TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #669: Building the Events App That Bitcoin Deserves with Aleks Svetski

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

Marty sits down with Svetski to discuss AI as a productivity tool rather than AGI, the unsustainable economics of large language models, Nostr's evolution beyond social media toward portable identity and new market opportunities, SatLantis's pivot to become a Bitcoin-native events platform, solving the cold start problem, digital burnout and the shift toward meatspace connection, and why building second-generation Bitcoin companies means creating new markets rather than replicating existing ones. Svetski's links:Website: Satlantis.io iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/satlantis/id6648819135 Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.satlantis.satlantis Nostr: https://Satlantis.io/satlantis X: http://x.com/joinsatlantis IG: http://instagram.com/joinsatlantis STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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 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 down with alex gretzky to solve all the world's problems again it's been a while dude yeah we we solved the

old 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 there's something there is the way it's being applied the way it will ultimately be applied um in terms of bringing the most utility and productivity to the world where are we in the cycle as somebody who as i'm toying around with it for quite a long time now yeah i think i don't think my opinion's changed since we we finished up an open source the 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 over hype um or hype in general is that

It's some sort of, you know, second coming 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 all the religious people wrong that, you know, 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 illogical. 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 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 patterns linguistically first and now uh in applications like video but by no means um is this anywhere near a general intelligence nor is it anywhere near sentience which is you know further down the track so there was um i shared a tweet with you now from um from devon erickson and a couple other people who sort of like pointing at this which is hey this is a a great tool uh it can be used effectively although as with all tools it's quite hard to be used effectively 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 um but if used effectively um 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, um, was sneezing the other day. And the first thing we did was we just asked chat GPT, 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 calculator, um, or the opportunity cost app, like that was fucking brilliant man um so so for that stuff fundamentally it's it's great but does that mean that this is um 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 sort of slowly come to that conclusion themselves instinctively because you know you had gpt3 gpt4 and people like oh yeah by the time we get the gpt5 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 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 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 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 lms 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 and director and understand how to prompt that like it's not easy we have a bunch of people in our circle saying like we're gonna go do this and it's we're gonna create similar memes and short films whatever

you want to call them and it's like all right good luck because it takes us like a week the last one we just did took 55 hours of work from storyboarding scripting and then iterating on generations and it is simply just a tool allows us and enables us to do things that would have cost us tens of thousands of dollars and now they cost five thousand dollars in labor and minimal cost of credits right now which you pulled up another tweet from from 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 end customer right now where they're just essentially

trying to subsidize this with loss leading by making tokens super cheap when that we know that 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 um around around the time when we were sort of trying to commercialize spirit satoshi two years ago now um this hit me like a ton of bricks as a business owner because we had spent all of this time um training and building and refining and fine-tuning this the spiritual social model and we we had finally got to a good enough model that we thought we could charge for it and when we went to uh some bitcoin companies to kind of sell it as a assistant but an

assistant that actually understands bitcoin um 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 there's um you know the the the economics don't make any sense whatsoever and 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. So there is a, 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 can, you have users who don't use it that much and hopefully pay a subscription to subsidize the users that do use it obviously you know as with all of these things and you know at large scales maybe there's some sort of model that works but what i realized um kind of into it when we when we were trying to raise money from some uh sort of more ai um uh centric venture capitalists i did some digging you know 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 they

were sort of like either the lps or behind the lps so what i found was that the it was kind of like the wrong kind of circular economy it was like laundering money but the you got the money going to the startups and then startups spending all of their money on uh inference and training um 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. 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, it's a really interesting, um, somewhat false economy. Um, 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. 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 satoshi um but i actually think we're probably going to end up in a world where we have like the 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 was 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 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

