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Your savings represent hours you worked, risks you accepted, businesses you built, time spent away from people you love, and consumption you postponed for the sake of the future. When the monetary system allows others to dilute those savings without your consent, it weakens your claim on that future. Bitcoin offers a peaceful alternative, giving every individual access to property that cannot be created without limitations, altered for political convenience, or administered according to a different set of rules for the powerful. 250 years ago, Americans declared they would no longer live as subjects. The best way to honor that inheritance is not merely to look backward and celebrate what they accomplished. It is to identify the unfinished work of freedom in our time and do our part to advance it. The best in Bitcoin Made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible. What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. The show is brought to you by bitbox. The bitbox hardware wallet or shift crypto actually is the company. If you are not holding your keys and you don't want to by the end of this episode, then I have failed at my job. And that is not to get you to buy a bitbox is to get you to understand what bitcoin means and why holding your keys is everything. Or at least it's 90% of the fight and we should not be worrying about the other 10% until the 90% is dealt with. Hello, I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else. You know, bitcoin og been around the block a little bit. You know, I used to hate to say, it's funny, I had a realization the other day, actually, I used to hate to say something like that. It's like, oh, I'm a bitcoin og it sounds so like, authoritative, like, oh, you have to listen to me. And I. I'm right about something. And that's not what I mean by it, but what I mean. I used to have imposter syndrome for a long time with the show and even before the show when I would try to take a stance on something in bitcoin because I feel like I didn't have. There was always something missing in the foundation for understanding or having some sort of an opinion about something. You know, instinct only comes with an extremely broad and deep foundation of thinking about something. And that was a huge part of why I started this show earlier. Right? And anybody who's been with me long enough knows that I've said this before is I would have read some headline or some article or something and then adopted or Inherited opinion, an opinion about it because of the apparent direction or, you know, the subset of who or what group it landed in and whether it aligned with me. And then I would carry that forward and I wouldn't realize that I hadn't actually dug into the concept. I hadn't actually dug into the article. I'd only read like three sentences and then I would get challenged on it or there would be some sort of debate, and I realized I couldn't back it up. And so a huge part of the value of this show is just that for me, not even for other people, was just that I could. I would see the same thing reflected in other people. And I. I forced myself. I had to actually read the whole thing and then make an assessment and think about it. And for a long time, I think I still wasn't confident enough in myself that I still kind of had this element of imposter syndrome. And I felt like it was arrogant to say that, oh, I know some things about bitcoin, or I'm quote, unquote, a bitcoin OG because it sounded to me like, oh, you should listen to me and not question me, when obviously that's not necessarily what is meant by that. That's, again, probably was a projection at the time, but I'm at least confident now. And I just recognize that I kind of reached a point where that doesn't bother me because I think it's simply a fact. Like, it's just simply true. You know, if you do that, do something for 10,000 hours, to say I did something for 10,000 hours doesn't. It's not arrogance. It just kind of is, and I'm at least secure in myself, that if I have an opinion about something or I share some stance on something that I. I go out of my way to make sure, especially when it's something that I care about, when it's something that I do know about, like bitcoin and, you know, Internet history or kind of architectural design of these sorts of things and how these things work and why they fail, etc. Etc. I feel I have enough knowledge and experience and explaining my interpretation of things and of pieces of history and of events that occurred. That my position is not unreasonable doesn't mean it's right, but it's not unreasonable from what I know and what I've experienced, and I feel like I know and have experienced enough that it's not an arbitrary opinion. I guess maybe the simple way to say that is that I trust my own intuition about things, about money and Bitcoin and these sorts of things because I feel I have earned it. Anyway, that's not what this episode's about. I just thought about it the other day, and it made me realize that I had not realized previously that I was thinking about myself and my own position differently than I had in the past. You know, kind of like a. And I took a moment to have like a. An honest employee evaluation that wasn't just like, you know, me being humble because I wanted to be humble or me being arrogant and make myself look good. Like, what did I honestly think about where I was and how well I had earned? What I