The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin For Everyone | Cory Klippsten, Founder Of Swan Bitcoin

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Some crypto companies can brag about their OG status in the space, however others who are relatively new let their actions speak for them. Swan Bitcoin’s short history in crypto has not stopped it from quickly becoming a dominant player. Offering newcomers, retail, and high net worth individuals alike the opportunity to buy Bitcoin and dollar cost average has given them a place at the table. On top of their convenient Bitcoin services, Swan Bitcoin also provides a top-notch educational platform. According to Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten, “the recent dip is not only extremely healthy for crypto, but OG investors have also been taking serious advantage of the opportunity.”   In this episode, Cory Klippsten and Scott Melker explore:   Bitcoin as legal tender - Volcano mining in El Salvador Government officials spreading FUD Can Bitcoin & the dollar co-exist ESG concerns & government bans CBDCs & their relation to Bitcoin Bitcoin vs. repeated FUD cycles Geographic miner redistribution 5% CPI on goods Swan Bitcoin & Bitcoin’s future Bracing for a bear market How Swan Bitcoin works Swan’s customers & their behavior Bitcoin’s role in Latin America The fight against inflation Sats vs. Bitcoin denomination Bitcoin causing friction Are stablecoins better? A bitcoin-based future Countries, institutions, & companies buying Bitcoin Writing a Bitcoin book Do individual investors matter? --- Voyager:  This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 9.5% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits.  Go to https://thewolfofallstreets.link/voyager and download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. -- Matcha: Matcha is the easiest way to trade in DeFi. Matcha enables you to trade across all the major DEXs so you can be sure you’re getting better prices than going to a centralized exchange or Uniswap.   Connect your wallet and start today at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/matcha --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Voyager and Matcha. Stay tuned for more information on both later in this episode. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of Wall Street podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Today's guest founded Swan Bitcoin in 2019, which has already become one of the most important names in the Bitcoin investing space. Corey has an extensive background in traditional finance, but what excites me most

is his passion for Bitcoin and the revolution he and I both believe that it will bring. If you made it to the Bitcoin conference in Miami, you probably saw the Swan tent, which hosted a massive tent, which was the hangout for the biggest names in the Bitcoin space. Having Corey on the show today is my goal to better understand the recent developments happening in the Bitcoin world and what he sees in the future for our beloved asset. And of course, what's happening at Swan. Corey Clifton, thanks so much for coming on today. Yeah, thanks for having me back. And I love the expanded focus. I hadn't heard that pitch for the show. I've got to catch up on some recent episodes, man. This sounds really cool. Yeah, thank you.

So listen, man, everybody's talking about since Miami, El Salvador, of course, right? They passed a law identifying Bitcoin as legal tender. It even says so now on Wikipedia that it's one of their national currencies. And within just 48 hours of that announcement, we're already showing videos of wells being dug to mine renewable clean Bitcoin from volcanoes. Did you see that coming? It was not on my, as they say, it was not on my 2021 Bitcoin bingo card was the volcano mining in El Salvador. But it was nice to see. And, you know, clearly they had a pretty solid PR rollout plan ready to go. So you could kind of hit the one announcement and then, you know,

follow it up with a few different things. It's kind of funny. Cause he, he acted on, on the Twitter spaces a couple of nights ago. So basically if you didn't catch this and we actually posted the, the audio on the Swan signal YouTube. So youtube.com slash Swan signal. We have the audio from the Twitter spaces a couple of nights ago. Basically, the president of El Salvador was hanging out in Twitter spaces from the presidential residence, giving the play by play of the bill passing in Congress, which was just the most incredible sort of real time thing to be a part of and to watch. And, you know, he played it slow when somebody was asking about,

you know, you should get into Bitcoin mining. Like he didn't tip his hand at all. And then the next day they came out with that announcement. Like he knew it. He was in his hip pocket. He was just waiting for the bill to pass. Yeah. He was actually dismissive, you know, not even on our radar basically is kind of the route that he went. And then a day later, it was like, I've instructed them to, you know, check out the volcanoes. And and four hours later there's videos of uh you know geysers spurting for the ground and he knows the right narrative he's like by the way all of that emission that's steam that's 100 water vapor just so the esg people don't freak out okay so you know and in the same day that you see those videos you you see Elizabeth Warren and Senate committee hearings and just spewing the same old fud and garbage about energy usage and Bitcoin mining.

What do you make of that absolute bipolarity and even cognitive dissonance, knowing that everything's moving renewable. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think this is good for Bitcoin because any time it's out in the public sphere and people go and read and do the investigation, if they do enough research, they end up becoming a huge fan. And so that will happen among even her constituents. Some of them will turn over, maybe as importantly, political opponents who are sort of inclined to go against whatever someone like Elizabeth Warren says are even more likely to go down the rabbit hole and understand what Bitcoin is. So, you know, I think when any politician takes a hard stance on Bitcoin pro or against, it's very good for Bitcoin. I tend to agree. It's just interesting to see that stance

after those exact criticisms. The juxtaposition was hilarious. So many times. Right, but also it's just like, it's the same criticisms every cycle, right? Well, until you actually do it yourself, like those, yeah, it's those talking points are there right and it's the same it's the same things that dalio was saying about bitcoin in 2016 2017 before

he did his own research it's the same thing that any of these silicon valley vcs like calicanis or whoever will say about bitcoin until they actually sit down and do their own research and stop listening to their social circle so it happened to me obviously listening to their social circle. So what happened to me, obviously listening to my social circle and professional circle being in Silicon Valley circles and investing in tech companies and stuff like I had it all wrong because I was listening to Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures and these people that I respected from non cryptocurrency space things. And, you know, the narrative was always like, you know, Bitcoin is MySpace and Facebook is around the corner and this is tech, not money. It's, you know, I'm not a fan of Bitcoin. I like the underlying technology. And it takes a while to sort through all of that because you have, you know, in many cases, decades of trusting these voices that have been right on lots of other important things and happened to be wrong on this one. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And it's also, I mean, it can't go unnoticed that the hearing and

what they were really talking about was central bank digital currencies, right? So of course, they're going to be dismissive or even aggressive against Bitcoin when talking about their own poor competitor that is actually a more superior version of fiat, if you want to call it that, for the central bank. Yeah. I mean, I love the tack that Michael Saylor is taking, which is also one shared by Nick Batia. And I think even Safedine has talked about it this way, which is that the dollar and Bitcoin game theoretically probably will coexist for a long, long, long time. And there is no reason for like a hard landing way more Republic style hyperinflation for the dollar.

