We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC105: It's Bitcoin Not Crypto w/ Cory Klippsten (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, we have a special guest, Mr. Corey Clipsden. Corey comes with a wealth of knowledge and experience in the Bitcoin space. He's the founder and CEO of Swan Bitcoin, which is a noteworthy exchange. During our discussion, Corey provides some incredible insights into how corrupt and broke many of the incentives are for the quote-unquote crypto ecosystem, where we discussed the discuss things like FTX, JPEGs of monkey pictures, and much, much more. That's why I've titled

Starting point is 00:00:35 this show, it's Bitcoin, not Crypto. And after you're done listening to this, you'll understand why so many people in the space take deep offense to the two being lumped together as the same thing. So without further delay, here's my conversation with Corey Clipson. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the show. I'm here with Corey. Corey, welcome to the Investors podcast. Hey, good to be here, Preston. Thanks for having me. Corey, I think everybody, everybody wants to know what in the world is happening in this space right now. And as a hardcore bitcoiner, and I know you're a hardcore bitcoiner, it's just kind of like, yeah, I know all this stuff's blowing up.

Starting point is 00:01:34 I've got all my coins in cold storage, so it just really doesn't matter. but for people that aren't comfortable or maybe they had funds on FTCS or they have them on some other platform and they're just like, what in the world is this? Give them a rundown of what's playing out, why it's so important to fully understand what's playing out. And it just give us the one over the world from your point of view. Well, the good thing is, as you noted, if you have your coins in self-custody, you don't need to know all the stuff that's going on. It's only if you actually have your funds at risk that you need to follow the stuff closely. And we've seen some crazy announcements over the last couple of days of very sophisticated, smart, pretty good people who happen to run crypto funds.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Even one in particular, who I know personally is 99% Bitcoin in his own personal portfolio, but he runs crypto fund just actively trading this stuff. And, you know, that guy kept about 40% of his funds crypto on it. F-TX. And it looks like, you know, so that was Goloi Capital, and that's Keith. He's, you know, really smart guy and pretty good guy. Travis Kling over at Ikigai, who a lot of people in Los Angeles know, really strong arguments for Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:02:50 You've seen his tweets. We think very similarly about Bitcoin. I very much disagree with him on DLT slash blockchain, crypto, whatever, having any lasting value. But otherwise, he is a nice guy and he's a smart guy. and man, had almost all his hedge funds crypto on FTX. It's insane. So just in line for pennies on the dollar, maybe someday.

Starting point is 00:03:14 Talk to us about what Sam was doing, because this isn't like he just made some bad positions. I mean, it was fraud. He was doing things that were just really unethical in many different ways. But talk to us about it. Yeah, fair enough. So, I mean, at the end of the day, he was clearly gambling. with customer funds. The money's on the exchange and they were trading it. And that's all you really

Starting point is 00:03:40 need to know. I think we'll find out all the details over the coming months. But I think it's fair to say that even though technically you have to put the alleged around that today, I think it's really clear that's what happened. Otherwise, he would have been able to let people withdraw their funds. And instead, we see that they're trying to raise $9.4 billion to cover over the whole they have in their balance sheet. Wow, that's the number right now, $9.4 billion. Yeah. First it was a billion, then it was five to six, now it's actually 9.4. I mean, that number is just so massive. Do you think that a number that massive could spill into like traditional markets and start to create contagion into traditional markets?

Starting point is 00:04:19 Is it that big of a number? No, it's not big enough to mess with the regular, the traditional financial system. It's just causing mass contagion across the non-bitcoin crypto ecosystem. So obviously impacting the Bitcoin price, but I think that's just a short-term thing. And we Bitcoiners don't really care. Do you think that everything that happened in the Luna Celsius, I don't know how many months ago, that probably has been like four or five months ago, was Sam tied in? Do you think he was having issues through that and the can was just kicked?

Starting point is 00:04:52 Or is this a whole other manifestation of kind of the same thing? That seems the most plausible. and I am not a sophisticated on-chain analyst, but what's his name, Luca Nuzzi, is that Nick's partner over at Coin Metrics. So he put out a thread about 10 days ago and actually did some on. Once he saw what had happened and had a hypothesis,

Starting point is 00:05:15 it was easier to go and find what he was looking for, and he thinks that he found a transfer of at the time a little over $4 billion worth of FTT tokens from FTX to Alameda. and that is likely because Alameda actually blew up alongside Three Arrows Capital and everybody else. Wow. Alongside Luna and probably had exposure to Three Aros Capital, which had a lot of exposure to Luna. We don't know yet whether Alameda had a lot of direct exposure to Luna,

Starting point is 00:05:44 but it wouldn't be necessary as long as they had a lot of exposure to one of the other desks that were blowing up or funds that were blowing up. And that probably propped up Alameda and let them. claim. Because again, because of the myth propagated by Sam and his PR machine, nobody really did any diligence on them. So if they could say that they had X dollars worth of collateral, people would lend to them. And so even though the vast majority of that collateral was this printed out a thin air token from their sister company that literally was next door in the same building with the same ownership and backdoors between them that Sam and friends coded so that they could not trigger audit review or even risk committee review as they funneled money

Starting point is 00:06:27 back and forth between the two companies. Again, allegedly, but it appears this is what happened, all these companies would lend to them because they said that they had the collateral. What I get when I'm seeing some of the things that are being posted on Twitter is just a total lack of decency and respect with so many people in this space. And let me give me an example. So one of the things that you read on Twitter was this engagement where, Sam was raising funds from Sequoia. And it was this chat log where he was literally, Corey, he was playing a video game, like some Dungeons and Dragons video game while he was pitching Sequoia on how for the

Starting point is 00:07:07 round that they were raising. I have no idea the amount that they were raising, but I would guess it was in the billions. They raised a billion, including about 400 million of that from Sequoia. So this meeting was a $400 million meeting, right? Like, no regard for your employees, no regard for your existing customers. I don't know how many millions, I would imagine they had millions of customers. Five million customers. No regard for, no respect for the amount of work that it takes to earn $400 million.

