(upbeat music)
- Hey everybody, welcome back to Fanchin Power Business.
Fanchin Power Business Hour, that's right.
We haven't done a lot of these yet,
but we're gonna start doing them every week.
We're gonna start doing them on Mondays.
Now I know it's Tuesday,
but one of our guests was busy galloping around Costa Rica
and just got back in town,
so we had to push this back a day.
This conversation is all about Noster,
and I am fortunate enough to be joined by Vanessa Gray
from Domus and Derek Ross from Noster Club,
and if you are on Noster, you have seen these folks around,
but we're gonna dive into what this platform is,
what it's potential could be,
where they would like to see it go,
and some best case uses for musicians.
I advocate that every musician that is new to value for value
should get on this space and start promoting their work,
and Derek and Vanessa back me up in this conversation.
So I will shut up and let's bring on the guests,
and we'll go from there.
All right, here we go.
Hey, everybody, welcome to Phantom Power Business Hour.
Haven't done a lot of these yet,
but they're gonna be a weekly occurrence.
They are going to be a weekly occurrence on Mondays,
and we would have done it this week on Monday,
but one of our guests was lolligagging
around the beautiful tropics of Costa Rica.
Is that right, Derek?
- Absolutely, I was down enjoying the beautiful jungle weather
and the beach and the whole non-jar,
and I'm sure we'll get to that a little bit more later.
- Yeah, we will, 'cause me, well, Vanessa and I
were still way up north having to deal with all the snow
and rain.
Vanessa Gray from Domus is here as well as Derek Ross,
so hello Vanessa.
- Hi, thanks for having me.
Yeah, I unfortunately have been stuck inside for days on end,
working tirelessly on Nostrader,
while you were out doing no work at all, Nostrader.
- Lolligagging.
I was lolligagging maybe from time to time,
but I was doing the IRL work,
putting in the ground.
- You were working hard.
In the trenches, it was horrible walking around without shoes
and shirt, but I was working hard though.
- Well, I know, I saw wearing that,
when you did wear a shirt, you wore the Domus shirt,
so that's all I care.
- I did, I did.
When I did my Nostrader talk, I had the Domus shirt on.
I had to represent my friends.
- Mm, let's see it.
- Jealous, yeah, we had a lovely eight inches of snow
and a lot of ice here in Nashville, so welcome back
to the continental US and the nice cold there, buddy.
So, I'm sure that was a nice shot.
Well, let's dive right in.
Vanessa, let's start with you.
Why don't you introduce yourself,
just give us a little background
and how you got into Nostrader.
- Thanks, yeah, so I have been on Nostrader for about a year now,
had my official anniversary of interacting on DM only,
a few weeks ago, January of 2023.
And yeah, I got into Nostrader, I like to say,
kind of without, I kind of had to get into it
because my partner who I live with and we have a son together
is one of the developers and one of the early developers
on Nostrader, so he started talking about it months
and months before that, I probably didn't listen,
wasn't sure what a protocol even was at that time,
but quickly learned that it was something pretty exciting
that was happening, so I started to dig into it
just from a user perspective, obviously, and to support him,
but that has quickly evolved in the last year to now
where I'm working quite tirelessly
on trying to promote Nostrader in general,
not just Thomas, from a marketing perspective,
he are kind of many, many different roles
and have been speaking a lot and probably a lot
to kind of promote that over the last year
and got to spend some great time with Derek
and his family trying to move the thing along,
so thanks for having me here.
- Yeah, my pleasure.
What was your gig prior to Thomas?
- So I still have a current,
- Oh, okay. - A regular job, actually.
- I don't know.
- That's the start-up life for you.
So yeah, I work in marketing full-time,
I work remotely for a company working for various clients,
but it's quickly moving to more on the Nostrader side,
which is an ideal world I would end up entirely working on that,
so I see that as the future,
but both of those jobs kind of have gone hand in hand,
which has been great, so.
- Okay. - Worked out.
- Derek, what's your background
and how did you get into Nostrader?
- So I'm one of those IT guys
where I run all sorts of applications and systems
and services.
It might, my day job,
but I've been a bit coiner for the last several years,
and about a year ago,
Jack Dorsey had asked on Twitter
what applications, what services needed to be funding,
needed additional funding,
and some bit-cointers replied that Nostrader needed funding,
and I said, "What is Nostrader?"
I had never heard of Nostrad before,
and then Jack Dorsey said, "Hey, Bitcoin Twitter,
"you should really check out Nostrader."
So I started checking out Nostrader
and realizing what its potential was,
and I just jumped right in.
I started looking for ways to contribute,
and as I said a minute ago,
my fiat-money job, my day job is running a bunch
of servers and services,
and I started looking, how can I use those skills
to bring services to Nostrader?
I started a business called Nostrad Plibs,
aptly named.
(laughs)
It's just a Nostrad services provider
where we give different services,
bells and whistles, enhancements to users of Nostrader.
And then I started traveling around the world
and talking about Nostrader at various conferences
and using my love for community growing and marketing
and just community building,
and using that to talk about my latest passion
and drive, which is Nostrader,
and it led me to all sorts of places
I never thought that I would be,
such as we were saying at the beginning of the show,
down in Costa Rica again,
for the second time in the past year,
and meeting amazing people like yourself,
and in person in Nashville,
in Vanessa, in various places around the world,
and it's just been a wild ride over the past year.
Yeah, as I told you guys,
before the show started in the green room,
yeah, of course Derek, of course I remember meeting you
in November here at Bitcoin Park.
I've only been in the space now for about seven months,
but I am amazed at what I see going on
in two areas, number one,
whenever I get in a room of people who are Bitcoin developers,
like if I go down to Bitcoin Park,
or I go to a meetup in another city,
like Minneapolis, whatever,
like the brain power in the room just absolutely blows me away.
Number one, and number two is the community of people
that I keep running into, just this is a very tight network,
a very philanthropic and giving network,
and I certainly see that within the community of Noster,
when I'm on the relays or on the app,
or however is the proper way to describe it.
I guess there's a million questions that I have,
and I don't care who answers this first one,
but I would like to know how you feel about it
about a year into development.
I know you, Beness, I know William was,
pretty much the first one out of the gate,
either William and Fiat Jeff,
but where do you guys see it now one year in?
Are you surprised?
It's this popular, are you dismayed
that it's not more prevalent?
Like, you know, take it away.
What do you guys think we are one year in?
- Well, I would say that I'm surprised
that it hasn't taken off more than it has,
but I also understand that developers over the past year,
such as Will and many other developers
have been really working on and focusing on the technology layer
and building that foundational layer of tech,
and not so much focusing on onboarding,
and not so much focusing on design,
and some of that has hindered a little bit of adoption,
but I think that is okay,
because if Noster were to blow up right now
with a million users, things would break
and things would not be fun, you know, kind of crashing burn.
