You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 36: Aleks Svetski - Reclaim Your Powers

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

My guest today is Aleks Svetski, an entrepreneur, co-author of the best selling book, the “UnCommunist Manifesto” and the upcoming "Bushido of Bitcoin” book, as well as the founder of Satlantis - a travel & community social network built on Nostr. In 2018, he founded the #1 Collectible-Publication called “the bitcoin times”, and the world’s first Bitcoin-only savings app: Amber. Svetski is also building open source Bitcoin & AI tools with the Spirit of Satoshi project. This episode covers Svetski’s background, his journey into Bitcoin, his views on authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and the virtues that are important for a thriving society. Svetski breaks the status quo, and believes in authoritative hierarchies and strong leadership, while criticizing the flattening of society and equality. He argues that Bitcoin will bring back feudalism and that elitism is necessary for a functioning society. The conversation explores individual empowerment, the limitations of the masses and the importance of beauty. Svetski critiques the hype around AI, highlighting its limitations and the potential dangers of regulation. We conclude with the connection between beauty and the rejection of communism.  ► If you got value, please like, comment, share, subscribe and support my work. Thank you! -- SPONSORS – ►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): ⁠https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn⁠  -- LINKS – What’s Satlantis? Presentation from BTC Prague: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndpff0JkvEo⁠  Svetski’s Twitter:⁠ ⁠⁠https://x.com/SvetskiWrites⁠  Satlantis’ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/JoinSatlantis⁠  “The Bushido of Bitcoin” book: ⁠https://www.bushidoofbitcoin.com/⁠  Efrat's Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/efenigson⁠ Efrat's Telegram:⁠ https://t.me/efenigson⁠ Watch/listen on all platforms:⁠ https://linktr.ee/yourethevoice⁠ Support Efrat's work:⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson⁠⁠ Support Efrat with Bitcoin:⁠ https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson⁠ -- CHAPTERS – 00:00 Coming Up... 01:00 Intro & Background on Svetski 07:40 Discovering Bitcoin 13:30 Svetski's Covid Experience 20:20 Authoritarianism vs Totalitarianism 25:00 Uber Money 31:50 The Importance of Excellence and Inequality 37:50 AI - Misconceptions & Svetski's Take 47:00 AI and Universal Basic Income (UBI) 50:00 The Significance of Visceral Learning 53:10 The Role of Beauty in Society 58:10 Message of Hope: Be Powerful, Ditch Guilt

You're stronger and better than you've fucking been told. And you can be great. You can be excellent. You can be the best. You can be powerful. But don't be fucking guilty about being that. Stop falling for the guilt lies. Yes.

Like, everything is designed around you to make you feel guilty, to make you abdicate literally the power that you have inside you. So go out there, claim it. Be fucking unapologetic. Build, create, love, travel, see, climb, be ascendant. And that means coming to terms with the fact that power is a beautiful thing. Power doesn't corrupt. Power only corrupts the weak.

Be strong. Be powerful. Be responsible. Be loving. Be compassionate. Be courageous. Rise up. Ascend.

You're going to leave people behind. It's their duty to come with you or stay behind. That's it. Hello, welcome to another episode of You're the Voice. Thanks for being with me. We are one day after Bitcoin Atlantis and Madeira filming another interview with a person that I've met for the first time a few months ago, but it feels like I know I've known him for years. You know, I have this connection with some people that I feel like they're my brother from another mother. This is one of them, Alex Vetsky. Thanks for being with me, dude.

Thank you for that. Okay, so just as an introduction, for those of you who don't know Alex yet, and after this episode, I'm sure you're going to either read his books or start reading his articles or following him on Twitter or all of the above. Alex is an author and entrepreneur. He's the author of the best-selling book, Uncommonist Manifesto. I just got a copy. And upcoming, The Bushido of Bitcoin.

That's your next book coming up, right? Yes. Soon. Can't wait. Yes, it's almost done. Almost done. In 2018, he founded the number one collectible publication called the Bitcoin Times and the world's first Bitcoin-only savings app called Amber. Yes.

He's currently building open-source Bitcoin and AI tools with the Spirit of Satoshi project and working on a new initiative called Satlantis. That's right. And we're going to try and touch most of this. i also want to touch some of your articles like the last one that i read uber money which was fantastic i loved it but let's start with your background can you share a bit of your beginning where you're originally from you know what do you want to tell us about how far back do you want me to go childhood if you want wherever you want i was a twinkle in my mother's eye i mean on my father's eye no look i was i was born in australia to um to macedonian parents

and the i was you know bad boy blah blah blah i went to school but i was very academically strong so i got a bunch of scholarships given to me for university and i went and took my scholarship money i did civil engineering but i put it on the stock market and i taught myself to trade and this was back in the age of like we didn't have lcd monitors like we're still on these crt you know the big right monitors and we the internet was still new like we had 100 hours per month of internet usage at the library yes so like i'd go to a lecture and then between the lectures i'd sprint to the um to the library and get on and place trades and i taught myself to trade derivatives so like options and warrants and i managed to turn like a three or four thousand dollar scholarship

into fifty thousand dollars and i thought i was a genius i'm like man i did my little spreadsheet extrapolation I said you know by the time I'm 25 I'll be a billionaire all in the world off we go you're the voice is brought to you by treasure the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self custody for crypto assets since 2013 empowering individuals with an open-source device enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins I find my treasures super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family enjoy my 5% discount on Trezor product by clicking the link

in the show notes and using the code FLAT but the first step was to be to be a millionaire and a week before my 20th birthday I was living in this like little shack of an apartment where I would literally it was in like a bad area of town and I had a motorbike so I would like ride my motorbike up the stairs inside the apartment and I would use my motorbike as my office chair I was like, I was broke. But I was making money. So, like, I had this, like, plan.