think about things, how I think about things. But today's episode is about independence, about what freedom actually is in the context of money and what bitcoin's actual mission is. Why bitcoin does not need a narrative, or I guess, what its one narrative is, if you will, and the honest boots on the ground reasons for why independence is ever achieved, why battle is won. Because it's not the heroes, it's not the big crazy events or the expert pilots. All of those things matter, sure, but none of those things can actually play out. None of those things can actually occur without the people who just, you know, patch the bullet holes that reload the gun, that clean the decks so that the plane can take off. It's actually a massive amount of pure operational boring work. And if we want to win our independence, if we want to understand, if we want to find ourselves in a sound money future, what is the boring work that you and I need to do every single day? What is the greasing of the gears that simply allow the machine to turn to propel us to a better future? And Corey Clipston, the CEO of Swan, had a really, really good article, and he actually had an. A parallel to get a journal from his grandfather from World War II. And if you haven't read this, it's a real treat. This was a really good article and I loved the historical comparison. And I just think you're. I think you'll really love it. So this was a long intro, but we will go ahead and get right into today's read. And it is titled the Battle for Monetary Independence by Corey Clipston. It should make history because it's a really big operation. Philip Clipston. February 14, 1945. My grandfather, Philip Clipston, wrote those words aboard the USS Yorktown, 300 miles offshore from Tokyo, two days before the ship began launching strikes against the Japanese home islands. He was 34 years old, married to my grandmother, Lily the father of two young children and desperate to get home to the ordinary life he had left behind in Kansas City. He did not know when the war would end, whether the operation would succeed, or whether he would live to see his family again. He knew only that an enormous force had been assembled, that the moment had arrived, and that the work in front of them could bring the war to its conclusion. His journal is compelling because it was written without the benefit of hindsight. History now compresses those months into a familiar sequence of battles, victories, surrender and homecoming. But he experienced them as a long series of uncertain days filled with hard work, false starts, rumors, bad weather, fear, boredom, exhaustion, and an almost unbearable longing for his wife and children. He had no way to know which operation would prove decisive or which day would later seem important. He simply continued doing his job, while thousands of other ordinary Americans did the same. Little we do today compares with the sacrifices of his generation. And Bitcoin adoption is not a literal war. In fact, the entire purpose of our work is to help produce a peaceful transition to a better monetary system without the destruction and human suffering that usually accompany the collapse of an old order. But his journal carries a lesson that applies to every great historical change. History looks inevitable only after the people living through it have done the work required to make it happen. This summer, the United States celebrates 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. We rightly honor the founders, the soldiers who secured the new nation, and the generations of Americans who strengthened and defended it ever since. But America was not founded by people celebrating independence. It was founded by people acting to achieve it at considerable risk to themselves, because they had concluded that free people should no longer live as subjects of a distant and unaccountable power. Political independence was the great achievement of their generation. Monetary independence is the great unfinished work of ours. The work that wins. All those guys can see are the glamour and heroics. Not the damn hard, monotonous work and cleaning that always goes on. June 6, 1945, my grandfather wrote that after watching visiting newspaper men report from the comfort of the officers quarters, when, while paying little attention to the sailors whose repetitive exhausting work kept the carrier operating, the public would see the heroic pilots, the great battles, the photographs and the victories. It would rarely see the endless cleaning, loading, repairing, watching, practicing and maintaining that made those victories possible. Bitcoin has its own version of this dynamic. Bull markets receive all the attention because they deliver the spectacle new all time highs, breathless media coverage, institutional announcements, political conversions, suddenly popular conferences, and millions of people discovering that they have always been interested in sound money. We should recognize those moments, but they are the visible result of work performed earlier during the periods when bitcoin was quiet, unpopular, and declared dead. Once again, bear markets are when developers improve the protocol and the tools around it, miners become more efficient, companies strengthen their products, educators refine their arguments, and committed bitcoiners continue converting the fruits of their labor into better money. They are when tourists leave, distractions fade, and conviction deepens. The bull market