Here everyone, Welcome to another episode of the Market Disruptor Show, and today I am joined by Brady Swinton. He is he's the host of the Sistum Bitcoin podcast, also head of marketing and Education at Swan Bitcoin and Company. I talked about quite a bit um and today we have a very exciting topic when I'm happy to dig into um about of renaissance, but it's a message of hope.
Today we're gonna use historical references, which you know, I love to bring um and talk about hope of the of a better future that I'm I'm pretty excited for. So anyway, Brady, thanks for thanks for joining absolutely, Mark man, I'm a big fan of yours. Uh really glad that we've gotten to know each other a bit better through uh doing some business and talking bitcoin and happy to
be here. Thanks for thanks for the time. Yeah. So um, yeah, I'm I'm excited for this conversation today because sometimes people say I talk too much gloom and doom and because the stuff going on, Yeah, I mean the stuff going on today is is doom and gloom. Um. But on the other side of this is amazing hope, and so that's what I want to talk about. Today, we'll talk about the doom and gloom and then we'll talk about
the hope. But anyway, um Brady, just give us a little bit of background on on what you're doing so kind of people get a reference of that. Yeah, absolutely so. I am head of education at Swan Bitcoin. We launched about fifteen months ago, fourteen months ago something like that, so we're still relatively new on the scene, but we are the easiest, fastest, safest way to accumulate bitcoin. We have automatic recurring buys, instant buys, we can do wire
buys up the ten million dollars. We're kind of engine air way out toward the international scene right now. We're just focused on the United States. So that's what we do. We and as my title suggests, were really focused on providing bitcoin education. We think that the more you learn about bitcoin, the more comfortable you are, you know, buying bitcoin, accumulating it, developing that conviction. Uh So we have to that extent, published a bunch of you know, blog content,
We published on YouTube. We have a couple of weekly shows, one called Swan Signal Live, on which you've been a couple of times. Were repair up guests and and talk about economics and bitcoin. We also do Swan Lounge, just kind of a fun hangout show on Fridays. We're really ramping up the YouTube show. Of course, we published those podcasts, Um, we have a book coming out, we published an e books, were doing webinars, So we just do a bunch of
educational content and that's really our focus. We try to make most of our marketing efforts educational. Yeah. I love that for so many reasons. And one of the biggest reasons I love that is because, um, you know, in order to I always help people before you buy anything, you didn't know what it is that you're doing, Like why am I buying this? And what am I expecting? And and all that comes to education, right, It all comes to education. Um, you know, education is the edge,
right that that's the edge that you can get. But also, like with perspective, by the time this video goes out, you'll have seen a new video on YouTube that I just finished recording. And I was talking about historical narrative of of the Weimar republican Germany and uh, how that inflation crept up on them and what happened, And I used that and then I pulled the narrative, and I'm
not gonna spoil it. But the reason why I showed that is because people thought, oh, if I would have just you know, bought here and sold here, I would have made a bunch of money. But you didn't understand. If you didn't understand what was really going on, if you weren't educated, it wasn't a smooth ride and you would have gotten shaken out. And so, UM, education is that edge. UM. I also like to say, I'll plug
one thing. Um. You know, I think we have one of the biggest asymmetric opportunities in the world in front of us and you that's more upside than downside. And the way you get asymmetrical upside is through having asymmetric information. And so I'm working with Swan. I have a new email going out and I'll put a link to it down below. You can sign it from my email. UM. It's called the asymmetric edge, and it gives you that information you need. So I'm gonna just plug that real quick.
We're talking about it, but let's dig into this historical narrative. UM. And I always try to bring that forward and what does that tell us about the future? And so we're gonna kind of talk about this this Renaissance two point oh, where we both agree. I think let's see the same future that there's massive prosperity in front of us. But going back right we I think there's a historical narrative between like the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages and into
the next the Renaissance Age and Enlightening age. Um, that is is kind of a good analogy of where we at and where we're going. Why don't you kind of set that up for us? Hey, guys, let me just interrupt this interview real quick, just to plug the show sponsor, and that is Block five. Now. Block five is doing amazing things in the bitcoin finance space. As a matter of fact, they've cracked some really big news by bringing on the x c ftc UM chair Chris gian Carlo Um.
And they are one of the most transparent, most heavily regulated UM companies inside the United States, which gives me a lot of trust into what their services are. Now, I've recently did a video talking about how to retire off bitcoin, and you can do that by leveraging debt and interest against bitcoin. And Block five is the number one company in the United States or maybe in the world to go to and use UM. They are leading the charges, are paying interest on your bitcoin if you
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that money into bitcoin. Now as that bitcoin price has risen, I'm able to borrow against it and go back and buy the same real estate or something similar, and I still own the bitcoin, and I also own the new asset as well. Lots of ways you can do this UM and Block five is the company that I recommend. Down in the description, I have a link that you can click on. If you choose to use that link, you can earn up the two fifty dollars in bitcoin just for using that link. So check out block fine now.
