How Tech and Finance Push Bitcoin Mainstream | Cory Klippsten

some point. Yeah. Thanks, Uh, Yeah, I love talking bitcoin. If you watched any of my shows, you know that already. But Corey, you know so just for everybody watching, want you give us a little bit of a background, just who you are, a couple of minutes on who you are and where you've been. Yeah, absolutely so. Right now today, I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Swan Bitcoin swan bitcoin dot com. Uh. Going back a few decades,

I started out my career working at Microsoft. Was at Morgan Stanley for a little while doing like high net worth client marketing UM, and that was just before business school. Went to University of Chicago, got an NBA in finance

and entrepreneurship. There after that was that McKenzie and Company, the management consulting company out in their New York office, did private equity consulting with my own firm out of Chicago for a couple of years before another little stint, and management consulting through the downturn like eight to eleven.

It was probably about two thousand nine two ten that I really caught the the early stage tech bug and really decided I wanted to spend the rest of my career building startups, investing in startups, and being in kind of a startup ecosystem. Was kind of sick of fixing other people's problems and consulting in private equity and cleaning up their messes, and I decided I wanted to make

my own mistakes and build things. So I went to Google for two years really just to kind of do b school apart to the Internet version, and learned as much as I could. Fen met something like fifteen vcs and founders, was mentoring startups, organizing tech meetups and things like that out of Chicago and l A and UH. By summer of about six months after moving my family to Los Angeles, I was confident enough that I could leave Google, jump in with two feet start advising investing

and looking for startups to help operate. And that's what I've been doing for the last seven years. So you've been helping startups operator get start up, I guess, and then you finally decided to take the plunge and started up on your own. Yeah, well I did take the plunge.

From late thirteen to late fifteen, I was on the senior team of an ad tech startup that did pretty well and raised a bunch of money and at a bunch of vcs and kind of went through that thing, and I came out of that kind of combining prowess and fundraising, which I've been doing, you know, off and on for sixteen years now, and strategy from all the work that I've done in consulting and uh basically worked with something like thirty CEOs over the next four years

on strategy and fundraising, helped raise over a quarter billion dollars across twenty companies and thirty rounds, and and also

continued to make angel investment throughout. So I built myself a nice little like a name and some experience and kind of got my uh, you know, my master's degree in in startups and got to the point where you know, I've been kicking around ideas for a while of something to start and had some fits and starts of things outside the bitcoin space, and nothing really you know, got my attention and passion to the point where this did and this, uh you know, bitcoin grabbed me, never let go.

And once I had the idea for for what I'm doing in the space, now it grabbed me and never let go and it's just become a reality because I couldn't do anything else. Yeah, I know, I know what you're talking about. So, um, just for everybody that's watching, we're gonna go through a bunch of information and um, if you are new to bitcoin, um, you probably have a whole bunch of objections in your head. We're gonna run through those towards the end to make sure you

stick around for that. But um, Corey, So it's interesting that you know, you've been through all these different businesses, the ins and outs of it, inside the belly of the beast almost so to speak. Right, like lit working in the financial system you had mentioned, like Mackenzie Morgan, stan Stanley. I mean, they're like as as deep as you can get kind of right. Yeah, absolutely, it was

right in the thick of it. I was even spent a lot of that time at Mackenzie working in Financial Institutions group and putting together you know, financial models for new products for financial firms things like that. Yeah, so, you know, I find it interesting because you have like this very deep background in finance and then you also have a deep background in tech at the same time. So, um, you know, bitcoin is a lot of different things, and

it's definitely finance and tech. Right, So when did you first hear about bitcoin and when did you decide to finally get in? I mean, even someone that knows as much as you do, like tell me how that journey worked out. Well, this is why I would say, like, if you felt like, you know, you heard about bitcoin in twenty or twenty eighteen and didn't get in or got it, you know, heard about it last year and

still didn't get in, it's absolutely not too late. In fact, every day that you wait is only going to hurt you in the future, because the chances are this thing becomes ubiquitous and we all end up pricing goods and services globally in bitcoin, you know, So like the earlier you can start learning about it and understanding it. The better. So that's my first bit of imploring you to take this seriously. It's kind of like the old proverb the best time to plan a three is twenty years ago.

