locale's needs and then having the mesh network be able to
supplement things. So maybe where I'm located, it would be really hard to grow wool in a
regenerative way. So people that are further north, where they don't necessarily have as much
humidity or they don't have as much heat, I would rely on them to be the wool production. Maybe
people down south, like right now I'm making this deodorant with arrowroot powder. Florida is the
only, I believe it's the only place in America where you can get arrowroot powder. So we need
to get a Citadel that's growing that.
And having this Bitcoin-only circular economy
that is self-sustaining internally and locally,
but for luxuries, for additional items
that will just add value,
you can look to the rest of the mesh network.
so you know when mesh network in the literal technological definition is these nodes that form
a and you know a network that's sort of parallel to the internet it interoperates with the internet
if you can you could choose to right typically radio waves uh lower low frequency or you're
playing around with different frequency bands and getting these devices that can communicate
with each other, you can potentially send Bitcoin transactions over as well, right? But also Nostra
notes and so on, right? So in some sense, that's the literal technical idea behind a mesh network.
But I get the sense, Augie, when I talk to you and I talk to others who are involved in this,
that mesh sort of transcends the literal definition and becomes more of a metaphor.
Is that a fair understanding?
yeah i think another way to think about it too is like a hologram where if you like cut it in half
each piece still contains like the whole like but it's just degraded so my maybe my citadel has the
ability to produce food in xyz ways but it doesn't have the ability to produce um like i don't know i
I don't do rabbits like Rev does rabbits.
But if you cut the hologram that is the entire mesh to Dell, in part, we're still able to still produce food.
It might not be the best items that we could have if we're all together, but we're still able to meet those basic needs.
And in some sense, there's a parallel here with Noster, right?
You can take a bunch of the main relays offline.
you could take them down
but NOSDA can still survive
because it is in some sense a headless protocol
anyone can spin up a relay if they so choose
and you could take down damas.io
you could take down primal.net
you could take down nos.lol
and a couple of the other big ones
but you could still communicate
yes you might not get the perfect broadcast
you won't be able to broadcast your notes to every single person right off the bat,
but it will regenerate.
It has the ability to regenerate in that sense.
Right. Redundancy, reproducibility is going to make the network more resilient.
You know, these many to many connections.
Okay, we have a cattle producer, but what if we have multiple cattle producers?
That will make us more resilient.
Maybe it will be more difficult to use some backup one but like Rev talks about we need to produce more than we actually need And then how do we use that abundance that we have
So before we get into talking about what you're doing with your farm, you said you're a software developer.
And presumably that's what got you into NOSTA.
So I'm curious how you found NOSTA.
And then I guess the other question is, how does a software developer say, you know what, screw this?
Well, not screw this, but yeah, I'm a software developer, but I want to become a regenerative farmer as well.
Yeah. How did I get into Nostra?
I think it's just Hazard, the NoStrudle developer, goes to my Bitcoin meetup, and he was talking about it, and I tried it and was like, I'm going to play with this for a little bit before I decide to start using it.
And probably like a month later, I ended up just deleting all of the other platforms that I used.
They're just so they had become so toxic.
To my life at that point, even if like you kind of need it when you have a business to be able to like share content out to large groups of people.
But at this point, it's just I would rather just build the things that I need here on Noster to help with that.
I think the social media part of it is not particularly interesting to me.
If we talk about some of the dev projects I'm working on, they're on the other stuff side of the spectrum.
um but how do i go from so what got me to wanting to be regenerative agriculture i think is just
the touch of the tism that i happen to have is like the systems mindedness of uh of things so
being an engineer like i love working in systems and uh the software systems just don't have
any limitations besides like the speed of light. So it's really fun for work on that. But I think
once I got out of college, I started studying YouTube University and when COVID hit, then I
needed to get a little bit, I figured I needed to get a little bit more serious. That's a topic
that I can get into more, what actually pushed me over the edge to making the jump. But I think
I've been ingrained in my life from early on. I was a scout when I was a kid and, you know,
leave no trace or like leave the campsite better than you left it. Just applying that to like the
whole of my life of, I want the patch of dirt that I'm responsible for to be better off than
whenever, like whenever I leave this planet, than whenever I found it.
But studying a lot of regenerative agriculture stuff happened because I was actually starting to figure out how we could build food plots on some hunting ground that we had.
That quickly was like no-till food plots, which the algorithm just kept pushing me into permaculture stuff from there and animals and all of those things.
And I was like, I really should just do this because I think it's not that hard and I can't find any of these products locally for Bitcoin.
So I really should just do this and be the change I want to see in the world.
And it is just amazing being outside all of the time, having a work product that is so physically present and like can't.
there's no bullshit involved.
Like I'm a DevOps engineer,
which is more abstract than a regular software developer.
Like I build software for other software developers.
So that abstraction is difficult to relate to other people with.
And just like being out on the land and like looking at my animals and
observing and the trees and the different species that are growing and trying to figure out how I can
impact that in a way that I want and making mistakes along the way, fixing those, learning,
adapting, changing, doing these longer term experiments is just so different than my day job
that it is very fulfilling to my soul
to have these two ends of the spectrum
as part of my life.
Hey, man, as a DevOps engineer,
if you understand how Kubernetes works
and can actually explain it to people,
then soil and agriculture must be a walk in the park
in comparison, in complexity terms.
um no but but i actually you know there's something you said uh a short while back
augie which is i just wanted to leave this patch of earth i showed up on a little better than
when i came or was to that effect and that is so simple such a simple philosophy why is it so hard
for for everyone to just say something like that and accept that as a core directive uh for them to
or a guiding principle to live their life.
It makes so much sense.
I think a big part is a lack of ownership.
I feel like that's kind of a cop-out answer, though,
because even people that have ownership over the land
don't necessarily abide by that.
I think part of it is the system that we've been brought up in
allows you to ignore the externalities that you create.
You don't have any responsibility for the soil being depleted on your,
on your property because you're,
there's nothing negatively impacting you when there is a,
a dust bowl that is created because you plow and plow and plow and well,
everybody else is doing it too.
so I'm gonna I'm gonna do it that way as well and I think the I I'm I've been leaning heavily
lately on this you need to pay for your externalities um in whatever way it is like
everyone I mean an easy an easy example of this is just plumbing like we just create waste every
day and just it's somebody else's problem and that's basically a good metaphor for the rest of
society like we can just create waste and it's out of sight out of mind and we don't have to care
we have a system that doesn't care and it's really not not healthy to not be able to see the problems
that you're creating downstream.
