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Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitco.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be. Stand at the precipice. Gold running to 4,000. Bitcoin cooling off after hitting a new all time high. The debasement trade is on. AI is taking over the world. Or is it sitting down with Alex Betsky to solve all the world's problems again? It's been a while, dude.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Yeah, we solved the world's problems like what was it, a year ago, 18 months ago? Now we've got new problems to deal with. So here we are again.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah, a lot has changed and we were just riffing on AI. Is it hype? Overhype? Is there something There is the way it's being applied, the way it will ultimately be applied in terms of bringing the most utility and productivity to the world. Where are we in the cycle? As somebody who has been toying around with it for quite a long time now.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Yeah, I think, I don't think my opinions changed since we, we finished up and open source the spirit satoshi stuff. My opinion remains that it's a tool. It's very much like the tractor or, you know, the, the PC, the laptop, whatever. It's, I think where I've always diverged with a lot of the overhype or hype in general is that it's some sort of, you know, second coming of God or some sort of sentient being that's gonna take over the world and all this sort of stuff. I've always felt like that was, you know, the nerd's wet dream, you know, like overblown kind of like eschatological desire to see the circuits take over the world and to prove all the religious people wrong that, you know, God can be created in the, in the circuit. So I've always felt like there was a, there was a strange sort of desire for that that was completely logical. And we might have discussed this last time, it's been so long, but I know I've riffed with someone about the fact that intelligence, or the concept of general intelligence is just infinite. And what we have with the breakthrough with LLMs has been specialized intelligence around the reproduction of patterns linguistically first and now in applications like video. But by no means is this anywhere near general intelligence, nor is it anywhere near sentience, which is further down the track. So there was. I shared a tweet with you now from Devin Erickson and a couple other people who sort of like pointing at this, which is, hey, this is a great tool. It can be used effectively. Although, as with all tools, it's quite hard to be used effectively. Most people just use it poorly and they just get slop. And as we're seeing, the whole world is sort of. Or the whole online world is just being filled with more and more and more slop. But if used effectively, you can create quite cool things with it. I know, for example, I'm fathered now to a newborn and the little guy was sneezing the other day. And the first thing we did was we just asked ChatGPT, hey, you know, what should we do? Should we get like some saline solution or anything like that? What, like, what do we do? And we got some good feedback. So for, like, for that kind of stuff, it's a super breakthrough. Also for things like the video that you guys did for the opportunity cost calculator or the opportunity cost app, like, that was fucking brilliant, man. So for that stuff, fundamentally, it's, it's great. But does that mean that this is going to end all the jobs and replace all the human beings and give us some sort of sentient being? No, like that. It's just. And I think people have sort of slowly come to that conclusion themselves, instinctively. Because, you know, you had GPT3, GPT4, and people like, oh, yeah, by the time we get to GPT5, this thing's going to be like, God, and GPT6, it's going to be running the world. And here we are. GPT 5 is not really any different than 4. You know, we sort of had that jump between 3 and 4, but since then, you know, everything's kind of tapered off and all of the different models are kind of, you know, the same. The big guys, whether it's Grok, GPT, Gemini, they all sort of like function the same. So I feel like we've hit a ceiling there. So, yeah, that's my. That's sort of my thoughts off the cuff.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah, I completely agree because it's funny making these videos. It's people. And we've had a bunch of people come to us like, how are you doing this? What is the secret sauce? It's like there is no secret sauce. It actually does take hard work, like the amount of iterations you have to run through with the generations because you understand that the LLMs are actually not smart and do not. They're not intelligent. You have to literally hand hold them and format things in a certain way. You have to bring the context of a cinematographer and director and understand how to prompt that. Like, it's not easy. We have a bunch of people in our circle saying we're gonna go do this and it's. We're gonna create similar memes and short films, whatever you want to call them. And it's like, all right, good luck. Because it takes us like a week. The last one we just did took 55 hours of work from storyboarding, scripting and then iterating on generations. And it is simply just a tool that allows us and enables us to do things that would have cost us tens of thousands of dollars. And now they cost $5,000 in labor and minimal cost of credits right now, which you put up another tweet from Zoomer. It's like, how sustainable is the business model for these large language models with how much they're charging customers right now? I think we're probably in a very unique and anomalous points in the cost curve for the end customer right now where they're just essentially trying to subsidize this with loss leading by making tokens super cheap when that we know that the power, that the cost of the power it takes to actually produce the outputs is far exceeds and tech and the hardware as well far exceeds what they're charging us.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
This, this is such a good point. So actually I. Around, around the time when we were sort of trying to commercialize spirit Satoshi two years ago now, this hit me like a ton of bricks as a business owner because we had spent all of this time training and building and refining and fine tuning the Spiritual Sochi model. And we had finally got to a good enough model that we thought we could charge for it. And when we went to some bitcoin companies to kind of sell it as a assistant, but an assistant that actually understands bitcoin, they were only willing to pay like 20 bucks a month or something or maybe 50 bucks a month for it. And when we did the cost analysis on the back end, the inference cost to provide that was in the thousands so that these guys could have it. And I was like, what the fuck is going on here? There's, you know, the, the, the economics don't make any sense whatsoever. And and that was when it first hit me that in the AI space, what you've got is a situation where actually in traditional software, your marginal cost per new customer is effectively zero. Doesn't cost you anything else for another person to download the app and use the app, whereas in the AI space, each new user actually costs you. So there is a, there is a marginal cost, there is a real marginal cost for every single new person that you add. Now, the bet is that you can, you have users who don't use it that much and hopefully pay a subscription to subsidize the users that do use it. Obviously, you know, as with all of these things and you know, at large scales, maybe there's some sort of model that works. But what I realized, realized kind of into it when we, when we were trying to raise money from some sort of more AI centric venture capitalists, I did some digging, you know, some research and everything, who they are, who their LPs are and everything. And what I found, like if I traced the chain back, was that a lot of the money was actually coming somehow some way through Amazon or Google or Nvidia or something like that. They were sort of like either the LPs or behind the LPs. So what I found was that it was kind of like the wrong kind of circular economy. It was like laundering money, but you got the money going to the startups and then startups spending all of their money on inference and training and obviously getting a little bit of money in the front end from customers if they found some sort of success. But it became like the money would end up being invested in the startups to be spent back with the same ultimate LPs who were investing in the startup. So it was kind of this kind of circular logic. And I was like, what the fuck? And I remember writing a tweet about that two years ago. And anyway, I sent you a tweet from some guy who kind of like outlined that about four or five weeks ago he'd actually done some research and outlined it. So it's a really interesting somewhat false economy. And what that's led me to believe, where 18 months ago or two years ago, this is maybe the one opinion I've changed, is I thought there was going to be like a total proliferation of models. I've actually changed my mind on that. I think it's kind of like an oligopoly situation just by virtue of the fact that this only really works at scale. I thought there was going to be many, many, many models. That was my Whole premise when I previously launched Spirit Satoshi. But I actually think we're probably going to end up in a world where we have the fang of language models and the long tail is just like pointless. Hugging face these days is really struggling. Remember if you remember 18 months ago, hugging face was everyone was using models on there. No one gives a shit anymore. Everyone just uses ChatGPT or if they have Google credits, they're using that. Some people use Claude and that's about it. I don't think there's anything else really that people use.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Keep muting that because I'm moving my stuff. I said we're using Claude and Gemini predominantly here at tftc.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