Second best time is today exactly exactly. Yeah, um, you know so, so don't feel bad if it didn't take the first time. It's the story of of people that are heavy in the bitcoin today, the bitcoin founders, even the coders that that work on Bitcoin Corps, the people that write about it and have podcasts. Like, most of these people missed it the first time around. I was at a tech conference in uh January and uh, and somebody had a blockchain wallet and was given away fifty

dollars for everybody that installed a blockchain wallet. And I got my bitcoin on my blockchain wallet, and I proceeded to not read the white paper, not go down the rabbit hole, and lose the private key. Oh and you know.

And then in December, I was at a Buddies holiday party up in Santa Barbara and uh, he knew knows what I do, and he asked me to help him basically put together like a marketing deck for a series I'll see that had stakes of his that he had in in eight different startups, and one of them was Balagi's company, which is like early bitcoin mining attempt, and another one was ripple Um, which is trash but you know as a company, but you know, And so I

had another opportunity. I was like reading up on bitcoin over the holidays and putting together these slides for him, and like it still didn't take. I was so busy with other things and other clients and investments and things like that, Like it just didn't didn't click. It wasn't until I'm a pretty social animal. I like to organize things. I like to recruit people, like like to throw parties. I like to you know, you know, just basically like

throw conferences. Like I always organizing people. And I take my cues a lot more than I probably should from what's going on around me. And it was only the noise of the price run up in bitcoin and ethereum and then all of these people jumping over into I c O projects in spring of that really caught my attention. And it was only by luck that one of the first kindly say alt coin fund founders, Uh, this is

who running a crypto fund? Uh? And I guess he liked me, and he knew what he was doing with all the I c O crap insisted that I read digital gold first and that I buy some bitcoin first. So thank goodness for that gentleman, who's another guy here in so cal forced me to at least start there, and I think that gave me just enough of like a head start on bitcoin to make what what people call your am I allowed to use off color language

on this show, Mark Sure, go for it. Okay. Well, a lot of people in bitcoin refer to a shipcoin horse shoe, which is basically most people do start in the space in bitcoin, and then you basically have a shipcoin journey where you're like, go and explore everything else because why wouldn't you. You're a curious person. And eventually you finish your horse shoe journey and come back to bitcoin.

Thank goodness for this guy getting me started. My my shipcoin horse shoe only took about ten or eleven months, and by then I was actually already working full time in the space. I had taken over as president and chief investment officer of a crypto fund UH in early eighteen terrible timing, but yeah, by like March or April of that year, I wanted nothing to do with any of the I c O s or the cryptos, and

I saw no value in any of them. And I saw bitcoin as a money that would you know, trend toward one and the hardest money ever and all the things that you talk about in your videos. And so I basically spent about six months trying to extricate myself from the situation of having hired a dozen people and uh and having responsibilities and etcetera. And uh, yes, since I left completely by the beginning of August or late August, and basically spent the next six months trying to figure

out what to do in bitcoin. I really wanted to do something in this space, and I finally figured it out. And it's the most obvious thing that you could possibly think of, the new business that you finally decided to jump into. It is the most obvious thing. It's the most obvious thing that you could possibly think of to do with bitcoin, yeah, which is selling it sell bitcoin. Yeah. And it's it's so funny. And this is again, this is that this is like having the wrong mental framework.

You know, I got caught up with all these uh these all coins thinking that you know, maybe bitcoins my Space and Facebook is around the corner, or maybe it's like tech and there's all these other things that can kind of do different versions of the same thing, and it's like, no, actually, bitcoin's money, and tech enables it, and it's this protocol and there's some other cool things. So it's like a new kind of money. But at

the end of the day, it's money. It's the hardest money, the soundest money that's ever existed, and all these other things combined may have a you know, a maximum market opportunity of something like two orders of magnitude smaller than bitcoin. So like, if you take the current crop of all all coins that exist ethereum included, you know, their upside combined is like one percent of what bitcoins upside is. Um. Yeah, I mean that's there's there's so many different ways to

look at it. Um. I just made a tweet yesterday that is probably the biggest viral tweet I've ever put out. I can't believe it. And I basically just said I was just thinking last night and I was just like, you know, what if bitcoin never goes up in value, but it keeps my value, keeps my my store of value up within aation like I'll be fine with it. And I just tweeted that out and uh, I mean it's like like the biggest viral tweet I've ever put out, it seems like. But the point being, I'm not in

it to get to the moon. And so you talk about other all, it's like, uh, they don't they don't have as much upside? Well do do we really care about the upside? Like? What is it that bitcoin feet like? For me? Anyway, it's kind of like, you know, the features that bitcoin gives us being borderless, permission list, censorship resistant, immutable, that's what makes it special to me. And some people in the US don't care. But if you're in Iran

