#669: Building the Events App That Bitcoin Deserves with Aleks Svetski

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.

(00:10):
You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency,
Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

(00:31):
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Stand at the precipice.
Gold running to 4,000.
Bitcoin cooling off after hitting a new all-time high.
The debasement trade is on.
AI is taking over the world.
Or is it?
Sitting there with Alex Kretzky to solve all the world's problems.

(00:52):
Again.
It's been a while, dude.
Yeah, we solved the world problems like, what was it, a year ago, 18 months ago?
Now we've got new problems to deal with.
So here we are again.
Yeah, a lot has changed.
And we were just riffing on AI.
Is it hype, overhype?
Is there something there?

(01:12):
Is the way it's being applied, the way it will ultimately be applied
in terms of bringing the most utility and productivity to the world?
where are we in the cycle as somebody who has been toying around with it for quite a long time now
yeah i think i don't think my opinions changed since we we finished up an open source the

(01:35):
spiritual toshi stuff um my opinion remains that it's a tool uh it's very much like the tractor or
uh you know the the pc the laptop whatever it's um i think where i've always diverged with a lot
of the overhype or hype in general is that it's some sort of, you know, second coming

(01:55):
of God or some sort of sentient being that's going to take over the world and all this
sort of stuff.
I've always felt like that was, you know, the nerd's wet dream, you know, like overblown
kind of like eschatological desire to see the circuits take over the world and to prove

(02:16):
all the religious people wrong, that God can be created in the circus.
So I've always felt like there was a strange sort of desire for that
that was completely logical.
And we might have discussed this last time, it's been so long,
but I know I've riffed with someone about the fact that intelligence

(02:37):
or the concept of general intelligence is just infinite,
and what we have with the breakthrough with LLMs has been specialized
intelligence around the reproduction of patents linguistically first and now in applications
like video.
But by no means is this anywhere near general intelligence, nor is it anywhere near sentience,

(03:01):
which is further down the track.
So there was, I shared a tweet with you now from Devin Erickson and a couple other people
who are sort of like pointing at this, which is, hey, this is a great tool.
It can be used effectively.
Although, as with all tools, it's quite hard to be used effectively.

(03:22):
Most people just use it poorly and they just get slop.
And as we're seeing, the whole world is sort of,
or the whole online world is just being filled with more and more and more slop.
But if used effectively, you can create quite cool things with it.
Um, I know, for example, I'm, I'm a father now to a newborn and, uh, the little guy was,

(03:45):
um, was sneezing the other day.
And the first thing we did was we just asked Chachipiti, Hey, you know, what should we do?
Should we get like some saline solution or anything like that?
What, like, what do we do?
And we've got some good feedback.
So, so for like, for that kind of stuff, it's a super breakthrough.
Um, also for things like the video that you guys did for, um, for the opportunity cost

(04:06):
calculator or the opportunity cost app. Like that was fucking brilliant, man. So, so for that stuff,
fundamentally, it's, it's great. But does that mean that this is going to end all the jobs and
replace all the human beings and give us some sort of sentient being? Fuck no. Like that,
it's just, and I think people have sort of slowly come to that conclusion themselves instinctively

(04:29):
because, you know, you had GPT-3, GPT-4 and people are like, oh yeah, by the time we get the GPT-5,
this thing's going to be like fucking god and gpt6 it's going to be running the world and here we are
gpt5 is not really any different than four um you know we we sort of had that jump between three and
four but since then you know everything's kind of tapered off um and all of the different models are

(04:52):
kind of you know the same the big guys whether it's grok gpt gemini they all sort of like
function the same so i feel like we've hit a ceiling there um so yeah that's my that's sort
of my thoughts off the cuff yeah the i completely agree because it's funny making these videos
it's people and we've had a bunch of people come to us like how are you doing this like it like

(05:18):
what is the secret sauce it's like there is no secret sauce like it actually does take hard work
like the amount of iterations you have to run through with the generations because you understand
that the LLMs are actually not smart and they're not intelligent. You have to literally handhold
them and format things in a certain way. You have to bring the context of a cinematographer

(05:40):
and a director and understand how to prompt that. Like it's not easy. We have a bunch of people
in our circle saying,
we're going to go do this and
we're going to create similar memes
and short films, whatever you want to call them.
And it's like, all right, good luck.
It takes us like a week.
The last one we just did took 55 hours

(06:01):
of work from storyboarding, scripting,
and then iterating on
generations. And it is simply just
a tool that allows us
and enables us to do things that would have cost us
tens of thousands of dollars and now they cost
$5,000
in labor and minimal cost of credits right now, which you pulled up another tweet from

(06:22):
Zoomer.
It's like how sustainable is the business model for these large language models with
how much they're charging customers right now.
I think we're probably in a very unique and anomalous point in the cost curve for the
customer right now where they're just essentially um trying to subsidize this with loss leading by

(06:48):
making tokens super cheap when that we know that the power that uh the cost of the power it takes
to actually produce the outputs is far exceeds and hacking the hardware as well far exceeds uh
what they're charging us this this is such a good point so actually i am around around the time when
we were sort of trying to commercialize Spirit of Satoshi two years ago now, this hit me like

(07:14):
a ton of bricks as a business owner, because we had spent all of this time training and building
and refining and fine tuning this, the Spirit of Satoshi model. And we had finally got to a good
enough model that we thought we could charge for it. And when we went to some Bitcoin companies to
kind of sell it as a assistant, but an assistant that actually understands Bitcoin.

(07:39):
They were only willing to pay like 20 bucks a month or something, or maybe 50 bucks a
month for it.
And when we did the cost analysis on the back end, the inference cost to provide that was
in the thousands so that these guys could have it.
And I was like, what the fuck is going on here?
You know, the economics don't make any sense whatsoever.

(08:00):
And that was when it first hit me that in the AI space, what you've got is a situation where, actually in traditional software, your marginal cost per new customer is effectively zero.
It doesn't cost you anything else for another person to download the app and use the app.
Whereas in the AI space, each new user actually costs you.

(08:23):
So there is a marginal cost.
There is a real marginal cost for every single new person that you add.
Now, the bet is that you have users who don't use it that much and hopefully pay a subscription to subsidize the users that do use it, obviously, as with all of these things.
And at large scales, maybe there's some sort of model that works.
But what I realized, I'm kind of into it when we were trying to raise money from some sort of more AI-centric venture capitalists.

(08:53):
I did some digging, some research and everything, who they are, who their LPs are and everything.
And what I found, like if I traced the chain back, was that a lot of the money was actually coming somehow, some way through Amazon or Google or NVIDIA or something like that.
That was sort of like either the LPs or behind the LPs.
So what I found was that it was kind of like the wrong kind of circular economy.

(09:17):
It was like laundering money.
But you got the money going to the startups and then startups spending all of their money on inference and training.
And, you know, obviously getting a little bit of money in the front end from customers if they found some sort of success.
But it became like the money would end up being invested in the startups to be spent back with the same ultimate LPs who were investing in the startups.

(09:41):
So it was kind of this kind of circular logic.
And I was like, what the fuck?
And I remember writing a tweet about that two years ago.
And anyway, I sent you a tweet from some guy who kind of like outlined that about four or five weeks ago.
He had actually done some research and outlined it.
So it's a really interesting, somewhat false economy.
And what that's led me to believe where 18 months ago, two years ago, this is maybe the one opinion I've changed, is I thought there was going to be like a total proliferation of models.

(10:12):
I've actually changed my mind on that.
I think it's a, it's kind of like an oligopoly situation just by virtue of, um, the fact that
this only really works at scale.
Like I thought there was going to be many, many, many models.
That was my whole premise when I previously launched Spirit of Satoshi.
Um, but I actually think we're probably going to end up in a world where we have like the

(10:35):
fang of language models.
Um, and the long tail is just like pointless, you know, hugging face these days is really
struggling you know at the remember if you remember like 18 months ago hugging face was booming
everyone's using models on there no one gives a shit anymore everyone just uses chat gpt
or if they have google credits they're using that um some people use claude and that's about it

(10:56):
i don't think there's anything else really that people use i keep muting that because i'm moving
my stuff i said we're using claude and gemini predominantly here at tftc um and that scares me
we're using them because they're the most useful.
I guess the idealist in me would like the open source models to be able to

(11:18):
compete and to take market share from the closed source models at the end of
the day.
They're just not capable yet of doing exactly what these other models can do.
It's partly not capable.
And it's also partly,
you know,
I've,
I've kind of become less and less and less of an idealist myself.