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 compete and take market share from the closed source models at the end of the day that are 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 kind of become less and less and less of an idealist myself and I guess somewhat more of a realist, maybe the older I get, but i just sort of realized that you know people just don't give a shit man you know they they sort

of they build a habit around i mean i think that the i haven't seen usage statistics but my guess would be that chat gpt has like the absolute lion's share of usage when it comes to these models i think gemini and stuff like that are still like a 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 chat gpt is one like people don't give a fuck about um open source or you know having their own model running on their own computer unless you're like sort of a techie um but beyond that i just don't think there's a there's a significant business in there it's it's kind of like google search and duck duck go right duck

duck go has a space but it's like what is it a 0.1 percent of the fraction of um what google searches like yeah definitely i'm a duck duck go user i'm going to move to kg agi i'll repronounce it soon i think duck duck goes experience has deprecated but because yeah i guess you have to hope for moore's law to come into place um really aggressively the costs come down and making it dead simple to download a model and run it locally and reap the same benefits that you would from open ai or um clod or anthropic and i just don't think that's going to happen anytime soon i hope i'm wrong maybe these chinese the the arms race between the chinese and the west is so 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 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 is so so at least like if i put my business hat on um you know i'm like i don't know if there's a business case there but if i put my consumer hat on yeah maybe there's a there's a um upside for me as a consumer when these things sort of hit a local maxima at least for a period uh at which they're all sort

of producing the same output in which case yeah maybe it makes sense for me to drop chat gbt and start using something else yeah well with that in mind i mean what does the future look like i guess throwing specific models and open source first post-source ai aside right now i'm thinking about just broad applications people how they're using these things whether it's via n8m flows to create these sort of agentic workflows or um using claude's mpc or anthropics mpc looks like chat gbts about to release uh an agent for a dev kit where you can connect things um it seems like based off of um what you've been writing about and sort of what you're working on is atlantis and your view of sort of a new web emerging

with ai nostre and bitcoin that there's 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 so sort of like what we had about 10 years ago when we had the rise of like shopify and uber and um abnb and all this sort of stuff like for the last decade there hasn't really been a lot of um uh new consumer apps like consumers been dead for a little while and if i look at the the technical landscape you know sort of ai if i put that in a bucket you've got these new tools and frameworks 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 um outreach uh or communications or whether it's some of these agentic frameworks although i'm a little bit skeptical around the agentic stuff because you know maybe there is some things you can really uh turn into a process because that's that's effectively what these agentic frameworks are for it's like to take a 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 uh really critical uh as a function in the business with that 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 so ai is sort of a a um an effort multiplier as a business. 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. 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. 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. 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 and until even though nostra is more censorship resistant um like getting that through people's heads is a very very very very hard job at least

in my opinion i think that's it's it's too high a bar to climb um 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 um each application can enhance the experience by virtue of the fact that you have connections underlying that that to me is quite interesting 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 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 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 uh envision this you know we can talk about how i'm trying to implement that with with our product we've had a bunch of significant uh 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. 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 or series of tools that entrepreneurs and small startups can use to let them compete with prior incumbents. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet,

one key on your mobile device and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step, your first step to self-custody. If you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off, tell them to pick up a BitKey. Go to bitkey.world, use the key TFTC20 at checkout for 20% off your order. That's bitkey.world, code TFTC20.

What's up, freaks? This was brought to you by our good friends at Obscura. If you've been listening to the show long enough, you know we care deeply about privacy, particularly as you peruse the web. It is important to be using a VPN, and Obscura is our VPN of choice. That is because it is a VPN built by a Bitcoiner. For Bitcoiners, it is the first VPN that can't log your activity and outsmarts internet censorship. Obscura VPN works even in the most restrictive Wi-Fi networks where other VPNs simply fail to connect. With server locations across America and the globe, Obscura keeps your internet access unrestricted wherever you are. I've been using it since it launched. I see no problems with speed. I can get on YouTube TV without any problems. It

simply works. They can't log. You can pay in Bitcoin. Go to Obscura.net. Use the code TFTC25 for 25% off an annual subscription. It's already a good deal, their annual deal. The TFTC25 code gets you 25 more off go check it out obscure.net use the code tftc25 i really agree with you on the point that like 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 x substack and rumble which have for at least a temporary period of time brought back what seems to be uh 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 nostre 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 and accessibility to everybody that they've already connected with on the protocol. Well, let's dig into that. So 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 Nostra is a protocol. Well, actually, let me start with this. I think there's been a bit of a conflation in the Nostra space and the Bitcoin space 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. 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 but what's what's important is actually the implementation it's the it's the longest chain it's the you know the the chain that runs the genesis block it's the node uh 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 um with noster it's actually not the implementation that matters 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. 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, if Bitcoin fails tomorrow, the implementation, 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 would be bad for the future. It would be bad for our kids. It would be bad for civilization. It would be bad for everything. um but if nostra fails tomorrow like what have we lost some content content is worth nothing you know in a world of infinite content you know sure maybe we've lost some sort of you know social relationships but because social relationships are uh sort of derived from us as physical human