So this kind of slower adoption,
while that may, you know, turn some people off,
and people may be a little bit upset about that,
I think that's fine, because that gives us more time to build,
more times to hone things in and fine tune things,
and file it down and get things ready for mass adoption,
because this isn't something that is,
it has a massive team behind it.
It's a hobby project, it's a startup project,
it's a bunch of people spending their free time building this,
and it's not gonna happen overnight,
so I think a slow and steady growth is fine,
but I also think that in some regards,
looking at back about all of the apps
that have been built over the past year,
all the enhancements, all of the additional other stuff clients,
outside of social, like streaming apps and music apps,
and all sorts of other things,
this other stuff part of Noster,
that a year ago was just a pipe dream,
and not even a thought in anybody's head,
and we, I say, we, the collective, we, the royal we,
we have built, you know, a lot of stuff
across Noster over the past year that is wild,
and once some of those really take off,
we're gonna be ready,
we're gonna have this tech layer built.
Vanessa, what about you?
One year in from a marketing perspective,
are you happy or you're just made?
What do you think?
- Yeah, it's a great question.
I think that I'm really happy about some of the major,
kind of milestones that we've been able to accomplish
in what actually is quite a small amount of time,
even though it's been a year,
sorry, my son's in the background here.
So, you know, it's, I think, yes,
we may not have the number of users
that maybe were originally predicted
or people had anticipated,
but certainly, again, like some of these major users
and groups that have joined in the past year
are incredibly impressive.
You know, we were really fortunate
to attend the Oslem Freedom Forum
about halfway through the year, last year,
and seeing some of the really, really interesting people
who are using Noster in that context, right?
People who really need it for free speech reasons evenly.
And then, you know, on the flip side of that
is people coming on who have quite large followings, right?
And who are interested in seeing what they can do
in the space from a value for value
or making actual money within the app.
So, there's both sides of that.
And I think on top of that,
it's also the fact that we've had a lot of attention
in the past year.
You know, I've been doing a bit of a recap,
so that's a surprise for next week
'cause it'll be a year as of next week
that Thomas has been on the app store.
So, we're having a little bit of fun with it
to kind of say like, where have we been?
What are the things that have been accomplished?
And it's amazing how many podcasts like this
and talks and events and everything
that people have been a part of in just a year.
It's absolutely incredible.
Again, not just Thomas, but on Noster in general.
So, I'm really proud of what everybody's been doing
and as Derek said, it's people who are just
dedicating their time, not people who are
necessarily getting paid for it.
So, that's super exciting.
Oops, sorry, my mic was off.
Right now, as I mentioned to you guys in the green room,
you know, I'm trying to bring as many musicians
into the space as I can.
And I'm telling them all, hey, get a Noster account.
I see and correct me if I'm wrong,
like, you know, the population right now
consists of like 90% developers, right?
Maybe even 98% developers.
I mean, there's a lot of developers,
a lot of technical people, but mostly I would say,
you know, 95% Bitcoiners.
Okay, yeah.
So, and I tell these musicians, I'm like,
hey, you got to get in there and just start thanking people
and interacting people whenever your songs are played,
you know, you're gonna be one of a handful of musicians
right now, but you'll be an early adopter.
Do you guys have any sort of idea or wish, I should say?
Like a year from now, how would you like
to see the population be segmented?
Like, do you like, are you guys thinking
that this is gonna be another Twitter, another,
like, is it gonna be a place?
So, it's gonna be balanced between all professional
sessions is this gonna stay primarily a community of developers
like who in your mind is the perfect community for this?
- Well, somebody has to be first
in every type of community, right?
So, Bitcoiners built, Noster,
or are currently building Noster.
So it makes sense or a lot of the early adopters
to be from the Bitcoin community.
But from there, I mean, we want this to grow
to each and every type of community.
So we gotta start really thinking
what type of community will be next.
Bitcoiners love value for value and love proof of work.
That's kinda like part of our ethos.
We truly understand that better than probably most
communities out there.
So any type of creator community, I think,
would thrive is the next community on Noster
because you're gonna be creating some type of content
and we're eager to consume it and provide value
for that value that you're giving us.
We wanna reward the proof of work.
And I think that whatever that community may be,
whether it's an artist community, a musician community,
anybody that creates any type of content,
I think once they come over in mass,
we'll just be very, very successful.
It seems like the will have a nice symbiotic relationship
together, but I think you would agree Vanessa.
Like we don't want this to stay Bitcoin is forever.
We want this to be for everybody across the planet.
- Yeah, I agree completely.
I am a Bitcoiner, but not one that talks about it
or that's not the reason I'm using Noster.
I just, I happen to enjoy the integration,
but when I own more people from a non-technical perspective,
I don't ever bring up the fact that Bitcoin is integrated often
because it's just, it's a little bit scary
for people who maybe aren't familiar.
And I'd prefer to your point that more and more people join
regardless of whether they're interested in Bitcoin or not.
And then if they decide that they wanna learn more about that,
then I direct them to Derek.
But no, seriously.
- What do we say?
The purple pill helps the orange pill go down, right?
So you get purple pill on Noster and then we'll give you
the Bitcoin pill.
We'll give you that orange pill later.
- Exactly.
And you know, Tyra question about, you know,
developers versus non-development.
There are a lot of developers,
but there's a lot of creators to not just, you know,
developers by definition.
I'd say there's a lot of designers, there's a lot of artists
and the community currently, which I hope continues to happen
is as you mentioned, really supportive,
but also very, like it's good quality content
that seems to be coming out, especially with the people
who are most active.
So, you know, if we were to grow this in a year from now,
if we can continue on that trajectory of people
who really want to be here and, you know,
they're not necessarily here just for the likes,
but they're here for the value they provide
and the value they can offer.
I think that's kind of where we'd like to go.
I know, you know, with our team specifically,
one of our objectives for 2024 is to get away
from the Bitcoin conferences of it,
just not that we won't be attending some
and, you know, both professionally and personally,
but it's thinking about other places we could be
in other initiatives we could be involved in.
You know, I remember this summer, it was at a local festival
and those artists were looking for things like Noster
and we just happened to have an opportunity
to be a part of that festival.
So, I think it's those types of, you know, initiatives
that we're looking at trying to be involved in,
as opposed to just tack or just Bitcoin.
- Has anybody done some research on this, you know,
like the Wikipedia page is about a quarter of a page long,
right?
You can, there's a nice article in Forbes,
but there's not a whole heck of a lot of unbiased,
factual information on it, right?
So, Noster seems to fly under the media radar.
At any time, any time any media article was written
about Twitter alternatives, like 90% of the time,
Noster is not mentioned, you know,
what we see like Macedon or Threads mentioned,
you know, things like that.