You know, Bitcoin should be a reserve asset, you know, and you can still use the dollar as a medium of exchange for a long, long, long time with all kinds of policy levers still available to the US government and the legislature and spending programs or whatever. And it can kind of have a soft landing. You don't need to rip this thing out and replace it with Bitcoin. It doesn't make any sense to do that. It would be wildly disruptive and unfair to all the participants of an economy that are completely built in layers on top of the dollar with all of the incentives that, and sort of the, the rules and that, that exist in the current system. So I think you have to have, you know, a slow transition

to coexistence first, and then we'll just see how things play out. It may replace in the long run, but it doesn't even have to, it could just be, you know, a massive asset as Saylor says that, that lives underneath, but it's just great that it'll provide a check on that spending because people always can voluntarily opt out and store their value in Bitcoin rather than, you know, centrally controlled fiat currency. Right. But do you believe that the government is incentivized to allow them to coexist peacefully? I think the people that comprise the government are, and I don't believe that there is a cabal of people coordinated, organized, and powerful enough,

even inside the US government, let alone coordinating across all of the other countries to be able to go against the truth and power inherent with Bitcoin. I think we're past it. I think it's past. I, you know, I started the company when big part of the mission statement was making sure we could get to a point that the US government would never like outright ban it or turn off the on ramps or whatever. And I actually believe that in the last, you know, 15, 16 months that enough

has happened that that isn't really possible anymore. I agree. I mean, listen, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't like to dig too deep, but I can't imagine that the Elon Musk's and Michael Saylor's and Dalio's of the world invest in something without making a call to make sure that it's not going to be regulated away or, or made illegal, right? I mean, we're talking about exceptionally connected people who are making significant investments in the space. So you have to imagine that they know that it's not going to be banned. Yeah, I mean, it was either, I mean, it goes back to January. I can't remember which one it was. But when Ross and Saylor were talking, Ross from NYDAG and Saylor at that little

conference in January, big conference January, where if you were looking at a, uh, a bell curve distribution of the likely outcomes for Bitcoin, we basically chopped off the left end of the distribution. You know, like if somebody, if Brad Sherman and Elizabeth Warren get together and try to do something contra Bitcoin, you know, there are going to be free speech lawsuits. There's going to be privacy lawsuits, property lawsuits, like lobbyists. I mean, so many corporations at this point have vested interest in Bitcoin continuing. It'll be a really, really well-funded and well-thought-through battle on every front. I just don't see them getting it through. Nobody wants to spend all of their political capital being against freedom. Right. Yeah. Or again, something that they still view as too small to go all in reputationally on, I would imagine.

So I guess the question is, are the Elizabeth Warrens and the Mungers and the Buffetts of the world, are they willfully ignorant? Is it they just haven't done the work? Are they too set in their ways to even ever understand? Or is there an ulterior motive here that the central bank digital currency, in Warren's case, is coming and, you know, obviously they want Bitcoin out of the way? Or is there something more sinister? Or do you really just think they just don't get it and they never will because they're so set in their ways well politicians of the establishment uh from either party that uh basically are in the the patronage game so you know pelosi at the top of one patronage pyramid and then you know the what's his name mitch probably at the top of the the other side you know those two have these massive you know k street patronage networks and the reason you can never house Pelosi is because all of the lieutenants and all of the people, they don't want to get displaced. So as long as they can cart her out on a life support, they'll just keep her alive as long as possible so that nobody can mess with it. It's a whole power structure, right? And it's the same on the Republican side. And this is not unique to the US.

It's how it is in a lot of countries, right? There's a strong incentive to keep the money flowing through the network that currently exists. We've seen this in, you know, the democratic machine in Chicago for 40 years and Philly with Rundell and, you know, on and on and on and on these things happen, right? So they don't want to give up the ability to lobby people and use power to get money for them and their friends. Yeah. They will fight for that as long as they possibly can, because that's what butters their bread. Totally. That makes sense. So speaking of central bank digital currencies, what's your view on them in general?

Obviously, we've seen the evolution in China. You know, they're very rapidly moving towards that. And some other countries, the United States, understandably far behind. But I mean, digital money is a dream for a central bank, right? So what's your position on CBDCs and their relationship to Bitcoin? Bearish, bullish? Will it drive more adoption or less? I mean, when people see how creepy CBDCs are,

I think it will kind of drive them more naturally toward freedom and wanting less government control. So I think that's probably an educational vector for humanity to learn more about what money actually is and how much better it could be when the government gives you like $200 and tells you that you can only spend it on this brand or going to the movies or whatever it is. It's just going to get worse and worse and worse as governments naturally sort of get lobbied, get paid off and work things into bills such that your money gets stolen and diverted to people that are connected to power. That's the natural progression of what will happen with CBDCs. And I don't think anybody wants that. We should be able to spend our money how we choose.

And it's never free money. It's being stolen from you. It's being stolen from savers if they print it. That's the natural evolution of every fiat currency in government and history, right? And so you have to imagine that a central bank digital currency, making that digital faster just accelerates that process. I mean, the US has to export the dollar to keep our current system going. So they will try to make the dollar usable. And as fiat currencies, as weaker currencies fail around the world, they'll try to figure out ways to get the

dollar used there and they'll be helpful and i don't think they're going to step in the way of making the dollar more useful in el salvador via strike and a bunch of other companies like they'll probably be fine with that and they like these countries being dollarized you want to export dollars and import cheap goods and services right yep um Yep. You know, so that can keep this gravy train running longer if they can have the dollar used in digital forms. I think it's a big reason why you saw, you know, Brian Brooks say, like, we don't, we're never going to have a Fed coin.

We'll just have guidelines and regulations and, you know, probably be just fine with USDT and USDC and TUSD and GUSD and whatever else you guys want to come up with. That's broadly stable coins pegged to the dollar, backed by the dollar, one-to-one or with a basket of whatever is probably fine for the Fed and the dollar system. As far as the yuan, I mean, they're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. They're just speeding off a cliff. I'm such a bear on the Titanic. Like they're just speeding off a cliff. I'm like such a,

such a bear on the paper tiger. That is the Chinese economy and the CCP is like iron grip on their people and just how, how much more insular they have to become as growth falls off a cliff. And they are just facing a massive demographic population bomb. I mean, their economy and population and situation was, you know, if you follow Peter Zion, which I do, and I read a lot of supporting things that he points to and that other people do, you know, I think China peaked last year and we'll not have it as good again,

probably for a century. Yeah, that makes sense. But it's interesting because they're going to make a lot of noise with the Olympics next year and rolling out their digital wallets to everybody that goes to the Olympics. And they're going to make everybody pay with this digital yuan. You're going to have to download the wallet and use it for everything in the Olympic Village and all the tourists, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. And they're cracking and they're once again, I mean, China FUD is part of the same ransomware, criminal energy FUD cycle that we see repeatedly. And India bans, of course, and coming back are the repeated FUD cycle. But it does seem that China is getting a bit more aggressive, certainly with miners and with Bitcoin. Do you think that that's reactionary?