gets the glory, but the bear market does much of the work. In 2020, when we launched Swan, I wrote 10 million Bitcoiners, the intransigent minority. Drawing on Nassim Taleb's observation that a stubborn minority can flip an entire system, I argued that bitcoin would become politically irreversible once the United states had roughly 10 million committed Bitcoiners. I did not mean 10 million people who had purchased $20 of Bitcoin, snagged some ETF shares, or downloaded an app. I meant 10 million Americans who owned a meaningful amount, understood why bitcoin matters, and would strongly oppose any attempt to take it away from them. At the time, I estimated that we had perhaps 100,000Americans who met that standard. We needed a hundred fold increase. I argued that driving adoption must therefore dominate every other priority. The greatest remaining threat to Bitcoin was not a technical failure, because Bitcoin had already proved remarkably resilient. The greatest threat was that the incumbent system might decide to coordinate an attack while the number of committed bitcoiners was still small enough to isolate, demonize, and overpower. Two years later, I wrote the Race to Avoid the War. My argument was that Bitcoin is going to win, but the manner in which it wins remains profoundly important. Bitcoin can emerge as the orderly, antifragile alternative to a failing monetary system through education, voluntary adoption, better products, and the steady growth of a constituency that makes political confrontation obviously futile. It can also win the longer, harder way. After capital controls, monetary chaos, collapsing currencies, and attempts by desperate governments to hold onto the power of the money printer, we are still running that race, and the work still happens one person at a time. Every committed bitcoiner was once someone who did not understand Bitcoin. Every meaningful position began with a first purchase. Every person willing to defend Bitcoin began by learning why 21 million matters, why ownership differs from exposure, and why money controlled by transparent rules is preferable to money governed by institutional discretion. Independence must be won unless the folks at home get riled up and make the government do something. September 7, 1945. The American founders did not merely replace a British government with an American government. They advanced a radical proposition about the relationship between the individual and the state. People possess rights that precede government. Legitimate authority derives from the consent of the governed, and the purpose of political institutions is to secure liberty rather than dispense it as a privilege. The constitutional system they subsequently built reflects a realistic understanding of human nature and concentrated power. Authority was divided among branches and levels of government because even good people should not be trusted with unlimited discretion. The system did not depend on finding a permanently virtuous ruler. It attempted to establish rules, incentives, and institutional checks, things it would restrain every ruler. Bitcoin applies this proposition to money. It does not ask us to search endlessly for wiser central bankers, more disciplined politicians, or a sufficiently responsible committee with the power to determine the value of everyone else's savings. It replaces discretion with rules that are transparent, predictable, and extraordinarily difficult for any individual, institution or government to to change. No man can vote himself a privileged allocation from Bitcoin's issuer because there is no issuer. No president can create more Bitcoin to fund a favored project. No central bank can change the supply schedule in response to political pressure. No corporation can dilute every existing holder to finance an acquisition. The network applies the same rules to everyone, whether they own $10 of Bitcoin or $10 billion. This makes Bitcoin the most powerful tool for monetary independence ever created. But its existence does not guarantee its adoption. Bitcoin does not buy itself, explain itself, defend itself in Congress, teach your children, help your friend, take custody, or persuade your family to convert a portion of its savings. Those are human actions undertaken by individuals who decide that monetary independence is worth pursuing. The Founders did not believe that independence could be secured by spectators, and neither should we. Freedom is not a condition we passively inherit and permanently possess. It is a way of organizing society that must be continually understood, exercised, strengthened, and passed forward. This is true of political freedom, and it is equally true of monetary freedom. Killing the bear if we had let up even a little, they would have knocked the hell out of our feet. August 14, 1945. Let's be clear about what we mean when we talk about killing the bear market. No company can command Bitcoin's price to rise, and no single campaign, purchase or group of people determines the market. We cannot promise a date, a price target, or a magic incantation that can turn every chart green. What we can do is reject the passivity that allows a bear market to become a state of mind that passivity takes hold when people begin waiting for someone else to act. They assume adoption will resume only after Wall street gives permission or Washington offers encouragement. The media discovers a fresh story, or the price has already risen enough to make buying