August 3, 2026 – Five Businesses Ryan Duncan and Nostr Protocol Wouter Constant

00:04 Jim Beach: In the AM, broadcasting from Atlanta. We are too crowded today, with a great show, to do the intro music. So we’re going to go ahead and get started. We have two amazing guests: Ryan Duncan, and then Wouter Constant. An amazing show. I am blown away by both guests. Let’s get started. Here we go. Very excited to introduce my first guest today. Boy, has he got an interesting career. Ryan Duncan has spent the last 30 years building interesting businesses, five of them across three different countries, and he’s done it without the publicists and the social media and all of that kind of stuff. Instead, he’s just been focusing on building real wealth. He is now in his early 50s and he runs a business in Florida, Costa Rica and Montana. He has a luxury farm-to-table wedding venue with a bunch of weddings there, including my next wedding, which is going to be there, from what I was told. He has a regenerative farm growing thousands of pounds of food weekly. He has an international thing he’s doing down in Costa Rica, where he’s building a resort on 100 acres and doing regenerative agriculture there. He has a gut-health product and a new book out called The Bloodline Ring, which is historical fiction, my favorite type, of course. He’s got five kids and zero time to himself. Ryan Duncan, welcome to the show. How you doing?

01:37 Ryan Duncan: I’m doing great, man, that just exhausted me.

01:40 Jim Beach: I offer a service where I’ll follow you around and every time you walk into a new room, I’ll introduce you like that. And for certain crowds, I’ll also throw in world-renowned lover.

01:54 Ryan Duncan: All right, I might take you up on that, but the scariest thing is we might build a business around it.

02:02 Jim Beach: Or it could be your ringtone.

02:05 Ryan Duncan: I love it.

02:06 Jim Beach: Welcome, Ryan. How do you do all of this in, you know, have a life? How do you manage your time?

02:15 Ryan Duncan: Well, you know, thankfully it was not compressed into three years. This has been more of an accumulation of 15 years of what I, quote-unquote, call work, but it’s really not. I follow whatever my passion of the season is. Sometimes the season is short-lived, and sometimes it is more prolonged. I really love to build concepts and create in spaces that I’m already passionate about. That enables me to marry and join together what you may call free time, recreational time, or just me time into an income-producing activity. I always wrap some passion around the idea. I want an ROI on my time, energy, and capital, but I want to enjoy doing it. The secret for me is that I’ve noticed I always have another concept up my sleeve, and it has to put me in a position to be a hands-on dad, be an available husband, travel, fish, and do all the things I love to do. So that has really been my secret sauce: joining income production together with what I love doing anyway.

03:28 Jim Beach: Very well said. You know, people say, ‘How do you get an idea? I can’t think of a business to start.’ I have no ideas. And then they look at someone like you. I also have an endless stream of ideas. I’m focusing on novels right now and I can’t stop thinking of new ideas. Don’t you find that once you break the creativity virginity, it becomes incredibly easy and you start to see ideas everywhere? But you have to kind of learn to think about it that way. You have to learn to think, oh, is there an idea there and to when you go into a new place, actively see if there are ideas there. Don’t you find that about creativity and ideation?

04:18 Ryan Duncan: That is actually such a rich question, and there are so many directions I could go with that answer. I operate from a fundamental belief that every human being who walks this earth, and has ever walked this earth, has an incredible creative idea inside of them that, sadly and maybe tragically, many take to the graveyard with them. I really believe with all my heart that we, we are builders. Human beings are creators and we all have an idea in us that will generate prosperity. And, you know, that prosperity may look different for everyone. Maybe, maybe sometimes it it has dollars associated with it. But there are many forms of prosperity: relational prosperity, and all these different areas of life in which we can prosper. But I believe everyone has an idea. So part two of your question, though, maybe the more interesting and depth-filled question, is: How do we break out of that? I just had this conversation with my wife the other day. I used to follow Richard Branson back in the day, and one of his core tenets, one of the pillars of his life, was that he insisted on getting out to his Bahamian island annually for a retreat with himself. He would take a pad, a pencil, and paper, and lie in his hammock. He’d do Richard Branson things, and he would come up with new concepts. I don’t believe that Richard Branson’s any better or worse than anyone else. What Richard Branson has that a lot of people didn’t have was margin. And when we have margin in our lives, It gives us space to create. It gives us space to dream. It gives us space not to think about the daily grind or punching the clock. That, I believe, is what separates a lot of creators and builders from people who, by no fault of their own, are trapped. They’re trapped in a system. They’re trapped in a rat race where there isn’t enough margin to allow their imagination to solve problems that exist in this world, tell the story that’s in their heart, or build a solution for a problem that only they could solve. They were intended to solve it. They’re here on this earth for that purpose. So, you know, that, that’s my top of mind, but I believe there’s probably so much more to that, um, than just that top of mind answer, but being that I just had that conversation with my wife last week about, uh, time being the great antidote for blocked creativity. I just think there’s a connection there.