Noster's still in the underdog stage right now.
- Yeah, so how does it, so Derek,
how does it get out of the underdog stage?
And then as a follow-up, I would say, you know,
every app, every business has to, you know,
somehow sustain a profit, you know, bring in some income.
Like, so how does it get out from underneath the shadows
and how is it going to, in your opinion,
what does it need to do to be a profitable enterprise
that's here in five years?
- Well, so when we look at what Noster is,
it's just a protocol, right?
And we don't talk about the success of the email protocol
or we don't talk about the success of HTTP,
the web protocol, we talk about outlook for email,
we talk about Gmail for email, right?
We talk about Google Chrome,
we talk about internet explorer, edge,
or opera, firefox, we talk about these specific apps
or clients that use that protocol and the success of those.
So I think that for the protocol to succeed,
you know, we're gonna have to have successful apps,
successful companies, and those will be the brands
that are talked about.
Those will be the apps that are making the headlines,
so something like Domus or Primal,
or, you know, that are have actual,
seed capital behind them and grants behind them.
Those will be the ones that are making the headlines.
How do we break out of that underdog, you know,
mantra where we're kind of at now, you know,
they need to hit critical mass,
maybe that's 250,000 downloads,
half a million downloads, a million downloads,
something like that, something to catch a headline.
But I also think we need a specific community or a group
to join Noster or to join one of these apps besides Bitcoiners,
because Bitcoiners are already seen as the underdogs
of the world, right?
We're already a small group of people
that kind of do our own thing in the shadows,
and, you know, where we already have a bad spotlight
in the media, and we like that,
but to have a good spotlight in the media, you know,
we need a different group to join,
and like, you know, maybe that's the musicians and artists,
you know, we just, we need another group to come in
and talk about how they're having success
on one of these platforms or inside the Noster protocol
to help kind of grow the media hype around Noster.
- Vanessa, what do you think it needs to do to get past
the grants and the investments and start monetizing?
I mean, maybe I'm asking the wrong question,
but I, and, you know, again, I've only been in the space
for about seven months,
but when I look at it, I'm like, okay, like, you know,
this thing's gotta be making money to stay around.
Like, how's it gonna, you know, what is it have to do
to get past the grants to stay in business?
- Yeah, so this is a really popular topic right now,
at our, in our team, and I think in Noster, in general, right?
Because obviously, you know, even some of the apps
that do have, you know, BC funding,
that's not necessarily gonna last forever,
they need a model, and I'm sure they have models
that they're working on us from a grant-only perspective.
You know, it's difficult, and we definitely need to find ways
to monetize it, you know, in the immediate future, like, quote,
unquote, maybe next week.
We have something launching where we would take
an optional subscription, so, you know, that is exciting,
'cause it offers some new features, some things that might
benefit certain people, yes, Derek, I'll let you know,
I'll give you the announcement before the announcement.
And so, you know, that's, that's, it's gonna be more
of a test than anything else, right?
Because without that critical mass, as Derek said,
that's only gonna go so far too,
because not everyone's gonna want to do it,
not everyone has to, you still can use the app without it.
But it'll be interesting to see,
and then what could that look like if we scale
10 times, 100 times, whatever, in terms of number of users?
And then I think beyond that, it's things like,
like you said, the other stuff, so, you know,
Dommas is looking at, can we build on top
where, you know, whether it's a gamification part,
if it may be it's something that's specific for certain groups
that they'd be willing to pay for, right?
That's an offshoot of the brand, not necessarily
the social media app, because that's, I think,
what's gonna bring people in on mass, right?
So they, they're looking for alternatives to Twitter
or they're, you know, seeing that something happens
and people are switching to Noster,
so that's how they get in.
But beyond that, there, I think there's different ways
we can look at monetizing it as we grow,
but it certainly could happen quicker.
So, it's one of those things that, you know,
you wanna build stuff that people really like
and that's easy to use and has great onboarding,
but at the same time, you do need to be figuring out
the monetization sooner than later.
So it's a bit of a tricky, tricky one to answer, but.
- Yeah, yeah, and I don't envy the position that you're in.
I mean, from a marketing standpoint,
you certainly have, hey, there's, you know,
the benefits of free speech and the benefits
of no algorithms and no garden walls and things like that.
And that's one of the things that I absolutely love about it.
I absolutely love the fact that I don't,
I'm not being forced fed some crap that I'm not interested in, you know.
- What's tough about that though is that most people
don't care about that, right?
Like, that is a hard selling point because most people
don't understand it until they need it
or until they experience it or have a friend or family member,
a loved one that experiences the need for decentralization
or the need for censorship resistance.
So it's really hard to tell somebody to use
Noster because of these groundbreaking technologies
when they themselves have never really had the need for it.
So that's a tough selling point.
So I think we need other more prominent features
in selling points.
And I think those will come, right?
Like, I think that we use, again,
we'll all use the, the Royal Wii here and speak broadly
and say we, but.
Noster developers will use the next year or two
while grant money and funding is available to them
to build the underlying tech to get their application,
to get their client ready for the masses.
And then by the time, you know, hopefully that,
by the time that funding model dries up,
the free money disappears, maybe critical mass will be reached
and you'll have a million users where a subscription model
makes sense and other funding models makes sense.
Because right now you won't be able to survive
with a subscription model.
We just don't have enough users.
When we have 25,000 active daily users,
you can't survive on that.
But if we have a million active users,
then you might be able to do that.
So we just need to get to that point.
So I'm hoping over the next two years
while funding is available that the technology layer is built,
this killer feature is launched and the killer app is launched
and users are on boarder, on boarded to where developers
can get paid rightly so for their work.
Well, what do you think are the big technological developments
that need to happen for it to achieve critical mass?
Vanessa can speak a little bit more about DOMIS numbers.
But I think across the board, user retention is a tough one
that people install the apps because they hear
it's the new cool, exciting thing.
And we don't do enough to retain users,
the onboarding process, across almost the entire protocol
on every app that uses NOST.
You could probably be better.
I think search could definitely be better.
Content discoverability could be much better.
So we need to do things that enhance the user experience
to keep users coming back and to bring them back to whichever
app that they're using.
Once that is fixed, then maybe that's the year of discoverability
and the year of user retention is 2024.
Maybe that's what we're going to start focusing on this year.
Now that apps are starting to mature,
and maybe that will help with that.
Yeah, I agree.
Retention is huge.
It's literally at the top of the list of the roadmap right now.
Hand in hand with onboarding, obviously,
and apart from that, just general performance
and search is a part of that too, right?
Because it's not fun if you can't find anything.
And yeah, it's an education piece too, in my mind,
from a marketing perspective, right?
Because people just assume that they download it
and it's going to be like Twitter, it's going to be like Instagram.
And it's not, right?