feel safe again. It produces the strange but familiar spectacle of people becoming more enthusiastic about acquiring Bitcoin as it becomes more expensive and and less enthusiastic as it becomes cheaper. We are repeatedly told that Bitcoin needs a new narrative before the next bull market can begin. This gets the causality narrative follows price. Bitcoin does not need journalists and bankers to invent a new reason for it to succeed. When the price rises, they will write the narratives for us because journalists need stories that sell ads and bankers need stories that sell deals. They will announce that Bitcoin has been transformed by institutional adoption, sovereign accumulation, monetary instability, geopolitical fragmentation, artificial intelligence, or whatever explanation fits the moment. The underlying case for Bitcoin will not have suddenly changed more people will simply have acted on it. Bitcoin already has the only narrative it governments continue to spend more than they collect, central banks continue to debase currencies to sustain the system, and people everywhere continue to need a form of money that cannot be printed, censored, frozen or altered for the benefit of the powerful. The contest is not between two competing political programs for administering the same broken monetary order. There is a third option outside the endless struggle between kleptocrats and communists, money governed by rules rather than rulers. The Bear army is made up of defeatism, distraction, exhaustion, cynicism and short term thinking. It tells companies to retreat and stop investing. It tells individual bitcoiners that their purchases are too small to matter, their conversations persuade no one, and their efforts will have no effect on history. It teaches people to stare at the price while ignoring the steady expansion of the network, the the infrastructure, the knowledge base and the committed constituency around it. Most damaging of all, it persuades bitcoiners to stop evangelizing at precisely the moment when evangelizing can do the most good. This is the best time to bring someone into Bitcoin. Would you rather persuade a friend to begin buying while the market is quiet and prices are low, or wait until the next all time high when the media is screaming, everyone is chasing, and your friend reasonably wonders why you did not tell him sooner? Would you rather wear the Bitcoin shirt when everyone suddenly thinks it's cool, or wear it proudly now when it communicates real conviction? Would you rather reconnect with the Bitcoin Friends who helped you through the last cycle, or leave the old group chat dormant until price makes everyone care again. We reject that posture. Bitcoiners do not need to wait for the bull market to return before we resume building the intransigent minority in earnest. The next bull market will be fueled by the people who learn, buy, build, organize, and commit during the bear market. Bull markets do not descend from the sky as gifts, and they do not begin because a banker discovers a clever phrase. They emerge from the cumulative actions of human beings who have decided the future is worth building before everyone else can see it. The enemy came down. They. They shot down 13 enemy planes. It was a funny thing, but most all the officers hit the deck when the enemy came in close to flag plot. The admiral just stood there giving out orders, so I just stood up too, and we smiled at each other. He's a swell guy. April 29, 1945. My grandfather never says he stopped being afraid. He says he looked at the man responsible for leading the battle, saw him calmly doing his job, and decided to do his own. Courage is contagious. So is conviction. When leaders remain focused instead of panicking, other people discover they can stand up, too. That is why Swan is launching 50 Days of Freedom, a campaign to accelerate bitcoin adoption, grow the ranks of committed bitcoiners, and advance the cause of monetary independence. 250 years after after America's declaration, we are not taking the summer off. Every weekday on Xspaces Cafe, bitcoin will bring together old friends, new voices, builders, educators, founders, and committed bitcoiners who are ready to coordinate, generate ideas, launch campaigns, and make things happen. Swann will be in the trenches all summer long, and we invite the entire bitcoin ecosystem to join us. For the next 50 days, Swan is cutting Bitcoin purchase fees to 0.5%, which is with Swann paying our clients withdrawal fees. As always, we're committed to this rate for the duration of the campaign because urgency is the point. Swann is putting its economic energy behind adoption for 50 days, and we ask bitcoiners everywhere to put their own energy behind it as well. We want people who are hesitating to make their first purchase to get off zero. We want existing bitcoiners to increase their recurring buys to make that big purchase they've been postponing to take advantage of low fees while the campaign is live to. We want every bitcoiner to recruit someone, answer questions, share the best educational material, explain the difference between bitcoin and crypto, and help another person move from curiosity to genuine understanding and ownership. Buy the Bitcoin shirt and wear it. Pick up a children's book about Bitcoin and read it to your kids. Reopen the group chat, schedule the video call. Get the posse back together. They want to hear from you and you want to be there for them. We also want to take