beings we can always rebuild those that's why if you get banned on twitter um 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 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 a identity protocol where the identity is a barrier instrument 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 so then from there i asked the 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. The plus side is protocols are very hard to kill. They can live on so long as there is like a core set of users there. You know, Nostra can last five, 10 years. And who knows, maybe in five or 10 years, you know,

the web starts to become more 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 Nostra can operate at one speed whereas businesses have to operate at a much like that they work on a much shorter horizon right like as a company you can come and sort of make a bet on Nostra and be like okay well we're gonna build another social app and build a content centric app um and you know bootstrap the network with nostre but if you know nostre is not growing

that fast you're not going to get much of a benefit actually from doing that in fact you probably bring more of a benefit to the protocol than the other way around um whereas you know and your goal as a company or as a product is to try and find um product market fit as soon as possible But maybe you don't get there in time because the, you know, the speed of Nostra development or the speed of protocol hardening is much longer, like the timeframe is longer than the business. So that makes me start to wonder, and this is part of the big shift we've had in 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 the number of end pubs on this network. and for us we found two things and and honestly right now it's like one thing that we're really focusing on which is events i i don't know for the fucking life of me why i didn't think of this earlier like when we first started this atlantis we were thinking of building more like a trip

advisor meets um instagram meets eventbrite right like it was kind of a travel nomad sovereign individual super app and the idea was that we could take that social graph um you know build beautiful feed and then embed things into the feed like places and reviews and events and all this sort of shit um i look back on myself now uh 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 and the the big aha moment that we had a couple of months ago when we were in um when we were in prague was we rolled out the first version of the app and it had places it had the 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. 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 nostril 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 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 nostril

space it has by far the best feed um you know you've got damas and amethyst and all this sort I've even got this Atlantis feed. But I don't see why you would use another app when you're following the same people, 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 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 um is influenced by my social graph and people that i'm close to that i share interests with and stuff like that that starts to become really interesting because you can't do that on eventbrite can't do that on luma um you know there's there's no sort of social glue that ties these apps together um and if we can build a really really really good events app that hosts can create events on in like 60 seconds um where every time someone rsvps to their event they grow their follower um they grow

their audience but then those event uh attendees also actually become nostril users and they don't even know um 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 that's a 10 million people or 10 million sign-ins that's just grown the Nostra base massively maybe that you know they're unlikely to all be posting content so you're not going to see a huge boost in like Nostra activity in terms of kind one 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 we 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 um bitcoin payments like i can't believe there is no actual uh bitcoin native events app on the planet like imagine an event with just bitcoin payments 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, um, 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, I feel like that's, that's a big lift and there's probably

one winner in that space. And that's in my opinion, clearly primal. Um, 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 and here's the tool for that and that inadvertently grows noster 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 this atlantis 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 and the

ability to have somewhat censorship resistant content and social profiles the social web web of trust and payments embedded is cool but i forget who was i think it was peter teal but i mean obviously peter teal had that famous uh talk at stanford where he said you want to find of monopoly you don't want it you don't want competitors and i think leaning into the social side of nostre the like leaning into the social side of things via the nostre protocol is 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 you can go create like that should be yeah you're going it's interesting because nostre 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 different people to it i think spot on i'm glad you said that because um this was another realization that we had um this has become a podcast on like entrepreneur mistakes um we after the prague conference we went to another conference which was the the largest nomad conference in uh 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 content on the first day and then 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 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 sort of that hit me really hard. I was like, I walked out of that conference and spent like, 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 most expensive currency on the planet today. Like it's so fucking expensive. And you're competing with TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, which are literally designed to hijack your fucking brain and turn you into a zombie that is triggered by everything.