(11:40):
and I guess somewhat more of a realist maybe the older I get.
But I just sort of realized that people just don't give a shit, man.
You know, they sort of build a habit around.
I mean, I think that the – I haven't seen usage statistics,
but my guess would be that ChatGPT has like the absolute lion's share of usage

(12:03):
when it comes to these models.
I think Gemini and stuff like that are still like a fraction and they're more used by more enterprise or more, you know, customers like yourself who are trying to do something more unique.
But in terms of like general mass market, ChatGPT is one.
Like people don't give a fuck about open source or, you know, having their own model running on their own computer unless you're like sort of a techie.

(12:26):
But beyond that, I just don't think there's a significant business in there.
It's kind of like Google search and DuckDuckGo.
Right. DuckDuckGo has a space, but it's like, what is it?
A 0.1% of the fraction of what Google search is?
Yeah, definitely.

(12:47):
I'm a DuckDuckGo user.
I'm going to move to KG.
I'll re-pronounce it soon, I think.
DuckDuckGo's experience has deprecated.
Because, yeah, I guess you have to hope for Moore's Law to come into place.
really aggressively the cost to come down and making it dead simple to

(13:08):
download a model and run it locally and reap the same benefits that you would from open
AI or Claude or Anthropic. And I just don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.
I hope I'm wrong. Maybe these Chinese, the arms race between the Chinese and the West is so

(13:28):
aggressive that the Chinese come out with some open source model that blows everything out of
the water but i think that's wishful thinking i mean maybe the only time that works is if um
the models actually hit an actual ceiling and no amount of extra compute can break that ceiling
at which point what you get is moore's law forces the smaller models to catch up

(13:50):
and everyone is at the same ceiling and in that case then you have an opportunity but still
what i then wonder is like what is the business model for these um and and i'm not sure what it
So at least if I put my business hat on, I don't know if there's a business case there, but if I put my consumer hat on, yeah, maybe there's an upside for me as a consumer when these things sort of hit a local maxima, at least for a period, at which they're all sort of producing the same output.

(14:22):
In which case, yeah, maybe it makes sense for me to drop ChatGPT and start using something else.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, with that in mind, I mean, what does the future look like?
I guess throwing specific models and open source versus post-source AI aside right now,

(14:46):
I'm thinking about just broad applications of people, how they're using these things,
whether it's via N8M flows to create these sort of agentic workflows
or using Claude's MPC or Anthropics MPC.
It looks like ChatGPT is about to release an agent or a dev kit
where you can connect things.

(15:08):
It seems like based off of what you been writing about and sort of what you working on as Atlantis and your view of sort of a new web emerging with AI Noster and Bitcoin that there another way to do these things
So here's, if I had to boil down my position, is that I think we are at the point of a renaissance again of cool new consumer products, basically.

(15:36):
Sort of like what we had about 10 years ago when we had the rise of like Shopify and Uber and Airbnb and all this sort of stuff.
Like for the last decade, there hasn't really been a lot of new consumer apps.
Like consumers have been dead for a little while.
And if I look at the technical landscape, you know, sort of AI, if I put that in a bucket, you've got these new tools and frameworks.

(16:02):
and whether that's like vibe coding stuff to produce like little quick MVPs,
whether it's the video generation stuff to maybe do some more intelligent marketing
and stuff like that so you can lower your cost of producing outreach or communications,
or whether it's some of these agentic frameworks,
although I'm a little bit skeptical around the agentic stuff

(16:23):
because maybe there is some things you can really turn into a process
because that's effectively what these agentic frameworks are for.
It's like to take a dumb process that you might hire, you know,
an outsourced person in the Philippines for and just like do it with that
for 10% or 20% of the cost.
You wouldn't do anything really critical as a function in the business with that.

(16:48):
You know, maybe you were previously hiring someone to write technical tests
to make sure that your code passes a certain standard.
You know, for that, you might be able to build an agentic framework
and you save yourself X amount of hours per person in code review
or you save yourself one higher or something like that.
So AI is sort of an effort multiplier as a business.

(17:10):
But you've got these two other tools which I find really interesting.
One is obviously Bitcoin for payments and the ability to embed payments
into any application you build.
And then number three is something like Nostra.
And I say something like Nostra because whether Nostra succeeds or fails doesn't really matter.

(17:32):
What matters is the idea of an identity layer to the web where the identity is actually owned by the user.
That creates a bit of a new design space for having a profile that can move across different applications.

(17:52):
So that's the interesting thing about Nostra, in my opinion.
I know a lot of people talk about the censorship resistance element and all of this, but in my opinion, I think that ship has sailed.
A lot of Bitcoiners probably will be annoyed at me for saying that, or maybe even Nostra people will be annoyed at me for saying that.
But I think the mind space for censorship resistance is now basically taken up in most people's minds by X, Substack, and Rumble.

(18:22):
I don't think, you know, maybe a couple of years ago there was an opportunity there for Nostra really to claim mind share.
But I think that ship has sailed.
And until, even though Nostra is more censorship resistant, like getting that through people's heads is a very, very, very, very hard job, at least in my opinion.

(18:43):
I think it's too high a bar to climb.
whereas the idea of a of a web where you have a portable identity and you can use the one
identity across multiple applications and you each application can enhance the experience
by virtue of the fact that you have connections underlying that that to me is quite interesting

(19:05):
so for me as a startup guy as a business owner and stuff like that i look at this and i'm like okay
shit we have a bunch of new tools here that we could build an application that may have taken
a massive fucking team or you know tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to do before
we can now do it as a startup again and to me that is almost like the beginning of the app boom

(19:34):
when apple rolled out applications and you could build apps and you could build these massive
startups with a small team and you had a basically a renaissance in consumer applications and that
sort of died off because all the consumer apps that were successful became incumbents and they
kind of blocked off the space etc but now we're at a new stage and now you have small startups again
can now do payments at scale with bitcoin can hopefully do a social graph at scale with something

(20:00):
like nostro and can build faster better quicker and go to market faster better quicker with ai
tools. So that's kind of how I envision this. You know, we can talk about how I'm trying to
implement that with our product. We've had a bunch of significant sort of refinements of what we're
doing with Atlantis. And I can give an example of that. But that's my answer to your question.

(20:23):
It's like these are tools. And I'm really excited over the next five years and 10 years, ideally,
to see how completely new startups that were either impossible before or very expensive to
build before are going to come to fruition by virtue of the fact that there's a new toolkit

(20:43):
or series of tools that entrepreneurs and small startups can use to let them compete with prior
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(22:32):
off. Go check it out. Obscura.net. Use the code TFTC25. I really agree with you on the point that
focusing on censorship resistance for two reasons probably doesn't make sense. Number one,
people don't care about number two you're competing with xsubstack and rumble which
have for at least a temporary period of time brought back what seems to be

(22:55):
more free speech oriented sort of policies um but yeah the the bootstrapping and network effect
via the social graph has always been the killer feature of nostr in my my opinion just being able
to if you're a company just put an app into the ether and people sign up and have connectivity

(23:18):
and accessibility to everybody that they've already connected with on the protocol well let's let's
dig into that so i've i've evolved my thinking a step further on that side of things so i and this
may be an unpopular opinion of some sort but um nostra is a protocol well actually let me start

(23:40):
with this um i think there's been a bit of a um a conflation in the nostra space in the bitcoin
space um related to the importance of nostra and the importance of bitcoin so the way i like to
think about it and i was going to write a small article on this but i haven't got around to it yet

(24:02):
But basically, Bitcoin, the implementation, is more important than Bitcoin, the idea.
And that's evident by Bitcoin, the idea is every other fucking 50,000 shit coins out there, right?
Like people have taken the concept and created a shit coin and everything like that.

(24:22):
But what's important is actually the implementation.
It's the longest chain.
It's the chain that runs the Genesis block.
It's the Node software that we all run.
It's the fact that we're all in sync.
It's the actual implementation of Bitcoin that matters.
That's why Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV and all this sort of stuff doesn't matter.
On the flip side, though, with Noster, it's actually not the implementation that matters.

