Aleks Svetski: Saving humanity by building AI Large Language Models that tell truth using Bitcoin

The Spirit of Satoshi AI

Brandon Gentile

Mar 23, 2024

Aleks Svetski: Saving humanity by building AI Large Language Models that tell truth using bitcoin

Another playable character graced us with their time..

Aleksandar Svetski: The Spirit of Satoshi AI

Playable Characters Show - Ep037

Summary

Honored to have Aleks Svetski sit with me to discuss his recent work in AI and the mission of Spirit of Satoshi plus the collaboration with Bitcoin Trading Cards. Aleks shares his perspective on the wealth gap and our inverted relationship with power and the importance of wielding it responsibly. He emphasizes the need to build real wealth by creating value in order to support the growth of Bitcoin. He envisions a future where governance structures resemble a meritocratic, capitalistic feudalism. Finally, he reflects on the current state of society and suggests that future generations may view this era as a modern dark age.

Presented by:

Bitcoin Trading Cards - https://btc-tc.com

Bio of Aleks:

Building non-cringe AI things @Spirit_Satoshi. Wrote @Un_Communist #1 Bitcoin Collectible-Publication @TimelessBitcoin "Bushido of Bitcoin" coming soon

Connect with Aleks here:

Site: https://linktr.ee/svetski

Twitter: https://x.com/Spirit_Satoshi?s=20

Spirit of Satoshi: https://geyser.fund/project/spiritofsatoshi

Book here: https://www.uncommunist.com/optin1642549665295

Bitcoin Times: https://bitcointimes.io

Bitcoin Times Substack:

Timestamps:

00:00 Where Has Aleks Been Hiding?

05:41 The AI Opportunity

09:14 The AI Rabbit Hole

16:10 Large Language Models

25:05 Collaboration with Bitcoin Trading Cards

27:18 The Wealth Gap and Power

36:44 Power and Responsibility

39:09 Our Inverted Relationship with Power

41:02 The Importance of Wielding Power

44:53 Building Real Wealth

49:59 The Role of Consequences in Human Behavior

55:30 The Impact of Fiat Currency on Capitalism

56:26 The Future of Governance and Feudalism

01:06:36 Living in a Modern Dark Age

Transcription:

Brandon Gentile (00:08.935)

Mr. Aleks Svetski, thank you so much for joining me today and being a playable character. The name of the show, The Playable Character Show, and like we were talking off stage, finding people that can think critically in this world is very rare in a sea of non-playable characters. So I appreciate you joining me today. A prolific writer and ranter, purveyor of truth, written many, many books, articles that I'm sure many of the listeners have seen, and those that are new to space, please go check those out.

Rit wrote the Uncommunist Manifesto, the Bitcoin Times leads that charge and the Bushido of Bitcoin, by the way, coming in soon in the future. I know, I know it is. I know you've been saying that for a while, so it's kind of the running joke in a way. And the big thing that we're here to really kind of start off with today is building non-cringe AI things in the Spirit of Satoshi. Thank you, sir, for coming on today.

Svetski (00:49.262)

Yes.

Svetski (01:04.622)

Thank you, my friend. Thank you for the beautiful intro. Appreciate it.

Brandon Gentile (01:07.387)

Absolutely. So we were just talking off stage a little bit. You know, the last couple of years, you kind of went to hiding. I gave you my backstory, and I kind of caught the tail end of your, you know, really public persona a few years ago, and you kind of went into hiding a little bit. And does it didn't mean that you weren't working on stuff? Because again, that's what we're here to talk about today. So give us the last, you know, really, I guess, couple years synopsis, but leading up to what you are so excited about right now.

Svetski (01:15.118)

Mm-hmm.

Svetski (01:31.63)

Yeah, so I mean, I was very much a public.

persona on Twitter for a number of years there. And particularly during the COVID, I think there on Twitter for a number of years there. And particularly during the COVID, I think there myself, Saifedean, Francis Pouliot, and Giacomo Zucco. We were sort of like the four people that were Francis Pouliot, and Giacomo Zucco. We were sort of like the four people that were I think Pouliot,

way into non Bitcoin groups and really started talking about like trying to orange pill them and presenting Bitcoin as a solution to all these people that were, you know, skeptical about injecting themselves and skeptical about lockdowns and all this sort of stuff. And I think that, yeah, that kind of brought me a level of notoriety that, I don't know, didn't do well in a professional capacity. So, you know, after a little bit of time, I decided to

Look, I've been kicking, bitching, screaming, and yelling at people for too long on Twitter. It's a real waste of energy. And I was a little bit disappointed by some of sort of the way the community behaved afterwards. So anyway, I just thought, you know, I'm done with this shit. I'm out. And I'm just going to go and like...

write and build stuff, got married, took a bit of a hiatus. But yeah, in particular while I've been away, writing has been a big part of things. The Vashita of Bitcoin is sort of the main thing in a writing capacity that I've been working on. And I'm up to like draft number six or whatever. I keep rewriting sections, I keep sort of adding to things, I keep like...

Svetski (03:24.174)

Because I read quite broadly and I listen to a lot of history, historical fiction, all this sort of stuff and it inspires me. And I'm like, oh man, that's a beautiful nugget that I want to embed in there somewhere. And that's a fantastic quote or that's an awesome aphorism. And then I sort of like, I start by embedding a little bit and then I end up writing a whole thing. I'm like, fuck, OK, now this needs to be integrated somewhere in the book. So it's been it's yeah, it's been a process. But I think the.

I can say now pretty confidently that the crux of the book is there. I found what I think is probably the best editor on the planet for this book specifically. He goes by the Nim John Carter and I actually personally believe he's probably the best writer on the planet at the moment. He's not in the Bitcoin space, he's sort of in like the emergent distant bright and he's like a powerfully, powerfully nuanced thinker.

Brandon Gentile (04:14.175)

Mm-hmm.

Svetski (04:17.517)

And yeah, I was sort of following him on Substack for a little while. And when I was seeking out an editor, because I was originally going to have Bitcoin magazine published the book, but I wanted to do a lot more with it, which they didn't have the capacity to do. So I decided to take it back, self-publish, find my own editor, find all that. And it was the best decision because it's allowed me to like, the book has really like gone up not a notch, but like 10 notches since then. And

Brandon Gentile (04:28.092)

Mm.

Brandon Gentile (04:40.167)

Wow.

Svetski (04:41.55)

It's looking special. John is helping me out now, so I'm finishing off the last of it. And yeah, fingers crossed.

probably do a campaign for it on Geyser or something like that in the next couple months. In fact, I would love to do a trading card set for it. I think that would be a sick idea. But yeah, that aside, that's sort of from a writing capacity, obviously the Bitcoin times as well. And then from a building side of stuff, I've been down the AI rabbit hole, which I'm sure we'll have a bit of a chat about. And I will be open sourcing all the stuff that we've done in the AI space.

Brandon Gentile (04:59.239)

Yes.

Svetski (05:19.44)

concept that the AI opportunity opened up for me, which I believe is where my focus is going to start moving into, which is to do with Bitcoin communities and stuff like that. Nothing to disclose just yet, but it's sort of related to all the work that I've been doing the last couple of years, understanding NOS to Bitcoin AI, everything sort of culminating into one thing.

Brandon Gentile (05:41.895)

Wow. What sparked the AI rabbit hole for you? You know, what was it? Was it just, I mean, is it something you were like, hey, I've always kind of been into things like that? Or is that something that just kind of was out of left field for you and just kind of sparked you the right way?

Svetski (05:56.782)

Hmm. So I've been a bit of a technologist for a while. And most people don't know me as that. But I've built software companies for almost a decade now. So I've built all sorts of things. The AI thing...