That's a really high bar. It's a very difficult thing to do. And I sort of found Settlantis 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. 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 better than our feet 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 gonna 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 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 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 um 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 it's insane so you got eventbrite on one side um on the other side you 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 um 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 don't know if you've ever used luma or partiful 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 coiners um but like again credit where credit's due it's so much better than eventbrite it's so much better than 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 um 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 do have ticketing but after their fees and stripes 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 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 uh i said this to um to the team the other week i was like hey we're not a bitcoin company we're not an austria company we're an events app that happens to be using bitcoin in austria and this is this makes me think actually about a an article that i wrote a couple years ago called three generations theory where i kind of said that the first generation of bitcoin apps were all going to be about um something to do with the financial element of bitcoin so exchanges wallets mining and you know you've got this kind of like late stage fiat um treasury company bullshit going on right so which we can talk about but like the the first generation of bitcoin like the first 20 years is going to be about like the nature of bitcoin emerging against the u.s dollar

but the second generation of bitcoin so let's just say the first generation is 2010 to 2030 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 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 apps they'll build you know ubers they'll build like actual applications but bitcoin's just it's part of the stack like the same like they'll look at it exactly like they you know modern developers look at javascript you know node.js like it's just okay we're going to use this for payments we're going to use you know nostra to you know add a social glue to it we're going to use you know ai to do this and that's it like it's part of the stack that to me is when bitcoin really starts to embed itself in the world in technology and that's like you know somewhat

But unconsciously, I've started like making Atlantis a an attempt at a second generation Bitcoin company. It's like we're not a Bitcoin company. We're an events app. We just happen to use Bitcoin in the in the stack. And that to me starts to get interesting. Anyway, I'll shut up. I kind of went off on a bunch of tangents, but here's to you. So it's that time of year again. The health care enrollment window is open. It'll be open between now and the end of January. And we're here to advocate for our good partners at CrowdHealth. I and my family have been using CrowdHealth for four and a half years now, and it's been

incredible. I was on COBRA paying $1,800 a month at the time for my wife, myself, and our young child back in 2020. We switched to CrowdHealth because it's cheaper. We've since added two children to our life. Both were born while we were using CrowdHealth, and our monthly payment for the family of five now, adding two more children, is $695 a month. And better yet, if we ever have a health event, we only pay $500.

There's no deductible minimum that we have to hit. The rest will be crowdfunded by the CrowdHealth community. It's been a game changer. I'm sure you're aware that healthcare premiums across the board are going up this year, in some cases, 40, 50%. Healthcare has gotten completely, insanely expensive. And I highly recommend that you consider moving to CrowdHealth. It is cheaper. You get more one-on-one time with your healthcare advocate at CrowdHealth. You get treated well, they negotiate bills lower for you. It is not health insurance. It is crowdfunded medical care, and it works better for me and my family, at least. So go to joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC

during this enrollment period. If you sign up using the code TFTC or sign up via the link, joincrowdhealth.com slash tftc. You'll get a reduced membership fee of $99 per month for the first three months. So go check it out. What's up, freaks? Bitcoin's market cycles tend to follow the same old pattern, parabolic spikes, brutal crashes. This time is measurably different. The Bitcoin check from Unchained and Check on Chain shows how the 2023 to 2025 cycle has permanently reshaped Bitcoin's market structure. Inside, you'll find why volatility has collapsed, why ETFs have anchored new five and six-figure price floors, and why long-term hodlers remain firmly in control download now you also get access to the online event featuring james check

bitcoin has crossed the rubicon get the report at unchained.com slash tftc that's unchained.com slash tftc i don't want to i don't think this is a digression but like really uh 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 monster should be thinking about but you reference andrew chen's uh cold start problem um in his book and he was at uber when they had this cold star problem and i think i'm really happy we're having this conversation as it pertains to noster 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 on that totally i mean do you want to should we dive into that a little bit yeah yeah um so cold start problem maybe is like a for people who don't know what that means is when you're 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 as 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 so it's like the chicken and egg problem so how do you solve that um you know there's andrew chen 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 online but then when you share it people get more utility by also creating a dropbox or google drive account right um instagram was actually one of these as well is uh 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. 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. 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 smaller in the beginning, but you get more connections. And with more connections you get more sticking power 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 raya 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 um and it's completely paid um 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 uh super narrow super niche but they have such a good network effect and they have such a good product like that that dude who built that is like a master class in building uh powerful network effects so that's sort of the the second um mechanism and i will say and i said this in the article i think noster to some degree accidentally uh did that as a mechanism to build the first level of network effect because if you sort of think about um networked effects happening in like uh in surges or in waves um 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 um and even though it's not invite only even though it's open um the fact that it's just like a bunch of bitcoiners on there telling each other gm and tapping each other and all that sort of stuff it 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 it's done that but at the same time now it's almost like a if you remember from chemistry you had like you