They did.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
That scares me. We're using them because they're the most useful. I guess the idealist in me would like the open source models to be able to compete and take market share from the closed source models. At the end of the day they're just not capable yet of doing exactly what these other models can do.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
It's partly not capable and it's also partly. I've kind of become less and less and less of an idealist myself and I guess somewhat more of a realist maybe the older I get. But I just sort of realized that people just don't give a shit, man. They build a habit around. I mean I think that the. I haven't seen usage statistics but my guess would be that ChatGPT has like the absolute lion's share of usage when it comes to these models. I think Gemini and stuff like that are still like a. A fraction and they're more used by more enterprise or more customers like yourself who are trying to do something more unique. But in terms of General Mass Market, ChatGPT is one. People don't give a fuck about open source or having their own model running on their own computer unless you're sort of a techie. But beyond that I just don't think there's a significant business in there. It's kind of like Google Search and DuckDuckGo, right? DuckDuckGo has a space but it's like what is it? 0.1% of the fraction of what Google searches.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah, definitely. I'm a DuckDuckGo user. I'm gonna move to kg cogi. I'll re pronounce it soon. I think DuckDuckGo's experience has deprecated but because yeah, I guess you have to hope for Moore's Law to come into place really aggressively. The cost to come down and making it dead simple to download A model, run it locally and reap the same benefits that you would from OpenAI or Claude or Anthropic. And I just don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. I hope I'm wrong. Maybe these Chinese, the arms race between the Chinese in the west is so aggressive that the Chinese come out with some open source model that blows everything out of the water. But I think that's wishful thinking.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
I mean, maybe the only time that works is if the models actually hit an actual ceiling and no amount of extra compute can break that ceiling. At which point what you get is Moore's law forces the smaller models to catch up and everyone is at the same ceiling. And in that case, then you have an opportunity. But still, what I then wonder is like, what is the business model for these? And I'm not sure what it is. So at least, like, if I put my business hat on, I don't know if there's a business case there, but if I put my consumer hat on, yeah, maybe there's a upside for me as a consumer when these things sort of hit a local maxima, at least for a period at which they're all sort of producing the same output, in which case, yeah, maybe it makes sense for me to drop ChatGPT and start using something else.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah, well, with that in mind, I mean, what does the future look like? I guess throwing specific models and open source versus closed source AI aside right now, thinking about just broad applications of people, how they're using these things, whether it's via N8M flows to create these sort of agentic workflows, or using Claude's MPC or anthropics. MPC looks like ChatGPT is about to release an agent sort of dev kit where you can connect things, it seems like, based off of what you've been writing about and sort of what you're working on at Satlantis and your view of a new web emerging with AI, Nostr and Bitcoin, that there's another way to do these things.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
So if I had to boil down, my position is that I think we are at the point of a renaissance again of cool new consumer products. Basically sort of like what we had about 10 years ago when we had the rise of like Shopify and Uber and Airbnb and all this sort of stuff. Like for the last decade there hasn't really been a lot of new consumer apps. Like consumer's been dead for a little while. And if I look at the, the technical landscape, you know, sort of AI If I put that in a bucket, you've got these new tools and frameworks and whether that's like vibe coding stuff to produce, like little quick MVPs, whether it's the video generation stuff to maybe do some more intelligent marketing and stuff like that so you can lower your cost of producing outreach or communications, or whether it's some of these agentic frameworks. Although I'm a little bit skeptical around the agentic stuff because, you know, maybe there is some things you can really turn into a process because that's, that's effectively what these agentic frameworks are for. It's like to take a dumb process that you might hire, you know, an outsourced person in the Philippines for and just like do it with that for 10% or 20% of the cost. You wouldn't do anything really critical as a function in the business with that. You know, may maybe you were previously hiring someone to write technical tests to make sure that your code passes a certain standard. You know, for that you might be able to build an agentic framework and you save yourself X amount of hours per person in code review, or you save yourself one hire or something like that. So, so AI is sort of an effort multiplier as a business. But you've got these two other tools which I find really interesting. One is obviously Bitcoin for payments and the ability to embed payments into any application you build. And then number three is something like Nostr. And I say something like Nostr because whether Nostr succeeds or fails, it doesn't really matter. What matters is the idea of an identity layer to the web where the identity is actually owned by the user. That creates a bit of a new design space for having a profile that can move across different applications. So that's the interesting thing about Nostr, in my opinion. I know a lot of people talk about the censorship resistance element and all of this, but in my opinion, I think, I think that ship has sailed. A lot of bitcoiners probably will be annoyed at me for saying that, or maybe even Nostra people will be annoyed at me for saying that. But I think the mind space for censorship resistance is now basically taken up in most people's minds by X, Substack and Rumble. I don't think maybe a couple of years ago there was an opportunity there for Nostra really to claim Mind share. But I think that ship has sailed. Even though Nostr is more censorship resistant, getting that through people's heads is a very, very, very, very hard job, at least in my opinion. I think that's, it's too high a bar to climb. Whereas the idea of a web where you have a portable identity and you can use the one identity across multiple applications and each application can enhance the experience by virtue of the fact that you have connections underlying that, that, to me is quite interesting. So for me, as a startup guy, as a business owner and stuff like that, I look at this and I'm like, okay, shit, we have a bunch of new tools here that we could build an application that may have taken a massive fucking team or, you know, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to do before we can now do it as a startup again. And to me, that is almost like the beginning of the app boom, when Apple rolled out applications and you could build apps and you could build these massive startups with a small team, and you had a, basically a renaissance in consumer applications. And that sort of died off because all the consumer apps that were successful became incumbents and they kind of blocked off the space, et cetera. But now we're at a new stage, and now you have small startups again, can now do payments at scale with Bitcoin, can hopefully do a social graph at scale with something like Nostr, and can build faster, better, quicker, and go to market faster, better, quicker with AI tools. So that's kind of how I envision this. You know, we can talk about how I'm trying to implement that with, with our product. We've had a bunch of significant sort of refinements of what we're doing with Atlantis, and I can give an example of that. But that's my answer to your question. It's like, these are tools. And I'm, I'm really excited over the next five years and 10 years, ideally to see how completely new startups that were either impossible before or very expensive to build before are going to come to fruition by virtue of the fact that there's a new toolkit or series of tools that, that entrepreneurs and small startups can use to let them compete with prior incumbents.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