possession of real on chain Bitcoin rather than settling for financial exposure. That leaves the actual asset somewhere else. Swan has always paid the network fee for our clients withdrawals because we want our clients to own Bitcoin and develop the confidence to secure it appropriately. Buying Bitcoin is the beginning of monetary independence, but understanding and controlling what you own is what makes it real. This is how we will reach 10 million bitcoiners, and this is how the race to avoid the war will be won. We do not need one heroic action from one extraordinary person. We need sustained action from millions of ordinary people who understand that the work matters even when the world is not yet paying attention. The Bear army is counting on us to wait for a new narrative, a higher price or permission from the very institutions Bitcoin was built to route around. We intend to disappoint those bears. What Freedom is for I'm so happy. Life is worth living again. Everything I've been missing can come true again. I can be with Lily and live. Just live again. What a wonderful thought. August 10, 1945 my grandfather wrote those words by flashlight with a picture of Lily in front of him after the captain announced that Japan had asked for peace. What he wanted after months of battle was not glory, power, or a permanent life of heroic struggle. He wanted to go home to his wife and children, return to work, and live an ordinary life as a free man. That is what freedom is for. Bitcoin is not the purpose of life, and accumulating money for its own sake is not a worthy substitute for living. Sound money is valuable because it helps people preserve the results of their work, make plans across time, support their families, build institutions, take risks, and devote more of their lives to purposes they choose. Your savings represent hours you worked, risks you accepted, businesses you built, time spent away from people you love, and consumption you postponed for the sake of the future. When the monetary system allows others to dilute those savings without your consent, it weakens your claim on that future. Bitcoin offers a peaceful alternative, giving every individual access to property that cannot be created without limit, altered for political convenience, or administered according to a different set of rules for the powerful. 250 years ago, Americans declared that they would no longer live as subjects. We have inherited the political institutions, cultural traditions, and extraordinary prosperity made possible by their courage. But the best way to honor that inheritance is not merely to look backward and celebrate what they accomplished. It is to identify the unfinished work of freedom in our own time and do our part to advance it. This summer, Swan will spend 50 days lowering the cost of buying Bitcoin, educating new bitcoiners, supporting existing bitcoiners, and recruiting the intransigent minority that will make monetary freedom irreversible. We invite you to buy, learn, take ownership, increase your commitment, and bring someone else with you. The Bear army is counting on us to remain passive until the price tells us it is safe to act. But history has never been made that way. It is time to finish the job in front of us. Let's defeat the Bear, build toward 10 million Bitcoiners, and win the race to monetary independence. Corey Clipston don't be stupid. Hold your own keys. Get yourself a bitbox. I wanted to read this piece because this is about independence and that doesn't mean a small risk, that means a huge risk. And we will never achieve independence. We will never actually succeed at this thing if the overwhelming majority of everyone in it is here just because number go up. And despite the kind of comedy and the levity of that narrative or that little trope, it couldn't be more wrong with the typical experience of what bitcoin really is and the nature of its volatility. And importantly, it's not a narrative that helps us overall. It's not the consistent narrative. All of the narratives, the explanations, the things that I actually love. The framing in this piece of like the bankers and the journalists will figure out whatever the next stupid narrative is, we don't need it. What this is about is achieving independence and forcing the hand. Revealing the true nature of the central bank and the government is being a consistent and immovable object that reflects the nature of the money printer and the forever debt machine. And think about what the founders of the U.S. of the United States of America went through and what the idea of founding a new country even means. There is the potential for wealth, yes, but it explicitly comes at the cost of a staggering amount of hard work and accepting the insane volatility of a life without a society around you. Think about what it took to leave Britain, to leave a civilization that had architecture and infrastructure that was centuries old, huge established markets, trade routes, houses, waterways, entertainment, people that you left civilization to go start a new one. You think life wasn't volatile when you didn't have a grocery store or a farmer's market to go to. Quite the contrary. Your life was as volatile as your harvest season was because there was no market buffer to make up the difference. Your harvest season was the food supply. They went from no stock to all flow, from no infrastructure to building in the wild. They threw out their backup plan to start something brand