Before we get started and we get into this I want you to know that this is not
a full episode of the First Church of Lorenzo.
There will be no sermons here today.
What I'm doing is I'm dropping in here today to talk to you about where I've
been the last couple months, why I've been gone, and what my fucking process
has been to get back to where I am right now talking to you.
A couple months ago I got kicked in the nuts.
Hard. By Spotify. And I'm going to really launch into detail on that and tell
you the who, what, why, when, and where on what happened with Spotify.
And I'm going to try to do it in as linear a fashion as possible.
But I don't know how good a job I'm going to because in a very real way I'm putting
it together in my mind.
All I can tell you is this.
If you're listening to this right now, and you heard it, my efforts for the last
two months have been successful.
What I've done is I've taken myself off the corporate teat.
I have taken myself and this podcast,
I guess you could say, as off the grid as you can possibly be and still be on
the internet. Allow me to explain.
I've been gone. So last time I took an extended leave of absence.
It was because things got so crazy at the job and I couldn't keep up.
This time it's been a little bit different.
The first part of September I started getting emails in volume from Spotify telling
me things like, This particular episode violates copyright.
That particular episode violates copyright laws.
And then this particular episode here violates their terms of service and then
that one over there violates their terms of service.
And so what they started doing was systematically taking each episode of misanthropy
radio and subsequently the First Church of Lorenzo down off of Spotify one at
a time. So then they say, okay, but if you want to dispute this claim, go ahead
and click this link and then go through the process to dispute the
I started going through the process on each one of the episodes that they had
taken offline and started disputing this claim or that claim or that claim, or
this claim, uh, with the episodes of First Church of Lorenzo, they took issue
with me using Mars, uh, the bringer of war, performed by the Air Force Band.
they took those two episodes off off of Spotify i then had to go and provide
documentation to Spotify that Mars, the Bringer of War by Gustav Holst was public
domain and the fact that it was performed by a military service band also made
it public domain no copyright was infringed and I had to send those up and so
on and so forth for all 30 episodes I had to prove that I had the right to use
the music or I had the right to use the sound and I also on two episodes had
to prove that the bit that I did was my own intellectual property and I didn't
take it from wherever they said I took it from every single fucking episode of
Misanthrope Radio and then the two episodes that I had produced to that point
of First Church of Lorenzo got struck by Spotify.
And I had to fight for each fucking episode on its own, each particular fucking
infringement on its own to get it cleared, to get them back on to Spotify.
So I go through that process and I get everything cleared, but two episodes and
they just wouldn't hear it.
They were having none of it.
They would not take my explanation.
They would not acknowledge the email that I had received from the copyright holder
saying that I could use this particular piece of music for Misanthrope Radio.
And it really gave me pause.
It was a fucking kick in the nuts.
I get done with that process and I'm sitting there and this again is over the
course of a few weeks, I'm fighting back and forth with Spotify every day, several
times a day over the course of a few weeks trying to get my show cleared and
back on the service so then after the process is all said and done and I have
everything cleared but those two episodes that they just would not fucking clear
I found myself one night sitting in my basement staring at the wall like kind
of milling it over in my head because it had been a frantic three weeks I'm gonna
say where I was just constantly in the fight in the fight in the fight proving
this proving that arguing this appealing that trying in my arsenal to make them
see that what I had done with Misanthrope Radio and subsequently First Church
of Lorenzo, I was not violating anyone's fucking intellectual property.
Everything was fine. Everybody was getting their credit.
Everything was on the up and up.
And like I said, so I'm sitting there and I'm staring at the wall and I'm just
kind of working through the previous three weeks in my fucking head.
And I'm getting more and more angry and I didn't know why because I'm a very
fucking logical person.
I didn't understand why they had done this to me in the first place.
But then once I thought about it and I was going through the process, I thought,
okay, you know, yeah, I get it.
They're trying to make sure that I am not infringing upon anyone's rights as
copyright holders and I'm not out here making what I'm not making any money on
it. So what am I doing?