07:14 Jim Beach: There has to be, yes. There’s like there’s a connection between creativity and mowing the lawn.

07:20 Ryan Duncan: Yeah, absolutely. Not one of my favorite tasks, but you know, I can get in the groove if I’ve got the right music and the right equipment.

07:31 Jim Beach: See, I don’t go with music. If I have music, it slows the creativity down, I think, or just the brain’s thought process overall. So, I just saw that you went to Auburn. I feel like we should end the interview now and I should just kick you off, but anyway, we’ll go on.

07:53 Ryan Duncan: Where did you go then?

07:55 Jim Beach: I’m, you know, in Atlanta and I went to school in Vermont. I did go to Georgia Tech for a while, but I got kicked out and, um, I don’t know, I just like to make fun of all Alabama, you know, that’s just what us Georgians do. It’s the only thing left for us to make fun of.

08:18 Ryan Duncan: That’s so funny. Yeah, no. I actually spent half of my college career at UGA in Athens because my best friend was enrolled at UGA, and I absolutely fell in love with UGA. I spent half my time in Auburn and the other half in Athens, lamenting the fact that I didn’t go there. I have a deep love for both states, and I’m an SEC guy, so of course I love all SEC competitiveness. But, yeah, I hear you. It’s uh, it’s, it’s, the Georgia, Alabama rivalry is real.

08:55 Jim Beach: Yes, very. Tell us about the book, The Bloodline Ring.

08:59 Ryan Duncan: Sure, well, thank you. It’s interesting how these things come about, because I really thought I would write a nonfiction book. But I love research, and I spent 10 years, maybe 12 years, researching my family genealogy and ancestry. And I really didn’t know what I was going to do with it. It was really for my own, my own, um, kind of information, um, and maybe even a little healing. Um, you know, searching for identity, and uh, what ended up being born out of that was a story, and um, I really didn’t know what to do with it, and I sat down over the course of several years multiple times and tried to somehow launch this thing. But last year, once again, I had the space and the time. Once I started getting this story out there, it just started flowing. And it’s about a New York City hedge fund manager. He’s, by all accounts, very successful. His career is booming. He’s a rising star, and he receives from his father an ancient ring. He doesn’t know its origins, and his dad doesn’t know its origins. He just knows that this is a family heirloom that’s been around a long time. That sends the main character, Lucas, on a quest to find the origins of the ring, and that unravels a really exciting odyssey around Europe and South America, as well as through different periods of history. There are flashbacks to the 1800s and the 1500s. It’s just a lot of fun. It’s got a little James Bond meets The Da Vinci Code. It’s it’s a really fun book.

10:48 Jim Beach: Sounds like fun. That sounds like a great read.

10:51 Ryan Duncan: Yeah, I hope you read it and let me know what you think.

10:57 Jim Beach: I will do so. All right. Moving on. We have so much to cover. Costa Rica. How’d you get involved there?

11:05 Ryan Duncan: Well, COVID-19. I brought some friends over for dinner. I invited them and I said, guys, I don’t know what’s going on here. I don’t know what’s actually happening. Seems to be there’s some worldwide distress. It’s 2020, early 2021. Costa Rica is a place we’ve always traveled to as a family. I went there for the first time more than 20 years ago, fell in love with the country, and we’ve been going back periodically ever since. I brought these good friends over for dinner and launched a plan I had about planting a flag in Costa Rica, creating a Plan B, a social-storm strategy, not knowing where everything was going here stateside. So we went down, did some prospecting, and initially I really wanted to build a house, but that took a back seat. I was finding big farms for sale, so I spent the next three or four years buying farmland there. That was a lot of fun. I watched how the pandemic played out, and I knew I had land, so if I needed to build anything, I could build it. After everything started to calm down a little bit, I decided, okay, I think it’s time to build. I found a river there that I love, and over the course of those four or five years I realized it was an underestimated natural asset and natural resource there. They, they kind of, uh, the, the locals don’t necessarily value the river like we would value a river in Montana and Wyoming. So I decided to build a little five-unit hotel, really more of a boutique resort. I made one of the houses my house, and I’ve been renting out the other houses. We’ve really been enjoying the country. It’s a completely different vibe down there. Um, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s a great spot to retreat to. Now that I think about it, it’s kind of my Bahamian island, like Richard Branson’s. I can get down there, get away from it all, get in the river, think, and really focus on my overall wellness.

