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It all comes down to computers. Communicating the information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of, OK, this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of God. The one thing that's missing, but that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of Final Settlement, a podcast from On RAMP Media. On today's show, we speak with Sam Means, the founder of Wave Lake, a music streaming app that seamlessly aligns incentives between creators and listeners through the power of open protocols. We explore the value for value model of content monetization, value driven social graphs and discovery mechanisms, and the issues with existing centralized creator platforms as well as ticketing systems. Sam and Wave Lake are innovators at the forefront of leveraging open protocols like Bitcoin, Lightning and Noster. To disrupt incumbent models by empowering both the user and the creator. Now time for the show. Welcome back to final settlement. Today we have on a guest Sam Means from Wave Lake. Very excited for this conversation. As as mentioned in previous pods on funnel settlement, we try to take a take a look at Bitcoin really more from a technological perspective as a piece of software and open protocol that people are building on. And one great example of of this sort of element of the Bitcoin thesis if you if you will is what the guys at at Wave Lake are building. And so really excited to have Sam on here and and talk through everything that they've done both on you know the music and streaming side but also more recently a few announcements about disagree meeting the the ticketing space as well. So excited to get into that, but welcome Sam. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Glad we could finally make it work after few weeks moving stuff around, here we are. Yeah, I love it. I'm like, Brian said, very pumped for this conversation. You know, we've been talking for a few years. I think back my days when I was at 10:31 and some of the stuff you guys were doing and always found a passion for personal passion and and music and caring. You know it's something that's very visceral and when you get to that point you kind of you, you look at it differently than our any other experience and then because of that that experience matters from like the money side you start to think about it. One of the conversations we had early was back in the the COVID days when people used to play online and you would like tip them over like cash app. And I think now even if you go to like a local restaurant or wherever, you can tip them if they they put up the QR code, it's like there has to be better experience because people are really willing to actually put up dollars, hard earned capital for this feeling. And it just felt right for like this new wave of open protocols and value transfer to be able to figure out a better structure that has historically been kind of I think we'll talk about this for decades, if not longer, maybe it's over 100 years where creators have kind of just been cut out from middle men from their end value that they produce. Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a it's a cycle that keeps happening. It's been happening. We we say on calls. You know the just in the music industry alone, it's been essentially 100 years that artists have somehow gotten the low, the low end of the deal on on everything you've been dating back to, to how sheet music used to be sold. You know it just there's this thing that comes out that's a really cool connection from artist to fan and then people just get in the way and you know I think you you need people to create those those pathways. But hopefully with what we're working on here, we can we can act as a middleman, as the, as the on ramp. No pun intended. But we can build as we build these things, people, other people can adapt those in many different ways and many different clients and completely separate from us completely, you know. So yeah, it's exciting. It's exciting to actually be working on something that could potentially at least be the start of a new era for creators and artists. At ON RAMP, we believe that Bitcoin will be the most important asset to own in the 21st century. Our multi institution custody solution is the safest and most secure way to ensure that your Bitcoin remains in your in your family's possession for decades to come. Multi institution custody maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk. Leveraging Bitcoin's native properties to eliminate single points of failure that have historically complicated Bitcoin ownership on RAMP provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey. For more information, check us out. At on rampbitcoin.com yeah, maybe it would be helpful just to sort of take a step back and and learn a little bit about, you know, your background, how you got into the music business. But then also you know how you found Bitcoin and then sort of you know secondarily to that, like you know what, what were the problems that you identified in the existing sort of music industry and and how did Bitcoin ultimately help sort of map how you would attack those inefficiencies or or issues that you that you had identified? Yeah, it's a lot. I'll try not to be super long winded here. I'll try to give the the Cliff notes version. So yeah, I mean I've been, I've been in music ever since I I could. I mean, I started playing guitar when I was like 9 or 10 or something and got into The Beatles and and as soon as I found out you could be in a band, I started one with my friends. And that turned into, you know, going to a ton of concerts. And that turned into working for the venue and that turned into being a concert promoter and and all the while still making music and figuring out ways to you know utilize those business elements and to to to benefit the band and how kind of sort of how that structure works. I mean I even at one point in time was making websites and and posters and all kinds of you know just doing graphic design for artists and talking to the managers and just figuring out how the the behind the scenes of all that stuff. How everything worked and then ultimately got into a a a more successful band got signed to a major label. It was something I knew from my my DIY background probably wasn't a great idea but it seemed like a a good way to get some money that we would never have to pay back and we could maybe use it to to kick start something. But what I didn't fully understand is the I guess the implications that truly come with that which is you're you are stuck. Like you are truly stuck at a certain point. So what ended up happening is that was not really a a timely deal. The record industry started falling apart. That was in 2003, The beginning of 2004 a bunch of the major labels collapsed. I was on Electra that completely folded after you know 40 something years and and we got moved to Atlantic Records and then we were stuck there in just this weird limbo period for a couple of years until we ultimately got dropped. This all connects at some point I promise. So we you know from that point forward it it just I I just sort of made a decision never to or at least to try to never do anything like that again. I mean certainly never do anything just for money. It was you know it didn't feel great going into it but it you know when you're in your early 20s and you're broke and you're just trying to live your dream you just you sometimes you make mistakes. So went on to be pretty DIY from that point. We started putting out our own records, started doing our own merchandise, tried out a lot of interesting experiments from, you know that point, like 2005 into 2008 or 2009 or 2008. I guess a few years of just trying stuff out like giving out our music for free just doing interesting things around touring and you know Fast forward from there. I I the van broke up I started merch company. I just sort of on the IT. It rolled over into doing merch for my band to just doing merch for a bunch of bands and then I so then I got really heavily into e-commerce and then you know 2014 I think after a couple years of a friend of mine some people may may know him. Mike Jarmus, someone I knew from back in Arizona in middle school. He had been telling me about Bitcoin for a couple years and and I just saw an opportunity through. I think at the time it was BitPay connected to Shopify and I was like, I'll just turn it on and see if anybody uses it. And that was my first interaction with Bitcoin was just, can this be used in commerce? Will people use it? And it's more of an experiment like I'll just turn this on and see if people use it, see what happens. Cause I mean it's really easy to set up an e-commerce store. Now the credit card networks have changed so much in the last 16 years since I started this, the merch business that I have. But it's always been tough. I mean you can you know I've I've, I've, I've I've stopped using PayPal now completely because they froze one time. They froze up just a large amount of money for no reason with no explanation. And you know, you just, you really see like how you know at