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Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Well, let's dig into that. So I've evolved my thinking a step further on that side of things. So I. And this may be an unpopular opinion of some sort, but Nostr is a protocol. Well, actually, let me start with this. I think there's been a bit of a conflation in the NOSTR space and the Bitcoin space related to the importance of NOSTR and the importance of Bitcoin. So the way I like to think about it, and I was going to write a small article on this, but I haven't got around to it yet. But basically, Bitcoin, the implementation is more important than Bitcoin the idea, and that's evident by Bitcoin, the idea is every other fucking 50,000 shitcoins out there, right? Like people have taken the concept and created a shitcoin and everything like that. But what's important is actually the implementation. It's the longest chain. It's the chain that runs the genesis block. It's the node software that we all run. It's the fact that we're all in sync. It's the actual implementation, implementation of Bitcoin that matters. That's why Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin SV and all this sort of stuff doesn't matter. On the flip side, though, with Noster, it's actually not the implementation that matters, it's the idea that matters. And I kind of alluded to that five minutes ago when I said the premise of an identity layer on the web is something that was always kind of wanted for the last 20, 30 years of the web, right? There was always this idea to have, hey, let's have identity baked into a protocol on the web. Not the identity being a feature inside an application on top of the web. And it's always been something that was wanted, but we never got around to it. And I think partly that's because people were never used to having a bearer instrument in a digital capacity. Bitcoin probably opened the doorway to something like Nostra to be successful. But if we sort of look at this objectively, if Bitcoin fails tomorrow, the implementation, I think the world's up shit creek without a paddle. Like, that's a fucking disaster. And it would be really, really, really, really bad for the world. It'll be bad for the future, it'll be bad for our kids, it'll be bad for civilization, it'll be bad for everything. But if Nostra fails tomorrow, what have we lost? Some content. Content is worth nothing in a world of infinite content. Sure, maybe we've lost Some sort of social relationships. But because social relationships are sort of derived from us as physical human beings, we can always rebuild those. That's why if you get banned on Twitter, you can create a new account and you can rebuild your profile, right? Like I got banned 10 times, so, you know, I rebuild my profile. So I've sort of been there, done that. So like the, the cost of losing or the cost of Nostra dying is very low, whereas the cost of Bitcoin dying and failing is catastrophic. So if Nostra was to fail, I'm sure someone else will come up with another instantiation of a identity protocol where the identity is a barrier instrument and there's a public private key pair and we go and create a new one. So that's sort of how I start and that's how I look at this. And that's like purely objective. Yes, I know it's going to piss some people. I'll probably piss Odell off. But that's like, you know, I think that's the, the, the, the detached objective way to sort of understand this. So then from there I asked the next question that sort of flows into my mind is, okay, well, if Nostr is this protocol, protocols, actually, especially if they've gained some level of critical mass, which Nostr has, the plus side is protocols are very hard to kill. They can live on so long as there is like a core set of users there. You know, Nostra can last five, ten years. And who knows, maybe in five or ten years the web starts to become more censorship full and all this sort of stuff. And then people start being like, okay, fuck, we need to jump on something else. You know, you get that kind of the next push, the next wave. The trouble is Nostr can operate at one speed, whereas businesses have to operate at a much like they work on a much shorter horizon, right. Like as a company, you can come and sort of make a bet on Nostr and be like, okay, well we're going to build another social app and build a content centric app and bootstrap the network with Nostr. But if Nostr is not growing that fast, you're not going to get much of a benefit actually from doing that. In fact, you probably bring more of a benefit to the protocol than the other way around. Whereas. And your goal as a company or as a product is to try and find product market fit as soon as possible. But maybe you don't get there in time because the, you know, the speed of Nostra development or the speed of protocol hardening is much longer. Like, the time frame is longer than the business. So that makes me start to wonder, and this is part of the big shift we've had in Atlantis in the last probably two months, is maybe there's something other than competing for content and attention that we can do to build the foundations or to build a number of endpubs on this network. And for us, we found two things. And. And honestly, right now it's like one thing that we're really focusing on, which is events. I. I don't know for the life of me why I didn't think of this earlier. Like, when we first started Atlantis, we were thinking of building more like a TripAdvisor meets Instagram meets Eventbrite, right? Like, it was kind of a travel nomad, sovereign, individual, super app. And the idea was that we could take that social graph, you know, build a beautiful feed and then embed things into the feed, like places and reviews and events and all this sort of shit. I look back on myself now, 12 months ago, whatever it was, when we started this, and I was like, I was on fucking crack. I should have just picked one of these things and done it really well. And the, the big aha moment that we had a couple of months ago when we were in. When we were in Prague was we rolled out the first version of the app and it had places, it had the social feed, it had all of that, but also had the events piece. And the biggest uptick of users we had was people RSVPing for events. And we've designed the app in such a way that you might not even care about Nostr or any of that sort of stuff. So you can log in with an email or Google single sign on or Apple single sign on, but it creates an endpub for you. So it is an actual Nostra identity, which you can later, when you give a shit, you can just extract your private key, but otherwise we just manage it for you there. But that created a whole bunch of new Nostra users. And what we did with Primal during the event was people signed up for satellite events around the conference with our app. And then we told them, hey, take your keynote and you can put it into Primal and you can experience zaps and the social thing, because Primal has by far, in the nostril space, it has by far the best feedback. You've got Damas and Amethyst and all this sort of stuff. You've even got this Atlantis feed. But I don't see why you would use another app when you're following the same people and you're going to see the same content. So I think even Nostr from a feed perspective I think converges to one winner. And that's in my opinion Primal, which is for us. We're actually going to get rid of our feed from the app. We're going to deprioritize the feed as a feature. And what we're going to take from the social graph is when you're finding an event, what's important. Well, shit, I'm going to go to an event and I'm going to see that Marty Bent's going to this event because we're connected. That gives me instant insight into maybe I should go to that event or maybe I want to go to the event discovery page on the app. And the kind of events that come up on my discovery sort of feed, which looks a little bit like Spotify now instead of a vertical feed we've got like these carousels is influenced by my social graph and people that I'm close to that I share interests with and stuff like that. That starts to become really interesting because you can't do that on Eventbrite, can't do that on Luma. You know, there's no sort of social glue that ties these apps together. And if we can build a really, really, really good events app that hosts can create events on in like 60 seconds, where every time someone RSVPs to their event they grow their follower, they grow their audience, but then those event attendees also actually become nostril users and they don't even know where later they can use Primal. We actually start to build like imagine you host, you know, you have a thousand hosts hosting 10 events a year with 100 people per event. Like that's a 10 million people or 10 million sign ins that's just grown the Nostr base massively, maybe that, you know, they're unlikely to all be posting content. So you're not going to see a huge boost in like Noster activity in terms of Kind one events. But you've got a larger foundation for when the time comes they will just take their account and log into Primal or something like that and start to use it. So that's kind of the big switch I've had in my mind is we're kind of taking, we've been trying to be this social app for sovereign individuals and we're going to kind of kill the social and we're just going to become the best fucking events app in the world that has a social layer built in. And what I forgot to mention is Bitcoin payments, Like, I can't believe there is no actual Bitcoin native events app on the planet. Like, imagine an eventbrite with just Bitcoin payments doesn't exist. I was like, this was staring me in the face the whole time and I didn't notice it. So anyway, that's a long way of explaining, like, I definitely agree with you that being able to sort of somewhat bootstrap your social app with Nostr is somewhat of a good idea. But I feel like that's a big lift and there's probably one winner in that space. And that's, in my opinion, clearly primal. But I think there's another approach where you can use Noster just purely as a tool. It's hidden. The average consumer doesn't know. But this is a tool that people use because it solves a particular problem, which is, I want to host an event, get paid and grow an audience very quickly. And here's the tool for that. And that inadvertently grows Noster and it creates bitcoin adoption. That to me is really compelling.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah, no, I love this train of thought. This is interesting, right? You have to say Atlantis, you're building a startup, a company that's leveraging this protocol. And this protocol has a problem where it's been leaning into the social aspect, which is good and all, and the ability to have somewhat censorship resistant content and social profiles, a social web, a web of trust and then payments embedded is cool. But I forget who was. I think it was Peter Thiel. But I mean, obviously Peter Thiel had that famous talk at Stanford where he said, you want to find a monopoly, you don't want competitors. And I think leaning into the social side of Nostr, leaning into the social side of things via the Nostr protocol, it's like, all right, you're competing with a highly saturated and competitive landscape already. What is the area that doesn't exist? What's the market that you can go create? That should be your goal. And it's interesting because Nostr is a protocol, it's not really a company. But as a company building, it's like, okay, what can we do with this protocol to go create a market, bring people to it?