Starting point is 00:07:44 Like, he's there. And I can only imagine if this is a Zoom call, the Sequoia employees that are sitting on the other end and they're probably, you know, watching videos or doing their own or on Twitter or whatever while they're taking the meeting. And then they're just filling out these chat logs saying, oh, I love him. He's so brilliant because he said he could integrate bananas into his application on FTX. The whole thing just seems like it's straight out of a really bad horror movie where both sides are just total scammers on both sides.

Starting point is 00:08:13 And there's a question in here somewhere. So this gets at the problems with crypto VC, right? And so now I think finally, finally we Bitcoiners and the journalists that care about truth, just like Bitcoiners care about truth, appear to have enough of a microphone or enough of a megaphone to start going after the absolute scam fest that has been going on for the last four or five years in Silicon Valley. Talk to people about strong enough to really go out. with a hard-hitting thread about Andreson Horowitz that I posted this morning. Oh. So I haven't talked about this anywhere.

Starting point is 00:08:54 Walk us through it. Yeah, we can talk about that a little bit. And I've talked about these themes and kind of what's going on. But essentially, there's never been a better industry vertical for the venture capital business model than crypto, meaning non-bitcoin, alt-coin scamming. Why? because they can, they benefit from information arbitrage and regulatory arbitrage. And at the same time, and basically they can, so any crypto VC deck when they go and raise from LPs only

Starting point is 00:09:30 needs two things on it. Really, it's just literally, one is short time to liquidity. And the second is we make our own weather. And these are the two things that when I came into the space, as lots of people know I was in Silicon Valley ecosystem, advising startups, cutting angel checks, you know, starting in 2012, 2013, all the way through going Bitcoin full time in 2018. That first 11 months from like May of getting caught up in the in the ICO run up and Bitcoin and everything through about April of 2018 when I decided Bitcoin was the only thing that mattered, I was heavily immersed in all aspects of the crypto space. And I heard this said over and over over and over again and didn't see the obvious lie in that and just how immoral it is to

Starting point is 00:10:19 hinge a business model on short time to liquidity, meaning that you don't need to have revenue, you don't need to have product market fit. None of that. It doesn't need to be real because you can just dump this token on retail or undone institutional. And there's no market or there's no product. There's no service. There's no product. There's just literally nothing.

Starting point is 00:10:35 It's just self-referential gambling and gambling tools. And that's it on something that has no. value or no real world use case. And then we make our own weather is that they all just, they all are just marketers. And so this is where it becomes really important that the genesis of Andreson Horowitz is in partnership essentially with CAA. The, you know, it was basically modeled after CAA. This is the talent agency down in Los Angeles. So Mike Ovitz, the founder of CIA was the senior advisor to Ben and Mark when they started the firm. They kind of modeled it after CIA, the whole point was that they were going to treat the founders of these companies as talent,

Starting point is 00:11:13 the same way a Hollywood talent agency would treat their talent. It would be kind of in service of them. What it also came with is in the DNA of that firm from the very beginning was to make your own weather, to put out your own media. So this is where you see them always putting out podcasts and trying to get everybody at their firm to blog all the time and hosting conferences and just being in the media as much as possible. They even created a new media arm a couple of years ago, basically specifically to push their crypto agenda called Future. Essentially, they push out and market and make their own weather with these crypto scams that get short time to liquidity.

Starting point is 00:11:50 And as long as the window is open, where these things are unregulated, and you can say whatever you want about magic bean stocks on the blockchain or whatever that will save the world, you can go over and over again and push World Coin, helium token, axi infinity, you can buy $300 million worth of salana and get all your friends at CAA and the other agencies down to Hollywood to have all these celebrities go on talk shows talking about their salana, which happened in the summer of 2021, and then they can dump it

Starting point is 00:12:21 as soon as it pumps and get out of their cost basis and still let some ride. And as long as that window is open, they're going to continue doing it because you stack these funds. You raise a fund. If you can get out of the J-curve where you've made your investments and you start to have exits, if you can start to show that you've actually returned to the fund, the faster you can do that, the faster you can raise another fund. So, Drayson Horowitz is on like fund number four now, I think. It's between $12 and $15 billion that they're collecting 2% on of these crypto funds. It's so much money that they can hire people out of D.C. over and over again as partners in these funds deliberately to get around the regulations

Starting point is 00:13:00 around lobbying. So if you spend more than 20% of your time in D.C. lobbying, you have to register as a lobbyist. That doesn't count if you're a partner in a company. So they just hire people straight out of D.C. Make them partners of these funds and they can basically be in D.C. full time arguing for Ethereum matters or whatever it is that they're trying to get across. And, you know, the game that SBF was up to over the past year and a half, two years was essentially trying to rest control of crypto, oversight of crypto, away from the SEC and put it under the

Starting point is 00:13:36 CFTC. And they've been working on this with Paradigm, which is Fred Erisom, Brian Armstrong's co-founder at Coinbase. This is Andreessen Horowitz. This is FTX. This is also Coinbase. And obviously, the entire Ethereum Foundation and Joe Lubin and Novogratzic Galaxy and all these guys, essentially trying to have crypto regulated by anyone other than the SEC, because the SEC, obviously knows that this stuff all passes the Howie test and these are all securities. So they've basically just been dangling millions and millions and millions of dollars in front of the CFTC and saying, if you regulate us, please charge us tons and tons of money so that we can staff your office and you guys will get super, super powerful and you'll be, you know, big swinging

Starting point is 00:14:20 dicks out there at the CFTC because you'll oversee this burgeoning crypto industry. Just, you know, wink, wink, regulate us with a light hand. I'm so disturbed. What you're saying now is just crystal clear, like what the model is. But I've never even, I mean, I knew there was this perverted incentive structure that was happening up there with, and you just named one of many firms, I think, that are all in cahoots doing this in the VC crypto space, right? Yeah, the worst actors are like Andreessen Horowitz, multi-coin capital. Kyle Simani hasn't said a true word in probably six years. It's all just trash, marketing, scheming, pumping, dumping, dumping, scamming. How do you overcome something like this?