I wonder if urban living has created this
or shaped this mindset over the last,
whatever it is, few hundred years.
You know, I think of it as the trash compactor analogy, right?
You're talking about waste.
It's if you live in a high-rise building,
as I did for a long time in New York City,
and your trash piles up for a couple of days,
you take the bag out,
you walk down the lobby to the compactor you open the door or you open that little trap door
put it in boom it's gone not your problem anymore then it goes you know it falls down that chute
into the basement in a giant bag in the basement the the building handyman or or or staff they you
know once every ex presumably once a day they come they collect that big bucket or cart with
all the trash bags that have fallen in from the various floors. They bag those up and they toss
them once a week onto the side of the street. Not their problem anymore. Their job is done.
Then the municipal, it's the city, right? So the dump trucks come, the sanitation trucks come,
they come once a week or twice a week, they come pick these things up, toss them into the back of
the truck, go to the garbage dump, drop it there. They wash their hands off it at that point. And
then so on and on and on it's just like this moral hazard essentially right that's that's there where
you don't once it's off your hands you don't really care and i think uh i think that's kind
of crept into modern behavior behavior right so when someone goes um and is building a plumbing
system for their house or is is is tilling land they don't really have to care about what happens
to their neighbor because, you know, they do their thing,
it's on their property, and then they're done at that point.
Yeah, and it's really another aspect to it is, like,
there's subsidies that, at least in America,
that make this mindset easier.
Like agriculture, having subsidies,
uh means that like we don't need to worry about um like the food production as much because the
government is going to pay that person's bills but if like a simplest thing is like uh collecting
collecting urine watering it down and putting it on your garden is going to make it so much
add so much nitrogen in there and going to make your plants so much more fertile
and we just like we put that into drinking water and flush it away and it's it's that's really a
crazy thing if you're thinking about it like 200 years ago you tell somebody you're just gonna do
that that's how you're gonna deal with your your urine is it's gonna be insane but we don't we have
a cheap and easy way to add fertility um but again that creates its own externalities like
that's a highly energy intensive system we have to be reliant on um other entities like i think
most of the that a lot of that fertilizer comes from um different countries as well and specifically
mines and things like that that are just crazy when we have a lot of fertility and we have
ways to deal with these externalities we're creating locally i mean it's it's is the exact
opposite of a closed loop system, what we have today, which is what folks like you in
the regenerative world and permaculture world, they're trying to close that loop and make
it as sustainable as possible.
But even you're talking about, I mean, just waste in general, right?
You could have a situation, again, it's not easy to build this.
I understand there is a capital, upfront capital cost to building this, but waste in general
can be either used as fertilizer or anaerobically digested to create biomethane,
which can be used as fuel, right?
I mean, there is that.
And not that many people are doing it, biomass and those types of things.
We're in the early stages of a project that's similar to that here.
We actually just had, it's called the Foundation for Regeneration.
Uh, they have this project that's called the circular economy.
And, um, we reached out to them to come talk to us and we did it like our first Socratic
seminar at our Bitcoin meetup, um, regenerative agriculture and Bitcoin.
Um, I think I called it cultivating value and they're built, they're doing this and
they have this methane production facility.
and then they from bio like they're making that biogas and so we've been talking with
uh there's some characters in the twitter space that uh some guys at the meetup know who have
talked about we have something that we can produce like three megawatts of energy so we're trying to
talk with them about instead of spending this 60 million dollars of capital that you need to
make the like three dollars per unit um from the from the selling this gas to the gaff company
can we figure out how to we're going to spend a lot less money on the infrastructure to just
spin up a bitcoin mine there and then you can have that or you can use that for your cash flow
but also the impact of that is they have a biochar production facility alongside of that
And so if we can figure this project out, this is really early stages, like we just talked about this last month. But then you can use the heat from the Bitcoin mine to dry the material that goes into the biochar production as well.
Then again another closed loop there I think the biochar production produces syngas and heat So then can we use the heat from that on your phase two of the biogas setup which is black soldier fly larva further processing that down to provide heat for them during the winter um oh and then the syngas to again can we get a small generator that it it less energy every time but a
generator that runs on that to then also add additional uh power to the bitcoin mine
yeah amazing stuff uh if it all plays out and why why wouldn't it if there are enough committed
individuals to doing it so augie let's go back to the farm when did you start this farm and
i'm guessing you you jumped in as a software developer so you didn't have a background
in farming or any of this stuff correct yeah i'm a city boy so i started this farm in 2022
prior to that basically no farming experience during COVID I moved back to the St. Louis area
for to take care of my grandfather for a year and a half yeah he lived on like 10 acres
and I got chickens just to make sure that like this would be the lifestyle for me like I was
fairly nomadic before that almost got trapped in Brazil when the COVID lockdown started happening
Um, so my only experience was having a flock of 12 chickens. I came here. I think the first thing
I got was a guard dog. I got a small flock of sheep to start. So she was trained with four
sheep and my chickens. And then I had been moving them around super frequently. And just by
happenstance I got into contact with some people in the city who were having issues with one of
their leases or whatever it was just some hippies that were kind of trying to do what I'm actually
doing but didn't have access to the land so I got a contract with them ended up within six months
of going from four sheep to 90 sheep.
And then they had 10, 12 pigs that I was raising as well.
So that deal worked pretty good for about a year and a half.
By the time that I ended that contract,
there was 160 sheep under my control.
And I had bred those pigs, all those pigs.
So there was, gosh, how many piglets?
60 to 80?
I don't remember the final count.
But so...
Not bad for a city boy.
Yeah.
And so the people in the contract kept trying to change the terms of the deal.
So I decided to get out of that.
And now I only raise my own animals.
I have 99 acres under my control. I have 30-ish sheep. I have three sows, which I actually just killed my boar because he got them pregnant.
And so then in, I guess that's April, I should have about 30 piglets.
This will be my third year of breeding pigs.
Then I have four cows.
I started by buying a little herd of three just to start.
And one of them decided to jump the fence before I left for Thanksgiving at my parents
and spent the weekend on my neighbor's property,
and I didn't know there was bulls in there.
So this summer she dropped that calf.
So we had a fourth one.
Yeah, yeah, super funny.
Brought a neighbor's bull in just earlier this year
and got the rest of them pregnant, hopefully,
and slowly just growing the herd and the flock.