So it's similar, and there are a lot of similarities,
and then there are a lot of benefits to kind of,
to your point, James, but not having any ads
that are bothering you constantly.
I think that's something that people might be appreciative of.
But at the same time, they like the features of Instagram.
So they're OK with allowing that, and they're not willing
to try something new.
So yeah, I think it's all of those things.
And then I also think it is features like the Instagrams, right?
Like there's a reason that people love that app and that they use it.
And so we're looking at ways to incorporate some of those things into Domus
so that it feels a little bit more like that.
And there's tools for some of these bigger users
that have a lot of followers that they can use it to grow their business
and to grow their fans or whatever.
And in turn, hopefully bring more of those people over to Noster.
One of the things that I've heard said about it
that people don't like is that there's not an adult in the room
to maintain whatever you want to say.
Professionalism, maturity, whatever.
Now, I personally haven't run into a lot of content
that I don't care for or call it adult content or language
or politics that I don't care for, whatever.
But when I look at some of the social media apps in the traditional world,
like Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it,
like I don't think there's an adult in the room of that place at all.
Like I can't believe what I see over there.
And not like I'm some sort of conservative guy who gets upset by things like that.
But what do you guys think about that comment of like,
hey, one of the things that I don't like,
and this is not me talking, this is comments I've heard from other people,
like, well, there's not an adult in the room.
And it can get sideways quickly and it'll just turn into,
since there's no censorship and there's no algorithm and there's no garden wall,
once this thing goes mainstream, it's just going to be a dumpster fire.
Like, how do you guys come back that early?
So it took me a while to understand when I was talking about all the benefits of
nocturne talking about censorship, resistance.
It took me some time to understand that
speech that you, like free speech means all speech.
It means the speech you love, it means the speech you hate,
it means the opinions you agree with, it means the opinions you don't.
And it also means the stuff that you don't want to see and the stuff that you don't like to see.
But it also means that I have the power as a user to control my own feed.
And you have the power to try to show me things that I don't want to see.
And I can meet you and you still get to say what you want to say and post what you want to post publicly.
And since I've needed you, I don't get to see it because I win in that scenario.
And you win in your scenario.
It's win-win for both of us.
We both have the freedom to control and post and do whatever we want.
Now, does that mean that things could get out of control at some point?
Sure.
But there's negativity and there's bad people all over the world.
And if they want to have their little corner of the internet of hate and
little corner of the internet of bad stuff, then that's fine.
And I'm going to be over here with my friends and loved ones having positive vibes and
having a good time.
And they can be in their tiny little corner over here of hate.
And that's fine and we don't have to interact.
And eventually, you can only be negative in a troll for so long before it's going to go away.
And I really, I like to think that Zaps kind of help fix this because we're incentivized
to post content that is more positive and content that will have a better impact because
the majority of the human race are nice people.
And your content is going to get zapped and well interacted with and be well received if
it aligns with most of humanity.
And if you're an asshole in the corner of the internet, you're not going to get as many
zaps as I am for my positive content.
So yeah, like I hate to say it's going to work itself out because it will give it a long enough
timeline.
And there's going to be some outliers that are bad and some outlying content that's bad
sure, but it's going to be massively, massively outweighed by the good content.
And that's hard to understand, but I think that will be okay.
I think humans will find a way.
I share your view as an optimist, Derek.
And for anybody who doesn't follow Derek Ross on, I mean, will it be that way?
No, because I said that it's going to be a dumpster file probably because that's how the
internet works.
I've been around the internet for a long time to know that a shit storm is just unhold
because I tried to sell it as a good point.
But in a long enough timeline, man, it's going to work out.
I really think it is.
I share your optimism and I will say, and I'm not just saying this because you're on the
call, but like every time I open up an Oscar, man, there you are.
Like, hey, good morning, everybody.
I tried.
I'm so happy.
Good night.
Love you guys.
Like, Derek, all right in the world, you know, the enthusiasm and energy for the network.
It's great.
You know, I'm doing my part, man, I'm trying.
Yeah, there's enough negative energy in the world.
We don't need any more positive energy attracts it, you know?
So I do share your optimism on that.
Vanessa, what are your thoughts on that comment or on that question of no adults in the
room and positive versus negative energy in the space and how it survives?
What do you think?
Yeah, I think it's another big topic, kind of with the team here.
And I think because we have so many motivated developers working in this space, a lot of
whom are really positive people, I think, and who wants the same future that Derek sees.
So I think because we have all of that and there's so much collaboration and it's not just
one, again, centralized system that's saying, here's what we're going to see.
And here's how we're going to moderate it.
But we have the ability if there are things that come up that are real problems.
I think that they'll work together as a community to come up with tools to combat that, right?
So like we were even talking about kind of the topic of private relays or private groups,
communities, those types of things that I know you've been interested in as well.
And you know, we'll mention that there's ways that, you know, we can put relay moderation
tools in place.
We can help people to figure out how to run their own relays potentially or have kind
of join me a noster to my own private group that you can then put on your own website
or Twitter or whatever and bring people over to your own private space.
It's not that that's going to work 100% of the time and there's still going to be a lot
of modifications that are needed.
But I think as long as there's still innovators in this space and I mean, like true innovators
who are not just like, I'm doing this because I want to paycheck and I'm going to develop
what I've been told, but people who really care and want to see a real future for social
media.
So I think that's our strength really at this point is just that we're not that typical
one corporate entity that's going to decide that everybody needs to see horrible videos
of violence in order to stay interested in their product.
Yeah.
Go ahead there.
As I said, Vanessa, you're absolutely right.
We don't have algorithms feeding us negative content for clicks and views to keep us engaged.
We have positive human interaction.
I think that noster really changes your outlook on social media, social networking because
of that.
We don't have this constant negative vibe that makes you feel bad for using social media
like you would if you were doomed scrolling on Twitter.
We just don't have that.
Now that could also be partly because we have such a small amount of users, but also we
don't have software that's keeping us negatively engaged either.
I really think that's part of it.
You know, your partner will there.
He often says that we're just humans being humans on noster, right?
We don't have software getting in the way and degrading the experience.
Yeah, Derek, the community thing that Vanessa mentioned is something that has come up and
we breached out to Vanessa and Will on with respect to a community room from musicians, right?
Like imagine if you're man like Quacks, right?
Shout out to man like Quacks in Tanzania.
And you want to have a private room for all your supporters where you can say, hey, I'm
going to do a Q&A about my latest song.
And I'm going to bring in Kavenia from Italy.
She's going to join in on the conversation.
Join us here at like nine o'clock Eastern and over here in this room, right?
Like that's what we were kind of that's what we had reached out to Will on.
And it's actually something that I think Terry and I don't know how to pronounce Terry's
last name.
Why?
I you, right?
Terry you.