Starting point is 00:15:08 Truth helps, just exposing it. I think that's one of the reasons that Bitcoiners and journalists, especially this year, have increasingly found common cause. There are a lot of journalists that actually want to find the truth, including quite a few that actually work for crypto rags. So their industry industry journalists, but they actually have real backgrounds in journalism. And kind of like me in my first, you know, almost year in the space going through my shit coin horse shoe of like, hey, there's Bitcoin, let's explore all this other stuff. You know, they've been bamboozled by these people with credibility, right? I used to read Andreessen Horowitz's blog religiously. I used to read Fred Wilson's newsletter every single issue. As soon as it hit, this is the guy that runs Union Square

Starting point is 00:15:49 Ventures, which has been a big crypto scammer. Like, I used to read his newsletter every morning. And he's a good guy. I actually think Fred probably just doesn't get it and just doesn't understand what's going on, maybe. Drason Horowitz has no excuse. They're very clearly, like, deliberately got 140 of their employees registered as representatives so that they could sell securities in case anybody came hunting for them. They did that back in 2018. So they knew exactly what they were doing this entire time.

Starting point is 00:16:17 I'm totally floored by what you just said. I think the way that Bitcoiners are, have been. been driving home the message of Bitcoin, not crypto, for the entire year of 2022. That was literally the mantra of Swan, for instance, and I've done this in every media appearance. I've stopped interviews live on TV when somebody says crypto. And I don't care if I use 45 of the 60 seconds for my spot to explain the difference. Like, that's the message I'm getting across. I think that you're going to see a great industry of venture capital based in Silicon Valley now reject the scammers and kick them out.

Starting point is 00:16:54 So you have firms like Kleiner Perkins, Coffield buyers that's been around a long, long time, and they were the top firm in the Valley for many, many years, you know, the biggest investor in Google, things like that. They've never done crypto. So it's in their interest now to separate themselves from the Sequoias and the Andresan Horowitz's and all of these people that have jumped on the money train

Starting point is 00:17:15 and basically just taking advantage of this one-time opportunity to get super, super rich by scamming the people. And I think you'll see the, I think you'll see nature healing in Silicon Valley, but it's going to take a while. And it won't be completely done until the longest con of all Ethereum actually collapses and is exposed. Talk to us about Ethereum then.

Starting point is 00:17:36 I'm curious to hear your very candid overview of Ethereum. You've probably had plenty of people on to talk about Ethereum. And I'm not really like, that's not next on my target list. I got it. Again, like, I'm not a coin PI. The ones that catch my attention are the ones that are really close to Bitcoin and that have false narratives around Bitcoin. Nick Zabo, I'm paraphrasing here at some point, said that, you know, you basically, it's more

Starting point is 00:18:01 or less like save your bullets for influential ignorance. And I take it a step further. I save my bullets for influential ignorance that directly affects my day, essentially, what I work on. You know, if I saw Luna an obvious coin talking a bunch of mess about Bitcoin and how we had common cause, like my gut says, now let me figure out why and let me expose it, which I did starting back in March. And then obviously that resulted their fraud collapsed by May 9th or whatever. And then it was Celsius. And you could see right away as Machinsky started taking to the airwaves after they dumbly tweeted that they had pulled over $500 million of customer

Starting point is 00:18:42 funds out of Anchor, which was part of the Luna Ponzi scheme, was the key component of Luna Ponzi scheme. obviously I jumped all over that and I was like, why were there customer funds in an obvious Ponzi scheme? You guys are clearly not good stewards of risk and you're probably in on it. And then, you know, he put out a video, Mishinsky put out a video saying that Bitcoin maximalists are responsible for 30% of Bitcoin being lost because they encourage self-custody as he was trying to recruit deposits. And it's like, dude, this guy is trying to pay out old investors with new investors money. It's very clear. This is a Ponzi. And so I just started yelling about Celsius.

Starting point is 00:19:20 It collapsed June 12th, like a month later. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year, bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history.

Starting point is 00:19:59 This is where you hear firsthand stories from people using Bitcoin to survive currency collapse, using AI to expose human rights abuses, and building technology under censorship and authoritarian pressures. These aren't abstract ideas. These are tools real people. are using right now. You'll be in the room with about 2,000 extraordinary individuals, dissidents, founders, philanthropists, policymakers, the kind of people you don't just listen to but end up having dinner with. Over three days, you'll experience powerful mainstage talks, hands-on workshops on freedom tech, and financial sovereignty, immersive art installations, and conversations that continue long after the sessions end. And it's all happening in Oslo in June. If this sounds like

Starting point is 00:20:43 your kind of room, well, you're in luck because you can attend in person. Standard and patron passes are available at Osloof Freedom Forum.com with patron passes offering deep access, private events, and small group time with the speakers. The Oslo Freedom Forum isn't just a conference. It's a place where ideas meet reality and where the future is being built by people living it. If you run a business, you've probably had the same thought lately. How do we make AI useful in the real world, because the upside is huge, but guessing your way into it is a risky move. With NetSuite by Oracle, you can put AI to work today. NetSuite is the number one AI cloud ERP, trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It pulls your financials, inventory,

Starting point is 00:21:28 commerce, HR, and CRM into one unified system. And that connected data is what makes your AI smarter. It can automate routine work, surface actionable insights, and help you cut costs while making fast AI-powered decisions with confidence. And now with the Netsuite AI connector, you can use the AI of your choice to connect directly to your real business data. This isn't some add-on, it's AI built into the system that runs your business. And whether your company does millions or even hundreds of millions, Netsuite helps you stay ahead. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get their free business guide, demystifying AI at Netsuite.com slash study. They got is free to you at netsuite.com slash study.

Starting point is 00:22:13 NetSuite.com slash study. When I started my own side business, it suddenly felt like I had to become 10 different people overnight wearing many different hats. Starting something from scratch can feel exciting, but also incredibly overwhelming and lonely. That's why having the right tools matters. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world.