or Venezuela, you probably do care. Um. And so for me, I mean I would say, maybe some alts give you better returns right now, it's like penny stocks. It's like chasing penny stocks, right, but none of them, I guess. I guess the argument I get into with with crypto crypto alts is, uh, what are the features you're trying to optimize? Force? So people tell me, oh, but this is this one's faster, and I'm like, do people want

faster money? Well? I mean, I think at the end of the day, I think we're talking about the same thing on different time frames and with different strategies and different people. So if you're a professional trader and you're a short term time horizon, and I have a lot of professional trader friends, and I don't begrudge them whatsoever for increasing their net worth by trading cryptos, like this

is the easiest thing that you could possibly do. To look at these inefficient markets, with these pump and dump schemes constantly going out, and like insider information makes you rich, like absolutely by all means, get on key base and discord and telegram and call your friends and Nike a

Tunnelly or look at your technical analysis. But everybody else that's not a professional trader and hasn't been a professional trader for the last decade or two, You, like all other humans, are going to buy high and sell low because you're gonna find out about it and get excited about it when it's finally starting to go up and you're gonna buy you know, compound or whatever at eight

and it's gonna go down the next day or whatever. Um, you know, So you just want to be accumulating the thing that's going to be around for a long time. If something in this space is going to work, it's gonna be bitcoin. And that's the only one that has an opportunity to actually be global money out of everything in this space. And really these arguments are much more

of like vintage argument. And most bitcoiners that are serious, that spend a lot of time in the space, as I'm sure you know the people you talk to, but your audience would know this too, they're not actually spending any time talking about alts anymore. Our conversations are about governments. Our conversations about financial infrastructure, our conferstrates. Our conversations are

about liquidity, privacy technologies, payments technologies. They're about fidelity, they're about square, They're about visa, They're about you know about non k y C bitcoin, you know, like how can you buy bitcoin without having to have it, you know, on the grid, that kind of thing. Ye. Yeah, And if anyone watching my videos, they know that's all I spend my time talking about. I'm curious. So having been in tech, in finance, UM and all these different industries

and now you're building a company in this space. Now you're building you're not building on bitcoin. You're not building on the code, but you're building a business that revolves

around bitcoin. And I'm curious how that is to build a business, um with someone that has kind of experienced that you do so um dealing with banks, dealing with uh, you know, fundraising, if you guys are doing fundraising, and just uh, is there this stigma that's making it difficult to grow a business around bitcoin or does it seem

pretty easy? Well, there's obviously a lot more easy money slashing around when you can create your own token, and so that's why you see a lot of these legacy like raises, like still having a lot of money to slash around, and it's gonna take a while for you know, the market to swallow all of that malinvestment and all

the inefficiency. So you have you know, crap like Cardano and Tron still putting out videos and marketing programs and things like that because they're raised a hundred million dollars and have this big treasure or whatever. But at the end of the day, eventually that will get spent in an old results. I'm more I'm more talking about like, uh, you know at the bank, do they say, oh, you're

a bitcoin business, we can't accept your bank account. Uh no, no, there's there There are enough there are enough banks that will work with bitcoin companies that it's not really an issue anymore. I mean, you've got you've got plenty of partners to choose from at this point. Okay, So as far as building a business on a revolves around bitcoin today, a couple years ago it wasn't. But today you feel it's a kind of not too much different to building

in any other type of business. So let's look at it through the lens that I know really well, which is like startups. And so you know, one of the challenges that you certainly have is in the fundraising arena. And you know, basically the problem that you have is you're looking for investors that care enough about bitcoin and know enough about bitcoin to think that your company is

a good bet. But by definition they know enough about bitcoin to be judging a startup investment versus their expectations for bitcoin as an asset. Their total rate is basically their expectations of you know, what they think bitcoin is going to do over the life of your startup, and so basically that that makes it very difficult for most

bitcoin startups to raise money. You know, because of my background and extensive network, it's not been an issue for us, but I do see that problem for a lot of other companies in the space, and that's why I and and three friends of mine have gotten together and we

started a fund called bitcoiner Ventures earlier this year. And basically the goal there is, you know, while the percentage of people who would invest in a bitcoin start up maybe small, the denominator of people that you can pull from should be the largest of any vertical and technology

because there's so many people around the world. So our our goal basically is just aggregate like a few thousand people that might raise their hand and write a small check into a bitcoin startup and do those through syndicates. And we successfully did a funding for Unchained Capital out of Austin, which does really really cool stuff in the bitcoin space, including bitcoin backed loans and and multi sig