Right now, I am grass-rich, and I need more cows, but the price of cattle is way too high.
One of my guard dogs is pregnant, so I have seven puppies in the barn right now.
But yeah, that's the state, at least of the animals.
I've been slowly.
I work on really, really not farmable land.
It's super rocky.
It's very hilly.
This is ground that basically can only be farmed with animals because it's just been bulldozed down and now there's grass in some places, but there's pioneer species popping up and taking over more and more pasture.
And I'm taking the invasives out in all of the woods and running pigs and sheep through there to clean that up and using that instead of just going through and spraying a bunch of stuff to kill all these species.
Because one of the main problems we have here is Japanese honeysuckle.
And the sheep really, really love to eat the leaves, but it's invasive as could be.
And it grows everywhere.
And you just look in all the woods.
You can't really walk or see.
You can't even see five feet into them, let alone walk.
But in three years, I've used the sheep and the pigs to my advantage to repair those forests.
So now I can walk around and consider, okay, how do I want to continue thinning this and creating silvopasture?
I guess some things that I've steps I've taken for like education outside, like formally, instead of just looking things up and reading books and, and YouTube, which is great. But I do have a agroforestry certificate from the University of Missouri. And I got a management intensive rotational grazing certificate as well. But those are more just paper certs, like the same and same thing that I have for
DevOps just to
let the fiat-minded know
that I know what I'm talking about.
The fiat obsession
with paper is amazing.
Paper credentials.
Why not just look
at the proof of work? Oh, no.
Where's the piece of paper that says
you were certified by X, Y, and Z?
So the pigs
uh do you raise them for meat or is there an ecological
uh how do they is there a way in which they they participate in this closed loop that you're
trying to trying to create yeah so i do i do raise them for me um they get rotated around the farm
mostly in the wooded areas um i like i'll have these 30 piglets i mostly sell um i sell most of
the piglets to another farmer in the area because my genetics grow way faster than whatever they
can get from another farmer. I'm not sure why that is. They just told me that they bought
some other piglets at the same time as they bought mine and it took them three months longer to finish
out these hogs than mine. I think it just happens to be like the fact that they're raised on dirt
and get to move around and eat different things that they produce piglets that are really
resilient. But so, yes, I use the pigs in the woods because all of the woods that I had was,
like I said before, unwalkable. It was unmanageable. It's just overgrown. Everything's
there. So I can use them to mostly to direct my attention. I can put them in an area,
let them disturb the ground as much as as i feel is necessary in that spot but like while i'm out
and about feeding them i'll go back there with a set of loppers and you know cut stuff down so now i
have a way ways to put other fence for other the other animals like the sheep back there um they
eat all the nuts off the ground um and then i can like um i can use them to break up big big old
logs that are rotting on the ground and turn those into just, you know, dirt as opposed to
just a rotting log that's going to be there for years and years. I can use them to, at one point
we were getting a pickup truck load of ugly produce from the city every week and giving that
to them. And they ended up seeding a bunch of volunteer tomatoes and we get pumpkins from people
when Thanksgiving season's over, and that's really good for them.
They love those as treats.
It's super fun to watch them bust open a pumpkin the size of a human head
or bigger and just like chow down on it.
But they're really good at disturbing the soil in the woods
that is overgrown with invasive species and letting you start over.
So in a traditional pig farm, I say traditional,
in a, let's call it a Fiat pig farm.
Are they fed some kind of industrial slop
that comes in sacks?
Or do they?
Okay.
So yeah, our pigs still get pig feed.
It's just they,
we don't have to give them as much.
And originally I was going with a soy-free feed.
I've since lost that supplier
and I've been trying to find a new one.
Um, there is another, um, there is another feed supplier that I'm considering using.
It's just significantly, like I'm talking about four times as much, um, to, to do that.
And I don't have the market to support that currently.
And so the plan now is to, uh, we just feed the regular corn based, corn based pig feed.
and in I think the next batch I have from a local guy I just found him at my church actually
he has a plot that he has a non-GMO corn so I should be able to trans I'll be able to transition
to at least a non-GMO feed this next month I guess and and that's going to be a little bit
more expensive but again like selling direct to consumer allows me to have a little bit more
control over my clientele as opposed to selling into just a a barn a sale barn i mean soy and
corn are they seem so unavoidable you know in in certainly in america in agriculture here right
it's like they're they're beyond just crops that are grown they're the platform industrial grade
platforms uh corn especially right i mean corn fiber corn high fructose corn syrup it's used for
xanthan gum and and other kinds of gums come out of it that are used as fillers and whatnot
is that even for pigs which i which i believe are some of the most resilient eaters
is corn and soy actually good for them oh definitely definitely not soy i'm a huge i do
not like the fact that i'm feeding soy to my breeders right now the the phytoestrogen stuff
i do i really don't like that it's just a matter of trying to uh i can only i can only sell into
a market my the market that i sell into can only accept a certain dollar value um so i have to make
do with what i can and just use them as tools um to to do the other work around the the farm that i
need while I build up a market that wants that demands more higher quality stuff.
Corn, I'm actually not like a huge hater of corn.
I think the way that it's necessary that it's grown today is really bad.
I think if we did it like non GMO, more organic, less mono crops, it would be super beneficial.
And also just like.
a distillery near me just closed down.
And so I'm talking to my neighbor who's a mechanic to see if he'll want to
convert my Polaris over to ethanol and have me start distilling ethanol
so that I can run my farm equipment off of the feed that they fill my animals.
And I think that the idea of function stacking and having the resilience,
like the corn is all over i ideally would not be sheeting that to any of my uh animals at least the
corn that is being grown here but if i can function stack where i now have independence from
um gas for my farm equipment then we start to get into more of like a permaculture ideal and not
necessarily just being purists. Cause I, I, again, I'm like, I was a kid in high school who loved
biology to the point where I was like determined to become a genetic engineer. And then we went on
a field trip my senior year to Monsanto And I was like Oh I have a pipeline to a job here This is in my hometown This is going to be great I wanted to do so much genetic engineering stuff And then I like did all
the research and was like, Oh, this is the devil. Like I do not want to sell my soul to this
company and do this. So I went in an entirely different direction, but, uh, it is just like
operating within the existing environment.
so that was the pigs uh the cows are they dairy cows or beef cows
these are beef cows it's a cross of an angus and a beef master i definitely uh want different
genetics but um again cattle is at the such a high price right now that i'm just trying to
take what I can get.