By the way, somebody sent me a front page of a paper in India today that said they were planning to classify Bitcoin as an asset. Yeah. So, yeah. So we know that that that entire part of this news cycle was completely false. It was recycled news and completely misconstrued. And it makes sense for countries to do that. But do you think that this is that China's ban on Bitcoin has anything to do with that central bank digital currency rollout that you're talking about? Or do you think it's just time and they're worried about the environmental effects? It's not the environmental effects. I think it's actually, I think it's energy competition. I think it's like internally in their own economy. So they're trying to become more energy independent just for normal functioning of the economy. A wide swath of the country right now

that's rationing power because they don't have enough. They got in a trade spat with Australia that was providing the coal to fire the electricity plants in like a couple of provinces that are heavy on industry and manufacturing. And so, yeah, I think that's very possibly part of what's going on with the, you know, reduction in Bitcoin mining or whatever it is. But, you know, I think they're also not stupid. Like Bitcoin destroys their plans for the digital Yuan. I mean, the digital Yuan and one belt, one road is a Hail Mary from 300 yards that even Michael Vick or Tom Brady couldn't make that pass. They've got to thread like nine needles in a row to survive and keep power over the next few decades

but that's what they're trying to do with the digital yuan and you know stadium diplomacy in africa and trying to get access to all these resources at the end of the day like they're hemmed in by a bunch of neighbors that don't like them and they're essentially in you know full-blown economic and internet warfare with a much more powerful foe in the United States. And it's just not looking good for them. What I find interesting is that it's viewed as a negative of the cycle, what's happening in China while still having this energy debate. But I think you can totally spin it and say, listen, like less dependence on China for mining is less centralization. And it's a much bigger move towards more responsible miners

using renewables in other parts of the world, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm more concerned with the diversity of location of miners. That's a much bigger thing for me. And we know as of a couple of months ago, the next 12 months, the last two months, plus the 10 coming, that over half of ASIC manufacturing globally were slotted for delivery to North America. It's amazing.

So it's just booming. And you've seen, you know, Marathon basically just get whipped into shape by all the bullying of toxic Bitcoiners that hate patent trolls and hate people doing things anti-Bitcoin. And now their new CEO has been in there for five weeks and he's saying all kinds of the right things and doing the right things. And, you know, they signaled for Taproot and they got rid of their stupid, you know, no blood coins, whatever, Mr. Blunderful storyline. Green, green crypto. Yeah. So. Green crypto, right, yeah. Yeah, so like all that stuff will go away. Don't pay attention to these altcoins trying to do like carbon credit bundled with Bitcoin. That's a scam.

Kevin O'Leary is a scam. Mara was a scam. Looks like they've turned a new leaf, thank God. You know, all of that is just noise. And going back to talking about the US government and CBDCs and all that, we just saw May numbers come out 5% inflation year over year. Was that today? Literally, we're talking on June 10th, came out today, 5% consumer good price increase since last May. I've been on meetings for the last two and a half hours. I mean, people that I was reading earlier in the week were saying that it was freak out time if it was over three.

Yep, 5%. What are the markets doing? There's been no major reaction. It's funny and interesting, you know, the, and the, the crypto market certainly seems to just be absorbing everything right now and not really reacting, but, um, 5% may to may. I mean, this is, that's, that, that seems like it's approaching panic button time. And when you see that CPI chart, now we're down there with like the turkeys and the Brazils and the Mexicos, and we're not up top and the Russia's, and we're not there with like the turkeys and the brazils and the mexicos and we're not up top and the russias and we're not up top with uh with the japan's you know so it's really interesting

wow that's a huge number uh be interesting to i mean obviously they're going to spin it and say it's because you know the prices were depressed know, post pandemic onset last year or whatever. But, you know, like you said, that's got to tick some alarm bells and these things tend to have sort of pro cyclical effects and they tend to run away from you. I wonder what policy levers they can pull there. It's really a crazy number. So I'm curious, I want to dig more into what you guys are doing specifically, obviously there's all this crazy news. But, you know, you started in 2019, correct? We started the company, but we didn't actually launch until March 30th of 2020.

So it's actually been 14 months. The timing is really incredible when you look back, you know, knowing that March 12th was like the day that crypto died, right? No, it was. And I think we actually did our first alpha group trades were like Thursday and Friday. It was the 12th and the 13th. I think I'm the first user in the database. And I think it's March 12th. It's unbelievable. I mean, the worst day in the history of crypto.

Although when you look back now, it's not such a negative, right? Of course, it's a blip on the screen. But at the time, you had to be feeling something. If you multiply number of people times amount of stress, that's probably the worst. I would say as far as historically, the worst stress was probably that time it went from like 80 cents to one. You can watch that YouTube. But there were very few people involved at the time. Right? And yeah, so I guess some would argue

with the level of adoption that the recent drop was probably emotionally or just as difficult as March 20. I have a March 2020. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. Because there were a lot of institutions buying this time and there's been like a lot of retail adoption, but I don't know if it's been like, you know, look at the numbers. I think that retail in my view has probably underperformed as far as, you know, new people coming in. You know, we, we, we hit it pretty hard in 2017 and got a lot of people in and a lot of those people probably came back around this bull market.

But, um, you know, if there was like maybe 10 X adoption from 2015 to 2017, it feels more like another two X maybe from 2019 to 2021. It wasn't one is, wasn't as big of a flood. Obviously our numbers are crazy because we're going on small numbers so you can't really look at i can't look at my numbers and say like well that's happening industry-wide but you can look at right you know coinbase's numbers as a good proxy and say like well it kind of appears they kind of doubled over the last year something like that yeah i mean the on interestingly the on-chain metrics when you look at this drop, it seems somewhat clear that it was new buyers that

Panic sold and that the old- As it usually is. Yeah. Right. But that's a more bullish narrative, obviously, right? Because when the big money's buying or holding, you know that there's a floor. Is that what you're seeing? I mean, speaking of what you guys are doing. If you think about it, I mean, it was, it's a pretty bananas run up from, you know, 5k to 60k in a year, you know, like, you know, and realistically more like, you know, whatever, seven or 8k, notwithstanding the March 12th drop and quick bounce back, but still it's, it's a crazy run up. So I think a pullback is very healthy.

I think it's good for people to understand that, you know, moon math is a meme. It ain't real. And that thing is a market. And while we've had cycles historically, you know, the percentage of the number of coins extant that have been keeps going up and the number of new coins being mined each day keeps going down so obviously by net definition the effect of new supply versus the total supply of bitcoins for sale 18 million or 14 million or whatever that keeps going down so by definition like the new flow matters less significantly less over time right um and i think you see that these cycles are looking weirder and different and you know like we had a what 380 percent run up from the depths

of december 2018 up through you know june 26th of 2019 before crashing back down to where we were again almost yeah you know and now we're in another bull market and now we've pulled back like a lot. We went from 65 to 30. Yeah. It was more than a 50% drop. Yeah. And, but I also don't think that we're done with this bull market, but you know, but I also think, you know, in, in my view, and this is just something I do for thinking about my own personal finances and, you know, company finances and how to finance Swan and think about hiring and stuff like that. Like I have to handicap the peak of this cycle or whatever it is as being a bit lower than probably what I was looking at, you know, prior to the drop from 65 to 30, if we'd gone from like 65 to 45 and then charge right back up to 75 or 80, then I'd be looking at 250, 300 or something like that. But I think we should all as Bitcoiners give ourselves like a resounding round of applause if we hit like, you know, 150 or even 120 before an extended bear market. That would be an amazing- Right. Sort of as you said, I mean, you're also running a business, right? I mean,