the mercy you are. I have a lot of these credit card companies and payment channels. So the idea of of Bitcoin and being able to interact around the world essentially for free really was interesting to me. So I did that for a number of years and then I heard about the Lightning Network, you know a few years later skip ahead 2017 I think or 2018 somewhere around there. Whenever that started picking up, same thing I just I was it was more so just seemed like a an improvement on this, on the utility of spending it. So I got into it, but I really had no idea how to participate. But I definitely started getting more interested in getting involved somehow. So I started going to some conferences and paying attention and spun up a couple nodes and did that whole thing, but wasn't until 20/21 when I discovered you know, through I think Marty's podcast listening to Paul from Sphinx talk about how they were streaming money through this application and that that really connected all the dots for me. So then I not only was I thinking about the, there's the e-commerce aspect of it, but then I started thinking, well, if you can stream this money, what can you do with music and how can I, you know, how can I help this. This is now going to help with physical merchandise and physical exchange of goods. But also this could work digitally for for streaming and start to solve potentially solve that problem. That was really starting to ramp up at that point. So I spent the next couple years really just like going out on Twitter and trying to find people who might be interested in building something on Bitcoin and Lightning that would, you know, be be heavily focused on music. So yeah, I mean 2000, end of 2022 or something. I met Michael Rhee, who's a Co founder of Wave Lake. He started an early version of Wave Lake before we officially teamed up and I was his first beta tester. And we just kept in touch and he tried it for a year and it didn't really work. And so we put our heads together and sort of read change a bunch of things around you know that that the point at that at that point it was it was kind of a paywall thing and we decided to to change it into a distribution channel and that really opened the door for a lot of stuff and got us essentially to where we are today which is you know it's it kind of encapsulates all of those all that stuff I just talked about it like brings it into a place where now we're building something that could potentially be the starting point. The portal for everything is my current catch phrase I'm working on. It really is kind of the portal for everything for an artist. You know, in the future you, you come here, you distribute your digital music, you come here, you, you, you're live streaming, you're you're doing something that feels similar to Patreon, you know, but without the pressure of the the monthly subscription. You're releasing your music to multiple clients and social media and platforms and and maybe booking, you know, selling tickets and events and all kinds of things. So building that social layer is what we're working on now and starting to think about some of these bigger picture things. But that's that's how I got here. It's amazing. It's it's cool. Like we mentioned in the top, you know, we haven't chatted in a while and here in the progress, you know, portal for everything and what that means. And we'll dig into it because it sounds exciting and like again, loving music, just knowing that these tools need to exist that are more kind of like rooted in what's needed from a participant side with an also creator. But you said something early that I know you're very passionate about and knows the creator. I'm sorry. Being stuck with the record label, I think it's really helpful to like understand where people get stuck and how that that model's broken because I think that'll help And just our side understanding and anybody listening and like how foundation because I think most people inherently know a lot of the music industry has been kind of crazy or even maybe entertainment in general. But like the intermediate intermediaries that like rent, seek and all of that process I think is helpful to to understand better. Yeah, I mean it's it's so complicated. But I guess to simplify it as much as I can, it's just things are always when when you're starting out or even just in the process, you know, maybe you're a few years in, everything is just out of reach for the most part. You know, it's like when I was a kid and I was growing up, it was, it was touring. It was like get in a van and tour, you know, So that seems easy. But you need a booking agent or you're just going around and booking crappy shows that you know aren't going to get paid or have people have people there. So you need a booking agent, but you can't get a booking agent until you have a record deal. And you can't get a record deal until this happens. And so everything is just like kind of one step ahead of you unless you somehow do something and stumble into something that that makes you just shiny enough that that record label or that booking agent that you know, that person sees you and discovers you and gives you something and now it just opens up all the other doors for you. But when that happens, you don't just you have to give up a lot, you know, you have to give up in that how what that looks like today is totally different from when I was a kid. But now it's like you have to battle through TikTok and build up a massive following on social media so that the because the label doesn't know how to develop record labeled, the music industry doesn't really know how to develop artists anymore because everything's changed so much in the last 10 to 15 years and they just haven't kept up. You know, the way they used to develop artists is very different. We don't have radio anymore, barely. There's no college radio. There's or at least none that, you know, it's making any kind of like significant impact around the world or the country. And so they don't, they don't know what to do. So now they just kind of put all that pressure on on the artists and that pulls them away from their what what they should just be doing is just making music. But now they're now they're content creators and and they build up this following and they do all the heavy lifting and then a record label will come and you know, like, hey, thanks for doing that. Now you're ours. You know, if if you want to here's a little bit of money and some promise of success, but it it doesn't usually work out like that, you know. So it's just it's it's like most of you you you have to do something that you don't really want to do so that you can keep doing the thing you want to do. That's kind of the the deal that's like the handshake and it always feels kind of gross, you know. So I I think we're just trying to step in and help with this idea of you still need a little bit of help. You do need someone to have this bridge you you might need a platform, you might need a service, you know. But, but if you want to just make have that connection straight with your fans and and that can be something that can now be monetized in a way that brings way more value to you and allows you to to just be a regular musician or artist or do the thing that you that you truly love doing at your pace. That's going to be really important for people and they won't be as desperate to connect with these other avenues that typically you would have to do because they're able to just live as artists now because their fans are able to to help them in a way that they've really never been able to do before. Because right now it's you know it's touring is still great but it's becoming very hard, difficult to tour just because it's expensive. It's way too expensive. And a lot of the venues have been bought up by Live Nation and bigger companies. And so touring just doesn't exist the same way it did 20 years ago. And yeah, it's tough. It's tough. It's it's really it. We're sort of in this weird area between between cycles of, you know, the the peak of digital streaming and sort of the peak of social media and what is about to come next is the exciting part. Yeah, I'm, I'm curious if you can sort of pull on that thread a bit of you know being able to monetize your content or whatever you're creating in a way that was previously not possible without without Bitcoin. Like the this concept of value for value for folks that aren't necessarily familiar with what that means. And it would be helpful to sort of breakdown, you know, the actual logistics of of what what this model for monetization looks like for creators and why it's a, you know, arguably a step function improvement on what we just outlined in terms of you know, whether in in sort of previous eras you had to get a record deal. Now there's social media, but you know that's not necessarily, you know a great way to monetize unless you have you know millions of followers and maybe it's a creative to some sense but what what is Bitcoin and in this value for value model unlock that was was really not previously possible. Yeah. So I guess the main, the main difference now is you know you're building up a following