Starting point is 00:22:39 and 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. from brands just getting started to household names. It gives you everything you need in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics. So you're not juggling a bunch of different platforms. You can build a beautiful online store with hundreds of ready-to-use templates, and Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions and even enhance your product photography. Plus, if you ever get stuck, they've got award-winning 24-7 customer support. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing

Starting point is 00:23:15 sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash WSB. Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. Corey, I couldn't imagine the number of like DMs and just thank yous that you've received in the past year because, you know, maybe it's probably over a thousand now. Like really felt letters of saving marriages, saving families, saving finances, saving their mothers, their brothers, their cousins,

Starting point is 00:23:51 their coworkers. Yeah, across all of these, it's just mountains and mountains, hundreds of millions of dollars. You know, I'll say this, you had the courage to actually speak up. And although some other people maybe might thought something was going wrong, right, they're just like, oh, that looks really ugly over there. But what if I'm wrong? So I'm not going to say anything. You put your neck out there multiple, multiple times in the past year to help people. Well, truly, your intention was to help people. And I don't know that there were really many others that were saying anything, especially with the Luna and Celsius blow up. Well, I mean, the hard thing is like there's even people that are, you know, known as like Bitcoin influencers. Like, I think Anthony Pompeiano is probably

Starting point is 00:24:38 the biggest example. I mean, he was actively promoting Doe Kwan and Luna, putting him on his show, talking about how good it was for Bitcoin. And this is also somebody that actively promoted BlockFi all these years, you know, and that's a company that I sort of never trusted from meeting the management early on, didn't really go after them. Like, it's kind of a neutral actor in the space. But then FTX, I mean, Pomp had like so much shilling of FTCX. And so much sort of mythologizing and participating in that. He's not the only one. Obviously, a ton of people have pumped up FTX as being some sort of like

Starting point is 00:25:16 Wonderkin genius. But the guy clearly wasn't. I think there's just this thing with people like SBF and Vitalik where people look at someone that acts that way. They're just kind of like slovenly and awkward and talks like in computer code or something. They assume that that's a genius. I think, I don't know, maybe it's my background having been a journalist before I

Starting point is 00:25:38 ever got into business, but that's how I grew up. I wanted to be a journalist from the time I was eight. I found a what do you want to be when you grow up from 1986 that said I wanted to be a journalist. And I did practice for a while. I was in local NBC TV reporter. And I think we bring the code of journalism. I went to University of Missouri, the first journalism school in the world. And I think we bring the code of journalism to our work at Swan. And we try to be objective. And we try to caveat things that we always caveat things that we aren't certain of. So you'll notice, I'm extremely careful in what I say and what I tweet. Only if I'm certain of something, do I say it? Otherwise, I just poke and I ask questions. And I poked and asked questions about Sam and

Starting point is 00:26:20 FTX from June through 12 days ago. We're recording here on the 14th. And it wasn't until 12 days ago that Coindex got in touch because of my constant poking and passed me the balance sheet and we, you know, broke the story. I was certain that Luna was a Ponzi. That was obvious after looking at it for about 14 or 45 minutes back late March. Once I saw that they had this 20% interest on Anchor and that that was essentially propping up the ecosystem and that they were backfilling it, it was like, oh, my God, that is clearly going to collapse. So I had no problem whatsoever just telling everyone that was going to collapse. How much more contagion or impairment do you think there is in the space right now after all of this? That hasn't happened yet or is still getting churned through right now?

Starting point is 00:27:06 I mean, my pet number is I tally up the amount invested in the scam crypto ecosystem over the last 30 months is about 40 billion of money that came into Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz and all these funds. So, you know, I mean, as far as market cap, obviously, these are propping up market caps that are complete garbage. But obviously, that's not real money if you have some, I mean, literally a complete fake project like link, which is probably still in the top 20. that claims to have solved the Oracle problem when anyone that knows computer science knows that the Oracle problem hasn't been solved, it's like, well, that's actually a complete lie with a multi-billion dollar market cap.

Starting point is 00:27:47 Plus, you know, Solana is still hanging out there. Obviously, a value of zero. It's completely centralized. Jump capital controls their oracles when the Oracle was going to make them lose a lot of money. They just shut down their oracles. That just happened last week. You know, so it's just completely fake.

Starting point is 00:28:01 It's not decentralized at all, right? Yeah, I mean, at minimum $40 billion, of real money invested. And then whatever multiple. Poorly by these crypto funds needs to just wash out, plus all the market cap that created. That's the hard part is like how much capitalization or multiple is there on top of that number that has been factored in.

Starting point is 00:28:22 Yeah. That still needs to deflate with it. All right. I mean, it's funny too, though, right? Because we suffer in the short term right or alongside them as Bitcoiners. It looks pretty dang clear. that Alameda research was running an algorithm on multiple exchanges to essentially create the echo bubble or the echo bull market in Bitcoin in 2021.

Starting point is 00:28:48 What do you mean by that? They saw correctly that it would cost them less money to market make and keep on creating the illusion of a second bull market in the second half of 2021 because they knew that there would not be a bull market for Solana. they hadn't got they hadn't pumped solana enough it was positive it was positive ROI for them to spend a few bill to pump bitcoin because they can make way more billions by dumping their salana if they could get bitcoin to pump and kind of drag the whole market up salana would be high beta to that and they'd make 20 billion on that while spending two billion to pump bitcoin i'm not sure that so are you saying

Starting point is 00:29:29 that the double pump in the in the last bull run i'm saying that alameda created the size and pump probably. Wow. Wow. And they did it to pump their salamabags. Holy moly, dude. So, so let's talk about, let's go down that path a bit, right? So if they're able to do something like that, is this something that can be exploited moving forward by other exchanges? Like, let's say Binance. It doesn't seem like there's too many differences between Binance and FTX, other than maybe the intelligence of CZ versus SBF. But what are your thoughts that? I think what was special. Well, was special about Salinas, so many of the big players were willing to go along with it and essentially pump the bags at the same time.