I was like, I'm going to make a million bucks. And anyway, I took all of my money and I placed it on this levered trade. It was a bank called Babcock and Brown at the time in Australia. And I woke up the next morning and I remember it was like the entire screen was, like, red. I think Babcock and Brown was down 60% and my options were down 96%. So I literally, like, just lost everything overnight. When was that? This was 2007.

wow so right before the gfc so it was like the tremors and i think either layman or bare stones or someone i don't remember exactly what it was it was too long ago but had just blown up and then so like the shock waves obviously started to ripple through and anyway that was um that was the catalyst so i was at university at the time and that was the catalyst that sent me on my entrepreneurial journey so i told you earlier today that i was an introvert so like i literally i was a hermit i would get up at 5 a.m i'd go to the gym i didn't talk to anyone i didn't have many friends um i would hit the gym come back i would read then i'd go to the lectures between lectures i'd run up and down to the library place trades lunchtime i would train again um then i'd

go run up and down between lectures come back go go home eat read go and hit the gym again i'd train three times a day like i was this like machine and and yeah after that all happened i i ended up stupidly enough getting a bunch of loans from uh different banks so that i could trade my way out of the hole and within about six months more debt yeah basically i was uh i ended up my plan was to be a millionaire by the time i was 20 uh i was quarter of a million in debt by the time i was 20 so i kind of had the car in reverse uh at the uh at the wrong way and that was what put me on my journey because the only way I could pay the bills was to go on like sell something and I remember the last bit of money I had left I remember what I did I

I took it and I went to a Tony Robbins seminar I had no idea who he was like how did you know to go there I don't know I just followed my gut I just I saw a YouTube video and I was like I should go and I went and I remember like the first two days I was like right up the back of like what's this cult you a bunch of weird people and you know something unlocked in me and then i went and uh started studying nlp um i became one of the youngest uh hypnotherapists and nlp practitioners in australia at the time i started working with people want to commit suicide this and that and i just learned how to communicate and i took that and i took it on door-to-door sales so like here i'm knocking on

doors selling and i became the best sales person in the country and i didn't even have a tv i didn't know what was on pay television i didn't know any of that sort of stuff but i just learned how to communicate and um and yeah slowly but slowly dug myself out and then you know built businesses blew them up built businesses blew them up built businesses blew them up a real entrepreneur yeah had this whole uh journey and um and anyway that sort of brought me to bitcoin around 2016 and then um how why um what happened so i i'd heard about bitcoin when i was so post that whole gfc thing while i was knocking on doors gfc great great financial crisis yeah exactly um crisis uh during 2008 so that that sent me down the gold and silver rabbit hole right so

i used to follow max kaiser kc mike maloney all these all these og like gold bugs basically so i started buying gold and silver yep and like that i did very well out of that like that you know all the money that i lost and everything i made that multifold you bought actual assets or i bought hard um like i had gold bars and silver bars everywhere like um and i remember like you know running around trying to buy like the silver eagles and this and that was crazy but i also was it hard to get i mean it got so scarce at the time right so you know i remember buying the silver eagles at like eight dollars and selling them for like 50 bucks 60 bucks later wow i did really well out of that and also options warrants everything everything i get my hands on so i did

quite well out of that but that was when i first heard about bitcoin and i can't remember if it was like an article or max kaiser jumping up and down on a couch telling people to buy bitcoin like it was it was something right and but i ignored it i just was like yeah whatever i got my hard money i got gold silver i didn't care and you know i just continued my entrepreneurial path i built like a renewable energy company i got into hospitality i got into every stupid conceivable business you could think of i did um some successful some blew up whatever and it wasn't until 2016 i met with this friend who was just a degenerate and he's like bro you heard about this thing called bitcoin i was like yeah is that thing still and he's like yeah man my friend made

like a million bucks out of it he put like 20 grand in and i was like what and like i looked and it was like 500 bucks at the time 600 bucks and i was like i remember this being like single or double digits like i was like what the hell and that just sort of like got me digging again and and i remember at the time i was um i was interested i started like re-digging into philosophy and how the world functions and like there was a boom around 2015 2016 of like these origins books and um and yeah just just some things clicked for me for bitcoin And that's when I just started writing in public about Bitcoin. And that was sort of how people came to know me.

And simultaneously, I launched Amber, which was the first Bitcoin savings app in the world, actually. We did it in Australia. And then, yeah, my journey sort of started there. So anyway, the long, short story. So you started with Bitcoin for the money, really. Because for you, it was another investment opportunity. Yeah, I wanted to make much money. And what did you discover when you were inside that game already?

yeah so like i have a little saying it's like i came for the money but i stayed for the money like so it's you know you start to understand what that means and it like i i quickly caught on i think i was one of the the very first few bitcoin maximalists um at least in australia like and i started started all these meetup groups and you know started like excluding the shitcoiners and stuff like that and um and just something about it like i i went from just making a bunch of money to like realizing there's something really profound and important here and you know and one of my businesses in 20 it was like 2013 2014 i had a big battle with the australian government where um where they distorted the entire solar

industry and like a bunch of people lost money like i lost millions overnight and like i always so i had this distrust for government already i was always a bad boy so like give me anything anti-authoritarian or anti-totalitarian i should say um and that's intriguing to me um and i was already like i had this uh gold and silver um thing from before so like all the ingredients like you know sort of added up and just like bitcoin just made sense like it clicked boom i love this and there's something deep and profound here and you know i i genuinely believe the period between 2017 and 2021 was bitcoin's golden age in terms of thinking like so you had breed love gg eric case and um you know myself like you you had these you know john ballas like