you have to scale at the lower end of your estimation and not at the highest potential. Yeah. You don't necessarily want to get out of your skis and then have to sell, you know, half the company in a down route because you ran out of money. Yeah. So what do you guys by firing people? Yeah. So talk, I mean, talk more about the business for people who don't know because yeah, of course that it's a year old you know yeah yeah sure so uh we sell bitcoin we're just an on-ramp u.s focused um we do bank transfers in the u.s wire transfers in the u.s and then wire transfers internationally so we are we are global but only funded by wire transfer outside the u.s um we're really well known for extremely easy to set up uh automatic recurring

purchase plans with uh the lowest fees in the U.S. on that. So our fees are 68% lower than the Coinbase app and about half of Cash App for setting up automatic recurring purchase plans. And then we have smash buys, obviously, so you can just go and automatically buy and we'll float you the money till your ACH gets there, but you locked in the price. And so we do a huge volume with that. And then we have a really beefed up private client services division now, which we kind of rolled out quietly in January, but really ramped up in April by hiring a couple of managing directors. And now we have a third. So that's been exciting to see that. And this is like, you know, really someone to talk to for high net worth individuals, for CFOs, CEOs, fund managers, you know, real high touch customer service.

95% of those conversations, like the content of, if you're talking to somebody for an hour, like 55 minutes, it's just going to be about Bitcoin. It's not that complicated, but people have a lot of questions. They want to know they can talk to somebody that they can call them they can text them you can handle their needs help them with tax like all of that so that's super high touch service is great so it's basically a white glove service for white glove service yeah and it's and you know the qualifications like basically we turn on that service for anybody that uh intends to buy a hundred thousand dollars or more of Bitcoin over the next 12 months. Okay. And that's how we sort of, we always have that service for them. So,

you know, basically I'd say like the, I think the largest customer has probably bought like 55 or 60 mil from us. And then obviously lots of people have bought like a hundred grand. So. So you're across the board. I mean, for that, that's, that's a pretty widespread obviously in the kind of clients that you're servicing. And then you have your average, like person who's dollar cost averaging and just wants to fix it and forget it. Yeah. Well, I think if you're,

if you're a pension fund and you're thinking of putting like a few hundred million into it, like you're going to get good service from like a Cumberland or a NYDIG and they're going to have slightly better pricing on the spread. But if you're a small, medium sized business or you're a high net worth individual family office, and you really want that high touch service, like that's what we're built for. We have, I think of any company,

we have the best education in the industry. Obviously we can't do it full time like Bitcoin Magazine does. But as far as any company, we have the best education. I'll just say that. And our entire team basically is made up of podcasters, writers, authors that also do other things. But everybody can create content and they do constantly. And so it's cool. You've got, you know, you get in

touch with us and, you know, the person on the other end of your support ticket is a hardcore Bitcoiner for the last five years and knows everything and everybody. And if you're on a call with a salesperson, that person's been in Bitcoin since 2012 or 2011 or 2014, and they know everything and everybody. And we're kind of orienting ourselves to be Bitcoin's customer service team. But what's so interesting about that is that the core business, obviously, at the beginning was just easy on ramp, right? As you said, the cheapest way to dollar cost average, which is how most people should approach Bitcoin. But clearly, you're hiring because there's demand for family offices and high net worth individuals.

And maybe that wasn't something we would have seen in the last cycle. I think, I mean, I think the high net worth individuals have always been there. Obviously, I think the buying for your company narrative is definitely sparked by Saylor and created a great opportunity. And, you know, our entities spend something like 20 X the average individual or more. So company accounts are a big deal for us. And we have hundreds of them now, which is really cool. So we saw this crazy trend sort of at the beginning of the year, every time I talked to someone at the time, Catherine Coley was the CEO of Binance US and I had CZ and all these people on and everyone was saying, listen, we're like doubling our signups,

you know, like week over week, 10 times a month over what we're doing. A lot of that was Doge for all of them. Apparently they told me they were all pretty, pretty clear about that. It was sort of after GameStop, you know, and the Robinhood debacle. But I'm curious if you were seeing that sort of level of ramp up earlier in the year. But then the corollary is I haven't talked to anyone about this since the price dropped. So are we seeing a slowdown? Well, I mean, the interesting thing about people that have the propensity to choose Swan is they probably know a decent bit about bitcoin and we're not out there

at the top of funnel advertising on you know pomp and real vision or whatever um so you're kind of a little bit down the rabbit hole or you know a real bitcoiner that's going to point you towards swan or like you've got to kind of find out about us still um we still haven't spent any money on paid ads that's actually starting later this month which is is pretty cool. Um, but, um, so I think what that means is that these people are naturally more into hodling and more likely to buy a dip. And so our three biggest weeks in company history were the last three weeks of May. Wow. Yeah. So May was by far our best month ever. Um were up, I think 65% over April. You know, I think May was up 60X over October. So in, you know, six or seven months, we grew run rate sales

by like 60X. You know, we put out on Twitter when we crossed like a billion run rate sales, I think at the end of April, and then we did another 60% on top of that. So, you know, I think we're a little over 10% of Cash App's Bitcoin volume today. And, you know, kind of our goal is to pass them next year. So that's our goal is like our signpost is to, you know, and I would love to fail by the way, because I love Cash App and I hope they'd absolutely moon and make that completely impossible for us. We don't, it's not like I, like I don't like them or something. They're amazing. Yeah. But that's just kind of, you know, I like, I like friendly competition and that's what we're kind of shooting for. Such an interesting point though, because we just talked about how retail panicked and sold,

but your clients who some are still retail are eager to buy the dip and take advantage of the lower prices. I wouldn't have expected that. We also don't have a sell button. It helps. You can't sell on Swan. So you can call us or get in touch with a support ticket and we'll facilitate a sale for you. But I don't think we had a sale in May. We had a couple in February or March. We had one in 2020. One person sold one time. So how do you eventually exit? You can sell if you want to. Why would you exit though? The whole point is to convert to a Bitcoin standard. Like most people that buy from Swan are, you know, not buying Bitcoin that they plan to sell.

Yeah, I mean, I get it. I'm just saying that there's that that's obviously a challenging pitch probably for the masses when they're not already Bitcoiners. Oh, we don't pitch it. I mean, they can sell. They just have to get in touch. I love it. We like that little friction point. It's okay. If you've been paying any attention to me or have been following me for any length of time, then you know I absolutely love Voyager. Every single time someone tweets me or asks me, hey, Scott, where do you trade and invest? The

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there are much better options like Matcha. And now Matcha has upgraded to 2.0. Now, I've told you about Matcha a number of times. They have limit orders, which these other platforms don't, which is absolutely incredible. So you don't have to sit there staring at your screen waiting for that perfect moment to enter or exit a trade. And they also aggregate liquidity from all of the different platforms, finding you the best price and reduced fees. But now they have Matcha 2.0 and have added so many awesome features. Matcha is now the only DEX with an integrated fiat on-ramp. You can put your dollars directly onto the platform. They also now have OTC trading for orders between $1K and $1 million, which is beyond huge. And maybe most importantly, Matcha now supports trading on Polygon, meaning those gas fees will almost evaporate completely.