custody setups and things like that. So we cut our first check for them in in May towards late May um and we're hoping to do another deal this fall out of bitcoin Ventures. Nice. That's good. Continue to help the ecosystem grow. Oh so, um, I'm just curious. I wanted to dive back in for a second before we

move on. UM, So again you had kind of talked about how, or maybe you told me before we started recording, but you were saying how you got into bitcoin but you thought it was just like a tech play, um, and you were buying it, but you didn't really understand what it was. Your eyes hadn't really been opened up. You haven't been read build whatever you wanna call it. UM, tell me about that, like what what what? What was it? What was your old view that was wrong? And then

how did you come to look at it differently? I mean, I'll just come back to the you know, the my Space Facebook analogy is probably the easiest one. Like you know, you you get into something in technology and the first thing you think of is something better going to come along soon and disrupt this. So you may be an investor in Friendster and then you just get your lunch eaten by my Space and you think you have the right one because you're at my Space, But then Facebook

comes along and just like destroys you. So that's actually probably the I would I would say, I mean, at least the top two. UM, you know, complain not complains, but objections that I hear, um is that but there's a thousand other cryptos and and and exactly what you said, Bitcoin is gonna be the old mice brace and um all though, so how do you look at that? Now?

So let me let me use this. So there's a lot of arguments for why it can only be Bitcoin, but I'll almost even more easily say why it can't be any other one because let's say that some alt coin becomes dominant, why would you stop there? Let's say it becomes dominant because of some feature, and and people make the argument and it flippings, as they say, if it flippings bitcoin, why would you stop there? So now it's Ethereum, well why not eos? Why not some other thing?

Why not you know, cosmos? Why not whatever? You know? Like there will always be people. So basically, this concept of of a shelling point, which is basically where you know the second order estimation of what you think other people will think, ends up that we all basically think

it's the same thing. So it's like, you know, these things exist where you're like, uh, you know, let's meet in New York tomorrow, but you don't give any other information, like where would you meet, right, And you know, basically the shelling point is grand Central Station in the Grand Hall at noon, because that's what most people would think, right, And so it's like the point that where most people are are being concentrated around, which I which I agree with,

But you know, I think Bitcoin is a little bit different even to that, because like back to the MySpace Facebook kind of analogy, I can have accounts on both, so like for example, um, on Twitter, everyone's moving to like parlor now, but like there's not that many people on parlor yet, and so like I don't really want to use it, but I can have an account on both. But with Bitcoin, it's like you only can really have your money in one place. So it's a little bit different.

You know, well, you can have investments in other things like you can. I mean, there are a lot of people that own a lot more Bitcoin than I do, and even that may understand bitcoin better than I do and may still have, you know, some gambles because they have you know, a bet that like in this cycle, they think this coin is gonna you know, be higher beta and we'll go up or than bitcoin does. And

that's fine. That's like they're gambling thing. But it's not your savings, right, it's not your hard money hedge against a financial system that is demonstrated it's unbelievable profligacy and lack of restraint over and over and over again, reflating the two thousand one you know dot com bust with you know, mortgages, and reflating that with the everything bubble, and now doing it again with essentially like in gold terms,

we're in a depression right now. Yeah, I also like to think about it like, um it really you have to look at like what are the important characteristics of bitcoin again? Like I said, right, borderless, permission list, censorship resistant, etcetera. And so for another crypto to come along and beat it at those characteristics, so okay, it's faster, whatever, it's cheaper, whatever, but like in those characteristics get mat or it's like almost impossible. And it was really like Andreas on top

of us that kind of give me this argument. But it's like, you know, when bitcoin started, nobody knew about it, nobody cared about it. The government let it go by an F. A. Hyak right, uh, Nobel Pride Peace Prize winner nineteen seventy four. He said that there will never be a sound money again until we can take it out of the hands of the government. But it has to be done in a slide roundabout way, and that's

exactly what bitcoin did. It was sly and uh, you know today we see like all these attacks on networks and then double spending and all that, and so now if anybody really tried to be decentralized like bitcoin, it would be attacked, it would just be shut down. It would be almost impossible to ever launch that again. It seems like to me anyway, Well, I think decentralization is actually the key wenchpin of that line of thinking, which is absolutely correct, and it's that Bitcoin was able to