Gaining popularity, using someone else's work.
I get it. Through the whole process, I'm just trying to prove that everything
I do is either A, from my fucking brain, or B, I am allowed to use.
But there was this fucking anger, like this fucking rage just brewing in the
back of my head and I just I couldn't put my finger on why I was so fucking mad
about it. I was mad that the two episodes never got cleared.
I was mad that three weeks of constant fucking bickering back back and forth
with Spotify had to be done in the first fucking place.
But I didn't understand why I was so fucking angry.
And then all of a sudden, like a fucking epiphany, like a ray of light shown
down from the heavens, it occurred to me why I was so fucking mad.
Because no other platform does this.
Not a single one. Misanthrope Radio and now First Church of Lorenzo is on
every single podcast platform, everyone that you can fucking think of.
I'm on, and I've never heard a peep out of anyone, not even YouTube.
I've never heard a peep out of YouTube.
Never heard a peep out of Apple.
Never heard a peep out of Amazon or Audible or any of these, any of the other
fucking heavy hitters.
It was just fucking Spotify.
They're using AI to crawl everybody's content and they're just yanking them off
their fucking site. And even now I'm having a hard time quantifying why exactly
that made me so angry, but I think it really boiled down to this.
Fuck you.
I mean, here's, here's my issue with Spotify.
This has always been my problem with Spotify.
If you. Remember OG Misanthrope Radio from fucking back in 2019.
And then the brief stint with my podcast called Unmoderate that I think is gone,
that has faded out of the fucking public ether and all through Misanthrope Radio.
My problem with Spotify has always been the same.
When you deal with a company like Apple and Audible Apple and iHeart and all
of these other major, major, major podcast distributors, they don't treat you
any kind of way. But I have to treat you some kind of way, it's with a degree,
the slightest degree of gratitude.
And again, it's not much, you know, don't get me wrong, Apple podcasts have absolutely
no idea who Lorenzo is, I can tell you that for sure, right?
Same thing with iHeart and and and Amazon and none of those motherfuckers know
who I am I'm not anybody important, but they don't treat you that way They either
ignore you entirely or if they have to communicate with you in any way shape
or form They do so with a degree of gratitude or at least polite business in
difference You see what I'm saying?
Spotify on the other hand treats their content creators completely differently
now I'm sure Joe Rogan has a different experience than I do.
Joe Rogan. I'm just little fucking Lorenzo sitting in my sweaty basement.
But even all the way back I I first released Misanthrope Radio version 1.0 I
had the hardest fucking time getting that Spotify they just would not approve
it they would not approve the podcast they wouldn't fucking do it and then once
they finally approved it it wasn't there it wasn't searchable it wasn't available
I could pull it up on their fucking content creators portal and see that misanthrope
radio version 1.0 was live and and it was out there, but you couldn't fucking
find it. You couldn't search for it.
It was un searchable, unfindable, unknowable.
I finally gained enough traction with it wasn a blip in Spotify's algorithm.
Fast forward to Unmoderate, same thing.
Fast forward to Misanthrope Radio 2.0, same fucking thing, until the downloads
and I guess the, what, the search requests or whatever, got to the point where,
where it any longer in in their fucking algorithm.
And then they put it out there, right?
And they got it to where Misanthrope Radio would pop up.
Uh, when you were searching for comedy or you were searching for commentary,
for whatever you happen to be searching for on the Spotify engine, misanthrope
radio 2.0 would show up.
So whatever milestone I had to reach in order to be important or, or moderately
important to Spotify, as far as their algorithm goes, I eventually reached and
then. became searchable and knowable and findable in their suggestion algorithm
thingy i don't know all the fucking technical terms, okay?
but then once I got to a point where you could easily find Misanthrope Radio
on Spotify here comes the fucking strikes systematically systematically, one
after the other, taking down each and every one of my episodes.
But then anytime I've ever had to deal with Spotify in the past, all the way
up to this recent issue here, it's always been, as a podcaster and content creator,
you're always made to feel like they're doing you.
some kind of service.