(24:46):
It's the idea that matters.
And I kind of alluded to that five minutes ago when I said the premise of an identity layer on the web is something that was always kind of wanted for the last 20, 30 years of the web, right?
There was always this idea to have, hey, let's have identity baked into a protocol on the web, not the identity being a feature inside an application on top of the web.

(25:10):
And it's always been something that was wanted, but we never got around to it.
And I think, you know, partly that's because people were never used to having a bearer instrument on, you know, like in a digital capacity.
You know, Bitcoin probably opened the doorway to something like Nostra to be successful.
but if we sort of look at this objectively um if bitcoin fails tomorrow the implementation

(25:32):
i think the world's up shit creek without a paddle like that's a fucking disaster and it
would be really really really really bad for the world it'll be bad for the future it'll be bad for
our kids it'll be bad for civilization it'll be bad for everything um but if nostril fails tomorrow
like what have we lost some content content is worth nothing you know in a world of infinite

(25:53):
content. You know, sure, maybe we've lost some sort of, you know, social relationships, but
because social relationships are sort of derived from us as physical human beings, we can always
rebuild those. That's why if you get banned on Twitter, you can create a new account and you can
rebuild your profile, right? Like I got banned 10 times. So, you know, I rebuilt my profile. So I've

(26:13):
sort of been there, done that. So like the cost of losing or the cost of Nostra dying is very low,
whereas the cost of Bitcoin dying and failing is catastrophic.
So if Nostra was to fail, I'm sure someone else will come up with another instantiation
of an identity protocol where the identity is a barrier instrument

(26:35):
and there's a public-private key pair and we go and create a new one.
So that's sort of how I start and that's how I look at this.
And that's like purely objective.
Yes, I know it's going to piss some people.
I would probably piss Odell off.
Um, but that's like, you know, I think that's the, um, the, the, the detached objective way
to, to sort of understand this.

(26:58):
So then from there, I asked the next question that sort of flows into my mind is, okay,
well, if Nostra is this protocol, protocols actually, especially if they've gained some
level of critical mass, which Nostra has, um, the plus side is protocols are very hard
to kill.
they they can live on so long as there is like a core set of users there um you know nostril can

(27:21):
last five ten years and who knows maybe in five or ten years uh you know the the web starts to
become more um censorship full and all this sort of stuff and then people start being like okay
fuck we need to jump on something else you know you get that kind of the next push the next wave
the trouble is nostril can operate at one speed whereas businesses have to operate at a much like

(27:47):
that they work on a much shorter horizon right like as a company you can come and sort of make
a bet on nostril and be like okay well um we're gonna build another social app and build a content
centric app and bootstrap the network with Nostra.
But if Nostra is not growing that fast, you're not going to get much of a benefit actually

(28:09):
from doing that.
In fact, you probably bring more of a benefit to the protocol than the other way around.
Whereas, and your goal as a company or as a product is to try and find product market
fit as soon as possible.
But maybe you don't get there in time because the speed of Nostra development or the speed of protocol hardening is much longer, like the timeframe is longer than the business.

(28:38):
So that makes me start to wonder, and this is part of the big shift we've had into Atlantis in the last probably two months, is maybe there's something other than competing for content and attention that we can do to build the foundations or to build a number of end pubs on this network.

(29:02):
And for us, we found two things.
And honestly, right now, it's like one thing that we're really focusing on.
which is events. I don't know for the fucking life of me why I didn't think of this earlier.
Like when we first started Atlantis, we were thinking of building more like a trip advisor
meets Instagram meets Eventbrite, right? Like it was kind of a travel nomad, sovereign individual

(29:25):
super app. And the idea was that we could take that social graph, you know, build a beautiful
feed and then embed things into the feed, like places and reviews and events and all this sort
of shit. I look back on myself now, 12 months ago, whatever it was when we started this. And I was
like, I was on fucking crack. I should have just picked one of these things and done it really well.

(29:47):
And the big aha moment that we had a couple of months ago when we were in Prague was we rolled
out the first version of the app and it had places, it had the social feed, it had all of that,
but also had the events piece.
And the biggest uptick of users we had was people RSVPing for events.

(30:07):
And we've designed the app in such a way that you might not even care about Nostra
or any of that sort of stuff.
So you can log in with an email or Google single sign-on or Apple single sign-on,
but it creates an end pub for you.
So it is an actual Nostra identity, which you can later, when you give a shit,
you can just extract your private key.
But otherwise we just manage it for you there But that created a whole bunch of new Nostra users And what we did with Primal during the event was people signed up for satellite events around the conference with our app And then

(30:38):
we told them, hey, take your key now and you can put it into Primal and you can experience
Zaps and the social thing. Because Primal has by far, in the Nostra space, it has by far the best
feed. You know, you've got Damas and Amethyst and all this sort of stuff. You've even got the
Atlantis feed. But I don't see why you would use another app when you're following the same people

(31:01):
and you're going to see the same content. So I think, you know, even Nostra from a feed perspective,
I think converges to one winner. And that's, in my opinion, primal, which is, you know, for us,
we're actually going to get rid of our feed from the app. Like we're going to deprioritize the feed
as a feature. And what we're going to take from the social graph is when you're finding an event,
what's important well shit i'm going to go to an event and i'm going to see that marty bent's going

(31:26):
to this event because we're connected that gives me instant insight into maybe i should go to that
event or maybe i want to go to the event discovery page on the app and the kind of events that come
up on my um discovery sort of feed which looks a little bit like spotify now instead of a vertical
feed, we've got like these carousels, is influenced by my social graph and people that I'm close

(31:51):
to that I share interests with and stuff like that.
That starts to become really interesting because you can't do that on Eventbrite.
You can't do that on Luma.
You know, there's no sort of social glue that ties these apps together.
And if we can build a really, really, really good events app that hosts can create events
on in like 60 seconds, where every time someone RSVPs to their event, they grow their follower,

(32:19):
they grow their audience. But then those event attendees also actually become Nostra users,
and they don't even know where later they can use Primal. We actually start to build,
like imagine you host, you know, you have a thousand hosts hosting 10 events a year
with 100 people per event. Like that's a 10 million people or 10 million sign-ins.

(32:40):
that's just grown the Nostra base massively.
Maybe they're unlikely to all be posting content,
so you're not going to see a huge boost in Nostra activity
in terms of Kind1 events, but you've got a larger foundation
for when the time comes, they will just take their account
and log into Primal or something like that and start to use it.
So that's kind of the big switch I've had in my mind is we're kind of taking,

(33:04):
we've been trying to be this social app for sovereign individuals
and we're going to kind of kill the social element.
We're just going to become the best fucking events app in the world
that has a social layer built in.
And what I forgot to mention is Bitcoin payments.
Like I can't believe there is no actual Bitcoin native events app on the planet.

(33:25):
Like imagine Eventbrite with just Bitcoin payments.
It doesn't exist.
I was like, this was staring me in the face the whole time and I didn't notice it.
So anyway, that's a long way of explaining.
Like, I definitely agree with you that the being able to sort of somewhat bootstrap your social app with Nostra is somewhat of a good idea.
But I feel like that's that's a big lift.

(33:46):
And there's probably one winner in that space.
And that's, in my opinion, clearly primal.
But I think there's another approach where you can use Nostra just purely as a tool.
It's hidden.
The average consumer doesn't know.
But this is a tool that people use because it solves a particular problem, which is I want to host an event, get paid and grow an audience very quickly.

(34:08):
And here's the tool for that.
And that inadvertently grows Nostra and it creates Bitcoin adoption.
That to me is really compelling.
Yeah.
No, I love this train of thought.
This is interesting, right?
you have to sat lantis you're building a startup a company that's leveraging this protocol and this
protocol has a problem where it's been leaning into the social aspect which is good and all

(34:32):
and the ability to have somewhat censorship resistant content and social profiles the
social web a web of trust and payments embedded is cool but i forget who was i think it was peter
Thiel, but I mean, obviously Peter Thiel had that famous talk at Stanford where he said,

(34:52):
you want to find a monopoly.
You don't want it.
You don't want competitors.
And I think leading into the social side of Nostra, like leaning into the social side
of things via the Nostra protocols, like, all right, you're competing with a highly
saturated and competitive landscape already.
What is the area that doesn't exist?
What's the marketing note create?

