Jimmy Song and Aleks Svetski: Swan Signal Live E17

Jimmy Song, Bitcoin educator, devel­oper, and entre­pre­neur, and Aleks Svetski, the Australian founder of Amber App, join Brady Swenson and Cory Klipp­sten to talk about Bitcoin’s morality, immune system, toxicity, and Bitcoin funding.

Episode Summary

Episode Recap by Rob Sarrow

Recap from today’s Swan Signal with @jimmysong & @alekssvetski 👇

cc @SwanBitcoin

— Rob Sarrow 💫 (@rsarrow) July 2, 2020

YouTube Timestamps

00:00:00 — Introductions 

00:02:12 — Building on Bitcoin and the virtues of being Bitcoin-only 

00:11:38 — Investing in Bitcoin compa­nies and fighting misaligned incentives 

00:16:24 — The influ­ence of VC funding 

00:20:13 — Why you should support Bitcoin-only companies 

00:31:27 — Bitcoin’s toxic immune system 

00:44:51 — Incen­tivizing people to run nodes 

00:55:49 — How Bitcoin’s economic incen­tives interact with morality 

00:53:31 — The undeni­able reality of Bitcoin and Bitcoin as a beacon of hope 

01:18:54 — The macro­eco­nomic impact of Bitcoin 

01:25:51 — The Spiral Dynamics model 

01:32:29 — Closing thoughts

Transcript

Brady Swenson:

Welcome to the Swan Signal podcast, a produc­tion of Swan Bitcoin. The best way to accumu­late Bitcoin using automatic recur­ring buys at swanbitcoin.com. I’m Brady, head of educa­tion at Swan. On behalf of the entire Swan team, I’d like to welcome you back to the Swan Signal podcast. Swan Signal pairs up great Bitcoiners for compelling discus­sions that are unique on the Bitcoin content scene. Every week we broad­cast Swan Signal live on Twitter @swanbitcoin and on YouTube at youtube.com/swansignal. Then we publish the audio here on this feed. This week, we’re joined by Jimmy Song, Bitcoin educator, devel­oper and entre­pre­neur, Aleks Svetski, founder of Amber, an Aussie based Bitcoin-only company, as well as Swan founder Cory Klipp­sten. I’m glad you found your way here, hope you enjoy.

Brady Swenson:

All right. We are live. Welcome everyone on Twitter, on YouTube on Facebook. Appar­ently Twitch is down right now, so you’re not watching there. Welcome back to Swan Signal live, a weekly show that pairs up great Bitcoiners for compelling discus­sions. I’m Brady Swenson, head of educa­tion at Swan. Before we dive in, a quick word about the service we provide here at Swan. We built the best way to accumu­late Bitcoin with automatic recur­ring buys. It’s a very simple setup. One, you connect your bank account to auto fund USD. Two, we automat­i­cally stack for you. Three, you can set up automatic withdrawals to your wallet. We do that all with very low fees for recur­ring purchases in the industry. Up to 80% less than Coinbase, 57% less than Cash App. You can get started at swanbitcoin.com/btcpay, and you’ll get $10 of Bitcoin dropped to your account.

Brady Swenson:

After you start saving with Swan and the Bitcoin open source project by that name, BTC pay, we’ll get 0.25% of every Swan plan purchase you make for the next three years. You can get in on this great referral program yourself, you can refer US-based customers from anywhere in the world, and stack some stats while you do it. Get paid to mint new Bitcoiners. Check it out at swanbitcoin.com/enlist.

Brady Swenson:

All right, let’s get to today’s show. We have a great pair of Bitcoiners with us today. Again, Jimmy Song, Bitcoin educator, devel­oper, and entre­pre­neur. Welcome to Swan Signal, Jimmy.

Jimmy Song:

Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be on.

Brady Swenson:

And Aleks Svetski, founder of Amber, Swan’s wing man down under. Welcome Aleks, how’s it going?

Aleks Svetski:

Very good gentlemen. Thank you for having me on and for getting me on with Jimmy.

Brady Swenson:

Absolutely man. And Cory Klipp­sten, founder of Swan. Glad to have you here as always. How’s it going, Cory?

Cory Klipp­sten:

You know, I usually chime in for like the last half hour, but I wasn’t going to miss this one. I’m in for the whole gig. Got some stories to tell about both of these guys and I’m excited to have this conversation.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah, Cory came on this morning in Slack and was like, “I’m hanging out the whole time. I’m going to dive in, I’m going to be more involved in this one.” He’s stoked. All right. Let’s start by talking about building on Bitcoin. We’ll start with you, Jimmy. You authored Program­ming Bitcoin, of course, it teaches the basics of building on Bitcoin. And of course you also run Program­ming Blockchain, which is a two day inter­ac­tive seminar that gets into the details, live coding challenges, et cetera. So first, what inspired you to begin building on Bitcoin and what in turn inspired you to start teaching?

Jimmy Song:

Yeah. Great questions. The reason why I got into building on Bitcoin was because right around 2016, 2017, I realized Bitcoin was becoming a signif­i­cant part of my network and I needed to protect it in whatever way I could. And I’ve been a devel­oper for 20 something years. So I was like, okay, I need to put my devel­op­ment skills into making this commu­nity better. And I was looking into ways to contribute and so on. My contri­bu­tion started in 2013 with various open source projects and so on, but it got to the point where it was just kind of like, “Okay, I could contribute and I could probably get in maybe a hundred pull requests a year or something like that, but that’s not going to scale very well. Because I’m only one person.” And at that point I was like, “The biggest thing missing in this industry are good devel­opers or a path for devel­opers to get into Bitcoin.”

Jimmy Song:

So I created a program to do that. I taught it at a previous company that I used to be at, Paxos. And I did it every time there was a new cohort of devel­opers, and I taught it three times and I got really good feedback from them saying, “Okay, now Bitcoin makes sense. Because before I didn’t under­stand it at all, I thought I did, but I didn’t know.” And at that point I was like, “Okay, well, if these people find that useful, there’s a good chance that other people might find it useful.” So I started doing those seminars back in 2017 and I’ve taught over 500 people, a lot of different types of people, people that I would never have guessed would want to learn this stuff like retired octoge­nar­ians, 14-year-old high school figure skaters, just random people all over the place that want to learn this. But it’s been very rewarding. A lot of my students have gone on and done, for example, the Chain­code residency, that have gone out to all of the different Bitcoin compa­nies that are out there and they’re contributing to the ecosystem. So in that sense, I think I’ve at least gotten part way through to my mission, which is to create more devel­opers for the ecosystem.

Brady Swenson:

So tell me a little bit about maybe just a couple of samples of some stories about people who’ve gone through your course and ended up contributing to Bitcoin Core.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah, so I think Federico Wilfo, he’s now being sponsored I think by OKCoin to contribute to Bitcoin Core. He took my course, then he went on to the Chain­code residency. That seems to be a comet for some reason. There’s a bunch of other people that have done that. But yeah, he’s now sponsored and he’s doing a lot of coding for Bitcoin Core. Valen­tine Wallace, she actually won a schol­ar­ship and she ended up going to Light­ning Labs. She’s now at Square, working on the Rust-Light­ning imple­men­ta­tion. So she’s doing pretty well.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Carl Dong, he was at Block­stream when he took my course. And when I asked him why he was taking my course, he’s from Block­stream, he was like, “Well, I want to under­stand what the hell Pieter Wuille is saying whenever he talks to me. Because I don’t under­stand what the hell he’s saying.” So he took that course, then, he went on to Chain­code Labs and he’s done that. Jonas, I forget his last name, but he’s the director for the Chain­code Labs residency. He took my course a while back and he now arranges the curriculum for the Chain­code residency and so on. But yeah, there’s a ton more people. Those are just the ones that I can think of off the top.

Brady Swenson:

That’s a legacy already. And you’re just getting started, man. All right, Aleks, you’re up. You’re not a technical person in the way that Jimmy is, but you’re building on Bitcoin in a different way. You’re building from the business side of things. So I’ll ask you the same question. What inspired you to build a business on Bitcoin and why in partic­ular, a recur­ring buys platform?

Aleks Svetski:

Slightly different story, I guess. Well, we’ve all got our paral­lels right? I fell down the rabbit hole a bit later than Jimmy did. So 2016 sort of time. And the more I fell down, the more I basically pissed everyone else around me that I knew with berating them, telling them to buy some Bitcoin. And I just kept getting the usual, “Stop annoying me. I don’t know where to buy it, how to buy it, how much to buy, it’s too volatile.” The usual, what we call in sales negs. The usual opposite… Jesus, what’s the word? My brain’s fried. I’ve been doing too many podcasts today.

Brady Swenson:

Is it toxic? Is the word toxic?

Aleks Svetski:

Usual objec­tions. That’s the word I’m looking for. The usual objec­tions that people give you for button up buying Bitcoin. And at the time, the status quo in Australia was that you use Coinbase or there was primarily the Shitcoin casino called CoinSpot and P.S., am I allowed to swear on here? I just did. But anyway, I’ll try… So I thought, man, there has to be an easier way. And I decided to look at building something.

Aleks Svetski:

So the first itera­tion of Amber was actually a rounding up your spare change into Bitcoin. So that was the original version, and the idea was that you could link your bank account, go buy a coffee for $4.50 or whatever and then round it up to the nearest dollar amount and stack that. But what we found was we spent all this time and energy building this tech and all this crap, and we realized that with the legacy finan­cial system, the amount of intru­sive things you would need to do to look at somebody’s payment history and every­thing to actually work out that kind of stuff, we ended up dunking that. And then we went with a much smoother DCA where you set an amount and the frequency.