13:26 Jim Beach: Very cool. And you’re building a retreat there? You already have some VRBOs, or…?

13:32 Ryan Duncan: Yeah, so uh, those, those units are um, on Airbnb, they’re, they’re up and running. However, what we decided to do this year was to start to transition. One of the farms that we purchased, and it’s about 100 acres. Um, and uh, we decided, you know what? We should start and this has always been the vision. It’s not a brand new vision. It was just on the back burner, but we decided to create some 10-acre ranchettes on the land. It’s really interesting Geographically where we’re located. We’re in an area called Dominical, which is on the Osa Peninsula in the south of Costa Rica. One of the neat things about Costa Rica is that you can be surfing at five o’clock and be at 800 feet of elevation at 5:20. The mountain goes straight up from the ocean. The farm is at about 800 feet of elevation and has about a 10- to 15-degree climate fluctuation. It’s that dichotomy, those two different worlds, that I fell in love with in that area. The new ranch, Finca Magnolia, is up in the mountains. It plays out perfectly for an off-the-grid paradise: growing food, spring-driven water. It really is an incredible place to plant a flag and have what I call a social-storm property, because uncertainty is real. One thing I’ve learned and always leveraged is diversification. I’m always trying to build hedges around my life, my wealth, and my freedom.

15:12 Jim Beach: That’s why you have five kids. One’s gonna turn out good.

15:16 Ryan Duncan: Yeah, that’s right, bro. Maybe you just solved the mystery. Yeah, that’s that’s true. That’s 100 percent true. That’s the story. There was an appetite during the pandemic for that, but I believe everybody should contemplate what a secondary backup plan would look like. I think that’s a healthy practice.

15:36 Jim Beach: I have been to Nicaragua, which is the next country up, and it has the same feature. It has an Atlantic and a Pacific coastline. What’s the difference between the Costa Rica, Atlantic, and Costa Rica Pacific sides? Not Atlantic. Caribbean, wouldn’t it be?

15:54 Ryan Duncan: Yeah, the Caribbean.

15:55 Jim Beach: Caribbean and the Pacific sides.

15:57 Ryan Duncan: Well, they’re they’re actually quite different. I would say that it depends on if we’re talking about natural resources or the culture. So the beach sides in both countries, really, because I owned in Nicaragua for 10 years and was very vested in that country. Nicaragua, you said?

16:16 Jim Beach: Yes, yes.

16:17 Ryan Duncan: Yes, in a big American development there. It’s very different culturally in Nicaragua versus Costa Rica. I owned in Costa Rica, then I sold and went to Nicaragua to get more bang for my buck. But the uncertainty of the government there and the Sandinistas, especially during COVID, was a mess. So I sold in Nicaragua and came back to Costa Rica. The Caribbean side has a very Rasta community. It has beautiful clear waters, a lot of diving, and that type of Caribbean vibe. Then you have the little villages. On the Pacific side you have the big surf, and culturally it’s quite different. You got a hippie culture, you know, a big hippie culture, but you also have people, lots of yogis on the Pacific side. You have just a huge cross section of people from all over the world. So I would say the Caribbean side is still much more off the beaten path. The Pacific side is kind of the gold standard of Central America. And it’s certainly where I’ve decided to plan a flag. The Caribbean side’s just a total, total different animal.

17:33 Jim Beach: Every February when I was uh, preteen, young teen. My dad and I would go to West Yellowstone, stay at the Three Bear Lodge, and go snowmobiling. It was one of the best weeks of my life every year. I have amazing memories of that. One of my favorite memories. Ryan. We woke up and Willard Scott on the Today show said, ‘The coldest place in the country today is West Yellowstone, where it’s minus 21 degrees.’ A great day for snowmobiling, and we were going snowmobiling that day. And we froze our asses off that day. Tell us about your wedding venue in Montana. This sounds amazing. Farm to table, or the other way around. I am also a certified wedding officiant. So if you need a wedding officiant, I do it in three languages.

18:27 Ryan Duncan: Wow, that’s incredible. Okay, so I know it’s a lot to keep up with here, but our wedding venue, event venue, farm-to-table estate is in Bradenton, Florida.

18:39 Jim Beach: I thought it was in Montana. What do you do in Montana? I’m lost.

18:44 Ryan Duncan: In Montana, we have a luxury rental. It’s in Bozeman, about 45 minutes from the gates of Yellowstone. Like you, I have had a love affair with Montana since I spent my 18th birthday there with my dad and my family. I stood in the mountains on horseback during a ride and said, ‘One day, I am going to own something in this state.’ It was quite different back then. It has grown, much to the dismay of Montanans. It has grown, exploded, and expanded. But I finally…

19:20 Jim Beach: Yellowstone.