So notwithstanding the fact that I've sort of been around technology for a little bit, the AI thing was a little bit left to field. Even though I did a podcast with a guy called Rob Malka, about three years ago now, maybe even longer, maybe four years ago, it was I think, podcast.

episode 62 or something like that of the wake up podcast when I used to run my own show and Rob was talking about GPT two back then. So it was pre GPT three. And at the time I was like, yeah, cute, whatever. Um, not interested. And we ended up talking about nature the whole time. And, um, so funny enough, GPT three comes around and I get all the flashbacks about, you know, the, the off camera discussion that Rob and I had.

Okay, he was onto something. So I then, like a lot of people, got super excited about it, started going down the rabbit hole. And the more I dug, the more I found something that initially was very, very, very, very intriguing. If you ask me now, I think most of AI is just smoke and mirrors. It's like Wizard of Oz, you know, bunch of people behind a green curtain. But not withstanding, at the time, I was under the impression that this is...

incredible, it's huge, it's going to transform the world. And me sort of being both a software guy plus a linguist in some sense, like and I'm not a linguist but as in like I write stuff, language models became interesting. I was like holy shit can we can we produce this stuff? Am I is my skill of writing going to be made obsolete?

Brandon Gentile (07:32.146)

Mm.

Brandon Gentile (07:35.633)

Right.

Svetski (07:45.806)

went down, started digging, and I coined the term midwit obsolescence technology for language models, because what I quickly found was that these models basically represent some sort of aggregate of what the normies believe. So it's basically Wikipedia in a chatbot. And Wikipedia is for what? Midwits. So now we have these language models that can basically garble a bunch of shit, which is no different to what's the average CNN

would write on a blog. So therefore these idiots kind of replace themselves and anybody who has any sense or any ability to think outside of the Overton window just got an opportunity to be more noticeable because they can produce signal in amongst all the midwit noise.

So anyway, as I started going down the path, before I really came to that conclusion, I asked the question, because I saw it early on that these things were just reflecting of a model of the world. I said, can we represent or can we entrain a new model of the world in a language model?

and make it act like a Bitcoiner. And that was sort of the genesis of Spirit of Satoshi's. I wanted to do something that was different and I wanted to build a model that is unlike any other model on the planet. And we talk about how that's gone, but that was the initial premise and that was the initial idea.

Brandon Gentile (09:14.027)

Do you, I was telling you earlier that I was having a conversation with Dr. Jeff Ross and we were talking about, you'll see where I'm going with this in a second, we were talking about the intranet versus the internet and we were talking about free banking and people have this, this weird, you know, especially like Gen Xers, they had like the gold bugs and things of that nature. They like a, like a George Gammon, for example, it's a very hard time. Like, well, we tried free banking and wildcat banking in the 1800s and you know, Dr. Jeff

he likened that to like, you know, Starbucks points or, you know, like when you have like, the state of Ohio has their own money in the bank there will agree, we see why. Do you like in, in where I'm going with this is do you like in these AI models, a lot of them like we just accept now in a way, chat GPT and interview with you had with Natalie a couple months ago, you even talked about the Google search result, like it just

I'm going to go through a couple of pages and then it was like, well, I'm just going to go to like the first page. And now it's just like, whatever the first result is, if there's an ad there or whatever Google wants there, is that kind of where we're at with AI in a way where people just accept it like, oh, it's chat GPT. That's the one. I'm just going to use that now kind of first mover advantage when there really could be a million of these and the best AI will win type of thing. Like, how do you kind of see this playing out? Because like, again, I see yours and what you're doing is like, wow, it's a model built on truth and the real facts like that's.

gotta win over this all other garbage that people are already realizing is garbage. So is that is it kind of does that make sense in a way? I hope I'm thinking about that chronic correctly.

Svetski (10:44.27)

Yeah, I don't know how to tie that into the free banking piece. But let me just talk to the second piece, which is, uh huh. Okay, okay. Okay. The

Brandon Gentile (10:48.839)

No, I'll use that as an example. Don't even, yeah, don't, yeah.

Svetski (10:57.006)

What's going to win out? Um, chat GPT fundamentally has a massive, massive lead, right? Uh, but what we're, what we're finding in the AI space in general is that, and this is going to sound strange, but nobody actually knows what the fuck's going on.

Honestly, I've come to the conclusion that chat GPT was a fluke, that a lot of these AI models are really just trial and error, trial and error, trial and error, trial and error. And something pops out and something's half decent and sort of they run with it, they go with it. And then every time they iterate, they change shit. And

Brandon Gentile (11:12.203)

Yeah.

Svetski (11:35.47)

oftentimes it gets worse, sometimes it gets better. Like we've had this challenge internally is, you know, we, one of our really early models was quite good. And then we're like, okay, I think we figured something out. So we, you know, took that process, we refined it, did a bunch more work and then produced another model. We're like, certain it was gonna get better. And it got worse. We're like, what the?

like, I don't understand. And, and, you know, the the AI space, and even the top thinkers in it, the people who came up with how to train these models are basically openly saying at the moment, they're saying, look, it's, it's 90% art, 10% science. We're all making up as we go. So, so the the opening, our guys definitely had some sort of secret source, whatever it was, or fluke or some blend of the two, and they are out ahead.

The fact that they have turned it into sort of a thing that toes the party line, to a large degree, can be expected. That's obviously what they were going to do. The nature of the content that they use to train the model is...

toes the party line already, right? It's Wikipedia essentially. So that is obviously going to just like say what, is something that the normies will believe in. So to kind of tie it back to what you were asking, all kinds of software products and everything like this.

will always be subject to power laws. So there's someone's going to gobble up 80% of the market and then, you know, everyone else can compete for the other 20%. And that'll happen whether we're on a Bitcoin standard or not, right? Maybe in the, in the current paradigm, instead of a healthy 80 20, we get like unhealthy 99 one, right? So you get this like really skewed sort of effect. And that's sort of the danger that I've been talking about with AI for a while is it's not that AI is going to grow sentient and kill us and all this sort of shit. That's all bullshit. You know, there's no AGI,

Brandon Gentile (13:10.364)

Mm-hmm.

Svetski (13:35.792)

that's going to emerge out of the circuits. That's all like Yuval Harari's wet dream, right? Like that's not what we're talking about. You know, the only reality is being able to basically prescribe what truth is. And the challenge though, and I've become even less concerned about that as a problem too, because...

Brandon Gentile (13:40.208)

Thank you.

Svetski (13:57.226)

You know, normies are just going to believe what they're told anyway. And whether they're going to believe what they're told from chat, GPT or from Google or from the TV, um, or for whatever stupid influence that they follow on Instagram or Twitter. Um, they're just going to believe the same shit anyway. So like, you can't save the normies. Um, if anything, I've started to believe that the

ChatGPT and Gemini and all the wokeness that is embedded in these AIs is actually going to be a net benefit for us because we humans who have agency, like the player characters, right, the real people, we're actually going to just be ourselves and prosper while the rest of the NPCs are going to be non-differentiable from the bots.

and they'll sort of all dissolve into a grey goo. And quite frankly, fuck them, I don't care. Like, they can be as grey gooey as they wanna be. Like I'm just, yeah, I'm just no longer concerned that it's a massive risk. I mean, maybe, maybe you could argue at some point.

All right, the regulators and the powers that the mandate the use of approved language models for anything that you're trying to build. And, you know, could that impede people with a brain? Possibly. Do I still use chat GPT?

Not a lot, honestly, like where I was using it almost daily six months ago. I'd be lucky to use it once a week now, maybe once every two weeks, um, for just a random, like faster search, which then I go and validate on Google anyway, and do a bit more digging. Um, but beyond that, like.

Brandon Gentile (15:29.675)

Mm-hmm.