grow because nobody paid attention to it. It It was able to grow three or four years at the beginning completely decentralized because everybody was just working on that one. And as soon as people realize, oh my gosh, I can sucker retail investors and n vcs into giving me money from my central lives thing, and I can pre mind it and take two thirds of it from my treasury or you know, set up all these like jan key things that fund to foundation and keep me eating for

a bunch of years. And buying me mansions and houses and private security forces or whatever it is. That's what people are gonna do. And not only that in a noisy space where now the cats out of the bag,

the ico bubbles happened. If you have a concept for a crypto member wimble coin, or whatever the heck you want to scam people with, you better have a huge marketing budget, and you better have agencies working in Korea and China and Japan and Georgia and Estonia and the UK and the US, you know, promoting your crypto like justin Sun style, or you're gonna get your lunch eaten and and you have every incentive to to lie about it and to do all kinds of But even that,

even that isn't going to save it, because they're never going to achieve the level of decentralization. That's right. That's why I often talk about the immaculate conception. Just like you know, bitcoin, bitcoin is coin came to be, it was the first one, and the advantages that it has with with its beginnings. It has the moral authority that

no other coin can have. And it doesn't matter if Satoshi comes back and claims his million coins or sells them or whatever, like it actually doesn't matter at this point. He doesn't own ship because nobody owns it, just like nobody owns the Internet. And and it's important for me to understand or really even convey that point because to like you said, right to to to achieve that level

of decentralization would be almost impossible today. But the the level of the centralization is what allows it to be censorship resistant. And um, on this last video I just did, I got comments, like, like over a thousand comments, a lot, and and the the most the biggest objection you know, probably people at least said, oh, but the government is just gonna come and kill it, shut it down or whatever. And so being that decentralized censorship resistant is what's so important.

How do you view that? Yeah, so there's two things at work here. One is the protocol layer, and then the second one is the social layer, which is what humans are going to do and what what human incentives have been created? Right, so, you know, the protocol doesn't make somebody go and hook up you know, a bitcoin mining facility to hydroelectric power and you know, bribe a Chinese official to give you that power for free. So that you can give hash power to the bitcoin network.

Those are human actions that are being taken because of incentives at the social layer, right, So, you know, the the idea that a government could go and shut down the bitcoin protocol is that ludicrous, is like shutting off electricity worldwide. And even then the ledger would survive because it lives on hard discs all over. Like the Bitcoin ledger doesn't have to be connected to the Internet at

all times. You could e MP the whole globe and as soon as you're back online or as soon as you found another way through smoke signals or whatever to communicate the next block, you know, you could you could

keep bitcoin alive. Um. You know, I'm mostly focused on the social layer, and that's really what you know, the mission of of Swan Bitcoin is all about, you know, basically the concept of in the U S specifically, which is where we operate, where I live, where I want to keep living, or at least want to have the option to keep living. I don't want the government to take major actions adverse to the growth and eventual success

of bitcoin. I want it to be as smooth as possible for all of us that work in the space that are early early purchasers of bitcoin and that are holding onto it and helping promote it and helping evangelize and educate people and and and bring people towards you know,

a bright orange future like you are. UM. So that's our goal basically is to get ten million bitcoiners to find as someone that you know owns some bit of bitcoin that's meaningful to them and is educated and passionate enough to actually argue for it, whether that me you know, calling a congressman or attending a town hall meeting, or writing a blog post or fighting it out on Twitter

or whatever. It is. That combination of having some skin in the game and enough knowledge to be a little bit dangerous, those ten million people would be just over the bar of you know, witness mteleb would call the transgent minority that time and time again in a complex system, is enough to flip a society uh to doing things the way that they want it done. Like the tipping point. It's the tipping point. It's it's the same as regulatory capture. UM. It's the same as like hallal meat or or all

of us eating kosher. Just about every packaged food in the US is kosher because you know, we're fine with eating kosher if you're a non Jew, but if you're Jewish, you would only eat kosher. Right, so we all eat kosher. And now we see you know, the no no no hormones at milk, or now we see free everything or whatever. Um So, ten million users, where do you estimate we

are right now? So that combination of both owning a meaningful bit of bitcoin and actually under ending a decent bit about it, I think that numbers around a hundred thousand people in the US. We got a long way to go. Yeah, I think we got about a hundred cks to go, you know. Uh So Toshi said, uh, it might make sense to get a little bit just in case it catches on, and so I recommend that on on my video I just did on bitcoin on a couple of days ago. At the end, I said, look,