19:20 Ryan Duncan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:21 Jim Beach: You’re not kidding, man. That was the catalyst. It’s amazing what a marketing engine that was, but that is what did it.

19:30 Ryan Duncan: I was finally able to get in. In the 10 years I waited, my purchasing power probably got cut in half. Actually, it got cut to about a fourth. What you once could have had there for $250,000 is now $1 million or more. Um, but you know what? I’m not going to cry over spilt milk. I was able to get my foot in the door. We got a beautiful home there. Um, five bedrooms, four baths, sitting on about an acre. We have a horse pasture in our backyard that belongs to the neighbors, so I don’t have to take care of the horses. We go down, I jump in my camper, and we head out to Yellowstone. But the nice thing is most of the year we share it with others, and that is also on Airbnb. It’s just a great home and a great state, and Bozeman has become quite the city.

20:33 Jim Beach: It is a culinary…

20:35 Ryan Duncan: Yeah, it’s a culinary destination with great shopping. They call it ‘Boz Angeles’ now because of the California migration into Montana. It brought a lot of that California vibe into Montana. So, uh, yeah, it’s it’s great. We love it out there.

20:52 Ryan Duncan: We’re heading out for the summer here shortly.

20:55 Jim Beach: Wedding venue in Bradenton, in under a minute.

20:58 Ryan Duncan: It’s a 12.5-acre property on the bay, and it has a six-acre tropical-fruit farm built on a regenerative-agriculture chassis. It’s about a 10,000-square-foot home. It sleeps 16 people, has a great boat dock, a giant pool, and a hot tub big enough for 12 people. We also do events there, and people have been loving it for weddings and family reunions. It’s absolutely stunning. It’s one of a kind. There’s nothing like it in Florida. Jubilee Estate. We are absolutely thrilled to be fortunate enough to steward this property. It’s really special.

21:38 Jim Beach: And I could drive down there for the weekends to perform the weddings. So I’m excited. And I’m a lefty-certified environmentalist. I wrote a book on the environment that’s award-winning. So all the lefties will want me and, uh, I can’t wait. I’m so excited. My new job.

21:58 Ryan Duncan: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Come on down.

22:01 Jim Beach: Do you have a resident officiant?

22:03 Ryan Duncan: No, we do not. Generally, that’s left up to the whoever’s getting married. Sometimes they have someone nominated, but they’ve never asked me about it, so they must already have that hammered out by the time they get to me.

22:19 Jim Beach: Okay. Well, the next time someone asks, I’m your man.

22:23 Ryan Duncan: Okay, I got you. Consider it done.

22:26 Jim Beach: The first wedding I did was a Muslim-Jewish wedding.

22:30 Ryan Duncan: Ah, there’s an interesting combination to kick off your career. Good for you.

22:35 Jim Beach: Actually, that’s funny. Ryan, how do we find out more? Follow you online, book events, get a copy of the book. Book a VRBO?

22:45 Ryan Duncan: The best thing to do is visit my website, which is being constantly tweaked, improved, and enhanced. I’ve operated without anything for so long, and this is all new to me. Uh, doing these types of conversations, you know, launching a website. Um, it’s it’s really not my first love, but I’m trying. The website is RyanSDuncan.com, and I try to put all my projects on there. The biggest thing on there is a call-to-action button that says, ‘Book a call with me.’ I love being on the phone. I love talking to people. I love helping people, and whether or not I’m an expert at it or can monetize the conversation is secondary to getting to know people, learning what they’re struggling with, what’s on their mind, and what visions they have. So the biggest reason to visit the website is that it has a button that says, ‘Book a call.’ And so uh, that’s what I would encourage anybody that uh, kind of wants to dig into, um, any of the areas we discussed or beyond to, uh, we can, uh, we can do it that way.

24:02 Jim Beach: Excellent, excellent. What’s your number one revenue stream? You have five or six, I guess. What’s the number one? What’s the bread and butter?

24:12 Ryan Duncan: Well, right now, it is the luxury rentals. That’s, uh, that’s driving a, a good top line revenue. But that might not even be the most important part. The most important part is that it allows me to control properties I might not be able to control without that revenue stream. I’m able to hold on to appreciating assets, trophy assets, and use the rental program to help me carry the cost. So that’s, that’s the, that’s the number one in our portfolio right now.

24:46 Jim Beach: And you’re not having any decline, as Airbnb is taking so many hits recently?