these thinkers come up and sort of like find all this nuance in bitcoin and you know you had this sort of like almost renaissance like you know a million books came out about bitcoin about you know everything about it and um yeah it was tell me about it i'm catching up now with all those books already yeah like we yeah we all started basically it all started from us just writing articles and that's how we found each other we were just like we were writing you know i told you earlier breed love wrote his like you know treatise on like time money energy or whatever it was mine was um homo sapiens evolution money and bitcoin or something like that um you know gg started you know writing these deep pieces about time and energy and bitcoin so we're all

sort of like writing the same things but in our own words and it all started off with essays uh i believe gg was the first one to sort of publish uh a book and he wrote the 21 lessons like it's a gorgeous little book really easy to um digest and yeah gave gave everybody else the idea that maybe we should also write a book and now like everyone's written 10 000 books So obviously the Bitcoin standard, like, was the thing that hit and, like, became, like, the central piece of all of this literature. But there's some incredible stuff out there now. There are. Okay.

What happened to you during COVID? Before we dive into the essays and the books and everything. I lost my mind. I mean I'm interviewing on my podcast a lot of dissident voices to the establishment and government and doctors lawyers politicians most of them talk about COVID and what it did to them and what it did to their countries I find that in the Bitcoin community a lot of people were hurt during COVID just like many other people around the world but they don't talk about it much um and i don't know whether they they really don't want to show that they are a decision of

voice in covid because they want to continue being liked by everyone and they don't want to rock the boat or whether everyone just agrees with everything that happened which is completely totalitarian and you know bitcoin is supposed to be like freedom movement so what happened to you during that time yeah i um there was like three really loud voices probably four uh in the bitcoin space that were like totally anti-covid it was safer dean francis jacomo and me like and we just called it out early this is bullshit and you know we started writing about it talking about it and all this sort of stuff and we we were sort of like the real dissident voices in in bitcoin and at the time i was nomading and um i actually have a really funny story which was um i was in

i was in berlin when it all happened i was supposed to be flying to the states for uh what was supposed to be bitcoin 2020 and i was in this airbnb and the uh the one night i was like with a tinder date um and as you do as you do um and like i was like trying to have like multiple tinder dates and um at the same time at the same time of course and i i'd literally just gone on a date with one and then i came home with a date with another no yes and um and i had this like I had this little Sony speaker, like this little portable speaker, and I had it on at home, you know, with this girl that I was hooking up with, and the neighbors called the cops on me for whatever reason, and we were like, we were high on weed.

And anyway, like, I was so paranoid that I thought the cops had come for like the weed and everything like that, so like, we had this like bag of weed on the bed, and I like threw it out the window it was this funny thing so actually what had happened was um before the cops got called like i had walked her down and like the cops were at the front of the um of the apartment block and like they're banging on the door they're like uh they said this name like oldenburg or something like that i'm like who what the hell you know i'm like hi and like like what are you talking about and um anyway they like sort of walked into the building and started walking up the stairs like you know these like old berlin sort of like um uh apartments

So they're, like, checking all the names of the thing. So, like, I say goodbye to the girl, and then it clicks that Oldenburg was the Airbnb that I was in. And that's when I was like, oh, crap, they came for the weed. So, like, I jumped in the elevator, I got in there, and I heard them, like, walking up the stairs. So I ran inside the thing, grabbed the weed, threw it out the window. And they go bang, bang, bang on the door, and they're like, Oldenburg.

And I was like, I open up, and they're like, you. And I was like, because they saw me at the front, you know, they'd asked. And I was like, no, nothing. and they're like they come in and they're like what's this music and i'm like what i'm on a date music and they're like but but the thing is like it didn't register and even for them it didn't register because the music was like playing so softly it was just like some angry german next door like just just to like call the cops and they're like looking at me they're like the music is too loud i was like really and um and they're like yeah you must turn it down or we come and

confiscate the speaker i was like okay so like i turned on the speaker is that better like yeah so they like leave and i look at the bed and um the weed's sitting there on the bed because the window wasn't open like the the flash screen was there so if they came for the weed like it was right there so nothing happened but the next day the airbnb lady um she like cancels my airbnb she's like you must get out because the police were called so you know you you have to leave and i was like what and that was the day that the lockdowns happened so bitcoin crashes in price and i had um uh like bitcoin on uh bitmex at the time which i was trading levered so like i was getting margin called i had um some loans with unchained um you know with bitcoin so i was getting margin

called by unchained i was getting margin called by bitmex i was um the we had just raised money with our business as well at the time and we were like some of our money was in bitcoin and we had customers like so it was like this massive cluster and i'm trying to manage all of this from the stairs inside the um inside the building because i can't get in the apartment because i got thrown out and i'm like sitting there like panicking and everything so one of the tinder she calls me she's like oh um what are you up to and i was like freaking out you know i'm trying to save my company my money i'm about to go broke and she's like um and i was like i can't find an abnb because you know abnb like canceled all bookings all this sort of stuff so i couldn't

make anything i couldn't book at a hotel she's like oh don't come stay with me so i go and i um stay with her and this is where the story gets even funnier is um it's okay for like the first couple of days but turns out she's like a raging communist who's like sitting there and saying what's wrong with these people everybody should be locked in their house for two weeks and i'm like sitting there like working and i'm like excuse me and she's like yeah everyone should be locked in their houses for two weeks until this thing is over i'm like who's gonna pay the bills and she's like the government and i was like where does the government get the money from she's like that doesn't matter i was like but it does i'm like like i've got to pay for that like it's my

taxes and like she does nothing she was like a trust fund baby or whatever it was like got money from her parents um and it was like this awkward situation where she had gone and told uh her work that um she was in touch with a covid person so she could get time off work and she put both of our names down so i was locked in a house with her for like three weeks and couldn't go in it It was like the funniest situation. So basically, my COVID journey started with being stuck in a random Tinder date's house for three weeks. We went to kill each other. And then, yeah, so anyway, what happened to me during COVID?