Why is that? Is that just
fiat fuckery
with inflation or is there something more
insidious happening with cattle prices?
Joel would be the one
to, Joel or
I think you had Tom on.
Tom Tabor, yeah.
Yeah.
I think
it's more insidious.
I think that
it's a little bit
legislative stuff happening with the labeling requirements and a bunch of different things.
The stock of cattle that we have in the US is the lowest rate that it's ever been right now.
So it is just supply and demand. But why that stock is so low is pretty much,
I think, government intervention is causing that.
in what way so for folks who don't fully understand this and i know you said there
are others who are experts on this okay but what is your take on this how is government intervention
with with the government in theory right you have guys like rfk who are part of this
administration so who in theory should be friendlier uh to beef uh how exactly are they
dwindling the stock with their regulation um well like a lot of it has to do with like the labeling
requirements that are going on and i haven't looked into this in the past three months or so
but i my my understanding is like their beef that it says it's like made in america it doesn't
necessarily have to be like made in america it can just be like packaged here and come from overseas
So if you're like a meat packaging facility, it's going to behoove you to go just get the lowest quality product, not lowest quality, lowest cost product that you have, repackage it, and then you can just sell it for a higher premium, increase your profit margin that way versus going to like American farmers.
There's that. There's the USDA facilities that you have to use to get your product into restaurants and such. They're so limited. They're so overbearing with those regulations that that part becomes hard.
um i think importing genetics i think there's i haven't like looked into that specifically but i
do know at least the sheep level that that is um severely like overbearing it's very difficult to
like import genetics from overseas um and then also just like it's like a long it's like a long
term thing too like black angus is such a big animal um and the re like that is really not good
for the soil and the industry has just gone that way because oh we can just put pesticides we can
just put uh herbicides we can just um give these animals like medicine and we don't have to worry
about the fact that like oh they're this breed is going to get pink eye um like we're gonna
supplement all these other in these other pharmaceutical ways so that these animals
stay healthy even if they're um like the soil beneath them is just going to keep continue to
get worse and like yeah there's a lot of like there's no like that thing we talked about earlier
with externalities like seeing all across the midwest you'll see cows swimming in ponds and
lakes that farmers have and that is just like so bad for the ecosystem because like they're
they're going to then require additional pharmaceutical inputs to keep them healthy
because they're pooping and peeing in the water that they're drinking and then that ground water
then has to continue to be treated at even higher ratios
instead of using that as a fertilizer,
it becomes pollution almost.
And there's some things that you can't quite control,
even if you're fully regenerative at your end, right,
which is water bodies.
if a farmer next door is allowing his cows to do that
and that water body's, your farm is downstream of that farm, right?
And, you know, he treats the water with whatever chemicals.
Those could enter either entering your water supply
or the water body on your property or just the soil through osmosis, right?
Yeah, actually, like a year or two ago,
a couple of us neighbors even though i'm really the only farmer on this creek that goes through
the back of my property uh we kind of formed a little posse and went and
had to intimidate one of the the neighbor kids that's like 18 19 years old because he
got an asphalt business doing people's um doing people's driveways and we caught him
putting the waste or extra from his tank or whatever into that creek and i was like dude
i am literally feeding animals that i'm going to eat off of this and we like kind of put the fear
of god in him that even the neighbors who are not farmers were like hey now you can't be putting
asphalt into the creek so um yeah the upstream effects are really really uh you gotta do what
you can with what you got, but having close neighbors and hopefully a little bit smarter
people upstream than you usually benefits.
Let's talk about how we're still on the topic of cows in your farm, the 99 acres.
And what is it?
Almost a dozen cows that you have?
A handful of cows that you...
We only have four cows right now.
We've got more sheep.
We have 32 sheep.
Oh, sheep, okay.
Yeah, so they're all pregnant now.
So then this year we should have upwards around 60 to 90 sheep again.
And yeah.
No, but before we get to the sheep, the cows themselves,
let's talk about how they can contribute to this feedback loop,
this regenerative nature.
Okay, yeah.
Um, so most of the land that I lease, so I only own, I only own about a third of what
I have under my control.
The other land is basically hay ground.
And what you can see from these, these hay fields that, uh, the hay has just been taken
and taken and taken is they get this thing called poverty grass.
Uh, some people call it broom sedge.
It is a grass that is golden brown. It's cover covers the Midwest. You can tell that that it's a hay field because of this after they cut the hay. It grows up fast and is just the only thing there. It has no nutritional value to any of the animals. It is super. It spreads super easily when you when you just hay and hay and hay and you don't add any fertility on the ground.
And so I've already like in just one of the fields that I've leased, I've just been unrolling hay for a year and I've killed off like 50 percent of the poverty grass that's growing there.
And so that just is going to add additional carbon into the soil.
it's going to um like we've had in the three years that i've been here nobody in my neighborhood has
ever seen a dung beetle and now we have dung beetles and i was like taking pictures of cow
crap and showing my neighbors pictures and they're like what a weirdo but uh it's so neat to see
on the dung beetles for for very much a city guy like me and perhaps a few others who might be
listening seeing dung beetles is a good thing yes or is it about yes yes so they uh contribute to
making the the cow manure the cow pies break down faster um certain species i'm not sure which ones
we have um certain species actually like will bury the manure in the ground so that the nitrogen
doesn't just off gas straight into the atmosphere um uh yeah but they make like our cow patties
disintegrate much more rapidly um since when we started but you can't have those if you're
going to be constantly worming worming your animals um let's see so yeah they contribute
um their manure and their urine is obviously nitrogen it's a fertilizer for the grassland
um then the i keep i keep coming back to this but like my attention with the animals like it helps me
when i'm out there like uh the way i water is i have to haul water so i have a a lopper in the
back of my truck and oh i see that there's some uh some invasive species popping up like a
multiflora rose, a super thorny rose bush that is invasive and really painful if you run into it.
