Bitcoin isn't enough... we need to DISRUPT social networks | Aleksandar Svetski

Aleks Svetski, author of The Bushido of Bitcoin and entrepreneur behind new ventures like Atlantis, returns to explore why capital alone isn’t enough — and why character, virtue, and community must stand alongside money to build a meaningful future. From Bitcoin’s role as a foundation of sound capital to the need for beauty, excellence, and integrity, Aleks unpacks how civilization risks turning into a strip mall when we optimize only for profit. In this conversation, we dive into the balance of capital and character, the rise of borderless living, and the evolution from social networks into engagement farms. Aleks explains why algorithms and cheap capital erode society, and how projects like Atlantis aim to rebuild authentic community in the real world. We also discuss the future of decentralized identity with Noster, the bifurcation of society into creators and consumers, and why this era could mark the most transformative shift in human civilization in centuries.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You've got bitcoin, you've got borderless money, you've got the
original borderless communications medium, which was the Internet. If you remember,
like twenty years ago, right when Facebook and all these
sort of social networks first came out, we have real
world social networks, and these original digital social networks were
kind of like mirrors of that real world social network.
They put a recommendation algorithm into that. The metric that

(00:20):
they measure is not how much connections you have, but
how much time is spent on the device. Now there's
a vacuum for social networks. I want to actually build community,
but Lance has sort of becomes it's almost like a
Spotify for communities, places, and events. I wanted to become
a social network. There's about discovering things to do in
the real world, and yeah, that's effective what we're trying

(00:42):
to do for this borderless movement.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
One thing that I know that you're doing a little
bit different is by building our noster, which is a
decentralized protocol, so different than like the traditional platform.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
So how does that change?

Speaker 1 (00:56):
I wonder if.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Alex welcome back to the show. I think we've I
don't know, we've done three or four shows. We excited
to have you here. I love the book you got
there in the background, the uncommiss Manifesto. Of course, the
book that we co authored together. If you guys haven't
read that book, you certainly should. But Alex, you know,
we both obviously have a lot in common in regards
to bitcoin and the books that we've written, and I

(01:21):
talk mostly about bitcoin from like an investing lens and
macroeconomic lens and trying to understand sort of the dangers
in the market so we can get ahead. Right. We're
all trying to improve our lives, and most of us
think money is a way to do that. But in
your latest book, The Bushido Bitcoin, you talk about how
maybe just getting that money, maybe bitcoin alone isn't enough.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
It's not enough, and.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
We need capital and character. How do you see bitcoin
maybe projects that you're working on now, like sat Lanis,
how do you see them restoring the balance of capital
and character.

Speaker 4 (01:55):
First of all, good to be back, buddy.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
It's it's been a couple months since we caught up,
so I'm glad to be here. I let me answer
this question this way. I I'm of the opinion that, well,
at least when.

Speaker 4 (02:07):
I wrote the book a couple of years ago.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
I think the world was in a really challenging space, right.
It seems like, you know, wog virus was going to
take over, that the world was coming to an end,
that up was down, down was up, like was white.
You know, everything was sort of inverted, and it was
an interesting period.

Speaker 4 (02:24):
I feel like.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
We've turned the corner, particularly of the last eighteen months,
and I think that's continued to accelerate.

Speaker 4 (02:32):
I think the world is moving in a better trajectory.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
And I think it's got, you know, not something to
do with my book, like as if my book changed
this trajectory, but I think what I touched on in
the book was this sort of desire, this to move
back towards a age in which we kind of value
character once again, like character principles, virtues and things like that.

(02:59):
And there's been like a in my opinion at least,
the marked improvement. Like you look at the discourse even
on things like I mean, you know, you and I
went back and forth on this.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
On X the other day.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
It's like a lot of social media and all this
sort of stuff is just becoming slop. But beneath the slop,
there's actually, you know, the quality of the discourse is
much better. You know, the kind of stuff that is
getting traction and the kind of stuff we're talking about
is far more honest, far more real, and what I would.

Speaker 4 (03:26):
Say, like write coded right.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
So for me, the premise or the idea behind the
book of like uniting capital and character is kind of
stems from this idea that if you optimize just for
one and which is capital, and I think a big
problem in the world over the last probably one hundred
years is that we've optimized more and more and more
just for capital, and we've kind of forgot the character

(03:51):
side of things. What you end up doing is you
kind of turn civilization into a giant strip mall. You know,
it's just everything is just designed not for meaning anymore.
You don't get these beautiful cathedrals, you get these like
you know, shopping mall squares where everything looks the same,
sounds the same, and it's you know, just about extracting
something from you instead of you know, building something beautiful

(04:13):
that actually gives back to the environment around it. So,
in my opinion, and this is the sort of the
core message of the book is that in order to
build a better world, we can't just win the economic game.
I think this is probably this was my big insight
out of the book, is like the economic part is
really really important, and you and I wrote about it
in the Uncommunist manifestos. That's like the foundation, but it

(04:37):
needs to form the basis of something higher, something more ascendant,
and that I think is sort of the pursuit of beauty,
of character, of virtue, of excellence, which are things that
are often not economic in nature, like going and building
a cathedral over three hundred years, which you're not going
to see the return on investment on it, and all
that sort of stuff has nothing to do with Ustrea

(05:00):
economics and sound money. It's got everything to do with
the in fact sacrificing economics for something higher. And I
think that's it's an important distinction. And my hope as
a message for the book is that people start to
realize that, hey, okay, we need to win the capital game.
Yes we need a strong foundation. You can't build a

(05:21):
house in a weak foundation, but then you need the
character and the virtual around that.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
So that's sort of the message.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Then do you think they're like a chicken or the egg?
Are they are they complementary or is it more of
like a hierarchy of needs where once I've been able
to secure my capital and I've built myself or secured
my future with the capital, then I can focus on
things of beauty and building character. Or is it where
if I surround myself with beauty and character first, then

(05:50):
I can get the capitol and secure my future better, faster, easier.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
I think it's more like a yin yang actually where
they're related, because it's it's you know, you can probably
find we probably find evidence of both, right, Like you
can find people who might not be surrounded by beauty,
but somehow they have the courage.