Brandon Gentile (15:35.6)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Svetski (15:40.19)

I almost feel sorry for people who have transformed their entire life to make it dependent on chat GPT, for example, because, you know, one, they're losing their own mental faculties, they can't think for themselves. And two, they're just getting garbage back anyway. So it's like, I don't know. Anyway, like I've sort of my thinking is constantly evolving on this. And I really, where I was ringing alarm bells earlier on about the threat, it seems that like the threat is more innocuous than what I originally thought.

Brandon Gentile (16:10.219)

It's fascinating. I mean, obviously people are so just enthralled with it right now. Can you, cause I'm sure there's a lot of people that will listen to this that are older, younger, whatever. Could you just take a minute actually and kind of explain what these large language models, you know, like the pattern recognition, kind of what they are, regurgitating things. Can you kind of go into it, just explaining that so the average person can understand what it is.

Svetski (16:32.886)

Yeah, sure.

The basis of all of it is we figured out how to codify language and the meaning of language in numbers, right? So there's this stuff called vectorization, which is the process of taking words and sentences and associating a vector to it. And a vector is a number, and that number can have multiple dimensions. This is where the mathematics sort of gets a little bit wild. But basically, instead of associating a word based on the letters it has and the number

like cat and hat, you know, to a traditional computer might've been associated. But from a meaning standpoint, a cat and a hat are completely separate. So in a vector space, a cat and a hat will be very distant from each other. But a cat and a dog...

Brandon Gentile (17:07.209)

Mm.

Svetski (17:21.566)

which is spelled differently, will be much closer to each other. Right. So in the process of figuring out this sort of this vectorization, this transformation of words, sentences, letters, meaning and everything like that, into meaning represented by numbers, we've managed to then build AI models, which shouldn't even be called AI, like machine learning models, or statistical probabilistic models that can

basically do sentence complete, which is essentially what language models are. They are, they are sophisticated auto complete, uh, where you provide an input and it then provides an output, uh, that is, uh, semantically related. So in other words, it's got, it's associated or it understands, and I say that in air quotes, it understands, uh, the meaning associated to what you're asking and it'll give you an output that is,

Brandon Gentile (18:11.595)

Thanks for watching!

Svetski (18:18.794)

uh, semantically related or related in meaning to what you've asked. Um, and a lot of people, and I was one included in the early days, I thought there was some understanding going on in here. And a lot of people still convinced that, oh, the machine understands. And the more I've dug, the more I realized it's not, it's just the law of large numbers applied to language. Now, that's literally all that's happened, which is

Brandon Gentile (18:29.543)

Mm, yeah.

Svetski (18:42.686)

very different from, oh, the machine is alive. And it's really funny, because it's a classic self-owned by the nerds. The nerds are always like, oh yeah, we're gonna live brain in a vat. Oh yeah, we're gonna live a thousand years. Oh yeah, the body doesn't matter. Oh yeah, we're just like, you know.

According to you, our Harari, we are just biological programs with no soul and no agency and all this sort of shit, whatever he says. Right. And the funny thing about this self-own is all of these idiots were literally convinced they were like utterly convinced. There's a whole book about it called Superintelligence that if we crack language, we have cracked general intelligence, which means general intelligence to super intelligence is a really small gap and the machines take over. Well, we cracked language 18 months ago.

and nobody gives a fuck and humans still run the world. So it's like, it's literally classic self-own. They over-project everything because they don't understand the nature of humanities far more complex than just sort of these computational elements. So really all we've done in the AI space is we've discovered that a large part of language has to do with patterns and probability. And we figured out how to compute those patterns and probability and apply it to language.

Brandon Gentile (19:36.05)

Mm-hmm.

Svetski (19:55.49)

That's it. It's not magic. It's not, you know, I would say it's rocket science because it is mathematically really sophisticated and it is incredible, but it's not alive. It's not magical. It doesn't have a spirit, doesn't have a soul. And it's definitely not as doomsday or as utopian as people try to make it sound.

Brandon Gentile (20:20.991)

So Spirit of Satoshi, what are you guys hoping to achieve? What's the end goal, the end state for this? Obviously we just did the collaborative between Spirit of Satoshi and Bitcoin Trading Cards, got a bunch of packs laying around here. And I know, I know, so we gotta get to, we were just talking about that the other day actually. So get you some, but we just launched this, what was this, two weeks ago.

Svetski (20:39.306)

Awesome, I haven't even seen them yet, can't wait.

Brandon Gentile (20:49.995)

something like that right around there. And this effort, they're beautiful. Actually, I'll share it here in a second here, just what it looks like, just so people can see. But what is the end goal of Spiros Atochi? What you guys are trying to do to, is it getting it out to everybody? Obviously, you start small and building it. I think you walk me through the end goal, but also even the complexity. Like there's, I was watching when you were on stage, I think it was down in Brazil. And there's...

It takes time for this thing to learn, you know, for you to input the things and for it to grow over time as you're doing it, as the human is doing. So walk me through, I guess, the mission where you guys are kind of going long term and what the complexities are that you guys are dealing with.

Svetski (21:32.27)

Sure. So if I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say that we want it to be a conversational interface for all the Bitcoin content and knowledge out there. Right. And that's probably the easiest, simplest way to define.

the essence, the raison d'etre for why this thing exists. Whether there's a commercial application for that long term, that remains to be seen. I think maybe the commercial element is some sort of embedding in Bitcoin products and services so that it's there as an education system or whatever. I mean, partnering with people like you guys to, you know.

to kind of bring the Spirit of Satoshi character to life. We've done this 21 questions book, which we're gonna do a whole series of these books. So we've got like 21 questions, the original edition. And that's like, we took out of the thousands of questions that we trained Satoshi on, we sort of distilled it down to the 21 most pertinent, common and important for people as they start their bit coin joining. And we answer those 21 questions with both the AI and also...

a bunch of different Bitcoin thinkers, right? So Toma, Natalie Brunel.

Pablo's in there, Max Killebrand, Giacomo Zucco, like all awesome thinkers like Knut Zwangholm, all the sort of people. And we, and you know, what that means is we're trying to find applications for the AI itself outside of just it being a chatbot that lives on the internet, right? So like a chatbot that lives on the internet, people will go, they might spend some sats and ask it a couple of questions. Happy days, that's fine. But like...

Svetski (23:14.742)

Beyond that, what can we do? And that's the big challenge to figure out, right?

is how do we monetize it? And is there a real monetization angle here? Because one thing I will say as a side note is no one's really cracked the code of how to monetize in the AI space yet. A lot of it is just the money losing endeavor basically. And part of that is like the mechanics are very different to traditional software companies. Traditional software company, you build a piece of software and your marginal cost of adding a user is basically zero. In AI, your marginal cost of adding a user

Brandon Gentile (23:37.792)

Yeah.

Svetski (23:51.14)

more than what they'll pay you because you have inference costs. So like the business model hasn't really been figured out. And that's why like Chad GPT, it has the most subscriptions by far, but they lose money every single day. The subscriptions do not cover what it costs to operate the thing. So it's an interesting place, but to come back to it, if you can have this utilities archive, this conversational archive of...

Brandon Gentile (24:05.611)

Wow.

Svetski (24:16.854)

Bitcoin content and knowledge or string economic knowledge, whatever, like within that frame of reference. Could you embed that across applications? Probably. Could it be a place like could it act as a, you know, a Nostra system or a Twitter character or something like that, that people can interact with and get some, you know, real information data from? Sure, I think so. I think there is something there and we will continue to pursue that. But it's by...

I don't think as I did in the beginning that there's a huge like massive business here. I think it's more going to be like a public utility that we make for the Bitcoin community. We'll open source it and we just give people access to it and say that, hey, we went out and that's what we went out to build and we built that.