I can just go over there while their water's filling up and cut it down with my loppers early
on, and I can use them to trample hay into those poverty grass spots. But I've gotten,
my county advises, I think they advise one cow for every four acres, and I've only been doing
this for three years and i'm up to one cow for every two acres and i hope to get to one cow per
acre in the next two to five years um just by moving them around so much um as opposed to the
hay ground gets cut one was getting cut once a year and i'm grazing these fields four five six
times in some in some cases uh every year you know this is all incredibly inspiring
stuff, Augie, because these are all stories of resilience and rebirth and just, you know,
showing that nature and life will find a way if you give it a chance. All it needs is a chance,
not bombarded with chemicals or overused or abused. Just take a step back and
do things the natural way and life finds a way.
yeah i mean even my my cow jumping the fence to go get knocked up by the neighbor's bulls like
she just had it one morning and i walked out there and i'm like is there another grass puppy
out here what's going on that's great uh all right so let's talk about the sheep uh which
are the 30-odd you have, and you're expecting that to double soon.
Clearly the largest member of your burgeoning farm.
What is the – so do you use them – are they for meat, lamb, mutton, or wool?
Yeah, so these are hare sheep.
uh they're a mixed katahdin saint croix cross which if anyone is familiar with greg judy that's
the genetics that i have he's a farmer in missouri that's popular on youtube with the regenerative
agriculture space um they are also a tool that i use um mostly the sheep are good because we have
such crazy hills that if we're using big, large cattle, we would have huge ruts and divots. In the
month of March, it gets really muddy here in general just because the ice is melting and all
the ground starts to get soppy. And they're light enough that they don't have that big of an impact
on compressing the soil. So they can go up and down the hills a lot faster too. The benefit for
that is that they also like, um, like a cow mostly only wants to eat grass, but a sheep really will,
is it's more like a goat, not that it will eat everything, but it'll eat a lot more of a diverse
diet. So it will browse on the trees and such and help, um, to in like in those parts of the woods
where I've been cutting down, um,
um, the Japanese honeysuckle, they love those huge bushes that I just, I just go out there,
cut them down and I cut them down at the, at the base. So then the next year that they come,
um, back through there, that the honeysuckle will be right at the height that they need
to be able to eat it. And then, you know, three, four years of doing that, I've seen
those plants die off because I'm hitting them so frequently. And so they're helping me to get rid
of the invasive species that we have. They also eat the multiflora rose because their mouth is
small enough to not get the thorns. Like a cow would get those thorns in their tongue. A sheep
can just pull those leaves off. And then, so those two invasive species are dying off a lot.
um they also like we have a lot of osage orange which is the thorny tree which i'm not trying to
get rid of entirely but i am trying to um get rid of a lot of it so i have a bunch of tree hay
that i can cut from that um and their their manure and their urine is is just as uh fertilizer uh
it's just as much of a fertilizer as the as the cows is um craig judy talks about whenever he
looks around his field, he sees every time he sees a cow pat, he sees a dollar. And I like to
look at those little cow, those little pellets, like a deer is how, uh, sheep, sheep droppings
are. And I like to look at those and think of each one of those as a penny. So, um, I think that,
um, the sheep are also way more efficient at water. If you don't feed them hay in the winter
for four, four, basically four months out of the year, they don't drink water unless you're feeding
them hay, in which case they need, they need some water. But, um, in the past when I wasn't using hay,
I did not have to water them. They barely drink anything. Um, they have, uh, a more valuable meat
product. They also reproduce mostly in twins. So you can grow your flock a lot faster. Um,
they're super parasite resistant. Like I've never given any, any sheep, any kind of medicine
whatsoever. Like I've had to give, um, some of my cattle, some pink eye, um, medication because
they'll get their eyes poked by the seed heads on the grass, but I've literally never given a single,
um, bit of any antibiotic to any sheep and they've just performed so great. And all the moms give me,
um, give me twins every year. And, uh, I really do hope someday to cultivate, uh, um, a network
that we can use, um, their skins as well, because I'm, I have a, a, a shearling lambskin jacket that
I wear all over town. Um, and I really love it. And I think that their, their hides can make
really really beautiful clothing jackets and um pants and things like that
and you said you did you say sell them for meat as well yeah so while we're growing the flock i
just uh when they they're born in may i banned all the ram lambs that are born and so this year i
have seven for sale. Uh, and then like next year I'll probably end up having like 14, uh, 14 or
more, um, Rams. So I just keep all of the girls and I, um, sell all the boys for, for me.
Amazing. Okay. Okay. Well, we're at the hour mark. Um, so let's turn over to our Valley for
value music segment and then when we come back i want to talk about how all of this uh plays into
bitcoin and then we can talk a little bit about what you're working on on nostril as well but uh
we're going to keep the energy pinned for this next one uh you know i sometimes scroll the
headlines really i shouldn't but i do before i record these shows and half the time it feels
like we're living through a slow motion collapse but the trick isn't to ignore it it's to find the
right soundtrack for it right maybe that's how you you deal with it so this band is called the
trusted they're out of the uk and they have this massive anthemic sound like you can think arctic
monkeys or the 1975 but also a little bit of grit this track is called doomsday it's a song about
psychological apocalypse about the pressure building up inside your head until it cracks
if you looked at
the charts recently
you know exactly what this feels like
so
let's let it rip
I heard the world was ending
And I don't know how I'm supposed to feel
We're playing poker without demons
And I've got nothing left to steal
So throw yourself against the wall
Don't let them see you crying
Get on your knees and start to crawl
Take my life by lying
Watch it all just to crush and burn
In a really bad place
If all you don't say
Just stop
Are you talking?
Please keep both hands on the wheel
You're angry
And you're howling
I've got no time left to kill
Just throw yourself against the wall
Don't let them see you crying
Get on your knees and start to crawl
Take my life by lying
Watch it all just to crush and burn
And hurt a bad place
With all your birthday
I heard the world was ending
And I don't know how I'm supposed to feel
We're playing poker without demons
And I've got nothing left to steal
So throw yourself against the wall
Don't let them see you crying
Get on your knees and start to crawl
Take my life by lying
Wipe it all just to crush and burn
You're in a really bad place
Slip it for the fire, you don't stay
Just throw yourself against the wall
Don't let them see you crying
Get on your knees and start to crawl
Take my love by lying
Watch it out just to crush and burn
In a really bad place
Slip it for the fire, you don't stay
That was Doomsday by The Trusted.
That chorus felt big with the piercing guitar hooks
and the wall of sound production
that's asking, screaming in fact,
to be played in a stadium.
And it's funny, I think the song
is technically about a personal meltdown,
it's a cry for help,
but it also somehow feels triumphant it's like yeah it's doomsday but we're still here
we're still broadcasting and we we are still building so i've got the 90 splits set up for
the chapter if you dug that high energy indie vibe send them a boost and let them know that
even on doomsday the sats are still flowing augie what did you think of the song
i uh i'm more of a plebslop gangster rap aficionado myself so i have to send this one to my
my brother who's the musician in the family tell tell him to give it a listen what is plebslop
gangster rap oh i'd say like juicy j the old school three six mafia all that 90s and early 2000s
nonsense.
