Trust Revolution

S03E02 Jason Hughey – Companies Don't Keep Promises. People Do.

Enron had “integrity” as a core value. FTX had none at all. Both collapsed. Jason Hughey argues the problem isn't whether companies state their values—it's whether those values function as actual decision-making frameworks or just motivational posters on the wall. Episode Summary Most organizations betray trust not through malice but through design. Jason Hughey breaks down the two paradigms shaping every workplace: top-down control systems that optimize for short-term extraction, and emergent systems that treat employees as contributors rather than resources. The dysfunction you've felt—being punished for good ideas, watching customer service decline to hit quarterly targets, seeing values that exist only on walls—isn't random. It's built in. Hughey works with a framework called Principle Based Management, developed by Charles Koch at Koch Industries and first codified in 1990. The core distinction: rules tell people what to do, principles empower them to decide. When you suppress the signals coming from people closest to the work, you get the same coordination failures that collapsed the Soviet economy—just at company scale. The alternative requires hiring for virtue over talent, building genuine challenge cultures, and committing to low time preference even when it's not exciting. If better money requires better principles, better organizations might too. About the Guest Jason Hughey leads business development at Satoshi Pacioli, a Bitcoin-focused accounting firm founded in 2022, where he's also driving the firm's adoption of Principle Based Management—a framework rooted in Austrian economics that treats organizations like markets rather than command structures. With over ten years in customer experience and team building, including time in the fitness industry, Hughey brings a practitioner's lens to management theory. He co-authored Called to Freedom (2016), exploring the intersection of Christianity and libertarianism. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonhughey/ Satoshi Pacioli: https://satoshipacioli.com Substack: https://satoshipacioliaccounting.substack.com Key Quotes "Values or a company's culture becomes the motivational poster on the wall that you walk by and acknowledge and see the word integrity there, and then you forget about it." — Jason Hughey "When you are consistently using your power to shut down those signals that are emerging from people who are on the front lines doing the work, you're going to run into the problem of now we're not getting the knowledge to where it needs to go." — Jason Hughey “The value is the ideal that you live by. The virtue is the day-to-day commitment to doing it.” — Jason Hughey Key Takeaways Stated values mean nothing without lived virtue: Enron had “integrity” on the wall. The distinction between values (ideals you claim) and virtue (daily commitment to act on them) separates companies that build trust from those that betray it. Suppressing internal signals creates Soviet-style coordination failures: When employees are punished for bringing ideas or challenges forward, knowledge stops flowing to where it's needed—the same problem that collapsed centrally planned economies, just at organizational scale. Hire for virtue first, talent second: Talent can be coached; character rarely changes. If you have to choose between someone highly skilled who plays politics and someone less skilled with integrity, take the latter. Principles empower, rules constrain: Rules-based management treats employees as resources to accomplish tasks. Principle-based management gives people a framework and lets them decide—unlocking creativity, ownership, and better customer outcomes. Timestamps [00:48] Why most organizations betray trust—two competing management paradigms [04:41] FTX, Enron, Theranos: the pattern behind corporate values failures [09:16] The fifth dimension of PBM: self-actualization and meaning at work [11:34] Design choices that guarantee dysfunction—challenge culture and cult of personality [16:18] How high time preference management destroys customer service and employee trust [20:35] Information flow in broken organizations—when signals get siloed or shut down [23:49] The socialist calculation problem applied to business management [26:01] Principles vs. rules: empowering employees to decide [29:08] What local knowledge actually requires—integrity, challenge culture, knowledge systems [30:49] Virtue vs. values: the ideal you claim vs. the commitment to live it [36:06] Building scaffolding so you don't fall when times get tough [39:08] Where to start when your team shows cracks—two diagnostic questions [43:24] Hiring for virtue when everyone can perform values in an interview [49:41] What's been harder than expected implementing PBM at Satoshi Pacioli [52:21] What changes if more organizations operated this way—restoring trust [55:41] The infinite game: low time preference as competitive advantage [59:13] Legitimate organizational authority and equal application of rules Mentioned in Episode: TFTC #699: Jason Hughey on Principle Based Management (Jan 17, 2026) — Jason's conversation with Marty Bent Principle Based Management — The framework developed by Charles Koch at Koch Industries, first codified in 1990 Podcast: Subscribe: https://podcast.trustrevolution.co Music: More Ghost Than Man