just put ten bucks in it. Just put a little skin in the game, because then all of a sudden it's gonna attract your interest and you're gonna start focusing on more. You canna start learning about it more. So just get a little bit ten bucks. Right, So you just dialed in on exactly what our value proposition is with Swan Bitcoin. So at swan bitcoin dot com what it is, it's it's a decision that you make one time, but then it's a recurring purchase. So it's an automatic

recurring purchase. So you're constantly, just like dollar cost, averaging a little bit every week or every month in the bitcoin uh and learning about it as you go. So that's what we really like about it. As far as we can tell, it looks like a little over half of our users were the first place that they've ever

bought bitcoin, and that's really what it's for. Yes, we're winning tons of people over from coin based because our fees are six lower, but also because you know, it's a it's a great place to experience bitcoin for the first time. You can do as little as five bucks a month with Swan and we have the lowest fees in the US for automatic pull from your bank account, automatic purchase a bitcoin, free automatic withdrawal to self custody

if you're ready for that. If you're not ready, we use the same crustodian as like Finance and bit tracks and all these fancy big companies, and custody with us as free as well. So that's interesting how your model is is kind of built around helping people get in and and uh it does like these automatic payments now for people that are a little bit more advanced than investing. No, that's dollar cost averaging, um, and so dollar cost averaging is one of the best ways to get into a position,

especially a volatile position. Um. I'm sure you have some numbers and stats around that you want to kind of dig in and explain with that how that works. Yeah, I mean absolut I mean at it at its basic level, if you dollar cost average into an asset, by definition, you're committing the same amount of US d uh into the purchase each period. So if you buy every week and you're always putting a hunter bucks, and when the price of bitcoin point is low, you're always buying a

little bit more bitcoin. When the prices bitcoin is relatively higher, you're buying a little bit less. So your entry point, you know, over time is always going to be pretty darn good. Yeah, um, you know. But I actually think the much more important thing, and this is why we don't really define the product as d c A because d c A is kind of like a trading strategy. It's actually much more about the psychological trick of making a decision once and therefore having it happen automatically from

then on. Because the basically for the last fifty years, call it since nine when we went off the gold standard, there's really been only two assets that most Americans have been any good at accumulating value in. One is a four O n K because it's automatically taken out your paycheck, and the other is a mortgage, which is for almost everybody, the only way that the Americans for the most part, have any value, and that's because you sign up for mortgage,

sign the contract, you lose your house. If you don't make the payment, you usually find a way to make the payment. So those are basically the big buckets of wealth. We think bitcoin is important enough to do that in the same way, even if it's only like one percent of your monthly earnings or five percent or whatever it is, you should be thinking about building that position in the same way. Yeah, you wise. Yeah, of people, I just

gotta I'm so passionate about this, man. But ahead they've studied this over and over and over again with people that trade in assets that they, you know, don't really know much about. And this is true for me too. I will always before this existed, and I don't buy a bitcoin anymore outside of my my swan plan. Uh, you're always going to throw down when the price catches

your attention, and so of people. It's basically everybody that hasn't had twenty years of conquering their emotions in the market and really knowing you as that they're investing in. People in on average will buy high and solo. Yeah, because as humans were horrible investors because we run towards pleasure and we run away from pain. And so when the price goes up, we want pleasure, we jump in, and when it goes down, we want to get away

from pains that we get out were horrible. I made a video a while ago now it was shoot might have been a year ago, uh, and it was should I buy bitcoin now? Or wait? I think was the title of it. And basically the concept of that video was, you know, because I get asked all the time, should I buy bitcoin now? Or is it gonna drop in the future? Right? Like what's it gonna do? And so the title of videos should I buy it now? Weight? And what? I basically what the point of the video was,

and I I demonstrated through math. Is that even if you would have bought at the very peak of two thousand, seventeen and twenty thousand or whatever, right, and you would have bought every single week until the mota, you know, until mid two thousand eighteen, whenever I did the video, you would have been in profit. Yeah. And so instead of trying to time the market, which nobody can do. And so you said it's like a trading strategy, I

think it's a long term accumulation strategy. But either way, um, but instead of trying to time the market, I don't know if it's gonna go upro down. So what I do is I just buy consistently and then I don't have to worry about it anymore. For the average person, as you said, it's the best opportunity, not only because you beat that volatility so you don't have to worry about it the fluctuations, but also the point that you brought up is perfect. And I teach this in my