And we met in November, down at Bitcoin Park, because he was developing in like a side of
Noster that was kind of synonymous with a convention app, right?
Yes, like you go ahead, Derek.
Yeah, it was, I don't remember the new name.
It was originally called Comster and then he rebranded it to a much better sounding name.
Yeah, but you would know it's much better.
I can't remember what it's called, but yeah, yeah, Terry is a talented Noster developer.
And I think also Domas contributor as well.
Yeah, and I told them, I pull them aside and I'm like, hey man, that's really cool.
Like it's kind of like like a group, like like an HOA group, an HOA Facebook group, right?
Like to be able to do that in Noster, I think would be beneficial for musicians or knitting
club.
Whatever, you know, anybody, I think that's something that would be really cool to be able to implement.
And I know as we onboard musicians here at Fan of Power, that's something that I would
love to be able to do because part of what we're going to be doing when we onboard musicians
is teaching them about Noster, teaching them about RSS feeds, teaching them about how to get
a wallet, teaching them about Bitcoin.
And to be able to do that, potentially in Noster would make life easy because we could zap back
and forth and, you know, about a being about a boom.
So that's one of the things that I think is pretty special about it if we can make it happen.
Absolutely.
No, I think it's the natural place to do it, right?
I just think of determining, you know, what the needs are and how best to do it.
And you mentioned some of those other groups, right?
And there are groups that are beginning to form a similar interest and they are, you know,
starting to interact and sell their goods, whether they be, you know, like you said, knitting
products or whatever it is, right?
And so that's cool because those people will, if they grow, they'll kind of be asking for
things that they might need.
And that in turn leads to developers saying, hey, you know what, I can build that.
And this is how I propose to do it.
That's usually how some of these new products are coming out, right?
Where people have an idea and then just about how to implement it and who's going to implement it.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Well, let me put, let me start throwing on the independent musicians hat.
And you guys know where I stand on this.
But let me just review it for anybody who is new to the podcast.
I have never been more excited about being an independent artist than I am now.
I was a singer, songwriter and Los Angeles from 95 to 03.
I got really lucky.
I did more than most people ever get a chance to do TV tours, radio, but I never signed
a big deal.
I signed a couple of publishing deals and got some mailbox money for years.
But what I have seen happen in value for value and at wave lake in the past seven months when
I met the guys from wave lake during the lightning summit.
And I have seen the success that artists like just loud and Joe Martin have had are having
an angelic hostel are having in this space.
I've never been more excited about the about being an independent musician than I am
now.
I am, you know, they have the tools at their disposal to be completely sovereign and to
turn down really crappy offers from record labels.
So let's, let's put our, our drinking hats on and let's say the three of us, myself, Vanessa
and Derek are at a bar in Nashville.
And we just saw this amazing band.
And we're like, we got to get these guys into the roster and we got to get them into Bitcoin.
What do we say?
How do we pitch it?
Vanessa, you're first.
How do you pitch it?
I think Derek has a lot more experience with this.
Come on, you're the marketing get you're the marketing guru.
No, I'm just unofficial marketer.
I don't wear the official hat like you.
I'm unofficial too.
But no, it's a really good question.
And I think, you know, it's interesting that you say, how do we get them on a stere, how
do we get them on Bitcoin?
Because those are two, you know, they are different things because it's a bit of a leap
right to just automatically be like, yep, I believe in Bitcoin.
No problem.
I'll start getting paid in Bitcoin.
You know, will always talks about his experience working at Monster Cat, the label where
he suggested many, many years ago that the artists start getting paid in Bitcoin and that
was quite, I don't know.
The reaction was not necessarily.
Obviously, they said, no, he said screw you.
I'm going to be.
So he implemented a way that it could happen.
And, you know, I think that was kind of the genesis of Zaps eventually and all of that.
So it does have a music background component because I've seen how much of a struggle it
is for independent artists to be paid for their work and, you know, the problem with bigger
labels and stuff like that.
So I think if I was to start a conversation, it would be kind of getting information from
them.
So, you know, what are some of the struggles you're having?
How are you currently trying to sell your music?
What are you currently doing to try to market yourself and then find ways to show them how
Noster could be different?
Right?
So the ease of being able to share, the ease of being able to make money so simply, again,
you can weave in the Zaps conversation with that.
It being able to be themselves not having to censor anything.
And then if they're able to catch the attention of some, you know, fairly prominent people,
that gets reposted.
And, you know, I think if you showed them kind of the evolution of how that can happen, especially
within a year and now looking forward, I think it could be, you know, quite a good spell.
But it's certainly, it's going to be a little while before they see, you know, how big this
thing could be.
But any conversation I've had with any artist, whether they be musical or otherwise, like
I'm wearing a sweatshirt right now from one of our, it's cute, I don't know if you can see
it, it's up.
One of our contributors out of Japan who, you know, really loved Domis, started doing
some designs, started doing Noster designs.
He's now getting a lot of attention from, you know, even Jack Dorsey and for people who
are looking at buying her stuff.
And so it's amazing how just these little connections can make a difference.
And yeah, so it's, I think that's how it approached is getting more information from them
first and finding how to tie that into what we can help them with.
Do you know Sean Yeager at Ambas?
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
You and Sean are cut from the same cloth.
Wow.
What are your pain points?
What do you have in the store?
Yeah.
What do you, I wouldn't use that terminology so much because I can't stand that in my regular
job.
So before like, you know, hey, what are you, what are you struggling with?
It's really casual.
But you have to know what problems there haven't seen.
You can solve it.
You can't solve it if you don't know what the problem is.
But so I think the best way to, well, so I figured out what the problem is, we have a real
world example that happened almost a month ago, right?
Like we had two artists that made almost 19 million sats over the course of two nights, right?
By live streaming, just by live streaming on NOSTER, right?
The real world, I think scenarios, real world numbers are really powerful saying that, you
know, we had an artist just loud that had 10 million downloads on Spotify and made, what
did he say?
Like, nothing.
Yeah.
He made, he made nothing.
And over the course of two days, like, I don't remember what the exact number was, but between
Ainsley and Just Loud, they made 19 million sats.
That's insane.
In one time.
And NOSTER doesn't have a whole lot of people that, you know, we're nowhere near 10 million users
for those 10 million downloads, right?
Like there was only a few thousand people that probably watched the stream.
I think that those real world numbers and using that example, you know, come up with, you know,
get all the hard numbers that we can come up with a one sheet, come up with all this information,
you know, and make it a nice, pretty info graphic on the one sheet and say, hey, this is how
many users were watching.
This is how many sats they made in today's dollar value.
It's this.
And then highlight the fact that they didn't have to ask anyone's permission to do it.
They didn't have to have a record label.
They didn't have to do splits with marketers and, you know, you probably, James, you probably
know more about than I do.
How many other people take pieces of your pie?