24:51 Ryan Duncan: It has slowed down. It definitely has slowed down. I definitely sense there’s, there’s, there’s some people that are struggling financially out there. Things are tightening up. That’s been my core business for the last 20 years: helping people with credit-card debt. I’d be remiss not to mention that, because we talked about a lot of fun stuff, but there are a lot of people out there struggling. Our core business, which has been our major bread and butter for the last 20 years, is helping people navigate when they hit a wall financially. We have a website called Life After Debt. We’re trying to help people navigate the storm of financial uncertainty. So that also is right up there with our number one, um, uh, you know, financial, financial, you know, bonanza, but uh, the, the luxury rental business is good too.

25:49 Jim Beach: Very cool. RyanSDuncan.com. We hope you come back to the show. Do you know what Nostr is, N-O-S-T-R? Nostr? Ryan?

25:59 Ryan Duncan: Don’t think so.

26:01 Jim Beach: Okay, you’ve got to listen to the next guest to figure it out, because we will be right back to talk about Nostr, N-O-S-T-R. I don’t know what it is. We’ll be right back.

26:17 Jim Beach: We are back. And again, thank you so very much for being with us. You know, we talk about the things that we need from the internet and we hope that it always is there to work for us. We’ve got to fight for it, though. We have to fight for the internet that we want, especially an open internet, one where we don’t have censorship. I’m very excited to welcome someone who can help us learn more about this. Please welcome Wouter Constant to the show. He is an open voice for the open internet. He is also an advocate for Nostr, N-O-S-T-R, which is something I have not heard about, but we are going to learn about it. That is changing the way the internet works by removing corporate control and censorship. Wouter, welcome to the show. How you doing?

27:19 Wouter Constant: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m doing excellent.

27:24 Jim Beach: Let’s talk about Nostr. It’s Dutch?

27:26 Wouter Constant: Dutch.

27:27 Jim Beach: Okay. Is it the same name as Walter?

27:30 Wouter Constant: Yeah, well, it’s the Dutch version of that. Yes. Correct.

27:34 Jim Beach: All right. Tell us about Nostr. I have not heard about this.

27:39 Wouter Constant: Nostr, in an abstract sense, is what we call an open internet protocol for the management of identities, networks, and publication online. But none of this actually means anything to anyone. Another way of approaching this is to say that we had the emergence of the internet, which started sometime in the 1990s. It got mass adoption sometime in the 2000s, and it had a certain trajectory where we started to use platforms. Because in the early days of the internet, everybody had their own website. But eventually people congregated on particular websites. And this is how we started to do much of anything. We do videos on YouTube. We do our resumes and business networking on, what’s it called, LinkedIn. We have our pictures on Instagram, we do taxis via Uber. So these are all platforms. It’s an architecture that we basically built to onboard everybody onto the web, and it became how we started doing things. Um, but there is a different way of doing things because we recognize there are a lot of problems with using these platforms. Somebody came up with an alternative way to construct all these things, built in a different way, that allows us to create a better internet. We just stumbled into the internet that we have right now. Now that it has global adoption, it’s time for us to reflect on what we did, look back at what we constructed, and consider whether there’s a better way to do it. The point of the story today is that Nostr is that better way.

29:31 Jim Beach: Okay, a better way to do what? Upload a resume, all of those things that you mentioned?

29:39 Wouter Constant: Yes. So it started out as, uh, an idea to do what’s generally called social networking. To make this clear, Nostr is just an idea, or what we call a protocol, a system that somebody published. And uh, there’s no, there’s nobody behind it per se. There’s no corporation behind it, and there’s no organization behind it. It’s just the idea. And initially a couple of guys thought it was an interesting idea, so they started working on it. The first things they built were kind of like Twitter clients, Twitter apps. If you are interfacing with Nostr right now, it’s probably very similar to the experience you have with Twitter, what we call microblogging. Tweets can be applied to long-form articles. It can be applied to podcasts. Last week, Jack Dorsey’s company, Block, published an application called Buzz, which is, how do you call it? It’s like a Slack environment for your AI coding agents. You have a chat channel where your teammates, humans, and AI agents can work in the same environment, manage and produce code, and all those things are built on Nostr. So it’s not just, it’s not just the fact that we can have like the social media environment for ourselves as humans. We can also do these other things now in the world of AI. All the things that we’re already familiar with on the web Can be replicated with Nostr.

31:20 Jim Beach: Is it an operating system? Is it the actual OS?