Aleks Svetski:

And the idea has always been… I think it’s been inter­esting having discus­sions with poten­tial investors and this and that, partic­u­larly in 2018 when we were first raising money, we raised our first chunk of money right in the death throes of the bear market where Bitcoin really sort of fell from 10 grand down to three grand and people were losing their minds and they’re wondering why we weren’t… Everyone used to look at me like I had three heads. They’re like, “What do you mean you’re not doing a coin? Or what do you mean you’re not… Why is this not a blockchain project?” And I just felt like such a fish out of water. I remember going to these capital-raising expos and getting on stage and talking about how ICOs are scams and people would boo me off the stage. And the next year I got invited back to those confer­ences with apolo­gies saying, “Oh, you know what, you were right.”

Aleks Svetski:

And the MO for me always with Amber was just to specif­i­cally help people accumu­late Bitcoin and none of the Shitcoiner and chicanery that sort of went around with that. And I’m glad to say that here we are… I mean, it’s been over two years since the incep­tion of the idea, and I kind of see 2018 as a write-off year because that’s the year we were fucking around with all the little roundups and stuff. So really we’ve only been in market for about a year and a bit. But again, the essence was there from the beginning.

Aleks Svetski:

So two years later, I’m really happy to see a resur­gence of Bitcoin-only compa­nies, with you guys, River, with all sorts of strong, solid businesses now that are waving the Bitcoin flag. And all at the same time, you’ve got the backdrop of people at Coinbase who continue to hire NSA opera­tives, to put it lightly, and add Shitcoins. So it’s a beautiful thing. So I’m glad we stuck to our guns, and I think it’s testa­ment to sort of under­standing the essence of why Bitcoin exists in the first place, as opposed to just going out and building the next shiny Shitcoin app. So, yeah.

Jimmy Song:

Yeah. I want to take that oppor­tu­nity to dunk on some of these old school compa­nies, because they piss me off. I mean, compa­nies like Coinbase and Binance and many of these others, especially like the Silicon Valley types, Cory, you would know a lot more about this. But it’s amazing to me how many of them just refuse to get Bitcoin’s value prop and are always, I don’t know, talking their book and trying to encourage people to buy more ICOS or something. What’s up with that?

Cory Klipp­sten:

Well, there’s definitely an incen­tive problem there, and I think that’s super clear, right? Once you get investors involved or you get greedy or… There can be a lot of reasons that a company starts to do things that aren’t neces­sarily in the best inter­ests of the world, themselves even, their customers. I mean, I haven’t heard Google saying, “Don’t be evil” for 10 years now. Because it just would be laughed at, right? Can’t really carry that flag anymore.

Cory Klipp­sten:

So one of the things that happens is, in a cyclical business, which Bitcoin ended up being more cyclical than anyone probably could have forecast off of one data point, any company that raised money in 2013, or again in 2017, 2018, whatever, ended up getting really bloated. And then because it’s trans­ac­tional revenue and it’s not repeating, it’s not recur­ring revenue, you don’t have SAS customers or subscribers, right? Then you end up essen­tially really bloated and you’ve got to start firing people basically and cutting offices and all of that, unless you go hard at cryptos or blockchain — sprinkle some blockchain on it, bro!

Cory Klipp­sten:

And so that’s what I think you’ve seen people do. Some of it is a willful ignorance, some of it is actual ignorance and some of it is just incen­tives. And some of it is just what you see with any company that’s just trying to stay alive and it takes a contract that’s unsavory instead of cutting offices. Because it’s not even neces­sarily that you would be cutting those people, it’s also if you start to shrink when you’re on a VC growth train, you don’t raise that next round and you’re DOA, you’re just, it’s done, it’s over. Right? So growth at all costs basically. And I think that’s what you see happening with these compa­nies. So, that’s been one of the… I mean that is the driving factor behind the two major strategic decisions that we’ve taken at Swan.

Cory Klipp­sten:

One is to focus exclu­sively on recur­ring purchases, and we don’t even count nonre­cur­ring revenue in our revenue column. It’s nice, that’s cool. We’ll use that for marketing dollars, but we don’t use it in our forecasts and we don’t consider ourselves further on the path toward break even unless it’s prepaid annual revenue. And the second thing is we’ve made a conscious decision not to take any fund money. So all a hundred percent angel funded, and we’re going to try to do that forever so that we never have someone with a fiduciary respon­si­bility to their LPs to try to flatten the J curve in their fund and have all these messed up incen­tives that happen. And that’s not that I wouldn’t take venture capital. As you know, I worked in that industry for seven years, post-Google and raised over a quarter billion dollars for 30 rounds and 20 compa­nies, so I’m very familiar with that.

Cory Klipp­sten:

And there are businesses that it’s great for, I don’t think it’s very good for Bitcoin. Unless you have… And you are starting to see a handful of funds that will just be there for the long haul and are doing it really for the love of Bitcoin. And it’s a really short list I am seeing, it seems like Oleg and Fulgur Ventures are very much down for the cause and will be there for a long time, however many cycles it takes for big wind startups to deliver. But really that’s it, there’s one starting down in Austin that looks like it’ll have 20 or 30 mil to put to work, but they haven’t announced yet.

Cory Klipp­sten:

And that’s pretty much it in our tiny little Angel­List syndi­cate for Bitcoin or ventures. And every­body else might be investing in some Bitcoin startups, but they are trying to make money off of fees and carry, and that just by defin­i­tion ends up sprin­kling some blockchain on it, saying, “Hey, let’s widen the conver­sa­tion. Hey, I don’t know who’s going to win.” Whatever. You end up losing your job and getting divorced and having a horrible life if you’ve put your eggs in that basket and you’re only betting on Bitcoin startups this early in the game.

Jimmy Song:

Aleks, how did you feel about taking some of that VC money?

Aleks Svetski:

Hmm. Well, yeah I agree with every­thing that Cory just said, but I still think… I don’t know what it’s been about the way I’ve approached it. Because we’ve taken both angel money and just recently we took a little bit of VC money and I’m always very delib­erate about the VC money that I took though, so they’re Bitcoin aligned. So it’s pump, right? So [inaudible 00:18:30] pop some money in via Morgan Creek. So they’re relatively strongly aligned with what we’re doing. But I think the way I’ve managed the investors and the team and every­thing is by, I hate this word or this idea of thought leader.

Aleks Svetski:

But I think just under­standing Bitcoin and just being almost the intol­erant CEO or the intol­erant visionary… Kind of, I’m not going to compare myself to Steve Jobs here, but just being the person who knows why you’re doing what you’re doing, sorry. I think that’s been a differ­en­ti­ating factor. So when I hear people use the usual excuses of, “But you know we didn’t have a choice, we had to take money in or this and that and blah, blah, blah.” I kind of say, “Look, I had the same problems.” We came really, really, really, really, really close in 2018 to not having anything left, we’re operating on fumes. And I still didn’t deviate. I got offered money from Dash people from Litecoin people from all sorts of people’s fucking listings.

Aleks Svetski:

And it got really, really tempting. We got close to thinking about doing that. I remember sitting down in the room and I just, I don’t know, I got angry about it, this and that. And I just said, “Fuck it, I’m not going to give up. I’m just going to keep finding a way to do this.” And we managed to pull through. Now, we might just be an anomaly. I don’t know. But the fact that now that’s kind of become a stronger trend and we’re seeing more people get behind Bitcoin-only compa­nies, I think that’s now going to turn into an advan­tage. So I think businesses like Amber, like Swan, et cetera, we’ve pioneered that and now there’s no longer an excuse for somebody to say, “In order to exist, we have to list Shitcoins.” Or, “In order to exist, we have to make up a fraud­u­lent blockchain narra­tive to justify why we need to gain money.”

Aleks Svetski:

Because now there is examples of compa­nies who have managed to exist and by no means is Amber some successful company yet, we’re still a startup, we’re still young, we’re still growing. But if we can pull this off, we’ve success­fully built a Bitcoin-only company during one of the harshest periods possible, which I think, is if anything a testa­ment to perse­ver­ance and grit. So I think that’s impor­tant to have when building something in this space.

Brady Swenson:

The hard part is that you kind of have to build during the bear cycle because there’s such a crush during the bull cycle, but it’s hard to raise money and kind of weather the bear cycle. You never know exactly how long it’s going to be, but you have to be able to stay lean until you can get through it. And we’re all hoping for the next cycle to start. Let’s dive in a little bit more into the birth of this Bitcoin-only industry. Like you said, we have River, we have Casa and Unchained on the custody front, Swan, of course, Amber and a slew of other Bitcoin-only recur­ring purchase compa­nies all over the world. I know Friar Hass is just super excited about that devel­op­ment and he’s been documenting it thoroughly on Twitter as it’s proceeded. So let’s start with you, Jimmy. How do you see the emergence of Bitcoin-only compa­nies playing out over the next few years, and have we put to rest the quote unquote need to peddle Shitcoins to estab­lish a viable longterm business?

Jimmy Song:

Yeah, it’s inter­esting. Because it really reminds me of the search engine wars in the nineties. I don’t know if you guys were around back then. But back then there were tons of search engines, AltaVista, Infoseek and Lycos and Yahoo and all of these. And the thing about all of them was that they all sort of sold out, right? They started charging compa­nies to be the first listing for certain keywords and things like that. Instead of doing something objec­tive. Google actually came in fairly late into the game. And the reason why they won was that they were actually the most subjec­tive, they didn’t sell out. And what this whole discus­sion reminds me of is that compa­nies like Coinbase they’re the Lycos or AltaVista of 1997 or something like that. I mean, it works until it doesn’t, until consumers get smarter about what the hell’s going on. And at that point you can actually get an advan­tage by being more honest. Of course, Google has gotten more evil since then, as Cory already said, but that is what this whole Bitcoin-only thing reminds me of.