Absolutely so. I mean the era that we're in right now is not uh an aberration of history. We've had eras of fiat money all throughout history. We've had eras of sound money all throughout history, and it's a pendulum that sort of swings back and forth, and studying that history really gives us some insight into what's coming next. Uh And and so one of the eras that I have really liked to take a look at is the
Roman Empire. And one of the things I've learned through studying bitcoin is that money is the foundation of civilization. It is the way that we advance civilization. We create technologies because we communicate our needs are wants to other people, and those The way that we effectively and efficiently communicate those needs and wants, especially over long distances of space and and and over time, is the accumulate generation after
generation is with money. It was with prices. So we set of value on certain solutions um by a price at a price, and we establish that price. So that's really a communication. It's a language, and that language lays the foundation of our civilization, the way we advance over time. Um. So the quality of our money matters very much. And of course when we talk, when we keep in mind, of course I'm not as we're talking about this, there's a lot of variables that go into the you know,
rise and fall of empires. But like I said, this is the foundational costs, right, uh and so and and that's because just just a dig and and just a dig in. Sorry interrupt, but I just just kind of help you, help you set that base. Um, if if price signal, if money works as price signal, and that is communication and so of course it's it's obvious to anybody that if you can't communicate properly, you can't coordinate
and you can't grow. And so um that's why countries are formed and they have their own language and they can all work together. Um. And so that's just uh yeah, so when when that communication gets messed up, then you can't function together. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's just it's more efficient to have one language when it comes to markets and economies. And uh, you know that's sort of the
Tower of Babbel story from the Bible. And this era where we've had you know, nationally enforced fiat moneys, it's hasn't allowed the global economy to operate efficiently. There's just these there's a lot of noise in the signal. And the promise of bitcoin is that we're going to really make that signal a lot clearer, and we have you know, the technology it's built upon is a global communications technology.
And not coincidentally, not coincidentally, uh, the way that the language of money is now going to be spread instantaneously across the world and the same same voice, the same language, the same code, I think, will you know lead to what we're gonna you know, talk about here is is the Renaissance. UM. So let's let's look at the Roman Empire as kind of instructive and then going through the Middle Ages and then to the Renaissance. So the Roman
Empire was extremely successful, um. And it was based on a money called the It was a gold coin called the arias, and this was sort of the international settlement money. Uh. And it was first minted by Julius Caesar uh and it uh it was eight grams of pure gold UM. And eventually over time it became uh, you know, there was a decision made by a Roman emperor to reduce it to six point five grams of gold. That was at the kind of the beginning of the second century
to fund empirical expansion and wars. And then it was replaced by a four point five Graham uh solidus uh where they renamed the coin because they had debased it. Um. So the purity of the coin itself, the purity of it was never debased, but the weight of it was debased as government spending the end outpacing revenues. Uh. And this went on for centuries. Now, there was a compliment
to these gold coins. And like I said, those gold coins were international settlement, big nation states and empire settling between each other, large merchants, etcetera. But there was a silver coin for your you know, everyday person. And Um, the you know, deflation or debasement of the gold coins, the arias and the lead is really paled in comparison to what happened to the denarius, which you know, makes
makes sense. It's sort of a cancel on effect. The money that you know, the everyday guy was was using suffered the most debasement. And we're seeing that today as well. Yeah so so um, and then and then tell us about the let's let's talk about the innarius then I
want to dig into that a bit. So then the denarius with the silver coin, and I mean the same thing happened where that got debased and um, yeah, I guess the parallel that I'd like to pull just from this segment before we keep going so people can understand its historical narrative is that most people probably know about the Roman Empire and they you know, basically kind of took over the world at that point at that point in time, and uh, as they needed to continue to grow,
to continue to increase their empire, they needed more money, right, but they didn't have any more money. So what did they do. They debased it, which means they took a big coin and made it a small coin. By making it smaller, they got more. The same thing happened with the denarius, right, it used to be full silver than it was silver, which gave them ten percent more money,
et cetera. And so the narrative that I like to pull that historical reference is just that they needed more money to expand the empire and continue their social programs. They didn't have it, so they just made the money worth less and less and less. And so we obviously you can see that parallel today absolutely, yeah, uh, you know, just don't have the revenues coming in, and taxes are unpopular and they were back then as well, led to
uprisings and a lot of complaints and um. So the easier way to tax, the easier way to raise more revenue, revenue for the government or the empire, is just to debase the money. Uh. And that sort of um instidious tax is a lot easier to kind of sneak past the populace. Um. Yeah. So the denarius began as four and a half grams of silver, and it stayed that
way for centuries under the Roman Empire. And this helped, you know, not coincidentally, it was a fundamental It was a foundation of civilization for the Roman Empire, and it was very healthy for trade, for commerce, for artisans, producers of solutions to the needs and wants of other Roman citizens. Um. And they could rely on that to be a consistent measurement of value over over centuries. So um as Rome.
