Guest host Aaron of Essex takes the Sunday Brunch wheel again and welcomes Nat Cole for a lively, music-first conversation about building a “new music economy” on a Bitcoin standard. Nat frames the idea carefully: not just another platform or “ecosystem,” but a permissionless economic layer where artists can participate without gatekeepers, own more of their rails, and connect more directly with listeners.

From there, the episode opens into Nat’s origin story: a childhood split between music and computing, with a Jamaican sound-system lineage on one side, early internet tinkering on the other, and formative years spent around studios, sound engineering, youth projects, pirate-tech curiosity, and anti-establishment energy that made Bitcoin’s freedom ethos click hard once he finally understood it.

A big center of gravity is 2140 Music, Nat’s culture-maxi bridge between legacy music and Bitcoin rails. He describes it as part education hub, part events engine, part curation/bookings layer, built to help artists understand the tools, perform live, and find real opportunities in Bitcoin-adjacent spaces rather than just getting dumped into the deep ocean of Spotify-style discovery. The recurring theme is that the goal is not simply to preach “leave Spotify,” but to help artists add sovereign tools to their stack and gradually own more of their infrastructure.

Along the way, Aaron and Nat spin a five-track set from the 2140 orbit, including music from Air Klipz, Andy Prince, G-O-L-D, Sites, and Acme, using each song as a doorway into the artists, the camp, and the wider mission. One highlight is “Buffalo Gals,” which Nat describes as the unofficial mascot track for 2140 Music, anchored by the refrain that they “came to change the game.”

The closing stretch turns practical and forward-looking: Nat previews Bitcoin Graffiti Jam in Brixton/Stockwell, more intimate education/community events, and a continued push to build new bridges from the fiat music world into an uncapturable network where artists can actually own the relationship with their audience.

Links

• 2140 Art
• Nat on Nostr
• New Music Nudge Unit
• Aaron on Nostr

Episode 157 opens with Avi’s sermon “The Forgotten Forge,” a meditation on what happens when a civilization outsources the making of the things that keep it alive. The frame is applied directly to Bitcoin: early on, acquiring BTC and producing it were effectively the same act, but convenience split buyers from builders, and the network has been living with that fracture ever since.

Kent Halliburton, CEO of Saz Mining, joins to argue that this split is one of Bitcoin’s under-discussed fault lines. He traces his own path from a decade in the solar industry, through burnout and a Portugal walkabout, into Bitcoin and eventually mining, where he came to see mining as the “hashpunk” counterpart to the ledger’s cypherpunk side. His core mission with Saz Mining is to make sat-based acquisition through mining accessible to normal people rather than leaving production to specialists and institutions.

A big chunk of the episode is devoted to Kent’s “hidden history” thesis: the 2013 combination of ASIC specialization and Coinbase convenience created a fork in how people acquire Bitcoin. One path led to buyers, the other to producers, and over time those became culturally separate worlds. Kent argues that Bitcoiners failed to think through the downstream consequences of surrendering majority hashrate, while the mining industry failed to earn the trust of Bitcoin-native users with products that felt sovereign, legible, and easy to use.

From there the conversation gets practical: Saz’s hosted-ownership model, mining pool payout tradeoffs, the meaning of “wild sats” mined straight from the network, and the dangers of pool concentration, especially with Foundry and Antpool commanding an outsized share of global hashpower. Kent’s answer is simple but demanding: more proof of work from actual Bitcoiners, and less passive dependence on fiat-native public mining companies.

There is also a rich side-thread through the geopolitics of energy and place: solar incentives and greenwashing, hydro-powered mining in Paraguay, Norway, and Ethiopia, plus reflections on Portugal, Peru, and the cultural textures of life on a Bitcoin standard outside the U.S. orbit.

Executive Producer: Richard Greaser

Links

• Sazming
• Kent on Nostr
• Avi's New Book – July 18
• Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]
• Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)

Sunday Brunch #11 is a relaxed, music-first decompression chamber with Buttercup Roberts at the table: coffee poured, no sermon, no script, and the Value-for-Value house rule intact, where 90% of sats streamed during songs goes directly to the artist. Buttercup brings a playlist built through deep dives on WaveLake and Nostr, using the episode to reflect on how direct zaps can create a real feeling of connection between listener and musician in a world usually clogged with intermediaries.

The conversation ranges across Buttercup’s wider creative world. She shares her film background, her love of storytelling’s emotional power, and her growing disenchantment with the modern film industry’s shift from immersive movies toward disposable “content.” That opens naturally into talk about The Bridge, her parallel Nostr project using comics, characters, and visual storytelling to make privacy, censorship, data rights, and digital freedom more legible to everyday people.

A big middle section focuses on discovery, onboarding, and the UX challenge in open music ecosystems. Avi and Buttercup compare WaveLake and Fountain, discuss how hard it still is for normal people to browse music intuitively, and zoom out to the broader Nostr problem: how do you onboard artists and non-Bitcoiners into a network that is still culturally dominated by Bitcoin-native conversation? Their answer is less about hiding the ethos and more about building compelling creative entry points around art, identity, and sovereignty.

That leads into Bitcoin for the Arts, where Buttercup discusses the initiative’s mission to fund artists across disciplines, not necessarily for explicitly “Bitcoin” art, but for work that carries the ethos into culture through story, symbolism, and emotional resonance. The episode closes in a playful, ambitious place: imagining grants, murals, scavenger hunts, and global artistic treasure maps as ways to make the parallel culture feel alive, participatory, and worth showing up for.

Links

• The Bridge on Nostr
• Today's Playlist