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Spot on. I'm glad you said that because this was another realization that we had. This has become a podcast on like entrepreneur mistakes. After the Prague conference, we went to another conference which was the largest nomad conference in the world in Bulgaria. And we went there and we pitched the product as a social network for nomads. And people were like, oh, this is cool. They downloaded it. They posted a little bit of content on the first day, and then they didn't post again. And we sort of, like, tried to convince them, like, look, just post the same kind of content you're doing on Instagram, but you can post it here, and you get to own your audience, blah, blah, blah. You know, we did all this pitching, and, man, it was so fucking hard to get them to stop posting on Instagram or even just post alongside the posting on Instagram. It felt like we didn't solve a problem. We actually gave them a new problem, which was another place to post. And. And sort of. That hit me really hard. I was like, I. I walked out of that conference and spent, like, you know, a week or two kind of digesting and thinking, competing on social. Like, you're competing for attention, and attention is, like, the. The most expensive currency on the planet today. Like, it's so expensive. Like, and you're competing with TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, who. Which are literally designed to hijack your brain and turn you into a, you know, zombie that is triggered by everything. That's. That's a really. That's a really high bar. It's a very difficult thing to do. And. And I sort of found Atlantis kind of sandwiched between trying to get people to drop these mainstream social apps on the one hand, but also sandwich between, as I said earlier, we had a feed, or we have a feed still. We haven't completely deprecated or changed it, but we're competing also with Amethyst, Primal, Damas, and the other apps. And we're like, okay, what's the differentiator here? Sure, on our feed, you can see events and you can see places and you can see some other stuff, but it's not really that compelling. It's not really that differentiated. And quite honestly, like, I'll say this myself, Primal. Primal's feed is functionally 10 times better than our feet. Like, our feed looks nice, but it's not that great. And we. We never. We also never got around to building zaps because we wanted to try and figure out a way to make our feed more unique without zaps. And then we're gonna sort of add zaps as a. As a icing on the cake. But, yeah, like, I ended up sort of stuck between these two, and I was like, man, I'm playing the wrong game here. Like, let me go pick myself up out of here and go over here. And then I realized in the event space, you've got basically meetup.com and Eventbrite, who everyone like universally fucking hates. They haven't changed for 20 years. Eventbrite is like, by the time you, like, first of all, you can only host an event and get paid if you're a Westerner. So like, you know, if you're from Brazil or if you're from Latin America, if you're from Africa, if you're from most of Asia, if you're from Eastern Europe, you can't use Eventbrite as a host. Like, sure, as an attendee you can attend, but as a host you can't get paid out. So that throws that out the window. But even if you're a host in one of the Western countries, Eventbrite takes almost 10% after payment processing fees. So it's a fucking highway robbery. Like, it's insane. So you got Eventbrite on one side, on the other side you got meetup.com, which charges now 45 bucks a month so that you can have the privilege of running a meetup. But everyone hates meetup.com and it's outdated, it hasn't changed, it's been bought by private equity. So it's tired as hell. Which is why in my opinion, you've got these kind of like new. I don't know if you've ever used Luma or Particle. Have you used that?
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
I've used Luma before.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
So Luma, again, credit where credit's due to that in my opinion, is the best events app in the world today. It's so fucking good. Unfortunately, it's run by Solana dudes and it's like winners, but like, again, credit where credit's due. It's so much better than Eventbrite. It's so much better than meetup.com and they've really cornered the market, particularly for tech events and for sort of like up and coming meetups and all this sort of stuff. So what we realized is, hey, there's actually no bitcoin native equivalent for Luma. And if we can build that and just like build bitcoin payments into it, naturally, because even with Luma, like they do have stripe and they do have ticketing, but after their fees and stripes fees, you're paying about 7 and a half, 8% per ticket on Luma. So it's still fucking hyper expensive. Like it's a little bit cheaper than Eventbrite, but it's super, super expensive. You could do bitcoin ticketing like in a Luma sort of like experience. And you can do that for 1% and, and not Only can you do it cheaper so for everybody, but you can actually unlock the entire fucking world. It'd be the first global events app on the planet which doesn't exist. So for me that starts to get really interesting. It's like, okay, now bitcoin actually unlocks something. So we're not, we're not. I said this to, to the team the other week. I was like, hey, we're not a bitcoin company. We're not an Austria company. We're an events app that happens to be using Bitcoin Nostra. And this makes me think actually about an article that I wrote a couple of years ago called Three Generations Theory, where I kind of said that the first generation of bitcoin apps were all going to be about something to do with the financial element of bitcoin. So exchanges, wallets, mining, and you've got this kind of like late stage Fiat, treasury company bullshit going on, right? Which we can talk about. But the first generation of bitcoin, the first 20 years is going to be about the nature of bitcoin emerging against the US dollar. But the second generation of Bitcoin, so let's just say the first generation is 2010 to 2030. The next generation 2030 to 2050, you're going to have young business owners and entrepreneurs who were born after bitcoin was launched. They were born in 2010 onwards. They're not going to know of a world. They will perceive bitcoin completely differently. To you and I, you and I were born with one foot in the Fiat world, one foot in bitcoin. So we fundamentally, even though we're a little bit different, like we think already in terms of bitcoin, but the large majority of the world still views bitcoin as this speculative investment or this instrument for making more Fiat, right, for making more US dollars, These kids will see bitcoin completely different. And for them it's like they'll build what I call second generation bitcoin companies, which is they'll build events apps, they'll build travel apps, they'll build Ubers, they'll build actual applications. But bitcoin's just, it's part of the stack. They'll look at it exactly like modern developers look at JavaScript Node JS. It's just, okay, we're going to use this for payments, we're going to use Nostr to add a social glue to it, we're going to use AI to do this. And that's it. It's part of the stack that to me is when bitcoin really starts to embed itself in the world, in technology. And that's like somewhat unconsciously, I've started making Atlantis, an attempt at a second generation bitcoin company. It's like we're not a bitcoin company, we're an events app. But we just happen to use bitcoin in the in the stack. And that to me starts to get interesting. Anyway, I'll shut up. I kind of went off on a bunch of tangents, but here's the thought.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
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Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Totally. I mean, do you want to. Should we dive into that a little bit?
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
So cold start problem, maybe for people who don't know what that means, is when you're trying to build a kind of like a marketplace application or something that has a network effect which has two sides to the market. Like Uber as an example, you have drivers and riders. Like if there's no drivers, you can't get riders, and if there's no riders, you can't get drivers. So it's like the chicken and egg problem. So how do you solve that? Andrew Chen kind of outlines four ways to solve it. You've got, what do you call it? Come for the tool, stay for the network. And he uses some examples like Dropbox or Google Drive. So you came for the tool so you could store your stuff online, but then when you share, people get more utility by also creating a Dropbox or Google Drive account. Right. Instagram was actually one of these as well. Originally, Instagram was a competitor to an app called Hipstamatic, which was just a photo filtering app. But the difference was that with Hipstamatic, you had to download the photo to your phone after you put the filters on, and then you could separately upload it to Facebook or one of the social networks. Instagram flipped the script there was they allowed you to instantly post to the socials, but also post to your own feed. So what ended up happening was people came for the tool, but slowly by slowly they stayed for the network. The, the other mechanism is invite only. So they. Andrew chen points at LinkedIn as someone who did this really well was by making it invite only. It's sort of like a club. And what you do is you get, you get network density. And what network density does is it increases the quality of the network effect. It's smaller in the beginning, but you get more connections and with more connections you get more sticking power. Tinder did that as well. Probably the best app in the world that ever, ever, ever, ever did. This is that Raya app, which is like Tinder for celebrities. They fucking killed it with this. Like they are completely locked down and they have a wait months long and it's completely paid. So they basically tell you to fuck off, you can't join. But people are sort of jumping over themselves so they can be a part of that network. So they keep it super, super high quality, super narrow, super niche. But they have such a good network effect and they have such a good product like that. That dude who built that is like a masterclass in building powerful network effects. So that's sort of the second mechanism. And I will say, and I said this in the article, I think Noster to some degree accidentally did that as a mechanism to build the