in a very specific place. This is why we like Noster and why we integrated it so quickly even though it's still so new and people are very skeptical of it. We we don't really want everybody coming to Wave Lake, you know, we we want Wave Lake to be just the the, the place where the music gets pushed off and now it's everywhere. We started building, we started building things to to highlight how that stuff works, but not not to get people to come there necessarily, but just to as a showcase to show like hey, this is what this is what's possible here. You know, here's a music player, here's a mobile app, here's a here's a Nostra client. Now take all the stuff and you guys go do this and implement it in your stuff. So you know this is still somewhat conceptual, but it's like if you build up a big following right now on let's say you'd you know on Wave Lake and Wave Lake starts to suck. But whether you realize it or not your social profile, you know soon we're sort of unifying this across the the desktop and the mobile version. But ultimately you're you're just building up a following on Noster which is an open protocol where your identity can really live anywhere. And so whereas in the past you build that up on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or whatever it is and they start to roll out advertising. You know after a a couple years they get you hooked in and you've built built up your following and now you have to start interacting the way they want you to interact so that you're feeding those algorithms and and they're able to you know manipulate that that content however they however they want to. So next thing you know you're essentially just creating stuff for a computer algorithm in hopes that it's going to feed it to the people that actually are following you here. I mean I'm sure with Noster and some other things and there will be algorithms, but I guess the main difference is if they start to, they start to suck. You can just take your following wherever you want, you know. So if Wavely starts to become a bad social client, maybe it's still a great place to to distribute your music. But maybe, you know, we're doing something that you don't like and so you can just go to go to Fountain or go to maybe even like a social media client, like not like a primal or or Dom is one of those things. And then maybe they've now figured out a way that they have and a good way for them to implement music as a service. You know, much like Fountain has, like Fountain only did podcast, but now the Wave Lake catalog's on Fountain and they've started adding features for music and playlists and and they've they're experiment experimenting with some other things like the jukebox they did a couple months ago. So yeah, I mean, I think it's it. It's still such a a fund, developmental, early stage. But I guess the idea is just you should own your Internet identity and you should be able to take that with you wherever you want. You know, maybe it's not even that one client's doing a bad job. Maybe it's just you, you make music and now you want to start making videos. It's really cool to just think that you just pop over to that video client and everyone's there with you. You know, whoever's using that video client, if they're following you on wavelength, they're following you there too. So I think as it grows that's that's going to be one of the main catalyst that drives people to it is once they realize they can hop around the Internet with this identity and everyone's there with them, you know, so you're not having to start over when a client, when a product, when a platform starts to change the rules on you or you get you do something wrong and you get kicked off of it or whatever. You know, it's like that kind of stuff won't necessarily happen with this, with this new idea. So yeah, we're very optimistic about it, but it is, it's new, you know, so a lot of people are very unsure we are as well. But it's it's the best thing out there right now for us to utilize for the the social elements and the engagement. And if we want to, if we want people, if we want this to work cross-platform, then it's the way to go right now. I think, I think one of the interesting dynamics is like on the artist side, right, Because generally things like this are two sided. You need to have the listeners, but then to get the listeners, you know you need the the artists and they kind of come back. If you want to get paid, you need listeners or people that are going to use the app. Yeah, I've always thought like the the artist side, this is like the one unique experience where the artists, it's natural because they want the relationship, they have a relationship with the end user and they can help move them. I think we saw this like Kanye in title, right? And there's different flavors of artists have followings that can really move in mass as individuals. That dynamic that exists today with the aggregators like Spotify and and Apple like understanding the, you know for that 1% or 3% that actually get paid anything there or the rest of that long tail gets basically peanuts if if even peanuts and why they would opt for a better experience or value transfer I think is important to like why the structure starts to like move over where we could see growth. Yeah. And it's, you know, people talk about these things not having enough users yet, which is true. They don't. You know, I think Nostra has like 13,000 daily users or something. But you know, you get if if the clients are there, if the if the clients are there and they can easily onboard fans and and create that connection and it's seamless. You know, like Primal's really good for social and you can buy Bitcoin there and it just makes it really easy. We're doing that with our mobile app, like working on just making sure like when we roll that out to the public. You can beta test it now on wavelake.com, but if you know eventually when it's in the app stores and stuff, it's going to have to be a seamless experience so that someone discovers it and they have maybe they have a 500,000 fans or something and they get on and the current community on there starts doing their thing and being generous and discovering this music and they're like wow, this is really refreshing, this is cool and they go out and they tell their their actual fans, hey, this is a really great place to support me. I've been here for a week and I've already made X amount and that's that feels really good and I'm like communicating with people then if they bring over their people you know that that could move the needle overnight if you get the right person to do that and if you're set up to scale quickly like that. So you know it could it could be something like Wave Lake. I I I certainly think social media is a great start. But I think it's it it's sort of peaking you know, at this point because we have everyone over from Twitter that's probably going to come here at least at least the big boom for now. You know until there's until there's a significant thing. I mean a lot. So many people are talking about what needs to happen next in order to to really move the needle there. And I think it could be it's going to be something or need to be something like music or gaming or someplace that just where you have these these people that can really change things overnight. You know, you get a small handful of artists talking about the value of of this new exchange that they're finding. And that could spark something huge that just starts compounding, you know, snowballing down. And next thing you know, you could have, within a week, you could have multiples of what you have. And much like what happened when Jack first started talking about it in December, you know, like that that type of thing can happen over and over and over again, but with much larger audiences. Yeah, it's almost like the, you know, the earliest adopters of these protocols of these networks, whether it's Noster or you know, just using lightning for for value, for value streaming. It's like, you know, the the the first people who adopt that are going to be, you know, largely bitcoiners, people on Twitter who are just interested in the tech. And I think it's, it's interesting in the sense that, you know, I'm curious how we cross that chasm of whether it's an artist or, you know, someone creating any form of content, getting them to recognize that this isn't just about Bitcoin. This is just a a better, a better product or a better experience, a better way for you to monetize what you're creating, right. Like if we can get them to that point of understanding, then it starts to, you know, inflect this flywheel of they're not just adopting it because it's Bitcoin and it's and they think Bitcoin is interesting, they're adopting it because it's a better product or service or experience, right. And they might not even know that Bitcoin is on the back end, but they're. They shouldn't know. They shouldn't have to exactly. Yeah. And that's that's our main goal. Like we, we tried to barely even use the word Bitcoin, 'cause it's, it's a turn off, if anything, for most people, you know, Yeah, I mean I have 10 years of education on this. And