Starting point is 00:30:12 So FTX and Sam were completely behind it. And Drason got completely behind it. Multi-coin was completely behind it. CAA and the entire Hollywood apparatus, all the crypto-inflicted agents and managers were all behind it. And so I think they, like the one that's on the come now that has the same group of people aligning around a new pump is APTOS. APTOS has basically the same group of cockroaches that scurried away after dumping Solana and they've kind of like realigned this giant crypto cockroach like, you know, Voltron style and they're getting behind Aptos to try to pump that. So we'll see if they succeed.

Starting point is 00:30:49 But yeah, you can see them whatever trading desk is still around that kind of leads the charge and sets their black box algorithms behind trying to fake a bull market in Bitcoin before all this stuff washes out so they can try to pump their Aptos bags. You could see something like that happening again. Again, all of this is illegal according to the rules on the books. And all of these things are securities. And if they were regulated as such, as what they are, none of this is legal. None of these exchanges are legal, including Coinbase, obviously, finance, FtX,

Starting point is 00:31:20 UX is not legal. Like, none of this stuff is legal according to the rules on the books. And the reason those rules are there, you know, you can certainly have a principled stand and you can say like the SEC shouldn't exist, bro, you know, or there should be no regulations. and that's fine. If you're out there, you're in D.C. and you've been banging the table saying like Stratton-Okmont should be able to market penny stocks to your grandma at the nursing home and let the market decide. That's totally fine if that's your hardcore libertarian stance.

Starting point is 00:31:48 But you can't have it both ways. You can't not want Ponzi schemes and OTC stock manipulation and fraud on elders and stuff and then be pro-crypto being unregulated. You can't have your cake need it to. So you can't be coin-based and benefit from all of the credibility that comes with being listed on a major U.S. stock exchange and all of the credibility that grants you around the world knowing that you're regulated, that you're audited, that you have analyst coverage, all this stuff. And then on the other hand, say, oh, but these other securities that are trading on my platform, don't look there. Those aren't securities. Bology hired some shitty lawyers and they have a framework and they said that they're not securities, but of course they are.

Starting point is 00:32:32 Talk to us about the library ruling that recently happened. Are you dialed in on any of that and what the ramifications of it are? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So it's not the highest level court. It's New Hampshire. But there are plenty of examples in the past where well-reasoned rulings from courts of that level, which is the same level as I believe the Southern District of New York, which is probably the one that matters and would set precedent for everybody else.

Starting point is 00:32:57 if they take up their next case and agree with the ruling on library up at New Hampshire, then I think basically the game is over for these fake decentralized projects in the United States. And the really interesting thing about libraries, you can literally sub Ethereum N for library in all of the findings, and it's the same. So there is no fair notice granted. They said, no, we didn't have to tell you before. It's up to you to follow the rules on the books. Nothing changed here.

Starting point is 00:33:26 This was a security. You sold it with expectation of creating profit. It passes the how we test. And obviously, anything south of Ethereum on the leaderboard is the same. So then how would that get applied to the exchange? So if you're Coinbase and you're seeing this library case, which I know Gary Gensler was on CNBC, I think at the end of last week, and he was running around talking about this particular case, how do the exchanges view that? What do they do differently because it seems pretty crystal clear what the SEC's position and the U.S. government's position is as to these all being securities at this point. Yeah, I mean, they'd all have to register as securities and Coinbase would have to register

Starting point is 00:34:07 as a securities exchange. And they're not in the works of doing anything of the sort, correct? I think they're prepping for that future. There's too much money involved, not to prepare for it. And Bitcoin is the only commodity, correct? Yeah. Yeah, it's the only one that's actually a commodity. And obviously the Ethereum people are trying to line as many pockets in D.C. as possible

Starting point is 00:34:31 and cut as many deals with the bankers as possible because the natural axis of shitcoinery is banks, government, and shit coins. So they're trying to get together and do what they can to save this thing. But at the end of the day, it just went proof of stake. This thing is gathering interest. This thing is centrally controlled. It's getting more centralized every day. a small group of people decides its fate, hard forks it constantly, changes its monetary policy

Starting point is 00:34:59 all the time. This thing is obviously a company that's controlled by a small number of people for the benefit of the price of the token that people invest in. That ain't a commodity, obviously. Corey, I want to talk a little bit about your background. So you used to work at Google, correct? And then you came into the space. you said that you went Bitcoin Maxi.

Starting point is 00:35:23 I got an adventure for a long time first. Uh-huh. So I was just doing like normal startup stuff and cutting angel checks and advising startups. And it was like the number two guy in an ad tech company from like 2013 to 2015 after leaving Google. But yeah, I mean, way back in the day going back. So I did the broadcast undergrad.

Starting point is 00:35:41 I reported while I was still in school, I was on the local NBC station, decided not to do that and interned at Microsoft and went to work for Microsoft instead. So that got me out to New York. Was at Microsoft. And I was at Morgan Stanley doing private client marketing, basically. So putting together all the newsletters and presentations and videos for all of their wealthy clients, including the high end of the Dean Wedder clients that had just come over. Then I went to B-School, University of Chicago.

Starting point is 00:36:05 Back then it was the other GSB. Now it's booth, but I was there from 02 to 04. And then I went to McKenzie and company, did management consulting for a couple years out of New York. Private equity was kind of blowing up. I was single for the first time in my adult life and decided to go back to Chicago where I had had a lot of fun in business school. Started a private equity consulting firm there and opened up a $5 million, $12,000 square foot restaurant nightclub on the river. So that was fun for a couple of years. It came in handy this past week.

Starting point is 00:36:36 And it came in very handy for the Pacific Bitcoin conference. And then, yeah, three more years of management consulting. And then I think it was really the global financial crisis of 0809, that really made me think, wow, not only having lived through the dot-com boom and bust at the start of my career, and I think that's what made me want to get on solid ground and go to B-school and, you know, go to consulting and all this stuff. Now I'm looking at that and I'm like, oh, my God, like, I can't be whipped around. I can't have my career in my life whipped around by these external factors.

