Freedom Money Ep4

George, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure and it's good to reconnect again.

It is. It's been a few months. I don't know, 3 months, 6 months.

Yes, gosh, what a time. What a time.

Time just flies by. So it's really great to reconnect. And, you know, I'd love for you to tell the guests about your background.

Yeah, sure. So, yeah, my name is George Siyosi Samuels. Also known as the Digital Wayfinder because of my cultural heritage. I'm part Polynesian, part Fijian Indian, and grew up in a lot of different places. So, you know, we're going to be talking about freedom. So my life has really been about having a bit of physical freedom by moving across countries growing up. But, you know, fast forward to more of my career over the last 15 years, I've been in the emerging tech space have, you know, experienced all the different tech waves that have come through that. And I've worked from startups all the way up to corporate and government, uh, was involved with Bitcoin as far back as 2012, um, worked across fintech, blockchain, uh, community management at one point, and, uh, I'm involved in AI currently. But Bitcoin holds a very special place in my heart because, you know, back in 2012 You know, the, the spirit of Bitcoin and what I experienced personally through it was, uh, yeah, truly revolutionary, um, and, and hyper innovative, uh, from a technical standpoint. And, uh, yeah, that brings us to today. And so I think we'll, we'll talk a little bit more about some of the ventures I'm currently working on, but, uh, more specifically, you know, about the, the Bitcoin experiences and, uh, the future.

Yeah, the Bitcoin experiences are super interesting. I definitely want to deep dive, uh, into that. Yeah, um, you know, I, I came to Costa Rica from Canada, as you know, and, you know, there wasn't a lot of hope leading to that transition, and Bitcoin gave me a huge amount of hope, as did the Bitcoin community and connecting with people like you. So thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, I know, uh, normally I ask now what, what your company's mission is, and with you, I know, you know, there's a number of different, different buckets, and your fingers are in a number of things, so Yes, maybe, maybe if you can go through those starting there.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Um, I would say at this point in time, my, my mission has actually become about protecting, uh, human minds. And there's a whole backstory around this, but with what I've been seeing around AI, there is a sort of cognitive collapse that is kind of on the horizon. You know, there you might have been hearing about, uh, people that have, you know, experienced psychosis and all these other sort of things. But this cognitive tax from tech in general has been there, but it's now just being accelerated by AI. And so there are a lot of cases increasing of people who are just having this sort of cognitive collapse. I think some people are, uh, focusing more on like, oh, you know, there's, there's cognitive deterioration or decay happening, and those those sort of things. But I think it's more about like, if people aren't aware and aren't consciously using their technology appropriately, AI will just have this cognitive rewiring on people who aren't attuned for this new world. And it's super fascinating to watch because I think there's still only a very small sliver of people in the world who are actually using AI, right? We're in like the fortunate percentage of people who are using it. And I use it a lot myself. But I can see how if we are not careful, we can outsource too much of our cognition. And in terms of the companies that I've been involved with, the last company I had was Anna. It was a Web3 accountability platform. And we were essentially coupling people's accountability goals with Bitcoin blockchain. And so it was super fascinating because— we were getting into prediction markets, um, before prediction markets like really became a thing, um, on-chain. And, uh, before that, um, the other company I had, uh, was Faya, which, uh, was set up in Singapore around late 2018. And that has always been focused on just more the consultancy side of emerging tech. So every new tech wave that comes in, we look at people, culture, and tech. And that was what its focus was. And yeah, I think that sums up the last 3 companies that I've had.

Well, I guess kind of digging in now to the company. So maybe more generally before I go there, there's a word conscious, consciously thinking, consciously doing things.

Yes.

That's in a lot of, you know, what I read about you and when I hear you speak. What exactly does that mean?

Yeah. Let's just replace conscious with intentional. I think different people have a different relationship to that word. It's super fascinating when you use the word conscious because I think like other words in the English language, you can have multiple meanings. For me, at least in the way that I'm approaching Conscious Stack Design, which is a system that I'm sharing with a lot of people, and we're getting super interesting results from it, But it is about teaching people how to consciously design their stacks and not just become masters of individual tools because the world is becoming tokenized. It's already digitized, and more people are operating in digital environments. But we don't actually see or take much conscious awareness of how these digital environments are influencing us. There's a lot of research already and scientific studies about physical environments on our behavior, and we know that a lot of tech companies have been manipulating our behavior through the doom scroll and all these other behaviors, the hooks. But I think what AI is doing is that, one, it's flipping the economics of the SaaS world, and two, it's introducing new types of behavior that is pushing us to become more orchestrators than individual tool masters. This orchestration is where you need to start to think in stacks. This, I think, is actually going to help us deal with the cognitive load that will come through AI introducing more tools and technologies through all this abundance.