luckily the education part is getting easier, like things are definitely getting easier. It's there's it's so much more in the mainstream now than it was 10 years ago, obviously. So you know, you don't need as much time to learn, but you really shouldn't have to learn anything at all. You don't have to learn how to use TikTok, really, You know, it's pretty seamless. You don't have to learn how to use Twitter. It's just the idea is simple. You just get on. You don't have to know how you know. So many people use this all the time, but it's like you don't have to know how HTTPS and e-mail work. You know, they just work. You just have to. The barrier for entry is really low. And so that's what I think most of us are trying to do, especially with Noster and and these new Bitcoin apps is, you know it it has to be easy. The the, the education piece. Our Roy from Breeze had a really cool article. I think it was called an orange. Orange Pilling is no longer working or something like that. You know, and it's I mean it's smart. He's right. It it's there's only so far you can keep having this orange pill conversation with people. You know it's like all of my friends and everybody knows that I like Bitcoin and I'm a dork and I'm doing all. I've tried all these things and you know eventually they'll figure out and some of come over and whatever. But until there's something that like really they can just use that actually has a better a better function for them and Wave lake's not even there. I mean I have a ton of friends in that are in bands I have. I work with a ton of musicians and I I haven't even brought this up yet. You know, like they've caught wind of Wave Lake, but it's just not ready yet and I want it. I don't want to miss that opportunity to say like hey, go check this out and not have it be right, you know, and not have it work. So yeah, it's just it's just going to take some time and it's hard because it's, you know, when you're working on stuff like this, it's it's hard to get funding. It's hard to get things going. Your resources are limited. You can only move so fast and it's we have a million ideas and a ton of stuff we want to do and we have to just really be patient and try to think through this outing. There's there's there's three of us that we've like and I don't code anything so I'm not much help there. I'm just sort of being obnoxious and hoping things can get done and and somehow magically they do between Michael and Josh. So yeah, it's you know it's if people, it's our job on this side of things to just really support the people that are building these projects and and do the best that we can and and try to get things to work for us. If they're not working for us, they're definitely not going to work for anybody else. That's the that's the main thing right now. It's like we have to get like 100% of the Bitcoin people have to be into Wave Lake or else no one's no one's going to use it. Can't expect the mainstream to use it if if if you know someone on this podcast, can't figure it out. Yeah I think that's where like it gets a bad rap but why price is the ultimate function forcing function because I when I think about you know one of the forcing functions for a wavelength and and the growth of that is like the artist moving over and taking over like you referenced really making a size of change even on the Noster side of things. But what what takes an artist to move over and they have to really go down the the rabbit hole and like you know one of the easiest ways to start get them started on that is that price appreciation and the the market sentiment and the awareness and then the natural progression happens like that. We've seen it happen time and time again every time we like go up and so but then the other part is like in the growth and we we see it's like you have the price appreciation but it's starting to come to like the vision of the utility maps to the price in parallel. So like price goes up and people like number go up but then utility goes up in parallel and generally it comes down to like oh which happens 1st that I think it like happens together, right. We're like price goes up and then these services or platforms exist. And the one that it seems like incredible when I was listening to today you and Marty on the the the pod discussing the ticketing side of things. Because again like on the there's just, it's so perfect for music because there's a natural relationship that we keep anchoring to with the individual artist and and the individual that transcends like the platform or anything related to like lock in. So if they say hey, do this or try this, they will just go naturally there because they have a tie to that artist and they think about what's happening with the events and the the ticket set up and and would love for you to kind of like tie tie that in like how broken that is. But everybody knows when you go buy a ticket you see all these crazy surcharges and all the craziness with like, you know Taylor Swift and all these fees. And there's this indie guy that's kind of blown up and you might know of him, Sam. Just because being a music of Zac Bryant and Zac Bryant and following him for years and he was like putting. He was in the Navy and put YouTube videos and you know that's where he. I think he got actually got big and got honorably discharged from the Navy to go pursue his passion and blew up the past two years. And he loves his fans. He came from like small town Oklahoma and would love for his fans be able to see him at $15.20. He literally can't because every time he does it, they just completely crush it. And like when you guys were talking about this idea of like the social graph on Noster and him and being able to map to the followers and knowing that these people have actually exchanged value for listening and then opening that these tickets only up for these people. If he knew of that he would 100% move over. I know without question like we were able to get in touch with him because that's all he's looking for is like that experience. And especially as counterculture like grows and that's like what music is, right. It's kind of like counterculture when it starts. It's like the opposite of what people are popular with. That's like this is where that I could see it tying into is just having a better relationship with your end user and then artists start to learn that and if you can monetize it just all like works out downstream. So anyway, long way to way of saying like you could see the path, it's just obviously takes time with appreciation. The tools have to be pulled out. Yeah, I mean the ticket thing is so, so early. I mean if if if the if wavelike with music and all these and noster and all these things are early. I mean this is like a you know the idea of that being even remotely ready for someone like that is it's gonna take a lot of work you know. But the the cool thing about it is that it all those things are possible like it is it is completely possible and it might you know maybe he does catch wind of this some point in time and just fund somebody to build that that platform and that's the cool thing. That's the other cool thing about it. It's like it's there, somebody go build it. Like we don't have to do it in Wave Lake. That was literally just like we had a show in Nashville, a show in Nashville coming up and around the conference on the 25th. And we're just like, hey, wouldn't be cool if we could just this this idea that we've had of artists being able to to go live on Wave Lake eventually and do an RSVP. You know, it would be nice to know how many people are going to show up or like you're you're booking a small tour somewhere or whatever, you know, you can just be able to throw up a ticket. It's just going to be very helpful for for an artist. So we just did it as part of our annual, our our new annual hackathon thing. Last year we did it, it was the mobile app, we did a proof of concept called Wave Man, which was essentially turned into our mobile app. And this year it was the ticket. Let's just let's our little hackathon will be like can you guys get this done in a couple weeks. And they did and it works and it's really cool. And it it actually, yeah. I mean there's if if you go back and listen to this the TFTC episode that we did this week, we go into much more detail. But there's everything you need we need to be able to do for ticketing. We can do it. You know we can totally do it. We can limit and control the resale market. We can he said identify your number one fans. I mean, I'm I'm in a band. I put some shows up on sale a few years ago before COVID, and they didn't end up happening because it killed the whole thing. But you know we wanted we you try to do the thing. You try to like get a promo code that's just for your mailing list and just for the the people that are really paying the most close attention to you and you just can't. It just ends it ends up getting manipulated somehow. And I mentioned on a couple shows, I feel like this last couple weeks, you know, someone like Maggie Rogers is a great artist who's doing physical outlets to try to combat that a little bit like you have to actually show up and