Nice.
All right.
So, Augie, we talked about, you know,
the different aspects of your farm,
how you're controlling for the externalities,
how all of the animals you have
are contributing in one way or another
to that feedback loop, right?
That's the regenerative aspect of it.
Let's talk about how all of this ties into Bitcoin
and then more broadly the Meshtadel community
that you know, Rev. Hoddle, Shadrach, others are involved in.
Okay yeah So I really started this farm because I could not find Virginia of Agriculture products locally that I could pay for in Bitcoin I was already into Bitcoin for a couple of years beforehand and I was already bought into the you know Bitcoin is money let use it as such
that Oshie puts on his labels.
But so I've been going to this Bitcoin meetup since about the time that I started this farm,
maybe a little bit afterwards.
But I have been offering these products for Bitcoin. So I try to supplement my products. I try to supplement them with some other goods that are from neighboring farms.
So I've been selling raw milk at the meetup. I got a five-pound bucket of honey from actually two doors down is where the hives are, but it's a local beekeeper and been selling that for sats.
It's hoping to build my reputation up and have a good relationship with the people at my meetup to be able to want to buy higher ticket items like a half a lamb, a whole lamb, half a cow, a pork, a whole pig.
I mean, and building that reputation with them so that they whenever they come to these, you know, these higher ticket items that they're like, oh, I trust this guy.
He's not going to rip me off.
Things like that.
So.
Also been able to like because I started coming and selling my products at these meetups, other people have started to sell more and more things like we have a guy sells some little 3D printed trinkets.
he's been bringing those more frequently we have a lady who started making salsa and selling it
another lady who's been coming around and selling her soaps that she makes and really just like
trying to build a circular economy trying to build relationships through transacting with each other
I think I'm going to give some of my hides to Lorian if you ever watch a bowl after bowl podcast
her and spencer do that and i think she's going to try to do some tanning with those and so we're
just trying to build like the basic goods that need to be offered for bitcoin i know it's nice
to be able to pay for like a vpn to be able to pay for um like digital services to be able to send
zaps um but i am a huge huge raw materials maxi on like i want to be able to buy bricks
wood um the things that like um max uh i forget the guy up up in england that that he's really
close with that does the has the sawmill but i really think that we need to get if we're going
to build a parallel economy, then we need to start from the ground up. We, luxury goods are nice,
but I want to be able, I want people to be able to feed their families. I want people to be able
to clothe their families on a Bitcoin standard and not have to, um, just go to a store where
they don't know the farmer, where they don't know what these goods are and, um, buy, buy goods with
their with their bitcoin that way how many people up uh in your meetup in your community are part of
this are using bitcoin for goods and services uh i'd say i have about five i have five milk customers
regularly and then i have about 10 to 15 people who are buying um buying my goods my other farm
goods from me um i really really am we're pushing this year to to to try to grow the offerings that
we have not necessarily from from my farm but like getting more people to come that have products to
offer um and hopefully that we can use that part of the uh the circular economy to drive
increased participation in the in the bitcoin space and there are other
nodes that are doing similar things right you have them in pennsylvania
i think in the michigan area if i'm not mistaken somewhere mostly in the midwest it seems like
um do you connect with with those i mean like rev hodl right is doing and others how do you
connect with those how does that work yeah so i am like super on fire about uh lake satoshi last
year it was so inspiring whenever i went i mostly just went drove up there uh brought some brought
a cooler full of meat and cheese and um just like wanted to figure out what the vibe was and went up
there and just being was so inspired um that is how i really connect with those guys um but i came
away with so much ideas that we wanted to that i wanted to do down here so um we're gonna have
our first uh like lake satoshi's a retreat and we're gonna have our first on on my farm
we're gonna have a retreat and call it nakamo town um that's gonna be that that's gonna be in
october um we have can i invite myself ogie oh for sure for sure it'll be our first one so
So it won't be as nice and put together as the Lake Satoshi guys have, but it will be a fun time getting together, just drinking beers, talking Bitcoin and swimming in the pond.
It probably won't be warm enough by then, but people can fish and camp out.
It'll be a good time.
But coming from there, I was just on fire and the Michigan meetup scene is really great.
And so I've been what I have been doing is going to other meetups across the state of Missouri once a quarter.
So there's a meetup in St. Louis and then in the middle of Kansas City and St. Louis, there's Jeff City and Columbia.
And so I've been going to those meetups once a quarter. And the goal is to basically create a Silk Road as in the ancient version, the Chinese Silk Road, not the website.
But to have a trade, a Bitcoin trade route, we can call it the denim road or whatever we want to call it.
But to be able to benefit from the St. Louis guys, if they orange pill, some vendor of materials or products that we want in Kansas City, then we have a way to get those delivered out here.
And the same thing for the Jeff City people.
So that's like what we're working on now.
And I think you're going to have Ryan on soon if you haven't already.
he's a little south of st louis those guys i met those farmington guys um and they have a whole
big circular economy down there and so we're hoping to have this cross state of the state
of missouri getting all these goods moved regularly through the meetup um event eventually
i hope to plug in with shadrach's um his uh a to b stuff and have that um be the actual
coordination layer for it. We just haven't gotten a chance to do that. But that's really what I'm
working on right now is to get locally, build up the circular economy, but also have more
cross-pollination between the other meetups in the state.
And please tell me, Augie, that the coordination layer for all of this is NOSTA, correct?
it's it's got to be yeah yeah so uh i mean right right now it's just getting those going to those
meetups i have a suitcase basically that i have that i just pop open like a drug dealer and it's
got honey and uh lard based deodorant and uh other other farm goods and and you know transacting that
way um but hope i really want to get to the point where it's like my pickup truck is full once a
quarter and then maybe we end up having to move it towards i'm going to these meetups these other
meetups once a month um or somebody else is doing um travel to these meetups uh more frequently than
than quarterly so that we can slowly but surely over the next couple of years start to build this
uh um supply chain of our own yeah well you know it's a supply chain running through
the center of the country
and the
coastal elites
are completely out of the picture.
It's nice.
And it's also,
pardon me, as someone who lives on the East Coast,
it's not that far from
New York.