As Rome began to grow, the Roman Empire began to grow. Uh. Kind of started at the top of the debasement of the arius. Um. But then base metals started being combined. This another way to debase money. Base medals that were more common uh in in the in I guess the Earth's surface. Then silver began to be mixed in with the coins, so they would have copper cores for instance,
or they would be blended with silver. UM. And so throughout the first century the UH A D. The denarius was debased in just a hundred years by over uh so Uh it was by three fifty a d. It was all but worthless. Um had an exchange rate of four million, six hundred thousand denarius to a gold's ladus. So they experienced what you talked about in your previous video. Inflation.
Weimar Republic like inflation caused economic chaos. Uh. And the population of Rome, which was at one point a peak of about a million inhabitants probably uh, if not you know, the largest city on the planet, if not the you know, if not the largest, there was probably some competition from from eastern empires as well. But UM, by the fifth century, hundred hundred and fifty years after the hyper inflation the denarius, it was down to fifty thousand people. Uh, it really
just destroyed the empire. And UH. One phrase that I like from this era, UH to use is it comes from is bread and circuses, and it means that it came from a poet, a Roman poet. It means offerings like benefits, or entertainments that are intended to placate you know, the discontent, um, and the uh you know, the I guess just distract from the policies and failures economically and
monetarily that the empire is inflicted. Yeah, that's a great that's that's a great piece to kind of kind of stop right there, because, um, kind of get that historical perspective again. So the Roman, the Roman Republic saw massive prosperity. They had a good sound money, They were able to freely trade, which allowed people to specialize and get good at what they were doing. So then there was you know, all these new things that were created and in mentions whatnot.
But as the Roman Empire started to decline, debasing their currency, they started falling apart, not just from a monetary standpoint, but even from a societal standpoint. And so to your point about the bread and circuses, Um, the government changed to where they used to rotate in and out all the time to keep people kind of fresh. And then they got to lifetime politicians and we saw massive corruption
that started happening. Yeah sound familiar. Um, Then we had lots of people that had you know, money problems, and they were very unhappy, and so they created these bread and circuses, bread being welfare, circuses being entertainment. Well, we give the people bread and we keep them entertained. Maybe we'll keep them at bay a little bit. And does that sound familiar again, right? Um So that's a good
historical perspective. And then what happened after that, Well that was we plunged into the Dark Ages after that and uh, you know, the the empire broke up. Uh, the sort of knowledge of why that happened was sort of lost to history. Uh. And the ideas of of money, Uh, we're sort of we're sort of lost. There was all kinds of infighting. Uh, the you know, ability to establish commerce again was took took quite quite some time. Um So, so yeah, it was. It was, you know, obviously a
dark time. It's called the Dark Ages for a reason. Uh. And then we emerged from it and we can we can talk about some of the reasons why the Renaissance was able to be born. Yeah, yeah, I want to talk about that. Um So, just real quick onto that Dark Ages. You know, Rome was basically taken over by the barbarians and I think they just destroyed everything. So all that literature and all that history that kind of showed why it was great and how it was great
before it was kind of lost. Um. So history was destroyed. History was lost. Um. And then almost like people didn't have a template, they didn't know what to do. There was no no good historical references. And again another historical references. I mean, it's kind of easy to see how history is kind of being rewritten, like histories under attack right now, um. And that and that that's bad because that's our guide, um as we can see from the Roman Empire going
to the Dark Ages. So that's another great historical reference I think. And then with all that information, all that education gone, they didn't know what to do and they basically had to rediscover it all again. So they kind of had to start all over with no frame of reference. Um so and yeah, go ahead and uh and keep
it going. Yeah. So it was born again in Italy, so which which makes sense that the core of that knowledge sort of the embers of the fallen Roman Empire were still sort of burning in in the you know, in Italy and in the area. And uh so in in medieval Renaissance, the Medieval Renaissance, the Florin was born and these sort of these families that we know of, like the Medici's, these big banking families, they eventually invented
modern banking. They were merchants and they either rediscovered or somehow, you know, through some uh you know, beneficial like happenstance of history, were able to rediscover this idea of sound money and how important it was. So that the thing here I think that's uh crucialton note, is that the Medici's understood very clearly, uh, the value of sound money and maintaining the measurement the signal of that value over generations, so the floor and it was stable for three hundred years,
and this was the foundation of the Renaissance civilization. It was used widely beyond the borders of the Republic of Florence. It was the most trusted money. Uh. It became reliable, you know, because people far and wide knew that the florin was going to be worth the same amount now as it will be in ten or fifteen or twenty years. It was a reliable store of value. That's what made