I'm digesting. I'm digesting.

Yes. Sorry. But yes, hopefully some of that made sense, and if you need me to clarify anything, just ask away.

Well, I guess maybe if you can dig deeper and to some of the specific problems that you see from kind of outsourcing your life to AI. I mean, you know, my experience, and I'm sure a lot of people listening to the podcast or hearing about it, is, you know, we use these tools, uh, do things that I would normally do, and they take up my time. And, you know, I can automate some things if I want to do some research. You know, for example, in my company, we're doing some research into some compliance issues, not not really my strength or something I, you know, want to do, but it was able to just generate a ridiculous amount of output. And, you know, being the compliance officer, I obviously can't outsource that to AI. I need to consciously be aware of, you know, what's going on and how it impacts the partners I'm working with, whether that's my law firm, compliance officer, regulators. Uh, so like, where's the risk? Like, what's the point where you're like, you know, using this tool effectively and you've kind of fallen off?

Yeah, so the, the, the signals that I'm already seeing is where professionals like yourself, or, you know, those who have deep expertise, where they've outsourced so much of that thinking that they can't even remember how to open their email because they've outsourced. This is happening now where like if you go to Reddit and you look at all the stories that are coming out, and I've also seen posts from some really smart friends of mine where they're sharing these sort of stories where they got so used to using agents for everything that they had this moment where they forgot how to just open up an email and hit reply. And this is, this is the, warning signal. If you— I hope you never experience this, right?

It seems like, it seems like it's the same, like, when you couldn't remember anybody's phone number, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, right? And so, you know, I'm not, I'm not much of an alarmist. I actually want to see us just simply become more conscious technologists in general. I think we have grown up in a time where the technology grew at a pace that we were still able to manage. AI has now just compressed time further, 100 times, right? Where now it can do so many things almost seemingly from our side at the speed of light that we can't possibly, um, oversee it all, right? Like all these things that it's outputting most people are now summarizing summaries. And so if, you know, it's just like with language, right? When you— if you get— if you do that enough times, you lose context and you get lost in translation, right?

I, I have one kind of example of this. Like, for me, when I was studying in university and CFA, I would get the books. Like, I would go straight to the original source. And there were a lot of people at the time who were using, you know, different summaries of the books or people's representations of the books. And yeah, I think to me that didn't make sense because clearly you were losing something in translation. It wasn't going to be perfect.

And people's summaries are different too, right?

Yeah.

How they summarize what they read can be different. And so then it makes you wonder, how is the LLM thinking about it when they're giving us summaries, right? Yeah. And you notice when you start, because I do this because I'm a nerd, But I literally use 3 models minimum now for my outputs because I started to see over the last few years how each model upgrade, there were new guardrails, which meant new types of bias, which, you know, and it just kept stacking. And I was like, no, no, this is—

if—

and this is for us who are technical people. So I can only imagine if it starts to hit the masses, they won't even realize how their minds and cognition are being rewired. Just through the simple summaries and relationships that they're having in a technology that is so good at mirroring what we want to hear.

Yeah, I, it's— I agree exactly 100% with what you're saying. So there's one tool I use for some automation at work.

Yeah.

And it's just become a bit woke on me, right? It won't do certain things that it doesn't kind of, uh, So I find that strange, but I think another experience that I'll point to is like when I was developing Kadena, and so this was like end of 2024, you know, in the early AI tools, and it just shows how much things have changed and come up. But, you know, I was using the tools to get me to a certain point. The tools didn't help beyond that, right? Like I had to connect some things on my own. The AI didn't know yes, you know, that Kadena was even possible, if that makes any sense. It was just— yes, you know, at the time, maybe it does now, but it wasn't, um, you know, helpful beyond a certain point, and it kind of reached the limits of its knowledge, and, you know, that was it. And so, yeah, I don't know, I, I guess that continues for a few things.