Speaker 4 (06:12):
Or the ingredients to make something beautiful.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
And I would argue that that's sort of the story
of humanity, you know, coming out of coming out of nothing,
coming out of poverty, coming out of you know, lack,
and actually building something. So I do think though it's
there's probably a spectrum there because the periods in which

(06:35):
the greatest quote unquote sort of beauty and character were
developed came from times when there was quite a bit
of a strong sound capital base underneath it, so you
actually can reach higher. I don't think it's the way
I'll put it, is I don't think it's one hundred
percent necessary because you can do it without capital, but

(06:59):
I think it's a it's definitely a help, and it's
definitely an accelerant.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
Well, I think about, you know, if if I'm broke
and I'm just trying to figure out how to feed
my family, I don't have time to build beauty totally,
so I have to kind of take care of that need.
But I also last summer, I took my family to
Italy and we went to Florence, which was absolutely beautiful.
And you know, in that Renaissance age, it was the
wealthy people who kind of funded all of that stuff,

(07:24):
so it was probably you know, the people that were
making the David statue and those beautiful buildings weren't the wealthy,
but people they had wealthy benefactors that gave them that money.
But I also think, you know, something I talk about
quite often is that there's three types of capital, and
so most of us just think about financial capital, and
that's where most people spend most of their life pursuing

(07:45):
financial capital. But I kind of think of it where
financial capital isn't something that we chase, it's actually a
byproduct and it's a byproduct of our relationship capital and
our mental or our skill capital. So maybe the care
character is part of like building the relationship. If I
have good character, then those relationships are nurtured and protected

(08:07):
and grown. And if I nurture relate my own mental
skill capital, that's also part of the character right, So
then I have the mental capital the skills, and I
have the people, the connections, the relationships, and those combined
then bring the financial capital together.

Speaker 4 (08:24):
Totally, totally, I think you.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
I wonder if how well I'm thinking out aloud here,
I'm chucking a ped of teel. I wonder how related.
So it seems like maybe there is a fourth dimension.

Speaker 4 (08:40):
There and sort of ruin your model here.

Speaker 1 (08:42):
But maybe the character capital is a fourth dimension that is,
like how much integrity or virtue or honor and all
that sort of stuff that you have as a human
being then leads to the establishment of better relationships. So
therefore you have stronger relationship capital leads to the greater

(09:06):
development of skill capital, et cetera, because you have the
the virtue of excellence, honor and all that sort of
stuff that is necessary to develop the skills. And then
ultimately that leads to material capital, So I feel like
they're all interrelated. Maybe there's there's a nuance there or
maybe you know, you could place it as a subset
to these things. But there's just something there about, you know,

(09:27):
because there's people with you know, lots of relationships. There's
people with you know, with lots of skills, but you
know that they don't have.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
That. I don't know that.

Speaker 4 (09:37):
I don't know the character. I think.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
I think it maybe lives in its own dimension.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Okay, all right, Then in a world like we have today,
where we have you know, unlimited money basically being printed
with no true cost of capital, it starts to change
the way that we think about money, use money, invest
our money. Obviously there's a lot of malinvestment going on
without a true class there.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
So how do you think it would?

Speaker 2 (10:04):
I guess this character then influenced our investment decisions in
a in a macro environment that's flooded with all this
cheap capital.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
It's really hard, man, I mean, it's so strong. Character
would look at an opportunity to make a quick, easy buck,
but realized that it was a net detriment to society
and would then say, no, I'm not going to do that, right.

Speaker 4 (10:32):
It's it's almost like the.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
Kind of like the emergence of the bigcoin vcs, right,
they were like, Okay, well, we know that we can
probably actually make more money by aping into a shitcoin
ic O, but we chose not to because we want
to actually build something interesting for the future. So I
think that's got something to do with with time preference, certainly,
but I think it's also got something to do with

(10:56):
with character, which is sort of saying like, look, yeah,
you know what, I could probably make money sex trafficking.
I could probably make money doing XYZ. But it's not
about the money. It's about like what kind of a
world am I creating? What am I producing? And I
think that's really important. And those lines have gotten blurred
and particularly over the last fifty years, as we know,

(11:16):
like and I would even say very much so over
the last ten to fifteen years, where even on like man,
you know that stupid app that went viral the other
week with the tea app right where you know, chicks
are sort of dubbin on other dudes and all this
sort of stuff, like these are the apps that are
like taking off, which are they making society better? No,
they're actually making everything worse right, they're contributing to poor

(11:39):
relationships to you know, really bad dynamic between men and women,
to fuck that birth rates, all this sort of stuff
like so, yeah, sure a bunch of VC's made some money,
but did that do anything positive? Absolutely not, right, So
I think these things are forgotten often when you have
all this cheap capital and it doesn't matter, like the
thing becomes let's just how can we double up on

(12:00):
my money very quickly?

Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah, you know, speaking of that, like kind of the
short game versus the long game. I was telling you
before we started recording about the next five years of
my life building out this company called the Satsuma And
you know, I used to when I first got into bitcoin,
and then I started writing a cryptocurrency newsletter and I
started talking about all the cryptocurrencies and I was like,
it's not bitcoin, it's blockchain, and I kind of went

(12:22):
down that rabbit hole. And about twenty nineteen, after publishing
a thousand pages of research, I decided, no, no, I'm
just going to focus my career on bitcoin. And at
the time, crypto was still taking off, and like, I
could have made a lot of money by launching my
own ico and my own coin. As a matter of fact,
my old business partner that I was with at the time,
he did he did launch a token and he did

(12:43):
make you know, eight figures pretty quickly. And sometimes I
was like, man, I could have just stayed with him
and I would have made that money, right, But I
decided to build my life and my future and my
brand reputation on what I considered what I thought would
be a bigger foundation, a bigger bed rock. And now
I was just telling you that I'd now have launched
this company, Satsuma, which is that company, And I probably

(13:07):
never would have gotten here if I had taken the
short road and gone for the quick buck in the ico,
which I could have done.