it the best money. Yeah. So another thing that I like to look at from that kind of period that kind of helped usher in that change also was you had kind of a new technology, so technological revolutions. I'm kind of working on a thesis on that, UM. And we had the invention of the printing press ye. And with the invention of the printing press, we were able to start getting information out to people that typically wouldn't
have ever gotten that information. And so I think I think there's two key pieces there that I like to look at. One it was this decentralization of information. Whereas before information was centrally controlled and had to kind of just be told, spoken or passed down. But all of a sudden, now it could be decentralized and spread out
to everybody. Everybody got the information UM. And then then that you know, that just kind of snowballed, where now there was exchange of free ideas and people built on top of that UM. And then you got the sound money again, which UM one gave people that kind of that good communication again. But also I think the key piece was that because it was globally accepted, it opened up free trade. So UM, it expanded the amount of free trade and communication and information and ideation and all
these things. And so with the information and the sound money, it was just an explosion. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and that was that's an you know, it's it comes down to language, right, uh, and being able to communicate to one another in such such broadly like that in such a broader way made a massive difference. And that comes down to basically the power of language to travel far and wide, and money is just a form of language, the way to communicate value.
So um, being able to you know, for sound money to reach far and wide was really enabled just a flowering explosion of blossoming of commerce all over Europe. Uh. And eventually we saw you know, other very prosperous uh, you know, merchant cities uh in the Netherlands and Germany, eventually in Britain, uh, Spain. So all over Europe, centers of commerce grew through the trade of free ideas and
the trade based on trade based on sound money. And now there are other currencies, but eventually the settlement currency among you know, large merchants and even even um, you know, in some cases everyday people was the fort Yeah. Yeah.
And I think, you know, for people that haven't studied this at link like we have, you know for years, sometimes they don't realize like how deep this really goes um where it's like, okay, you had a sound money, Okay, whatever, right, but like they don't understand like all the effects of money and like what sound money is and so um it really comes down to, you know, when I have a way to store my energy to be used at a later date, Um, it changes my mindset, so I
have like this longer term perspective. But then it allows me to go pursue other things that could be of benefit to other people. So I could invent a new you know, a new technology or or whatever. And then because that that that money, that communication is universal. So just like you know, English and Spanish don't match up it, but the money does, right, And so um, now you're
sharing those ideas with even more people. So if I'm forced to just you know, work twelve hours a day just to survive and get my food and get my clothes, I don't have any time to communicate and share ideas and invent. But when I can. Um, it's just it's just hard to even comprehend or state like how powerful that is. Yeah, it's you know, it's again that's how civilization advances, and the faster that can happen, the more efficiently that can happen, the faster civilization can advance and how,
and the faster it can spread to everyone. Right, we often say that the futures here, it's not evenly distributed yet. Um.
That's been the case for a long time. And there's still lots of people around the world that are waiting for the benefits of technologies that have been around for decades that you know, more privileged societies that access to and what we're seeing now with like the Internet and what I hope will happen, you know and be aided by, uh by bitcoin is the access to the means of of make taking advantage over the information that's available in
you know, a growing number of pockets you know, literal pockets, people's pockets around the world. Uh in the form of you know, Internet enabled devices. UM. So these these people will have a way now to receive money through those devices over the Internet that they will actually be able to hold, you know, in a self sovereign way and not and know that it's not going to be debased confiscated, and they can rely on it to grow some wealth for their family and and pass it along and make
your family richer and richer over time. And this is what we used to call the American dream. This is the first generation now I think in the history of America that will be uh financially in terms of wealth, worse off than the previous generation. So um, yeah, that's not the way it's supposed to be. Hey, sorry to interrupt this video just one more time. I'm not running Google ads. So it's actually way less interruption than I normally would have on a video. Um. And that's because
it's sponsored by block five. Um. They are opening up the world of bitcoin and financial products offering to pay you interest on your bitcoin. Um. Better than own in a rental property that you have to manage and control and have the risks. You can just earn interest on it, or you can leverage against it. Now, I plan to hold my bitcoin forever and literally never sell my bitcoin. So how do you do that? Well, if I need money,
I don't want to sell that bitcoin. I'm gonna pay tax on it, all right, I'm gonna end up with less and I don't have the bitcoin anymore. So a better way to do it is to borrow against the bitcoin. So I've put all my money into bitcoin. If I want to buy a car, or I want to buy a house, I can borrow against it at very very low competitive rates. Get my house, get my car, whatever that may be, and get to keep the bitcoin. I've done a whole video on this. You can find it.