have electrons in a certain valence right so it's kind of like stuck in this valence it hasn't it's it's not able to move to the next one which is in my opinion sort of why the nostril growth is tapered off even though the products have gotten way better like if you i mean like primal is 10 times better than it was a year ago it's so fucking good now um but the the usage like is maybe incrementally a little bit better but the 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 the current network effect is um 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 um the come for the

tool stay for the network the third mechanism andrew chen talks about is um what he calls yeah the hard side but then also flintstoning so the hard side he talks about um if you if you have a product and 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 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 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 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 that sort of started a 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 i could even list it which is fucking hilarious so you know there's these four mechanisms um for us it's come for the toolstay for the network that is i think the unlock um 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 stablecoin soon as well um and we'll add fiat we'll add stripe so that way there's like the whole buffet for for you as an event host so come create an awesome event get paid instantly low fees 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 nostru 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 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 like what was i doing yeah 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 the lms 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 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 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 nostrum bitcoin

hold on i'm looking through my stuff all right i'm gonna i'm gonna send this to you on signal so you can see it and maybe you can share it with um people listening but it'll like the the the initial four layer stack opened up um the opportunity for the world to get everything from amazon to uh 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 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 man 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 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 n pub uh n sec only like if you want to sign in via email via google via apple whatever just sign up and we'll spin up a key for you yep 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 pub when you sign up for this app like you can go use it totally totally because then then we're using the the time in our favor we get users now we get product market fit we succeed as

a business and over the next three five ten years we can educate people it's like hey you 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 um whereas the old design space was just four layers but this is the old yeah this is 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 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 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 and at some point business applications again, because I think consumer apps usually kick off first. That's the initial wave.

And then later on, like, you know, maybe five, 10 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. there will be pay per use because you've got the ability to do micro payments with bitcoin so it's like the the whole the whole thing changes that's like 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 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 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 web3 you know because all the web3 dorks 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 what have you noticed in terms of user behaviors me touched on some earlier but what are some of the most popular events that people are spinning up type of events what um the the first thing i'll say is that it 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 salantis can do and 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 um 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 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 users up the wait list or users 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 um just click the register button because there's no cost in doing that um with bitcoin you could put like a free ticket but just make it 100 sats or something or make it a thousand 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 uh event host you know got a thousand sites out of it or something like that so you can start doing interesting things like that um the other one is we're partnering with bitcoin conferences now um obviously being the the low-hanging fruit but we luma actually does this really well they have this calendar feature where you can associate um events around a calendar and people can subscribe to a calendar and that can be used both by communities but also by conferences we're adding a little bit more flexibility to that and then obviously there's the social layer in the calendar that makes a little bit smarter but um yeah the one of the big features that we're fleshing out now will 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 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 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 um the other thing and this is part of a legacy feature we had collections which is um which is places on a map so we're going to keep that feature 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 you know what are the cool places to hang out at which restaurant which cafe this and that so as an event host you can associate like a list of your favorite places and it could be like here's the the 10 top 10 um bitcoin places around the event or here's the top 10 you know brunch places or here's the best gyms whatever you want like

you create a list and you append it to the event um and then you know 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 that would be powerful there's a number of events i go to you show up early like all right where do i hang out before this thing it's like here's the best cocktail bar you know 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 satlantis and added 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 just mention this place so it's like there's there's a there's a social graph utility there that is surfaced not for content purposes but for um uh what do you call it like validation purposes like that that to me is a is a really interesting use case for a open social graph as opposed to a post more content yeah no we're getting into something i've intuitively believed is like social 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 it uh even i um 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 master to really draw people in and then ultimately feed people to the social side of things um maybe maybe it'll be like a horseshoe start of a social it really blows up because of a bunch of other things and then ends with this everything app where where everything protocol everything protocol yeah with social at its core totally totally i i i really think that's going to happen but i think it's going to take 10 years right i think to to some degree you know we all sort of drank the kool-aid a little bit too quickly uh last year i think and we're all like