buy a paper ticket at a retail. You know it's old school but it helped back in the day. You know you'd have to go to the department store or record store or something and get your ticket for the show which scalping was still a problem then but it definitely helped like there weren't bots you know and that that type of thing that we see now. So yeah I mean we're really excited. I don't I don't know where. You know it's that's the fun part of building on Bitcoin and Lightning and Noster and living in this world right now is it's it's really open. You know how the how this stuff ends up integrating with Wave Lake and through other projects and events. I don't I don't know we'll see how it shakes out but we're definitely very excited to be able to be working on ticketing right now because we didn't think we would be when we when we first launched in January of last year. You know the Noster was very barely on our radar just kind of coming into focus and had no idea what we could do with it. And now you know fast forwarding just barely a year later. It's cool to be able to start now we have a mobile app and now we're working on ticketing and our next integration of this is coming out in a couple weeks will be like way more of a social layer And all these things we just didn't think we'd be able to do for years. We're suddenly able to do relatively quickly. Whether you're a seasoned bitcoiner or brand new to the asset class, On RAMP provides a best in class private client experience. To ensure that your Bitcoin remains accessible, secure, and in your control, I'll have a dedicated advisor to guide you every step of the way. If you want to meet in person, we now have on ramp branches in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Nashville, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Los Angeles and Denver with more on the way. Check out on rampbitcoin.com/branches to learn more and get connected with our team. Yeah, the the ticketing stuff is is really fascinating to me because you know if you think of if you well one, it's just complementary to what you're already doing and sort of the music space in terms of streaming. But to me it's it's even more tangible is the wrong word, but it's like, you know people who stream music on Apple or Spotify, like most of the normie crowd is like pretty pleased with that experience I would presume, right. Whereas like with ticketing, I think everyone can agree like the ticketing experience is is pretty bad and it's gotten worse over the years. Yeah, it's just the the fees that that feel prohibitive or it's just that you know the various platforms, the lock in the the you know whatever it may be. I think it's something that people will appreciate. You know the normal person who doesn't understand Bitcoin will appreciate a different method of ticketing where you know they're actually getting the ticket directly from the artist. It is is like a very interesting concept. So I I'd be curious if you could walk through a little, maybe a little bit more detail like how logistically the ticket bot in particular works and then like what you envision can be built on top of it because obviously it's very early stage and sort of a prototype MVP type release. But just you know, where do you envision this going and? That would be interesting. Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm not the, the dev at Wave Lake, so I can't get too too nerdy here. But I'll try to just, you know, walk through the the Normy explanation of this. Yeah. I mean at its simplest form. I mean you are, you're on, you're on the Wave Lake app, go download the Wave Wave Link app and you're on Noster. You may not realize it. We're going to make it even more so so that you don't really have to think about that right now. You know there's language in there that's pretty technical and and dorky so and most people are using that our app at that app are familiar with NOSTER. But you know what's happening is you are, you know, cryptographically signing into a a Noster client. There's a listing that is a, there's an event Nip I guess that is universal for all clients that read this calendar, this calendar event type that's happening. It was really cool because we we listed this and then I think it was coracle or one of the other things at one point in time implemented a calendar for Noster events and it just automatically populated there, which was really cool. That was just a very early peek at how this could work across client. But today the way it works is you just, you know you go into Wave Lake, you see an event listing you you click on it. We made this a total value for value thing. So there's a one sat minimum just to just to state that there is some purchase price you can pay one sat you can pay a million Sats, you can do whatever you want. That money's getting distributed to the artists that are performing on the 25th of July in Nashville. But then what happens is you're you're signing, you're essentially signing it with your Noster identity within the app on your social client. It's let's say you're using Primal or Domus, you're going to get Adm from the ticket bot that gives you your information. Your ticket will also live within Wave Lake, but you'll get in your DMS, you'll get all your ticket information and you know when you get to the door there's AQR code. It's very similar to how most well call ticketing works today. Scan AQR code and verify that you're there. Where we see it going, I mean just like a couple cool features you you want to sell that ticket, someone else has to essentially sign it and so it's, you know you can kind of do that now with with Ticketmaster. I think they have a thing where it can only go from Ticketmaster app to Ticketmaster app if you want to, if you want to sell it. Unless of course you're selling it on the secondary market, which I think Ticketmaster owns and they they get to double dip on on or one of the secondary markets. But you know in the future, let's say this is my event and it's very popular and I know the show's going to sell out and I know that there's going to be a secondary market. I could say hey that's cool. You know you can you can sell this ticket to your to your friend or you can give it to your brother or something and they can sign off on the other side. But if you resell it, you can only resell it for 5% above the face value of the ticket. You can't exceed that. You could put a limit on it or you could say, you know you could sell it for whatever you want. But when that exchange happens, I become part of the split. So you have to give me 50% of whatever you sell, the overage or even the like. Future, future, you buy a ticket and everybody gets paid the 2nd that ticket is purchased. So you buy a ticket for my show and I get paid and my drummer gets paid and the promoter gets paid and the everybody who's involved is, is, is part of some sort of instant settled split that's set up when the tickets created. There's a lot of ways it could go, but it just solves, sorry, that's something's beeping here. Good old New York, you know, there's a lot of things that can happen. That's just really the start. That's that's the the the first version of this and what we're focused on is just we want people to be able to create tickets from within Wave Lake for for small independent events. Sorry. All good. Brian's in a New York as well and and we have work calls and and is it goes off and every time I hear it it's just so foreign to me. I'm thinking that he still has like a a landline that's call like and then I'm I'm expecting like 1/2. People won't even know what I'm about to say is like I'm expecting like the audio recording to pick up. It's like this is Brian, you please leave a message at. Yeah, it's there's no way to mute this thing. If you've ever been in an apartment with a a door buzzer, luckily, it's it's somewhat It's not totally obnoxious, but. Sam, you just made me think like how amazing one of the ideas with this is like, so there's the angle of the resell and the programmatic nature of you get the ticket and the downstream effects, which is I think important. But thinking about like even ahead of it, imagine that graph and I'm not technical, but I would imagine just in the same perspective like somebody buys a ticket, they sell it. You can figure out the split in in the relationship with the buyers of the relationship with the followers and zaps, with an artist where you can actually incentivize the amount of value for value pre any merch or ticketing coming out. Because you can basically say if you have X whether it's sats or number of that's then you can actually maybe get ahead of it or a discount on the tickets or even have the ability. So then you actually keep the bots from ever being able to buy and you influence or incentivize your artists or your fans to like participate when it historically it's like that, you know you like create a better experience for everyone. Yeah, you have a way better super fan group or fan club or whatever you want to call it. You know, it's like, right now, the way people do that are through, you know, something like Patreon where it's like, hey, if you are like extra and