Now, if you guys want to check out Matcha, which you absolutely should, you can do that at the wolfofallstreets.link slash matcha. That's the wolfofallstreets.link slash matcha. Please check them out. I'm telling you, it will save you so much money and is such a superior experience. Do it now. So I'm curious, back to El Salvador, because it still really is the biggest news we've got. What do you think this looks like for adoption from other nations? I mean, do you think that because immediately we saw Paraguay, Panama, Brazil, at least one guy, one politician in each country either turn on laser eyes or say something was coming. Do you think that there's like a planned rollout here? There's more coming? Or do you think that this is just sort of like the straw that's going to break the camel's back in Central and South America? Or do you think that we'll be disappointed

and El Salvador will stand alone? Well, even if they do stand alone for a long time, carrying the torch and carrying the banner and showing that it can be done is really important. So it's a win no matter what. You know, I, nobody else, no other public company has done convertible bond offerings like MicroStrategy to buy Bitcoin, but it's still, it's still amazing. And it still gets them on Hannity last night and whatever else, like he's in the news cycle all the time and it's cool and it's a

you know a signal to other companies to at least be making buys um so i think it's good no matter what i think there were some special circumstances with you know a new young administration with a 90 approval rating and the and also no local currency so they already didn't have a printing press the dollar yeah they have the dollar right so they already can't have a printing press dollar. Yeah. They have the dollar, right. So they already can't print money. Um, so it's not that much of a difference for them compared to some other countries. So I would be looking for, I would be looking for countries where, uh, you know, they're probably already using the dollar as, as their currency, or at least have, at least have the dollar or the Euro as a legal currency, as legal tender in the country. And there's actually quite a large list of countries that have that. Whereas second major

currency is also legal tender. Because that actually provides a little bit of a check and they're kind of used to that check on money printing for their own local currency if they have one. And that opens the door to think about Bitcoin the same way. Do you think that we could see a transition where Bitcoin becomes not just the smaller little cousin of the dollar in El Salvador, but becomes the most used legal tender in the country? Or do you think that it just kind of remains a small part of it and they still remain largely on the country? Or do you think that it just kind of remains a small part of it and they still remain largely on the dollar? I think they'll remain largely on the dollar for the foreseeable future. I think we're probably at least 10, maybe 15 years away from Bitcoin being a widely used

medium of exchange in large swaths of the world. Um, and that's just because I think the price is going to keep going up for a long time and just doesn't make, doesn't make a lot of sense, a lot of sense to spend a Bitcoin unless it's the only money that you have to spend. So, you know, but I guess in that respect, you know, if you're receiving Bitcoin and you're planning to spend it pretty quickly, then it doesn't really matter what the volatility is all that much. And then if you're receiving Bitcoin and you're planning to spend it pretty quickly, then it doesn't really matter what the volatility is all that much. And then if you're planning to save it, you know, if you can orange pill these people and help them learn, you're better off saving for the long term. If you don't have to tap into that savings, you're a business or an individual, you really can't risk the volatility of Bitcoin if you would have to tap into that savings. So really only the short term savings can't really be Bitcoin for these people.

The long term savings can both be Bitcoin today, but that short-term savings really cannot. Isn't that one of the biggest problems, not for Bitcoin necessarily, but for humanity in general? with hyperinflation and if goods are 5% more expensive this May than they were last May, but your paycheck isn't going up, then effectively you can never save anything because you're living check to check and things are becoming more expensive. So how does Bitcoin solve for that for those people, which is the majority of people who never have enough money to save? Because Bitcoin is the most incredible hard asset there is to invest in. I think we all agree,

but you only need to store value if you're wealthy and have value to store. Yeah, really, it's a challenging thing. Listen, everybody can save a little bit. There's always something that you can choose to put away. And it's one of the reasons that we don't, you know, we don't jack up fees. Our fees are the same for people doing

$10 a month, which is our smallest plan. Right. And we want to keep it that way forever and make it that easy to just get started and put in what you can, you know, as an economy, Bitcoinizes or just, you know, Bitcoin, it starts to have more of an effect, is used by more people. It doesn't have to completely supplant the local currency. It can just provide a check on the money printing, because if you're irresponsible, then people will use Bitcoin instead. You know, so if you're inflating too far, then, you know, country after country already, wherever the, you know, wherever inflation is rampant, you know, Bitcoin purchases skyrocket. Right. And so I think what's what will happen is basically you'll just see inflation sort of brought under control as Bitcoin rises because of open competition with Bitcoin. Because people can exit the financial system of their local economy without having to exit physically, which is something Andreas always pointed out in his videos. Like this is the first time you can vote with your wallet and not with your feet. What does Bitcoin actually do for people that can't buy a lot of Bitcoin? I think what it does is it provides that check

on inflation. I want to answer that very clearly. Even if you don't own Bitcoin, you benefit from a lot of other people owning Bitcoin because it is a check on tyranny and it's a check on money printing around the world in each local economy. That's a great point. So it has power, whether you can afford to invest in it right now or not. It will lower it. The expectation is that it will lower inflation for you. That makes perfect sense. So that, yeah, going back to what I was saying, do you believe that right now, I mean, with lightning network or the existing structure for Bitcoin, if you're an average person in one of these countries and you are, do not have much money, can you live solely with Bitcoin? Can you transact fast enough? Does the volatility matter? Do you think that it's at a point where it can be used as your

everyday money? Well, if you're paycheck to paycheck, you know, and you're spending substantially all of your paycheck, the volatility really doesn't matter. So, yeah, you can use Bitcoin as your medium of exchange. And I think that's what you're kind of seeing with Bitcoin Beach and El Zante and El Salvador. And I think you'll see a lot of people just kind of use sats. It will happen because it's available. Um, I think I actually think, and this is, I'm an investor in, uh, in breeze, but I think this is kind of like a, a really important milestone coming up and I'm playing with it on test flight, but it launches in the app store for iOS and, um, in a month or month or two. It'll be, I think the first time

that you can just download an app and receive sats non-custodial. So you don't have to like worry about KYC or anything. You have your private keys. You know, I was playing around with it. I'm pretty much a lightning novice, but you know, somebody challenged me to, you know, send them, you know,

a hundred sats and let them like download it and own it non-custodially. And I asked everybody, like, how do you do this? Where can you do this? And then there's nothing that you could actually, there's nothing in market where you could actually do that. Um, you can do that with breeze and I'm sure that other ones will follow suit and you don't need to be running anything complicated and like, and it's yours. So I think, you know, just abstracting away some of the complicated stuff and, you know, maybe just companies abstracting away the setting up of, or open source projects, abstracting away needing to open up channels and worry about, you know, channel management and liquidity and inbound and outbound or whatever,

like all this complicated lightning stuff that you can hear about from Guy Swan or anybody else that uses lightning all the time. I'm not there. I just haven't had the time, even though I really appreciate it and love what's going on. But when you make it that easy, which strike is doing custodially