oh yeah your nostril 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 um the the network effect cold start problem solution right that it's really really really really difficult to um to 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 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 you know thanks to apple like so you know they came um this way so that's that's what great uh 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 as you're explaining that too i think that's one of the key breakthroughs 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

noster than we do on x or youtube or anywhere else um 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 we have something like events um and adding value there uh 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 experiences that are they're severely lacking um a wide open landscape for people to really tap into totally you know another thing that reminds me of speaking of meat space is um since since i last spoke to you um you know i've sort of had this like on off relationship with um with twitter with substack with all of my socials actually no 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 kirk and arena thing man that 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 and i 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'm 10,000 miles away. There's nothing I can do. And you know, yelling on Twitter doesn't actually help the situation. And to some degree I'm like, I'm impotent in that sense. Like

i can't do anything about it and all i did was create a bunch 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 um and this this shift with satlanta 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 um 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

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 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 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 and

obviously with lockdowns and everything like that it crushed everything but there's been a fucking massive rebound there is almost double the number of events going on in the world 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 meetups and everything there's almost double the number of events happening now than pre-covid it's insane like this massive like whiplash effect 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 no in san francisco san francisco yeah 2019 yeah 2019 dude like we were

all fucking babies we're all innocent and shit like that and there was like what three bitcoin conferences 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 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 that thing

is still associated to places like you want to know where to go and what to do but in the real world um so anyway yeah when you said meet space you reminded me of that it's like i it feels like a more fulfilling mission for me than um building another social app it's like okay get out there and meet people in the real world build build actual networks again um and friendships and communities and like that's what people are craving and i and i i i think more people are going to wake up to that and we're going to see a massive especially even now is like ai this is the last i'll say on it is um as ai kind of turns a lot of the internet 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 and that you you know as much as you can do something over a zoom call like real connection happens in person um and if we can facilitate that uh through through a good product that to me gets very exciting and it gives me a mission again that is um that that i'm that i want to work at like 24 7 yeah as you're saying i'm just writing some things down i've noticed in myself like i have somebody who i mean i want to call myself like uh an avid we're not an avid but uh i'm not wholly engaged in the culture wars but

from time to time over the last five years specifically like i've definitely dove in gotten involved to a certain extent but i've to your point about like digital burnout like 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 sort of strategy is definitely being deployed in the digital world and the best option is just like not participate and so i particularly the last going back to like charlie kirk and irana 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 uh and i haven't been perfect but what i put out there

on x or whatever social it's just like maniacally focus on bitcoin and freedom tech and just like present solutions and don't get drug into the the mud of the culture wars and focusing on the problems because it is soul-sucking and it never nothing ever happens it's like exactly and it never ends as well yeah it's it's and it's really hard when you're a passionate person i i the the distance between my brain and the fucking keyboard is like very short like so i end up like saying a lot of things that are like you know 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 it comes from a place of like i give a shit and when i see bad things i'm like fuck i gotta 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 it's like that's the thing i was joking about it uh 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 i need to find a young gen ear tap him on the shoulder be like this is you brother i don't have it it's your turn now you don't have to do it anymore yeah we we don't have time in the trenches dude honestly especially when you have kids it's like is was this is this time well spent this is not the

reason why we moved back to where we're from originally but like i have noticed we've been 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 they've got kids yeah boy's age and yeah we find ourselves like when they get home from school it's like all right what are we gonna do we're gonna play with your cousins we're gonna go to the park it's like much more fulfilling don't worry i'm not turning into real 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 fiat to

basement the censorship rises like the culture wars are the noise that they're trying to drag you into and like focus on the signal connection to meet space bitcoin noster and sort of build around yeah the 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 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 maybe in your um in your sort of like mid-20s go hard but then as soon as possible 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 gonna 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 satlantis and uh start an event yeah meet up at the local pub this is sweet i really this conversation went uh in a really good direction i'm happy it did particularly as it pertains to again nostre 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 oster is how you grow that network effect appreciate it and yeah i was uh i wasn't sure