first level of network effect. Because if you sort of think about networked effects happening in like in surges or in waves, like Nostra had its initial network effect and it's got this kind of critical mass of bitcoiners who all know each other. So it's got quite like, it's almost got an invite only feel. And even though it's not invite only, even though it's open, the fact that it's just like a bunch of bitcoiners on there telling each other GM and tapping each other and all that sort of stuff, it like attracts a particular crowd which has made the network quite dense. Like we are all connected on there, we all know each other and it's basically become bitcoin Twitter, right? To some degree. And a much better bitcoin Twitter, because bitcoin Twitter now fucking sucks. It's full of just morons talking about treasury companies. It's so bad. So it's done that. But at the same time now it's almost like a. If you remember from chemistry, you had like you have electrons in a certain valence, right? So it's kind of like stuck in this valence, it hasn't. It's. It's not able to move to the next one, which is, in my opinion, sort of why the nostril growth is tapered off, even though the products have gotten way better. Like, if you. I mean, like, Primal is ten times better than it was a year ago. It's so fucking good now. But the usage is maybe incrementally a little bit better, but the ratio between the improvement in the product versus the number of users is just not there. Right. And I think that's because the current network effect is very good for the current club, but it hasn't allowed for a new club. So in my mind, there needs to be an unlock. So anyway, that was invite only. The come for the tool, stay for the network. The third mechanism Andrew Chen talks about is what he calls hard side. Yeah, the hard side, but then also Flintstoning. So the hard side he talks about if you have a product and like Uber, you got drivers and riders focus on the hard side first. So you buy the hard side, whatever that takes. So it's like what they did at Uber, for example, in the beginning, they walked around and they like, they paid drivers 30 bucks an hour just to drive around during conferences. Whether they made money or not didn't matter. But what that created was available drivers. And then they went around to train stations and stuff like that and gave vouchers out to potential riders and said, here's a $30 voucher. You can ride with Uber for the first time. So they kind of like. Like they invested in creating that, and they built the first atomic network in San Francisco. I think it was. I think second was New York, et cetera. And then they sort of expanded from there, and obviously Uber is a great use case. And then the final method, Flintstoning, which is basically fake it till you make it. So this is what Reddit did as an example, and DoorDash did a funny one. But basically Reddit did it with fucking bots. So it looked like there was real activity on there and fake activity created some real activity. And that sort of started a snowball. DoorDash did it with. They just listed restaurants on there. People ordered from DoorDash, and then DoorDash paid Uber drivers and shit like that to come and actually pick it up from the restaurant without the restaurant actually listed, which is fucking hilarious. So, you know, there's these four mechanisms for us. It's come for the tool, stay for the network. That is, I think, the unlock that we're looking at now. Really, really Seriously. Which is, hey, here's a tool that you can use to host beautiful events. Get paid in Bitcoin instantly. We'll add stablecoin soon as well. And we'll add fiat, we'll add Stripe. So that way there's like the whole buffet for you as an event host. So come create an awesome event. Get paid instantly low fees. You get to build an audience while you're doing it. And in the process, we're building this network effect underneath. And hopefully people realize that they can stick around on Nostr more broadly and find other applications where they can actually communicate and build relationships and do stuff.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah, I love it. Go build the market that doesn't exist yet. And I didn't realize the event space was that sort of confined and constricted geographically.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Didn't hit me either, man. It didn't hit me either. That's why Southeast Asia, for example, has its own Eventbrite or has its own meetup.com, everyone is super, super fragmented. The more I dug into that, the more I was like, holy crap. Like, this is. Like, this is the market. Like, what was I doing?
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Now my mind's running through, like, what are other markets that don't exist yet that could be built on the stack? With using this tool and these set of tools, my mind immediately wanders to something like data vending machines, which was sort of drawn to when they originally dropped. But as we discussed earlier, it doesn't seem like the LLMs are there yet. But these marketplaces that don't exist, that are uniquely suited to be built on this open stack of open protocols with Noster and Bitcoin.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
If anyone is listening to this and they've got ideas, there's your toolkit, AI, Noster, Bitcoin, you have a whole new design space. Let me see if I've got this diagram here. It's like, it's a really good way to visualize the new design space that we have with Nostra and Bitcoin. Hold on, I'm looking through my stuff. All right, I'm going to send this to you on signal so you can see it and maybe you can share it with people listening. But it'll like, the initial four layer stack opened up the opportunity for the world to get everything from Amazon to Google to Uber to every single application that we have in the world today. And now we have a two extra layers on the stack. We have a whole new design space, which I think is going to create a renaissance for new products. And like the people building in this Space and the people investing in this space and all this sort of shit, man, the next 10, 20 years are going to be crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy good.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
I really, I really am loving this conversation because I, I agree. And I've talked to many people building a Noster milion too, and I think many people are beginning to recognize this. Like, all right, what are the new hot sort of applications that don't exist that could be novel to Noster? And I love the, like, ditching the idealist approach and being like, we're not going to be like NP NSEC only, like, if you want to sign in via email, via Google, via Apple, whatever, just sign up and we'll spin up a key for you. You'll always have it here. You probably don't even know that you have it, but it's here. Once you recognize that you created an mpub when you sign up for this app, like, you can go use it.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Totally, totally. Because then we're using the time in our favor. We get users now, we get product market fit. We succeed as a business and over the next three, three, five, 10 years, we can educate people. It's like, hey, you know, you actually own your identity and you can, like, make it portable. They're like, oh, that's fucking cool. So then they do it, as opposed to putting the barrier up front. They're like, oh, what's a key? How do I do it? Where do I store it? Like that. So, yeah, so that's the new design space, whereas the old design space was just four layers.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
But this is the old.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Yeah, this is basically. This stack is so powerful. It gave us everything that we have today. It's given us Riverside that we're talking on. It's given us figures that we're designing on. It's given us Google. It's given us everything. It's fucking incredible. But now imagine if you add Identity and payments, like, baked into the stack, not as apps. Because to date we've had this weird situation where Payments is kind of an application on top of this protocol stack, and Payments lives inside shit like stripe and PayPal and all that junk and shitty banks. And Identity has been a complete mess because you have a million and one identities in every single application as a feature. Like, throw that shit out and let's move on to this new stack. You have six layers, two new protocols. This is like a massive, massive, massive upgrade to the digital experience for the world. And I think it's. Yeah, anyway, I said it before, I'll say it again. The renaissance in Consumer applications and at some point, business applications again, because I think consumer apps usually kick off buff first. That's the initial wave. And then later on, maybe five, ten years from now, we'll get new version of Slack, new version of Jira and Linear and whatever else. Sort of more business SaaS type products that maybe won't even be SaaS at that point. There will be pay per use because you've got the ability to do micropayments with Bitcoin. So it's like the whole thing changes. That's really, really, really, really exciting as an entrepreneur.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah. And I think by framing it this way, by just adding two layers to the stack, instead of saying, oh, you have to throw out everything else and build on, this new stack is much more approachable too. It's like, hey, you've been handed two more stack layers and tools, if you will, to build your applications. Just view them as additive. It's much more approachable for bullying.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Way more approachable. Yeah, for sure. Actually, I didn't think of that explicitly, but when I have shared this with people in sort of normie land outside of Bitcoin, because I've done a bunch of talks and travel and discussions with people in that space, this comparison clicks for people, they're like, oh, that's interesting. They don't sort of see Bitcoin as this thing that they have to entirely switch to. And I think this is actually more powerful than pitching Web3, you know, because all the Web3 dorks are like, oh, you know, the Internet is dead. And come over here. It's like, well, no, it's just the Internet was missing this and now we can actually make the Internet so much better.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah. And since you've sort of shifted and realized, I got to go make this market, we're going to make a social events app that's global. That's what Satlantis is going to be. What have you noticed in terms of user behaviors? I mean, you touched on some earlier, but what are the most popular events that people are spinning up type of events.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