you spend 8 bucks a month, I'll give you all this extra stuff, and then you'll have early access to tours and music and stuff. But it's just so hard to keep up with that 'cause you, you know, you have to keep up with this subscriber base and you have to keep pushing out the content that whatever it was you promised to give them. In order for that to come in, you have to maintain that. It's really difficult or like a Kickstarter thing. That was a big thing for a while with artists where you know, if they wanted to make a record, they may put it up on Kickstarter and then they have to come up with a bunch of all these different rewards and things in order to get someone to pledge for the the campaign. And if that's just so hard to do and keep up with. So yeah, that that concept, that's really that's what we're working on next which will be great for ticketing. It'll be great for merchandise, it'll be great just for really anything is yeah, you can see you'll be able to see your top fans and identify them in your in in Wave Lake or you know other other places and just see like hey, this is my, these are my top 100 supporters. They get first access to to everything or they only get access to these things. So it kind of creates the, the OR allows you to like move off something like like Patreon because now you you just have them like the the supporters, they just are your supporters naturally because they've supported you. They've they've now fallen into a certain category and maybe they did that through streaming your music. Maybe they did that while you were on a live stream. Maybe they did that by buying one of your tickets. Maybe they purchased, merged, merged through this which we also want to get into at some point in time soon You could really set those boundaries and it's really just about implementing it into the back end of of of Wave Lake. Just being able to activate those things and and organize these events in a way that show who did what when and and you can reward them however you'd like, you know? In your mind, would that be? Would that would those sort of functions be like artist view only if you will? Or would that be like, you know, if I'm a fan or a listener, I can go see those leaderboards and see, like, you know, I'm #5. I've zapped the five, you know, fifth most zaps to this song. I've bought 2 shirts. I've gone to five events. Because that's an interesting dynamic too, where it's like you could almost gamify fandom to an extent. Yeah, I mean it could go either way. And I think that's that's a choice that the artist could make and that's the choice that the fan could make. Maybe I'm super privacy focused and I don't want to be on the leaderboard. That's cool. You don't have to be. You can opt out, but maybe you do want to be. That's a big, that's a big thing that can really, you know like think about like back in the day with Myspace and stuff, the top eight, that was a big deal. When you were a fan of a band you wanted to be in their in their top eight and that was just a manual process that they maybe they just arbitrarily identified or through some through whatever decided you were going to you were going to be there, you know. But there's yeah, there's so many ways to gamify this and ways for fans to interact. I mean even just the simple act of of commenting or boosting. I mean we see that with like the Boostogram or Boost. I forget the name forget the name on Noster where it's like the the boost the ZAP advertising. Zapper, Zapper Tising was like an early experiment which was like, I'm going to be the highest ZAP and I'm going to put a link to my thing in this app comment so that when it shows up, if it's sorted by tops apps, then my my advertisement. You know, you're kind of spamming a comment but through support. So it's sort of warranted, you know. And that's that's really what this could be too for. You know, it's like if I'm a fan and I want, I want recognition from the artist that I'm a supporter, then I'm going to ZAP a lot and with frequency or depth or whatever, you know, there's just, that's the cool thing is there's just going to be so many different ways to interact with support financially or even just interacting through communicate, communicating and participating in things, you know, because this is all, it's all connected. So if you if you've connected through Wave Lake or Fountain or one of these other things you know, and you want to see a live show it, it'll be there if you want to by merch. It'll be there if you want to. If you want to just listen to a new track or watch a song get written, you can do all of that there. Very cool. You mentioned earlier that you're sort of you know you obviously are well networked in the music industry and and at current you're sort of like hesitant to like push this on folks and say hey go use this two-part question. Like I'm curious at one point will you be comfortable doing so being like OK what do you need to see for it to be like ready state for you to say to get a little bit more aggressive about being like this is a better way to monetize your content. And then also sort of second part to that is like from the from the artist side, it's like you know how do you incentivize them to see that vision, you know when when that conversation does happen like what is the carrot to say this is actually a better way to go about things? It's getting really close. So I mean on the artist side, it's on the artist side, it's pretty much there. I mean that was the thing we built first was just making sure the upload process felt incredibly similar to to band camp or something like that. You know that's that's essentially what we've done there and it's it's working. You know we have about 700 artists on there. We get we have very few customer service issues. Most people can get track set up pretty pretty simply So that part's done. The part that is was tough was in, you know, like July when Aidsley Costello, who didn't know anything about Bitcoin, her dad heard us, heard me talking at at Bitcoin Park in Nashville and, you know, a few days later uploaded his daughter's music and she was like, cool, where do I send my fans, you know? And there just really wasn't a great place for that. Like we, I could say like wavelake.com, but can't buy Bitcoin there. It's like you have do you have to know what a lightning? Well, I mean, there's just so many complications there from the fan side. So that's why we expedited the mobile app and the things we're finishing up within the mobile app are really the final, well, not the final stage, but what's going to start getting me there where I'm, I'll start pushing it, you know, to certain levels of of friends and artists that I'm, I work with and just see how they react and how their fans react to like I wanted to be. I wanted to be real incremental with it. But you know, you have the artist has to. They'll get on and they'll see it because we're we've seen that already. Artists get on. They find out very quickly. This is really cool. I'm getting ZAP. I'm getting, you know, people are talking to me, people are discovering my music. This has never happened before. Spotify is an abyss. All these other places are just so hard for me to get noticed at this level. But the mobile app is is still in beta. So like it's going to take that. We have to get it into the app stores. The mobile app needs to have a wallet in it, which we're about to finish that. And I really want there to be some sort of listen to earn implementation so you don't have to buy any Bitcoin. You know, you could just get in there and we have some really cool ideas that will probably be the next, The next big thing that people find out about is a version of that, a concept of that that will ultimately roll into the app as well. Once that happens, once it's like truly frictionless for the artist and the fan, then we'll start pushing more to the mainstream. I love that you you said something on Marty's Pod that really resonated and I think resonates. A lot of people building this space is that the rules have changed. And I think that's important because a lot of these concepts, while they're foreign and they seem so far fetched, the reality is like once you've really get them and you, you get the the background and you know your background and having asymmetric information in the music industry and knowing how broken it is and then knowing Bitcoin, right? Those are two disparate themes. And once you combine them together, it's like, oh, I can see, like how the game has changed and it it doesn't go back in and it's just fascinating to think about what you're describing. And it's like when an artist goes in there and they have their existing relationship with whatever provider and all the things that they've been told is all the tools you have. And then you see another one. It's just like, oh, you don't put that back in the box. It's just the game has changed and now it's just a matter of time until everybody else wakes up and realizes it. Yeah, because it, I mean, it's so easy. It's just for the artist. It's just another place to upload your music. There's so much already. It's like it's not it's not that big of an