(35:13):
That should be.
Yeah.
You're going.
And it's interesting because Nostra is a protocol.
It's not really a company, but as a company building, it's like, okay, what can we do with this protocol to go create a market, bring people to it?
Spot on.
I'm glad you said that because this was another realization that we had.
This has become a podcast on like entrepreneur mistakes.

(35:36):
After the Prague conference, we went to another conference, which was the largest nomad conference in the world, in Bulgaria.
and we went there and we pitched the product as a um you know a social network for nomads
and people were like oh this is cool you know they downloaded it they posted a little bit of

(35:57):
content on the first day and then they didn't post again and we sort of like tried to convince
them like look just post the same kind of content you're doing on instagram but you can post it here
and you get to own your audience blah blah blah you know we did all this pitching and man it was
so fucking hard to get them to stop posting on Instagram or even just post alongside the posting

(36:17):
on Instagram. It felt like we didn't solve a problem. We actually gave them a new problem,
which was another place to post. And, and sort of that hit me really hard. I was like, I, I,
I walked out of that conference and spent like, um, you know, a week or two kind of digesting and
thinking competing on social, like you're competing for attention and attention is like the,

(36:39):
the most expensive, uh, currency on the planet today. Like it's so fucking expensive. Like,
and you're competing with TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, who, which are literally designed to
hijack your fucking brain and turn you into a zombie that is triggered by everything. Um,
that's, that's a really, that's a really high bar. It's a very difficult thing to do. And,

(37:04):
And I sort of found St. Lance's kind of sandwiched between trying to get people to drop these mainstream social apps on the one hand, but also sandwiched between, as I said earlier, you know, we had a feed or we have a feed still.
We haven't completely deprecated or changed it.
But we're competing also with Amethyst, Primal, Damus and, you know, the other apps.

(37:26):
And we're like, OK, what's the differentiator here?
you know sure we've you know you can on our feed you can see events and you can see places and you
can see some other stuff but it's not really that compelling um it's not really that differentiated
and quite honestly like i'll say this myself primal primal feed is functionally 10 times

(37:47):
better than our feed like our feed looks nice but it's not that fucking great um and we we never
we also never got around to building zaps because we wanted to try and figure out a way to make our
feed more unique without zaps. Um, and then we're going to sort of add zaps as a, as a icing on the
cake. But yeah, like I ended up sort of stuck between these two and I was like, man, I'm playing

(38:08):
the wrong game here. Like, let me go pick myself up out of here and go over here. And then I realized
in the event space, you've got basically meetup.com and Eventbrite who everyone like universally
fucking hates. They haven't changed for 20 years. Um, Eventbrite is like, by the time you,
like, first of all, you can only host an event and get paid if you're a Westerner. So like,

(38:33):
you know, if you, if you're from Brazil or if you're from Latin America, if you're from Africa,
if you're from most of Asia, if you're from Eastern Europe, you can't use Eventbrite as a
host. Like sure, as an attendee, you can attend, but as a host, you can't get paid out. So that
throws that out the window. But even if you're a host in one of the Western countries, Eventbrite
takes almost 10% after payment processing fees. Like, so it's a fucking highway robbery. Like,

(38:59):
it's insane. So you've got Eventbrite on one side. On the other side, you've got meetup.com,
which charges now 45 bucks a month so that you can have the privilege of running a meetup.
But everyone hates meetup.com. And it's outdated. It hasn't changed. It's been bought by private
equity so it's tired as hell um which is why in my opinion you've got these kind of like new um i

(39:19):
don't know if you've ever used luma or potterful have you used that i've used luma before yeah so
luma i i'll again credit where credit's due that in my opinion is the best events app in the world
today it's so fucking good unfortunately it's run by solana dudes and it's like shit winners um but
like again credit where credit's due it's so much better than eventbrite it's so much better than

(39:41):
meetup.com and they've really cornered the market, particularly for tech events and for sort of like
up and coming meetups and all this sort of stuff. So what we realized is, hey, there's,
there's actually no Bitcoin native equivalent for Luma. And if we can build that and just like
build Bitcoin payments into it naturally, because even with Luma, like they do have Stripe and they

(40:05):
do have ticketing, but after their fees and Stripe's fees, you're paying about seven and a
half eight percent per ticket on luma so it's still fucking hyper expensive like it's a little
bit cheaper than eventbrite but it's super super expensive um you could do bitcoin ticketing like
in a luma sort of like experience and you could do that for one percent and and not only can you

(40:26):
do it cheaper so for everybody but you can actually unlock the entire fucking world it'd be the first
global events app on the planet which doesn't exist so for me that starts to get really
interesting. It's like, okay, now Bitcoin actually unlocks something. So we're not, we're not,
I said this to, to the team the other week, I was like, hey, we're not a Bitcoin company.

(40:49):
We're not a Nostra company. We're an events app that happens to be using Bitcoin Nostra. And
this is, this makes me think actually about an article that I wrote a couple of years ago called
Three Generations Theory, where I kind of said that the first generation of Bitcoin apps
were all going to be about something to do with the financial element of Bitcoin.

(41:12):
So exchanges, wallets, mining, and you've got this kind of like late stage fiat treasury
company bullshit going on, right?
So which we can talk about.
But like the first generation of Bitcoin, like the first 20 years is going to be about like
the nature of Bitcoin emerging against the US dollar.
But the second generation of Bitcoin, so let's just say the first generation is 2010 to 2030.

(41:36):
the next generation 2030 to 2050 you're going to have like young business owners and entrepreneurs
who were born after bitcoin was launched like you know they were born in 2010 onwards they're not
going to know of a world like that they will perceive bitcoin completely differently to you
and i like you and i were born with one foot in the fiat world one foot in bitcoin so we

(41:57):
fundamentally even though we're a little bit different like we think already in terms of
Bitcoin, but the large majority of the world like sort of still views Bitcoin as this speculative
investment or this like instrument for making more fiat, right? For making more US dollars.
These kids will see Bitcoin completely different. And for them, it's like they'll build what I call
second generation Bitcoin companies, which is they'll build events apps, they'll build travel

(42:21):
apps, they'll build, you know, Ubers, they'll build like actual applications. But Bitcoin is just,
part of the stack. They'll look at it exactly like modern developers look at JavaScript,
Node.js. It's just, okay, we're going to use this for payments. We're going to use Nostra to
add a social glue to it. We're going to use AI to do this. And that's it. It's part of the stack.

(42:46):
That to me is when Bitcoin really starts to embed itself in the world in technology. And that's
like you know somewhat unconsciously i've started like making atlantis a um an attempt at a second
generation bitcoin company it's like we're not a bitcoin company we're an events app but we just

(43:07):
happen to use bitcoin in the in the stack and that to me starts to get interesting anyway i'll shut
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(43:53):
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(45:00):
unchained.com slash tftc. I don't think this is a digression, but really sort of an elaboration
because I think it's important to bring up because you have it in the article. And I think
something that everybody, particularly in Nostar,
should be thinking about, but you referenced
Andrew Chen's cold start
problem in his book,
and he was at Uber when they had this

(45:20):
cold start problem, and I think
I'm really happy we're having this conversation
as it pertains to Nostar specifically. I think we
really need to rethink how we solve this
cold start problem.
Why should people
really take the lessons
from this book and begin applying
it to what they're doing in terms
of building businesses online?
Totally. I mean, do you want to, should we dive into that a little bit?

(45:43):
Yeah Yeah So cold start problem maybe is like a for people who don know what that means is when you trying to build a kind of like a marketplace application or something that has a network effect which has two sides to the market like Uber is an example
You have drivers and riders. Like if there's no drivers, you can't get riders. And if there's no riders, you can't get drivers.

(46:06):
So it's like the chicken and egg problem. So how do you solve that?
um you know there's andrew chan kind of outlines four ways to solve it you've got um
uh what do you call it come for the tool stay for the network and he uses some examples like
dropbox um you know or google drive so you you came for the tool so you could store your stuff

(46:27):
online but then when you share it people get more utility by also creating a dropbox or google drive
account, right? Instagram was actually one of these as well. Originally, Instagram was a competitor
to an app called Hipstamatic, which was just a photo filtering app. But the difference was that
with Hipstamatic, you had to download the photo to your phone after you put the filters on,

(46:52):
and then you could separately upload it to Facebook or one of the social networks.
Instagram flipped the script there was they allowed you to instantly post to the socials, but also post to your own feed.
So what ended up happening was people came for the tool, but slowly by slowly they stayed for the network.
The other mechanism is invite only.