You don't have to do any of that.
It went directly to the artist of direct, which of the musician?
Like I really think that that using that, and thankfully we have this now, we have this,
this hard example to use to onboard the next musician and show them the power of independent
and sovereign artists have with people that understand and people that love to promote value
for value.
Yeah, that's a great example that I have been using in it, but I'll be honest with you.
I'll say, look, you got to kind of temper what happened with with Ainsley and Just Loud.
Like that was kind of like the first event of its kind.
And you had a lot of people jumping in and donating for two reasons.
Like, hey, let's just make sure the technology works, right?
Because there was a lot of devs and a lot of, I mean, they're like dovidas.
You know, he was up all night.
Oscar Mary was up all night.
You know, there was a, there was a lot of people all around the world that had invested interest
in making sure the technology of it worked.
So I think you got to kind of take it as wonderful and beautiful as that.
All of that success is you got to kind of take it with a little bit of grain of salt,
because it was the first of its kind.
Yeah, not everyone is going to have that type of turnout and that type of support.
You're right.
Right.
It is still extremely powerful.
And what I have been telling some artists is, look, like, how much are you making on Spotify
right now?
They're like, well, I'm not making anything.
I'm like, okay, well, you're not making anything on Spotify, but you could be making 100 bucks,
500 bucks a month doing this.
Now what if you started incorporating live streaming into your business plan and you double
that?
Like, it's, it's not uncommon.
It's not hard for me to think that somebody could be making anywhere from one to $10,000
a month in this space.
If they know how to push it, if they've got all the tech lined up and if they know how
to push it, and even like, something as simple as saying, as saying to these fans, like, I
just like, like, I got a band from the UK who's going to be uploading stuff this week, one
of my favorite bands, independent four young kids all in their early 20s.
They sound like if you two and cold play got in a car accident, that's what they sound like.
Yeah, they're amazing.
I'm like, look, guys, like, you know, if even if it, even if it goes slow and you only made
$2,000, $3,000 bucks this year, would that pay for another song to be done?
That's better than the zero they're making from Spotify.
Yeah.
Anything is better than zero.
Anything is better.
And once you get, once you put it to them that way, they're like, oh, yeah.
Yeah, what the hell?
Well, if they're already, if they're already uploading their content to Spotify, not making
anything, anything, why not upload it to Wave Lake where you could potentially make a few
dollars here and there.
You know, like, that doesn't, that's, it's not going to cost you anything more to do.
It's just going to cost you a few minutes to do it.
We're not talking about doing a massive live streaming event like we did a month ago, right?
This is just getting your foot in the door and just uploading your content to a secondary
space.
That's all.
Yeah.
And there's a lot of good personalities too on, on Noster.
Sorry, just beyond their music itself, right?
So if they, you know, not, not necessarily to the extent of a TikTok, but it could be more
simple where they just kind of tell a little bit about their process or where they're from
and try to get some of like the local support from certain countries or different things,
right?
And then what we found is, you know, there's certain waves of people that come on, right?
And so, you know, we had a TikTok or out of Thailand who brought in, you know, 10,000 downloads
in a day.
Like, it was, which is for us, that's pretty significant.
So it could be that, you know, if these artists have, have decent, you know, online personas
they can create or that they have and they're honest and they show, you know, some of that
background content that could then lead to more people wanting to support them in either
the content they post or the live stream example.
But that also doesn't have to cost a lot and it doesn't have to take much time and you
don't even need to run a website, really.
You can do your whole, you can just have a, you know, your account on Noster and that could
be enough.
And nobody does that better in Noster than man like Quacks.
That is a really good job.
Yeah.
That food is so good.
He is so, aside from just being a marvelous human and a good rapper, like he understands
marketing.
I mean, this is, this is a social media is a puppy, man.
If you don't feed it and pet it every day, it's going to die on you, you know?
And we don't have algorithms generally speaking on Noster to bring engagement and to bring
a content forward.
So we say you have to be your own algorithm and that, that just means that you need to engage
with your followers.
You need to engage with people that you follow to let them know that you're there.
And that's just as simple as just commenting and interacting.
You need, you need to do that.
You need to put in the work.
So once you let people know that you're there and you're engaging and you're active, they
will check out your content.
They'll check out your music in man like Quacks like, yeah, he's, he's a great engageer.
He posts his content everywhere, but besides posting it, he's also engaging in other people's
content too and commenting and interacting.
He's doing it right.
And zap and back and forth.
Yeah.
Zap and back and forth.
Absolutely.
Send a little zap.
You know, that's one thing we didn't mention is zap partizing is a way too, right?
You have a new song.
You just posted it to, you know, wherever you posted it to flare.pub or YouTube or Spotify
or or wave lake and you want somebody to check out your music, you can send them some
sats to promote your content.
And zap partizing is just for those not familiar.
It's just a way to send somebody a little bit of money to view your content.
They'll get the sats, maybe they'll get the dollar or they'll get the quarter or whatever
you decide to send somebody in their Bitcoin wallet.
They'll see a notification that you sent them a link to your content and you're paying
them to view it.
So zap partizing really works well.
We've seen a lot of brands and people have success over it over the past year.
Vanessa, what do you or for either one of you really with respect to musicians in this space?
I know that wave lake is working on some sort of integration with Noster.
But do you anticipate bands being able to place their music directly on Domas or on Amethyst
or like how do you see like the musicians and Noster really getting more closely integrated?
Well in terms of the tech side of things, you know, Domas is definitely working on and I'm
sure the other clients are working on better video playing in general, right?
So not just integration stuff, but literally like if you were to post a video in the app
right now specifically even like longer videos or higher res videos or whatever and some
of the you know, toggling back and forth and the controls and stuff when it comes to video
playing.
That's definitely on on our radar to be continually improving.
I don't know if you can speak to wave lake at all, Derek.
So we do have multiple clients that do support playing audio directly from what's in the
client playing an audio file or playing you know a video file.
They all do it a little bit differently like Amethyst will play audio and video directly
in the client snort or iris in the web will do it as well.
And it all depends on how the artists would post that content.
They're just posting a link to the audio file or if they're posting a link to the wave lake
file.
It depends on the client.
For example, like snort and iris on the web.
If you post a wave lake file, it's automatically embedded and it'll play it and it looks really
pretty.
But on Amethyst, the Android app, if you post a wave lake link, it doesn't look as pretty.
But if you posted an audio file, a link to an audio file, it would look pretty.
So there's some user experience enhancements that need to be addressed to make them look
pretty across more clients, I would say.
But it does exist.
It just depends on which client you're using.
Yeah, I will admit, like I don't know enough about how it's going to integrate over on
the master side.
And I'm actually looking for, I don't know if you guys are going to Phoenix next month,
but I'm going to go down there to the to the master event and Phoenix and hang out with
those guys and hopefully I can learn a lot more about it.