Never mind the fact that I'm giving you hours upon hours upon hours of the fucking
fruits of any time And any time I've ever had to deal with Spotify, in the past,
all the way up to this recent website I was always made to feel like they were
doing me some kind of favor allowing me to be on Spotify Why?
Like I should just be happy that I'm there.
Like I should just be happy that they are allowing me to sully their fucking
app with with my filth and ineptitude.
Now I'll be the first one to admit that Misanthrope Radio and subsequently First
church of Lorenzo is likely what you would call high in moral fiber.
Okay. Nope. We're not educating people over here.
I'm not teaching you life skills.
All right. This isn't a botany.
podcast. I'm not teaching you how to survive in the fucking wilderness.
I'm not doing anything over here to enrich your life in any way, shape or form,
but I am making you laugh.
And that's not nothing.
That's not nothing at all in 2026.
you have the ability or a place where you can go to fucking switch off the grim
horrible fucking disgustingness that is our reality and zone out for 20 or 30
minutes and listen to me fucking tell dick jokes and talk about poop stories
and stuff like that that's not value less and Spotify always treated me like
they were doing me some kind of allowing me to spew my filth on their fucking
app. They never came out and said it, but anytime I had to deal with them, that
was always like an underlying thing.
They were this giant giga corporation.
We are Spotify, you are trash.
If you want to be part of our service, you gotta do this, this, this, this, and
this. And then they'll come out of the other side of their mouths and say, Why
are you paying for a hosting service?
Lorenzo, why don't you allow us to host for you?
It's completely free.
We just want every podcaster in the world to host with Spotify.
And I fell into that trap for a while.
And then I eventually migrated over to Audioboom.
Now Audioboom, in fairness, didn't ever do anything to me.
They were delightful to deal with actually in that I was ignored just like I
was by Apple and Amazon and audible and all of the other big boys.
They provided me a service I paid for it.
And that was it. Again, Spotify was the only company that made me feel like I
was fucking garbage and I should just fall down on my knees and suck their green
circle dicks every fucking day and be thankful that I'm allowed to put my fucking
trash on their, on their website.
But that Spotify episode really left a fucking bad taste in my And it made me
realize just how easily we can all be fucking deplatformed, thrown away, forgotten,
and cast aside. It was Spotify today.
But it could be any of them tomorrow.
So what do I do? Well, the first thing I did was I sent an email to Spotify and
told them to fucking cancel my podcast.
Take it off their fucking website, I don't want to be a part of their network
anymore. Which they said that they were going to do.
I haven't looked to see that they did it.
Let me check. I'm gonna open up Spotify.
right now and see if First Church of Lorenzo is still on their service.
No it is not. If you search for First Church of Lorenzo or Misanthrope Radio
2.0 on Spotify it is no longer there.
So that's the first thing I did.
I told them get my shit off your fucking service.
I don't want to have anything to do with Spotify any longer.
But that was just the first part of the crash out.
Step
of thought and a lot of planning and a lot of research.
And that's why I've been gone for so fucking long.
What I decided I was going to do is I was going to try to figure out a way to
put out this podcast in the way I want to, when I want to, how I want to, while
relying on as few entities as possible.
Now there are certain things you're not going to be able to get around, right?
I have to rely on Apple Podcasts in order to allow me, to be part of the Apple
podcasting network. Similarly, I have to rely on Amazon and Audible, which is
the same entity. I'm still just geeked that my shit is on Audible.
It's like one of my favorite apps of all time.
iHeart and then Overcast and all these other podcasting apps, I have to rely
on the fact that they are going -to allow me to distribute my shit on their service.
Okay, so there's nothing I can do about that.
Same with YouTube. If I want to be a podcaster, I have to have a fucking platform
in order to Distribute my shit on to and those are the fucking entities that
I have to rely upon There's nothing I can fucking do about that.
But what hosting that was my next thing I was up until a few days ago So I'm
having my hosting go through a company called Audioboom, a British company.