Cory Klipp­sten:

There’s another angle there, and I’ll use any of these big tech compa­nies or… It basically is, there are a lot of people that got in early and were employees of early compa­nies or even started compa­nies that were sort of first to market in a space. And they experi­enced a great wealth creation and success and a rise in stature. But once the company is a little bit bigger and can have their pick of the litter and can hire brilliant people from all over the world into these roles, what you find, and this sort of changeover at Google was probably in the sort of like 2008, 2009 timeframe. And that’s when they really started to hit hyper-growth as far as headcount goes. And what you could kind of see is just getting rid of all of the dead wood of the people that were just lucky to be there.

Cory Klipp­sten:

And I think that’s what you see… You listen to inter­views and read things that Brian Armstrong writes and it was a great idea to start an easier way to buy Bitcoin when every­body was doing Mt. Gox. And he was in San Francisco, he fucking grew up in Palo Alto or San Jose or whatever, you had good enough connec­tions to get some people to work on it with him and raise some venture money and build this thing. But if there were four or five other really strong, successful founders that started at the same time, if it had caught fire and been like, “Oh, that’s a hot space.” And you started Uber, we’re starting Lyft. There’s no fucking way that Brian and Coinbase win if there were some other good founders starting at the same time.

Cory Klipp­sten:

So I don’t see that as some sort of unassail­able fortress of awesome in any way, shape or form because the ship rolls downhill and you take your cues from the top. He doesn’t under­stand that’s the most simple, most obvious thing in the world today. And he hires people that agree with him, or that will let him have his way. And they keep on doing horrible things and hiring horrible people that do horrible things. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So, VCs can keep on throwing tons of money at it and maybe they build up a big kitty in this next bull run. You know, maybe it just achieves escape velocity, but what it probably ends up doing is just selling themselves to JP Morgan or something. That is not going to be the crypto finan­cial insti­tu­tion to end all insti­tu­tions in five, 10 years.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Finan­cial insti­tu­tions and all insti­tu­tions in five, ten years.

Jimmy Song:

It’s hilar­ious because, at least from what I’ve heard, a lot of the employees at Coinbase are walking around like they’re the next Facebook or Google. And the thing is, like what you’re saying Cory, they’re not that talented, and they think that they’re this hot stuff because they happened to be at the right place at the right time, for a small amount of time. But I mean, we’re dunking on Coinbase here, but for me, the bigger company, or another company that’s much worse is Blockchain.info, Blockchain.com or whatever. They’ve done absolutely nothing. Nothing, for like six years, right? They only upgraded to HD wallets like three years ago or something? It’s insane to me that they are still alive even, because they’re supporting Bitcoin cash, they’ve supported Two Acts. They did all of these things. They’re still not supporting SegWit. It’s insane to me that, that’s a company that’s still around. They’re kind of like, I don’t know, if Go.com the search engine was still around.

Brady Swenson:

Absolutely nothing, all right. Nothing. This is good stuff. Does anybody else have any more fire to drop on this? I don’t want to move away too soon. Aleks, I know you’ve got something stored up there that you need to get out.

Jimmy Song:

There’s plenty of that to dunk on.

Aleks Svetski:

Look, there is. I don’t have any more comments because all I’m going to be doing is parroting what Cory and Jimmy said at this point. I think that there’s enough to do in and around Bitcoin, and the fact that there’s compa­nies that are well capital­ized that are still fucking around with things that don’t make sense should be good enough for anybody that’s a consumer of these products to question the ethics of a company. I think the more people support businesses that are consis­tent with their message, their vision, their mission and have some form of integrity around what they’re doing, the more we’re going to support the right teams and people in this space.

Aleks Svetski:

So if anyone’s listening to this and wanting to know what I think about it, that’s really what I think. If you’re a Bitcoiner, stop using fucking Binance, stop using Kraken or fucking Coinbase or whatever other shitcoin casino you’re using. Put your money where your mouth is and back a Bitcoin company, simple as that. That’s really what needs to happen here. And yeah, at some point you might save $5 in fees every month by using Binance, but who gives a shit? Fucking grow up and get behind the people who are helping build the infra­struc­ture around Bitcoin, lest you want to remain in shitcoin purga­tory for the rest of your life and sitting there gambling your fortune away and trying to “Make more BTC wallet, trade my alts bro.” Just shut the fuck up and stack your stats.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Here’s one just addendum to that. I think it’s really impor­tant for people… I mean, we’re talking to the core Bitcoin audience on a show like this, right? It’s just really impor­tant to think about what you’re recom­mending to other people. So if you’ve been in Bitcoin for six, seven years and you want to go and place a large buy, because you just had some finan­cial event and you want to go buy 250 grand worth of Bitcoin or something, by all means go to an OTC desk that deals in shitcoins or go to whatever exchange has the cheapest price for you. Make your order and get it for 25 BIPS or 15 BIPS or whatever. That’s totally fine. Whatever.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Do not recom­mend those shitcoin exchanges to people who are new to the space. You can save them years and marriages, et cetera, just getting them to go to sites that only have Bitcoin on them, that explain very clearly… Get them involved in the commu­nity and get them an Amber member­ship or… it sounds like Bittr might be coming back to Europe. Get them involved in Swan in the US or, or River or Bull Bitcoin in Canada, and let them become part of a site and a commu­nity and a regular relation­ship where they’re being talked to about Bitcoin, and make sure they get onboarded into this space, through the right lens, including a little bit of sprin­kling of toxicity.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Because if you’ve got two people and one really, really likes the other person or pretends to, and the second person is looking askance at the first one and being like “that dude’s full of shit.” You know, 95% this is a heuristic, but 95% of the time the skeptical one is telling the truth.

Cory Klipp­sten:

I experi­enced this — I’ll just get into a quick anecdote — I experi­enced this with Jimmy actually, at my very first ever Blockchain confer­ence in… it was probably October of 2017 and I’d been reading up on Bitcoin. I was not working in the space yet, it was the first time I was going to anything. I finally bought Bitcoin and started reading up in May of ’17. So I think it was October and there’s this raucous, crazy, booth girl. Just debauchery, ICO raising, bullshit, Maschinsky lying from the stage, et cetera in Santa Monica.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Jimmy’s hanging out with a couple of people, not partic­i­pating, he’s out on the lawn in front of the confer­ence, cowboy boots and jeans and just kind of looking askance at every­body, including me when I sat down. But he dropped some Bitcoin knowl­edge on me. He was like be a little careful. And I started watching Jimmy Song videos and it was definitely the next leg up for me at the time. And it was because he didn’t want to play nice with all the assholes. So don’t play nice with shitcoiners. There’s no reason to. Don’t try to widen the conver­sa­tion Raoul, why don’t you tell the truth and do right by your users and stop shilling shitcoins in front of your Real Vision audience.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. We know what you’re really trying to do Raoul. When I came in to the space, for three or four months I was trying to figure out what was going on, like every­body else who’s new. And I was suscep­tible to the toxicity fud, right. I was just like, what the heck are all these guys doing? Just calling these people out and being just assholes to these people? That’s the way I perceived it anyway. And I was like, it just left a bad taste in my mouth, the Bitcoiners. So it’s a real thing.

Brady Swenson:

But I very quickly realized once I got somewhat wrecked, that there’s so much at stake here. There’s too much at stake here. Right? It’s not just money and people’s liveli­hoods, but it’s also, like Cory said, liter­ally marriages, this can be… money is a very divisive thing in a marriage relation­ships. And you lose a bunch of it, that’s going to put a lot of strain on relation­ships so this is like real life, right? This is people… I mean, I wouldn’t even put it put past to say that people are just, I don’t know, depressed. This affects people. And we’re going to get into that in just a minute, but there’s a lot at stake here, is the point. And it’s warranted. Some of this toxicity towards these scammers is warranted. It’s Bitcoin’s immune system and we just can’t have it. You have zero toler­ance for this thing. I think it’s all good, something that we need for sure. And that I support and partic­i­pate in at this point.

Jimmy Song:

Yeah. It’s inter­esting. Because what you guys are saying about toxicity and all of this, it really does make a differ­ence. Whether or not you’re sort of nice to those people or not, in a sense… I think Aleks could speak better about this, but basically if you want to get the sale, you have to get them to like you instantly, right? It’s impor­tant to make that first initial impres­sion. But Bitcoin isn’t an instant sell kind of thing. It’s not an impulse decision. It’s a much longer term decision. And for a lot of shitcoins, of course, they want to get the sale, get people to partic­i­pate in their ICO or their token gener­a­tion event. And then kick off with the money. But when you’re selling Bitcoin, you don’t want that. You don’t want to leave that impres­sion. So I think, in that sense, that toxicity or that almost off putting-ness, not having the tradi­tional sales model of, hey, you know what, you need to go buy this and we’ll be all nice to you, I think that’s actually more effec­tive for the long-term vision of Bitcoin. It helps people recog­nize it more.

Aleks Svetski:

I actually love that point. I actually love that point. That reminds me of, of how… I’m going to use a really funny analogy here. I don’t know why this comes to mind, but when you’re trying to… How do I put this mildly… Get in a girl’s pants? One of the things you want to do is you want to make her earn it. So can you see the parallel here? Is there’s-

Jimmy Song:

Are we getting a lesson in pick up artistry? Is that what you’re doing?