and which breeze is going to be doing non-custodially, I think that is game changing. Do you think that we should be talking in terms of sats and not Bitcoin? I don't know. It matters. No, I don't think that like, cause obviously there's been a big push, you know, kind of a marketing campaign for Bitcoin is, Hey, let's talk about sats because people think they need to own one whole Bitcoin at $37,000 today as opposed to sats. I mean, I don't think it makes sense until you have kind of, I mean, it's going to be hard to shift your mental model with unit

of account until Bitcoin's volatility versus the US dollar, which is kind of the global unit of account for goods and services, like purchasing power is measured in dollars, until the volatility of Bitcoin versus dollars is dramatically lower. I think that'll be very difficult. And I don't think that'll happen until at least 10 or $20 trillion market cap. So I would say 500 grand to a million, somewhere in there, you'll see dramatically lowered volatility and people will be able to actually price goods and services in sats without having to change the price every day. You know, I think it's, I think it's, it's just very difficult to think about pricing goods and services in Bitcoin today to a mass audience, like for Bitcoiners. Sure. Like, yeah, you can just be like you know i'm selling

this course for 0.1 bitcoin or 0.01 bitcoin or whatever and you know bitcoiners are just happy to support because you're selling bitcoin one bitcoin is one bitcoin but if you're selling like gardening services or a sweatshirt you know that has a surf brand on it you know you're gonna have to change that price all the time i I mean, it's interesting is that we've had bipolarity there as well as you want Bitcoin to be a medium of exchange and used all the time, but nobody wants to part with their Bitcoin. It's just the natural path that an asset takes as it monetizes. And it's fuzzy, but basically people, most people, you need a lot of people to have a lot of their net worth in Bitcoin for it to start being used as a medium of exchange widely. The people that are using

Bitcoin to spend today are people that got in early and Bitcoin's already a hundred percent of their net worth or 90% of their net worth. And they don't want, they don't have anything else to spend. So of course they have to spend Bitcoin. They don't have anything else. That's where we got to get. And that means a lot more people in a lot more of their net worth in Bitcoin and the price of Bitcoin being a lot higher. And then you'll see it very widely used as medium of exchange and eventually a unit of account. That's why I saw the Elon Musk, you know, Tesla is not going to accept Bitcoin for cars as such a laughable news event for people to use as a narrative for a crashing market. Because I mean, I can't imagine there are more than 50 people on the planet that

want to buy a car that depreciates 30% when you drive it off the lot with their Bitcoin. Yeah, it makes no sense. It just adds friction. Like that was like my beef with these folks that got together to try to give bitcoin to uh to the campaigns of senators and congress people last year like what a dumb idea i mean it was just obscenely stupid because all you did was just introduce friction by using a bad medium of exchange you basically wrecked their conception of what Bitcoin is. Like the right thing to do would be to give some Bitcoin to the people themselves, even if the max gift is 50 bucks, 150 bucks, whatever it is, get them actually owning some Bitcoin personally, not jam this shitty medium of exchange in between that somebody buys Bitcoin for dollars and then they sell it immediately for dollars. And you've introduced this friction for no reason. Like,

yeah, it's stupid. It is useful for international transfers specifically because of lightning now, but also like, it is amazing just to be able to like use an on-chain transaction and pay a contractor over and, you know, the other side of the world, you know, pretty quickly with very low fees. And we do it all the time, obviously, like we do a lot of our payroll, you know, sending people Bitcoin. And I think this remittance thing that's going on in El Salvador is just going to be awesome. I mean, it's clearly a humanitarian boon for the people that get to participate in that. And I think you'll see Strike and others do that over and over again. You know a lot of remittance and money transfer companies that have actually been using stable coins and Bitcoin for years. They're just not well-known

among Bitcoiners because they just do finance stuff and their fees are higher. Right. I'm curious because I don't want to make any assumptions, but as a hardcore Bitcoiner, I mean, some would say that stable coins are better for what you just described, right? I mean, you can send USDC or USDT or something to someone anywhere in the world in the smallest fractional amount possible, pretty cheap depending on the network you choose to do it on.

And that's so far superior to a SWIFT or ACH transfer across the world. So maybe, I mean, do you agree that in some cases, stable coins are better for that than Bitcoin? I don't think it matters what you're using to send. It's just, do they want to receive dollars or Bitcoin? Right. That's all. It's just like the US dollar is a global reserve currency and Bitcoin is the money of the future. And it's the hardest, best money ever. So what do you want to receive? It doesn't matter really how you get it to them. So what does that Bitcoinized future that you keep mentioning look like?

What does it look like if we get to a Bitcoin standard? What's the timeline for that? And what does the world look like in that case? Because that, to some degree, likely requires the dollar exploding. I don't think it has to explode. I think what we're talking about is price tags with two currencies on them. You go to Turkey and you see the lira and the euro, go to the airport in France and you see the dollar and the euro and the pound or whatever.

I think it'll be like that. So I think that Bitcoinization looks like, I think that I've been saying for a long time, I think that by 2035, most people in most places around the world will be able to buy most goods and services priced in sats. That both sides of both sides of that market buyer and seller will understand the purchasing power of sats. And we'll be able to negotiate and price things in sats. You know, it's it's really kind of an anomaly if you're here in the West and like you only, and really just in the US where we only know the price of things in dollars. Like everywhere else you go, you know, the price of, you know, whatever it is in multiple

currencies pretty much. And it's a very easy, our human brain is very facile and able to do that. It's not a big deal at all. You could price things in yuan and yen and dollars if you're in the Philippines, like it's no big deal. So that's what I think will happen. I think it'll be another major currency that's used globally. It'll dominate the internet and it'll dominate remote work, which is a trend that is accelerating.

It'll dominate everything where you've got disparate teams around the world working on different things. And then I think it'll be a preferred currency in a lot of places where their local currency has failed. Right. That's interesting. I mean, I think that that's a conservative and reasonable view on what could happen because when you, sometimes you drill into, I guess, more maximalist thinking. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but you'll hear people saying that'll happen in two years. The dollar will blow up, like all these things. You're just kind of saying that Bitcoin will organically grow. People will see how important it is and it will become more viable and used around the world without having to go Mad Max dystopian future to get there.

Yeah. Well, I think this is the soft landing thing that I think was first floated by Nick Batia and safe talks about it as well, is that, you know, the, the supply of dollars can decrease as demand for dollars decreases. So if Bitcoin is taking up more of the pie over time, because people want to hold more Bitcoin, they'll just print fewer dollars. And you can actually maintain a relatively stable purchasing power for the dollar. Bitcoin will continue to rise and the purchasing power of Bitcoin will be increasing. And it'll increase as individuals making up a market, make their own calculation based on their understanding of how much they think Bitcoin will be worth in purchasing power or versus the dollar over what timeframe. And that matches their own risk appetite and sort of the horizon of, you know, well, I'm 75 and I've got a lot of dollars.