Brandon Gentile (25:05.611)

That's so cool. I'm going to share this other, uh, this other one too of the site as well. What was your, uh, impressions of the cards? I'm like you said, I'm, I know you don't have any physically, but when you saw the mockups and kind of what they are looking like, I think Aladdin actually just sent them to the printer, I believe in the last week or got them out to the printer. So, um, those will be coming soon physically. What were your first impressions when you saw those? I'm sure, I'm guessing you were like,

Svetski (25:33.474)

gorgeous

Brandon Gentile (25:34.867)

Yeah, I know. When I think of a year and a half ago, I was telling you when this first guy going, I was just, I didn't know what to expect. I saw him like, dang, what was your first impression?

Svetski (25:42.942)

Yeah, basically the same thing. I saw him, I was like, damn, he's sexy. You know, because I'd heard about the trading cards, like through another friend and he mentioned and I was like, okay, that's interesting. But like I didn't. I didn't get it. And when I caught up with Aladdin, exactly. Yeah. And we started digging, we started understanding, well, like, oh crap, there's something really cool here. And yeah, I mean, that's obviously how the collapse sort of initiated. So, yeah, I'm totally glad we did that.

Brandon Gentile (25:56.787)

Yeah, you don't get it right away.

Brandon Gentile (26:11.375)

That's so cool. How did you guys get together? Who was coming to who? I don't even remember how that came about.

Svetski (26:18.793)

Ahem.

Honestly, I don't entirely remember either. Old age, bro, it's getting to me. It was, yeah, who knows? It was one of us, it could have been me that approached Aladdin with like a brain fart of an idea to do like a single card. And then I think it was Aladdin who counted and said, no, let's do a whole set and then do like some special edition things that you guys can put on a crowdfund. So yeah, I think that's sort of how it all came together.

Brandon Gentile (26:23.58)

Yeah.

Brandon Gentile (26:27.391)

Yeah.

Brandon Gentile (26:50.291)

Very cool. Cool. We will kind of transition into some other, you know, I guess, not current events, but kind of current events, to things that are going on. You mentioned something earlier. By the way, I'll put the links down here. Obviously, I showed the crowdfunding, so everyone can see that. We'll put that up there in Geyser and everything, get the links to all that so people can see the collaboration there, and then Spiros Atochi, obviously, the site and everything. So people...

will be able to easily go to that. You mentioned earlier the. I don't know if it's a wealth gap specifically, but it means it made I forgot exactly how you said it, but it made me think of the wealth gap and a lot of people, me included. I used to think in a way like, oh, this will decrease the wealth gap and things of that nature. But again, to the 80 20 rule, like you kind of mentioned earlier, this the strong should get stronger, you know, in a merit based society. You know, really, at the end of the day, when I first came to Bitcoin, I was like, oh, this will help kind of decrease that. But in a way.

Svetski (27:20.878)

Appreciate it.

Brandon Gentile (27:48.615)

it's going to promote obviously more efficiency and there are going to be people that increase their power in a sense in a way, but that's not a bad thing, obviously. So this is something you've been kind of talking about, not a lot of people talk about it in the space. So I'd love for you to kind of go into this a bit and elaborate on why this is actually important to even see an increase in the wealth gap, but still that bottom is coming up exponentially faster than anything we see in the Fiat system. So can you elaborate on that?

Svetski (27:59.239)

Mm-hmm.

Svetski (28:16.678)

Yeah, it's a take that funny enough rubs just a lot of people the wrong way because I think it's and it's not just an everyday take, right? It's not like we've been brainwashed with sort of liberalism for the last 300 years and it's basically in our epigenetics now. Like we, you know, people feel guilty about being better.

people feel guilty about excelling. And we've transformed our civilization from a shame-oriented one to a guilt-oriented one. And a shame-oriented society is one in which your peers point out what is wrong and shame you to some degree into making it better. And it might not be nice, it might not be pretty and all this sort of stuff, but generally what happens is it forges stronger characters. Whereas a guilt-based one,

guilty and it removes the shame from the people who are either being lazy, who are being fat, who are not doing anything with their lives etc and we create acceptance for that and slowly by slowly the people who do want to put the effort, who do want to you know work hard or you know look after themselves or build stuff and everything they feel guilty so they start lowering their standards and then the people who are accepted for having low standards in the first place maintain low standards and everything starts to descend.

in society instead of ascending. You know, you get an ascended society, one that is shame-based, you get a descended society, one that is guilt-based. And that comes down to kind of the orientation around, you know, the gaze of like where people are going. So are you orienting society for equality or for excellence? Because they're diametrically opposed.

Brandon Gentile (29:59.332)

Mm-hmm.

Svetski (30:09.63)

You can't get equality by rising people up because people rise up at different levels. So you'll always You know not get equality, but you can get equality by cutting everyone down to the same size, right? Because you don't have to like Deal with the fact that people are different you just cut everyone down give her on the same thing and that's essentially, you know how communism and all these sort of things work, right and doing that Actually creates a situation where in fact

everything starts to spiral downwards. You get what's called the oppression Olympics, as I call it, which is, um, you know, everyone is like more oppressed and like, you know, Oh, so, you know, well, you know, I've got this problem. So, you know, feel sorry for me. And so I was like, that guy's got a bigger problem than I do. I better create a bigger problem for myself so that I get more handouts. So then, you know, like everyone starts to have like this sort of like victim mentality and we sort of, we, we bring ourselves down and, um, and I think. No one likes to.

admit it, but we all know it's true is, is wealth and everything else that is worth having long term compounds. We talk about it in a very non politically charged dimension, which is in making money, you know, so compound interests, right, but everything you do compounds, knowledge, your health, you know, your, your money, your balance, your, your genetics, like everything compounds and

By definition, if someone is making good decisions on a consistent basis and they're compounding and they're getting stronger, they're getting more powerful, they're channeling more energy, they are going to accelerate away from the person who's not making those decisions and who is...

behaving lazily or slothfully or poorly, or they're not like compounding their wealth. Like that is gonna happen. And that is why everything in civilization, everything in existence ends up in sort of this 80-20 skew.

Svetski (32:10.174)

It also has a self-correcting mechanism because you can't have a perfect score of getting things right. You know what I mean? So you can't compound to eternity. Otherwise, everything would end up becoming infinite and it just doesn't work that way. So there's always some sort of the story arc shifts, the energy of the time shifts, the...

Brandon Gentile (32:16.587)

Thank you.

Svetski (32:33.206)

the trend changes and you end up getting like a rebalancing and then you get a new 80-20 that emerges and forms up somewhere else, right? And people sort of like they over project how like natural inequality can work. They're like, oh yeah, but you'll end up with a single monopoly on everything. And it's like, well.

We live in a fear society which fundamentally creates monopolies artificially. And despite that, we still don't have a pure one world government and one company that runs and does everything. So it's like monopolies are really fucking hard to maintain. Right. So it's like, they don't just happen naturally. You do get a natural 80 20 split. You do get aggregation around good decision-making. You do get an enhancement of power, energy, strength, wealth, et cetera, around, you

20% who make the best decisions. But there's some dynamism involved in there, which naturally rebalances itself in a marketplace in a society in a civilization. And the worst thing we can do is what we're doing today in civilization, which is, which is why we don't have an 80 20, we have a 99 one is that

those who make initially good decisions and start to compound their wealth, compound their power, etc. When they make bad decisions, they're close enough to the monetary spigot so that the cost of the poor decision is then socialized on

you know, initially it was 80 20. So then the 20% worked out how to socialize their losses with the 80%. So then it became 10%, 90%, then it became 95, five, then it became 98, two, then it's 99, one, and sort of like, you just keep, you know, whoever's like, it's this game of like musical chairs almost, right? And it's like, just dump the losses on the, on the muppets, um, on the rest of us. And, you know, sort of, uh, privatize whatever games you can. And that creates a really unstable.

Brandon Gentile (34:28.424)

Thank you.