S03E01 Oscar Merry — What Joe Rogan Lost for $100M

“If you choose to go exclusive on Spotify, you're essentially saying to 70% of your existing and potential audience, ‘Sorry, you can't listen anymore.’” Oscar Merry watched Joe Rogan lose influence despite a $100 million payday—and built Fountain to prove there's a better way. Episode Summary Oscar Merry's Alexa skills hit #1 in productivity and earned $30,000 in six months. He moved on when the technology couldn't match the vision—and the gatekeepers made clear it wasn't going to. Now as CEO of Fountain, he's building infrastructure for creators who want to own their audience rather than rent access to them. The conversation maps the entire value chain—from how legacy media takes up to 90% of creator revenue with quarterly payouts to how open protocols enable instant payments with single-digit fees. Merry unpacks the Joe Rogan case study as proof that even $100 million can't compensate for lost reach and explains why Nostr's cross-app comments represent the most significant shift in content discovery since RSS. For creators sensing that platform dependence is a liability, this episode lays out what's actually working in open podcasting today—and what's still hard. About the Guest Oscar Merry is CEO and co-founder of Fountain, a podcast app built on open protocols including Bitcoin Lightning and Nostr. Before podcasting, he was an Amazon Alexa Champion who built skills used by millions, ran the London Alexa Meetup, and taught voice technology courses. He pivoted to audio after recognizing that voice assistants couldn't escape Big Tech gatekeeping. Based in the UK, he leads a small team building what he calls “a different way of doing content discovery on the internet." X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/MerryOscar Nostr: primal.net/merryoscar LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/oscarmerry Fountain: https://fountain.fm Key Quotes “If you choose to go exclusive on Spotify, you're essentially saying to 70% of your existing and potential audience, sorry, you can't listen anymore.” — Oscar Merry “In the current system, as an artist, as a content creator, you are losing out massively on both time and money.” — Oscar Merry “Imagine if that YouTube comment could go into the Twitter feed or the Instagram feed or the LinkedIn feed. That conceptual difference that Nostr can deliver is the thing that lights up the eyes of podcasters.” — Oscar Merry Key Takeaways Open podcasting is a check against centralization: Even Spotify's $100 million couldn't prevent Joe Rogan from losing influence during his exclusive period. The fragmented nature of podcasting—where Apple and Spotify together hold only ~30% market share—means exclusivity costs more than it pays. Legacy media takes up to 90% with quarterly delays: Between platforms, payment processors, labels, and collection agencies, creators can end up with 10 cents on the dollar months after the value was created. Open micropayments reverse this with instant settlement and single-digit fees. Value-based discovery beats attention algorithms: When a casual like and a life-changing experience are weighted equally, algorithms optimize for slop. Attaching payments to discovery signals lets quality surface over engagement bait. Nostr inverts the flow for creators: Instead of audiences traveling to walled-off comment sections, engagement and money flow toward the creator across any app that speaks the protocol. Timestamps [01:08] Oscar's origin story: #1 Alexa skill to questioning Big Tech control [09:56] Why podcasting's fragmented ecosystem resists centralization [11:32] The Joe Rogan case study: $200M couldn't buy back lost influence [17:14] Why value for value can work when only 1-5% participate [26:10] What Fountain learned from listen-to-earn rewards [31:14] Money flow comparison: legacy media vs open payments [38:44] Attention algorithms vs value-based content discovery [47:43] Nostr's magic: comments that appear across every app [51:22] What censorship resistance actually means in practice [53:33] Building a business on unproven protocols [1:00:25] First moves for creators exploring open podcasting [1:03:18] The Fountain pitch: why switch from Spotify or Apple Resources & Links Mentioned in Episode: Primal - Nostr client with built-in Lightning wallet Podcast Index - Open index for podcast RSS feeds Alby Hub - Self-hosted Lightning wallet for value-for-value payments Podcast: Subscribe: https://podcast.trustrevolution.co Music: More Ghost Than Man