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the interview. So if we go back and take some of those historical reference we kind of set up and then kind of look at how that fits kind of into more now times. One thing that catches me is that, you know, um, like I said, the Roman Empire kind of had this figure it out, and then the Barbarians kind of destroyed all that and they kind of lost
their way. And I look at like stuff like the Founding Fathers wrote down for us, like they told us, they put down warnings and they were so smart, right, they didn't have they didn't have the Internet, and they didn't have social media. So all they did was sit and read and like converse all day. And so they had all this time to think about philosophy, and they studied,
you know, Greek and Roman history. But um, like I said, they left all these warnings for us, and it seems like we've lost our way, We've lost all that information and and maybe even purposely not being shared. Yeah. Perhaps, certainly because there's a lot of power in the uh, in the printing press and controlling it. So yeah, certainly would be massive incentive to keep that information away from the general public. I think, I think I can't remember
who it was. Maybe it was Henry Ford who said that if people understood the way the banking system worked, they'd be rights in the street by tomorrow morning. Right. Uh So, so yeah, there's the founding fathers. Um, there were many of them who were adamantly against central control of money, adamantly against paper money, I mean, because they knew that by allowing someone to print paper money that
it would be easily debased. George Washington wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson about just in very very stark language, basically that you know, paper money has done, you know, ever as it will do in your colony, basically your state before it was a state then, which is to lead to every uh down every road of ruin u you know. So yeah, there's there's Alexander Hamilton's as well. Um,
so very much against central banking. There was heated debates about including it in the constitution to forbid central banking. It didn't happen, um, And we went back and forth. There were wars, you know, basically major battles, intellectual battles and sometimes even physical battles over the establishments and uh, you know, the destruction of central banking up until nineteen
thirteen when when we've you know, established at a reserve. Yeah. Yeah, if you study that history, you'll see that the central bank was established and destroyed multiple time were finally took hold, as you said in nine and yeah, so many quotes I can't remember them off the top of my head, but I mean I think Jefferson said like central banks were more dangerous than standing armies. Uh. We talked about
how it would enslave us, how would enslave our children? Um. And so they told us and they warned us and now here we are trying to figure this out again, so kind of like like what happened? But um, now shifting to a little bit of hope. UM, I think we are starting to see this new renaissance two point oh setting up and and it does give me great hope. Um, one of the big catalysts. So if we go back, I think the two pieces from the Dark Ages to
the Renaissance were both information education and sound money. And so if we look at the information education piece, I think we have Um. You know, we had the explosion of the Internet, which is kind of similar to the printing press, and the printing press kind of preceded the renaissance, sort of like the Internet has preceded what's happening. But you know, we're seeing people, I mean people are watching this right now, like what the heck? Like why are
people interested in this? People are using the word fiat, Like nobody used the word fiat before, right, nobody cared about the history of money. But all of a sudden, now there's a renewed interest that I'm excited for, and there's this free flow of ideas. And I know you're your head of education, I mean, you're you you're on
it even more than I am, so let's talk about that. Well, we're both educators, Mark, but yeah, it's it is an amazing time in that sense, the free flow of ideas, the freedom of information is incredibly important to individual freedom. And we have seen the internets UH and the ability to communicate ap peer to peer have drastic impacts on the ability of you know, people to resist tyrannical power. For instance, um, the length that countries will go to
China has a massive are well on the internet. North Korea's is even more restrictive because they understand the danger of the freedom of information to their power. Now, this is one of the greatest things that the you know, founding fathers, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights has given to Americans the freedom of speech UH. And it's too bad that the you know, the uh not allowing central banking didn't make it in, but the freedom has speeched it and that's important. And in fact, um, you know,
this is just an interesting side note. The UH encryption that bitcoin is based on shot to fifty six and other related encryption algorithms were actually challenged by the US government to be made into military grade and unitions essentially, um and so that they could be controlled, their export could be controlled, right, and the courts, this pream court eventually ruled that cryptography is a form of language and it is therefore it's protected another First Amendment. And the
same exact arguments can be made about bitcoins. So if there were ever some kind of state level attack on that in a legal sense, made on bitcoin, I don't think that's going to happen at this point, but if there ever were, it would fall under First Amendment protections. This is just a language and we have the freedom to communicate in that language over the Internet. It's just a bunch of words and letters uh in in in
the code. So um so yeah, if freedom of information massively important, and I think you're right that it creates this sort of fertile grounds, and the printing press created a fertile ground for the advent of the of the Renaissance, and so uh it's language is the is the foundation
of civilization. Money is just another form of language, right, um so yeah, I think with bitcoin and like you said, the combination of the Internet and other exponential technologies that are developing, uh, which we can get into if you want, but it's mind blowing what's happening. And we have no idea how to process what's going to happen, not only with the advent a bitcoin, but just the telescopic evolution of technology and how fast things are changing now. It's it's, uh,
it's what we can't We just can't grasp it. Our our monkey brains can't grasp it. So um, yeah, the freedom of information, the freedom of self sovereign money is going to change things drastically. You had said something earlier that was great. It's something that I that I pay attention to a lot. I'm actually reading f A. High x book The Constitution of Liberty right now. And uh, and I got this from him, but he was talking about how it's and you said this, it's the speed
of ideation, right. So it's it's about trying over and over and the faster the more tries we get, the more we're gonna do. Right. And so you had said that earlier and it's and it's totally right, and and it just made me think, Um, if you if you look at like the printing press sped up the amount of information that was getting to people instead of being centralized by one person and I can only relay to that one person or to a small group of people.