Aleks Svetski :

No.

Aleks Svetski:

There’s an idea called you are the prize, and I think that there’s a parallel here across every­thing in life. It’s that anything that’s worth having is worth earning and that’s where your time, say whether it’s a business capacity, whether it’s as a speaker, whether it’s as a leader, whether you’re trying to pick up chicks, even in your relation­ship, you need to be the person on the other side of the equation that’s worth having that time. And, always being a pleaser, always bending the knee, always trying to do a quick sale and all that sort of stuff, it doesn’t imply that someone needs to invest some time to sort of dig through the supposed toxicity. Because the world is awash with people who are desper­ately trying to vie for your atten­tion and Bitcoin being by nature, contrarian, you have this commu­nity that doesn’t give a shit about begging for your atten­tion. We’re more about being princi­pled and saying things as it is. And then the onus is on you coming into this space. Yes, we do our best to make it acces­sible and all of this sort of stuff, but we’re not going to deviate the message to sugar­coat shit so that it sounds nicer. So it’s kind of like people almost need to earn their stripes to come into the community.

Jimmy Song:

There is a self quali­fying the sales lead, and it’s a lot easier to sell to those people.

Aleks Svetski:

That’s right. So, anyway.

Brady Swenson:

All right. So I’m going to do a quick aside here, because when we get out of lockdown and there are crowds again, we actually are planning to shoot a lot of Bitcoin pickup down in [inaudible 00:38:00] neigh­bor­hood in Venice. Like actually having Bitcoiners go and try to accost people on the street and pitch them Bitcoin on camera. And it’s a hundred percent like the sunset strip 15 years ago with all those creepy pickup artists. That’s the whole plan. Jimmy, by the way, I think your flair… I think that’s what they call it, right? Flair plus lifts in the boots. You would have been a solid, solid pickup artist back in the day.

Jimmy Song:

Yeah. That would have been inter­esting. I’ve been married for a long time though. So that part of my life is way behind me.

Brady Swenson:

You could’ve been Aleks’ wingman though. You could have done some accom­plish­ment intros or something, would be great.

Jimmy Song:

Yeah. I don’t have the theory though. It’s totally natural flair right now.

Brady Swenson:

You want diver­sity, you want diver­sity in a crew. That’s ideal. Cast a wider net.

Jimmy Song:

Oh, geez. But it is true. A lot of these… It’s crazy to me that people complain about how, “Oh, this commu­nity isn’t nice to me. There­fore, I’m not going to buy this coin.” Since when do you make your finan­cial decision based on who’s nice to you? You do that, you’re going to get wrecked guaran­teed. You make your finan­cial decisions based on your longterm goals and what you think will happen based on objec­tive facts, instead of subjec­tive feelings. It’s crazy to me that that’s how people are thinking.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah, I think… I just kept on thinking of Bitcoin versus Ethereum and Bitcoin is, and you have to come in and you have to learn about what it is and adjust your life and your thinking to fit that reality. And Ethereum is this cuddly, fuzzy, warm, you can be whatever you want to be. And by the way, Ethereum can be anything that you want it to be. It’s just this malleable, impres­sion­able, immature, unformed… That’s who it’s for, is for people that just want to impress upon it whatever they want their hopes and dreams to be in some way. So I don’t know. It’s just super beta, and Bitcoin is super alpha.

Jimmy Song:

Yeah. It feels to me… it’s kind of like philos­ophy. There are children philoso­phies and there are adult philoso­phies. So adult philoso­phies have like actual tenets, actual princi­ples, actual something that you believe in. Children’s philoso­phies are malleable and it fits whatever situa­tion. It’s a ratio­nal­iza­tion engine for anything that you want to do, or believe. Ethereum feels much more, and really all shitcoins are in that realm of, okay, it’s going to be whatever I want it to be, because it’s going to let me do whatever it is that I want to do.

Jimmy Song:

Whereas Bitcoin is much more princi­pled, right? And this is a word that’s come up over and over again. It’s actually got tenets. It’s got facts. It’s got almost a morality around it that none of these others have. I still remember, back in 2017, you go to a meetup that isn’t Bitcoin only, and you get passed around white papers like there were scripts out of Holly­wood movie studio, right? Every­one’s like, “Hey, take a look at my white paper.” And then next week they come back like, “I raised $10 million.” That’s the kind of world where you don’t have any princi­ples. You don’t have any morality. And you just end up doing whatever gets you that money. And this is how you end up selling your soul.

Jimmy Song:

Whereas with Bitcoin, you stay princi­pled, but man, is it hard to hold onto that when there’s millions of dollars just… I’m sure you guys have experi­enced this where people are offering you a lot of money to endorse their product. It’s just that you have to give up your soul.

Cory Klipp­sten:

So I’m going to chime in here. This is specif­i­cally for Nate in the chat. About 10 years ago, maybe longer, before I met my wife, I was visiting friends in Los Angeles and we were just hanging out at a Holly­wood club and randomly the guy next to us was this bald guy. And he was really friendly and it ended up being a guy named Neil Strauss-

Jimmy Song:

The game guy, yeah.

Cory Klipp­sten:

I had totally read the book in like 2006 or something. I thought it was hilar­i­ously enter­taining and I was well on my way to… I was past the age where you kind of gamified pickup, I guess. But I found it super enter­taining to give a lexicon to all of that. So we kind of stayed in touch here and there. And when I moved to LA, he randomly was running around in shitcoin circles. When I got involved in Bitcoin and all that shitcoin madness down here with all the people that made a bunch of money on EOS before I found maximalism. And anyway, we kind of stayed in touch. So I actually grabbed 45 minutes with him maybe a month ago, just to talk about Bitcoin and commu­nity and how to start a cult, all those kinds of things and just kind of tested a bunch of my ideas with him. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s actually all that far off in some ways. I think Aleks is totally spot on. And Nate, now you have to increase your weekly Swan buy by 50% because I had talked about Neil Strauss per request.

Brady Swenson:

I did not think that this was going to be the route that we would take to get to this conver­sa­tion. I actually had the question what does Bitcoin do to change you as a person, lower time prefer­ence, et cetera, the morality of Bitcoin, how it’s going to change society as it sort of changes individ­uals collec­tively, et cetera. But we got there, man. Jimmy got there. I appre­ciate you guys coming around. That was a lot of fun.

Jimmy Song:

Well, it’s inter­esting, because there is a parallel here. I think we can all say we’re all familiar with that game liter­a­ture and all that stuff and the basic tenets, all that alpha beta or whatever. And the thing that I’ve noticed about the pickup quote unquote industry is that it’s evolved, right? It used to be dress up in the right flair and say this line, did you see the fight outside or something like that. It’s evolved to something else and… What’s that quote, the subtle art of not giving a fuck, right?

Jimmy Song:

That is written by a guy that was a pickup artist. And what I’ve noticed about that book, and when I read it, I was like, “Oh my God, this is basically stoicism for the modern age.” And he basically lays out all of the stoic tenets. In a more enter­taining way, with a lot of cursing, but that’s essen­tially what he does. And that’s what game has sort of evolved into. It’s more philo­soph­ical, it’s a lot more princi­pled and it’s a lot more about what makes you a better person. And this is what I’ve heard from a lot of guys that have gone through that pickup phase in their life, is that they do come out of it with actual princi­ples, with real moral values and things like that. And a similar thing I think is happening in the Bitcoin space as well, right?

Jimmy Song:

You start off wanting the Lambos and girls and all that stuff. But as you learn about it, as you lower your time prefer­ence, it becomes a lot more about improving yourself, improving your life, leaving a legacy, doing something that helps the world, helps civiliza­tion, helps every­thing grow. And I think that’s a real thing, is that it starts off selfishly, but it becomes a lot more… a lot less about you and a lot more about what you can contribute.

Brady Swenson:

All right, guys. I love that conver­sa­tion. Thank you, Jimmy, for wrapping that up. That was fantastic. All right. I have a question from the telegram. This is going to switch direc­tions back to Bitcoin, a little bit more serious topic, but I’m sure we can find a way to inject the fun again. So the ability to remain decen­tral­ized through acces­si­bility to running a node is as aggres­sively defended as the 21 million cap by Bitcoiners. We have about 10 K public nodes, publicly avail­able nodes, and about 50 K private nodes that are running out there. There’s a ton of room for more nodes to be run. We have plenty of… it’s very acces­sible all around the world, pretty much. There’s a ton of room and we only have 60,000 nodes running, essen­tially. So Rob in the telegram group wants to know, how do we frame the impor­tance of running a node to new Bitcoiners and, for that matter, existing Bitcoiners. We need to improve decen­tral­iza­tion, and how do we frame that so we can inspire people to run nodes? Let’s start with Aleks.

Brady Swenson:

Come on, man. I’m going to go to Jimmy, but I need to get Aleks sitting forward a little bit. Lean in.

Aleks Svetski:

How to answer this question. I think as I was listening to you ask it all, I was kind of thinking, I think there’s a silver bullet fallacy. I’m making this termi­nology up as I go. It’s this idea that there’s a single solution for any of these problems. And I think the reality, in the real world at least, is that complex problems involve lead bullet solutions. Which is multiple shots, multiple things happening at once.