The. The first thing I'll say is that it's just like, makes sense to people. Like, you know, when I was, when I was, I used to struggle, like, explaining all the things that Solantis can do and everything like that. And they're like, oh, that sounds really cool. Like, so what do I do? It's like, well, you could start here and you can post some content. It's like way too much. Whereas now it's just like, hey, you're Using meetup and you're paying for a crappy product. Come and move your meetup across to Atlantis. You can set it up quicker. You can even do things like, you know, one of the, the things that meetup organizers hate is let's say you have a maximum capacity of 50 people and then you just get people who just click register just because they click register, but they don't have any intention of coming. So kind of like uses up the wait list or uses up your RSVP list and then you had like room for 50 and then only 10 or 15 people turn up because the other 30 asshol just click the register button because there's no cost in doing that. With Bitcoin you could put like a free ticket, but just make it a hundred sats or something, or make it a thousand sats and then people sort of might even just think twice. And at the very least if they don't turn up, then the event host got 1000 sats out of it or something like that. So you can start doing interesting things like that. The other one is we're partnering with bitcoin conferences now, obviously being the low hanging fruit. But Loom actually does this really well. They have this calendar feature where you can associate events around a calendar and people can subscribe to a calendar and that can be used both by communities but also by conferences. We're adding a little bit more flexibility to that. And then obviously there's the social layer in the calendar that makes it a little bit smarter. But yeah, one of the big features that we're fleshing out now will have ready this month for use in all the November conferences and December conferences are coming up. But you have like Bitcoin Amsterdam as your main calendar and then you can associate all the satellite events to it. And now when people come to that event, they can find where their friends are going, who they know and all this sort of stuff. Because that's one thing when you go to these massive events trying to coordinate and figure out where people are going, holy, it's a pain in the ass, right? But if you can see instantly it's like, okay, six of my friends are going to this event, one of them is going to that event, this and that, you can make a really quick assessment on which ones to go to and then you can add the events to your profile so you can see which ones you're going to. You got your tickets in there, it's all sort of inbuilt. The other thing, and this is part of a legacy feature we had collections, which is. Which is places on a map. So we're going to keep that feature, but we're going to subordinate it to events. So instead, when you create an event, one of the biggest things that people have or biggest issues that they have when they're doing an event, particularly when they're traveling, is where do I go, what do I do? What are the cool places to hang out at? Which restaurant, which cafe? This and that. So as an event host, you can associate a list of your favorite places and it could be like, here's the top 10 Bitcoin places around the event, or here's the top 10 brunch places, or here's the best gyms. Whatever you want, you create a list and you append it to the event. And then people have their list there, they have their social graph there, they can pay in bitcoin and they have their places. And it's like a really beautiful sort of end to end solution for anyone running a meetup, a small event or a conference that wants to run all of the other stuff around it that would be powerful.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
There's a number of events I go to. You show up early, you're like, all right, where do I hang out before this thing? It's like, here's the best cocktail bar. Or before the event, if you want to go. Something like that.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Exactly. And the social graph actually works there as well because places are discovered by people on Atlantis and added and people can bookmark those places when they add them to the list. So you can see immediately, oh, one of my friends bookmarked this place or added this place or whatever. It's recommended by the event host. Or 35 people that I know in my social circle mention this place. So it's like there's a social graph utility there that is surfaced not for content purposes, but for, what do you call it, like validation purposes. Like that. That to me is a. Is a really interesting use case for an open social graph as opposed to, hey, post more content.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
We're.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Getting into something I've intuitively believed is like social media. It's been a good first use case. Great first use case. I've used it. It's fun. To your point about attention being scarce, valuable, having to cross post even I forget to cross post every once in a while. What are these unique use cases that don't exist anywhere else that can be built on NOSTR to really draw people in and then ultimately feed people to the social side of things? Maybe it'll be like a horseshoe it started with social, it really blows up because of a bunch of other things and then ends with this everything app where everything protocol. Everything protocol, yeah, with social at its core.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Totally, totally. I really think that's going to happen, but I think it's going to take 10 years, right? I think to some degree, you know, we all sort of drank the Kool Aid a little bit too quickly last year I think, and we were like, oh yeah, Nasser is going to take over the world and all this sort of stuff. And we sort of underestimated how hard it really is to sustain the network effect. Cold start problem solution. Right. That is really, really, really, really difficult to keep churning. So yeah, we'll get there in the end and who knows, maybe 10 years from now, X and Rumble and all that sort of stuff, realize that hey, we should actually make our applications Nostra compatible because it makes sense to plug into that open network in the same way as they use the freaking Internet. What they'll realize hopefully is that this new Internet stack with payments and with identity built in is of benefit to them. So then they come and move across in the same way as fucking incumbents. In the past, IBM ended up building laptops thanks to Apple, like so they came this way. So that's what great technological revolutions do is they enable startups to come and do something new to create entirely new markets, as you mentioned, and then the incumbents follow. That to me is really cool.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
As you're explaining that too. I think that's one of the key breakthroughs that you've honed in on too. When I think of Primal specifically, it is becoming an everything app. Like it's Substack X and now Twitch all in one with their live streaming. And it's incredible. As a content creator, we definitely make way more money publishing our stuff on Noster than we do on X or YouTube or anywhere else. But it's that going back to the cold star problem, I think in the digital sphere, highly competitive, like really bringing it in the meat space via something like events and adding value there I think is going to be critical because the digital landscape as we all know is hyper competitive and there are a ton of meatspace oriented experiences that are severely lacking. It's a wide open landscape for people to really tap into.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Totally. You know another thing that reminds me of speaking of meatspace is since, since I last spoke to you, you know, I've sort of had this like on off relationship with, with Twitter, with Substack, with all, with all of my socials. Actually. No, you Know, I'll get in there again and I'll say a bunch of things and I'll get excited, and then some will send me into a tailspin rage. Like, the last thing was this whole, like, Charlie, Kirk and Arena thing, man, that. That me up. Like, when I saw that poor girl get, like, stabbed. Holy, man, I couldn't sleep for a week like that. And I. I went on a rampage, like, yelling and saying, like, we should pick up arms and go to war and all this sort of stuff. And I kind of. I had a chance to, like, step away from that for a little bit. I was like, man, you know, I get that I'm a passionate guy, but, you know, I'm 10,000 miles away. There's nothing I can do. And, you know, yelling on Twitter doesn't actually help the situation. And to some degree, I'm like, I'm impotent in that sense. Like, I can't do anything about it. And all I did was create a bunch of stress for myself and not being able to sleep and being pissed off about everything. So I've kind of made the decision, honestly, dude, to take a massive hiatus from the online world. Like, I don't give a shit about, like, I deleted the apps all from my phone. I'm not going to post anymore for a while, if ever. And this shift with Atlantis to becoming more an events app, it's made me rethink, what are we doing here and why are we doing it? And I've come to the conclusion that I actually want to build an app that gets people to do shit in the real world and get the fuck off your screen, get off social media, get off your phone, and go and do something in the real world. And I sensed that in myself, and I've sensed that in myself for a little while. And maybe it's because I'm getting old. Maybe it's because I'm a dad now and, like, I'm more interested in actually hanging out with the baby than, like, scrolling Twitter or anything like that. But I've spoken to a bunch of people who are all sort of, kind of have had this almost call it like a burnout. Like a digital burnout. They're, like, fucking done. Like, man, it's the same thing over and over again. There's a new hysteria every single week. Like, I'm over it. I want to go do some stuff in the real world. And it's made me, like, I went and did some digging into the statistics and, like, what are the trends showing? And I don't think a lot of people realize, but events were like, pumping before COVID Then obviously with lockdowns and everything like that. It crushed everything. But there's been a massive rebound. There is almost double the number of events going on in the world across everything from the large end of town, like music festivals and all that sort of shit, all the way through to small meetups and everything. There's almost double the number of events happening now than pre Covid. It's insane. Massive whiplash effect where people are sort of craving, meeting up in person. And I guess we can probably sense it as a proxy from the bitcoin space, right? Imagine, remember 2019 when we first met in bitcoin. The bitcoin made Miami? No, in San Francisco.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