Starting point is 00:37:08 Like, I want to have more control. I want to be working in something that's like just the, where I benefit from the efforts of my labor and my thought and my networking. So that made me want to get into early stage startups. I went to Google very much deliberately, first good career decision I ever made, treated it like internet business school. So I went there in 2011, very much trying to break into the Silicon Valley ecosystem, networked like crazy from having a Google address.

Starting point is 00:37:34 Everybody would take a coffee or take a call. Met like a thousand founders in VCs in a couple of years out of Chicago and then moving out to L.A. after getting married. And then, yeah, by summer of 13, I felt comfortable getting into startups full time. So that's what I've been doing. I'm coming up on almost 10 years now in startups full time. I've been involved with over 65 companies as an investor and advisor, probably pretty intimately with about 30 of those. My sweet spot for about four years straight was being the external advisor directly to a Silicon Valley venture back CEO working on strategy

Starting point is 00:38:11 and fundraising. And so I did that for a long time. I helped raise over quarter billion dollars for, you know, seed and A stage startups through about 2019. And I started Swan in 2019. You said in 2018 is when you really kind of groked Bitcoin and you realize that this is different than everything else. What was it that helped you figure that out?

Starting point is 00:38:37 Well, I mean, I was seeing all the pitches and I was coming from somebody who had been raising money since 2004 and obviously I had had to sit through a lot of other people's pitches along the way. And then I'd been investing since 2012 when I was still at Google in startups. And so I'd seen a lot of startup pitches that way. And each time I thought there might be something there, as I dug in deeper, I realized there was no there there that went for, you know, the first thing I did was like one of the first NFT projects. And I was like consulting to them after they did their ICO. And, you know, they were good guys and they were good technologists. And they, you know, they were had all this money and, you know, all these smart people around.

Starting point is 00:39:13 But I just like, when it came down to it, it was like the, it was the business version of my old boss in my B-school internship at vitamin water. Darius wouldn't drink vitamin water because it had too much sugar in it. So you just drank Diet Coke. Like the whole executive team just drinks Diet Coke at vitamin water. And like, I was like, man, the emperor has no clothes. And at the end of the day, like when you dig in and you get through all the jargon and all the dressed up Silicon Valley and Dracen Horowitz blogs and the few.

Starting point is 00:39:40 features, crypto and tokenize the world and all this stuff. Like, there just wasn't anything there. And then so as my view of what crypto was was like going down in my estimation, I was starting to get punching through the incredible amount of noise. Because remember in 2017, like there was very little Bitcoin-only education out there. It's not like today. But little by little, I started to find the signal. I think I'm pretty famous for saying it started with Jimmy Song at a crypto conference in

Starting point is 00:40:08 Santa Monica. I think the beginning of November, end of October in 2017. And it's kind of a famous story at this point, but I saw this dude on the lawn outside the conference talking to a few people and he had a cowboy hat on. And he was just looking around like with daggers. Like he absolutely hated everyone around him. And I found that very attractive. So I went over and got to dome a little bit.

Starting point is 00:40:29 And you explained to me, you know, the basics of why, you know, none of this crypto blockchain stuff meant anything. And Bitcoin is the only thing that matters and started watching him. in town and that led to Andreas and then it led to, you know, obviously Sifan and Marty. And then Safe's book came out in like March of 18, I think was great. And then there was a big scary Graham that came across from Jay Clayton, I think was in March of 18 when he said, yeah, they're all securities. And I was like, bro, I got a family. So then I started going like really deep. And I mean, it was definitely like by the end of March beginning of April of 2018 that

Starting point is 00:41:02 I was like, well, even from an economic standpoint, it's clear that Bitcoin matters more than everything else by a factor of like a thousand. So I think it's going to be a thousand times bigger than everything else combined in the long run. And then as I just kept on going and going, I just became more and more passionate about Bitcoin and tried to like jam a Bitcoin ecosystem fund into the like crypto fund that I was working on at the time. And like that just didn't work.

Starting point is 00:41:30 And as always, I go to Turkey for, you know, four to six. six weeks in the summer. And when I got back from that in August of 18, I was like, yeah, I'm just going to work on Bitcoin full time. Wow. Wow. That's awesome. Hey, I want to talk about the conference because I literally just got back yesterday. And dude, I had a blast. Like, I wasn't there for more than like halfway through the morning of the first day at the conference. And I just texted my wife. I was like, oh, my God, you got to come to this conference next year. This is, everything out here is just so cool. Like, that's the only word that I can use to describe the experience was it was just

Starting point is 00:42:08 so laid back, West Coast, L.A., right? Just so cool. The basketball court, dude, the basketball court was so much fun. Like, I'm in there, I'm listening to all these amazing speakers. It's Bitcoin only, which was, you know, that alone just made it amazing. I go out for a break and like the people on the court, it was unbelievable. It was so much fun, the music. There was smack talking like literally with the microphone, people talking smack as others

Starting point is 00:42:41 are playing each one-on-one. And I was just like, this is the coolest thing ever. So talk to us about the conference, setting it up. Like, what were you going for? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think we had one motto or one mantra for all of 2022 for the company and it was Bitcoin not crypto.

Starting point is 00:42:58 And basically that one theme that you'll see us drive for all of 2023, and I think this kind of kicked it off at the conference as Bitcoin is cool. Yeah. And it literally is. It's literally the coolest thing on the planet. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up.

Starting point is 00:43:21 And customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why Vanta is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. Instead of chasing spreadsheets and screenshots, VANTA gives you continuous automation across more than 35 security and privacy frameworks.