Yeah, no, 100%. And, uh, just give me a sec. I think something's slowing down my computer, so I'm just going to try and like quit this thing that just randomly started up. I don't know why it does this. It's like Zoom sometimes, you know how it just like decides to upgrade things without you wanting it to?

Okay, that's technology. I think that's exactly what we were talking about. It's decided for you, George. That it knows, right, how to operate your computer, right, right, right.

Um, but you can still hear me, right? I don't know why I can hear you. I'm showing up.

Did you go back to your— your camera may have disconnected, or whatever the app was took your camera.

Okay, let me try. I'm just going to quickly switch, and if I can Yeah, it's like the camera— maybe because we were talking about technology, right? The technology was like, hey, I'm still here, I can hear you. What is this? All right, yeah, sorry about this. I don't know, this is strange. I think it's the first time this has happened.

But, but I find, George, I'll say this as you're trying to get it back on. Yeah, we had issues yesterday, and I don't know if you have this in Thailand or had it in Mexico, but like Electricity isn't the most reliable thing in these emerging markets, and so the electricity went off a couple times yesterday for 10 minutes, and it kind of throws a bit of a wrench in, you know, your podcast or your meetings or whatever, whatever's going on.

100%.

Sometimes the internet just does that too, independently. Um, yeah, these things we take for granted. It's life, right? We move on.

Whenever you can. There you go. Okay, you got me? Okay.

I can see you again. All right. So, let's start with a new topic here. And then we can probably edit out a bunch of stuff here.

So— Okay.

Do you want to tell us a bit about the company's mission?

Yeah. So, for Conscious Stack Design, the mission essentially is to protect human minds. And I think I had mentioned this, right, in terms of that particular mission. And this to me has become— I, I feel like it has become so ingrained on what I want to focus on for the next, you know, foreseeable, like even like the next 10 years minimum, um, because I see how our minds is the next thing that needs to be protected against just the influx of technologies. Like, there are so many innovations, um, coming out, you know. I don't know, like, there was one week just a few weeks ago where all these countries were releasing cures to different types of cancer all at the same time, and I'm going, that's strange. Like, did they have this the whole time, or is it because of AI, right, that now they are able to crack these things? I don't know what's going on, but the, the danger here is I feel like for human beings it is important for us to keep our own minds working because, you know, that we also have higher cases of Alzheimer's and, um, what's the other one, uh, just a lot more mind-related diseases. Exactly. And so You know, I think that is something that's important because what's happening now is we've outsourced so much and now we're starting to outsource our own minds. And a lot of our economy has been based on knowledge workers. And so if we outsource that part, what is there left for us in modern times?

Yeah, it's super interesting to hear you say that. And like one of the thoughts that's been running through my head as we're having this conversation is like, there's probably 20 years of my life where I was getting up, going to work and, you know, accumulating funds so I could, you know, take care of kids and do these things. And at no point was I really like even in a position where I was rested enough to be able to say, hey, uh, you know, is this what I actually want to be doing? Is this, you know, the right thing for me? It was just kind of, you're, you're on this train. The other thing I'll say about what you're saying in outsourcing your thinking to AI, I feel it's kind of the evolution of what's happened because, you know, we've essentially outsourced everything. Like in Canada, it became very obvious over a period of time that, you know, people outsource their thinking to the news, right? So the, you know, there was a time where the news was like a factual reporting of events and then There's a time now where the news is, in Canada specifically, you know, some government propaganda driven by an agenda. And so at some point those things switched.

Yeah.

You know, I think people maybe at one point were trained to look at the news critically, and now they're not. So they kind of accept this, okay, well, if somebody thinks, you know, freedom's important, then they're automatically racist. We need to paint these people with this brush. And so you had this fake news, and then you have the food that people go get from Food is, you know, essentially cardboard in many cases, or, you know, nothing really resembling food. It's in a package, in a box. It's been manufactured in a factory, um, you know, and, and so I think a lot of people Uh, you know, I think you're seeing some people kind of remove, remove themselves from that and get back to a life that's actually more connected with, you know, the ground, the sun, uh, certain realities in the world, as opposed to this just completely made-up fake nonsense, you know. And even, even like, I, I would take it to the money too, since we're— yeah, I, I could look back at The Matrix and I'm like, wow, This is— it's literally, you know, your entire banking sector, public sector, everything is literally just made up of, you know, money that they print at will and that banks can put on spreadsheets and create out of thin air also. And, you know, there's no kind of— how can I say— like, the consciousness, I don't know if it comes back to truth or like reality at some point, but is that Is that the desire when you're protecting people's minds so that they can, you know, I think to a certain extent we're all kind of shaped by everything that's coming in. And so like, how do you do that, especially when the speed at which things are coming in, you know, picking up every day?