(47:13):
So Andrew Chen points at LinkedIn as someone who did this really well was by making it invite only.
It's sort of like a club.
And what you do is you get network density.
and what network density does is it increases the quality of the network effect it's it's smaller in
the beginning but you get um more connections and with more connections you get more sticking power

(47:38):
um tinder did that as well uh probably the best app in the world that ever ever ever ever did this
is uh is that rare um app which is like tinder for celebrities they fucking killed it with this
Like they are completely locked down and they have a wait list that is months long and it's completely paid.

(47:59):
So they basically tell you to fuck off.
You can't join.
But people are sort of jumping over themselves so they can be a part of that network.
So they keep it super, super high quality, super narrow, super niche.
But they have such a good network effect and they have such a good product like that.
The dude who built that is like a masterclass in building powerful network effects.
So that's sort of the second mechanism. And I will say, and I said this in the article, I think Nostra to some degree accidentally did that as a mechanism to build the first level of network effect.

(48:33):
Because if you sort of think about networked effects happening in like in surges or in waves, like Nostra had its initial network effect and it's got this kind of critical mass of Bitcoiners who all know each other.
So it's got quite like it's almost got an invite only feel.
and even though it's not invite only even though it's open um the fact that it's just like a bunch

(48:58):
of bitcoiners on there telling each other gm and tapping each other and all that sort of stuff
like attracts a particular crowd um which has made the the network quite dense like we are all
connected on there we all know each other and it's basically become bitcoin twitter right just to some
to some degree um and a much better bitcoin twitter because bitcoin twitter now fucking
sucks it's full of just morons talking about treasury companies it's so bad um so

(49:22):
So it's done that.
But at the same time, now it's almost like a, if you remember from chemistry, you have electrons in a certain valence, right?
So it's kind of like stuck in this valence.
It hasn't, it's not able to move to the next one, which is, in my opinion, sort of why the nostril growth has tapered off.
Even though the products have gotten way better.

(49:44):
Like if you, I mean, like primal is 10 times better than it was a year ago.
It's so fucking good now.
but the usage like is maybe incrementally a little bit better
but the ratio between the improvement in the product
versus the number of users is just not there, right?
And I think that's because the current network effect

(50:06):
is very good for the current club
but it hasn't allowed for a new club.
So in my mind, there needs to be an unlock.
So anyway, that was invite only,
the come for the tool, stay for the network.
the third mechanism andrew chen talks about is um what he calls the hard side yeah the hard side
but then also flintstoning so the hard side he talks about um if you if you have a product and

(50:33):
like uber you've got drivers and riders focus on the hard side first so you buy the hard side
um whatever that takes so it's like what they did at uber for example in the beginning
they walked around and they like they paid drivers 30 bucks an hour just to drive around
the um for during conferences whether they made money or not didn't matter but what that created

(50:56):
was available drivers and then they went around to um to train stations and stuff like that and
gave vouchers out to potential riders and said here's a 30 voucher you can ride with uber for
the first time so they kind of like they they invested in creating that and they built the
first atomic network in san francisco i think it was i think second was new york etc and then they

(51:18):
sort of expanded from there and obviously uber is a great use case and then the final method
flintstoning which is basically fake it till you make it so this is what uh reddit did as an example
and doordash did a funny one but basically you um you like reddit did it with fucking bots so it
looked like there was real activity on there and real fake activity created some real activity and

(51:39):
that sort of started to snowball um doordash did it with um they just listed restaurants on there
people ordered um from doordash and then doordash paid uber drivers and shit like that to come and
actually pick it up from the restaurant without the restaurant actually which is fucking hilarious
so you know there's these four mechanisms um for us it's come for the tool state for the network

(52:01):
That is, I think, the unlock that we're looking at now really, really seriously, which is, hey, here's a tool that you can use to host beautiful events, get paid in Bitcoin instantly.
We'll add stable coins soon as well.
And we'll add fiat, we'll add Stripe.
So that way there's like the whole buffet for you as an event host.
So come create an awesome event, get paid instantly, low fees.

(52:25):
You get to build an audience while you're doing it.
And in the process, we're building this network effect underneath.
And hopefully people realize that they can stick around on Nostro more broadly and find other applications where they can actually communicate and build relationships and new stuff.
Yeah, I love it.
Go build the market that doesn't exist yet.

(52:47):
And I didn't realize the event space was that sort of confined and constricted geographically.
Didn't hit me either, man.
It didn't hit me either.
Like that's why Southeast Asia, for example, has its own like Eventbrite or has its own meetup.com.
Like everyone is like, it's super, super, super fragmented.
The more I dug into that, the more I was like, holy crap.
Like this is like, this is the market.

(53:09):
Like what was I doing?
Now my mind's running through like what are other markets that don't exist yet that could be built on the stack with this tool and these set of tools.
and my mind immediately wanders to something like data vending machines which
was sort of drawn to when they originally dropped but as we discussed earlier it doesn't seem like

(53:32):
the llms are there yet but one of these marketplaces that don't exist that are uniquely suited to be
built on this open stack of open protocols with nostril and bitcoin yep yep yep dude if anyone
is listening to this and they've got like ideas there's your there's your toolkit
ai nostril bitcoin like you you have a whole new design space i i have this um let me see if i've

(53:58):
got this diagram here um it's like it's it's a really good way to visualize um the the new design
space that we have with um with nostril bitcoin hold on i'm looking through my stuff all right i'm
going to send this to you on Signal so you can see it and maybe you can share it with people

(54:20):
listening. The initial four-layer stack opened up the opportunity for the world to get everything
from Amazon to Google to Uber to every single application that we have in the world today.
and now we have a two extra layers on the stack we have a whole new design space which i think is

(54:47):
going to create a renaissance for new products and like the people building in this space and
the people investing in this space and all this sort of shit and the next 10 20 years are going
to be crazy crazy crazy crazy good i really i really am loving this conversation because i agree
and i've talked to many people building a master million too and i think many people are beginning
to recognize this.

(55:08):
Like, all right, what are the new hot sort of applications
that don't exist that could be novel to Noster?
And I love the, like, ditching the idealist approach
and being like, we're not going to be like NSEC only.
Like, if you want to sign in via email via Google, via Apple,

(55:29):
whatever, just sign up and we'll spin up a key for you.
You always have it here.
You probably don't even know that you have it,
but it's here.
Totally.
Once you recognize that you created an MPUB
when you sign up for this app,
like you can go use it.
Totally, totally.
Because then we're using the time in our favor.
We get users now, we get product market fit,

(55:50):
we succeed as a business.
And over the next three, five, 10 years,
we can educate people.
It's like, hey, you know,
you actually own your identity
and you can like make it portable.
They're like, oh, that's fucking cool.
So then they do it.
As opposed to putting the barrier up front.
They're like, oh, what's the key?
How do I do it?
Where do I store it?
Like that.
So yeah, so that's the new design space.

(56:11):
Whereas the old design space was just four layers.
So this is the old.
Yeah, this is basically, this stack is so powerful.
It gave us everything that we have today.
It's given us Riverside that we're talking on.
It's given us Figma that we're designing on.
It's given us Google.
It's given us everything.
It's fucking incredible.
But now imagine if you add identity and payments,

(56:33):
like baked into the stack, not as apps,
because to date we've had this like weird situation where payments is kind of an application
on top of this protocol stack and you know payments lives inside shit like stripe and
paypal and you know all that junk um and shitty banks and identity has been a complete mess
because you have a million and one identities in every single application as a feature

(56:57):
like throw that shit out and let's move on to this new stack you have six layers two new protocols
this is like a massive massive massive upgrade to the the digital experience um for the world and i
think it's yeah anyway i said it before i'll say it again the renaissance in consumer applications

(57:18):
and at some point business applications again because i think consumer apps usually kick off
first that's the that's the initial wave and then later on like you know maybe five ten years from
Now we'll get like new version of Slack, new version of, you know, Jira and linear and whatever else sort of like more business SaaS type products that, you know, maybe won't even be SaaS at that point.