new, hoping that they could build something better than what they were leaving. And then the founders of the country, when the American Revolution actually kicked off, put all of it on the line, something they'd been working already a century for of carving their little corner out of the world for them and their lives and their freedom. They risked all of it going to zero. And they signed their known names on a piece of paper that would have had them bend, beheaded if they had lost. And the idea that they would win was kind of an absurd notion that a totally new nation that had barely started would actually put up a fight that would actually achieve independence from what was the empire of the time. Can you imagine the risk of publicly stating your independence from that, knowing that it was treasonous and that you would literally be killed and put your entire life and. And your wealth, all of it, on the line in defense of that? Bitcoin's narrative, if you want to call it that, is and should always have been peaceful rebellion against a system of slavery, a system of fraud that is a slow, poisonous destruction of both our society, our culture, and the hope for the future, everything that we actually stand for. I really love the. This is something that people just don't, I think is so lost on current generations because they don't think about what these things mean. And I love this. This reminds me of. If you haven't listened to it, in fact, I should probably dig it out of the archive of the Walking Tall episode. And it was actually an advertisement from a bank and I think the 50s or maybe the 60s, but I absolutely loved it. And it was one of the most potent, like, short runs or descriptions as to what it means to save, to like, like what a Runway for your future actually means from the human perspective. Not from finance or from returns or green candles or any of that stupid crap like this. This idea of fiat finance is like, what does it mean? Why the hell would I have $100 in the bank and hope that that dollars got me back something that I actually earned? So I want to read this section again. That is what freedom is for. Bitcoin is not the purpose of life. And accumulating money for its own Sake is not a worthy substitute for living. Sound money is valuable because it helps people preserve the results of their work, make plans across time, support their families, build institutions, take risks, and devote more of their lives to purposes they choose. Your savings represents hours you worked, risks you accepted, businesses you built, time spent away from family you love and consumption you postponed for the sake of the future. When the monetary system allows others to dilute those savings without your consent, it weakens your claim on that future. I'll actually interject and say it is literally stealing your claim on that future. Bitcoin offers a peaceful alternative, giving every individual access to property that cannot be created without limit, altered for political convenience, or administered according to a different set of rules for the powerful. That is the only sales pitch that bitcoin does or ever needs. And it's actually funny recently because I posted something about that after I first read this article because it got me like buzzing on this idea and someone post in response that, you know, because BlackRock is in Bitcoin and because people are looking at bitcoin, he said everything in bitcoin is surveilled. That means the combination of these two things means that bitcoin isn't free or that it grants no freedom. And nobody even liked the comment. But I just, I was just kind of like flabbergasted by the lack of perspective. You know, that guy is probably going around his day using a fully permissioned, fully surveilled like daily limits up and down six ways from sideways. If he even makes even attempts a transaction of any particular size, they're going to get a full form filled out and report filed with a regulator. It's blocked by God knows how many capital controls these days. Good luck sending a payment to somebody overseas. Seriously, try it. I work with people in three different countries. I know what it's like and it's a pain in the ass. So much so that I stopped two years ago, two and a half years ago somewhere, I guess maybe three years ago now that if somebody didn't take bitcoin, I'm just not going to work with them. Especially if they're overseas. Like maybe we could get away with it in within the US because like I could cash app somebody or something, but anybody in a different country, I'm just not even touching it. If you don't take bitcoin, I have no interest in working with you because I do not need a headache. I do not need a homework assignment with someone that I'm trying to work with. And that is what using Fiat assigns to me a literal, painful homework assignment every single time I want to do something simple. And then the same person is being deluded to the tune of trillions of dollars every single year. And all of the money that he thinks he does have is literally a liability to somebody else. It's a credit. It starts as debt. And if somebody isn't able to pay it back, it's going to blow out the value of his. And what he can actually purchase is going to destroy the economy because the economy isn't on a level playing field. It, it isn't. It's like, you know, they talk about this idea of running really, really fast to stay in place. Like that is how our economy is. And that's specifically