That's what happened. And basically... Yeah, that's a great start for... A fractal of that was the rest of my COVID situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People simply lost it during that time. Cool. Thanks for the story.

Insane. Okay. I've got really important stuff to ask you. So let's go. So you touched on, you mentioned it a little bit, authoritarian versus totalitarian regimes. You did a panel on it now at Bitcoin Atlantis. Can you give me a taste of your view about it and what we're seeing around the world right now? So I'm pro-authoritarian.

And I want you to explain that. Yeah, anti-totalitarian. So authoritarian, the word author or authority derives from the essence of competence, of self-ownership, right? And authority is a good thing. We used to respect authority, you know. There was a master and his apprentice. There was the teacher and the students. There was the parents and the children.

You know, nowadays there's the children are the boss of the parents. Like, you know, everything's become inverted. And what we don't have is we don't have authoritative hierarchies anymore. We've tried to flatten everything. And in the process of flattening everything, what you do is you create this sort of middle management bureaucratic sort of apparatus, which is totalitarian in nature. So to give you a sort of maybe just a visceral sense of what totalitarianism is, is, you know, when someone's like just standing here, like right behind you and just like looking over. Like imagine a manager, like you're trying to type something and they're just like standing here looking, watching. Like that's totalitarianism.

It's like, it is surveillance-oriented, it is micromanagement-oriented, it is a projection of, you're too dumb, stupid, incompetent, you know, NPC, like, you can't do anything yourself, so therefore you must be herded like a sheep. And that's the world we're living in today. It's, like, increasingly totalitarian and decreasingly authoritarian. People call Bukele an authoritarian. Yeah. And they say that in a degrading way. I actually think it's a good thing. I think he is an authoritarian.

And you see his competence has absolutely transformed a country that was a clusterfuck beforehand. So we need more of that. We need more people who have the capacity to bring competence and structures and hierarchy and strong leadership to the communities, the cities, the countries or whatever they're in. So that's my nuance on that. And I think it's a really important nuance because people run around, they're always, like, yelling, bitching, screaming about, oh, it's authoritarian. And it's like, no, shut up. It's about totalitarianism. Like, it's very important that we specify the language in the right way.

And that's my thing. And COVID was a totalitarian movement. It wasn't authoritarian. There was no intelligent authority or competence about it. There was none of that stuff. It was just this whole, we're all in this together, like, everyone has to wear masks, you know, it's not for your safety, it's for my safety somehow, and it's for everyone's safety, whatever that means. Like, you know, the amount of, like, stupidity, and I was in Germany most of the time. The amount of stupidity that I saw, like, you know, I remember I'd be the only one on the train not wearing a mask.

Like, every single time, I used to, like, carry a little fake ID with me. you know i'd get like the you know the mask nazi police officers you know oh you must wear a mask i don't have one i'm sorry here's a mask and then you know i get it i throw it away i'm like look just give me a fine you know and they would just give me a fine but always on this fake id so whoever like john smith was had a whole lot of fines in germany but like it's just you know i just didn't care it was just such a scam and i don't know like i refused to believe in the scam And I think the biggest problem we had as a civilization was there was a couple of people that were crazy enough, like you and I, that would say no to this. But more often than not, we were isolated.

And that's when they would, like, pounce. Yes. It was always on a plane or a train or a thing or whatever, right? And I always say to people, as much as I, particularly on Communist Manifesto, I talked about individualism a lot, extreme individualism is a weakness because it isolates you, makes you lonely, and you are far easier to pinpoint and to attack and to break when you're alone versus a tribe. The power of the group. Exactly. And you need strong groups, you need strong tribes, and that's actually fundamentally what we need to be building if we want to restructure the world. But anyway, I'm going off on a tangent here. But we'll get back to that when we talk about Atlantis, I think.

I read Uber Money, an excellent article. I'll put a link to it in the show notes so people can read it. I want to read an excerpt from it. I can read the whole thing, but I just chose something. History has proved this again and again, with the modern world being the most evident example. We live in a world of excessive quantities and ever-receding quality. Everywhere you turn, there is mass media, mass retail, mass politics, mass food, mass markets, mass social media, mass consumption, mass hysteria, mass medicine, mass money, mass everything. As a result, few of these things carry weight or value anymore. They contain no charge.

They have no energy. They are like worthless Zimbabwean hyperinflated toilet paper money. And from this kind of world, high quantities of low-quality character people emerge. And then you go on to claim that Bitcoin makes the strongest stronger, the best better, and the most powerful more powerful. and you talk about strong individuals creating stronger societies and weak individuals creating weak societies. I want to get your take on that. So I'm the ultimate Bitcoin contrarian.

I'm always disagreeing with Bitcoiners and I just think that, I was saying it yesterday in the car, I was like, a lot of what's happening in the Bitcoin space is now, it's like, you know, it's almost people just cheer for everything. It's like, Bitcoin is energy. We need more women in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is for the people.

Banking the unbanked. Woo! Like, that's how, like, if you want to get, I was thinking of, like, literally just doing a talk on stage one day and just calling it Bitcoin platitudes and just, like, reading each one. Put on the slogan. Exactly. Just, like, get everybody to clap. Yeah.