Aleks Svetski:

So, one example is, if we want to help prolif­erate the number of nodes that are running, I think there’s multiple things that need to happen. Number one is we need to allow for technology itself to get better. I kind of envision down the track and again, I’m not technical enough to know whether this is possible or not… But the idea that every single wallet that’s running, whether on a phone or something like that, is a node in and of itself, as bandwidth gets faster and as storage gets more ubiqui­tous et cetera, et cetera. And this is why keeping blocks small and the Bitcoin blockchain itself as nimble as possible is extra­or­di­narily impor­tant as a way forward, when it comes to optimization.

And then on the flip side, you’ve got the continual educa­tion and… I wrote a piece along­side Phil Geiger from Unchained called the Journey of the Bitcoin, and what we discussed in there was how a product like Amber, or for that matter Swan… we act as the gateway drug for people to get into the space. And our job is not to… Because I always get asked by people, “Oh, when’s Amber’s going to release a self custody wallet.” And I’m like, “Well, fuck that, that’s not what we’re going to do because that’s not our jam.” If we try to do every single part of the poten­tial Bitcoin product offering, we’re going to be way too bloated. Number one, it’s impos­sible. But number two, I think it’s just a deranged method of thinking when deliv­ering a product or service. You pick your compo­nent on that journey and you do that well. And then you’ve got Unchained on the other side, who’s for a more advanced Bitcoiner, wants to do some multi Sig, collab­o­ra­tive custody, et cetera, and under­stands how to do that.

And, by working together, we’re able to sort of extract the benefits of collab­o­ra­tive custody for Amber users, by us performing the function of storing their funds in collab­o­ra­tive custody. So that those users who are new to Bitcoin, who don’t under­stand keys and all this sort of stuff, they can enter. And as we educate them through educa­tional content, this and that, we take them to the first step of, hey, set up your own wallet, custom your own keys, and withdraw.

And then as we sort of start to build those two steps, which is buy some Bitcoin and then store your own Bitcoin, then the next bit of the journey is then to educate them on the impor­tance of running their own node… But I think this journey needs to take steps and people need to go through personal evolu­tions along that journey. There’s no way we’re going to get people to run nodes from day one. I just don’t think that’s going to happen, unless we get to the point where it becomes completely ubiqui­tous, where you don’t even know that you’re running a fucking node, you just are because it’s on your phone. And I think that whilst that is happening, because we will inevitably arrive at a point where that is the case over the next two, three, five, 10 years, we’ve got to take people through these evolu­tions of their under­standing of Bitcoin.

So that’s kind of the best way I can answer that. And I guess to tie off that point is ensuring that… coming back to the whole toxic white blood cells slash immov­able minority that will not deviate from the impor­tant princi­ples of Bitcoin, which is self sover­eignty, running your own node, et cetera. As long as that cohort exists in the middle, as long as the center is strong, there will always be a grounding for the rest of the commu­nity to hold it.

… rounding for the rest of the commu­nity to hold on to or to point to, which can then permeate outwards. That’s the impor­tance of people that run their own node, et cetera, to maintain that philos­ophy. I just think that’s going to grow and it’s going to… I think it’s not a huge issue. We just all have to do our part.

Brady Swenson

I hear that, I hear that.

Cory Klipp­sten

I’m going to just chime in and just give a shout out to the plebs there, because there have been some broad conver­sa­tions on Twitter the last few days about what exactly is toxicity and how much toxicity is too much, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t think it matters. What matters is that the plebs exist. If you don’t know what toxic plebs are or what Bitcoin plebs are, ask a friend who is in Bitcoin and check it out. They’re the ones that are policing shitcoinery and things that are bad for Bitcoin, and they’re not always right, and they’re not always nice, but it’s impor­tant to have that immune system, those white blood cells essen­tially going and attacking anything and it’s okay if they get some false positives sometimes.

Cory Klipp­sten:

And if they attack somebody that… Because it’s fine, if your heart is good and you’re doing the right thing for Bitcoin or whatever, you can easily defend yourself, and there can even be disagree­ments and you can take different views on things and that’s totally fine. But, those constant sort of checking on you, I know Alex has gone through this, we certainly have. Plebs can be very influ­en­tial too, it’s more of a mindset, like I’m going to question, I’m going to not trust, I’m going to verify. We went through it with the early marketing for GiveBit­coin where some strong opinions came out about us using the word Timelock because we just said give plus Timelock plus educate, but Timelock is an actual function in Bitcoin.

Cory Klipp­sten:

And so, you can’t use that word if you’re talking about a Bitcoin product unless you’re actually using the Timelock function and some people were very vocif­erous about that. I argued it for maybe an hour on Twitter and then somebody suggested, “Why don’t you just say escrow?” And I was like, “Okay, cool.” Or you can be obsti­nate and decide that you want to fight against Bitcoin and essen­tially just wash out. I found the toxic voice and the pleb voice and sort of the core Bitcoiner voice to be very reason­able, on balance, when it’s sort of aggre­gated and you look at it, and you’re going to get in some fights and you’re going to have some people that are a little chippy and some people that get personal or whatever. But, if you can keep your emotions out of it, it will guide you. The conscience of Bitcoin will guide you because it springs from such a beautiful place.

Jimmy Song:

Yeah. With regard to the original question about running your own full node: I don’t know if there’s a moral imper­a­tive that we can issue as a commu­nity and say you must run your own full node or you’re not being a good Bitcoiner or anything like that, I don’t think that’s going to work. What’s always worked in Bitcoin are economics incen­tives. Right now there aren’t that many economic incen­tives because people don’t care that much about privacy. That’s really what we’re talking about here. If you want privacy, you’re going to have to run your own node. If you want to be able to broad­cast trans­ac­tions without anyone knowing about it, if you want to be able to look up your own trans­ac­tions without anyone knowing about it, you’re going to need to run your own node. Unfor­tu­nately, not a lot of people care that much about privacy. That speaks to the society that we live in, there aren’t that many conse­quences, at least not yet.

Jimmy Song:

But, there will come a time when chain analysis compa­nies are going to be able to track your spending and figure out that, hey, you did this, this, and this and there­fore you owe this much money to this govern­ment organi­za­tion for this partic­ular tax or something like that. At that point, I think everyone will be running their own node because it doesn’t cost that much, and from an economics perspec­tive, you’re essen­tially buying insur­ance to not be prose­cuted on later on. So, I think that’s what needs to happen. Will that requires some enormous privacy breach? Probably. I mean, blockchain.info, for example, it’s a company that we mentioned here earlier, if they leak all of their logs and you know which IP looked up which address and there­fore you can link them very strongly and so on and you lose all your privacy, and at some point it leaks that you bought nipple rings or something, then you know, people are going to figure it out. And okay, I need to run my own node, I need to have my own Block Explorer, I need to do all of these things, that’s when people are going to start running their own node. Unfor­tu­nately, not until then, will it become as common.

Brady Swenson:

Awesome. Okay. We have Robert Breedlove in the telegram chat room and he is asking a question that touches back on the topic that we already brought up and Jimmy really on the nose. He wants to talk about the world being reshaped by Bitcoin, a Bitcoin future. When we all have lower time prefer­ences, it bakes lower time prefer­ence into how we function as humans and there­fore our society. How do you think, Jimmy, how do economic incen­tives interact with morality?

Jimmy Song:

They definitely interact quite a bit. The Keyne­sian world­view is that you need to contin­u­ously have money sluicing through the economy, velocity of money, money to constantly be in motion other­wise it’s not doing anything. The Austrian view is that storing of money, capital accumu­la­tion, is what allows you to build better things for civiliza­tion and create more efficiency and create better goods and services and so on. The Keyne­sian world­view, essen­tially, or the Keyne­sian system, Fiat money, all of that induces higher time prefer­ence because you don’t want money just sitting there, you have to spend, spend, spend, you have to consume, consume, consume. What that ends up doing is getting people to have sort of this like YOLO lifestyle, where they don’t really care about 10 years into the future, they’d rather go and do something now.

Jimmy Song:

One of the things that you see very clearly is that birth rates have dropped signif­i­cantly since the creation of the Fed. Or at least since like 1971, birth rates have dropped insanely low. This is one of the indica­tors of having a pretty low time prefer­ence, children, I can tell you for certain, are one of the most low time prefer­ence things that you can do because they don’t pay off for something like 30 years. The fact that people are able to think more longterm when you have something that isn’t inflating away. This is the main mecha­nism by which Keyne­sian econo­mists like for spending of money is through some level of infla­tion. By money losing value over time, they force you to spend to consume.

Jimmy Song:

By not having that, by having something like Bitcoin, you have a much lower time prefer­ence. You do things 20, 30, 40, even a hundred years from now. Some of the most forward looking people have the lowest time prefer­ence. I remember learning about Venice a long time ago, how the city was built. The families that controlled Venice, they had 200 year plans to irrigate certain parts of the land around Venice so that they can have enough farm land so that they can grow the city and so on. They had 200 year plans, this took forever, it was way past their lifetime. But, they wanted to leave a legacy. They did that because they had a low enough time prefer­ence where they could build civiliza­tion. I think that’s where Bitcoin really helps, is in that planning and creating good, creating a society that’s lower time prefer­ence that isn’t as impul­sive, that isn’t as suscep­tible to sales tactics, or propa­ganda and things like that, which we’re all suscep­tible to right now because of…

Aleks Svetski:

I’ll add to that. It reminds me of… I saw Allen Farrington, he made a tweet earlier today saying, “I followed the investing topic and liter­ally every­thing is about trading. I’m not sure that many people know what an invest­ment actually is anymore.” And I replied to the tweet, I said, “It’s trans­formed from a low time prefer­ence alloca­tion of resources into a high time prefer­ence blind chase for yield via elabo­rate, profes­sional sounding, get rich quick schemes and gambling.” We’ve forgotten what the concept of invest­ment even means. Not only does messing with these base incen­tives inspire, or I guess, incen­tivize behavior that is more consumer and spend oriented, it then also incen­tivizes the larger end of town to contin­u­ally chase yield. I would argue that that’s just as big, if not a bigger problem, because then what you end up getting is this misal­lo­ca­tion of resources, not just through malin­vest­ment because of cheap money, but you also get it through this inces­sant chase to beat somebody else or to get a better yield or to get a better return or to-

Jimmy Song:

Or to stand still. Right? It’s contin­u­ously depreciating.