Speaker 3 (13:13):
I could have just stayed with him and done that.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
And so we've got something bigger here. A lot of
it comes down to incentives, though, and I guess it,
you know, I guess I was in a place that
allowed me to take the bigger swing and play the
longer game. You're now launching your bigger swing. You have
that company, Satlantis. So how do you think sat Lantis
can serve as a model for how companies could combine?

(13:39):
I guess strong financial incentives and like strong character principles together.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
Are you trying to combine those two?

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Speaker 4 (15:05):
Yeah, So I mean the.

Speaker 1 (15:08):
I don't think the approach is novel, right. So you
look at all the great companies throughout history looked at
what was happening in the world at the time. They
looked at what tools or technologies were available, and then
they created something or produced something that was right for

(15:29):
the time, right for people, that solved the problem. And
ideally that the biggest ones they basically carved out or
created a new category of product, right, or a new
category of service, or they defined something new, right like
like Apple Computer defined or created the personal computer category. Right.

(15:50):
You know, Amazon created e commerce, like they carved out
and they became the category king. You know, the Henry
Fords of the world, you know, carved out the car and.

Speaker 4 (15:58):
All this sort of stuff.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
So it's not I don't think what we're doing is
is philosophically different to any of that. I think that
is going to be the case forever.

Speaker 4 (16:09):
Right.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
What what I'm doing is, I'm, you know, personally, like
in the in the context of Atlantis, I see this
kind of move towards a world I use the word borderless.
I'm trying to like come up with with a framing
for the kind of the sovereignty movement. And I'm hesitant
to use the word sovereignty. I know, sort of us
in the bitcoin space and all this sort of stuff,
we use it a lot. But we did some testing

(16:32):
to sort of understand how people perceive the word sovereignty
outside of the bitcoin space, and everyone thinks it's got
something to do with you know, white supremacist groups or
something like that.

Speaker 4 (16:42):
Just really fun.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
Yeah, So you.

Speaker 1 (16:44):
Know, I've been I've been thinking more about the idea
of borderless living. And you know, you've got some ingredients
now for that. You've got you've got bitcoin, You've got
borderless money, right, You've got the original borderless communications medium,
which was the Internet. Now you know, there's things being
built upon the Internet that will hopefully reinstate some of

(17:05):
that borderlessness because, as we know, the Internet has kind
of been siloed out into these like whether it's the
social media silos, but also like there's a lot of
this like cookies and KYC and all this other kind
of crap that has sort of like bogged the Internet
down a little bit where you can't log into a
freaking website anymore without you know, having to prove your humor.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
It's terrible and crazy, terrible.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
Drives me nuts. So so I think there's these tools
that are kind of like hopefully creating a section of
the Internet that will once again be a little bit
more borderless, a little bit more mobile. But it actually
extends beyond that. You know, there's this movement towards network
states and free private cities. There's obviously this whole movement
to you know, you see the passport brows and the

(17:47):
geo arbitrage people trying to do like flag theory multiple
passports have some level of location independence, and it all
comes from the same thread, right even down to people
that are like doing seed oil free and touching grass
and you know, using blue light blockers and saunas and
all this sort of shit that they're trying to get

(18:08):
outside of the mainstream bubble and do something that's sort
of outside and that has gives them more I guess sovereignty, choice, flexibility,
something you know, unique, unique for them. So I see
this movement happening, right. And the other accelerant in this

(18:30):
movement is with the with the rise of AI and
with the strip mollification of social media, right where everything
is just sort of becoming slop and you're just being
sold crap and all this sort of stuff, and it's
just kind of like proliferation of just crap online. There's
this craving from people to be not only more borderless

(18:54):
and location independent, but also to start like connecting, building community,
curating like real life experiences. So if I take that movement,
if I take this large trend that's happening, and then
I think, all right, what can we do? What is
the product that is kind of like lacking in the
world today. I see kind of this three pillars to it,

(19:20):
like people connecting, people connecting people with places, and with
events like real world events. I think the more online
gets like full of noise, people are actually gonna want
and whether that's like a run club, whether that is
just like a mastermind, whether that is a small event,

(19:42):
a large event, a conference, a retreat, whatever, this stuff
I think is going to increase and what s Atlanta's
sort of becomes is almost like a Spotify for communities,
places and events. It's a place where you can discover
all of this stuff and you can do so through
the lens of your social graph and your interests. Right,

(20:03):
So something like this doesn't necessarily exist, and for me,
it's how can I build or carve out a new
category of product that's almost like part map, part events app,
part social app, which is you know, in the past,
I was kind of framing it a little bit more
like Instagram, but now you know this sort of I've
had a big awakening after Prague, and I'm sort of
almost seeing it as a Spotify. Like Spotify, you're creating

(20:25):
lists and playlists and you're sharing it with people and
it kind of delivers something for your taste. Could you
have a Spotify for communities, for places and for events?
And I think that's really compelling sort of angle, And yeah,
that's effective what we're trying to do for this borderless movement,
for this movement of increasing sovereignty, choice and living outside

(20:46):
of the mainstream matrix.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
That word that you used, taste, right, that's the one
thing AI doesn't have.