So I really depart from a lot of Bitcoiners, like, around the egalitarian movement, around, like, the equality movement. Like, I believe Bitcoin will bring back feudalism, and I think feudalism is the greatest structure for a society. um so this triggers a lot of people and i'll explain that soon uh as i said i like authoritarianism let me start with this i'm an elitist i'm a total elitist i believe in a class structure i believe people are fundamentally different some people a are either born or crafted or both most likely to lead others are born to and crafted etc to support others to build others to fight others to follow etc like we have different people for a reason like people literally do personality tests to try and find out you know what their nature what they're

predisposed towards and then somehow oh we have no classes in society yes we do people are different and we we have these archetypical natures you know that is really important to sort of um understand now let's talk to the first piece about quality over quantity so i wrote i wrote an entire essay about that on for bitcoin magazine you know it sort of like extrapolates on that specific um paragraph that you read but quality is the antithesis to uh quantity and what matters in um in life in you know at an individual level and at the um at the collective state you know um or civilizational level i shouldn't say state but at the collective and civilizational level is the focus right if you focus on quality you um you produce things that are excellent unique

ascendant charged energetic but there is fundamentally fewer of those things but it lifts civilization up right when you go the opposite way around and you try and get mass quantities of stuff you cheapen things um there is a the word word um derives from the norse weird um which was which sort of meant like destiny and and place and the the relationship there is like when you said something you sort of created or you put it into being and this is why the norse um didn't talk a lot they just said and they they manifested or they created out of it as soon as you started talking too much um you cheapen the words you you create more quantity of it and there's less um less quality and in the modern world we're all uh guilty of this we all

talk too much uh we don't do as much you know philosophy i think has been a cancer to civilization in many ways so is psychology because instead of doing things we just talk about doing things and so so this has been something that i've had to come to terms with uh a lot in um in in recent years as I've started to attack my own prior ideas, because I try to do that as much as possible. It's like, okay, you know, I considered myself a philosopher before, and now I'm like, I try to philosophize less, unless I'm in this sort of setting. So quality is a North Star, but quality, by definition, is elitist. Like, the word elite means the quality layer of um of anything right of of of a people of a um of a food of a structure of a substance of

anything right and what we've done is we've accidentally given the word elite to a bunch of parasites like we call people like christine lagarde elite there's nothing elite about this person like there's a lot of parrot parasitical stuff about this person but they're not elite so maybe at the very best because they are in like the cream of the crop in terms of the um the so the current social structure which is broken we could call them parasitic elites but we need to reclaim the word elite like traditionally uh historically civilizationally speaking the elite were the best of us you know hussein bolt is an elite runner because the best you know alexander was the elite of all kings because he was the best so like jokovic is an elite tennis

player that that's what elite means to be the best to be the greatest and that is worth aspiring towards like we have changed our um our direction that like what we gaze towards like you know there's that interstellar saying right we used to um look up at the stars and like you know uh compete with like who's going to get there now we like uh squabble about our place in the dirt right like our gaze has gone from up there to down there because we are focused on the average man Like we are focused on equality, we are focused on egalitarianism, and all of these things... Even worse word, equity. Equity, equality, they're all in the same garbage because the problem with these things is they are descendant and they are equalizing.

You can never equalize on the way up, you can only equalize by cutting everything down to the same level. And this is so fundamentally important, is we cannot be seeking equality if we want a functional, striving, growing, ascendant society. and i've and i've come to find that even in the bitcoin space a lot of it is about oh equality and you know it's about the little man and you know the the rising people it's like no it is about a framework for excellence where the people who are the best win the people are the strongest the people who are the most powerful the people are the best the people who are willing to work for the most productive etc they're the ones who get rewarded the most because in any functional zero-sum game there has to be winners and there has to be losers and the purpose of the game is

to drive um the the an unequal result so that winners are rewarded and losers learn a lesson so that they can later become winners that creates a society that is growing and ascendant okay and then i challenge you so how do we get to the public adopting this thing called bitcoin if we're just aiming for the best and the brightest and um you inspire people to be the best and the brightest and the strongest simple as that this is not a handout this isn't fucking welfare this isn't you know oh we're here to help the poor people and all this sort of shit this is about an opportunity for those who want to get off their ass do something with their lives create build construct um rise do all these things to have a framework in which to do it and to have a tool

by which to be that so some would say you know i'm playing devil's advocate here some would say that maybe society or the masses are not able to be what they're not they're not able to be their best and brightest they continue to be to eat the bullshit that they're being sold and listen to the lies and they're not even going to get there so so what that means is for the few who want to do that and they have less competition so if you're listening to this you're one of the few who have that capacity there's a reason why noah's ark didn't save everybody save a few like i'm sorry but like this this is something that people have to get through their heads it's like the guilt complex around oh i have to help all the masses and shit yes no that that is that is

that is exactly what the parasites use against otherwise strong and good people to make us feel guilty that we're leaving everybody behind and to bring us down and to be resigned and and not try yeah correct and what they do is they make the masses they point them at the productive people of society and Ayn Rand talked about this a lot the looters and the moochers or whatever create narratives that the producers are the evil people and that they're the ones who are taking from you and you see this with like this idiot um what's that uh politician um the old which one of them let's yeah which yeah um the one in um that's like super anti-bitcoin in um elizabeth warren yeah yeah she's like literally a character out of atlas shrugged like literally a character out of

atlas shrugged um blaming you know businesses and everything who provide products and services for the inflation right like so so these idiots create the problem they blame someone else and that's the civilization we live in so to come to come back to like one thing like to use a matrix analogy right in the matrix remember when neo and morpheus are walking and morpheus explaining like you know we this is the construct and you know in in the matrix all of these people could be an agent because most of them are not ready to be unplugged and most of them are so inured and attached to the system that they will actually fight to defend it so i don't i don't bother anymore helping the person who is drowning because he's going to try and drown me as well

like learn to swim if you don't learn to swim i'm not going to help you now if they are my kin if they are my tribe um more than likely if they are they are my tribe they will be people who are doing their best to be self-sufficient but within the tribal framework and that is very small the tribal framework is very small you can't have a large tribe because you can't have a deep relationship with too many people but within that framework and context you know you do help people because you want to bring yourselves up and grow and strengthen as a tribe. But you can't do that at scale with people that you don't know and you don't really care about.