because money is issued as debt, which means that if you stop moving, you fall over. It's like being on a bicycle. You can't just relax. You can't stop anything. The economy cannot actually take a break because it will collapse if you do. And that's because anything that we earn is actually owed back with interest by default fault. It starts that way. And all of our apparent extra today that we get with that debt is paid for and then some by our grandchildren. And these are systemic. This is, these are systemic issues that are robbing the society to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars. And my man comes into bitch about the fact that Bitcoin is open and you can like look at it on a block explorer. And some money might be like taking tabs on that. Okay, I have a node too. I could do it if I wanted to. I just don't care. And I don't care if somebody else does. The whole point of it is that I can't be diluted to trillions of dollars. My money doesn't start out as an obligation that I have to pay back. I'm not permissioned. I don't have capital controls. I do work with people in three or four other countries. I do pay them every month. And I do get paid every month. And it's really easy. I don't ask anybody permission to use my money. Nobody. Not a soul. It is literally mine. And I guarantee you the person who discounts that, who thinks that doesn't matter is someone who's been a slave their whole life and doesn't even know what it's like to sit outside of the cage. It's the lion in the zoo that sits and says, but doesn't it rain out there? As if being a prisoner, as if being a slave is the solution, rather Than just learning how to build yourself a shelter. Or the idea that because BlackRock has an ETF that now this thing is captured. Like, this is such a perfect projection of the fiat mindset that who is there matters. That is something we are taught and is ingrained into us from the fiat system because it is literally fiat. Who runs it, who is in charge of it does matter, because that's all it is. Fiat is whatever the person in charge says that it is. So the people who are present and appear to have political power, well, that's the game. That's. That is. That is the state of fiat is pointing at a person that matters, pointing at an authority and saying, well, there's your fiat. Yet the communists and the Bolsheviks owned a lot of gold, but nobody was like, ah, well, there goes gold. Got to throw in the towel on this thing. Whole bunch of evil, terrible people use the Internet. BlackRock is also available over the Internet. Well, there goes TCP, IP. Screw that thing. Why would. Why would we even bother creating Bitcoin? It has to run over the Internet. It's not going to work without the Internet. And BlackRock already owns the Internet. Like, why do you even care about the etf? We were all. The gig was already up. Blackrock is literally on the network that bitcoin uses. Like, that's what your fiat brain thinks. How is it not applied to the Internet? What. What is your. Where. Where's the. Where's the line? Where's your big weird gray line where one of those things matters and one of them doesn't. I get that you think money is fiat because your money is fiat, but it just means that you don't understand anything about Bitcoin or how it works or what it is if you are applying the same thinking to it. My money belongs to me and I am in control of it. And I prove that every single day. And it never ceases to entertain me how many people will tell me that I cannot do or that it is impossible to do the thing that I do every single day. Like, people still tell me that lightning doesn't work and you can't live off of bitcoin. And I'm just, just like, who are you trying to convince, man? I say one more thing about the privacy issue because I have, you know, for the entire time I've been in bitcoin, most of its life, you know, 15 of the 17 years has been around, I have fought and looked for really good privacy options. And I'll tell you, privacy is actually easier to achieve today than it has been in the past. In fact, almost all privacy options back in, you know, 2012 to 2016 era were all centralized and custodial. At least the ones that were popular and had enough liquidity. Today they are not. They still have service providers like Wasabi. Being a good example is you have a coordinator but they are not custodial. You are not subject to their visibility into what's going on. They are coordinating blindly. But I think it's really important to understand where the privacy issue comes from because Bitcoin itself doesn't really have a privacy issue, it has an interfacing issue. It has a KYC issue at the Fiat Rails and people say was, oh well then that means that all Bitcoin is KYC'd because you. Because as soon as you get into bitcoin you, they know exactly where it came from. It came from an exchange address and they can track it, blah blah, blah. This exists entirely in the realm or exists entirely in the era of the transition from fiat to Bitcoin. And what's funny is that this random person told me that all my bitcoin is KYC and surveilled when it's actually not. Because a ton of my bitcoin I earn. I also only work with sponsors like bitbox. Bitbox just pays me Bitcoin for their ad spots. Now not every bitcoin company has plenty of money to throw around and we've been losing money for the last two years on net because of a ton of other investments I've been making and because of the, the, the growth in the