Speaker 3 (20:54):
You know, you're a writer. Obviously we coarc the book together.
You're much better writer than I am.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
But you can see, like, and I've tried to use
AI quite a bit for this, and it's really good
at a lot of things, and I use it a lot,
but it cannot write. There's no soul. It's just like
a bunch of words that don't really mean anything, and
you can just see there's no taste. And so then
you mentioned the slop online slop. I think that's kind
of what you're saying, where it's like you can see

(21:20):
people are using it just to write stuff and there's
nothing there. There's no substance, and not only in the content,
but then the posts.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
And the replies that come on top of that.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
But I think a lot of that comes back down
to the incentives, right, So like one of the things
I think obviously AI being that tool that allows people
to throw the slop out pretty quickly. But then with
X or Twitter, now X sort of incentivizing or monetizing accounts.
So now if I get a lot of views on
my post, then I get money, and then well we

(21:50):
find the formula that works. So there's a pattern interrupt
and I have to throw something out controversial, and then
I have to give the context, and then I have
to give the teaching point, and I have to give
this summary, and then everything looks the same. And as
soon as I see it, I'm like, Okay, that's.

Speaker 3 (22:04):
Going to not have any value.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
I'll just rolling by. But I think it was it
was a combination of the tools and the incentives that
sort of have caused that to sort of happen.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
So I'm just.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
Curious, like that seems to be where we're at in
the digital age. So how does something like satllinis fix that?
How do we kind of avoid that mediocrity that the
clickbait the outrage which is also the outrage is also
part of the human emotion, right, because we're much more
attuned to fear than we are for pleasure. So how
does that change?

Speaker 1 (22:36):
So let me let me take a step back. Then
let's do a little bit of a history lesson on
what happened and how we got here. So if we
if you remember like twenty years ago, right when when
Facebook and all these sort of social networks first came out, right,
they were they were somewhat of a replication of what
we did in real life, Like you and I have friends,
we're connected, we have a direct social connection, and then

(23:00):
I am connected to your friends through you.

Speaker 4 (23:02):
So there's a degree of separation.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
There, and you know, we have real world social networks
and these original digital social networks were kind of like
mirrors of that real world social network. And originally, if
you remember, like there was no algorithms. It was just
you're seeing what your friends are sharing, and you know
they're sharing stuff like that, and you had this kind
of network established online. About ten years ago, the Google

(23:26):
DeepMind team actually set out to after they bought YouTube,
they wanted to increase the time spent watching videos after
a particular video. So what they did was they built
the world's first like recommendation algorithm, and they nailed it.
I think it was I don't know the statistic exactly,

(23:48):
but it was something like three thousand percent increase in
view view time right after this. So then some companies
obviously quickly followed that up. So it was by Dance
at the time, I think was one of the first
early movies they were in China at the time. This
was before they had released dogin in America, which became
TikTok they had I can remember it was their news thing,

(24:09):
so they put a recommendation algorithm into that. Then Facebook
copied and we had what became the era of social
networks turning into social media. And social media is different.
Social media is more about algorithms and recommendation engines and
about that the metric that they measure is not how
much connections you have, but how much time is spent

(24:33):
on the device, so that the leading metric is engagement. Now,
if you kind of mix this together, this ties into
what you said about incentives. If your metric is engagement,
then what engages. As you said, people are more prone
to notice fear. So it's like it's that classic If
it bleeds, it leads, right. So media is always designed

(24:56):
or optimized to kind of capture your limbic brain and
like stress it and get you sucked into something. So
if the metric is engagement, what ends up happening is
these things naturally turn into kind of slop fests because
that is the thing that sucks people in. Now, what's
happened is we've left a massive gap. We've had like

(25:19):
everything has become social media, media, media media, and media media.
Like everything's basically looking the same. You look on Instagram,
you look on Twitter, you look on Snapchat, you look
on TikTok, It's all the same shit. Everything is a formula,
Everything is a piece of media. Everything is designed for
the algorithm, not for the content. All this sort of stuff,
and it's it's not gonna get better. That's in my opinion,
that's going to keep trending that way because AI is
going to accelerate this, but it's left a massive gap

(25:43):
for network social network, which is I want to know
who I'm connected to. I want to actually build community.
I don't want to just have a fucking an empty
following of a million people who I don't know. I
actually want to have some level of connection. And then
I want to use that network stuff in.

Speaker 4 (26:01):
The real world.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
I want to know where to go, what to do,
the places to check out. I want that to inform
my actual real life, not to make me spend more
time on the app. Right, So this is sort of
the needle I'm trying to thread now is Atlantis. I
don't want it to become a social media app that
is about content. I want it to become a social

(26:25):
network that is about discovering things to do in the
real world and connecting with people, so you can build communities,
so that you can curate places, so that you can
run events and attend events and discover them and all
this sort of stuff. So I wanted to get you
into the real world as opposed to keeping you on
your phone. So the metric for success for us will
be different, and I'm hoping that will keep it from

(26:48):
becoming a fucking engagement farm.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
Now, one thing that I know that you're doing a
little bit different is by building a Noster, which is
a decentralized product, so different than like the traditional platforms
that we have that are built in the centralized models.
But how do you think in a decentralized model that
changes that? I mean, do you think that in this
decentralized model it will keep that from happening?

Speaker 4 (27:17):
Not necessarily.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
I don't think Noster sort of keeps that from.

Speaker 2 (27:20):
Having to drive sware quality over time if it stays decentralized.

Speaker 4 (27:24):
Not necessarily.