And I travel to these so-called
places,
I guess Bitcoin hubs,
if you will,
whether it's in Nashville,
pub key in new york some of these other spots and and yes there's these are nice venues for
for speech for talks and conversations but the actual work is not happening there right these
it's it's the actual work is happening where you guys are in that in that stretch from all the way
north from Michigan down, you know, past Missouri.
I think even all the way down into Texas with the Beef Initiative
and some of that work.
Yeah, I do.
I do have this short-term goal for this Missouri, I guess, I mean,
it's still long-term because it's going to take a couple of years
to get off the ground and be like a regular thing that's happening
to connect Kansas City and St Louis so people can have all these Bitcoin goods But i want to do the same thing with connecting um i think it called the space out in denver to uh the
bitcoin park down in nashville because kansas city's exactly eight hours in the middle of both
of those so we can have these these trade routes that work off of each other um and
And I really just I really think that we can have these these individual citadels and the meshed just being this less frequent, but regularly inter intercommunication interoperability system where, oh, maybe some somebody in Tennessee orange pills, a guy making moonshine off off grid.
and somebody in Denver has somebody making, I don't know, whatever cannabis products they're
making and we can be in the middle. And at some point when they meet in Kansas city,
the people go back to Denver with their moonshine. The people go back to Tennessee with their
cannabis products and maybe both of them walk away with a little bit of my lamb or pork or
whatever and have these, these hubs like that and have these regular events like Nakamoto town and
Lake Satoshi, where we're having these, this other cross pollination.
Love that. Can't wait for this to become even more real than it is. I mean, you're already
making it real, Augie, you and all the others that you mentioned, but it's lots to look forward to.
All right. So Augie, we've talked about you, the farmer, the regenerative farmer, and how you're
building out all of that, the Mesh to Dell.
I guess the one thing, actually, before we move on to Nostro,
anything else on the farming or Mesh to Dell side that you think we've missed?
You want to cover before we start talking about Augie,
the software developer who's working on Nostro?
No, I mean, I really would just say, like, if you're going to a Bitcoin meetup,
you should try to sell something at it.
Take the time to figure out what it is, because Bitcoin is hard money.
but like offer the best product that you can try to figure out figure out what you can because
you're going to learn a lot from just interacting with people at an additional layer of not just
getting beers and talking about number go up stuff you're going to be like hey what do you actually
want to what is going to make you part with some of that bitcoin oh now i have to work harder i
have to show proof of work to to to get to get that out of your hands and then they they they
also have their products and you guys all start start trading amongst each other i think it's
so valuable to have those types of relationships on top of your friendships
yeah absolutely all right so let's talk about nostril uh what are you is there one project
that you focused on or are there multiple ones uh there's not really one specific one i've kind of
been just trying to help out as like uh the devops engineer in nostr um the one thing that i've just
been i just kind of got wrapped up a little bit today was um budabit which is using i don't i don't
own or run budabit but budabit is a nostr dev uh nostr git client and um arian um arian and i
talking last year. I was mostly just consulting him. He came up with this new protocol called
Loom based off our conversations and talking and working with each other. And it's more of like a
arbitrary compute via Noster. And then he further whittled it down to this Hive thing.
So I've implemented that onto BudaBit, and it is so we can have CICD pipelines or GitHub Actions.
I don't know if anyone noticed yesterday, but GitHub Actions was actually down for at least three hours in America.
and so like the ability to run your NosterGit based repositories builds on Noster and anyone
can spin up like the DVM sort of spec they could run these runners and then you don't have to make
any changes to like your github workflow if you're gonna migrate over from that and they they'll run
and you just like pay a cash you invoice let's say it takes uh a minute to run and you paid like
100 sats in cash you okay you get your refund 40 sats back in cash you whenever that's done um so
that like having decentralized git workers um or pipelines on top of nostor is something that i
Like just got wrapped up and really excited to see the development, the DevOps space in Nostra Bloom.
And Arjen is a Nostra developer, correct?
And he's built this thing called Loom, you said?
Yeah.
It's just sort of the spec behind how do we communicate that we want work done?
How does the worker communicate what work they can do?
Things like that.
how would a non-technical user right who's in who's in nostril either because
they're interested in the social media bit or they're looking for they found that you know
there's a nice overlap with the value for value music space with fountain being a
moving their social coordination to nostril right so they're looking for music or something like
that right they're not developers or anything they come in and everything you just described
how would that impact them from a user experience standpoint?
So like a benefit to non-technical person would be like,
it's really difficult because it is specifically development focused pipelines,
especially. But one of the things that once,
once this gets into production I'm also working with Fran,
the zap store guy to get reproducible builds um flagged on flagged for for whatever applications
are there right now it's just bootstrapping off of some of the f droid assertions that things are
reproducible but this would mean that we could have um we could have a flag or a little badge on
on some application let's say amber on your on zap store and you it would show that it is
reproducible or not and you could click through to see go through the back end and and it would
allow you to see okay yeah this was reproduced in the open by this user on this date at this time
i'm planning to like hopefully at some point make that so you could do that
on the fly so if you have like a really it depends on your security profile right so like if you want
to trust that this person reproduced the build cool if not you want to run the reproducible
build yourself and verify it right then and there you can pay for it and then okay yes it is
reproducible this exact app that i'm installing is exactly what they're offering on this app store
um there's other there's other ideas for like if you want to basically use someone else's compute
to do any amount of work that you would want.
That's up to the person.
And you've been looking into some Web of Trust-related things as well.
I know the NOS Fabrica water-thon that's going on,
you've been peeking in now and then.
Are you thinking about incorporating Web of Trust tools
into some of your projects on NOSTA?
so there would be a way to do this with the loom so with loom you have to choose which worker you
want to run on um like you could uh incorporate web of trust to decide which worker you have like
if there's a worker that you start trusting because you use them more and more then maybe
you're just going to default to them um because you you're going to trust like the work that they
do is the work that they say and they're not just going to like uh you know randomly put
inject other code into the into the uh pipeline or or something something along those lines um
you might be able to might want to run just have workers running from people that you follow
i'm not um i'm not super um up to date on i'm super interested on how web trust can
can impact all of this uh and the other thing that i've been looking at is how do we figure out
what how do we allow other people to possibly make releases for our software using web of trust um
what does that look like as opposed to just a whitelist of team members uh that that's something
i've been toying around in the back of my head but i haven't really put on paper yet
Mm-hmm. Got it. Anything else you're working on on Noster? I know you've mentioned you were working on something with LSAT. LSAT is the, I guess, the de facto product manager for Darmus.