31:24 Wouter Constant: There are some crazy people who try to tinker with things that far and that deep, but no. It’s a very simple set of rules that determine how you create an identity, such as a digital identity for yourself. So you’re just, you’re able to just generate a digital identity by yourself. Then you have a publication. I’m using ‘publication’ in an abstract sense, but to make it concrete, You have a tweet, let’s say. You’re writing something, or a blog post, and you’re able to digitally sign that blog post and publish it to the internet through various servers. The fundamental difference here is that this publication is tied to this digital identity that you created yourself. This is different from how all the systems on these platforms work, because on those platforms the publication is directly tied to the platform. So an Instagram post only exists because there is Instagram.com. And your Instagram post doesn’t exist outside of Instagram.com. So it’s tied to that. You create an account at Instagram. So your identity is tied to Instagram.com. So both your identity, the social network that you’ve maintained or created on that, on that platform, and the content that you’ve produced are all tied to this location, Instagram.com. What Nostr does is turn that on its head. It says the content you produce, or the publications you make, they’re not tied to a platform or a place. Are tied directly to you as a publisher. You’re able to interface with other people in a much more direct manner, through what you might call freedom of association, where a third party cannot effectively stand between you and your audience. That is the case right now. If these platforms decide to ban you, limit you, or shadow-ban you, the relationship between you and your audience, or between you as an audience member and the people you follow, is restricted. With Nostr, we flip things around so that you have a much more direct relationship with your audience, and no third party or policy can get in between.

33:54 Jim Beach: All right, but then if I do a post, only people on Nostr can see it.

34:01 Wouter Constant: Well, yes, but the question is: What does that mean? The thing with Nostr is that it’s not a place. It’s more like a method. Because it’s a method, everybody can create apps. It’s an open standard, so everybody can create their own apps, or apps that work with it. When I talked about the Twitter use case, I have about seven different apps on my phone. They’re all pretty good, and there are slight differences between them, but I use the same identity. I can do the exact same things using those various apps. The same thing goes for the app that Jack Dorsey’s company, Block, published last week. Buzz is an app they made. They’re doing these things, but it’s open, so anybody can use another app that does the same thing or interfaces with it. So you’re nobody’s actually required to have the same apps. And I can also create an app that’s just a website. Then you can see my stuff by going to a particular website, or any website that supports Nostr. So you’re not stuck in a place. It’s more like you’ve started using a method, if that makes sense.

35:25 Jim Beach: Why are we doing this? What’s the benefit of this? Why do I care if X is limiting my tweets to a certain number of characters? What’s the advantage of doing this? So I don’t, it seems like this is creating extra steps. I don’t see the advantage yet.

35:46 Wouter Constant: Actually, it doesn’t. So there are multiple ways to approach this. I can, like I can approach this from the carrot or the stick. Let’s talk about the carrot for one second. One way these things are better is that, for example, you’re not stuck with a particular app, right? If you if you want to use X, you have to download the X app and that’s the app you’re going to have. If you don’t like something about that app, tough luck, right? There’s also the policy that’s on X in terms of like the algorithm that they’re using, right? Maybe their algorithm is good and you like it a lot. Maybe you like their algorithm a lot, and they change it next week. Then tough luck for you. If you don’t like it, you don’t have any means to change it. There is a lot of friction on the current web because we’re stuck on these platforms. To interface on X, I have to create an account and sign up, and the same goes for all these platforms. So there’s a lot of friction in the sense that they created silos and there are all these walls on the internet. As long as you submit, create all these accounts, and maintain them, you can work your way through it. It’s normal for you, so you’ve adjusted to this mode of being, but it isn’t necessary to experience all those walls. That’s approaching it from the way it’s better, or the carrot. In terms of the stick, It depends on what type of user you are, but a lot of users’ businesses rely on these platforms, and deplatforming is a real risk. It can happen for any reason, right? It can be a policy reason or simply a mistake, but if they shut down your account, even by mistake, your business grinds to a halt. From their perspective, they have billions of users. They manage the interests of billions of users distributed across multiple countries, and we’re now getting into geopolitical conflicts because we’re all stuck on the same platform. There’s a knot there that has to be untangled, and it is impossible to untangle unless you start to use Nostr, where we dissolve this entire problem by disengaging from those networks in the first place, if that makes sense.

38:33 Jim Beach: Okay, so is this an app that I download? Nostr?

38:37 Wouter Constant: No. There are various apps you can download that use Nostr. So it’s it’s it’s the same. The web itself is a collection of protocols. And one of the main apps that you use to engage with the web is a web browser, right? Um, that you have on your computer and you can visit various websites. And it’s somewhat similar to that. Another analogy I could make is email. It isn’t completely similar, but it gets some of the points across. Email is also a protocol. I have an email provider, let’s say Gmail, and someone else runs his own email server because it’s a business, so it’s someone@business.com. A third person may have Proton Mail or another email provider. We’re all able to send emails to each other because these service providers communicate with one another using the email protocol. The same goes for Nostr. All these various apps can communicate with each other because they’re using the Nostr protocol.