In San Francisco, yeah. 2019.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Yeah, 2019. Dude, like, we were all fucking babies. We're all innocent and shit like that. And there was like, what, three bitcoin conferences that year. Now how many is there? It's like 100. It's insane, right? So it's like people want to meet in meat space. So when you're saying sort of meet space before, it's like, I'm kind of rethinking this product. It's like, okay, I want to build something for. I'm calling it. I don't know if it's the right term, but like, the experience economy, it's like, okay, what are things in the real world? Events, obviously, that, you know, people are interested in doing. So it's like, to me, events and places is kind of like the. The sweet spot. There's something there amongst those two things. And that's why I decided to, like, keep the collections feature in, because that thing is still associated to places. Like, you want to know where to go and what to do, but in the real world. So anyway, yeah, when you said meatspace, you reminded me of that. It's like, it feels like a more fulfilling mission for me than building another social app. It's like, okay, get out there and meet people in the real world. Build actual networks again and friendships and communities. And that's what people are craving. I think more people are going to wake up to that and we're going to see a massive. Especially even now, as AI, this is the last I'll say on it, as AI turns a lot of the Internet into To kind of like slop. Like, there's like infinite content now. There's infinite things you can get on the web. There's all this sort of stuff. So, you know, as human beings, what do we do? We sort of, we get overabundance here so we look for what is the scarce thing and the thing that's becoming more scarce is actually like connection and like real curation, real community and that you, you know, as much as you can do something over a zoom call, like real connection happens in person and if we can facilitate that through a good product, that to me gets very exciting and it gives me a mission again that I want to work at like 24 7.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah, as you're saying that, I'm just writing some things down. I've noticed in myself like I have somebody who, I mean I want to call myself like an avid or not an avid, but I'm not wholly engaged in the culture wars. But from time to time over the last five years specifically, I've definitely dove in, gotten involved to a certain extent. But I've to your point about digital burnout, the culture war stuff is becoming abundantly clear at the algos, the powers that be, whatever you want to point blame at, I don't care who it is, it's becoming very clear that the divide and conquer sort of strategy is definitely being deployed in the digital world and the best option is just not participate. And so particularly going back to Charlie, Kirk and Irana, I think those were the last two straws that broke the camel's back for me. It's like I really want what I put out there and I haven't been perfect, but what I put out there on X or whatever social, it's just like maniacally focus on bitcoin and freedom tech and just like present solutions and don't get drug into the, the mud of the culture wars and focusing on the problems because it is soul sucking and it never, nothing ever happens. It's like.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
And it never ends as well. Yeah, it's, it's, and it's really hard when you're a passionate person. I don't know, I, I, the, the distance between my brain and the fucking keyboard is like very short. Like so I end up like saying a lot of things that are like, like, you know, wild and you know, a lot of people think I'm just a. But it's like, it doesn't come from a place of like being a bad person necessarily. It comes from a place of like I give a. And when I see bad things, I'm like, hell, I gotta say something. You know, I went through all the crap with like Covid and everything like that and yeah, I don't know, I'm too old for this, bro. It's like.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
I was joking about it. We had. It was at an event last week and we were. It was meatspace event. We're talking about everything going on from Charlie Kirk and like the theories around it. Like it's obvious that the FBI story doesn't make any sense. And I was like, you know what? I need to find a young Gen Z or tap him on the shoulder. Be like, this is you brother.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
I don't have any.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
To do it anymore.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Yeah, we done our time in the trenches, dude. Honestly man, it's like.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Especially when you have kids. It's like, is this time well spent? This is not the reason why we moved back to where we're from originally. But like I've noticed we've been home in the Philadelphia area where my wife and I both grew up for three months, four months now. And it's just like we've got family around the corner, multiple family members like within a half mile.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Yeah bro, yeah bro.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
They've got kids age and yeah bro. We find ourselves like when they get home from school it's like, right, what are we going to do? We're going to play with your cousins, we're going to go to the park. It's like much more fulfilling. Don't worry, I'm not turning into grill dad. I'm not going to. I'm not going to be begin saying did you see that game last night? But it's like where's time best spent? And I truly believe there is like this push as fiat to basement. The censorship rises. The culture wars are the noise that they're trying to drag you into and focus on the signal connection, meat space, bitcoin nostr and sort of build around.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
The distractions that they're putting. Yeah, bro, totally, man, totally, totally. We're getting old, bro.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
We are. So if there's any Generation Z gen zers out there listening to this and want the tap on the shoulder and sort of the playbook for how to engage DM me actually don't. You don't want this life. It's not worth it. Start a family.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
It it. Yeah, that's true. I was gonna say it builds character. Maybe in your. In your sort of like mid-20s, go hard, but then as soon as possible get yourself a wife, have family and step out of the noise. Like there's a time and a place for all of these things. You know, everyone's gotta sort of go and build up some scars and shit like that. Then you want to move on.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
If you want to go build up the scars. You want to meet other like minded individuals, do that. Make sure you download Satlantis and start an event.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Yeah, absolutely.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Meet up at the local pub. This is sweet. I really. This conversation went in a really good direction. I'm happy it did, particularly as it pertains to, again, Nostr and how we're thinking about growing that network. Specifically, I think really trying to focus on areas where a market doesn't exist yet and leveraging the unique tool stack that exists on the existing web. Now, Bitcoin in Nostr is how you grow that network effect.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Appreciate it, man. Yeah, I wasn't sure where this conversation was going to go either, so I appreciate you letting me rant and ramble. I'm in the process of rethinking how Svetsky shows up in the world and for a while I've always been an entrepreneur first, but I think most people in the bitcoin space actually know me as a writer because I wrote a lot, I guess, but that's always been more of a hobby than a real vocation. And it's weird, I feel like I've come full circle where now the thing that gives me the most joy is, I mean, I still enjoy conversations like this because some of these conversations are really good, but I don't even necessarily want to be very public anymore. I'll have good conversations where I know if there's a good podcast host or something like that, we can dig into something like we did today. But I much prefer to sit down with my team and build cool. Like I, I studied engineering when I was, when I was young and that's like solving problems and building stuff like gives me a lot of juice. And then, you know, you get a bit of notoriety online and you think you're a celebrity and all this sort of stuff and then like, you know, that kind of sucks you into that world. But man, it's, it's a, it's a tough life. It's, you know, everything comes with, you know, pros and cons obviously, but you know, this sort of new chapter of Setsuki now, like being a dad and like trying to build something for meat Space, it feels like so much more peaceful and wholesome, at least for this stage. Who knows, maybe five years from now I decide to be a raging lunatic again and come people, maybe I'll have my, my next Nasim Taliban or something like that.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
No, I mean, I think similarly here, obviously I run a podcast and write a newsletter. I'm very online to some extent. But I think the thing that has really driven me and giving me the most fulfillment. Obviously family, moving closer to family. But here on, like, I've really been focused on the business side of tftc, working with Ed, our head of growth, to really just create like a management framework of how we actually operate the business and sort of expand the opportunities that we go after that aren't podcast newsletter x Focus. Like, what else can we do to sort of support our key vision of highlighting signal and helping people become more sovereign beyond what we're doing with the content? And that's been really fundamental and exercise that we've been playing through for the last few months.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