Speaker 1 (27:26):
I think there's a lot of misconception around what Noster is,
and it's I think the since Noster doesn't have a
marketing department, it's never been articulated very well. In my opinion,
Noster provides one piece of value or actually, no, I
should rephrase that nostill has many different values, but I
think the primary piece of value is that you own

(27:48):
the relationships between you and the other accounts. So let's
think about Instagram for a second. You go and build
a million follows on Instagram, but for whatever reason, you
either get banned or the algorithm changes, or what's happened
with Facebook recently, Like imagine you've gone and built all
this sort of audiences on Facebook and everything and nobody

(28:09):
uses Facebook anymore. How much value is they're left in
the networks, in the community you're built there, nothing like
It's exactly like people are increasing, Like they're like, man,
I've got an eighty thousand person group on Facebook and
I get three.

Speaker 4 (28:23):
Likes on my announcement there.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
It's like, okay, congratulations, you just put twenty years of
work into this thing, and it's worthless if you could
somehow And this is let's do a hypothetical here and
then I'll say how. Then I'll explain how to work
if Facebook and Instagram and all this sort of stuff
were supposedly built on a protocol where the identity was interoperable,
not the apps. The apps can all be different and
can do different things. They can be long form apps,

(28:46):
they can be video apps, they can be community apps,
they can be whatever. Right, but if somehow the identity
protocol was common, you could just log out a Facebook
and you could log into Twitter or Instagram or whatever,
and you're the relationships will be there, not necessarily the content.
And this is where a lot of people miscommunicate what
Noster is. They're like, oh, you know, you can keep

(29:07):
your content. Your content is unsensorable. No, that is not
the point of Noster. Who cares about the content. It's
not about that. It's the relationships that are important, because
then you can take your relationships and you can go
to the new app, which the new app might be
really cool. It might be for scrolling videos or whatever.
It might be for finding places, it might be for whatever.
But those relationships are there and that's where the value is.

(29:30):
It's almost like you would understand this as a marketer.
It's like owning your email list.

Speaker 4 (29:35):
Right.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
You can go and build an email list, you know,
on kit, on send grid, on this app, on click
funnels and all these different places, but ultimately you kind
of aggregate that into one list. The list is where
the value is so that's kind of like what Noster is.
It's the ownership of email with the distribution potential of

(29:58):
social So that is for me me why I chose
to use it. Now, I didn't choose it because you know,
Noster is supposedly going to be the thing that changes
the Internet. It is just the best implementation of the
original intent of the Internet. From the beginning, the Internet
was supposed to have an identity layer, but it just
never did. So like what ended up happening is identity

(30:19):
became a feature inside applications. So you have an identity
with LinkedIn, you have an identity with Uber, you have
an identity with Amazon, you have an identity with Facebook,
blah blah blah. It was just a feature inside all
of these apps. Noster or if it's not Noster that wins,
maybe something else will win. But Noster is a great
implementation for pushing the identity back down to the protocol

(30:40):
and then allowing application developers like us to build something
really cool, but to build it in such a way
that uses the social graph underneath to enhance the experience.
So that's what's cool about what we're doing.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
What about the security side of it?

Speaker 3 (30:56):
So you mentioned earlier.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
When you log into all these websites you have to
like in this KYC and two FA and everything. It's
so annoying. I hate that you have to do that.
I understand we have to do it because of the
security aspect of it, right, I mean, these networks and
these these database are getting hacked. Every day we find
out like another but another hack, it seems like. So
unfortunately with AI and the hackers, we have to have

(31:18):
that layer.

Speaker 3 (31:20):
Does does this? Does this?

Speaker 2 (31:22):
I guess the essentialized protocol of noster help prevent that.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
Somehow it doesn't prevent it. It creates optionality. So for example,
your identity is just the key, right, you can hold
that key yourself, very much like bitcoin, and you don't
have to go through the kind of the humiliation ritual
of proving you're a human online with like captives and
shit like that, because you can just take your key

(31:47):
and you can unlock any Nostra enable.

Speaker 4 (31:49):
App and you just enter.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
Now that that comes in the same way with bitcoin,
which is if you hold your Bitcoin keys, if you
lose them, no one's coming to help you. In the
same way with nosters if you lose your private key
or if someone gets it, then they actually hold your
identity because it's a very instrument. So there is a
danger there, which means you might need to think of
ways to secure that key. And it may just be

(32:14):
that you might want to secure that key with a
third party, someone like s Atlantis or whatever, and then
you might be able to like in the future, we
will look to build a tool which allows you to
abstract your noster key and log into other noster accounts
or other noster enabled apps with a single button, right,

(32:35):
because then it'll basically like the paradigm actually shifts. We're
used to log in, but actually in a noster paradigm
where you're in the key, it's actually that the paradigm
is unlock. It's actually a little bit different. So it's
it's a new topography for the web. And that's what
kind of the last thing I'll say on this really
quickly is what interests me about this is if you

(32:56):
look at web sort of one point zero and two
point oher that we've had to date, that all of
that was built on TCPIP, HCDP, Right, like these four
layers of the Internet, this next generation of the Web
has another two new layers it's got money as a
protocol being bitcoin, and it's got identity as a protocol,

(33:17):
which Noster is currently the leading implementation. As I said,
that might change, but currently that seems to be the one.
You have a new design space. If you think about
the first four layers gave us everything from Google to
Amazon to Snapchat, in to everything that we use today
to Riverside that we're using now all of it. What
will this new design space give us? What kind of

(33:38):
applications where you can have the social network intelligence embedded
into the product to make it more relevant, more real,
Like will it become the place where more human connection
happens and stuff like that. It'll be very interesting how
this evolves over the next five years, ten years. I
think it's as has the potential for a renaissance on

(33:58):
the web.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, it seems like it's always technology that changes the world.
It change the way that we organize and communicate and
all of these things. And kind of to the evolution
story that you already gave us, it's sort of gotten
us to the point we're at.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
But kind of going back to the Bashido code you were.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
You started out by saying, how eighteen months ago the
world seemed like we were going in a different direction,
and now not for all of the world. I mean,
look at what's going on in some of these other countries,
the UK, for example, they seem to still be going
down that same path. Most of the world seems to
kind of be on this alternate reality. I guess would
you say that, you know, kind of getting back to

(34:35):
this bashido code and trying to instill character and these
things into people. Do you think these new layers on
the internet will allow us to build things that will
bring that more to fruition or do you think it
if tech is what kind of got us here, does
it work against that?