Svetski (34:39.092)

system and that is only possible when you can you know steal without anybody watching right so anyway I'm going off on all sorts of tangents here but fundamentally speaking you want 80-20 you want inequality you want inequality to be dynamic you want the focus and the

the gaze and the orientation to be around excellence, not equality. And you'll naturally get a more healthy system and the healthier the system, the better it is for everybody. And that's sort of what you want.

Brandon Gentile (35:14.599)

You said, and I have all kinds of notes I've taken just over the years, over the last few months of just interviews you've done. And I always try to keep good notes really on everyone's interviews. Um, it's just kind of cataloging and, and w which is the linguistic, like the things that you're doing, obviously writing things. Many of us, I know taking notes and notepads or note, uh, apps, you know, just filled with unbelievable things, which is kind of coming full circle to the spirit of Satoshi thing of helping people, uh, build this truth model.

And people can go to that site actually that we showed and again, links to that, to help build that model again, it's open source. So again, another plug for that, cause that's, that's how we're going to build these things with the notes, with the, with the recordings, all the things that we have. So again, on that, this power is a function of responsibility. Again, it's something that you've been talking about recently as well. And the measure of the man, the Plato quote, kind of paraphrase, the measure of a man is what he does when he has power and, or, or character being, you know, character, what you're doing behind closed doors, the type of mentality. And.

Svetski (36:06.847)

Mm-hmm.

Brandon Gentile (36:12.011)

Power doesn't corrupt. I mean, Fiat, you just touched on this. It's Fiat incentivizes the bad and weak actors to do bad things and then rewards them with that false power. You see like the elites or the honorable so-and-so when they're going to Congress to testify here in America. And it's like this false sense of like power or structure, like they're above us when in reality, it's completely flipped. I think that's fascinating. Like this is such a fascinating talk that just, society is just, I think, getting ready to maybe have. What do you think?

Svetski (36:44.007)

I mean, there's been a palpable shift in the energy and I spoke about this, I wrote an essay at the beginning of the year.

about that, like there's a new energy is rising. And you see that with the Malays and the Burkhalas of the world. And I really tried to push that point home at the panel I did in Madera just a couple of weeks ago, or a week ago actually, it hasn't even been a couple of weeks. And everyone sort of came up to me afterwards saying, oh, that was the best panel of the whole event, blah, blah. It's like, at least someone's saying something different for once, because everyone like, I was laughing about this like.

I want to do just a meme talk at the next Bitcoin conference, just call Bitcoin platitudes and just say shit like Bitcoin is energy money. Yay. Let everyone clap and then just say like, we need more women in Bitcoin. Then just let everyone clap. Yeah. You know, and then we'll just say something like, you know, Bitcoin is for the people. Yay. You know, it's like.

Brandon Gentile (37:31.743)

Hey, Brit.

you've ever seen that it's I don't know if it's over by you, but in America, the family guy Seth McFarlane, the family guy, I'm like when I was in college 20 years ago watching that and then like Lois, the girl or lady was running for mayor and then they had her go on stage and she just kept like saying 911 and people kept cheering harder and harder. She's like 11. They're like, yeah, just kept doing it.

Svetski (37:52.206)

Okay.

Svetski (37:57.07)

Dude, that is literally what's happening in the Bitcoin space at the moment. It's driving me fucking crazy. And this is why I've sort of, I'm coming out with these unconventional sort of uh, thoughts, which is, Hey, you know, screw all of this, like, Oh, you know, we're here to help the little person. And like, you know, Oh, you know, all, you know, government is evil and let's just, you know, non-aggression principle. It's like, no, fuck that. You know, we, we we've been playing defensive the entire time and yes, you know, Bitcoin is defensive tech.

But that doesn't mean you just like run and hide the whole time. It's like we need to claim back territory. We need to conquer again. We need conquest. And, you know, people like, Oh, you know, that, that is bad. That is evil. You know, like colonizer and everything. It's like, no, well, fuck you. Like someone is going to colonize. Someone is going to conquer. Someone is going to expand their territory. And

it's either going to be the parasites or it's going to be those of us who have a healthy relationship with power, with strength, with energy. And we take on the role because the biggest thing we've done is we've started to believe shit like power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. You know, if I like

The amount of, and like we laugh about it now because we've got some rapport, but I guarantee you, I used to say that all the fucking time. Every Bitcoiner at some point in time has said that. And I would argue that 99% of Bitcoiners still believe that. I even hear the term, like I was just thinking about it the other day, speaking truth to power.

That implies that power is not truthful, right? So it's like, it's even in our fucking language, we sort of have this really bad relationship with power. Exactly, yeah, we have a completely inverted, retarded relationship to the concept of power, which when you think about it, and this, let me just, for the Bitcoiners listening to this, most Bitcoiners run around and they talk about proof of work, good, proof of work, yes, proof of work, proof of work. Proof of work is a relationship to energy. It is a...

Brandon Gentile (39:37.515)

weaponization of language.

Svetski (39:59.25)

It is a channeling of energy over time. That is work. Work is energy across time. Power is the same fucking mathematical relationship with energy. It is the capacity to channel energy across time. Proof of work is power. Like in the same sentence, a Bitcoin will tell you proof of work good, power evil. Like it makes no fucking sense. And we need to change our relationship with power because

The biggest lie the devil told you, and I'm just making this up as I go, but the biggest lie the devil told you was that you should, that power is evil, that power corrupts, and that you should abdicate power. Because when you and I abdicated power, positions of power, positions of influence, positions of leadership, we left the vacuum for the parasites to fill. And that's the biggest problem today. Is that...

these structures that exist.

Svetski (41:02.334)

in some capacity will always exist. You know, with the internet and with sort of Bitcoin, the structures will evolve and mold, but we'll always have hierarchies. And in every hierarchy, hierarchies are power oriented. You have more influence at the top of the hierarchy. And that is not a bad thing. It's a bad thing if you allow the parasites to enter that position, because then they degrade everything.

And that's essentially what is happening today. And that's the root of the cancer that we're facing. And that is why my argument is that Bitcoiners and non-Bitcoiners who are men of character need to don the responsibility of wielding and channeling that energy, that power, that strength. Because if they don't do it, the scumbags will.

Brandon Gentile (41:54.567)

Yeah, man, it makes me think of so many things, Alex, like it's, you look at like, again, American football, you look at American baseball, you look at American hockey here, or whatever it is. And you've got leaders all over the place. They just aren't in politics anymore, because not incentivized to be in politics. I mean, what better example of this world we used to have where the leaders went to the military, they went to these places of power, prestige, and they were men of character, whatever it was. And now those guys are like,

F that I'm out of here. Like why would I go do that? And you have people that don't even, they're the good people, like we said, the politics all the time, like no one wants to go there because whatever, whatever the reason being. So to your point, like that is the answer. It's beautifully said and explained because the average person sees that like cliche almost of like, well, you know, the good people don't go there type of thing and the mentality and well, it's like, well, that's why that's exactly why because they're not incentivized. The shitheads are the ones that are incentivized to be the ones.

corrupting things and selling their soul. The good people are like, nah, I'm good. I don't need to go sell my soul, I'll go do something else. And then we're run by the shitheads. But.

Svetski (42:57.906)

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Exactly. So, you know, I did, there was a great tweet from Elon Musk yesterday about like the night killing the dragon. I don't know if you saw it on Twitter. He kills the dragon looks for the pot of gold and he finds like a, what was it like a sewing machine or something that you know, produces stuff and the night's like, hey, where the fuck's my pot of gold and the, you know, the dragon's dying is like,

It's not the goal that matters. You know, that is the thing that produces the wealth. And, you know, I think a lot of Bitcoin is, you know, also get carried away with this idea of, hey, you know, just buy Bitcoin and sit around and do nothing. Right. And, and, you know, that's not everyone, you know, everyone's out there hustling in whatever capacity, but if we, if we win.

and all the civilization burns down around us. Well, we just had a, you know, what's called a Pyrrhic victory, which means you win, but you didn't fucking win. You know, we will hold all the Bitcoin and our Bitcoin, oops, we will hold all the Bitcoin and our Bitcoin will be worth zero because the civilization is, you know, in ashes. So like, while we are stacking stats, while we're building our Bitcoin balances, while we're claiming this,

property, this immutable property, which is supposed to represent and reflect more accurately real wealth, we actually have to go out there and build fucking real wealth, build businesses, build civilization, build communities, build stuff that the Bitcoin can then reference and measure. And that's how we all become wealthy by creating and having the measurement of what we're creating being accurate and

Svetski (44:39.653)

That's the name of the game, those two things. And we have to build in every single dimension. It's not just private businesses, but we need to influence the next generation. And we need to do that in every way possible.