Aleks Svetski:

Exactly. You’ve got to basically rage forward without a plan, without thinking longterm, without having any… I love this idea that capitalism is about getting efficiency out of… so that you can create more produc­tivity and then make the most use of the resources that you have. This is where a lot of people get capitalism wrong, is that they think that capitalism is about using up resources, but capitalism is about making the best use of resources. Your resources are part of your capital, and again, in an environ­ment where time prefer­ence is skewed because incen­tives are skewed, you no longer treat the resources that you have as capital, you treat it as something to fucking burn through as quickly as possible because the mecha­nism via which we measure prosperity or via which we measure success or via which we measure progress, i.e. money, the fabric of society, it’s falling in value and it keeps fucking depre­ci­ating and it drives all of these deranged behav­iors that we see existing in society today.

Aleks Svetski:

This is also another thing like where… I was on a podcast today with Heavily Armed Clown and Ben Prentice, we were talking about how Bitcoin almost repre­sents chapter two of what happened a quarter of a millen­nium ago with the indepen­dence of America and the creation of the Consti­tu­tion and the amend­ments and every­thing like that. Back then we were… And when I say, “We.” I mean, I’m not American or anything like that, but let’s just say a subset of humans went out to escape tyranny from the monarchy at the time and they took the time to sit down and actually think through a set of rules or a way to live.

Aleks Svetski:

They wrote treatises. They really defined what they wanted to do in this new society. They set out to build a social contract, if you want to call it that, that people could abide by, that they could opt into with some princi­ples at its core. Those princi­ples involve liberty, private property rights, the freedom to speak, the right to protect yourself, et cetera, et cetera, and that was some really profound thinking. Now, here we are quarter of a century later, and that shit’s been co-opted by maniacs from every side of politics. The state has become so large that not only… It’s basically feeding on the constituents, which is us, as its partic­i­pants. But, Bitcoin’s emerged as this new promised land, because we don’t have anywhere to go now, we can’t just go and sail out West, because now if we sail out West from California, we’re going to end up over in China and I don’t know how good that’s going to go for liberty.

Aleks Svetski:

We don’t have a new land to find, but we’ve been able to create this virtual promised land where there’s a consti­tu­tion called a white paper, it’s got some rules that we can all decide to opt into or opt out of if you don’t want to play ball there, and the two things that it’s really done well is that it’s volun­tary, so you can opt in or opt out and that’s really such a powerful piece if we want to have freedom as one of the princi­ples or liberty as one of the princi­ples. Then, what it’s done is it’s built private property rights into the protocol itself, and those private property rights are not protected by the rule of law or an insti­tu­tion, they’re protected via mathe­matics, that transcends every­thing that we’ve had before.

Aleks Svetski:

So, to Rob’s question: Quarter of a millen­nium ago, we’re able to rethink society and build what was arguably the most prosperous social exper­i­ment in history, which is America, from nothing and it became the power­house of the world. And it still is the power­house of the world, because some people thought deeply and came up with some rules that really respected things like liberty and private property rights at their core. From there, this nation grew. Yes, it’s devolved into madness now, but we are now getting an oppor­tu­nity to do this in digital realm. With this basis of economics at its core, with a fair game, like a fair playing field, I think we can redesign society even better than what we did last time. That gives me hope for the world. Anyway, that’s my…

Jimmy Song:

It’s inter­esting. Because what you’re talking about, I think, is not a physical nation, but a metaphys­ical nation of some kind. It’s got its own rules and the digital is metaphys­ical, it doesn’t have a physical form. So that… we could talk about singu­larity or whatever, but concep­tu­ally, you have much stronger property rights because physical things can be physi­cally taken away, metaphys­ical things you can’t take away. It’s much more conducive to individual liberty, which if you think about all the possible crimes and immoral things that you can do to one another, a lot of it is actually just physical, murdering or stealing from somebody, things like that. The fact that a lot of those things are naturally protected in that metaphys­ical realm means that this, I don’t know, metaphys­ical society that we’re creating is more conducive to what we really need or want or believe. It’s closer to our values and it could be enforced without a strong central authority like you’d need in the physical world.

Aleks Svetski:

Yeah. And it can be enforced without the same need for violence that an insti­tu­tion depends upon in order to enforce such rules. So, by and large, we have tended as humans to insti­tu­tion­alize values and ethics, and then turn them into laws and then enforce those laws with the threat of violence. Whereas this enables us to embody values and ethics through, like you said, a meta layer, which is really unique. Then, it’s going to be inter­esting to see how that then trans­lates into how we behave on the physical realm, partic­u­larly how the world trans­forms over the coming decades and partic­u­larly between now and the year 2100.

Aleks Svetski:

I mean, I was listening to a good podcast today about complexity and localism. The fact that, when any system bloats, partic­u­larly a complex system, bloats too much from any sort of central­ized point, it will crumble back down and become more decen­tral­ized again. Now, the question is: Does it happen through our own volition or will it happen through our own stupidity and ignorance? At this point in time it seems like some of us are going to build more robust lives we protect our wealth and we think more longterm, et cetera, et cetera, through our own volition, but the large majority of people are going to be subject to the inevitable collapsing in on itself of these central­ized insti­tu­tions that are funda­men­tally unnatural.

Aleks Svetski:

On a time span, that’s longer than the next two presi­den­tial fucking runs, these things don’t work. They will have to decen­tralize through choice or by natural devolu­tion. It’s going to be inter­esting to see then as that starts to happen, what Bitcoiners, partic­u­larly those who’ve under­stood why Bitcoin exists, et cetera, then do in the physical realm with this wealth that they’ve amassed. Obviously, I’m refer­ring here to the idea of whether it’s citadels or private cities or whatever. I think that’s going to be an inter­esting thing in the coming decades.

Cory Klipp­sten:

You guys both touched on something I’ve been thinking about a little bit, which is: How many arguments we’ve accepted as having two sides or multiple sides throughout human history or throughout our own educa­tion, and this could be like socialism versus capitalism or collec­tivism versus localism, all these different things, low time prefer­ence versus high time prefer­ence, and the existence of Bitcoin and the spread of Bitcoin especially as we watch over the next decade or two, it just ends so many arguments in favor of whatever fits to Bitcoin, because that’s just going to be the reality. So, carrying that forward and thinking about: What is your commu­nity and who do you build with? What kind of network do you build and who do you spend your time with? Who do you work with?

Cory Klipp­sten:

It actually makes all the sense in the world to be spending time with people who under­stand what the future is going to be like, which is going to be life in accor­dance with what naturally flows from Bitcoiniza­tion. So, how you organize an economy and a society and your work and your own life and all of these different things, I think that is probably at the root of why a lot of Bitcoiners are just more comfort­able talking to other Bitcoiners because it’s supported by so many different viewpoints in different areas, whether it’s economics or govern­ment or politics or economy or whatever, there’s a slant on it, or a view on it, or a reality that’s enforced by the now existence of Bitcoin where it just doesn’t really make sense to have those discus­sions anymore, because we know how it’s going to work out, or how it’s likely to work out at least.

Jimmy Song:

Yeah. That’s exactly kind of what’s happening. Even in crypto, there’s this false dichotomy of Bitcoin versus every­body else or something like that. It goes to this desire by people to be able to define their own morality or define their own reality and pretend that reality doesn’t exist and that they can change things to fit whatever it is that they want. This is the mentality of a lot of people in Ethereum: Oh, we can make this new newer system and do whatever. And then you find out that reality slaps them hard in the face when their latest EFI thing gets hacked. The thing about Bitcoin is that it is very truthful. There there’s a reality about it, it’s solid and you cannot subvert it no matter how much you want to subvert it, or believe that it’s not true, it is true.

Jimmy Song:

This is the wisdom behind number go up technology. The number continues to go up. You cannot deny that. You could be Peter Schiff, who heard about Bitcoin when it was like a dollar or something, but he can’t deny that it’s gone up 9,000x since he first heard about it. That’s a reality that you have to deal with. If you don’t deal with it, then you’re not being honest with yourself. A lot of people like to think that they tend to find reality however they want, because they don’t want to be condemned for whatever immoral things that they’re already doing. In that sense, Bitcoin gives you a grounding for a lot of other things and it does end a lot of arguments. It does give you a sense of what’s what’s to come, because it gives clarity into a lot of things that a lot of people have argued for a long time.

Brady Swenson:

It’s a funda­mental change in society and for individ­uals and I, for one, am incred­ibly hopeful because of Bitcoin. I’ve talked a lot on my podcast and elsewhere about how I was rather hopeless before I found Bitcoin. I had given up to the idea that we were living in a world progres­sively more absent of privacy and without a moral compass in a lot of ways. Bitcoin really affects both of those things. I love the fact that Bitcoin… the mass distri­b­u­tion of cryptog­raphy will help, I think, increase the amount of privacy that we have in a digital world, but also because the funda­mental proper­ties of a sound money will alter us as individ­uals and society, funda­men­tally. I am very encour­aged by it and why I am, and many of us Bitcoiners are devoting all of our spare brain cycles and all of our spare moments and working, trying to find a way to work full time in Bitcoin, it inspires its own marketing team, devel­oper team, and well, I guess, evangelists.