S02E16 Pippellia – Reputation Without a Kill Switch

“Web of Trust is any network of relationship where trust is distributed and emergent—it's not imposed by someone else.” Pip builds the infrastructure that makes decentralized reputation actually work. While platforms like Twitter sell verification for $8, he's applying Google's PageRank algorithm to Nostr—and giving it away for free. EPISODE SUMMARY Right now, if you want to know whether an account is real or a bot, you're trusting Twitter or Meta to tell you. That model is failing—platforms can't stop spam, won't stop scams that pay for ads, and increasingly demand full KYC just to participate. Pip is building the alternative: Vertex, a Web of Trust service that computes reputation scores across Nostr's social graph. Instead of a company database deciding who you are, your reputation emerges from the people who actually know you. The technology uses PageRank-style algorithms to surface trustworthy accounts and filter out impersonators—without any central authority making those calls. For builders, this means spam protection and personalized recommendations without reinventing the wheel. For individuals, it means your identity and audience become portable—no platform can erase you because no platform owns you. Pip made Vertex free because Nostr needs adoption more than he needs revenue, a bet that infrastructure must reach critical mass before it can sustain itself. ABOUT THE GUEST Pip (Pippellia) is the co-founder of Vertex, a Web of Trust service for Nostr developers. He builds the infrastructure layer that helps decentralized apps solve their hardest problem: figuring out who to trust when there's no central authority. Vertex uses PageRank-style algorithms to compute reputation scores, enabling spam filtering, personalized recommendations, and impersonation protection. He received an OpenSats grant in 2025 and made Vertex free to drive adoption, prioritizing network growth over immediate revenue. X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/pippellia Nostr: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqs0dqlgwq6l0t20gnstnr8mm9fhu9j9t2fv6wxwl3xtx8dh24l4auswr6u0j GitHub: https://github.com/pippellia-btc KEY QUOTES “Web of Trust is any network of relationship where trust is distributed and emergent. It emerges organically from interaction and connections—it's not imposed by someone else.” — Pip “Reputation is not a value, but it depends on the point of view. For me, your reputation is quite high because I follow you directly.” — Pip “Whatever you build, even if it's small, your audience on Nostr is gonna be yours forever—unless obviously you screw it up and people decide to leave you.” — Pip KEY TAKEAWAYS Centralized verification is broken by design: Platforms profit from bots inflating user counts and scammers paying for ads. Meta reportedly requires special permission to remove spammers whose ad budgets exceed certain thresholds—spam prevention conflicts with revenue. Your reputation should travel with you: On Nostr, if one app bans you, your identity and followers remain intact across every other client. Getting banned everywhere would require the entire network to decide you're toxic—a far higher bar than one company's content team. Web of Trust solves the cold start problem for builders: Instead of building authentication systems, spam filters, and recommendation engines from scratch, developers can plug into existing reputation infrastructure and inherit the social graph's accumulated trust signals. Personalized trust beats global authority: Different people can have different views on who's trustworthy. Vertex lets you borrow someone else's perspective—your technically-savvy friend's judgment on which app developers to trust, for example—without surrendering control to a platform. TIMESTAMPS [00:44] What Vertex is and the problem it solves [03:23] Why centralized trust verification is failing—the Twitter/X model [05:11] Pip's definition of Web of Trust: distributed and emergent trust [06:49] Why PGP's web of trust failed after 30 years [10:32] How Twitter's paid verification made identity meaningless [14:19] Meta's perverse incentives—when scammers pay more than spam costs [18:42] The primitives needed for healthy online discourse [21:26] Why reputation depends on point of view, not absolute values [27:13] How Nostr makes your audience portable and permanent [29:36] Can Web of Trust be weaponized? The exclusion question [34:52] Vertex's business model: freemium credits based on reputation [39:49] Why app store review models are going obsolete [41:57] Zapstore: using Web of Trust to verify app developers [49:00] What traditional developers get wrong about decentralized identity [55:21] What's next: explicit content detection and filtering [1:00:46] Personalized recommendations and onboarding without surveillance RESOURCES & LINKS Mentioned in Episode: Vertex - Web of Trust as a Service for Nostr npub.world - Nostr profile search engine powered by Vertex for accurate discovery and verification Zapstore - Permissionless app store using Web of Trust for developer verification Citadel Dispatch Episode 167 - Pip's previous interview with Matt Odell Podcast: Subscribe: https://podcast.trustrevolution.co Music: More Ghost Than Man