Brandon Gentile (44:53.343)

I really only said and that's again, let's be as a Toshi Bitcoin trading cards. How are we orange filling people? How are we getting people truth, you know, incepting them, the Trojan horse in different ways? I love that. The the weaponization of language we talked about a little bit ago, kind of circling back to this for a second. The you know, you're saying how Bitcoiners that we get caught sometimes in our humans, right? So we get caught in these patterns, we get caught in these things as a community and the cliches, platitudes. One of them, again, being.

Number go up technology. I mean, really at the end of the day, if you think about it, it's not number go up technology. It's life gets cheaper technology. Or as you said, many times responsibility go up technology. And that's really, I think one of those mindset shifts, those language shifts we need to start using so we're not falling into that trap of weaponization. Because again, a lot of the FUD you get at times is, hey, number go up, like, oh yeah, you moon boys, or, oh, you're gonna be the wealthiest people on earth. And like, there's people that's wealth gap argument and all of these things.

What are your thoughts on just again, like the weaponization of language and us being very careful of how we're using it. It's good at times, like you said, there's the counterintuitive nature of saying polarizing things at times, like you said, kind of flipping this, hey, we need a Bitcoin conquest, but at the same time, you do it to be careful with how you're saying things and falling into kind of the fiat traps. That's probably the best way to say it even.

Svetski (46:11.51)

Yeah, I mean that's... that's hard because...

I mean, particularly the NGU one, I've got a interesting relationship with that one. You know, there's this funny meme, which is, you know, it's this cycle of like, Bitcoin price goes up, friends and family think I'm a genius, Bitcoin price goes down, friends and family think I'm an idiot. Bitcoin price goes up, and it's like sort of like, there's never ending cycle, right? And, you know, NGU works 25% of the time, basically.

Brandon Gentile (46:32.147)

Yeah. Oh, man.

Brandon Gentile (46:40.84)

Right.

Svetski (46:41.302)

because Bitcoin is a seasonal thing and it grows in seasons. So you're right, 25% of the time, the other 75% of the time you're an idiot. And that's fine. I guess the question is like...

Svetski (46:59.346)

Is it a strong enough meme? I think it's the right meme for a particular season. And then in the other part of the season, we just need a different meme. It's not right or wrong. It's about using it appropriately. For many people, the reason we came to Bitcoin was to get rich. And then we found something else. And that like...

It's not, I don't even want to say like, you know, getting rich is a bad thing. It's not a fucking bad thing. Like, um, there's like this sort of idea that people think, Oh, you know, everything that's superficial is bad.

Svetski (47:39.426)

That's true to some degree, but like, if you wanna get to the root of something, if you wanna get to the core of something, like if you wanted to drill to the center of the earth, guess where you have to start? On the surface. Like you need to start with superficial stuff and you need to dig. And the more you dig, the more you find depth and meaning and something more, right? And you know, maybe to a large degree, like,

Svetski (48:07.346)

some people just remain in superficial surface forever. And the few who have the ability to dig beyond the surface, they're the ones that you're actually meant to make friends with and build relationships with, et cetera. And that's essentially what we're finding, I guess, to a large degree in the Bitcoin community is that we're finding kindred spirits, right? As we said at the outset. And, you know, we can't make, not everybody can be a kindred spirit. Not everybody can be, you know, this like,

Renaissance man. But the beauty is that there is a surface and some people remain on the surface, others will go and burrow down, they'll find deeper things and they'll relate about that journey, the deeper things that they find along the way. And, you know, maybe for a large cohort of humanity, the NGU tech is going to be the best way to get them across what we're doing. And for the rest, no, you know, for

you know, the people who have some more depth and who are more curious and who are more interested in the nuance, they might find responsibility, go up technology as the more important thing. Um, but you know, I would venture there's another 80 20 there, right? There'll be 80% that'll do the NGU 20% that will do the RGU. Um, and each one will come with its, um, trade-offs and each one feeds into the other, so it's, it's not right, wrong, good, bad, you know, it's all, it's all necessary.

Brandon Gentile (49:22.143)

and.

Brandon Gentile (49:35.675)

It's a great framing and that's, that's yeah, that's all I'm going to look at it going for because that is like you said, it's seasonal and you have to take out, you know, if you're, if you're going hunting, you're not bringing your fishing pole, you know, you got to use the right weapons at the right times. And that's yeah, I love the way you frame that. So again, the kind of the longest theme of Bitcoin reintroduces responsibility and consequences. Touch on it really quick. Why?

consequences, you know, bad things happening, you know, I guess we'll say for that person or consequences, why is this an important thing for human beings kind of this feedback loop? Why is that important to human humans and learning?

Svetski (50:11.63)

So before we talked about like the dynamic nature of inequality, right? So you want you want you want there to be an opportunity to rise up and the an opportunity to fall, right? And what makes both of those things happen is more good decisions, compounds, good results, and then you get ahead. Bad decisions do two things. One is they keep you down or.

they, if you've made a string of good decisions and you make a bad decision, it'll set you back in a functional world, right? Because that's the diff, like a bad decision is bad because it set you back. Right. So the point of a bad decision is for fucking feedback. Like if you don't have feedback, um, you don't know how to improve. Um, and if you ignore the feedback from the bad decision, um, you don't know what to improve. And.

depending on the mechanism of ignorance, there could come a time where you ignore the bad decision, ignore the bad decision, ignore the bad decision, ignore the bad decision, you never learn, you never learn, you never learn, you never learn. And then at some point, the mechanism that obfuscated the bad decision from the real consequence disappears and you are left with nothing but air underneath you and you make the next bad decision and everything comes crumbling down, which is where we are in civilization at the moment is that...

all of the bad decisions made by the, you know, the parasite ruling class, you and I pay for. So they have no ability, even if we gave them the benefit of the doubt that they were somehow good people, they have no ability to relate the inflation, the increase in prices, the social unrest and all that sort of stuff to their policy decisions, because they're not fucking

paying for anything like always, you know, with the same which is if you want to, like, if politicians had to pay for the programs and social programs, everything that they sort of promote out of their own pocket, I guarantee you, they wouldn't be promoting any of these things, right. So it's like, this is the thing about consequences, like, if I can jump off a cliff dude, and you die on my behalf, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna keep jumping off a cliff. And you know, everybody else dies for me. Like,

Brandon Gentile (52:33.353)

Yep.

Svetski (52:34.094)

The problem is reality doesn't work that way. And the more we create a society in which somebody else puts the bill for somebody else's decision, you just skew things. Like, so people who otherwise need the feedback for the bad decisions they're making, they are robbed of the feedback. And the people who know they're making bad decisions, but do it anyway because they know they can game the system, they just keep...

scamming the system, scamming the system. And when you scan the system, what you're doing is you're scamming everybody who's involved in the system because that's like the only way the system has anything is from the people who are getting scammed, right? So it's a, the economy is a zero sum game. So, you know, like it's all one big shit show and without real consequence, because the thing is, I used to say this more blanket, I used to say, you know, Bitcoin is a reintroduction of economic consequence. And what I realized I was like, okay, that's wrong with one word.