investing classes, is it has to be automatic systems. Right, yeah, and so h you you put both you give them an automatic way and dollar cost averaging together. I mean it's it's a perfect system. Yeah. It seems. I mean, we have insane devotion from our users, and you know, most of our new users come from referrals, as much as I'd love it to be from appearances on awesome shows like yours, like, the majority comes from people that use it and recommend it to their friends. And that's

always our north star. Our goal is to always be the top recommendation of bit cooinners when their friends ask them where should they buy? Yeah, well, I've definitely been thrown it out quite a bit, and I will continue to um where where are people able to buy from? Is it only in the US or all over the world or what? Yeah? So it's US only, US only including Puerto Rico? Is that going to change sometimes? Soon? Not this year? There's just so much rodehe here in

the States. And I think, you know, again, with the company's mission being to head off government intervention by recruiting this many bitcoiners, like any other government coming out against

bitcoin doesn't really matter. It'll just set that little government back, the hedgemon, the one with the military and you know, the global system depending on their currency crank cracking down and turning on or turning off on ramps or you know, otherwise penalizing bitcoiners or trying to tax bitcoiners and give it to boomers as they're spending the retirement money or whatever they're trying to do. Uh, that's what we want

to head off. And it doesn't it's not binary. There's all kinds of things that could be done that we're just going to try to get out in front of and and be actively involved in thwarting that would be adversarial to bit point in the coinners. I mean, it's a great mission statement and I love it, and uh that's that's why I do what I do. And and we're all on the same page right, which is trying to as you said earlier, like evangelize about it right,

tell people about it, um, and uh, encourage people. Maybe it makes sense just to get a little bit right. Yeah, Well, if you want to, if you want to get your friends involved, and we got to set this up for you. Um, if you're sold on Swan and I gotta get you,

uh trying to plan. But you can go to swan bitcoin dot com slash in list and this is basically where you sign up to get your own custom u r L and your own custom landing page where your friends can come and see your smiling face and something that you say about bitcoin and why you why you

think Swan is a good place to buy um. We have great people like Max Kaiser and Preston Tish and you know, hundreds of people, hundreds of normal people that are non media people as well, just using that that ref link and and letting people come and experience Swan on their recommendation and you can either you know, pocket

those those stats, pocket that bitcoin. We do a quarter point for three years for everybody that you bring um or or you can donate it and you know, if you're not comfortable and you just kind of like wanna have people show up. We also have a couple of organizations that we that we donate to for people that don't wanna you know, earn money from their network and

just want to get people using Swan. You can you can donate to either BTC pay Server which is Swan bit cooin dot com slash BTC pay spread that around, or Human Rights Foundation, which is Alex C. Gladstein in their career doing great work and very very pro bitcoin that Swan Bitcoin dot com slash HRF and and anybody that signs up through those links or any of these rough codes. Um, you know gets ten dollars a free bitcoin when they become a member, which is nice too. Yeah.

I do like both of those uh nonprofits as you're talking about alex and BTC pay Both both could causes for sure, definitely both doing especially what hr E is doing.

Man such good work and and uh that is exactly why bitcoin, what HRH is doing, right, It's like that's why we Yeah, you're right, Yeah, I mean, you know, Human Rights Foundation is always speaking out about you know, rights of the individual and the importance of separation of money and state, and you know, really coming out hard against you know, surveillance technologies and all this spying stuff

that's going on with different governments, including our own. Um, so yeah, I can't can't speak more highly of those guys. Yeah cool. So, um you gave out the name was a swan bitcoin dot com m hm and uh cool? Where would people go to find out more about you and follow along on your journey? Yeah? Sure, I think you know, Swan Bitcoin on Twitter is probably the most active channel that we use, but we also have two shows that we produce on on YouTube and and have podcasts.

So Swan Signal Live is every Wednesday. You can go YouTube dot com slash swan signal um and in that one every week we pair two people to come on and talk about bitcoin, macro tech, etcetera. Uh, I believe that we're having a guy, this Mark Moss guy. I

think it's coming on on next Wednesday. So if you give this episode up, if get this episode up in the in the next couple of days, Uh, Mark, I believe you're on on the So I think it's eleven am Pacific on the fifteenth, and you can watch live on Twitter YouTube or just catch it later on our

our YouTube channel. And then you know, you do something that I think is probably more important, frankly than a lot of the bitcoin podcasts that I often know on, which is reaching out to people that are in adjacent areas of interest. Because you have a broad audience that's interested in finance and you talk to them about bitcoin. I think you're gonna see a lot more of that over time. We're trying an experiment in that we just started a show called sounds like a nineties Man. It's