And that's the inversion that we've got happening in the West today is we've been taught to tribalism is bad, so you must hate everybody in your tribe and you must not help them, but you must be guilty and responsible for everybody else. We've inverted the whole thing. And this is the thing. We live in the inversion economy, in the inversion civilization. Everything is upside down. Men are women. Women are men. The inferior are superior. The superior are inferior. Everything is upside down. We must be guilty for everybody else. All this sort of bullshit. Quantity over quality. Weakness is strength. All this sort of stuff. Everything is inverted.

So we need to go back to what is instinctual, energetic, vital ascendant, which is, no, fuck you. I have the capacity to be the best version of myself, and I will go out and do that and create that and be that. And those who are inspired by that, they're your people. They're your tribe. The rest of the fucking lemmings, let them keep walking off into the lava. You can't help them. Love it. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, I don't love it, but I love it. AI. Let's talk about AI. If I have more time, I'll come back to this article, which is fantastic. Your take on AI. I'm taking one person I really, really dislike, Yvonne O'Harrari and Elon Musk, for example. Their approach for AI is that, you know, we're walking towards the end of humanity. If we don't restrain the power of AI, it's going to take over us.

And, you know, they have this gloom and doom vision of where AI can take humanity. So in their eyes, it's dangerous for society. And therefore, they're calling to regulate it so that they can protect me, little me. Again, it's for my own good. And in my opinion, regulation is just another sign of them wanting to be protected by the law for things that they may do with AI in the future. When I say they, I don't just mean Yuval and Elon Musk, but the big corporations or companies that are going to implement AI on a massive scale that will probably be in some form or another used by the institution to surveil on people, back to our point on totalitarian regimes. So regulation is always a protective measure in my eyes for corporations, never for the individuals.

What is your take on AI, especially when we combine that with the concept of universal basic income, UBI, and where that can take us in the context of socialism? AI is really 99% scam, 1% interesting. I've been down this rabbit hole, as you know, for a while. So you have an initiative, a whole project about AI, so you're learning this topic very, very deeply. We have an AI company. We are probably the premier team on the planet that works at the nexus of AI and Bitcoin.

We are doing research that nobody else is doing, which is trying to extract biases out of language models and embed new biases. This is stuff that nobody's doing. So we know this stuff deeply. And what I can tell you is most of AI is a scam. It's like one big let's pump NVIDIA's bags Ponzi scheme. right so i'll add a couple things thing number one is um 99.9 of these ai companies make no money

there's no business model here the business model is keep raising money and what happens is like the the lps of these vc funds are usually lps and limited partners those are the investors of the vc fund correct and they're usually nvidia google um microsoft amazon right so they give the money to the vc funds the vc funds invest in um startups and then the startups spend all their money on compute with amazon nvidia so it's a circular it's it's it's one big laundry um and then what happens is nvidia just pumps their bags and videos become a two trillion company two trillion dollar company for like literally just burning through gpu resources um has anybody done anything useful or made any money no uh language models really that useful i would argue no like i've literally

been building at language models they might be good for like maybe prompting an idea you know they're like useful insofar as they're like a you know a probabilistic search engine that can string together a couple words but these things are just probability machines and they're not that great anyway because they're a reflection of the data that they're trained on and they are not creative and there is no emergent properties a lot of people thought that there was a bunch of emergent properties with language models and that was a projection our human projection onto something that for the first time in history talked back to us like before language models we had parrots like and you know if a parrot said i'm going to kill you like you're not going to be like oh my

god it's going to take over the world you're like that's a fucking parrot you know but like you know you say that to a language model and language model says i'm going to kill you that's like oh my god it's alive it's going to kill us all right sentient in a way it is totally not sentient we totally not getting to agi you know this is like a nerd's wet dream like people like yuval harari who are still virgins at like you know 50 years old they're the kind of people who believe that ai is like gonna come and like take over the world and be sentient right like they're dorks so i have no respect for the dorks um i don't listen to them i just laugh at them and essentially um what you've got going on with this ai thing is it's mostly smoke and mirrors it's like wizard

of oz right it's so probability based that it's so funny it's like people throw a bunch of data at these models they run a bunch of uh training um basically like mixing a cauldron full of words and then like what it comes out the other end they're like oh we figured out something and like they don't know how it actually worked but they're like okay this something happened here and it's all just like experimentation r&d and it's just um the law of large numbers and patterns applied to language and all we found through language models and it's funny it's if you look at ai books like that idiot nick bostrom who wrote uh super intelligence dumbest book on the planet like if you want to lower your iq go and read super intelligence moronic um that book was like

adamant that when ai figures out language it's an ai complete problem which means we're going to get general intelligence super intelligence and it's all over all we figured out now that we figured out language is that language is largely patterns and that you know the same kind of ai neural processing that happens for like matching a rider and a driver on uber is now doing autocomplete for sentences that's all it is there's nothing more fancy about there's nothing more interesting about this but to tie it back to why they want to regulate it yeah these tools are fundamentally going to change the way we search for information and understand information and find information and all this sort of stuff. So they're kind of going to be like a Wikipedia meets Google

search, just more conveniently, right? So instead of searching Google for a thing, you just ask ChatGPT and it'll tell you something. This is where it gets interesting is most people don't go past the second or third result on Google. So whatever Google says at the top is gospel. They'll do the same with ChatGPT. Now, if you upstream regulate what words are safe and what things are safe um you will downstream or true or true exactly or or you know true safe and responsible they're the three words when you hear those you run yes um those things downstream will produce outputs that people will lap up it's like oh you know vaccines are all safe and effective you know or whatever the case is right add to that the filters that they place on