Speaker 1 (34:56):
Why?

Speaker 4 (34:57):
Let me say I can answer this question.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
I was on a pod the other day with with
Francis Pulliard and a couple other guys, and we're just
sort of.

Speaker 4 (35:05):
Riffing on a bunch of different things.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
I one of the things I said on that show
was I'm convinced the world is going to continue to
bifurcate into into the haves and have nots, that's one
way to put it, or into the the sheep and
the lions, into the remnant and the lemmings.

Speaker 4 (35:26):
You know, whichever sort of like framing.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
You want to give that creators and the consumers.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
Creators and the consumers, you know, the the producers and
the consumers whatever.

Speaker 4 (35:35):
Right, So.

Speaker 1 (35:37):
I I actually think that's going to get like the
middle class I believe is going to continue to get
hollowed out.

Speaker 4 (35:45):
And I don't think that trend is reversible in the
short term.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
It'll be reversible later because after a couple of generations
you'll have the distribution of wealth again and you will
start to get a fatter middle class. But I actually
think we're going into an era, into an age where
that's going to separate further. My hypothesis is that six
or six and a half billion people are going to
be addicted to social media, scrolling their phones, not touching grass,

(36:13):
eating soy bugs, whatever. Like, they're sort of going to
move more in that direction. Now that's obviously a caricature,
you know, and I'm sure that caricature will exist, but
they will move more in that direction, right, Like mindless
slop and they're just like downloading the slop from online
and that's it. They don't think for themselves anymore. Everything
is programmed. They'll take their next shot, they'll do all

(36:34):
that sort of stuff. But at the same time, there
will be these like this, you know, call it half
a billion people that are going to increase their sovereignty,
increase their location independence, increase their optionality.

Speaker 4 (36:48):
They'll hold bitcoin, they'll eat meat, they'll.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
You know, have babies, they'll you know that the fertility
rate amongst those half a billion people will probably five
times higher than the until your rate of these other
six billion, So you'll sort of get this like increasing bifurcation.
And I'm seeing that socially. I'm even predicting that on
a on a location basis, Like you're seeing places that

(37:14):
are popping up like that are enclaves. You know, Florianopolis
in Brazil is one of these like enclaves. It's becoming
the place where all the wealthy and brazil are coming
and did every single weekend I drive around a new corner.
There's a new building being built, there's a new family
that's come here. There's like this place is pumping. Same
thing in Bali. You look at what Bali was.

Speaker 4 (37:32):
Bali was just a.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
Freaking empty island with some Indonesians and some Dutch people.
And you know the Aussia is now the Russians came
in and that like Bali is pumping. Man, it's an
amazing place to be. You've got enclaves all throughout Mexico.
You've got Ibitha, You've got you know, the Greek Islands,
You've got Madera, You've got all these like sort of spots.
And I think what's going to happen is those spots
are going to become in high demand and they're going

(37:55):
to attract these sort of higher quality people that want
to connect and create these enclaves. So so that's sort
of my prediction is that this is going to stretch,
and we're gonna we're gonna have this separation and maybe
a couple generations after this, half a billion people that

(38:15):
have loads of kids are going to form the you know,
their descendants, they're going to form the new middle class.
And sort of of the six billion that you know,
lose their fertility rate and addicted to soil in bugs
and all this sort of stuff, that sort of those
lineages will kind of die out naturally. And that sounds
dark and I don't mean it in that way, but
that's sort of just nature is nature, right. I think

(38:37):
that's going to happen, and we're going to have this
new sort of formalization of a new middle class, of
a new low class, and of a new sort of
like aristocratic noble class, and the world is going to
sort of reset itself that way over the next hundred years.
This is the most formative time in human civilization, I
think for the last I don't know, at least five
hundred years, maybe a thousand years, maybe more.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
I mean, you're somebody who's studied a lot of history
and a lot of cultures and civilizations, and when you
look back through the long lens of history, correct me
if I'm wrong, but it appears that there was only
one short period of time for maybe about one hundred years,
where there was a strong middle class, and that was
just through the Industrial Revolution. And so the Industrial Revolution

(39:19):
and particularly through the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds,
is when we got the factories and the assembly lines,
and the factories in the assembly lines brought everybody and
made everybody equal, because whether we're smarter or dumber, we
just put the cog on the wheel as it goes
by on the assembly belt, and it created these massive
middle classes. But again, correct me if I'm wrong, But

(39:40):
if you look through the long lens of history, you
sort of had two classes, and not in like you're
born into a cast and you can't move up. But
when you think about the types of jobs and the
type of income that you had, right, so you had
the land owners and the land workers. And today we've
gone into the information age and now potentially with AI
calling it the intelligence age. And so you know, Sam
Altman says that we could see the single the first

(40:02):
single person billion dollar company. And so now if I'm
willing to work harder, if I'm if the world is
creators and consumers, the creators create more than they than
they than they consume.

Speaker 3 (40:12):
The consumers consume more than created, and so you have
like a war and buffet.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Why does he work till he's ninety three years old
as the president of the company when he's worth billions
of dollars.