No, I mean, the opportunity cost app is fucking brilliant, dude. When I saw that, I was like, why hasn't anyone done this before? This is like so good. Like, it's so, like, it's such a simple tool. Yeah, dude. Kudos to you guys. Like, that's, that's, that's an example of people who actually, you know, are creative and solving something very clear because they have an information edge, which is as bitcoin as we do. We're ahead of 99% of the world. People haven't even changed the paradigm yet of their method of thinking. As we said earlier, it's like they still perceive bitcoin as an investment, for fuck's sake. Even though maybe they see it less speculative now, it is still in the mental category of an investment. We're sort of like 50 years ahead of them. We're sort of seeing bitcoin as not only just money, but now it's a tool. And that is completely different paradigm. And that's where great products come from that are genuinely futuristic.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah, Zapp, I guess, last point on that. Thank you. Number one. But number two, for any bitcoiners, particularly like us, who've been in it for a while, I think that's the most important thing is recognize. Obviously we have this information asymmetry, we have this arbitrage that we're taking advantage of, obviously by stacking sats and building around it. But I think patience, recognizing it's a marathon and the market's going to come to us eventually, but at its own pace. And staying sane while that process plays out is incredibly important. There's going to be a lot of burnout and all that, but I think it's happening, it's happening at its own pace. And just. You don't want to be like the guy in the cave who gets close to the diamonds and then turns around. Just stay the course. Try to touch grass make sure your mental health, for lack of a better term, your mental clarity is probably the better term, is where it needs to be.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Totally. Totally. When treasury company.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Never. TFTC is a bitcoin treasury company. We just have an operating business that provides value to people.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
You actually have an actual business that makes sense. Bitcoin. That's it. It's so funny when. Because I got asked by that when we're doing a little fundraiser. Actually, we were about to start a fundraiser and I was in Prague and people started asking me, so they're like, so are you going to go public? And I was like, what? For what? And they're like, so you can put bitcoin in the balance sheet. I'm like, well, no, I think we're just going to try and get revenue and earn money in bitcoin. And they're sort of looking at me like, what the fuck's wrong with you? And I'm looking at them like, what the fuck's wrong with you? Yeah, it's hilarious to watch, man. What an interesting world.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
I've been saying it publicly for months, especially during paper bitcoin summer. But caveman to me is like, it's too good to be true. Nothing in life is that easy. And not that it's easy to go through all the SEO, I mean, relatively easy to go through the SEC paperwork and raise some capital, sell the vision. But obviously that takes work. But I think you can just get something to market and turn on a magic bitcoin printing machine. Seems a bit naive to me. I think there will be some that do it successfully, but it's going to be economies of scale game that obviously a few players have massive head start on 100%.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
It'll be like the AI space man. There'll be like three, four winners. And like this idea that everyone. There's going to be hundreds of bitcoin treasury companies, all this sort of stuff, it's fucking ludicrous. And yeah, it's interesting.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah. Build a product or service that brings people value, they pay for it and you produce it cheaper than they pay for it. And you sweep that excess into bitcoin.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Bitcoin economics 101. I was watching the Count of Monte Cristo with my wife a couple weeks ago, and while they're digging in the, in the, in the tunnel, trying to get out of the prison, the. The priest asks Dantes is like, define economics. And he sort of like says, you know, being able to create a surplus, blah, blah, blah. And then he says, in short, dig now, eat later, you know, so it's like, that's it. There's. There's your economics, like, do something and produce surplus and that's it. Yeah. It's not complicated.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
It's not, no. But I think the. Won't even call it greed. I think the. I guess it's a FOMO to an extent. Like this idea, like, we need to stack as many sats now, which I get. I have that feeling personally as well. The land grab, the gold rush, whatever you want to call it, that's what's driving a lot of this. And it's like, ah, I agree, but is this the best way to go about it? I don't know. I don't think so.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Yeah. For the people, you know what. And just benefit of the doubt. For like the people who know what they're doing there in capital markets and like that. Yeah, whatever, you know, they know that game. And there's probably like a few people, as you said, that'll be successful at that. Like. But man, like, it's. It's a. It's a. It's a weird relic of the. The FIAT world that something like that can actually happen. This is sort of like a strange period in history. Like, people look back and be like, that. That actually happened.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Yeah. And I think the next 12 months will reveal a lot about the efficacy of these strategies. Maybe we'll talk again at some point next year. Hopefully not a whole year. Maybe the first quarter, second quarter next year. Catch up on Satlantis and retrospective on the performance of the treasury company.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Totally. We should definitely do that.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
All right, we've got Logan's, got the links, the Satlantis, where everybody can find it. So we'll put that in the show notes. Particularly focus on Nostr and growing Nostr specifically. Take what we discussed here and really think about it. I think this is really important because again, you have Nostr, the protocol. People are building businesses on top of it. Should we be replicating businesses that already exist in the web 2.0 world, if that's what you want to refer to it as, or you just go create new markets? I think that's where the signal is and where the growth comes from. So shout out to you for honing in on that and leaning into it. It's Atlantis.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Appreciate it, man. I appreciate it. And then I will throw one thing out there for people listening. If you're an event host, event organizer of any kind, if you're using meetup or Loom or anything, would love you to come and give the app a try. It's ready to rock and roll. You can create an event on there. It's super fast. Doesn't have bitcoin ticketing yet. It'll have bitcoin ticketing in a couple of weeks. So by the time you hear this, it's either just about to be released or very shortly. But yeah, certainly by the end of October you'll have bitcoin ticketing. It's Nostra enabled, all of that sort of stuff. Would love some feedback. It would mean a lot. We really like our goal over the next six months is to have all of the bitcoin conferences, meetups, commun and all that sort of stuff beyond there. So it's like a real vibrant sort of place. Like if you want to know anything that's going on in the meat space in bitcoin like this is want it to be the place to be. So would love anyone try it out.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Check it out Freaks. Till next time.
Logan (entrepreneur and developer involved with Satlantis and Nostr)
Appreciate it.
Host (possibly a podcaster or interviewer)
Peace of love thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that that $5 a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.
Host: Marty Bent
Guest: Aleks (Logan) Svetski (Entrepreneur, Satlantis & Nostr)
Date: October 11, 2025
In this episode, Marty Bent sits down with Aleks Svetski (Logan), founder of Satlantis and a key builder in the Bitcoin/Nostr space, to explore the journey of building a genuinely useful events application empowered by Bitcoin and the Nostr protocol. The conversation weaves through practical challenges in AI, reflections on digital burnout, shifts in entrepreneurial focus, and what it means to harness open, global protocols to create new markets—rather than replicate existing ones.
Timestamp: 01:29–07:02
Timestamp: 07:02–14:28
Timestamp: 15:23–23:24
Timestamp: 23:24–35:25
Timestamp: 45:41–54:59
Timestamp: 59:00–64:44
Timestamp: 66:15–76:48
Timestamp: 76:50–88:27
“AI is sort of an effort multiplier as a business… But the big leap forward is identity and payments on the stack. Put those into the protocol—now you have a new design space for apps.”
“We tried to build a social network for nomads. What we ended up giving them was a new problem: another place to post. What people actually needed was a better way to run events with less friction.”
“There’s almost double the number of events happening now than pre-COVID. There’s been a massive rebound. People are craving meatspace connection.”
“Get out there and meet people in the real world. Build actual networks again and friendships and communities. That’s what people are craving.”
| Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------|----------------| | AI Purpose & Overhype | 01:29–07:02 | | AI Economics and Oligopoly | 07:02–14:28 | | The New Consumer Stack (AI, Bitcoin, Nostr) | 15:23–23:24 | | Events as a Killer App | 23:24–35:25 | | Solving the Cold Start Problem | 45:41–54:59 | | Product Features & User Behaviors | 59:00–64:44 | | Digital Burnout & Rediscovering Meatspace | 66:15–76:48 | | Building for New Markets | 76:50–88:27 |
This episode serves as both a practical case study and a philosophical roadmap for the next phase of Bitcoin-native, user-empowering application development. It’s essential listening for founders, builders, and anyone interested in where the intersection of Bitcoin, open protocols, and real-world value is headed.