Jimmy Song:

Can I say something about that? Because, I did write a tweet a while ago that said, “Think about how depressing this whole situa­tion would be without Bitcoin.” We’ve been locked out forever. And there are riots going on and looting and protests and all sorts of things going on all over the world. In a sense, all those people that are angry, that are out in the streets protesting and stuff like that, to a degree, I under­stand it, because if you didn’t have something like Bitcoin to give you at least a little bit of hope that things could improve, yeah I would be angry, I would be out there protesting, trying to figure out who the hell to blame, for all of this mess that we’re in. And yet, because there is something that… there’s a kernel of something, it’s a… let’s not fool ourselves, Bitcoin isn’t that big yet. But we could see the light at the end of the tunnel, right? There is hope at the end of this thing, there is economic salva­tion if you will or the entire world, after 50 years of pure fiat currency all around the world, there is something that can change. And that’s a very good thing. And man, would it be a really depressing time right now, if you were stuck at home, having to go through quaran­tine, seeing all the protests, seeing all the bad news on TV with no sports to make you happy, having all… how depressing would it be, right?

Cory:

You have Davey Day Trader Global for that, so at least there’s bread and circuses out there, and I think that’s what we’re seeing people do is just Robin Hood, waiting to get wrecked. But yeah, we have something better, which is something in the definite optimist quadrant. Not just the let-me-enter­tain-myself quadrant.

Aleks Svetski:

I was just going to say that I think Jimmy took the words out of my mouth, what I was going to say, liter­ally after Brady mentioned his thing is, I would be quite pessimistic and I’m an energetic kind of guy as most people kind of know already. So, I shudder to think where a lot of that energy would go had I not found Bitcoin as somewhere to really channel that energy and, quite frankly that frustra­tion that I have with, I guess, the derange­ment syndrome for the simula­tion that we seem to be living in, for lack of a better term. Not that I believe we’re in a simula­tion, but anyway.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Mathe­mat­i­cally proven, dude. No, I’m just kidding.

Brady Swenson:

Oh, man. All right, so let’s apply this discus­sion that we’ve been having, which is kind of like, general ideas to our specific situa­tion right now. How does… Jimmy’s already talking about how it gives us a source of hope in this partic­ular time, which is pretty dire. How does it affect the macro­eco­nomic situa­tion we’re in and how the next decade or so unfolds in your opinion. Cory, you want to take this one first?

Cory Klipp­sten:

Well, I mean, I guess we could go pretty like 30,000 feet on this and just talk about kind of this moment in history and kind of what’s sparking off here. And, I think we’ve talked before on this show, as have lots of people on other shows about, is there an oppor­tu­nity to get out of these debt super cycles that Ray Dalio might talk about? It seems fairly clear in the sense of the forth-turning frame­work of looking at things that certainly seems like that’s coming and that whether it’s this bubble that really just bursts and deflates all this hilar­ious Fiat facade that the global govern­ments have sprung on us or the next one, which would probably be in another five years or so, something’s got to give here and what we’re going to see give is the world order that has existed since the end of World War II and that has sort of accel­er­ated wildly since 1971, and then, in geopo­lit­ical terms, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in like ’89. So, I think that’s sort of what’s given rise to the massive accel­er­a­tion on this path that’s just ended in this hilarity that we’ve seen since the GFC one in 2008, 2009.

Cory Klipp­sten:

So I think really, as far as the transi­tion, what we’re looking at is, will it be hyper Bitcoiniza­tion or just soft landing Bitcoiniza­tion but what I’m almost more inter­ested in thinking about, and I want to spend a lot more time thinking about this is what specif­i­cally is likely to change. And this comes straight out of the last segment that we were just talking about in each area, whether it’s politics or society or technology or human relation­ships or the way we organize cities or countries or whatever, what are the scenarios that are likely to play out in a Bitcoinized world where the money printing is taken away from the government.

Cory Klipp­sten:

I spent a lot of time thinking about this in another area — driver­less cars — like what changes for real estate, what changes for exurbs  explode because you can essen­tially have a rolling office and you can get a couple extra hours of sleep if you’re way out in the desert and you’re driving into LA without having to be awake and you don’t care about leaving at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning and going to the office.

Cory Klipp­sten:

So similarly, what changes in a Bitcoinized world, and I think that’s going to be really impor­tant, and I think the best politi­cians and the best leaders and the best entre­pre­neurs and the best heads of house­hold and your best friends are going to be the people that figure that out the soonest and take action toward… skate where the puck is going, basically.

Jimmy Song:

I’ve thought about that question, partic­u­larly with respect to Bitcoin. I’ve come to the conclu­sion that things will be a lot smaller, just right now, every company is gigantic, in large part because they need to scale up in order to get a lot of the good effects of newly printed money. They, and this is why VCs only fund unit or they’re pushing all ways to create unicorns because you don’t get a lot of the benefits until you’re at least a billion dollars, you’re worth a billion dollars. Then, you have access to all of these things that large compa­nies have. And, you’re almost at the point where you’re too big to fail. You get bailouts, you get tax breaks and all this other stuff.

Jimmy Song:

But more impor­tantly, I think it’s more natural or human beings to be in smaller groups. And this is… there’s a lot of evidence with neuro­science and things like that. You can really only know about 150 people. This is what they call Dunbar’s number and compa­nies that go past that point of 150 people or so, they start having some serious problems on, especially with respect to manage­ment because it’s hard to know what everyone is doing. There tends to be a lot of dead wood and so on.

Jimmy Song:

So, I think compa­nies become smaller countries, I think also eventu­ally become smaller because there’s an enormous amount of ineffi­ciency that’s being propped up by fiat money, right? There’s a lot of rent seekers, there’s a lot of people that aren’t doing much in a lot of govern­ments, but they’re propped up because fiat money can buy up the bonds that these govern­ments create. And, they’re the one… there’s a last resort or whatever. So, it’s… and as things get smaller, you get actually a lot more person­al­iza­tion and local­iza­tion, a lot more efficiency, a lot more things that people want, a lot better quality, things like that.

Jimmy Song:

And you get micro-states, maybe you get sort of like the city-states of yester­year, back when Europe was off the gold standard. There were a lot more smaller city-states and even bigger countries. It was really more smaller states that nominally pay taxes to the King, but not quite as much as we do now.

Jimmy Song:

So I suspect that things will get a lot smaller and that’s something that I look forward to. Now, how’s that transi­tion going to happen? I don’t know, but I mean, I can’t imagine the US govern­ment giving up its dollar hegemony just right away, willingly or whatever. But, as Bitcoin gains in promi­nence, this is something that’s coming. I don’t know if it’s in the next 10 years or the next 100, but it will happen. And, like planning for that world, a world where banks aren’t as impor­tant, politi­cians aren’t as impor­tant, where VCs aren’t as impor­tant, things like that. It’s kind of a crazy world to think about it, but it’s not that different than, say the world was 100 years ago. So I look to the Wild West era as sort of an indicator of where we’re going to head, but in a more modern kind of way.

Aleks Svetski:

I like that. I like how… the idea that, I mean, I feel like society ebbs and flows anyway, cute human beings. There’s really good model, and I’m writing an article now, which is Bitcoin through the eyes of spiral dynamics. And there was a, really good philosopher/psychologist called Dr. Clare Graves, who came up with a model called Spiral Dynamics. And he talks about how Spiral Dynamics is a view of the mimetic evolu­tion of the way people operate at an individual level and at a societal level and the values that come at each level. And it sort of starts off as beige, which is survival, where the… it’s egocen­tric, it’s about means, about liter­ally existing and surviving. And that’s sort of where all human beings start and when we’re born as infants, sort of grow into the purple level, which is a little bit more about weeds. It’s tribal. And, we evolve into thinking more about a group and you sort of see this evolu­tion in society. And kids as they grow up, as they start to realize, it’s not just about them. They have a brother, they have a sister, or there’s parents, et cetera, where they start to realize that there’s other entities outside of them. And then, we then evolve, we pendulum back into a more egocen­tric model of the red color, which is power God, and you kind of see this embodied in people like the Genghis Khans of the world or the Warrior King or the Warrior God.

Aleks Svetski:

And that sort of is the kind of person that, kind of elevates outside of the purple mentality. And, the essence of the energy is leader­ship, but then it, how can I say it, there’s… all of these layers are really impor­tant, before I go into the rest of them, but they… as with anything in life and in the world, they come with an impor­tant essence that we need to integrate, kind of like where Peterson talks about… when he talks about the shadow, but along­side vices. As with anything, there’s virtues and vices, right? So, red was the evolu­tion beyond purple. Then, we sort of… society and people evolve into them.

Aleks Svetski:

The next layer, which is blue and blue’s kind of person­i­fied through values of systems and processes and proce­dures and rules and laws and all this sort of stuff. And you sort of see society kind of moved into that. And, social constructs that are very blue are things like, whether it’s religion or whether it’s the police, whether it’s the nation-state or whatever. It creates a system to function within.

Aleks Svetski:

And then, you see society and people kind of evolve into the next value set, which is charac­ter­ized by the color orange in this model. And orange is a little bit more… it’s science, it’s achieve­ment oriented, entre­pre­neurial, it’s about flares, it’s about breaking the rules, but you see a pendulum again to being in a more individual-centric.