I don't need that much Bitcoin, stuff like that. And it'll just kind of take its natural place. But I think in the long haul game, theoretically, it ends up taking over global money. But I don't think that'll even happen by 2035. I think it's like a 2070 thing. Yeah. Well, I mean, I love the long view because there's so many people who get into this market and just view it sort of speculatively, right? And then no, they don't have a 50 year view or a 60 year view. People like us who talk about leaving our Bitcoin to our kids, I think are few and far between. Yeah. Well, what happens if you think that it's going to the moon immediately and that it won't have pullbacks, you're going to over-allocate, you're going to leverage up, you're going to completely wreck yourself. And so I think this is the whole philosophy we have, like slow and steady wins the race. All sats under $5 million Bitcoin are cheap for the foreseeable future.

So just kind of put in whatever you think is based on your own situation. If you have a portfolio, liquid portfolio, like put in whatever percentage that you think you need. And then as you make more money and you have expenses, decide how much of your regular fiat inflows you're going to put into Bitcoin, set it and forget it. Most people are not as good a trader as you and some of our mutual friends, you know? So like the core of your savings

and your plans for the future should just be steady accumulation of Bitcoin. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. So in the future that you're discussing where things are priced both in dollars or euros and Bitcoin, and it sort of becomes a global reserve currency, you have to imagine that future that the central banks themselves are going to start adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets, right? Yeah, I think that'll happen way before. Yeah, I think it's already been happening. Dude, yeah. I mean, I have the belief that it's already happening too. It's just in the places we don't hear about. Yeah, I think so. And I think they just, you know, it's not that hard, frankly,

to accumulate a few billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. It's a big market. I've seen Michael Saylor do it in a weekend, right? I mean, so you can do that quietly with agents and LLCs and whatever that are owned by entities that own entities that are split with entities that roll up to the government. Yeah. So you believe it's already happening? I do. Yeah. I mean, 193 countries or whatever, like I think there's got to be at least 10 or 20 that own Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, Russia is already talking about basically, you know, eliminating their dollars. But what are you going to buy? Yeah. More gold. I don't know.

Yeah. I don't see that as being the natural path there. So, I mean, we've talked about institutional adoption in this cycle. Obviously, you're seeing it from the family offices and lower level. What do you think it takes for us to see pensions and endowments and the, I mean, this massive wall of money? I mean, you know, Coinbase today said they're going to allow 5% in a 401k. So now we're seeing 401ks added on top of like self-directed IRAs. But when do we see the pensioners coming in and gaining exposure? Is it an ETF? Is it just more time? Is it more infrastructure? It doesn't need to be an ETF. It's just these people having the meetings, you know,

it's, it's, I mean, I think it's mostly NYDIG and Galaxy carrying the water for the rest of us right now, talking to the pension funds and the endowments and stuff, and they're doing a great job. I think Galaxy announced they hired a head of IR today. That screams pensions. That's what that person does. So there's a head of investor relations at Galaxy now. That demand from those people is why you hire that person. Right.

But do you think that they can get past compliance right now to even buy Bitcoin? Or do you think that like- I mean, they already have. There's already pensions and endowments that do it. There is a playbook. It's just a matter of like doing the meetings and, you know, hacking through their process. It's a long process and you need sophisticated people to get through that process from a paperwork standpoint, a you know it's consultative selling can be yeah it can be 12 months can be three years yeah yeah so you know it's very likely that we don't see a big rush of pension money this cycle because you know and if you did you might see like quick selling too you know like if you i worry i worry very much about

institutions actually having well pensions won't. They'll just buy it, take some tiny percentage and keep it for freaking ever. But this company treasury angle definitely has the risk of accelerating a down cycle and making it deep and precipitous. It's fun to watch them make tons of money on Bitcoin, but when their risk engine starts triggering and they're not going to be the company that's going to take a loss on Bitcoin, it's pretty risky. And I mean, listen, we all love Michael Saylor, but he's a unicorn, right? I mean, what Elon Musk did is probably more in line with what you would expect from most institutions. You're going to buy it, but then when he sees an

opportunity to pad earnings in a quarter that they couldn't deliver a single Model S or a Model X and their only money is being made on energy credits and selling Bitcoin, they're going to sell some, right? Because it's what they have to do for their company. Yeah. Yeah. And however they spin it doesn't really matter. That's probably what happened. You know, we're rough and saw their position go way up and they were like, eh, you know what, chalk up the W, you know, these, these are individuals that have bonuses and they look super smart getting out. And I, I use the example of like, let's say that we rip up from, you know, 35 or 40 or wherever we are today. And we, we go up to like through, new all-time high.

Somebody started putting in the plans to purchase back in January because they attended Ross and Saylor's thing. And so they buy at 75 and they finally get it done. And some Fortune 200 company buys $200 million worth of Bitcoin. Price keeps going up, goes up to 250. Awesome. price keeps going up goes up to 250 awesome retail causes that giant you know 40k candle in the last two days of that bull run and you know it kind of crashes and it comes down and it's like up down up down down down now it's at 150 this guy that made the allocation and argued for it his position is down from 250 to, he's down 40% from his peak. And he was kind of crowing about it literally a week ago. And he's like,

wow, I could really just like, I could chalk up a two X here and like sleep again. I'm taking the two X. And now you have a bunch of selling pressure at one 50, which you're already down 40%. So, you know, I don't, I don't think that institutions, unless they're already down 40%. So, you know, I don't, I don't think that institutions, unless they're as orange pilled as, as Saylor, unless they've actually done the hard work of really educating themselves, I think they have paper hands and, and they won't act much different from retail. So education is really the key as always. And like my company was founded on

education. The first product was like bundling a gift of Bitcoin with Bitcoin education. Everybody we hire is an educator. Like the only thing that, that creates diamond hands is actually understanding Bitcoin deeply, not worrying that like, you know, is it deviating from a stock to flow model or not thinking like, Oh, having cycles. So I timed this right. Not thinking in fiat terms, like you have to understand where this thing's going and understand what Bitcoin actually is. You can only do that with like a hundred hours.

Yeah. You got to dig in deep. You do. You do. Because I think always one of the hardest things about crypto Bitcoin is it's just hard to like explain to a 12 year old, you know, it's the classic is like most people you ask, explain what Bitcoin is. And like 30 minutes later, you're asleep. And, you know, and I think that that's always been a challenge of messaging and marketing. Until it isn't because someday it'll just be money and it'll be the given, right? And you don't have to explain the internet and you won't have to explain Bitcoin because it's just our money. Right. You don't explain how your phone works. You just use it.

That's just my phone. So you mentioned orange pilling institutions. You're writing a book, right? Yeah. You wrote a book, Bitcoin, Orange Future. Tell me about that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is. So it's done. We're doing art and layout right now and we'll get it out sometime this summer, but yeah, it's, it's been a great process going through it and trying to think about how best to actually take somebody from a standing start and, and really written for the type of customer that we want at Swan, which is, you know, kind of the, the average normie pleb or, or high net worth individual. So kind of all, all, all encompassing what we think is

kind of like the right framing and the right stacking and the right order to the best of our ability to kind of lay out that case, 12 chapters, get through it, not a long read. I think it's probably two and a half to three hour read. It'll have a great audio version of it. And yeah, I think it'll, I think it'll be a helpful addition. I think, you know, my favorite book so far for introducing somebody to Bitcoin, it's been my top record for a couple of years is inventing Bitcoin by Jan Pritzker, who I obviously recruited to be my, my co-founder and CTO at Swan after reading the book. And I think it just does such a nice job. He's just such a great educator and, you know, but he breaks it down in a certain way

that is kind of like the way he would explain it. And he's an engineer and, you know, and it's got its own style. And I think people that read that book and read my book, some people will choose one and some people will choose the other. And it's just kind of like based on what you know of your friend that you're trying to orange pill.