these things and you've just got these like uh inception machines which sort of incept idiotic ideas into people's brains so so that's where the danger is that's where they're trying to uh regulate it once again the idiot sheeple and masses will like lap that shit up they'll buy that stuff um i think the jokes on them it's that people are building you know language models that are uh outside of the mainstream so there's a lot of competition although they're not that great to be honest no one really uses them but whatever i i think it's like a it's like it's over exaggerated the power of what i'll do i'm not afraid of agi so like even elon and all that sort of stuff for like wrong there so we don't have to worry about that too much do we have to worry about having

like a big brother-esque uh control over language possibly but not just language but ideas language ideas thinking yeah but in in the funniest way i call ai midwit obsolescence technology midwit obsolescence technology okay so the midwits basically self-own themselves because now if you ever want an opinion from a midwit cnn reporter just ask chat gpt now that idiot lost his job because that's all these things do is they regurgitate just if you ever like ask chat gpt to write you anything useful it's just platitude after platitude after platitude like it says a lot of words doesn't say anything exactly so you and i people with like actual substance and like agency like the non-npcs we've never had it easier because now we can write

something and it literally stands out from the junk so this is why it's like it's it's funny it's like one whole circular self-own by the nerds who thought they won but they just obsoleted themselves and all of their dork friends who think that agi is going to take over the world so anyway for me ai is like mega cringe i'm not afraid of it we're not going to die from it you're harnessing it no problem i'm using it where it's useful and and and to be honest the utility is much much much much much smaller than uh what we imagine and we're gonna have a massive ai winter in the next 18 to 24 months when everybody realizes that nobody made any money um so it's gonna be hilarious companies closed down investments it's gonna be hilarious wow okay thank you for that

and just on ubi this is like to me ubi is like uh the the easy way for lazy people to continue being lazy bums like we don't even have to say i just want people to understand the combination of ubi and ai is just taking us down the path of continue being those batteries for the matrix those energy providers you're not going to be as productive as before because you're going to be sitting at home and receiving money for doing not much but you're still going to participate in society you're still going to be paying the money that the government gives you to pharma so you're It's still going to be feeding that beast. The third demon that you haven't mixed in there is democracy.

Democracy. So you add all of this stuff up and you layer in some democracy and basically all of these lemmings who depend on UBI, who are midwits that AI does all the work for them, they're the ones who have the same vote as you and me. So this is why democracy doesn't work. It's literally giving the same right and voice to the Muppets and this is exactly the Parasite game.

is the parasite who doesn't want to do any work he wants to weaponize the muppets the lemmings whatever we want to call them the masses to extract wealth from the productive class okay i'm going to challenge you again so bukele for example was chosen in democratic elections are there no lemmings in el salvador that have given him power how come they saw through the they know 86% of the vote yeah they felt his um they feel his energy they felt his charisma and this is the power of the charismatic leader the Caesar Alexander the Napoleon they can draw the spirit out of people so UBI is a spirit killer leadership greatness grandeur excellence is a spirit enlivener so we

need that's the way to counteract this and then we need tools like Bitcoin like like some open source AI tools, like Atlantis, you know, community tools and everything like that that we're building. These are the things, these are the tools, these are the weapons that must be wielded by the strong, powerful, vital characters. And that empowers those who choose to wake up to do that. But time is running out because once UBI and everything comes in, It creates a gravitational pull on even the ones who are otherwise good who could have been awoken by that spirit of greatness and that vitality. The allure of free, cheap money, doing nothing, plugging myself into a fucking VR headset and making the AI do all my work for me. And like that starts to become alluring and it drags you down.

So, if anything, it's incumbent on us to wake the fuck up, drop all the egalitarian fucking narratives and all that sort of stuff, and claim power and greatness. Because if we don't, the parasites will continue to pump sludge and UBI and seed oils and everything into everybody else. You said something really interesting in one of the interviews that I listened to. You said, when you learn something really, you know it here. You don't know it here like you know it in the body Okay, I want you to talk about that for a second. Yeah, so true knowledge is visceral It's not it's not mental and this is this is a big this is why I was Beating up philosophy before right so philosophy is cerebral

And this is where all the AI and the nerds and all the dorks are right like everything is cerebral cerebral cerebral Real knowledge happens in the body when you like sort of you go through these layers of mastery um you know you have i mean most people have heard oh my god sorry i'm interrupting you this is exactly what we talked about in the cafe before yeah you had to go through what you had to go through during covid and even before in order to really know it in your body i guess and not just here understanding the maybe that's the wrong way of operating or the wrong thing to do you had to feel it you had to experience it okay keep going sorry you're 100 right so um visceral learning is the most powerful and i believe in some sense with like whether it's shaping your dna your your

your spirit your soul whatever it is when you learn something in the body you have you have transformed yep fundamentally speaking and this is what the um the the the nerds in the parasite class want you to forget they want to disconnect you from your body yes they want to lock you in a you know in your home for two weeks that becomes two years so that you don't get any sunshine so that you don't move so you don't feel so that you push everything into the brain right like even the this is why i don't like all these spiritual hippie movements it's like mind over matter or it's like mindfulness and all this stuff no no it should be bodyfulness okay that is where like the grounded uh true truth is it's not like about escaping and separating from the body it's like

you know when people say it's like oh you know you're in a meat suit like you know you're so much more it's like no no you're in a fucking meat suit do you get what that means like your your body is the most complex organism in the fucking universe that is powerful that is important that is like i have a whole couple of chapters on this called like uh physio psychology in um in the poshido of bitcoin like i grapple with this concept which is the nerds want to separate you they want to turn you into a brain in a vat to like you know building a vital powerful strong body is fundamentally more important even than reading books and doing all that sort of stuff like go out do be have sex like do all of that stuff that that is what makes us humans and we've