And he has some other side product. He's become a vibe coding maestro by the look of things. So what are you working on with him?
so with him i really i just built a poc for interoperability testing it really didn't go
much further than that um but just the idea that we can use obtaining an optadium um i forget what
the front the the python library that lets you interact with the ui i forget the name of it
but use that to just run data through a bunch of the desktop clients to verify that okay when i produce a kind one over here it looks the same over here and there to and like automate that process Um but one of the other tools that I
was building was, is called Bodark. It's really just a client that I'm making for meetups. Um,
the live version right now is at kcbitcoiners.com. I'm just, um, basically have like a meetup.com
replacement where you can add events to the calendar if you're a part of the meetup um you
could what else do i have in there i have a little bit of like a btc map i'm planning to revamp that
with some assertions um so that we can sort of reproduce a little bit of btc map on nostr um i
just added zap razors to that so that like at meetings we can do fundraising via the website
for like future events that go towards the meetups treasury. And the next thing I'm trying
to put on there is like, basically, if you're a member of the meetup that you can, what is it
called? You could put your marketplace on there so that people could like pay for goods ahead of
time. So you'd, you'd maybe know, oh, I need to bring these five things to the meetup. And that
would really help for this idea of going to the other meetups then they would be able to like
pre-purchase the things and then you're like oh i'm driving four hours to st louis i need to bring
like 10 pounds of sausage and 15 pounds of uh rack of lambs or whatever it is um just building
out a client that's specifically for meetups as part of bdc map uh no it's it's like its own thing
It's really just a super basic website with, you know, it has a calendar.
It has a page for the maps because like I want people in the meetup to be able to go like go look at it.
Basically, BTC maps embedded in it.
But also like there's a list of like every person who's in the meetup can say, oh, this this location takes lightning and tag Bitcoin tag like seed oil free, whatever, whatever tags that they would want to add onto it.
So it's like a community private version of Bitcoin, BTC maps that they can tag and add data to themselves.
Oh, interesting. And he said he wanted to add assertions to it. Are those Nostra events, these assertions, or is that something else?
Yeah, yeah, they're assertions. That's like what I'm talking about with, let's say you find this one restaurant, they start taking Bitcoin.
but do they take Bitcoin on chain or do they only take lightning?
So you would be able to like make an assertion for that.
And then people could,
other people in the meetup could like attest to that.
That is true or false,
whatever you could add an assertion that this is like a,
a vegan place.
These are just arbitrary things that you could,
you could add about,
about the place.
But I know the other people are working on like the ownership assertions.
separately that i'm trying to talk with them so i don't step on toes i know nathan day uh
the creator of btc map he uh he has the attestations custom nip that's out there uh and
these assertions you're talking about are which what event kind are they uh these assertions are
kind of random they're just kind of random because there's no really like a nip that i
have seen for the assertions but the attestations um the attestations i am using in the zap store
reproducible build work i am using his nips and i've been talking with him about the btc map stuff
on the side gotcha cool augie anything else that you think we've missed we've i think we've covered
a lot of ground a lot of varied ground which is which is fantastic right we talked about
this process of resilience and rebirth,
which is regenerative farming.
We talked about community and coordination,
which is the mesh to Dell.
And then we're talking about NOSTA,
which is in some sense a base layer,
just like soil that makes a lot of this possible.
And Bitcoin, of course,
Bitcoin and NOSTA both go hand in hand for this.
Anything that you think we've missed?
um i my dev my dev work is super abstract if you're not a developer i'm my dev stuff is not
really interesting i think the only thing that i would say to like bitcoiners out there is
you need to grow something if that means you have chickens or rabbits or if that just means you have
a plant growing some peppers or whatever on your balcony even if you live in the city like having
your hands in the soil is going to be super impactful to you. Try to get out there and touch
grass. Try to get out there and make some sort of any amount of calories that you can for yourself.
And even if not, get out there and try to meet the farmers that are producing your goods and try to
find Bitcoiners who are producing that really high quality farm goods or orange pill ones that
aren't doing that yet. So try to make an impact in the community and other ways of just,
I buy Bitcoin and I go have beers and talk about how Bitcoin is going to be a million dollars
someday. Yeah. I think that the days for that are, well, people could do what they want,
but it's just not particularly constructive thing to do. But Augie, let's say someone's heard this,
right and i think it's it's great advice to essentially touch grass but at a deeply
philosophical level where you're having an impact but what if someone says you know what this
mesh to doll stuff this uh denim road or whatever it ends up being called uh i'm not i'm not too
far away i'm i'm in i probably i'm in the belt or close to that belt uh i want to get involved
what how can they uh i guess how could they reach out to you or how would you direct them someone
who wants to build alongside with you yeah um for sure hit me up on nostr um we have like a bunch of
people within like i like to talk on signal so we'll probably move over to that until white noise
gets built out relatively quickly.
But I think that, yeah, if you want to work together,
like this Bodark tool that I'm talking about,
I made it so it doesn't require you to have to have
a virtual private server to deploy.
It's a static website that you can spin up
and you just can fork my repo
and there's already one meetup that's using this
on top of our meetup.
And it doesn't require any payment.
Like if you want to put it into an S3 bucket, it might cost you three bucks to run on top of whatever domain you want to run.
So we can get you started on building up your own local circular economy and having not having to pay hundreds of dollars to meetup.com just so you guys can have a calendar to cooperate on.
And yeah, we'll talk more about if it's the agriculture side of things, the Bitcoin side of things, the Nostra side of things, like however you want to build, get in touch on Nostra, please.
Yes. Awesome.
So you heard it here, folks.
And I'll put any relevant information, any links that Augie talked about or he's going to send me.
I'll put those in the show notes.
So you should be able to reach out.
I'll link his end pub so you can find him on Nostra as well.
So, Augie, thank you so much for sharing all of this,
really rooting for everything you're building.
It's super exciting.
I know it can feel like early days sometimes,
but I think between you and so many others who are working on the Mesh Tadel,
working on these regenerative agriculture ideas,
and just sovereign tools more broadly, right?
Nostra developers, Bitcoin developers.
uh it's there is so much to look forward to uh and the number go down that seems to be happening
as we're recording uh it is becomes irrelevant right definitely we can build in the bear markets
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