Brandon Gentile (53:10.09)

Yeah.

Svetski (53:29.246)

economic consequence still exists. The problem is, the fear is the, it's socialized economic consequence. Bitcoin is the reintroduction of localized economic consequence. So if you lose your Bitcoin, well, there's no socialization measures to balance it out across everybody else. The consequence was just localized. And that is really, really important because then the individual can adapt their behavior.

Brandon Gentile (53:41.977)

Mm.

Svetski (53:57.846)

And when individuals can adapt their behavior and transform, you get tribes that can adapt and transform. You get communities, you get civilization sort of scales up and grows. So feedback, feedback is the way human beings adapt. Feedback is the way all systems, all living systems adapt and orient. And if you remove the localized consequences, you remove feedback, you remove that loop, and we just get dumber and dumber and dumber. We get weaker and weaker and weaker. And then...

When the mechanism, as I said, that obfuscates this is removed, because it at some point breaks down, you basically wipe out the whole system. And that's, we're close to that now.

Brandon Gentile (54:39.855)

Yeah, yeah. And you touched on that was kind of one of my follow up to that a little bit was yeah, this the elites, you know, quote unquote, the ruling class, we're going to call them trying to eradicate all the bad things from life, right? Like they're trying to do everything to put people in a bubble. And and that's where we are when you have this localized. Again, like even though again, look at America where it was, it was decentralized as 50 states or whatever 13 to now 50. And then it was, hey, if you do something stupid, California does something dumb. Well, the other 49 get to learn from that.

When you don't have that, instead of like, we're all doing it together, like we do in America now, or like you said, if you have the whole tribe, it gets set back instead of one person. Now, instead of one person getting set back and now we all get to learn from that and speed up instead of now you set everyone back. We're trying to make it all. So I love that reframing because that's really important. Like it's a little subtle nuance, but it's man, is it important? So important. So to this point, and I know we're getting towards the end here, what

Svetski (55:30.094)

Totally.

Brandon Gentile (55:37.515)

So, you know, the Uncommunist Manifesto, you wrote that with Mark Moss. What are, give me your quick thoughts on, I just, because I've been thinking about this lately and I haven't read your book in a while. I was right when it came out. I read it, but I've just been thinking of it. Now it's funny that we're here talking about this, but it was just this thought of. Can you have capitalism on a

broken, you know, fiat currency, you know, you need true money, in my opinion, I would love your thoughts on this, because it seems that whenever you have capitalism, and it's on good money, it generally works for as long as you need it to. But then once you deteriorate that foundation of the money, that is the foundation, we devolve into whatever moral relativism, Marxism, etc. I would love to give me some thoughts on that. And let me know how you kind of see that that layer that money layer and how it kind of goes from this pendulum from capitalism, and then you break it and it goes to chaos.

Svetski (56:26.402)

Totally. So I've been that specific thought I've been thinking more about recently. And I've this is not in the book, actually, but it's an epiphany that I've had recently is in the book, we frame capitalism as a as an organic process. Right. So it's not it's not a political modality. It is just look, capital is things and stuff and energy and time basically. So resources, energy, time and capitalism is the process of using capital efficiently and effectively.

And then we make the argument that, hey, well, lo and behold, all living species do that. They use their time, their energy and whatever resources they can harness. They use that the more effectively and efficiently they use it, the longer they survive. And therefore every living species is involved in the game of capitalism. Right. Humans just, we play far more complex games so we can, you know, do this at much greater scale than, you know, say a beaver or a fish. Right. So anyway, what would have come to a

realize that there is capitalism, the process, but then there's also capitalism, the political modality, because one thing we can't escape is the fact that we are social creatures, and there is more than one of us. And because there is more than one of us, because we're social creatures, there will always be some sort of governance structure that emerges, which then leads to the question of what should that governance structure looks like? And the answer to that, I believe,

has to do with the system that maps or that allows as best as possible the capitalist process to occur. And if that political modality you want to call it capitalism, sure. Capitalism, the political modality, is the one that allows for the natural process of capitalism to function. If that's capitalism, then fantastic.

You can only have that. You can only have that with a functional feedback mechanism and a functional language of value, which is another way of saying a functional money. If you don't have that, you don't get a natural process. Like the natural process starts to break down. So as much as you want to build a framework that emulates capitalism, as soon as you start printing money,

Svetski (58:53.674)

you're distorting the signaling mechanism inside the system. So whatever governance structure you sort of apply on society thereafter starts to break down, doesn't work. And yeah. So, so basically you, you nailed it with what you said in the beginning. You know, I guess it was a leading question, but, um, you, you cannot emulate natural processes. Uh, when you have a, you know, a governance structure that is filled with, um,

with basically artificial inflation. And that's essentially what a fiat money is. It artificially distorts the system in such a way that it can never map to the natural process that is capitalism. And you get a breakdown.

Brandon Gentile (59:40.171)

Do you think that it's like you said, it's always some governance structure, you know, again, we're humans. Do you think it's capitalism in the future still just on good money and Bitcoin? Or do you think it's volunteerism? Like, what are your thoughts into the future? And then kind of leads in my other question, which is the 60 years, it's all hyper Bitcoinization, you know, thing that everyone had a real big problem with over the last year, as well, you coming out and saying that. What are your thoughts of what is this governing?

governance structure really look like in the future and your thoughts obviously into the thoughts behind, I guess, the hyper Bitcoinization decades from now.

Svetski (01:00:14.212)

Mm-hmm.

I mean, I probably have the most triggering view on this, which is I think we're gonna move back to the age of feudalism. I think feudalism is great. I think it's the most functional method of operation. And people once again have been brainwashed to think that feudalism was somehow bad or evil. We have feudalism today, it's just not called that. And it's just an ugly form of feudalism because we have less classes. But the reality of the fact is people,

uh kind of layer themselves in different classes anyway um and feudalism just made those classes clear and realized that different rights and responsibilities came with different classes um and you know so if you were a warrior or a knight in the feudal system you had more rights than the peasant but you also had way more responsibility because when the uh

Brandon Gentile (01:00:51.275)

Mm-hmm.

Svetski (01:01:14.23)

the enemy came and attacked, it wasn't a peasant that was going to go out and fight, it was the knight's job to go out and protect. So, you know, there is a functional hierarchy that emerges out of feudalism. The difference being because we live in the commercial age and the digital age and the nomad age and all this sort of stuff, we'll probably have somewhat of a more meritocratically, commercially, capitalistically oriented feudalism, which will mean

more permeability between classes. And that's a good thing because what you'll get is beyond just the class that you're born in, you'll be able to sort of migrate between it. And sometimes that migration won't be the right thing. Sometimes some people just have a natural, you know, like I can't imagine the kind of artistry that would sort of be evident in the world today.

had we not taken kids, for example, who have a predisposition for art and ram them into a fucking school system and try and teach them physics and math and whatever other bullshit they're teaching kids for 12 or 16 years now in school, right? So someone who could have been an artist who was born to a parent who was an artist and he had sort of the genes and the predisposition for that instead of going down that path where, you know.

that they flourished in life. They've been taught that, hey, you know, we're all the same and we all deserve the same opportunity. So here, 12 years of your fucking life down the toilet doing stuff that you didn't wanna do in the first place. And then they discover they're an artist when they're 35 and it's too late and they're already old and pissed off now. So it's like, you know, this is why we don't have Renaissance art anymore, right? Like, so, you know, the people who built these cathedrals, it was father passed down to son, you know.

Brandon Gentile (01:02:55.595)

Yeah. Yeah.

Svetski (01:03:01.078)

became father passed down to son became father passed down to son, right? So that class of people, the artisans built these things. And then there was a class of people who are the patrons, you know, the benefactors of these things, and they passed down the wealth and they, they made that possible. So to kind of tie it back into what I think the future will end up looking like is I think we'll have, you know, meritocratic capitalistic like feudalism where we'll have many more territories than we'll have nation states.

today and the territories will have to basically find their own balance of what is.