39:47 Jim Beach: Okay. So when you say I use apps that have it, I don’t have to download Nostr itself at some point?

39:56 Wouter Constant: No. No. Nostr is just the idea. It’s a way of doing things. The same goes for English. You can, you can, a protocol is like a language. A protocol is a set of rules that facilitates interaction and communication. So English itself is also a protocol. It has grammar rules, et cetera, that allow us to communicate with each other. On top of that, there are implicit protocols in human interaction. In order to confirm that I understand or that I’m listening, there are all these ways of communicating. You have English, existing web protocols, the underlying protocols of the internet, TCP/IP, which allow the internet as an infrastructure to function, or email, as I already explained. Nostr is a protocol just like that. You don’t download the protocol itself. You download apps that use that protocol. And the whole point of it is that they’re interoperable.

41:00 Jim Beach: Well, if I don’t put the protocol on my computer.

41:04 Wouter Constant: The app does what I described initially: it generates, or allows you to generate, an identity. This identity is what is called a cryptographic key pair. It’s the same as with Bitcoin, for example, is that you are just able to create a Bitcoin address. Here, you’re able to create a digital identity by yourself, and all you subsequently do is sign everything you publish so that outsiders can verify that those posts actually came from you. That’s the whole gimmick that’s going on here. That’s what Nostr is. That’s what the protocol is. It’s the creation of these publications with cryptographic signatures, and fetching those publications from various servers in order to consume them. And whatever the application, whatever the application is, that can depend, right? It can be Twitter, where you’re browsing tweets; it can be a blog app, where you’re browsing articles, similar to Substack; or it could be taxi rides, similar to Uber. But the point is that you, you are not stuck on a particular place. You’re not stuck using a particular app, you can use different apps at the same time if you’re so inclined or switch with very low friction. It’s a different way of architecting the internet, and a different way of engaging with it. The reason I’m here is to say ‘Nostr, Nostr, Nostr’ over and over again so people know the word. Last week, as I mentioned, Jack Dorsey’s Block, which is a fairly big company, published this app. It uses Nostr, and nobody was aware of what Nostr was. They’re slowly learning, ‘Okay, what is this Nostr thing that this app is actually running on?’ Slowly they’re going to realize, ‘Wait a minute. Jack Dorsey released an app that lets me communicate with my agents and my teammates in a chat channel.’ But at the same time, there’s this entire interoperable ecosystem of all these other apps that I can also start to use and leverage right now.

43:24 Jim Beach: So if I use that ecosystem. Does it eliminate the old ecosystem?

43:29 Wouter Constant: Well, hopefully. But that’s because I don’t much care for the old, old ecosystem.

43:35 Jim Beach: Okay. Who developed this in the first place? Is this sort of like Bitcoin, we don’t know where it came from?

43:44 Wouter Constant: Sort of. The person goes under a pseudonym called fiatjaf. We don’t know a whole lot about him other than that he is a man and he’s from Brazil. Um, uh, and well, he’s most likely from Brazil. He’s probably not lying about that, because you can hear his thick accent. But other than that, we don’t know much about him. We know some of the other work he has done before, Uh, because he was a Bitcoin developer. But the whole point is that he isn’t important, very similar to what you mentioned with Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto, the person who designed Bitcoin in the first place, isn’t important either. Satoshi Nakamoto even disappeared. Currently, fiatjaf is still around, but the point isn’t the person. The point is, the open protocol itself, and people, developers mostly are recognizing this, um, as a way for them to, uh, create the apps and the experiences and the stuff that they want, um, um, instead of, uh, either being stuck on platforms or frustrated with the fact that they’re interfacing with closed systems for the things that they want to build.

45:05 Jim Beach: All right, so for my business, I have a risk of relying on X, right? I could get booted off X, get deplatformed. This new platform could replace X, but don’t millions of people also need to be there for it to truly work as a social-media-platform replacement? Don’t we need millions of people to adopt this before it becomes useful at all?

45:32 Wouter Constant: Yes, so that’s why I’m here. What you’re referring to is the network effect. That’s what happened during the past decades: these platforms captured the network effect. So, which in short means that most people are there because most people are there. The thing with Nostr, and with any alternative, is that you don’t have the network effect. So that’s where the actual value is. So now your value is actually very marginal. The thing with Nostr is that we actually have a fighting chance because we have the potential network effect that all these platforms don’t have. These platforms are vertically oriented. We have YouTube for videos, X for tweets, LinkedIn for resumes, and so on. Because Nostr is an open system, all these things start to become interoperable. The network graph, or social network, that I create in the context of my resume and business environment can be leveraged in another context, maybe when I’m looking for videos or articles or whatever it is. All these things are stuck within the silos of these platforms, and Nostr liberates them. We can create this network effect across the entire horizon of applications on the web, if that makes sense.