Speaker 3 (40:18):
Because he's a creator.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
And if I have these tools, now I can continue
to create. And if if what you're saying is, you know,
six and a half billion or however many billions of people,
they just they're just plugged into the to the whatever
the matrix. It seems that separation between the haves and
the haves not just continues to get more out of

(40:41):
balance because there's nothing like that industrial revolution and the
assembly lines that builds that strong middle group. And again,
correct me if I'm wrong, but does history show that
is something that we would go back to.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
I don't know if we've had the kind of middle
class that we had in the last one hundred years,
because we had such a burgeoning population, like the population
you know, seven eight nine x of the last hundred years,
so there was like this explosion. I I think the

(41:21):
feudal system wasn't really the sort of the land owners
and just the land workers. There was actually you know,
multiple sort of layers. You had the artisans, you had
the nobles, you had the you know, you had the monarchy.
So there was a bit more of a strata associated
to it. Arguably, I know this one, this one will

(41:47):
require a bit of thinking. Honestly, I don't know the
correct answer here, but I just think it's going to
get way more stretched in the short term between the
producer and creators, haves and have nots, And I think
it's really going to just it's going to move into
two buckets before it stratifies again. And maybe maybe the

(42:08):
stratification won't have the same level of middle classes we
did during the Industrial age, because you know, that was
a bit more sort of hands on. But certainly I
think we'll over time, over a couple more generations, we'll
start to see an artist in generation pop up again.
This is my sort of my gut instinct. You'll have

(42:29):
people who, you know, for example, like imagine you've got
some descendants now and you sort of set your entire
lineage up for the next thousand years. You know, not
all of them are going to be you know, great
capital allocators. Some of them are going to be artists,
some of them are going to be bumped some of it.
Like you know, you'll sort of have this kind of
stratification that will once again emerge. But I think that'll
emerge from the class that is going to be the

(42:53):
haves over the next fifty years. Right, it'll it'll come
from those people. It won't come from the automn it
won't come from the six and a half billion.

Speaker 4 (43:02):
Yeah, that's my that's my sort of thinking.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
Sort of like a generational theory for fourth turning sort
of model something there.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
Yeah, I should probably think this through further and write
an essay or something on it. To get my head
around it.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
Yeah, interesting, what do you think about technology?

Speaker 2 (43:18):
And since we're on this pulling this thread, and I
don't know how much thought you've put into it, but
an AI taking away all the jobs and being so
smart that nobody has any work anymore, and we need,
you know, universal basic income for everybody to give them
money because there's just no jobs available for them to do.

Speaker 4 (43:36):
What do I think, ah man?

Speaker 1 (43:39):
I think the only thing that's unlimited is human ingenuity
and human desire. I think we always want what we
can have, and no matter what you take away and automate,
you know, infinite creativity will find something else to do
with ourselves. So as we I mean, I just I
bucket AI to the same category as every single prior

(44:02):
automation that we had, from the plow through to the
tractor through to everything else. Like what we've done is
with automated things. And look, there's a cost to all automation.
You and I spoke about this in Prague, right like
you if you sort of build a factory to automate
the creation of a trinket, what will happen over a
couple generations is will lose the physical dexterity to build

(44:24):
it with our own hands. You know, like we'll lose
the craftsmanship, but we will have gained the ability to
mass produce those things.

Speaker 3 (44:31):
Is that better or worse?

Speaker 1 (44:32):
You know, depending on which way you look at it.
You know, everything sort of has a cost. What that
will do, though, is if you create the factories that
mass produce these things and all the sort of stuff,
it'll actually create the desire for the people to build
it with their hands, and it'll create a marketplace for
the artisans to come and train themselves up again. So
like every time you create a vacuum of something, the

(44:53):
human condition drives us towards wanting to recreate the thing
that we're that we're missing. And you know kind of
what I said earlier about social media and social networks,
you know, like we've gone to created all this social media,
like the trend win that way, and now there's a
vacuum for social networks. You would not believe the amount
of people I talked to they're like, man, all I
want to do is open up an app and find

(45:14):
a place to eat that my friends have recommended open
up Instagram. And I realized one hour later that I'm
still fucking scrolling. Yeah, why you know, And it's like,
you know, so now I want to sort of fill
that vacuum with something else. So I feel like the
idea that AI is going to take it all away
and we need you bi and all this sort of stuff,
I think it's it's a gross misunderstanding of how of

(45:38):
the human condition.

Speaker 4 (45:39):
I think the human condition is much more complex.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yeah, I would agree with you one hundred percent on that.
When we wrote the Communist Manifesto, you would use the
word letedtite, and I wasn't even super familiar with what
that word was. But this is the same argument as
the Luddites, which we're afraid that technology would take away
all the jobs. And this is now the six technological
revolution that we've gone through, and every single one people
were afraid of it taking away all the jobs. And

(46:03):
I think it's warranted because there is disruption. Jobs are taken,
but new jobs are created, and so I think it's
a lack of understanding to your point, like sort of
the human condition, but it's also a lack of understanding
of how capitalism works. And so each wave creates entirely
new sectors.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
That we didn't know about.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
So you're thinking about things in a vacuum, Well, it
gets rid of all these jobs, yes, but it creates
all these new ones that we didn't even think about.
So all of a sudden, now we have automobiles, and
so we have this entire automobile industry that wasn't there
before the car. So they did put the buggy makers
out of business. But look how big the automobile industry
is today, right software of the Internet, and so it
creates industries that we haven't even thought of. But what

(46:42):
it also does is it creates consumer demand that wasn't there,
so we have lower costs and higher quality, and then
we get larger markets, which then creates more jobs because
of that. So like when in the eighties when cell
phones were just made, they were like big bricks and
I don't know, they are thirty grand or whatever hear,
anybody had them. But today, look how many people probably

(47:03):
on Amazon make money just selling like cases for an
iPhone that you know what I mean. And so it's
like more, more, more, cheaper, better, larger markets, more jobs.
And so yeah, in a vacuum, yes, it takes away
those jobs, but look how many more get created on
every single one. So all of the facts, all of
the data points to that there is no basis for

(47:25):
thinking that there is no future of that. And the
last thing I'd say is back to that human condition.
If you think about the only reason why we'd ever
give somebody money is if they've provided value, which is
typically solved the problem for me, I'm hungry, they solve
my hunger. I give them food, et cetera. And so
they're solving problems, right, And I don't imagine any future

(47:46):
where humans no longer have problems totally. Yeah, problems are infinite, right,
and it is Solf will probably get the next problem, right,
So it's like there's just no future for that.