ask. Just be like, I don't know dude, go throw up a track here, you know, and and try it out. So it's actually pretty easy to get them that's that's sort of the easy part because they're just used to uploading music everywhere just because that's what it is. It's like just spray everywhere and hope that something happens. You know, it's yeah, but it's that fan side. They're going to need them, their music to be there. They're going to need to be the the music that they want to listen to is going to have to get there. And that's a big ask. You know it's like no one's going to leave Spotify for for Wave Lake. No one's going to leave Apple Music right now for Wave Lake. They may supplement their, I mean we've been asking people or something we've seen out there, it's like, hey, what what are your, what are you listening to? And it's like 90% other platforms, 10% Wave Lake. And it's like that's awesome. I'll take that. You know it's like it's kind of cool to just be a part of someone's. And I I still use traditional platforms too. You know I I can't listen to The Beatles on Wave Lake. So yeah it's going to take some time. But you know, there's even if it takes a long time to get like legacy artists onto an idea like this, which I think it'll ramp up a lot faster than we saw before because the idea isn't really that foreign. It's really pretty similar to what we have going on now, which is better for the artist financially. So it'll be a lot easier to sell. But even just to build a robust independent music library like SoundCloud did or like Band Camp did, those are both very highly successful companies that had very strong communities and and started careers of a lot of artists and are still existing and as far as I know profitable today, you know, So there I I mean I have a lot of hope just for getting to that point and then implementing, you know, seeing how these other things that those things don't have can really change, change the trajectory of where we go from there. Because you can't buy tickets, you can't do live streams, you can't do all these things with these other music platforms, and you certainly can't do them in a way where it's all sort of unified in one place. You know, it's like you can buy merch on Spotify, but it has to be through this other thing. You can see ticket listings on somewhere else, but it's fed in through some other company, you know? So yeah, I think it's going to be really great. Yeah, your your music portal for everything. I I liked that early in the call and is that in like it actually works, right? Like you have this ubiquitous form of of money that that settles instantly and for a low cost and you can do all these different things all in the same place and can sort of sort of create this this music centric hub with just a much better model where. You know there aren't middle men extracting rent from from. Various elements of it. Yeah, for sure. What I mean I'm curious on the music side the the lock in because you referenced you still go into Spotify like everyone does and is there like are you able, is there any lock in that it occurs on a larger scale or is it pretty like anybody that's on Spotify can go they just have to opt it opt in to like uploading their their music to wave like? Yeah, I mean, there could be. There could be. I mean, I could see a world in the not too distant future where you're uploading through a different service like Distrokit or The Orchard or one of the OR Tune Core, one of these distribution platforms where you're selecting all the things that you're you're uploading to. It's like, hey, I I upload my music through Tune Core and it tells me I'm distributing to 65 different things. You know, it's it. This is all open. So we could partner up with with a with an existing distribution on ramp and say hey you know connect this here and and this could be one of your options and that could that could be a a way that we on board a bunch of people without anyone even realizing what it is whatsoever. You know, it could just, it's just another box that gets checked and funds start coming in in in a very different way and we would have to interact with something like that differently than you would if it was a one to one transaction. But yeah, I mean, there's so many ways to bring bring people into this. Yeah, that. That's a fascinating concept because you E reference how do the artists get on or the the fans asking for it. And we talk about price and and adoption grow and as adoption grows the overlap becomes greater with the list, the fan and the holder. Bitcoin or or you know whatever Bitcoin or whatever we refer to folks, I think we start to change as every money just becomes ubiquitous. But point being is when we launched this podcast a year ago, the only reason we got on true truly is got on Fountain was because everybody in Twitter D and comments were saying like are you on Fountain, Are you in Fountain? And they kept tagging. And then Fountain reached out and like, OK, well, it's just another app. And then it's just like, oh, these SAT's keep like growing. And there's like hundreds of dollars sitting in this thing that we don't like, you know, and it eventually gets to a certain point, you get enough zaps, enough incentive baked into that, then you're like, wait, this is actually real money. So you could see like that distribution channel like opening based on either partnerships or partnerships coupled with just like the fans asking for it at a fewer pace. Yeah, it's it's it's just going to take experimenting from artists. You know it's going to take, it's going to take some time. You know it's even right now on Fountain. I mean there's a pretty robust amount of listeners and podcasts on on Fountain, but it's still that's still very small. You know you it's, I mean it's evident now you could look at the supporters on Fountain and you can see like a lot of times it's even a small group of people that are sort of propping that show up and that's the thing works the same. You could say the same thing for Wave, like you know, it's very comparatively, it's an incredibly small market right now, you know, so but that's The thing is we just we have a better, we do have a better solution here, us and Fountain and all these other clients in Austere like it is actually a better system and that's typically that kind of thing typically tends to cut through, you know, it it may not be this exact version. I think Jesse from Amboss tweeted or maybe it was on Noster a couple months ago. But I liked it and it was like lightning may not, may not be the thing, but it's definitely going to be the thing to the thing that gets us to the thing. And that might be Noster, it might be lightning, it might be, you know, this E Cash and these fediments and all these other things are sort of becoming very interesting. You know, there's a lot of stuff popping up like this technology is moving very quickly and it's so exciting to be able to participate in it. But it's also nerve wracking because it's it's like happening so fast and you have all these options and it's it's tough to have the patience to pick the right one and not like get too deep, you know, before the user base is there. Not to get too in the weeds in the business model, but like you just made me think of this whole notion of people are going to need support navigating this, right. Like you referenced the different ways artists can adopt these things And it's just like, well, you can do XY and Z to optimize for revenue growth. And it's like are they going to have to do it or somebody's going to need to be able to provide them with the different, you know, like segments or tiers or be able to like shepherd them through until it's just I don't know what the end state looks like. But you can imagine the experience that we're describing is from anybody that has a relationship from produces some kind of like, you know whether it's a fitness instructor that has a following or artist where they want to do something that requires digital value like scarce value to provably show that it's not bots trying to extract rent. And you can imagine that like whole experience needs cultivating and like create creation around it to be able to like create like the the ticketing thing is a good example of imagine you're an artist or somebody that does something online and you want to open an event up to your community. But you don't want people to like go and you know basically corner the market on whatever that opportunity is. And so you can imagine going to something like a wave lake or somebody that creates something like this and to open up this is how you can effectively do it. So you can monetize it while also giving your fans the best experience. And that seems like a very like interesting opportunity. Have you guys thought about like whether it's on the music side or that in general or or not really? Yeah, I mean that's ultimately the goal. I mean we want, we want people to be able to essentially activate the, the, the top percentage of their audience in in every way, in every way possible. And we want to support that idea whether that's music or a fitness instructor or a recipe website or whatever. You