Starting point is 00:43:51 Companies like Ramp and Ryder spend 82% less time on audits with Vantta. That's not just faster compliance, it's more time for growth. If I were running a startup or scaling a team today, this is exactly the type of platform I'd want in place. Get started at vanta.com slash billionaires. That's vanta.com slash billionaires. Ever wanted to explore the world of online trading, but haven't dared try? The futures market is more active now than ever before, and plus 500 futures is the perfect

Starting point is 00:44:25 place to start. Plus 500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments, the S&P 500, NASDAQ, Bitcoin, gas, and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals, 4X, crypto, and beyond. With a simple and intuitive platform, you can trade from anywhere, right from your phone. Deposit with a minimum of $100 and experience the fast, accessible futures trading you've been waiting for. See a trading opportunity, you'll be able to trade it in just two clicks once your account is open. Not sure if you're ready, not a problem. Plus 500 gives you an unlimited, risk-free demo account with charts and analytic tools for you to practice on. With over 20 years of experience, Plus 500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit Plus500.com to learn more. Trading in futures

Starting point is 00:45:17 involves risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500, it's trading with a plus. Billion dollar investors don't typically park their cash in high-yield savings accounts. Instead, they often use one of the premier passive income strategies for institutional investors, private credit. Now, the same passive income strategy is available to investors of all sizes, thanks to the Fundrise income fund, which has more than $600 million invested in a 7.97% distribution rate, With traditional savings yields falling, it's no wonder private credit has grown to be a trillion

Starting point is 00:45:56 dollar asset class in the last few years. Visit fundrise.com slash WSB to invest in the Fundrise Income Fund in just minutes. The fund's total return in 2025 was 8%, and the average annual total return since inception is 7.8%. Past performance does not guarantee future results, current distribution rate as of 1231, 2025. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income.

Starting point is 00:46:32 This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. Corey, everybody that I passed that I talked to, they were like, this conference is just cool. Like, this conference is so much fun. I'm having a blast. I mean, you're right there in Santa Monica, California. dude, it was like...

Starting point is 00:46:47 You're at the airport, there's private jets, there's basketball, the Compton Magic is there, there's NBA players walking around, like the music is amazing. You know, it's all the little things, you know, it's just, we have a lot of people that have thrown parties and put on events over the years, and I kind of knew that. Those people kind of gravitate toward us, I think, just because of the beacon signal that we give out. You know, even Jan Pritzker, our CTO, you know, author of, you know, my favorite book on Bitcoin. Reverb, the company he co-founded, was very social and very content

Starting point is 00:47:22 driven and very event-driven. And it was all about musicians. Talk about a cool company. That was a cool company. And they sold for 300 mill or whatever a few years ago. But it was all about, it's a marketplace for used music equipment. But yeah, up and down the company. I mean, Brady Swenson's been organizing parties since he was in college. Brandon Quidham is a leader of men, been organizing parties for 20-some years. I mean, everybody at the company, I mean, Kristen Thompson, who put on this event, I mean, she's from Hidden Hills, which is like, that's like, okay, cool, you're in Calabasas, but like, are you in Hidden Hills? Like, she grew up there, riding horses and stuff, and she used to bartend on the sunset strip. Like,

Starting point is 00:48:03 these people know cool. I used to throw a Halloween party with some friends in Chicago every year that was just like completely free, VIP only, invite only. And it was bigger than the Pacific Bitcoin Conference. Like, I mean, met my wife at a party with 1,400 people at it in a two-story loft in Chicago with named DJs and premium liquor and cops working security and the whole deal. Like, this is not new for us, but we like it. It's fun. You could tell. You could tell me. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was unreal. We were to celebrate, you know? And so it's just, it's a hundred little decisions that you just dial on and you do this instead of that. You do this instead of that when you have to cut something, you cut this,

Starting point is 00:48:42 but don't cut that. And I think we got to something that that was really cool. And then, I mean, Swan is signal in Bitcoin for a certain type of person. And then you throw in probably like, you know, if there were 1,200 people there, 200 of them were probably people that got converted to us because we saved their finances earlier this year. They were just like, it was like a pilgrimage. There were people from all over the world coming just to try to meet us because we

Starting point is 00:49:09 helped them save their money. Yeah. So yeah, we're already gearing up for the next one. We've already sold a few hundred tickets for next year. I believe. Dude, I believe. Yeah, so we've got it up. Sorry to show, but yeah, Pacific Bitcoin, 223.com has the tickets both super discount.

Starting point is 00:49:25 I think it's 249 for GA and like 1499 for VIP. In that VIP section, I kind of wish that I could have just attended because that was just like the coolest way to watch a conference. Let me tell you. It was bad out. Couches all over the place that you could just sit on. And then the networking, if you wanted to hang out at the bar, you're still able to watch the speeches, which I think is huge. So, yeah, I just, it was great. Dude, it was.

Starting point is 00:49:52 That was. It was great. It was amazing. Yeah. It was amazing. All right. I'm still recovering. You're the first adult that I've talked to in a normal conversation today.

Starting point is 00:50:01 I'm dealing with my kids all morning because one's sick and the other one's school got closed for the day. So it's nice to talk to you. All I can say is Bravo. Like I left. I walked in the house. You know, my wife was watching the kids and she saw me roll in. And I was just like, beaming. And she's like, well, welcome home.

Starting point is 00:50:18 Now you can help me out with the kids. And we're like, but you don't understand. I just came back from this conference. It was amazing. She's like, I'm sure it was, Preston. I'm sure it was. But I went through the same thing. Thank goodness.

Starting point is 00:50:30 My wife was able to come for a couple of hours on Friday afternoon and kind of see it. And then she and the kids were able to join us for the, it was nice meeting them. The IP brunch on Saturday. Yeah. It was really nice meeting them. We hope to meet your better half next year. Yeah, I told her you have to go.

Starting point is 00:50:47 We're going to, you know, my parents could come watch the kids and the two of us are going to go for sure because it was awesome. A blast. Yes. Oh, and one other thing, the professor. So I go out there. I had no idea who this guy was. I go out for a break.