Svetski (01:03:42.954)

what is an economy and a diseconomy of scale? Because at some point, a territory gets too large where it's not economically viable anymore and things have a diseconomy of scale. But finding where that balance is, is gonna be the game for future leaders. And the size of the territory in terms of population, in terms of geographic size, is gonna be dependent on multiple factors. Culture, the people, the terrain, is it flat?

Brandon Gentile (01:03:57.131)

Mm-hmm.

Svetski (01:04:12.03)

Is it mountainous? Is it cold? Is it hot? What is the temperature variance? Like all of these sort of things will come into play. And we, you know, hopefully over the next 50, 100, 200 years, we'll end up with these different micro nations, hopefully. And the leadership structure of those micro nations, I believe will be more CEO king-like. So you'll have this sort of re-emergence of key figures who are leaders in that place. That doesn't mean we won't have republics as well. I think we'll start to look a lot more like, you know,

medieval Europe where you had kingdoms and you had republics like say you had Venice as a republic, you know, general as a republic, but then you had kingdoms, you know, like all like the Florentines with the Medici's and everything who, you know, they were the sort of the people who basically backed all of the Da Vinci's and everything like that to produce all the beautiful art that we go and visit today. So anyway, I think that's how civilization is going to transform.

Brandon Gentile (01:04:44.299)

Mm-hmm.

Svetski (01:05:07.806)

I don't know the steps. I don't know exactly what it's going to look like. You know, this is this is emergent and you can't predict emergent phenomena. But I truly fundamentally believe the democratic nation state is an aberration. I think it's it is something that was only made possible because we had to go through the fiat experiment. And that's not to say that we're ever going to miss the fiat experiment. It's just what humanity had to go through. And you know, the

The game that made the most sense on the fiat experiment was to build large nation states that could justify printing money and taxing you to fucking death, right? So these are uneconomic, large scale nation states that were only possible because we could run out of fiat standard. And it all happened accidentally. It was just the incentives that emerged and oriented as this whole fucking experiment of life and existence happened. But we are in the end stages of that.

And with the existence of something like Bitcoin, I truly believe the fabric of civilization is going to change and it's going to look very different 100 years from now than it does now.

Brandon Gentile (01:06:10.891)

So in kind of wrapping here, I got one more quick question and then a little word association for you to wrap. Do you think we will look back 100 years from now, this is something I've been thinking about now for maybe six months, but like 100 years from now, it just really to me feels like people will look back and be like, these people are living through a modern dark age. And like to the average person now, it's like, what are you talking about? Especially in the West. It's like, what do you mean we're in a dark age? To me,

I look at them like, well, we're killing our children inside of us. We're killing ourselves and we're sedating ourselves to death, medicating ourselves to death. I mean, you go on and on and on. And it just looked at to me, it feels like people don't look back and be like, what were these people doing? Yeah.

Svetski (01:06:54.946)

I mean, all I can say is I agree. What more can I say? Like our descendants are gonna look back and be like, the hell are these idiots doing, locking themselves up in a room for two weeks or for two years basically, over a what? A flu? Who? What? Like our ancestors are rolling in their graves and our descendants are like, who are not born yet are like looking at us from heaven or the galaxies or wherever they are at the moment in the soul dimension saying, you absolute ass clowns. Wake up and...Grow up.

Brandon Gentile (01:07:26.411)

Wild, absolutely wild. To end here, a new segment sponsored by Bitcoin Trading Cards. So we're a little word association. Just give you a word and give me, you know, as quick as you can, thought, I've got about 15 of them in there or something like that. So we'll rock through them before we end. So let's do this. Separation of money and state.

Svetski (01:07:39.758)

Oh shit, this is gonna be fun. Okay. Mm.

Brandon Gentile (01:07:50.251)

Mark Zuckerberg.

Svetski (01:07:52.343)

Lizard

Brandon Gentile (01:07:55.371)

Satoshi Nakamoto.

Svetski (01:07:58.954)

Greatness.

Brandon Gentile (01:08:00.651)

Altcoins.

Svetski (01:08:02.478)

Shitcoins.

Brandon Gentile (01:08:04.267)

ESG and DEI.

Svetski (01:08:07.518)

Death.

Brandon Gentile (01:08:09.739)

Writing.

Svetski (01:08:12.479)

Thinking, let's say that.

Brandon Gentile (01:08:18.283)

Shitposting.

Svetski (01:08:20.511)

Fun

Brandon Gentile (01:08:23.083)

Hyper Bitcoinization.

Svetski (01:08:25.452)

Coming soon.

Brandon Gentile (01:08:27.403)

Citadels.

Svetski (01:08:29.543)

Future civilizations.

Brandon Gentile (01:08:33.098)

Wizards.

Svetski (01:08:35.766)

Ooh, retards was the one that came to me straight away. Damn, that one's changed.

Brandon Gentile (01:08:43.691)

AI.

Svetski (01:08:45.76)

Wizard of Oz.

Brandon Gentile (01:08:53.387)

Capitalism.

Svetski (01:08:55.498)

Close to beauty.

Brandon Gentile (01:08:59.627)

Bitcoin or Freedom Maximalist.

Svetski (01:09:03.615)

Bitcoin or freedom maximalist? Which one?

Brandon Gentile (01:09:05.035)

Let's go freedom maximalist.

Svetski (01:09:07.695)

I'm gonna say naive.

Brandon Gentile (01:09:10.826)

Hmm. Let's go Bitcoin maximalist.

Svetski (01:09:14.343)

Also somewhat naive.

Brandon Gentile (01:09:18.986)

Responsibility.

Svetski (01:09:22.07)

The right thing to be a maximalist about.

Brandon Gentile (01:09:26.187)

Power.

Svetski (01:09:27.924)

Beauty.

Brandon Gentile (01:09:31.211)

energy.

Svetski (01:09:33.41)

Power.

Brandon Gentile (01:09:35.211)

Bitcoin Trading Cards.

Svetski (01:09:37.47)

Very cool

Brandon Gentile (01:09:39.467)

The Spirit of Satoshi.

Svetski (01:09:41.982)

Experiment.

Brandon Gentile (01:09:45.547)

Love it. Alex, appreciate you coming on. You passed the test. You passed the word association test at the end. So thank you so much, brother. This is an absolute blast. We'll have to do it again at some point. Talk about some of the other stuff you have going on, possible collaborations there. That would be an absolute blast. These cards turned out phenomenal too. Obviously they just look gorgeous. So man, where can people find you? Yeah.

Svetski (01:09:51.51)

Amazing, amazing. 100%.

Thank you, man. That was awesome. Really appreciate it. People can find me. If they're just typing svetzky.info, S-V-E-T-S-K-I.info. It's like got my link tree with all the fucking links of everything. And if anyone wants to be triggered, they can go and read the Nietzsche article, which is the top one on my link tree. You and I touched on a couple of the points there. But yeah, I promise you it'll challenge your thinking and it'll challenge sort of the general platitudes that get thrown around.

space and in the broader space. But yeah, my Twitter is in there, everything is in there. If you want to just link there and connect with me, reach out, say hi, whatever, always get people reaching out and my DMs are open. I try to get back to everyone as best as I can.

Brandon Gentile (01:10:52.747)

Well, no one can not say that you don't challenge popular opinion. Let's just say that. But again, I do truly appreciate you because you do push the narrative forward and expand. I guess you expand the context. I guess maybe better than quite near anybody, I guess, in the Bitcoin space. So appreciate you, brother. And thank you so much for coming on. Being a playable character, we need them.

Svetski (01:11:09.902)

Appreciate it. Thanks man. Appreciate it. Thank you.

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