And I apologize.
I want to jump back over to zappetizing Derek.
I didn't mean to cut you off and jump straight over to video, but I just had that thing in my
head and I wanted to get it out.
Vanessa, let me ask you about zappetizing and what Derek was talking about.
How do you see that moving forward?
Are you, what's Thomas's thought with respect to how to market that?
Yeah, so zappetizing was something we were really, really excited about early on, especially
before we had a little bit of an issue with Apple and the zapp notes and everything.
But that said, I still think it's great.
I mean, we as an app are using it to an extent, right, in terms of using zappas as ways of getting
some value for what we're creating.
The zappetizing itself, I think, is going to be huge.
I mean, we've got some people like Walker who, again, were not making much money if at all
on their Twitter content, but now are using zappetizing very successfully, I would say,
a monster.
So it's exciting.
I think that there's a lot of work to do there still and kind of navigating some of the
ways we can go about it.
But yeah, I think it could be the future, actually.
Okay.
Good.
Well, you guys have been nice enough to give me an hour of your time so far.
And let me wrap it up with a couple of quick and dumb questions.
And these are more for me than anything else.
Number one, and I'm going to tell you right now, I'm going to steal this stuff because
I'm going to share it with musicians, especially bass players, because bass players are notoriously
moronic, because they only have to play one note at a time on four strings.
Don't you play bass?
What's that?
Don't you play bass?
Maybe.
You might have seen me in some videos somewhere.
I think I did.
Yeah, I don't know.
I've been growing this beard out for about five, six weeks.
Maybe nobody will recognize me anymore.
All right.
Said what's the simplest and best way to set up a profile?
Any tips you guys can give on setting up a profile?
Derek?
Well, you know, it gets a little confusing because the first question we need to ask is to
use Android or do you use iOS?
You do.
You're an Android user.
But all the musicians are on iOS.
I think I'm the only one who's on Android.
See, Noster has so many different clients out there.
But I would say if you're an Android user, you're going to want to use Amethyst or Primal.
To set up your profile.
If you're an Apple user, you're going to use Domus or Primal where there's a couple other
ones.
Those are probably the two most popular ones.
We're partial to Domus here.
That's what my wife uses and I use Amethyst.
There you go.
You know, but the onboarding process of Amethyst doesn't exist.
It's gross and ugly and it's confusing.
It's what we have right now.
Primal, I honestly don't remember what the onboarding process is like because I haven't
reinstalled the app from scratch in a long time.
Maybe they have a better onboarding process right now.
But you want to use either of those two apps and you want to set up your profile.
And there's, like I said, there's not going to be an onboarding process that's going to
walk you through it.
So you're going to want to visit your profile and you're going to want to fill it out.
You're going to want to put your name, your username, user names aren't unique like it is on
Twitter.
So you can have any username you want and you want to put a profile picture.
You want to put a banner.
You want to set up a lightning wallet so you can get Saps.
Primal now has a built-in lightning wallet.
So you don't really have to worry about that.
It comes with one for you.
You just tap a button to turn it on.
That makes things easier.
And then on iOS, I'll let the iOS expert talk about that.
Yeah, it was the best way to set it up on iOS.
Yeah, I mean, I totally biased.
So I would say that you saw this.
I have not tried to do Primal's new onboarding or anything.
I'm sure it's great.
But from iOS, yeah.
So we have improved the domicon onboarding to an extent.
So there are follow recommendations, #Recommendations and tips things.
And you auto follow or main accounts.
A couple other things like that that make it a little bit easier.
Reminding you to keep a copy of your private key and those types of things that people don't
always think about.
But I would say one of the big piece of advice I would have for people is just have fun with
your profile itself.
So tell people about you.
Maybe include a few key points about what you're interested in.
It's funny to think back a year from right now where it was really difficult to upload your
profile picture and your banner and everything.
Luckily, that's at the click of a button, at least on DOS.
So that's nice and easy and you can have fun with that.
And then, yeah, and then I think the biggest, biggest thing is just start to engage with people.
And it doesn't have to be anything crazy.
I think in the latest version, we offer some example, like an example first post and the fact
that you should follow the introduction hashtag, which has led to I think a lot of good new
users being able to find people that they're interested in.
One of my tips is to find somebody.
And again, I, you know, Domestert, I think, is decent now actually to find certain people.
But find somebody you think is really cool and interesting.
It could be Derek.
It could be whoever.
It could be somebody, you know, quasi-famous on the network.
You want to look at who's snowed and fall is I'm not sure what his looks looks like now.
But.
And then, yeah, and then take a look at who they're following and start falling.
Some of those people and then as soon as you find somebody that has similar content, engage
with that person, repost or note with, you know, renote what they're saying and then try
to follow some of the people that they follow.
And that's how you, you know, kind of curate your own experience.
It seems like it would be a lot of work, but I know it's not really when you think about
the hours and hours people spend on TikTok just looking.
It's just a bit of a different way of engaging on social media.
I don't think it's more work.
I just think it's different.
And you know, this is coming from a completely non-social media person until a year ago.
So, so yeah, and then, you know, just don't, don't be afraid to put yourself out there,
especially as a content creator as an artist, you know, just start to ask questions of other
people too and see what they're interested in hearing about or seen from you.
And then you'll be surprised how quickly you should get some pretty decent response
as Derek, should you buy your name?
Like, what, what is that that I, I think I see on your website, like you can get like,
like I could buy some power media.
Yeah, so let me tell you what that is.
That's kind of like how I got started in this whole space a year ago.
Noster has something called a Noster address.
And what they do is they allow you to be easily identified and insurchable and found
and make your name unique on Noster.
Otherwise, you're not going to tell anybody this really big, ugly, long string of characters
is your account name.
That's, that's hard to remember.
It doesn't look pretty.
It's not sexy.
No one's ever going to remember it.
So, myself and a few other people started service platforms for users to go and, you know,
buy your name, as you said, register your name.
If you own your own website, if you have your own domain name, you should absolutely use
your existing website to do this.
If you don't know how to do it, you can send me a message.
I will gladly help you.
I helped countless people over the past few years set it up themselves.
But if you would just like to click a few buttons and do it, you can go to NosterPlebs.com
and register your, your name and pay a little bit of Bitcoin.
Like, just a couple dollars worth of Bitcoin and you can have your name.
Like I said, otherwise, you can set it up yourself.
I want to backtrack one second since we were talking about onboarding.
If you visit, if you visit the website, n-o-s-t-a.me, if you visit this website, it's probably
the best Noster onboarding experience.
It walks you through setting up everything.
And you can even generate a NosterP from, from here.
N-o-s-t-a.
N-o-s-t-a.me.
It's a website that focuses strictly on the onboarding experience and the profile completion
and stuff like that.