S02E15 Christian Keroles – What Dissidents Know About Bitcoin

“It's not enough for me to be taken care of if everyone else on the planet is living in a digital gulag.” CK explains why HRF treats Bitcoin as essential infrastructure for human rights—and why dictators keep failing to build alternatives that work. Episode Summary One billion people live in democracies with stable currency and property rights. Seven billion don't. Christian Keroles, Director of Financial Freedom at the Human Rights Foundation, argues that Bitcoin flips this equation—giving everyone access to the best property rights and most stable money regardless of where they're born. In this conversation, CK breaks down why authoritarian regimes are the most enthusiastic about CBDCs yet consistently fail to achieve adoption. Why activists from Russia to Myanmar to Venezuela are choosing Bitcoin as their financial infrastructure, and what HRF has learned funding nearly 300 open-source Bitcoin projects. The pattern is clear: governments build intranets while Bitcoin builds the internet of money. And just like email in the 90s, the protocol works—we're just waiting for everyone to get an address. About the Guest Christian Keroles (CK) is Director of Financial Freedom at the Human Rights Foundation, where he leads the CBDC Tracker, Bitcoin Development Fund, and activist education programs. Before HRF, he spent years as Managing Director and COO at Bitcoin Magazine and the Bitcoin Conference, building the infrastructure that shaped Bitcoin's public narrative. His team has distributed millions in grants to open-source developers and trained over 300 activists from 50+ countries on Bitcoin self-custody. CK discovered Bitcoin in 2017 through Laura Shin's Unchained podcast and hasn't stopped building since. Social Links: X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/ck_SNARKs LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ckeroles Nostr: https://primal.net/ck Key Quotes “If you are opposing the guys in charge, you're not going to have access for very long.” — Christian Keroles “Bitcoin is freedom enabling technology. Bitcoin is bad for dictators, and Bitcoin aligns with Western liberal values.” — Christian Keroles “Rather than exporting troops, rather than exporting inflation, the way that we do that is we export freedom technology.” — Christian Keroles Key Takeaways CBDCs are the intranet of money: Dictatorships are most excited about CBDCs because they enable capital controls, population surveillance, and data collection on unbanked citizens—but they consistently fail at consumer adoption because governments are terrible at shipping tech products. Debanked means playing whack-a-mole: Activists under authoritarian regimes describe constant account closures, using aliases, and moving between platforms. Bitcoin gives them permissionless access to digital payments for the first time—reconnecting them to the global economy. Bitcoin adoption follows the email playbook: The protocol works perfectly for sending value anywhere. The bottleneck is that nobody has a Bitcoin address yet. As more people come online, network effects compound—and HRF is funding the tools to accelerate that adoption. eCash, Nostr, and open-source AI are the frontier: HRF sees these technologies as complementary layers that make Bitcoin more adoptable. eCash enables jurisdictional arbitrage for product builders; Nostr creates censorship-resistant social infrastructure; open-source AI focuses on practical threats from surveillance systems rather than theoretical superintelligence. Mentioned in Episode: HRF CBDC Tracker - Monitoring government digital currency programs worldwide Zeus Wallet - Lightning and eCash wallet CK uses personally Bitcoin Design Foundation - User research for Bitcoin builders Check Your Financial Privilege - Alex Gladstein's book on Bitcoin and human rights Podcast: Subscribe: https://podcast.trustrevolution.co Music: More Ghost Than Man