Now books could go out and flourish, right, so it's sped up that information. And then I was just thinking about the parallel to the Internet where the internet. Um, Before the Internet, we had lots of books. Obviously the printing press of bent around. But if you think about that one, it takes somebody you know, potentially years to research and write a book, and then it could take me weeks or months or however long to read a book.
So like, how how how fast that that was faster than me having to travel to talk to so many word of mouth right, and it got to more people. But then think about the speed difference in the Internet and also the way that we get information. Now. I love books and I've read thousands of books, and I still read books. I'm reading high X book right now. I'm actually working on three or three or four books
right now. Um, but um, my education shifted a lot, and uh, you know, shifted from for a while, I didn't read books for a couple of years and it was all podcasts and like YouTube videos, so it was even and and part of the reason why it's because it's faster, more relevant information, and so it just kind of speeds that up. So that's what the information or
they it really did. And instead of just having to go to a bookstore that had limited selection of books, it's opened up the whole world back to that kind of free trade kind of like what happened in the in the Renaissance, where the whole world was able to kind of freely exchange. Um. So the Internet is that times a million or whatever, right, I mean it's way faster. Yeah,
you're absolutely right. Yeah, it's uh. The point you make about how uh you know, books are sort of these like longer term ideas, these more evergreen ideas, because books take a while to publish and disseminate, and so they could be you know, out of date relatively quickly. And then we had the odd events of like pamphlets and newspapers to disseminate information more quickly, you know, the relevant
like new information. Uh. And and now, like you said, like the Internet does that instantaneously around the world at the speed of light. Uh And and so you know we're all on Twitter, Twitter sort of like this distributed ap newswire, you know, and we can all just talk to the best thinkers in the world, and we can get their takes on news, and we can curate our feeds based on people that we trust and and who's takes we appreciate. Um. And it's it's incredible, man, it's incredible.
And so it's led to just like the printing prest did, but again a million times more, an absolute explosion of the transfer of ideas. Uh And and I like the idea um, you know that, I think it was Richard Dawkins about he really coined that. I think he coined the phrase meme or the name meme, which is the sort of he had this sort of like theory about
memes or ideas. There were sort of like jeans, right that that would um, you know, combine themselves and and sort of transcend or create something new when they would combine and brains. And so we have all these memes, which are in broader sense just ideas, but we also have this sort of art form of language that's been
developed on the Internet, which we call memes. So there's that kind of meme as well, and those ideas are just being transferred in directly into people's brains so quickly, and we're all thinking about things, and like just take Twitter for instance, it's like a crucible for the best
ideas in bitcoin. And this is where bitcoin sort of has its battle of ideas about how it's going to develop, about what it means to the world, about how we should communicate that all of those ideas to the world, and we you know, distill them down into this you know, list of like a couple of hundred you know, maybe a hundred bitcoin memes that we have that are two three four words on uh. And so it really helps us kind of learn how to communicate. We all work
on that together. It's a distributed collaborative marketing system, you know. Yeah, yeah, one more point on that, and then I want to move on to the second ingredient, which is that money. But um, one more thing I was just saying. King was also like before the printing press, Um, you know, you just kind of had very centralized information. You've got it from your teacher, who got it from their teacher or whatever. Um. The church kind of held a monopoly
over religion. And then the people got the Bibles and they said, wait a minute, this is not what it says. But it was the decentralizing of the information. And then um, if we look at the Internet, it's decentralized information times a million. Again. Um, so that's super powerful. And then we have another technology that's even decentralized even more. And so that takes us back to the the second ingredient,
which turbo charges. When you add these two together, it's uh, you know, the compound um and that that is that money. So we have now for the first time, a new technology that I think is it's much bigger than money, right, I mean, it's much bigger than money. It's um, it's it's it's in my opinion and what I'm working on this thesis, it's it's a technological revolution that will change the way humanity works. It's not a new technology, it's