called Ugly Duckling in the Bright Orange Future. So yeah, so that one is actually about gen x music and bitcoin and uh so that's that's another playlist on on YouTube dot com slash Swan Signal. We just posted our

third episode today. But it's me and my real life brother who's a longtime musician and former local rock star and Seattle with a bunch of musician friends, and you know, we'll get people like you to come on and talk about a little bit of music, a little bit of like eighties and nineties culture and how it sort of threads through and sets the table for bitcoin and what's going on today, and then we'll hit a little bitcoin towards the end of the show. Yeah, that's interesting. I

like that. You know, you talked about um, you know, your mission swan bitcoin and really to to to market, to evangelize, get you know, get people aware of it or whatever. I'm a marketing guy, always have been, I still am, and I love it. I I eat, sleep

and breathe marketing and business and all that stuff. But anyway, it's important to understand, like in marketing, like you have like this customer journey, and so you have to understand where customers are in their journey, and so at the top of the funnel, they're not even aware they have a problem yet, and then they have awareness of a problem, but they don't have a solution. Then they have a solution, but they haven't figured out which one is the best one,

and then they choose a solution. Right, So, like I think exactly kind of what you said with my channel is really about like people don't even know they have a problem yet, and so it's really about like, hey, we have a problem here, and then like hey, here's a potential solution, and just trying to to work well down that. But but I think anyway what you said,

I mean, I'm a fan. I've watched a bunch of your videos, and I think of your podcast is, uh, it's getting people to think about like what is money a lot, which I think it's not a coincidence that, you know, probably the last five good bitcoin books that have come out, you know, the first few chapters are always just about getting people to recognize like what is money? And have you really thought about money? Right? And why why do we have this unsound money for the first

time in human history? Like this is the longest it's lasted, It's or a hundred years into this fiad experiment since the creation of the fed. Everybody needs the message right now, right, Like, I mean, if there was ever a time in history we have people marching burning cities down. They're piste off, but like they don't really understand why. They don't understand why they're so like, why is there such a divide? Why is there such inequality? It all comes down to

the money. Yeah, and it's also you know, you can't un see it once you see it, like the matrix. Right, you also recognize that whether it's happening consciously or subconsciously, and I guarantee for some of these people pulling strings for the Fiat system that it's happening consciously. But regardless, the incentive exists to get people that don't have their hands in the honeypot, that aren't close to the money printer, that aren't close to d C in New York and

the government financial complex. They don't realize it's in those people's incentive to create strife and get people to fight amongst each other over other issues unrelated to their theft of our savings. Of course, it's like a magician, Hey look over here, and then I'm doing this over here right exactly. Well, recognize that you're being played understand money, and you might just find out that Mark has been right this whole time, and you should be buying some bitcoin. Well,

I love your mission statement. I'm I'm I'm on the same same mission, and I want to I want to help push it as much as I can, and we'll be a lined up on that, you know, just real quick, you know for me, I I told you, But you know, in in two thousand and eight, I had made a bunch of money. I was started buying bank owned repos in southern California and flipping them and done tons of

them and businesses fortune exit. But in two thousand and eight, I got completely wiped out, and uh, I was like, what the heck, Like I gotta figure this whole system out. And the more I started to learn, the more disillusioned, if you will, I became like this system is just completely screwed. And and uh I saw that what was

coming was like there was gonna be this war. And I remember telling my wife, like I don't want to be a freedom fighter, Like I'm out, Like I'll be on a beach in Nicaragua in a hammock, surfing and fishing all day, Like I'm not gonna be a freedom fighter. And it was when I found out about bitcoin. I was like, we finally have a tool we can use. I can support bitcoin if I can tell the world about bitcoin, and everybody used bitcoin, that's how we win. And I don't have to be a freedom fighter. It's

a peaceful, peaceful opt out. And so it was ever since I recognized that I was a switch. And so anyway, that's my mission to tell as many people as I can to become sovereign and become free. And so we're we're on the same team's exit the system without exiting physically, but not just exit the system as in like um bailing out of the system. What we do is we're taking their power. We're starving them. We're starving and and

it's because it's fractional reserve. It's exponential, right, So one dollar in the bank creates ten or a hundred or a thousand dollars, but one dollar out takes hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands out. And so anyway, yeah, so cool, Well we'll keep we'll keep pushing and we'll do more content together. And I appreciate you coming on. No, it's it's really my pleasure. This is a super fun conversation and you made fort some minutes go by real fast.

Yeah cool, all right, we'll talk again soon. Sounds by