S02E14 Why Ads Keep Winning

Big Tech captures $670 a year from the average American through attention and data. Voluntary payment has never broken past 5% adoption in 50 years of trying. So why does it still matter? Because it's not about replacing ads. It's about having somewhere to go when the platforms decide you shouldn't exist. Episode Summary Voluntary payment sounds like the answer to surveillance capitalism. Pay creators directly, cut out the middlemen, become the customer instead of the product. The philosophy is compelling. The data is brutal. NPR, Wikipedia, Patreon, Nostr — participation rates cluster between 1-5% and haven't budged in decades. Technology isn't the problem. Human behavior is. When given a choice, most people choose free with ads over paying directly. But this episode reframes the entire question. Voluntary payment doesn't need to replace extraction economics. It needs to exist as an exit. When Patreon banned Sargon of Akkad in 2018, thousands of creators watched their income evaporate. When they fled to SubscribeStar, Stripe and PayPal cut that platform off too. OnlyFans nearly killed its own business model because banks demanded it. Operation Choke Point proved the government can strangle legal businesses through financial pressure alone. The 5% who voluntarily pay aren't your main revenue stream. They're your lifeboat — an uncancellable base that doesn't depend on any platform's good graces. Key Quotes "Your ad revenue pays the bills. Your voluntary supporters are your insurance policy." "Stop thinking about voluntary payment as charity. Think about it as investing in creators you can't afford to lose." "Voluntary payment can't dominate. Defaults always beat choice. Human nature doesn't really change. But it can exist at a scale that makes it viable." Key Takeaways The 1-5% ceiling is structural, not technological: Patreon's conversion rate hasn't grown in a decade despite easier payments and lower friction. Better UX won't solve a values gap between early adopters and typical users. Defaults beat decisions: Apple's tracking transparency saw a 55-point swing from a single design change. People don't choose surveillance — they just don't reject it. Same with payment. The path forward may be changing defaults, not convincing more people to pay. Voluntary payment is deplatforming insurance: When Patreon, PayPal, or your bank decides you're too risky, most creators have no backup. Those who built direct relationships with even 5% of their audience have an escape route. The hybrid model works: Chapo Trap House ($140K/month Patreon plus sponsors), Tim Dillon ($200K/month Patreon plus ads) — successful creators aren't choosing between models, they're using both. Timestamps [00:43] The promise of value for value — paying creators instead of being monetized [02:15] The $670 Big Tech extracts annually from the average American [04:30] Evidence voluntary payment can work: Patreon success stories and Apple's tracking data [07:45] The counterevidence: YouTube Premium at 9%, Netflix ads at 55% of signups [10:20] Nostr's payment participation — 0.5% despite frictionless Bitcoin integration [14:30] Historical data: NPR, Wikipedia, pay-what-you-want restaurants all hit the same ceiling [17:00] Why defaults determine behavior more than decisions [18:45] The exit option reframe — why voluntary payment still matters [20:30] The Patreon/Sargon cascade and SubscribeStar deplatforming [23:00] Operation Choke Point and financial censorship [25:30] How successful creators actually operate: the hybrid model [28:00] What this means for creators, listeners, and builders Mentioned in Episode Fountain - Podcasting 2.0 app with Bitcoin Lightning payments Nostr - Censorship-resistant social protocol with built-in payments Patreon - Creator subscription platform OpenSats - Open source Bitcoin and freedom tech funding Podcast Subscribe: https://podcast.trustrevolution.co Music: More Ghost Than Man