46:58 Jim Beach: And so what would it look like if everyone did this? If we were all doing this, what would the big differences be?

47:08 Wouter Constant: We would be less dependent on only a handful of people deciding what the policies ought to be for how we interact with and experience the web. That is one of the major problems I already alluded to. It is now a geopolitical problem. Multiple countries have their own demands for what this experience ought to be, and they can directly target these platforms because everybody is there. I personally favor liberty in the sense of freedom of association. So if I want to associate with some people, and you don’t like it, that’s fine, but you don’t, we don’t have to be in each other’s way. And we’re very much in each other’s way right now. I guess there are a lot of problems wrapped up in there. You also have the algorithms on these platforms. Because everybody is already on the platform, they can dictate what the algorithm and your feed will be. They can leverage that to serve interests that aren’t necessarily your interests. There are many negative effects from that, which hopefully we can mitigate by allowing you to choose whatever algorithm you want to run, giving you much more freedom and flexibility. So I’m, I’m not sure, um, what the future will hold. For the most part, in my current experience, because I’m very deep into this, I’ve replaced most of the systems and things I used daily with things from the Nostr ecosystem, and it’s a far smoother experience. I have all these interoperable apps for my computer, desktop, web, phone, tablet, and so on. It’s um, it’s already, for me, it’s already better. It’s, uh, but from a broad perspective, it’s going to take a while before everybody adjusts. But, you know, it took a long time for the world to embrace the web as such. So, uh, we’re not necessarily in a rush, but, um, I think at the very least, it’s good for people to be aware that this thing even exists. If they are enthusiastic, they can jump on it. Um, and if they want to sit on the fence, that’s also completely fine. But then at least they’ve heard about it. They have some notion of what it is, and then maybe in a year or 2 years, or in 3 years, they encounter it again, and they at least have some conception or notion as to what it is and can then engage at their own pace.

50:02 Jim Beach: All right. I think I know the answer to this. Does AI affect this at all? It doesn’t, does it?

50:11 Wouter Constant: Uh, yeah, so, um, on various levels. Agentic coding has made the creation of software much easier. Because this is an open protocol, you can create all these apps and immediately access an existing ecosystem with users and other apps you can interface with. The big difference is that if I create a taxi app, for example, it is dependent on network effects, but I’m not directly competing in the same way I would with Uber today. I don’t need to convince all Uber users to download my app. I can create a nice app for booking taxis, and users who like my app can start using it without being excluded from the rest of the network. So in that sense, it’s very interesting. The other thing is that the web is experiencing a lot of spam problems and disinformation due to AI. With Nostr, we’re forced to face that head-on. From a protocol perspective, if I can create an identity by myself, an AI agent can do the same and start acting. That has benefits, but it also forces us to face the negative things directly and find solutions. We have the construction of software and how we engage with bots on the internet, and there are all sorts of other things that will have an impact in the future.

51:46 Jim Beach: Absolutely fascinating. You’ve blown my mind. I’m going to have to re-listen to this and…

51:52 Wouter Constant: Oh, go chew on it.

51:55 Jim Beach: Yeah, I’m going to have to do that.

51:58 Wouter Constant: Exactly.

51:58 Jim Beach: I’m going to have to spend some time thinking about this. Wouter, how do we find out more, get in touch with you and all of that, please. I know you’re not on LinkedIn.

52:13 Wouter Constant: No, I’m not on LinkedIn. If people are interested, the only call to action I have is that you can go to nostr.org. Um, and there is more information there. I’m deliberately not going to recommend a particular app or tell people what to do, because right now you have to put in a lot of effort yourself to figure things out. You can always ask for help, but it takes a lot of agency. It takes a particular type of person to join and stick around, right? If I’m going to heavily convince people to do something, 99 percent of them are going to drop it again because it isn’t their time. And I’m completely okay with this. For the most part, I want 100 percent of your audience to know the word Nostr and have some conception of what it is. Whatever share of your audience is interested enough can start picking it up and tinkering with it, also keeping in mind the Buzz thing released by Jack Dorsey’s Block that they could leverage within their business environment. That’s basically my goal here. I’m not trying to sell anyone anything. Just go to nostr.org and figure it out.

53:39 Jim Beach: Fantastic. Wouter, thank you so much for doing this and educating us. I love someone who isn’t trying to sell something. That’s a refreshing change, and we’d love to have you back.

53:53 Wouter Constant: Thanks a lot. My pleasure.

53:55 Jim Beach: We’re out of time. Bye.