Speaker 4 (47:56):
So long as we have women in the world.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Problems are So I always always tease my wife about this.
I'm like, everything is fine and then like all of
a sudden, something will like go wrong and should be
like I'm freaking out about something. But I think, look,
the reality is, like, let me give one little example
before we move on, is even let's take this to
the extreme, like AI and robotics and all this sort

(48:18):
of figure out how to do everything like provide you
with food and you know, you go to a restaurant,
everything is automated. You know, there's no one in the kitchen,
none of this sort of stuff. I guarantee you in
that kind of a world, the person who goes and
opens up a restaurant and says we have no AI,
no robots, and we have paper menus, that restaurant would
fucking pop right. Everyone will be there because they're gonna
want the handmade food. Like literally, every single innovation in

(48:43):
one direction creates a vacuum in another. And I think
that's the part that people need to sort of internalize
when they're trying to understand this, is that human beings
are infinitely creative, and in our infinite creativity, we create
infinite problems, and then we need to create infinite numbers
of solutions to those problems. No amount of AI I
can have a deal with infinity. It doesn't matter how
good the AI gets. We will always come up with

(49:04):
something you to do and some different nuance of variation
to do it in. And that means there'll be a need,
they'll be a demand, and they'll be a supply. To
feel that simple as that, Yeah, well let's let's let's
let's kind of wrap this up.

Speaker 3 (49:18):
But I want to think about. So, obviously you're building
sat lanis.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
I think it's an amazing tool, and I've certainly seen
the shift you're talking about from people wanting more of
that human connection. I do a lot of little events
and even big events, and I've seen a lot of
people returning back to those craving that human desire. So
it's that pendulum that swings back and forth. I guess,
you know, from an investor standpoint, or it's kind of
thinking about moving to where the puck is going to be,

(49:43):
So like, where is that pendulum going to swing back to.
So if Bitcoin was sort of like a hedge against
monetary debasement, do you think sat lanis is sort of
like a hedge against lack of trust or trust in
social platforms.

Speaker 4 (49:59):
Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
I think that's one way to frame it. I think
it's also a the Puck analogy is a good one
to use. Is if we make the assumption, or if
we can agree that this movement towards more connection, more community,
more curation is going to continue to increase, at least,
as I said, with a subset of the population might

(50:22):
not be all seven billion people on the planet, but
at least like half a billion that want to do
more stuff in the real world, want to connect with
real people, want to go to places, want to curate.
You know, they're not interested in chat GBT giving them
a list of top ten places, like they want to
know who their friends said.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
Like.

Speaker 1 (50:36):
If we agree that that is going to be a trend,
then that's the puck that I'm trying to catch, and
in my opinion, that's going to continue to accelerate. The
desire for social networks once again online is going to
continue to increase, and the desire for real man, what's

(50:56):
the word here, like like real recommendation and connection. I'm
lacking a word that sort of encompasses both of those.
But that piece, in my opinion, is going to be
where the value is at. And if we can surface
that for people through through an application, I think we

(51:18):
we're onto something big here. And I mean I don't
want to get off onto too much of a tangent here,
but once you wrap like sort of bitcoin in there
and you start to create like a marketplace element to
it for communities, for creators, for events, like we're about
to roll out the bitcoin ticketing inside the app, So
we're gonna we have some big partnerships announced with some

(51:39):
with some or sorry not announced but tied up that
will announce over the next two months with some big
bitcoin conferences where we're going to become the satellite event
partner for all of these major conferences. So that way
when people come to these conferences, when they register for
side events, they can see who of their friends, who
of the people they're connected to, and everything are going there.
They can pay with bitcoin. So Atlanta is going to

(52:00):
have a wallet in built in it as well, so
that way people who are running the events they can
earn bitcoin in there and kind of like start to
establish an entirely parallel social network, economy, product discovery system,
all this sort of stuff. It starts to become very
very interesting, very compelling over the coming years.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
If I could see who I know is going to
that event, that'd be super helpful. That'd be a great feature.
Cool Well, alex uh a couple good reads, get the
Bashido Bitcoin you can see the book there behind them,
and get the Uncommerce Manifesto of course, the book we
wrote together if you haven't gotten that.

Speaker 3 (52:33):
Already, But tell us where people can learn more about Atlantis.

Speaker 1 (52:37):
For sure, so obviously people should go and just check
out the websites Atlantis do. It is going through a
big revamp, so I don't know when this episode is
going to go live, but the revamp will move the
app a little bit away from the destination centric focus
we have at the moment. It'll become more of a
global focus where you can host events, discover events, places, collections,
all that kind of thing. You will also notice on

(52:58):
there we're doing actually a crowdfund, so if people like
the idea, like the concept, reach out to me, or
you can go and check outre We're doing an equity
crowdfund on Timestamp, which gives people the opportunity to own
a piece of so Atlantis early on. So we're going
to do a big institutional series a next year, but
we're opening it up to the retail market to jump
in and own a piece and then find me on

(53:20):
so Atlantis actually Solantis dot I ford slash Swetski. I've
got my social profile there. I'm most active there these days,
and I'm also still active obviously on Twitter. So Swetski writes,
and yeah, if you want to check out the book
Bashido Bitcoin dot com, that's over there as.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
Well we'll link to all that in the show notes
down below. Well, that will wrap it up.

Speaker 4 (53:39):
Thanks Alex, thanks great, good to see again, man,