Yeah. So, you know, I think, and okay, I, my video looks, uh, like You look good. Thanks. But no, I mean, on my side, it's going back and forth, but can you hear my audio fine?

I can hear your audio fine and you look the same. It had a period where it was out.

Okay, cool. As long as it's coming out clear on your end. Yeah, I think everything that you're touching on is spot on with how I'm framing this and how it's emerged too. The Conscious Stack Design is like a methodology and a system that came out from my own personal experiences with tech in the tech space over the last 15 years and rolling out and teaching people new tech for each wave, right? And, and just what I saw. And I, I did notice that when I would start rolling out new tech technologies, right, whether it was a startup or a corporate or a government to a nation, I noticed that there were always the same types of resistance at the beginning. Which you can expect with anything new. There's ingrained behaviors that often become rituals, they become traditions, they just become the culture. When you're trying to introduce new technology, either you do it forcefully and you just don't care how people feel about it, or you figure out a way to use analogies that map to existing worldviews or behaviors. And so it was from that where I then started to see patterns, and I realized that these patterns of how groups were thinking were showing up in the way that they chose their tools as a collective, right? And this wasn't just for the digital era. This was also when we had tools and technologies in a non-digital way also, right? If you look at the history of weaponry, it's super fascinating to see the types of tools that each culture would choose and why. Why they would be stronger with, say, a longbow or a simple bow, a crossbow, or why some would have large long swords or big swords versus small thin ones. Those same sort of patterns, when I started to see them, that's when I started to realize, "Aha, well, if we are spending so much time in our digital environments already, Can we not just use that as a way to sort of realign ourselves without having to retreat to the mountains or the middle of nowhere away from society, right? And still keep our center? Because I feel like we have these experiences as human beings, and I feel like it's not doing anyone any good if you just go and retreat with all that wisdom and experience, right? For, for forever. I feel like we do need to find a way to be able to integrate back so we can balance, you know. Um, well, I don't know if balance is even the right word, but integrate the wisdom, you know, that we all share through our individual experiences. Because I see all— like, I see everybody's experience as just data points at this point, right? As the techie inside of me just goes, these are all data points. And if we act like a large language model, we bring it all together and we see sort of what is the deterministic output that we are allowing out as a, as a collective, because LLMs operate in this way— probabilities, right? And so it's going to wait. It— for human beings, because we can't deal with probabilistic thinking, it— we had to program the LLM to give us a weighted response, right? And to give us a deterministic answer. But actually, the LLMs are holding multiple viewpoints at the same time constantly. You know, and I find that particular part fascinating.

I find, you know, I'll bring it back to the news example. And like, when, you know, you're shutting people's opinions out of things, and then the LLMs are basing their information on what's available to them. And, you know, people with unacceptable opinions aren't allowed to do or participate in certain things. Um, you know, you, you get really wonky results because you have— you've eliminated the tails of, you know, we have this distribution of life and the people on the outside of this normal distribution, they're the interesting ones, right? They're where the innovation is coming. They're the ones where societies evolve.

Exactly.

If we're all just kind of in the center here.

Yep.

You know, then, then we're just going to live the same life over and over again.

Correct. We're just going to get the averaged outputs all the time. And as, as you said, you know, the innovation often comes at the edges. And so what I've taught myself to do is when I get answers for specific queries that I'm giving, I'll often tell it, uh, give me, uh, give me the answer in probabilities and order it from most probable to least probable. That way I can take advantage of the LLM. Then I actually now have— I actually use 3 models at the same time for specific queries, whereby it can give me 3 answers at the same time. It can also reduce some of the bias that is inherent, of course, in each LLM. To me, that has just been my own personal way of trying to train my mind in different ways. I realize that the AI, right? I think some humans already think like that, but I think what AI is doing is that it is kind of pushing us to think in just different ways, new ways again. And I think that it needs, it needs to happen, but it needs to happen in a way that we don't collapse in on ourselves in the process.