know, it's anytime I explain this, this concept of just like giving your value to somebody as you consume the thing that's giving giving value to you this value for value idea. It's everyone's like, Oh yeah, that makes so much sense. How do I do that? You know, it's like you don't want it. I don't want a New York Times subscription because somebody's because my friend sent me one link, you know, to read an article. It's so dumb. Like it's just so dumb. And you explain to someone like, hey, wouldn't be cool if, like I sent you this link and you could just read it and pay $0.13 and then never pay New York Times anything ever again. Like, wouldn't that be great? Or like if you read it every single day, you could give them that $14.00 over the course of a month. Or, you know, whatever it is, this, this. There's no doubt in my mind that this is going to be the thing, the next thing, everywhere. You know, it just it's that's how we do everything. You have a you have you have a water bill. You don't just pay for, like a water subscription. You don't pay like $2000 a month, just have access to as much water as you want. You'd pay for the water that you consume. You pay for the gas that you consume and the electricity you consume. And that's how most things work. It's really strange, this idea of of paying like a monthly fee for unlimited access to stuff. You would could never in a million years conceivably listen to. I mean, I have my like main playlist on Spotify has like 8 days of music on it. I'm never going to listen to that like in one in one sitting, you know, it's like half the time I hit shuffle, it just plays the same 14 songs anyway. So yeah, I think I think people are going to be incredibly receptive to this as it starts moving more into the mainstream. It's just about building these things and pushing through and and like I said, supporting all of these things is the best that you can. I would someone, someone had a thread. I think it was. I can't remember who it was. Someone had a thread yesterday on Twitter about just like the early days generosity of Bitcoin and how you know like the pizza story or whatever, like any story from that era or like the first in 2014, someone buying 5T shirts on my merch company. It's, you know I'm paying looking back and laughing at that transaction, how much it is now. But you know that's what needs to happen. Like we all have to some people have to be building things. People have to be supporting those builders even if it's not perfect yet. And that's how we're going to get to the next step. That's how this thing has gotten us from A to B&B to C&C to D it just keep supporting. That's what I love most about the the bear markets is that's when everyone's is building the coolest stuff and you get in this new cycle and you get to see that get put to use. And every single time that happens, the stuff that gets built becomes more interesting and more more mainstream focus. And it's not just about wallets or exchanges or you know, infrastructure and mining and all these things. Now it's starting to be fun stuff like music and blogging and video and social media and these things that people want to, that actually use, people use daily. I feel like I got way off track there on no. No, that's that's exactly right. Because it go, it furthers that idea of like the convergence between utility and value because as the utility becomes more relevant and built out the the value increases to the point where people want to accept Bitcoin. Because right now, right, it's like you mentioned, you can't really bring it up or it doesn't come up. But imagine a state where the tools are built out to a point at the same time somebody's saying, hey, I actually want to receive Bitcoin and those two meet in parallel. Like if this in this convergence were like that everything just kind of like, you know, runs even faster because now people have the tools coupled what they want a better form of money to to receive, which both don't exist today. Yeah. And people are coming around to that. And the the cycles prove that because you see these things come and go, you know, but then Bitcoin sticks around and stays stable actually comparatively to all these other things. And I think people are starting to actually notice that you know it's like oh this everyone said this thing was the thing but then it just where to go. Like my my cousin told me to buy this shit coin and I lost 1500 bucks. My friend told me to buy Bitcoin. And like I would have made you know it's if you're thinking about it from that mindset and then you get and then once you realize that happens you start seeing the utility and you Start learning about that and that's that's how we all got here. You know, it's like it ultimately comes, starts with the price and ends with the the utility and and what this can do to really fix our just infrastructure of how we live. But I yeah, I mean, I think we're really close, 'cause I I think it is a lot of that, a lot of the nonsense that's attached to it that makes those conversations difficult to have. And just regular mainstream life, I think are starting to get easier, 'cause people are starting to realize like, oh, this isn't a scam, you know, this isn't the oceans haven't boiled yet. I don't know something's some somebody said this was going to happen and it didn't happen. So maybe it was just maybe that wasn't true. Maybe I should actually look into it. So yeah, I don't know. I think, you know, I I think I, I was sort of hopeful for this cycle that we might get some more, we might get more mainstream adoption that I'm starting to suspect it might take you know one more before we really go into like hyperdrive with that. But the more time the better, because it just allows for more of this stuff to get built and more things more of the kinks to get worked out. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think we're still very nascent and early in terms of sort of this more utility focused adoption, maybe this, this cycle is the the digital gold thesis, institutional adoption that's occurring more and more near term. But no, that's all really great thoughts in there in terms of you know this one, it's better money, it's better tools, it's open systems, interoperable system so people can continue to iterate and build on these things. It's it's been really cool to see what what you guys have built and excited for the future as well. Michael, did you have anything else or you? Want to maybe wrap it up? No, this has been great, Sam. Appreciate you coming on. I'm sure you're excited to think about like the incumbents they they'll more than likely miss all of this. It's not in their best interest to to, you know, adopt any of the things talking and there's some poetic justice and and kind of all of it. That's what I'm hoping for. The comeuppance for the artists. Yeah, that's that'll be really cool to see. Awesome and. Then Nashville. Maybe if he wants to just plug Nashville. Cause, Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you're gonna be in Nashville July 25th, we're doing a show, sort of a celebration that the Bitcoin conference is really like a milestone place for us. It's where I met Michael in person, and sort of a lot of this stuff came to be. So in celebration of that, it's a music town, so it makes perfect sense. We're throwing a concert with Joe Martin and Ainsley Costello and Jess Loud and the Higher Low and the Satoshi Rockamoto sort of live karaoke type thing, which has been at a few of these conferences. If you ever seen that, Yeah. July 25th at the Vinyl Lounge in Nashville, go download the Wave Lake app. You go to app.wavelake.com. Or you can just look for the little app logos on on wavelake.com and try it out. The mobile app's pretty cool, we're we're doing some updates in the next couple weeks that are going to make it even cooler and you can RSVP for the event there and try out this tick a bot thing and let us know what you think. And share with an artist. If you have an artist in your network, definitely show it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Let's I It's funny because a lot of people don't. I mean, the app is like, like I said, it's in beta, so it's pretty under the radar. But even a lot of people that are familiar with Wave, like, don't realize we have an app. So if you're one of those people, go download it and show your friends. Because it is actually like I, you know, I showed my sister and she's like, oh, this is cool. I didn't know this was like that. I thought it was, you know, Dorkier. So it's we're we're getting there. It's starting to get more familiar for the listener too. I love it. Well, go download the app, share it with friends, family, creators. Sam, thanks again. Really appreciate you coming on. It was a great convo and hopefully we can have you have you again. Yeah, down the line. Thanks guys. Appreciate it. All right, see you guys. Thanks. In a few weeks later, thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On RAMP Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com/contact. Schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
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