production and the people that I've hired with this. But I'm okay with taking that risk because I think I'm laying a much bigger foundation for something down the line and I'm trying to see this as a long term benefit. I'm taking a very long term position on what I believe is going to pay off. I certainly could be wrong and I'm taking a big risk on it. But part of my conviction in this is that I'm not going to take on sponsors that, well, not only that won't pay me bitcoin. I get really, really annoyed when I have to get paid in fiat. I will take it. Of course I'll try to get it sent directly to my River Swan, whatever account that I'm using to just transfer into bitcoin or fold. But I charge a premium for it of 5% because I don't want it, but because I've been in long enough and I made enough off of the bitcoin itself, I can take a much longer term risk. And I can say, like I've said this whole time is that I'm just not going to work with sponsors that I don't, that I feel are even slightly questionable. I get to be really, really choosy about who I work with because I didn't want this. And honestly, in the long term, I don't want this show to have to be profitable. From the context of sponsors, I don't really like sponsors on a podcast is why I'm a big part of the reason why I'm so selective about the companies because I like to be able to like just riff on bitbox or something. And I don't, I don't feel any. There's no like homework assignment or any like anxiety or thing built up because I just like, I like the bitbox. I literally still have one sitting right in front of me on the desk right now. I take it as like a public service announcement that I'm telling people to hold their own keys and here's the discount code. But I have that freedom. I have that freedom to work with who I want to work with. I have that freedom to be totally agnostic, to not care in the slightest what country the person I work with is from. In the last couple years, with the whole Pear Drive and pearcord stuff we've been building, I hired two people that I didn't even know where they were from until later on. It's like, oh snap, you're from Kenya, Cool. The very first thing is, will you take bitcoin? In fact, I get connected to them through people who know they already take bitcoin and, and then that just eliminates an entire hierarchy of concerns. My freedom to choose my sponsors, my freedom to lose money for two years and taking the risk in hopes of having groundwork for something much bigger. To hire whoever I want to hire from wherever the hell they are and to not even think about it as an issue. To not worry about limits or capital controls or whose permission I have to ask to either receive or send money. To know that if you add two or three more years to this, you know, to the heart of this bear market, there's going to be 40 more trillion dollars printed. And I just don't have to worry about the long term fiat value of this. I just need to work as hard as I can when it's low to know the BlackRock ETF isn't going to make a damn bit of difference. To know that I'm not being surveilled or that it's extremely difficult to surveil me because I receive my bitcoin directly non kyc from the people that I work with. I use a non custodial privacy coordinator to separate any savings or income I have from the outgoing. And it I don't have to ask somebody's permission to use it. I don't have to sign up for an account to figure out how to get privacy as a service. I can just do it. I have my own lightning node and I can just pay people directly without any on chain record. And I can send and receive any amount that I want to at any time that I want to and from or to anyone that I want to. And nobody 3,000 miles away can press a button and stop a damn thing. That is monetary freedom. It doesn't mean that corporations don't exist or that there's never going to be a payment processor. It means optionality. It means that I can use a payment processor if it benefits me, and if it it doesn't, I don't need them. That luxury exists nowhere in fiat. You have to have them, and if you don't, you have to have permission to compete with them. You don't need any of that in Bitcoin. And I know that is freedom. I know what I feel and live every day is monetary freedom. Because every once in a while I have to experience the awful, awful situation of going back into the cage and trying to figure out how to do shit. And when I finally get it out of the bank account or I finally get it out of, you know, some $2,000 weekly limit or some stupid shit on cash app or whatever. It's like this is this huge relief. It just feels like finally I have it and it's mine again. It's just always surprising to me to hear somebody from inside the cage be like, oh, you're just standing out in the rain. It's like, yeah, man, I like the rain. When I'm tired of it, I can go right back inside. But if you even want to go experience the rain, you have to ask somebody to unlock your door. My key is in my pocket. And that is the difference between you and me. Bitcoin is about freedom. It is about independence. It is a rebellion against the people who hold the keys so that we can get them back in our pockets. And if you're not actually holding and using yours, consider what that means and you can get a discount with a bitbox hardware wallet. All right, guys, I'll catch you on the next one. Until then, that's my two sets. People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take Emma Goldman.