Yeah, uh, sometimes it feels like a lot's collapsing in on ourselves.

Yeah, right.

I, um, I mean, you've had all this experience in the space, and obviously being in Bitcoin since 2012, I think brings a pretty unique perspective to this. Do you have any advice for builders in the space, or maybe what is your best advice for builders in the space?

Huh. Um, don't—

this is the portion of the podcast where I'm looking for therapy here, right?

Yeah. My, my advice, I think, is be careful of making money, kind of making money an identity. And why I say that is because Bitcoin has introduced the Bitcoiner. Yeah, where money— the first time in history people are literally defining themselves by a currency, right? Because you don't— people, I don't know, you don't see people say, I'm a US dollarer, or I'm a British pounder, you know. But with Bitcoin our religious tendencies have been and behaviors have been mapped to this new money. And it kind of, to me, reflected— and this is maybe part of the jaded side after being in the space for so long, right? Because I saw like the best and worst of humanity, I felt like, in those years of my Bitcoin days. Because I was like in the middle, um, of the action, you know, when it was split, um, with the associations and the funds and the miners at the time. And, um, I, I kind of was sad when Bitcoin started splitting, you know, like into their factions, because people lost the why and they started fighting over the how, you know, if that makes sense. And, um, that, that's, that seems to be Um, yeah, I think that might just be a human tendency. Like, I think we all want to have our own variations on a specific idea, and that's, that's, that's fine. But I think it's just what I go back to is just be wary of making Bitcoin an identity, because it's kind of reflecting how us as a collective have put money up almost to godlike status.

Yeah, I, I agree with that. In terms of— I, I would say You know, I would add that to anything, like, you know, yeah, dissolving ego and all this stuff. But yeah, what I think the reason, you know, I'll just say I think the reason for it, because I think I felt this, is you're, you know, a lot of people coming to Bitcoin have literally been kind of outcast and rejected from every community that they've ever been a part of. And so, you know, you find this community and then, yeah, that, that is how people identify. And I think once you're in the community, you're like, yeah, these people get it. These people are the ones I'd rather hang out and be with. I was just talking— like, the last guest on our podcast was, uh, he's a builder and he builds communities, houses, and, you know, for freedom-loving people. It's a big market for that, apparently.

Yeah, no, and I think that's the thing though, because What— there is Bitcoin, and maybe it provides a, a good umbrella, but it's that freedom part that I found that is the thing underneath Bitcoin, is that a lot of people who are very attracted to sovereignty, freedom, um, they're the ones who I found a lot in Bitcoin. Um, for my particular journey, I think I always resonated with people regardless of camps on that part, the freedom and sovereignty. And I live my life in that sort of manner, like I optimize my life for freedom and sovereignty with or without Bitcoin. And I think Bitcoin was a good support, you know. I think people who made their money with Bitcoin obviously benefiting from it, but you know, there are some other— like everything in life, there's good and bad. And I think with Bitcoin, it is more just maybe becoming conscious too of even the ideologies or identities we take on, you know. And we were talking before about how AI is kind of pushing us to maybe think more about like why we do what we do and what we are truly, um, interested in, right? And I think that's where Bitcoin, um, is very alluring, I think, you know, for folks who do want to have the freedom and sovereignty and then also have a feeling of economic empowerment. So I understand why, you know, it has become an identity. But the flip side is just be conscious of how far that identity goes.

No, that, that makes a lot of sense. I think, uh, yeah, I think that's important for all kinds of reasons. Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna cut it here, George. Is there people or places that people can go to find out more information about what you're doing?

Yeah, I think my website is probably the easiest. Just go to georgecoc.com and it'll link you out to all the various things that I'm working on. And, um, yeah, you should, you should be good to go from there.

Amazing. Well, it is, uh, very wonderful to reconnect with you again. I hope it's not another 6 months before we do it again, but, uh, Always good to see you, and, you know, enjoy the new adventure in Thailand.

Thank you so much.