What have we learned lately about the British idea of what freedom actually is?
Motherfuckers over there are getting jailed for saying shit that is a little
bit untoward on social media.
Maybe I don't want to fucking host with them, but what other options did I have?
And I searched and I researched and I researched and I researched and I don't
like fucking Podbean.
I wasn't gonna go back to Spotify.
They can fucking eat a bag of dicks as far as I'm concerned, right?
I didn't want to pay through the nose.
I wasn't gonna do Riverside So they were all of these different things and it
finally occurred to me one day How hard can it fucking be to a my own podcast?
Well, as it turns out, it's not hard at all.
So that's where I've been That's what I've been doing for the past shit couple
months is is figuring out a way to do my own hosting.
Well, I originally, in the midst of my crash -out, decided I'm going to get some
fucking server racks and I'm going to fucking get the T1 line and I'm going to
dedicate and I'm going to host it all from my fucking house, man.
Totally self -sufficient.
I'm not going to rely on anybody for anything.
But then I realized that that wasn't really all that practical.
So I looked at Ubuntu and I looked at AWS and I looked at quite a few.
And I ended up settling on a company that allows me to host my own podcast, to
set up my own fucking buckets and all of that stuff and distribution feeds and
all of that shit and hosted all on their cloud server system thingy.
And then it gets distributed out to all of the different podcast platform services.
And so I started reading and working and I'm working with Grok AI as a matter
of fact Grok Bot is fucking amazing by the way and Getting it all set up and getting
it all worked and being very specific about how I wanted things done and then
I rebuilt the website I cancelled my fucking website with pod page and Created
my own on the same cloud server
Incidentally all of this was free Not a fucking dime invested.
I bought the domain names, but lorenzosucks .com, I always owned.
I I always owned that.
But the actual setting up of the cloud server and the website and all of that
stuff, that was all free.
It's not costing me a fucking dime.
And so at the end of the day, here I am sitting down in front of you doing a
test run to. See just if this is going to fucking work.
If it's really going to work, because I just got it all set up, put the finishing
touches on everything this morning.
As a matter of fact, Grok Bot and I have been constant companions for weeks now
working on this project.
And this is the test run.
What you're hearing right now, if you're hearing it, it means that it all worked,
dude. And I can continue.
I can get back to work doing the business of being fucking stupid on the internet,
but without the fucking hassle of Spotify, first of all, go fuck yourself.
And without the fucking constant nagging at the back of my mind that I'm going
to violate somebody's fucking term of service and get deplatformed.
Just. Just like that.
I have my own cloud server hosting set up.
I have my own website that I'm not paying anybody to fucking run.
I'm not paying for the privilege of having a fucking website on their whatever
the it's called. I'm not paying for any of that shit.
It's all mine. 100 % of it belongs to me now.
I don't have to rely on anybody anymore for anything.
So again, I say all of that to say this.
I was gone for a while.
I got kicked in the nuts by Spotify.
It hurt. And after I got through fighting with them, I reassessed and then I
got mad. And then I completely changed the way I do everything involving this
fucking show. And now here we are.
Me putting out an episode, it's just a little drop in, but me putting out an
episode to you, basically to see if this still fucking works.
And if it does, we are off to the races, bitches.
I'll never be on Spotify again.
And I know in the world of business, you're never supposed to say never.
I don't see a scenario where I would ever fucking allow myself to be put on Spotify
ever again, and I'm never going to pay for another fucking hosting service And
I'm never going to pay for another fucking website service I'm never gonna pay
for any of that shit again because it is all property of Lorenzo from this point
forward Anyway, thank you for joining me for this drop -in episode of the first
Church of Lorenzo be looking for actual no shit real back -to -fucking -business
-of -business episodes of the First Church of Lorenzo moving forward.
If this works, and you're hearing this right now, then this fucking experiment
that I've undergone over the last few months has been a huge success and I will
be super energized and ready to get back to fucking work.
Alright, until next time.