Aleks Svetski:

And then, the next evolu­tion in this sort of first phase, so this first phase talks about these six levels of memetic, social, and individual values of evolu­tion. The sixth level is this idea of green and the idea, people are connected and we’re… it’s all about we, and you kind of see this embodied in kind of like the movement of the sixties, the hippies and all this sort of stuff. And, they all have their place. One of the mistakes people make is that, partic­u­larly in societies that have gone through and grown through each of these levels is that, someone born in the modern age is gener­ally born into relatively orange-ish or greenish type society. And they think that they view the world through that value lens. And they think that their valued hierarchy is right, this is the right way to do it, and every­thing else is fucking wrong.

Aleks Svetski:

And what they don’t realize is that, to be a whole human and to be a functional group of human beings, we need to somehow have elements of each of these things. And where I see Bitcoin is it kind of takes a leap into the next realm, beyond these six levels, which is charac­ter­ized through yellow and turquoise. And yellow is really the under­standing that each layer has its place in the ability to then flow or flex-flow between all of these states and apply the appro­priate values at the appro­priate time for the right reasons. So it’s a much more objec­tive kind of view.

Aleks Svetski:

So, I like… when I first… so I used to study a lot of psychology when I was younger and I did all the whole NLP and all that sort of stuff. I was like the youngest NLP practi­tioner in Australia and all of this shit. So I did all that stuff, but doing that in the early days, I spent some time going through this Clay Graves Model, and I’ve never in my life seen something that enabled society to sort of become a little bit more yellow, become more integrated in its ability to allow people to adopt the best of each kind of…

Aleks Svetski:

Yeah, I’ve almost forgotten the original question from you, Brady, but just… I think it was something to do with macro, but that’s kind of a really large viewpoint from a evolu­tionary-psychology perspec­tive of what Bitcoin may enable. I encourage everyone to look at some of Clay Graves’ work. I think it really allows you to sort of view behavior through value struc­tures, for people, on both an individual and on a social level so it’s a really inter­esting model, and I think, I mean, like I said, I’m going to write about it, but I think it’s a… Bitcoin for the first time enables something like this to evolve beyond where we’ve been stuck at, I think, for a long time now.

Brady Swenson:

All right, guys, thank you so much. This was a fantastic wide-ranging conver­sa­tion. I love this format because we get a couple of great Bitcoiners together. The brains interact, we end up going all over the place. I think we touched a lot of deep, impor­tant topics. We had a lot of fun in the middle there as well. So, appre­ciate your time guys. Thanks, Aleks.

Aleks Svetski:

Thanks-

Brady Swenson:

Yeah, man. Thank you, Jimmy.

Jimmy Song:

Thanks for having me.

Aleks Svetski:

Closing thoughts. No, I’m kidding, I was going to say something stupid about picking up chicks but I got nothing.

Brady Swenson:

I think you picked them all up already, it sounds like.

Jimmy Song:

Grow a beard.

Brady Swenson:

Grow a shaggy beard.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Jimmy Song:

And talk about Bitcoin. I actually… that would be really fun, Cory, like doing a Bitcoin pickup thing on Venice Beach or something?

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah. Well, we’re thinking of sending people out and so you’re not feeling lonely, and, so people would actually see that there’s something going on. We’ll hire an actor to stand there in a giant swan mascot so he’s seven or eight feet tall. So that whoev­er’s doing the pickup at least feels like they have a wing man, liter­ally. But it will just be a giant swan mascot.

Jimmy Song:

You should have a contest, see how many… if you could get them to actually buy Bitcoin.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah.

Jimmy Song:

That’s counted as a win.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah.

Jimmy Song:

And then, if you could do 10, then you get, I don’t know, 0.1 Bitcoin or something.

Cory Klipp­sten:

I love it.

Jimmy Song:

That’s your prize and then, I don’t know.

Cory Klipp­sten:

It makes sense, but I mean, that is exactly… just, I’ve got my Swan shirt on which is our refer­rals’ army, and we have people that make refer­rals to Swan and they go out and we basically try to arm them with memes and slide decks to go out into the world and pitch to their friends or go to a local… if they’re in college-

Jimmy Song:

Can you get Neil Strauss to do it? Because I would love to watch him on video.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Well, he’s a hodler. He’s been hodling for a long time.

Jimmy Song:

No, no, no, I mean, I wanted him to go and try to market that way and see how successful he is.

Cory Klipp­sten:

He uses mass media, he’ll write about it in Rolling Stone or something like that as he did a couple of years ago. But yeah, he doesn’t have to do hand-to-hand combat anymore. He just lets them come to him.

Cory Klipp­sten:

But yeah, I think it’s part of what compa­nies like Aleks’s and ours… you have to build a commu­nity of people that are going to go out and spread Bitcoin knowl­edge by word of mouth. And, that is the kind of factory that we try to build and to enable people to go out and be better talking to their uncle and their cousin and their friend and their coworker about Bitcoin and teaching people how to talk about this, and I think Aleks nailed it. There is no silver bullet. You’ve got to really tailor it to the audience that you have, but you need enough arrows in your quiver so that one of them will actually hit the target and get them to start down the rabbit hole. And then it really is a personal journey, and we all know that no amount of intel­li­gent spewings from anyone was going to get you to go down the rabbit hole until you actually started wanting to learn for yourself. So you’re just trying to spark that in the people that you care about.

Jimmy Song:

Yeah, it’s inter­esting, I read a book on propa­ganda awhile back. Jacque Ellul he wrote a book on… liter­ally named Propa­ganda. One of the things I learned from is that propa­ganda isn’t about brain­washing people, as is popularly perceived. The main thing that you need to get people to do is to take action. Even if it’s a very small step, it tends to make every­thing else happen on its own. And, this is absolutely true of Bitcoin too. It’s one thing, if you just give somebody Bitcoin, they don’t really care about it because they didn’t think they didn’t take the action. But if they go and buy Bitcoin, then it changes every­thing. And that’s where, if you can just get that tiny step, then they’re down that rabbit hole right away. Whereas, if you don’t have that action that you’ve taken, then it’s a much harder journey. It’s a lot more… it’s a much longer journey, it’s a lot harder to come out on the right end and so on. So something to think about and figure out how to market on.

Brady Swenson:

That’s what we’re here doing, man.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Love it.

Brady Swenson:

That’s what we’re doing and-

Cory Klipp­sten:

Liter­ally, define the red pill.

Jimmy Song:

That is the red pill, yes.

Brady Swenson:

Scaling the orange billing, one person at a time, and get that network effect working for us. It’s going to be fasci­nating to watch, guys, really proud to be along­side you all in the trenches, trying to red-pill everyone, as many as possible. All right-

Jimmy Song:

Orange pill, orange pill.

Brady Swenson:

Orange pill, thank you. All right, we’ll wrap it up there. This was fantastic. Thanks again, guys. If you are watching on YouTube or Twitter, you can subscribe to the podcast. We publish these as audio later, usually the same day @swansignalpodcast.com. We had probably the most active chat room of any session to date in telegram t.me/swansignal. It was a ton of fun. We all had good dozen people really going at it in the chat room, a lot of fun. So join that and you can ask questions of our guests in real time and have a lot of fun joining the conver­sa­tion. All right, that’s it. Take care everyone. Thanks, crew.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Thank you.

Jimmy Song

This swan is done.

Cory Klipp­sten:

This swan is done.

Brady Swenson:

Thanks to Jimmy and Aleks for joining us on Twitter. You can follow Jimmy @jimmysong and Aleks @alekssvetski. Cory is @Coryklippsten and myself @citizenbitcoin. On behalf of the Swan team, thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Swan Signal podcast. You can join us live next time. If you’re able, jump into our Swan Signal, telegram chat room at t.me/swansignal, and you can follow along live. We have a lively crew there that chats during our conver­sa­tion and in between each episode, all during the week. You can also watch, like I said, at the top on twitter @swanbitcoin and YouTube at YouTube.com/swansignal. Swan Signal is a produc­tion of Swan Bitcoin at swanbitcoin.com, the best way to accumu­late Bitcoin. That’s it for this week. Thanks for joining us.

Other Episodes

Episode 8 –Andy Edstrom and Ansel Linder

Episode 9 –Rockstar Devel­oper and Jeremy Rubin

Episode 10 – Bitcoin TINA and CK Snarks

Episode 11– Gigi and Knut Svanholm

Episode 12 –Adam Back and Preston Pysh

Episode 13 –Alex Gladstein and Matt Odell

Episode 14 –Robert Breedlove and Tuur Demeester

Episode 15 –Isaiah Jackson and Max Keiser

Episode 16 –Gigi and Udi Wertheimer

Episode 18 –Stephan Livera and Marty Bent

Episode 19 –Mark Moss and Ben Prentice

Episode 20 –Samson Mow and Parker Lewis

Episode 21– Lyn Alden and Jeff Booth

Links

Swan

Swan Bitcoin — the best place to buy and invest in Bitcoin 

Podcast version of this episode:

Swan Bitcoin on Twitter

Swan Signal on YouTube

Swan Signal on Facebook

Swan Signal on Twitch

Swan Signal Podcast

Swan Signal Telegram Chat Room:

Jimmy Song

Jimmy Song on Twitter

Program­ming Bitcoin –Jimmy’s book

Aleks Svetski

Aleks Svetski on Twitter

Amber App –Aleks’ Bitcoin Company