where this conversation was going to go either so i um appreciate you letting me rant and ramble um i'm uh yeah i mean i'm in the process of rethinking how svetsky shows up uh in the world and you know for for a while i you know i i've always been an entrepreneur first um but i think most people in the bitcoin space actually know me as um as a as a writer and because i wrote a lot i guess um 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 um i mean i i 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 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 everything comes with you know pros and cons obviously but you know this sort of new chapter now like being a dad and like trying to build something for me to face 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 decide to be a raging fucking lunatic again and come people maybe i'll have my my next nasim talib arc or something like that no i mean i think similarly here obviously i run a podcast and read a newsletter and 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 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 podcast newsletter x focus like what else

can we do to sort of uh support our key vision of highlighting signal and helping people become more sovereign um beyond what we're doing with the content that's been really fundamental 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 i when i 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 um yeah dude kudos to you guys like that's that's that's an example of people who actually you know uh are creative and solving something very clear because they have uh an information edge which as bitcoin as we do like we're ahead of 99 of the world 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 um 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 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 like and it's that is completely different paradigm and that's where great products come from that are genuinely futuristic yeah 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 to recognize obviously we have this information uh asymmetry with this arbitrage

that we're taking advantage of obviously by stacking sacks and building around it but i think patience recognizing it's a marathon and the market's going to come to us eventually but to add its own pace and staying sane while that process plays out is incredibly important there's gonna be a lot of burnout and all that but i think it's happening it's happening at its own pace and just yeah you don't want to be like the the guy in the cave gets close to the diamonds and then turns around like just stay the course try to touch grass make sure your uh mental health for lack of a better term um your mental clarity is probably the better term uh is where it needs to be totally totally um when treasury company never it's uh this is tftc is a bitcoin treasury

company we just have an operating business that that's it like that it provides value to people you actually yeah 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 start asking me so they're like so you're gonna go public and i was like what for what and they're like you know so you can put bitcoin in the balance sheet i'm like well no i think we're just gonna 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 but especially during paper bitcoin summer but caveman to me it's 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 see 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 machine seems a bit naive to me i think there will be some that do it successfully but it's gonna be a economy as a scale game that obviously a few players have yet 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 that sort of stuff it's 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 into 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 get out of the prison the the priest asks uh dante's is like define economics and he sort of like says you know being able to create a surplus blah blah and then he says in

short uh dig now um eat later you know so it's like that's it there's your economics like do something and produce surplus and that's it yeah it's not complicated it's not no but i think the i wouldn't even call it greed i think the uh i guess it's a FOMO to an extent like this idea like we need to stack as many sats now which i get i've had that feeling personally as well um the land grab the gold rush whatever you want to call it 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 i don't know i don't think so yeah for the people you know and just 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 a few people as you said that'll be successful at that like but man like it's it's a it's a it's a weird um relic of the the fiat world that something like that can actually happen um it's sort of like a strange period in history like people look back can be like no that actually happened and yeah and i think the next 12 months will will um reveal a lot about the efficacy of of these strategies maybe um we'll talk again uh 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 um logan's got the links to satlantis um where everybody can find it so we'll put that in the show notes freaks particularly focus on noster and growing noster specifically take what we discussed here and really think about it i think this is uh really important because again you have noster the protocol people are building businesses on top of it should we be replicating businesses that already exist in the web 2.0 world for that's what you want to refer to it as or 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 it's atlantis appreciate it man i appreciate it and

then um i will throw one thing out there for people listening if you like uh if you're an event host event organizer of any kind if you're using meetup or loom or anything would love you to come and give the app a try um it's it's ready to rock and roll you can create an event on there it's super fast um doesn't have bitcoin ticketing yet it'll have bitcoin ticketing in a couple weeks so by the time you hear this um it's either just about to be released or very shortly um but yeah certainly by the end of october you'll have bitcoin ticketing it's nostra enabled all of that sort of stuff um would love some feedback uh 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 so would love anyone 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 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 last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and

ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives you incredible value so please consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time Thank you.