(57:40):
There will be paper use because you've got the ability to do micropayments with Bitcoin.
So it's like the whole thing changes.
That's a really, really, really, really exciting as an entrepreneur.
yeah and i think by framing it this way by just adding two layers to the stack instead of saying
oh you have to throw out everything else and build on this new stack um it's much more approachable

(58:04):
and so it's like hey you've been handed two more stack layers and tools if you will to build your
applications just view them as additive it's much more approachable for the layman way more
approachable yeah for sure actually i um i didn't think of that explicitly but when i when i have

(58:24):
shared this with people in the in sort of normie land outside of bitcoin because i've done a bunch
of um talks and travel and discussions with people in that space this this comparison clicks for
people they're like oh that's interesting like they don't sort of see bitcoin as this thing that
they have to entirely switch to um and i think this is actually more powerful than pitching web

(58:48):
3 you know because all the web 3 docs are like oh you know the internet is dead and come over here
it's like well no it's just internet was missing this and now we can actually make the internet so
much better yeah and since you've sort of shifted and realized i gotta go make this market we're
gonna make a social events app that's global um that's what satlantis is going to be what have you

(59:12):
what have you noticed in terms of user behaviors me touched on some earlier but what are sort of
the most popular events that people are spinning up type of events.
Yeah.
The first thing I'll say is that it's just like makes sense to people.
Like, you know, when I was, when I was,
I used to struggle like explaining all the things that Solantis can do and

(59:33):
everything like that. And they're like, Oh, that sounds really cool.
Like, so what do I do? It's like, well,
you could start here and you can post some content. It's like way too much shit.
Whereas now it's just like, Hey,
you're using meetup and you're paying for a crappy product come and move your um meetup across to
atlantis you can set it up quicker you can even do things like you know one of the uh

(59:56):
the things that meetup organizers hate is let's say you have a maximum capacity of 50 people
and then you just get people just click register just because they click register but they don't
have any intention of coming so kind of like uses up the wait list or uses up your rsvp list and then
you had like room for 50 and then only 10 or 15 people turn up because the other 30 assholes

(01:00:17):
just click the register button because there's no cost in doing that.
With Bitcoin, you could put like a free ticket, but just make it 100 sats or something or make
it 1000 sats. And then, you know, people sort of might even just think twice. And at the very least,
if they don't turn up, then the event host, you know, got 1000 sats out of it or something like
So you can start doing interesting things like that.

(01:00:38):
The other one is we're partnering with Bitcoin conferences now, obviously being the low hanging fruit.
But Loom actually does this really well.
They have this calendar feature where you can associate events around a calendar and people can subscribe to a calendar.
And that can be used both by communities, but also by conferences.

(01:01:00):
We're adding a little bit more flexibility to that.
And then obviously there's the social layer in the calendar that makes it a little bit smarter.
but um yeah the one of the big features that we're fleshing out now we'll have ready this
month for use in all the november conferences and december conferences coming up but you have like
bitcoin amsterdam as your main calendar and then you can associate all the satellite events to it

(01:01:26):
and now when people come to that event they can find where their friends are going who they know
and all this sort of stuff.
Because that's one thing when you go to these massive events,
trying to coordinate and figure out where people are going,
holy shit, it's a pain in the ass, right?
But if you can see instantly, it's like, okay,
six of my friends are going to this event,
one of them is going to that event, this and that.

(01:01:47):
You can make a really quick assessment on which ones to go to.
And then you can add the events to your profile.
So you can see which ones you're going to.
You've got your tickets in there.
It's all sort of inbuilt.
The other thing, and this is part of a legacy feature,
we had collections, which is places on a map.
So we're going to keep that feature,

(01:02:07):
but we're going to subordinate it to events.
So instead, when you create an event,
one of the biggest things that people have
or biggest issues that they have when they're doing an event,
particularly when they're traveling, is where do I go?
What do I do?
What are the cool places to hang out at?
Which restaurant, which cafe, this and that.
So as an event host, you can associate a list of your favorite places.

(01:02:28):
And it could be like, here's the top 10 Bitcoin places around the event, or here's the top 10 brunch places, or here's the best gyms, whatever you want.
Like you create a list and you append it to the event.
And then people have their list there, they have their social graph there, they can pay in Bitcoin, and they have their places.
And it's like a really beautiful sort of end-to-end solution for anyone running a meetup, a small event, or a conference that wants to run all of the other stuff around it.

(01:02:56):
That would be powerful.
There's a number of events I go to.
You show up early.
You're like, all right, where do I hang out before this thing?
It's like, here's the best cocktail bar or before the event if you want to go.
Something like that.
Exactly.
And the social graph actually works there as well because places are discovered by people on Atlantis and added.

(01:03:18):
And people can bookmark those places when they add them to the list.
So you can see immediately, oh, you know, one of my friends bookmarked this place or added this place or whatever.
or it's recommended by the event host or, you know,
35 people that I know in my social circle, you know,
mention this place.
So it's like there's a social graph utility there that is surfaced not for

(01:03:41):
content purposes, but for, what do you call it, like validation purposes.
Like that to me is a really interesting use case for an open social graph as
opposed to, hey, post more content.
Yeah.
Now, we're getting into something I've intuitively believed is like social.

(01:04:04):
It's been a good first use case, great first use case.
I've used it.
It's fun.
To your point about attention being scarce, valuable, and having to cross post.
Even I forget to cross post every once in a while.
What are these unique use cases that don't exist anywhere else that can be built on Nostra to really draw people in?

(01:04:26):
And then ultimately feed people to the social side of things.
Maybe it'll be like a horseshoe that started with social.
It really blows up because of a bunch of other things and then ends with this everything app where everything protocol.
Everything protocol, yeah.
With social at its core.
Totally, totally.
I really think that's going to happen, but I think it's going to take 10 years, right?

(01:04:49):
I think to some degree, you know, we all sort of drank the Kool-Aid a little bit too quickly last year, I think.
And we were like, oh, yeah, your Nostra is going to take over the world and all this sort of stuff.
And we sort of underestimated how hard it really is to sustain the network effect cold start problem solution, right?

(01:05:12):
That is really, really, really, really difficult to keep churning.
um so yeah we'll get there in the end and who knows maybe 10 years from now x and rumble and
all that sort of stuff realize that hey we should actually make our applications nostril compatible

(01:05:33):
because it makes sense to plug into that open network in the same way as they use the freaking
internet you know what they'll realize hopefully is that this new internet stack with payments and
with identity built in is of benefit to them.
So then they come and move across in the same way as fucking incumbents,
like in the past or like, you know, IBM ended up building laptops,

(01:05:54):
you know, thanks to Apple.
Like, so, you know, they came this way.
So that's, that's what great technological revolutions do is they,
they enable startups to come and do something new to create entirely new
markets, as you mentioned, and then the incumbents follow.
That to me is really cool.
no and i and as you're explaining that too i think that's one of the key breakthroughs

(01:06:18):
that you've honed in on too like when i think of primal specifically like
it is becoming an everything app like it's substack x and now twitch all in one with
their live streaming um and it's incredible as a content creator we definitely make way more money
publishing our stuff on Nostra than we do on X or YouTube or anywhere else.

(01:06:43):
But it's that, and going back to the Cold Star problem, I think,
in the digital sphere, highly competitive,
like really bringing it in the meat space via something like events
and adding value there, I think is going to be critical
because the digital landscape, as we all know, is hyper-competitive
and there are a ton of meat space-oriented things.

(01:07:06):
experiences that are severely lacking.
It's a wide open landscape for people to really tap into.
Totally.
You know, another thing that reminds me of speaking of meatspace is
since I last spoke to you, you know,
I've sort of had this like on-off relationship with Twitter,

(01:07:29):
with Substack, with all of my socials actually.
You know, I'll get in there again and I'll say a bunch of things
and I'll get excited and then some shit will send me into a tailspin rage.
Like the last thing was this whole like Charlie Coke and arena thing, man.
That fucked me up.
Like when I saw that poor girl get like stabbed, holy fuck, man.
I couldn't sleep for a week.
Like that shook me up.