a technological revolution. Um. And so calling it money is too small. But to the point of what we're talking about, it's it's borderless, right, so it's global and it can speed up that free exchange of information and trade and so um. Yeah, So it's what are your thoughts there? Yeah, Bitcoin is the implications of it is are incredibly deep, and that's why we can spend years and years talking about it. We have thousands of podcast episodes we have
hundreds of incredible essays. We have books that are just being published by the dozen now, UM and we can continue to have these conversations because there's so much here and we're learning about the extent of what it is. Now. The first thing that we come to understand about bitcoin is that it's a money and we and I, you know, when we talked about this a little bit earlier, I like to say that we're all default gay sis right, We're all all by default believe or understand that the
government controls the money. That's how money works, uh. And that's just the way things are. A couple of generations have come up this way since you know, early nineteen seventies. I didn't know anything different. I was born in nineteen seventy nine. So this is just the way money was, um and and so when I found bitcoin, I learned it taught me what money really is. And I went
through college. I had uh, you know, classes in high school and college micro macroeconomics, business classes, finance classes never mentioned anything about what money is in the history of
money and how it function in society. UM and so to that extent, like it's hard to UM argue against the idea that it's at least some kind of unintentional conspiracy, because there are incentives for these uh, you know, institutional universities and etcetera, to teach this kind of new form of economics, to provide the stable of quote unquote economists to write papers about you know, econometrics and these massive models that are you know, use lots of complex math,
because we have the conceit that we can understand and better manage an economy than a natural money can. Um. So yeah, it's it's um. It's going to fundamentally change everything because we're returning to a sound money. Now. I know what money is, So that's the first thing. What is money? Right, That's the question that really leads you down the rabbit hole. But then yes, of course there's so much more to it than that. And uh, I think we have we have a hundred analogies to try
to understand describe bitcoin. Um. But one that I am you know, really enjoying thinking about right now is you know, point is energy and it is stored energy. It's all money. That's what money is. It stored the money is. But bitcoin does it so efficiently, right, it doesn't so efficiently it literally just directly turns energy into money. That's exactly
what money is. So it's, uh, it's the perfect transfer of energy into money, and it's it's fascinating to kind of I mean, just to even try to attempt to show like how powerful this is. I look at I look at what you know is happening in civilization today, in society today, and so um, back to money is energy. So just just to set that up real quick, Let's say that I have to dig holes, right, and if I dig holes for eight hours a day, I'm expending
my energy. I'm burning calories, right, um, expend energy to dig holes. I could decide to work an extra four hours one day, extra energy expense that I could hopefully save store that value to be used at a later date in time. And I want to make sure that that maintains its power, not not losing it like a battery. Right. You wanted to be able to store that that energy.
The problem that we have, um, you know, as the Roman Empire had debasing the currency in the United States is um you know, with with with being able to store that energy for you at a later date, then I'm free to go specialize and be the best brain surgeon I can be, or the best you know, coder, engineer I could be. Whatever. The problem that we have when our money doesn't hold its value is I'm forced
to go become an investor. So now instead of spending all my focus and energy on creating new technologies that serve you know, solve problems and serve needs, now I can only spend half my time because the other half of my time I'm forced to be able to find a way to not lose my energy that I've saved up. And think about I mean, if you can just think about the implications of that, how much how much brain
drain has been done on society? Like how much further could we be ahead if we didn't have to spend half our time being investors. Now, of course Wall Street doesn't want to hear that, but imagine if we could just save our money, we didn't have to be investors, and we could just go solve problems and create things. Yeah, it's so true. I interviewed a guy named named Noah Kaufman, Dr. NOA. Kaufman, and he told this great story that absolutely proves this point.
He uh, you know, doctor obviously works his butt off, went through uh med school seven years or whatever of intense work and then uh started working. I think he was an e R doc. So that's kind of one of the most intense forms of medical service you can provide. And he, you know, had had some money money saved up.