Starting point is 00:51:01 I'm outside. You know, just walk, gravitate towards the basketball court because there was always something happening. So I go over there. And this guy is playing. basketball at a level that I, like, you could have shown me a video and like, there's no way like all that was real that I just watched. But I was there in person watching this guy. It was unbelievable. Like, how can a person possibly play like that? And he's not that tall. Like,

Starting point is 00:51:25 he's not that big, but like his moves are- And he's 37, he's 37. Of course he's quicker than like any 20-year-old and he's 37. Like, what is his story? What's his real story? Because Yeah, so the professor, Grayson Boucher is his name. He got famous in the late 90s, early 2000s on the And One mixtape tour. So this was like streetball legends and they built a clothing brand around it

Starting point is 00:51:54 and a shoe brand around it. I think Steph Marbury was a spokesperson for them back in the day. Anyway, so he got famous from that. And then End one ended up in other hands and they mismanaged it and basically shut it down. And he had to relaunch himself you know, probably eight, nine years ago as YouTube and social media personality.

Starting point is 00:52:13 Oh, okay. But he loved doing basketball. He absolutely, like, he personally loves editing video and loves social media. So he's really good at it. And he has a great team, mostly made up of, like, his homies and, like, his brother and his cousin and stuff like that. And they just go around and shoot basketball-related content. But he's gotten super famous.

Starting point is 00:52:31 He's got a bunch of videos with, you know, anywhere from like five to 50 million views. I mean, huge, huge, huge numbers. That's unbelievable. guy posts. It was unbelievable. He's a super nice guy, very sort of high integrity, very moral, very smart. I'm investing a lot of time in him because I'm trying to orange pill the hell out of him because he just has such global reach. Basketball is cool. The professor is cool. He's one of those people that I think should be on the mission. Oh, that'd be so awesome. Yeah. So he's here. I really like, it didn't really make any sense, I guess, unless from like a branding perspective,

Starting point is 00:53:06 but there's not like an ROI. He was one of only two people that we paid to come speak at the conference. We paid Alex Epstein's speaker fee, which was totally reasonable. And then, you know, the professor was probably like way over budget for what we should be spending to have somebody come. But like I just felt like it was the right thing to do. It was. Like you said, it brought so much energy to it.

Starting point is 00:53:26 And yeah, it was so fun. And again, it's a down payment on if we can get this dude to read a few books and listen to some podcasts and become a bit coiner, like, oh, my God, he's one of those people that could really change it because his reach is just so, so big. And he's like, I've been talking a lot for the last few months about the shelling points of cool. Okay. You know, because we like shelling points in Bitcoin. Like, obviously, Bitcoin's a shelling point of money. But the a shelling point of cool is something that everyone thinks everybody else thinks is cool. Yeah. So like NASCAR doesn't make the cut, but Formula One does. Hmm. Interesting. Right. And baseball doesn't

Starting point is 00:53:59 make the cut, but basketball does. And country doesn't make the cut, but hip hop does. Things like that. surfing, obviously. So we had a lot of surf. We had basketball. We had the professor. We're trying to just identify. We're always brainstorming on like, what are the things that everybody thinks is cool? But everybody thinks everybody else will think is cool, basically. And I think that's what we need to associate that coin with. Firemen are a great example. I like that. I hope he comes back next year. I hope he comes back because, my goodness, I'm sure everybody that left that was out there that saw him. Like, I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've told the story to since I've come back

Starting point is 00:54:41 of just like how incredible this guy was sending them. Did you see Ray Ray from the Compton Magic? I did. He was unbelievable too. Amazing. He's an incredible player. And he took the mic and was basically like a guest emcee for, you know, probably 30 minutes doing a bunch of stuff right next to Dante and Yusuf while the Compton Magic was out there doing

Starting point is 00:55:01 their dunk contest and their knockout tournament and stuff. he's an amazing talent. We're straight up going to sign him for something, for real. He turns 18 in January and can name image likeness. You can start getting paid. I already extended an offer to him and his mom to have him be one of the emcees for next year. Oh, that's so awesome, Corey. Yeah, he's on Twitter now.

Starting point is 00:55:25 He joined Twitter. He has 100 followers. I retweeted him today. I put an amazing picture of him trying to do a crossover on the professor. like he's going to be out there. Anyway, we're going to, we've orange-pilled tope, the guy who owns and runs the Compton Magic. So he's the coach and CEO and he is totally into Bitcoin. We're sponsoring their entire coaching staff through the Bitcoin benefit plan. So we actually were sending the Bitcoin directly to his entire coaching staff every month, the same way that the

Starting point is 00:55:52 swans do in the IKEA stores and all these other people that participate in the Bitcoin benefit plan. So we're sponsoring them that way. And he's just trying to orange pill his kids who will basically most of them will become at least college famous. And he's got five lotto picks in the last three years. So these kids, a lot of times become big stars in the NBA as well. So, Corey, we're going to have links to the professor.

Starting point is 00:56:13 We're going to have links to the Compton Magic. We're going to have links to Pacific Bitcoin for next year, Swan. What else do you want to highlight or anything like that before we wrap things up? And can't thank you enough for coming on, man. This was awesome. Long overdue. Glad we're doing it. Won't be the last time. And thank you, by the way, for always coming and supporting Swinnell Live and, you know,

Starting point is 00:56:35 hard money and the shows that you've done with us. So we appreciate you. I think a lot of people are looking at Bitcoin now and realizing this is something that they'd like to do professionally. So I think, you know, Bitcoin or jobs, by far the biggest jobs website in the space is a great one to post in the notes. Obviously, Swan posts all our jobs there and so do, I think, 50 or 60 other Bitcoin companies. And increasingly, companies that are looking for Bitcoiners are getting added to it. So companies that are run by Bitcoiners and they're looking for Bitcoiners, I think it's just a really interesting niche in the job space because there's so much that's already said when a Bitcoiner meets a Bitcoiner.

Starting point is 00:57:18 Absolutely. That's all I have, man. I really appreciated that your rundown on everything happening right now at the start of the show was just phenomenal. But thank you so much for coming on the show. This was a blast and I look forward to doing it again in the future. Sounds good. Thanks, Preston. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, We would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search

Starting point is 00:57:59 algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening. And I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to the investorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. work. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC105: It's Bitcoin Not Crypto w/ Cory Klippsten (Bitcoin Podcast)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.