(01:07:49):
And I went on a rampage like fucking yelling and saying like we should pick up arms and
go to war and all this sort of stuff.
And I kind of I had a chance to like step away from that for a little bit.
I was like, man, you know, I get that I'm a passionate guy.
but you know I 10 miles away there nothing I can do and you know yelling on Twitter doesn actually help the situation and to some degree I like I impotent in that sense like I can do anything about it and all I did was create a bunch

(01:08:22):
of stress for myself um and not being able to sleep and being pissed off about everything um
so I've kind of made the decision honestly due to take a massive hiatus from the online world like
I don't give a shit about like I deleted the apps all from my phone.
I'm not going to post anymore for a while, if ever.
And this,

(01:08:43):
this shift with Atlanta to becoming more an events app,
it's made me rethink like,
what are we doing here and why are we doing it?
And I've come to the conclusion that I actually want to build an app that
does like gets people to do shit in the real world.
And get, get the fuck off your screen,
like get off social media get off like your phone and go and do something in the real world um and

(01:09:11):
i sensed that in myself and i've sensed that in myself for a little while um and maybe it's because
i'm getting old maybe it's because i'm a dad now and like i'm more interested in actually hanging
out with the baby than like scrolling twitter or anything like that um but i've spoken to a bunch
of people who are all sort of kind of have had this almost call it like a burnout like a digital

(01:09:31):
burnout they're like fucking done like man it's the same thing over and over again there's a new
hysteria every single week like i'm over it i want to go do some stuff in the real world and um
it's made me like i went and did some digging into the statistics and like what are the trends showing
and i don't think a lot of people realize but events were like pumping before covid

(01:09:57):
then obviously with lockdowns and everything like that it crushed everything um but there's been a
fucking massive rebound there is almost double the number of events going on in the world um across
everything from like you know the large end of town like music festivals and all that sort of
shit all the way through to small meetings everything there's almost double the number
of events happening now than pre-covid it's insane like this massive like whiplash effect

(01:10:23):
where people are like sort of craving meeting up in person i guess we we can probably sense it as a
proxy from the bitcoin space right imagine remember 2019 when we first met in um in uh bitcoin uh
the bitcoin meetup no in san francisco san francisco yeah 2019 yeah 2019 dude like we were all
fucking babies we're all innocent shit like that and there was like what three bitcoin conferences

(01:10:44):
that year now how many is there it's like 100 it's insane yeah right so it's like people want
to meet in meat space um so when you're saying sort of meat space before it's like i'm kind of
rethinking this product it's like okay i want to build something for i'm calling it i don't know
if it's the right term but like the experience economy it's like okay what are things in the
real world events obviously um that you know people are interested in doing so it's like to

(01:11:12):
me events and places is kind of like the the sweet spot there's something there amongst those two
things. And that's why I decided to like keep the collections feature in because that thing is still
associated to places. Like you want to know where to go and what to do, but in the real world.
So anyway, yeah, when you said meet space, you reminded me of that. It's like,
it feels like a more fulfilling mission for me than building another social app. It's like,

(01:11:38):
okay, get out there and meet people in the real world, build actual networks again,
and friendships and communities.
And like, that's what people are craving.
And I think more people are going to wake up to that.
And we're going to see a massive, especially even now as like AI,
this is the last I'll say on it, is as AI kind of turns a lot of the internet

(01:12:00):
into kind of like slop, like there's like infinite content now,
there's infinite things you can get on the web,
there's all this sort of stuff.
So, you know, as human beings, what do we do?
We sort of, we get overabundance here.
So we look for what is the scarce thing.
And the thing that's becoming more scarce is actually like connection and like real curation, real community.

(01:12:21):
And that you, you know, as much as you can do something over a Zoom call, like real connection happens in person.
And if we can facilitate that through a good product, that to me gets very exciting.
It gives me a mission, again, that I want to work at 24-7.

(01:12:44):
Yeah, as you're saying, I'm just writing some things down.
I've noticed in myself, I have somebody who, I mean, I want to call myself an avid,
or not an avid, but I'm not wholly engaged in the culture wars,
but from time to time over the last five years specifically,
I've definitely dove in, gotten involved to a certain extent,

(01:13:07):
but I've, to your point, I'm like digital burnout.
The culture war stuff is becoming abundantly clear.
At the algos, the powers that be, whatever you want to point flame at,
I don't care who it is, it's becoming very clear that the divide and conquer
strategy is definitely being deployed in the digital world.
And the best option is just not participate.

(01:13:29):
And so I'm particularly at last going back to like Charlie Kirk and Iran.
I think those were the last two straws that broke the camel's back for me.
It's like I really want what I put out there and I haven't been perfect.
But when I put out there on X or whatever social, I was just like maniacally focus on Bitcoin and freedom tech and just like present solutions and don't get drug into the mud of the culture wars and focusing on the problem.

(01:13:59):
because it is soul sucking and it never, nothing ever happens.
It's like, and it never ends as well. Yeah. It's, it's,
and it's really hard when you're a passionate person. I, I, I,
the, the distance between my brain and the fucking keyboard is like very short.
Like, so I ended up like saying a lot of things that are like, you know,

(01:14:20):
wild and, you know, a lot of people think I'm just a fucking asshole.
Um, but it's like, it doesn't come from a place of, um, uh,
like being a bad person necessarily comes from a place of like,
I give a shit.
And when I see bad things,
I'm like,
fuck it.
I got to say something,
you know,
I went through all the crap with like COVID and everything like that.
And yeah,
I don't know.
I'm too old for this shit,
bro.

(01:14:41):
It's like,
that's the thing.
I was joking about it.
We had,
uh,
it was at an event last week and we were,
it was meat space event.
We're talking about everything going on from Charlie Kirk and like the
theories around it.
like it's obvious that the FBI story doesn't make any sense.
And I was like, you know what?

(01:15:01):
I need to find a young Gen Z or tap him on the shoulder.
Be like, this is you, brother.
I don't have any more.
It's your turn now.
You don't have any more.
Yeah.
We, we done our time in the trenches, dude.
Honestly.
Especially when you have kids it like is is this is this time well spent this is not the reason why we moved back to where we from originally but like i have noticed we been

(01:15:28):
home in the philadelphia area where my wife and i both grew up for three months four months now
and it's just like we've got family around the corner multiple um family members like within a
half mile yeah right yeah right they've got kids yeah right age and yeah right we find ourselves
like when they get home from school it's like all right where are we gonna do we're gonna play your

(01:15:49):
cousins we're gonna go to the park it's like much more fulfilling don't worry i'm not turning into
grill dad i'm not gonna i'm not gonna be begin saying did you see that game last night but it's
like where where's time best spent and i truly believe there is like this push as if you got the
basement the censorship rises like the culture wars are the noise that they're trying to drag

(01:16:13):
you into and like focus on the signal connection meet space bitcoin nostre and sort of build around
yeah bro yeah bro distractions that they're putting in front of you yeah bro totally man
totally totally we're getting old bro we are so if there's any generation z gen zers out there

(01:16:36):
listening to this and want the tap on the shoulder and sort of the playbook for how to engage uh
dm me actually don't you don't want this life
it's not worth it it's part of family it yeah that's true i was gonna say it builds character
maybe in your um in your sort of like mid-20s go hard but then as soon as possible

(01:16:56):
get yourself a wife have family and step out of the noise like there's a time and a place for
all of these things you know everyone's got to sort of go and build up some scars and shit like
that um if you want to go build up the scars you want to meet other like-minded individuals do that
make sure you download satlanus and uh start an event yeah meet up at the local pub this is sweet

(01:17:23):
i really this conversation went uh in a really good direction i'm happy it did particularly as
pertains to again nostril and how we're thinking about growing that network specifically i think
really trying to focus on areas where a market doesn't exist yet and leveraging the unique
tool stack that exists on the existing web now bitcoin in nostril is how you grow that network

(01:17:48):
effect appreciate it and yeah i was uh i wasn't sure where this conversation was gonna go either
So I appreciate you letting me rant and ramble.
I'm in the process of rethinking how Svetsky shows up in the world.
And for a while, I've always been an entrepreneur first,

(01:18:11):
but I think most people in the Bitcoin space actually know me as a writer
because I wrote a lot, I guess.
but that's always been more of a hobby than a than a real vocation and it's it's weird like I
feel like I've come full circle where now the thing that gives me the most joy is I mean I