He didn't know what to do with it, right, and so he just kind of started and gave it to a financial advisor to invest, and he just was not happy with his smart dude was not happy with what the financial advisor was doing with it. So he actually he became a licensed financial advisor just to manage his own money. So he learned all of that stuff and and became you know, a license so that he could do whatever he wanted to with his own money. So
all self directed. And that's exactly the point, right. Uh. He spent all those hours in top of being a doctor where he could have with all that energy the expended doing this, uh you know, been an entrepreneur in other ways or whatever, and benefited society in even greater ways, thought more about his profession and contributed some sort of like new type of a medical service or way to approach solving solving health problems. Uh. And he couldn't so
it's it's exactly right. And with bitcoin, we have a way that allows us to store that value without having to think about all that stuff. It's insane. And so that just that alone. Imagine the benefit to society that will accrue just because of that alone. Um, And then you know there's there's other other ways. The bitcoin will you know, improve the efficiency of human civilization, society and advancements by orders of magnitude. Yeah, yeah, I mean we
just we just can't even comprehend it. I think as humans. Um, the problem is humans is that we can only imagine a better version of what we have today. We can't imagine something new. So we have cars, well flying cars, right, we can't imagine new things because we don't have the building blocks for those things. But I think hopefully we've made it clear to everybody listening that, um, just like history, when we decentralized information and got a way to store
value and trade freely, which even exploded the communication. Um, it led to massive you know, wealth and and and and a boom for for the civilization. And I see that setting up again today but times like a million. Yes, yeah, absolutely, And this is um, this is the exponential evolution of
human civilization. So it's happened all throughout history. I think it's been a six hundred thousand years for the hominid, hundred thousand years for uh Man as we know it, UH, ten thousand years of agriculture, you know, UH, five hundred years of the Industrial Revolution. Probably a little bit less than that fifty years of the information age. So I
think we're entering now a bitcoin renaissance of bitcoin age. UH. That's you know, going to be a compliment, is Jeff Booth talks about in the Price of Tomorrow, a compliment to these uh technologies that are deflationary essentially, right, They're all the cost of manufacturer any information based, silicon based technology is trending to zero, right, And if you pair that with a deflationary money, which you have to eventually just it's just math. You can't have an inflationary money
in this environment, it's going to actually speed up. It's collapsed, and so um you pair those together, the exponential advancement of technology with a money that will just incentivize that advancement even further. We're talking about technologies that will allow people to live for hundreds of years. You know, maybe even forever, like things that we can't imagine, you know, like basically like near light speed travel or maybe even
like speed travel. It's it's physically possible. So we will have the fundamental basis through this light speed transfer of information, the development of AI, you know, AI enhanced brains. UM. It's it's crazy what's happening. So it's not just the money, but the like you said, the transfer of ideas that's propagating and accelerating exponential rate and then combined with a sound money, uh, will just really lead to a flourishing of humanity. UM free up all kinds of time for us.
You know, most people will have their needs met, you know, basic maslow hierarchy needs at because of deflationary technology and a combination of bitcoin making it you know, this decreasing those prices trend and trend them towards zero even faster UM for essentially free and it's not going to have to be some government program through the collection of taxes.
Is just going to be that way because we're we've become so efficient, so productive, and that we can then we can all kind of spread around the capture of that productivity. That that chart that I always point to of one the uh, you know, breaking of productivity from wages, So wages flatline productivity continues apace. They had been lockstep up until the end of the gold standard. So we're not benefiting you and I and and most people are
not benefiting from the improvements of productivity. That's all accruing to the one, the point one the point on UM. So having that more more evenly distributed, UH, is going to give us all time to do to pursue our passions and perfect our crafts and think term and it's gonna really change everything. Yeah, it's gonna be an amazing renaissance. Again, it is gonna be an amazing bitcoin renaissance. Now, unfortunately the path from here to there may not be so smooth,
but there is hope on the other side. So that's a good message of hope. Brady, that's a super fun conversation. Like I said, I spent too much time focusing on doom and gloom and so I do like to just stop and think about how great things are. So thanks for breaking that down for us. That's great. UM, I know you've got the podcast, will link to the Citizen Bitcoin podcast. Um, anything else you want to point people to that. We can link down below. Yeah. I host
two podcasts. So Citizen Bitcoin has been around for a few years. There's a good hundred and thirty episode archive there with interviews with some of the best bitcoiners. It's fun to go back and listen to that archive. I had one of the first podcast episodes with g g who is a great author, with Robert Breedlove, who's really exploded since then. So it's fun. It's fun to go back and kind of hear their early thinking before they sort of before where they or now. Uh. And then
I also host the Swan Signal Live show. We publish it at swan Signal Live Podcast, Swan Signal podcast dot com and on our YouTube channel YouTube dot com slash swan Signal. Uh. So those are the two shows I'm hosting. And of course you can go to swan bitcoin dot com and start stacking some SATs. Uh. You know, Bill, it's that renaissance money. You got to get some of that renaissance money. Yeah, thanks so much, Brady. All right, Well with that, we're gonna go ouat and sign it off.
Thanks so much, Thanks, Mark, appreciate it.