So can we get Elizabeth Warren to read your book? They didn't get her on board and the mongers and the Buffetts and the Warrens and the people who like emotionally are just opposed? No, actually Nick Carter is responsible for Elizabeth Warren. Yeah, I'm responsible for like ted liu and brad sherman and all the la politicians but nick has to handle the massachusetts people they think he can do it i think listen i i don't i don't think that it matters at all

like i don't think buffett and munger they're not coming around it's a they're relevant before they die like they'll just they'll just die not understanding Bitcoin, you know, unless they have an incentive to, you know, and the people that are in finance and don't want to have egg on their face. And I mean that actually like active investors like Dalio, it's much more of an ego hit for him to be wrong year after year. And it wasn't. And that's been an interesting change, I think, in the last year is that you

had reputational risk if you talked about Bitcoin. And now we've shifted, I think, to reputational risk if you don't at least look at it. You have to take it seriously now. Yeah. Yeah. I think you do. But yeah, I think that that distinction is like, you know, he's been more of like a financial investor and trading instruments and things like that. Whereas, you know, Berkshire is like, let's buy big companies and just hold them forever. Right. It's a different it's a different orientation. Bill Gates doesn't need to talk about Bitcoin in his circles. Warren doesn't really need to talk about Bitcoin in his circles, but like Dalio does need to talk about Bitcoin in his circles. Warren doesn't really need to talk about Bitcoin in his circles, but like Dalio does need to talk about Bitcoin in his circles. And I think, you know, him sort of just parroting what his lieutenants or his social circle was saying in 2016, 2017, you know, wasn't going to cut it

as it got noisier. And as people that, you know, he looked up to or was being compared to were being lauded for actually understanding something that he didn't. I think it kind of pressured him into actually spending the time. I agree. I love seeing these guys switch over. I mean, I think it's a mark of intelligence, right? Like, yeah, even Saylor was vehemently opposed to Bitcoin in the early years. What I'd love to see is to see people who we think are intelligent stop spouting off on Bitcoin before they know much about it.

I think that is like, you know, whether it's Elon or Jason Calacanis or, you know, any of these talking heads talking about Bitcoin before they've done the work. It's just you're just exposing yourself as an intellectual fraud, basically. And Dahlia was in that category. Yeah, he's winning me back now because like he's set aside his ego it doesn't change the fact that he was spouting off without having done the research and without understanding what he was talking about a few years ago that's a big black it's a big black mark on his record yeah can't trust him can't trust to lab anymore well he called me an idiot uh so So I've joined the club finally of the people that Taleb has called an idiot on Twitter. I feel very, very entitled now. Yeah. Well, we can have a beer over that. I got a thinly veiled, I got retweeted by him with bit idiots. I think there was a

hashtag. So he learned hashtags. In the Talebate club. Talk about someone that like, listen, I always, I mean, I admire the guy. I think he was brilliant, but man, is he bad at social media. Man, I have all five on hard copy, ebook, Audible, and the box set. Wow. And I've read Antifragile probably 15 times, Black Swan probably seven,

Fooled by Randomness probably 10, you know, Skin in the game probably four or five but it's new i've even read the freaking bed of procrustes like six times that i have not read i've read the others it's a good bathroom book because it's like it's just maxims it's a little short you know knock it out in five minutes knock it out it's still sitting on the toilet over there um but uh yeah it's just really disappointing you know like it's just so funny to see somebody uh exhibit all of the characteristics that his writing rails against it's unbelievable it's like dude you're so fragile you clearly don't have skin in the game like you're fooled by randomness and you don't recognize the biggest black swan in history you know and you're

trying to and you're trying to fit this thing into a paradigm that you do understand when it's actually something different which is you know essentially for crusty's bed like and he's and he's being a freaking iyi like he rails against intellectual yet idiots and what is he doing it's pretty sad i can't think of a better place to end than there, since I know we've only got like two minutes left. So where can everybody find you? So by the way, officially, Swan Bitcoin is actually named now after, not that swan, it's officially named after Bitcoin at one time when it was early, it was like an ugly duckling, and now it's growing into this beautiful swan. So I like it. Now Swan Bitcoin is this beautiful swan so i like it now now swan

bitcoin is this beautiful swan he's out he is out he's out no more thank you so where can everybody follow you and people who want to become customers where should they yeah yeah so uh if you if you want that high touch sales experience swanbitcoin.com slash private um you can talk to me or steven or terence um and one more uh new salesperson who's pretty well known but we are not public about and um swanbitcoin.com slash do you have a rough link i forget i don't no i don't anyway but use yours anyway it doesn't matter anyway swanbitcoin.com swanbitcoin.com well if you want to get the uh the 10 bucks free on stand up swanbitcoin.com slash satoshi will work cool um but that's the url we've got an app comingbitcoin.com slash satoshi will work cool um but

that's the url we've got an app coming out uh in this summer so that'll be cool be a lot more accessible and open to everybody uh to have it in the app store android and ios um i'm cory clipston on twitter uh youtube all our shows are at youtube.com slash swan signal you can even go back and uh and watch your your host here on an episode from a few months back. Talked about all coins I got in trouble. Come on, dude. Know your audience. I know. Know your audience.

Absolutely. It's like showing up at a medium festival and playing 70s rock. Oh, my God. I think Daft Punk does that every freaking show. But, you know, I think. Oh, and one other thing. So Bitcoin Adventures, which is AngelList, oh, and one other thing. So Bitcoin or Ventures, which is AngelList syndicate investing in great Bitcoin startups. We invested in Unchained last

year, BitRefill earlier this year. We have a deal live currently. So you can find the AngelList syndicate is actually linked like halfway down the page at Bitcoin or Ventures.com. Check that out or search for Bitcoin or Ventures on AngelList if you're already on there. I think we're like two thirds filled on the current deal, but it's an awesome company. Love it. I can't say it publicly because it's security. All corners should learn that.

Not security yet. Exactly. No, but yeah, no, just a big fan of getting involved in the ecosystem. And while I think Bitcoin is the best asset that anybody could possibly hold, I also think that it's very educational to have that selective attention for what's going on in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And so part of my personal investment in my own education and being, you know, more into

Bitcoin is just making small investments into Bitcoin startups. You know, every few months, just cut a check for like five grand or something like that. Yeah, it can be as small as a thousand bucks. Well, thank you, man, so much for doing this. I think it was a really valuable episode. I can't wait to follow up down the road and see how Swan's progressing. So thank you. Bye.