But yeah, you don't have to use a Noster address, but we're kind of familiar with them as
humans.
We know what an email address is.
We know that some of us know what a lightning address is for Bitcoin.
And now you have a Noster address.
Yeah, it's funny.
I signed up for it when I first met Sam at Wabelake back in July.
I didn't have a lightning wallet.
I didn't have Noster.
And I was sitting there with one of his coworkers.
I think it was Josh.
And I'm like, I don't have any of this stuff.
And I just handed him my phone and my hair.
And within like two minutes, I had amethyst and I had wallet of satoshi.
And I'm like, I don't know how I do with this.
But I was able to figure it out from there and go on from there.
And of course, wallet of satoshi is, you know, now we've moved on from that, right?
Hey, what are these badges?
Like, do you have to do you buy them?
Are you giving them?
Are they gifted?
Oh, man.
Like, what the hell is this, dude?
Well, I absolutely love badges.
As you can tell, if you visit my profile from a client that supports them, Domest is not support
them, hint, hint, wink, wink.
But badges are just your, your 37 pieces of flare from office space, right?
Bad, badges, some badges sticker on your car.
Yeah.
So some badges actually have utility and actually have meaning behind them.
They're just cosmetic enhancements, cosmetic individuals for your profile.
Some of them mean that I attended certain events or I have access to certain clients or I
got a certain achievement from a certain app or some of them are actually like game references.
Like if you use thunder games, they're a Bitcoin gaming platform.
They use Noster badges.
If you back certain projects on Geyser, Geyser is a, think of it as like a Kickstarter for
a Bitcoin Kickstarter or Bitcoin Indiegogo.
If you back projects on Geyser, you can get badges.
If you have access to like a relays, things like that.
And then a lot of them don't really mean a whole lot.
A lot of them are just fun and memes.
I would say most of them are fun and memes.
But badges are kind of going through a new Renaissance now on Noster.
We have some new badge designers and we have badge enhancements now that show them their
rarity or how popular they are and how many of them were released are given out.
Now they're not like NFTs, they're not like shit coins.
They have no, they have no value.
You can't trade them and sell them.
But for, you know, speaking for, for Dommas, if what, if what Dommas wanted to do, if they
wanted to do a funding model and you would get a subscription, subscribers may get a badge
or something like that.
Like clients could absolutely use these as ways for funding.
I talked about that before.
Or if Vanessa had a punk band, it would not be interesting.
Imagine going to a virtual concert and getting these badges for attending a virtual concert.
How cool was that?
Yeah, I mean, we talked about it even for like, originally, it was the idea of like very
early on, you know, you attend some of our live events or whatever and that was the
kind of the early conversation of it.
I will, I will definitely bring it up in conversation, but a punk band, I don't have a hundred and fifty
five badges for nothing.
We got to have more clients that support badges and they're using badges.
Well, for Vanessa's punk band, she could be like, hey, show me that you, you know, you boosted
my song over on Boost Graham Ball and I'll give you this badge.
Show me that you zapped five other people in our fan group and I'll give you this badge,
right?
Like a cute one.
I know, I'm open to it.
I have no musical talent whatsoever except when it comes to karaoke in my own mind, but
my son just got a guitar for Christmas and I know Will likes music.
So it could be a family punk band and I can just, I don't know, stand back up the ends.
It's a great idea James.
I think we're on to something.
I like it.
I would see backup dancer Vanessa.
Perfect.
Yeah.
I like to sing.
I could sing in this band.
You know, let's do it.
I don't remember that.
Derek, maybe you and I could be like the guy, you know, like the guy who is on stage left
on the mighty, mighty boss tones, like always in a nice suit, just like the hype guy, right?
Yeah.
You know, I love hyping and things up.
Let's do it.
Yeah.
I think there might be something there.
One guys, thank you very much for talking to me about this and for talking about musicians
in the space.
I really do enjoy Noster.
I don't use it as much as I probably could, but I love the free speech aspect of it.
I love the no garden walls aspect of it.
I love just being able to follow who I want to follow and I really appreciate more than
anything at this stage in my life, but just being able to read and learn so much about
Bitcoin and lightning and everything from all these folks that are in there.
And thank you guys are a part of that.
So I thank you for enriching my life with education.
So cheers to you guys for that.
So all right, final thoughts.
You guys anything else you want to say about Noster?
Anything else you want to add about it before we wrap it up?
Oh, that's a whole entire second show, you know?
I will be back.
Come on.
I just, you know, Noster does take a little bit of work, but put in the proof of work.
It's definitely worth it.
Definitely worth your time and your effort.
Cool Vanessa?
Yeah.
No, I appreciate, you know, yourself and others trying it out and, you know, we need people
to try it out and to give us their feedback.
And, you know, so I would say that is is we're an open book here and we appreciate any
and all suggestions and ideas because it is a collaborative space still.
It's still very early.
And, you know, the shameless plug you can go to store.
At Thomas.io for a merch because that's another monetization idea that we're trying just
because I'm into experiential marketing, all that kind of stuff.
So there's that.
And yeah, just stay tuned for I think what is going to be a very exciting year for all of
those involved.
So thanks so much.
Awesome.
Derek, do you have a plug like doesn't your wife make Noster merger?
Yeah, where are the plugs?
Come on man.
And, you know, we don't have a merch store for Katie's merchandise, but you know, you
can put it on my merch store and I will gladly send it.
You know what?
I'm going to sign here up to make a Dom Moose.
You know?
Oh, me and a sir.
Yeah.
Are unofficial new.
All right.
Yeah.
I will sign here up to make a Moose and we'll sell 21 of them on the Domest Store.
That was fantastic.
She's going to love it.
It's wonderful.
Vanessa Gray and Derek Ross, thank you guys very much for your time and your effort, your
time, talent and treasure as they say.
And it is 6.50 pm here in Nashville and I am going to get this thing up tonight.
So hopefully it'll be up in about two hours.
So thanks you guys all the best in and I hope to see you, I hope to see you soon.
Absolutely.
Thanks.
Absolutely.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
My thanks again to Derek and Vanessa for joining us on this value for value podcast, the
Phantom Power Business Hour.
We're going to start doing them every Monday.
We had to delay this one one day because Derek was coming back from Costa Rica.
So thank you guys very much for listening.
Don't forget we've got other shows.
We've got the Music Hour which comes out on Wednesday.
The review that comes out on Friday and the Artist Hour which comes out on Sunday.
This past Sunday we had a great conversation with Enid Millel from Tanzania and I hope
you get a chance to check that out.
So thank you guys very much for listening.
Don't forget to listen on a modern podcasting 2.0 app and stack your wallet with sats
before you do.
Another thing that?
Smile for the mug shut.
Thanks.
(upbeat music)
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