(01:18:34):
still enjoy conversations like this because you know some of these conversations are really good
but I don't even necessarily want to be very public anymore like you know I'll have like
good conversations where I know if there's a good podcast host or something like that we can dig into
something like we did today but i i i much prefer to sit down with my team and build cool shit like

(01:18:59):
i i studied engineering when i was uh when i was young and that's like solving problems and
building stuff like gives me a lot of juice and then you know you get a bit of notoriety online
and you think you're a fucking celebrity and all this sort of stuff and then like you know that
kind of sucks you into that world but man it's um it's a it's a tough life um it's you know

(01:19:23):
everything comes with you know pros and cons obviously but you know this sort of new chapter
of setiki now like being a dad and like trying to build something for meat space um it feels like
so much more peaceful and wholesome at least for this stage i don't know it's maybe five years from
now I decided to be a raging fucking lunatic again and come people maybe I'll have my my next

(01:19:47):
Nassim Taleb arc or something like that no I mean I think similarly here obviously I run a podcast
written newsletter I'm very online to some extent but uh I think the thing that has really driven me
and given me the most fulfillment um obviously family moving closer to family but here on like

(01:20:11):
I've really been focused on the business side of TFTC, working with Ed, our head of growth to really just create like a management framework of how we actually operate the business and sort of expand the opportunities that we go after that aren't podcasts, newsletter, X-Focus.
Like what else can we do to sort of support our key vision of highlighting signal and helping people become more sovereign beyond what we're doing with the content?

(01:20:39):
And that's been really fun, mental and exercise that we've been playing through for the last few months.
No, I mean, the Opportunity Cost app is fucking brilliant, dude.
Like when I saw that, I was like, why hasn't anyone done this before?
This is like so good.
Like it's so like it's such a simple tool.
Yeah, dude, kudos to you guys.
Like that's that's that's an example of people who actually, you know, are creative and solving something very clear because they have an information edge, which as Bitcoin as we do, like we're ahead of 99 percent of the world.

(01:21:14):
Like people haven't even changed the paradigm yet of their method of thinking.
As we said earlier, it's like they still perceive Bitcoin as an investment for fuck's sake.
Even though maybe they see it less speculative now, it is still in the in the mental category of an investment.
Like, you know, we're sort of like 50 years ahead of them.
We're sort of seeing Bitcoin as like not only just money, but now it's like it's a it's a tool.

(01:21:39):
Like, and it's, that is completely different paradigm.
And that's where great products come from that are genuinely futuristic.
Yeah.
And Zep, I guess, last point on that.
Thank you, number one.
But number two, for any Bitcoiners, particularly like us who've been here for a while, I think
that's the most important thing is recognize, obviously, we have this information asymmetry

(01:22:02):
with this arbitrage that we're taking advantage of, obviously, by stacking sacks and building
around it.
but I think patients recognizing it's a marathon and the market's going to come
to us eventually,
but it had its own pace and staying sane while that process plays out is
incredibly important.
There's going to be a lot of burnout and all that,
but I think it happening It happening at its own pace and just yeah you don want to be like the guy in the cave who gets close to the diamonds and then turns around

(01:22:33):
Like, just stay the course.
Try to touch grass.
Make sure your mental health, for lack of a better term,
your mental clarity is probably the better term,
is where it needs to be.
Totally, totally.
When Treasury Company?
never it's uh this is tftc is a bitcoin treasury company we just have an operating business that

(01:22:58):
that's it like that provides value to people you actually have an actual business that makes
bitcoin that's it yeah like it's it's it's so funny when um you know because i i got asked by
that when um when we're doing like a little uh fundraiser um oh actually we were about to start
a fundraiser and i was in prague and you know people started asking me so they're like so you're
going to go public and i was like what for what and they're like you know so you can put bitcoin

(01:23:23):
on the balance sheet i'm like well no i think we're just going to try and get revenue and
earn money in bitcoin and like sort of looking at me like what the fuck's wrong with you and i'm
like looking at them like what the fuck's wrong with you um it's yeah it's hilarious to watch man
what a what an interesting world i mean i've been saying it publicly for months
especially during paper bitcoin summer but

(01:23:45):
caveman to me is like it's too good to be true yeah yeah yeah it's just like nothing nothing in
life is that easy and not that it's easy to go through all the seo i mean relatively easy to go
through the sec paperwork and raise some capital sell the vision but um obviously that takes work
but um i think you can just get something to market and turn on a magic bitcoin printing

(01:24:10):
machine seems a bit naive to me i think there will be some that do it successfully but it's
economy is a scale game that a few players have yeah 100 massive head start on 100 it'll be like
the ai spaceman like there'll be like three four winners and like this idea that everyone you know
everything there's gonna be hundreds of bitcoin treasury companies all this sort of stuff it's

(01:24:33):
fucking ludicrous um and yeah it's interesting yeah build a product or service that brings people
value they pay for it and uh you produce it cheaper than they pay for it and you sweep
that excess in the bitcoin bitcoin economics 101 i was watching um the count of monte cristo with
my wife a couple weeks ago and um while they're digging in the um in the in the tunnel trying to

(01:24:57):
get out of the prison the the priest asks dante's is like define economics and he sort of like says
being able to create a surplus
blah blah blah and then he says in short
dig now
eat later
that's it, there's your economics
do something and
produce surplus and that's it

(01:25:19):
it's not complicated
it's not
I wouldn't even call it greed
I guess it's a FOMO to an extent
this idea like we need to stack
as many sats now, which I get
I've had that feeling personally as well.
The land grab, the gold rush, whatever you want to call it.

(01:25:39):
That's what's driving a lot of this.
And it's like, ah, I agree.
But is this the best way to go about it?
I don't know.
I don't think so.
Yeah.
For the people, you know, and just the benefit of the doubt,
for like the people who know what they're doing there in capital markets
and shit like that, yeah, whatever.
You know, they know that game.
And there's probably like the few people, as you said,
that will be successful at that.
But man, it's a weird relic of the fiat world that something like that can actually happen.

(01:26:13):
It's sort of like a strange period in history.
People look back and be like, that actually happened.
Yeah.
and I think
the next 12 months
will
will reveal a lot
about the
efficacy of
of these strategies
mm-hmm
mm-hmm
oh
awesome
maybe
maybe

(01:26:34):
we'll talk again
at some point
next year
hopefully not
a whole year
maybe the first quarter
second quarter
next year
catch up on
SatLantis
and retrospective
on
the performance
of the treasury companies
totally
we should definitely
do that
All right, we've got Logan's got the links, the SatLantis, where everybody can find it.

(01:26:56):
So we'll put that in the show notes.
Freaks, particularly focus on Nostra and growing Nostra specifically.
Take what we discussed here and really think about it.
I think this is really important because, again, you have Nostra, the protocol.
People are building businesses on top of it.
Should we be replicating businesses that already exist in the Web 2.0 world?

(01:27:18):
if that's what you want to refer to it as,
or if you just go create new markets,
I think that's where the signal is
and where the growth comes from.
So shout out to you for honing in on that
and leaning into it at Atlantis.
Appreciate it, man.
I appreciate it.
And then I will throw one thing out there
for people listening.
If you're an event host, event organizer of any kind,

(01:27:39):
if you're using Meetup or Loom or anything,
would love you to come and give the app a try.
It's ready to rock and roll.
You can create an event on there.
It's super fast.
It doesn't have Bitcoin ticketing yet.
It'll have Bitcoin ticketing in a couple of weeks.
So by the time you hear this, it's either just about to be released or very shortly.
But yes, certainly by the end of October, you'll have Bitcoin ticketing.

(01:28:03):
It's Nostra enabled, all of that sort of stuff.
Would love some feedback.
It would mean a lot.
We really like our goal over the next six months is to have all of the Bitcoin conferences,
meetups, communities and all that sort of stuff be on there.
So it's like a real vibrant sort of place.
Like if you want to know anything that's going on in the meat space and
Bitcoin,
like this is wanted to be the place to be.

(01:28:24):
So we'd love anyone to try it out.
Check it out freaks.
Till next time.
Appreciate it.
Peace and love.
Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC.
If you've made it this far,
I imagine you got some value out of the episode.
If so,
please share it far and wide with your friends and family.
We're looking to get the word out there.

(01:28:45):
Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show.
And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way.
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(01:29:08):
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