we've come to forget that with the move into you know intellectual as i intellectualizing everything so i'm with you entirely yuval nohalari always says that there is no such thing as soul god all these ideas all these funny ideas we're data machines yeah yeah this is this is the thing so so they want to they like but but that's his own projection because that's what he is because he's an npc so like it all it all makes sense okay so you said you mentioned ugliness and i want to ask you a question about that and we talked about it when we talked about your book we did your book signing during the conference

why is beauty the opposite of communism? What is it about beauty and ugliness? Ugliness in people or beauty in society or in the world? Beauty is the thing that requires the most sacrifice of all to create

and it requires the most time and it requires the most effort and energetic input. The mountains that we see a beautiful because they took like thousands of years to emerge and it came through like the pressure between plates mashing against each other to create right um it takes time and effort to build a beautiful baby to raise a beautiful child and then to build a beautiful lineage takes multiple generations of honestly like people don't like to hear this but of uh

of uh what's the word intentional breeding like no one likes to talk about that but like you know the royals did it you know the the noble classes did it in in the past and they they wanted healthy strong powerful families and they went and they specifically married people who are also strong vital energetic and like who have some sort of spirit about them you know you want to go and marry someone with with fire and energy genetics beauty all this sort of stuff and you want to create babies and then you want to find other families who have those same sort of values this isn't a Nietzschean idea like to create the ubermensch is going to be a multi-generational endeavor to build human beings of and I'm just gonna say it like of superior strength of superior

character of superior genetics superior lineage like that is a project and it happens in everything Like, culture takes generations to build, and it takes generations of strong leadership. And you have beautiful cultures that emerge from really strong leadership. Architecture, like, you know, you go through Europe, medieval Europe, you know, I mentioned this last time, is you see these grand castles, or in the east, these grand temples. They took hundreds of years to build. They were beautiful because they took generations to build. The people who started didn't see the end.

a marble sculpture sitting there and putting the work into that like fractal encrypt you know that sculpture that he created that he sold for five freaking bitcoin like all of this stuff takes time and energy and ugly wants to destroy everything and do it quickly so ugliness is that which happens quickly ugliness is high time preference if you want to put it in a bitcoin frame of reference whereas beauty is the ultimate of low time preference and you know communism is this idea that every person can have the same thing um you know there's no property rights we all must share we must equalize everything and in order to equalize everything we can't have any variation so everything needs to look the same there's two flavors of wine there's red and white

there's no brands there's no labels there's none of this sort of stuff there's no flavor there's no color there's no differentiation there's no beauty it's all fucking sameness and sameness is very efficient it's very quick you know i mean like if we just paint everything fucking gray we don't have to think about it but there's nothing alive about it like you go to a gray city how do you feel you feel gray you feel dead it's fucking ugly whereas you go to something colorful which you know there was tension there was like we were talking about relationships before you know chemical tension polarity comes from difference like this is another thing that is you know really corrupt with the modern world is men have become closer to women women have become closer to men

there's no chemical polarity anymore so now you don't have like exactly there's no traction there's no vitality there's no strength there's no chemistry there's no charge there's no quality there's just a bunch of quantity of sameness and it takes me back to this beautiful um sentence of yours from that same article power is the capacity to channel energy and that also ties me back to energy is something that always exists in order for it to flow efficiently and in the most in the most beautiful way you need those polarities you need those dualities so that there is charge there is movement and things flow naturally from one opposite to the next and and i think a lot of what we're seeing in the world today is just trying to yeah as you said gray everything out so that

everything is dumbed down you know i always say that society is right now on a ventilator it's like completely asleep um and it's by design so yeah so so i totally agree with you and and this is beautiful and just to end up um on a message of hope what kind of words of hope can you give my listeners uh that you know it's it's hard yes but it's not hard actually it's really easy The words of hope are this, is that you're stronger and better than you've fucking been told. You know, that's the thing. And you can be great. You can be excellent.

You can be the best. You can be powerful. But don't be fucking guilty about being that. Yes. Like, literally, just stop falling for the guilt lies. Yes. Like, everything is designed around you to make you feel fucking guilty, to make you abdicate literally the power that you fucking have inside you. so go out there claim it be fucking unapologetic build create love travel see climb all of that

sort of stuff be ascendant and that means coming to terms with the fact that power is a beautiful thing power doesn't corrupt power only corrupts the weak be strong be powerful be responsible be loving be compassionate be courageous be just be respectful have self-control like all of these virtues they're they're all the virtues that are in the bushido of bitcoin so that's the message rise up ascend you're going to leave people behind it's their fucking duty to come with you or stay behind that's it amen oh where can people follow you find you continue consuming more of that of that okay greatness so that article that you mentioned lord lord svetsky that um that uh specific article that you're reading uber money is in the bitcoin times

so people can check that out bitcoin times dot io uh twitter is probably the best place to follow me swetsky writes w-r-i-t-e-s so like writing um which i'm sure will be in the in the show notes um swetsky.info has all of my links right so it's going to take you to a link tree it has like They're on communists, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this sort of stuff. But yeah, the thing I'm most excited about in the next couple of months is like the Bushido of Bitcoin. And Satlantis. Is the book and Satlantis is the product. We didn't have time to talk about it, but what I will do is I'll put a link to the presentation about it so people can check out what Satlantis is.

Beautiful startup, so you should pay attention to it. And if you want to become a CT community leader or ambassador, then you should get in touch with Alex and take it from there. Thank you so much, dear. That was fascinating. And we'll do it again. 100%? Good.

I love it. Thank you so much for all your help for me in this community. Appreciate it. Mwah. Mwah. Thanks. Love it. Yay.

Good? All right. And we're out.