← The Bitcoin Standard Podcast
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Saifedean Ammous
Foreign. Principles of Economics. My complete guide to understanding Economics is now available in hardcover, audiobook and ebook from seifeddin.com, amazon and many more booksellers worldwide. And now I am also teaching a course based on this book on my website, seyfeddin.com Principles of Economics will run the whole academic year from September to June and will have a new lecture
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Hello. Welcome to the Bitcoin Standard podcast. Our guest today is Corey Klippenston, the founder and CEO of swan, one of the sponsors of this podcast and good old friend with whom I've discussed bitcoin for many, many hours over the years. And today we're going to get an update from Corey on what's new in the world of bitcoin and in the world of Swan. Corey, welcome to safe.
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Corey Klippenstein
It's great to see you and, and welcome back on the field. I know you've taken a little hiatus from from podcasting and honored to be in the hot seat as you return.
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Saifedean Ammous
Thank you, sir. Yes, I was posting my Principles of Economics course, so if you haven't checked it out, go back to the YouTube page or the podcast and you can get all the lectures from the Principles of Economics course. But I'm glad to be back recording conversations. You know, one of the nice things about bitcoin is that there's things happening and yet at the same time, it's always the same thing. You know, it's just every 10 minutes a new block, bunch of transactions and more or less number going up in the long term. So pretty much the same thing as always. But what's new in your bitcoin world? What's been happening?
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Corey Klippenstein
Yeah, so look, I, I'm, I'm with you. It's always, you know, higher highs, higher lows, and that's kind of the long arc of this thing over time. I think one thing to step back and just think about is how to seeing Bitcoin in the 60,000 plus range we are and that's just the passage of time that does that. We were euphoric when bitcoin went from 3100 to 69,000 in 21. And now we've got five years in this range of 30 something thousand to 126,000 and bouncing around. And nobody would be astonished to see bitcoin jump to 75k next week or 85k or 108k or whatever it is. It would all just be kind of, oh, we're back here again, that's not a big deal. So that is what happens with bitcoin. It doesn't really start to move until enough people get used to it and are fine and don't feel like they want to sell because they have expectations for it to be higher. You know, so that's one side and that's just the price and the other one is just, you know, we've had this massive acceleration of actual actions taken and events coming to pass that for me, I had always forecast to come a little bit later in the arc of history and hopefully we'd be able to stave them off. But you know, we're recording here in the morning of July 14th and this morning there was an EU speech, I believe it was Ursula von der Leyen. And they're going to require everybody in the EU to register with a Europe app to be able to post on social media. So tying IDs to posting and blocking access for anons and dissidents and anybody that doesn't like the government, whatever, you'll be doxxed. And they will of course now have the means to come after you. You know, so things like that, things like VPN bans in different places, the, the fast rush into full CBDC ification of the EU and the US. The US doing it through stablecoins, which are functionally CBDCs because the government is in the database and can censor and reverse and do whatever they want and track and all those things with circle and tether. And now they're trying to expand that to hundreds and then thousands of stablecoins, all of which will just be represented in banking apps as USD. After they fall under regulation. It won't matter whether it has a T or a C or some other letter before or after the dollar part. This is all just dollars now. So it's a, it's a really interesting time and we've never really had a stronger moment for bitcoin broadly in history. This is the strongest moment ever for the arguments around freedom. Money equals free humans and a sovereign money leads to actual personal sovereignty. And so it's in a lot of cases, you know, this is A moment where we should be as loud as in. Let's call it an educator class. We should be as loud as we were in 20, 18, 19 and 2020. But it's kind of drowned out by so much other noise in the bitcoin space from, you know, ETFs and treasury companies and so many other things that I feel like it's harder to break through than it was back then when it was just kind of a battle for really, bitcoin versus a smaller enemy, a much smaller enemy, which was just altcoins. And that's over. And now it's bitcoin versus the dollar and the Fiat Ponzi scheme. And, you know, that's. That's a battle that you've been fighting much more uniquely than, you know, I'd say if I were just to estimate, you know, 80% of your battle, even in the. In the Bitcoin versus shitcoin era, was really Bitcoin versus fiat, because you were a sound money guy before. And so now a lot of us have to shift our mix of what we're sort of fighting against to be in line with where you've been for a long time.
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Saifedean Ammous
Yeah, I think, you know, the one interesting thing about this period is if you look back 18 months or 24 months ago, when Trump looked like he was going to be clinching the presidency, and he came to the bitcoin conference and he spoke about how he's going to make the US Into a bitcoin power and they're going to start accumulating bitcoin and that they were going to be using the bitcoin to support the dollar and extend dollar hegemony. It was. It was a period in which people started thinking, whoa, you know, maybe this is going to be the end of inflation. You know, remember Doge, Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk talking about cutting waste in government and reducing government spending. And at a. At a certain point, it looked like something might stop the strain, to borrow Lyn Alden's phrase, that they're going to rain spending. There's not going to be any more wars. He's not going to be spending crazy money like the Biden administration. There's not going to be more socialism. It's going to be a more of a free market, sound money presidency. 18 months in, we can confidently assert this was definitely not the case. The whole bitcoin strategic reserve thing turned out to just be like, pretty much every major personality who gets into bitcoin is just a way to pump a shitcoin and they pumped a whole bunch of shitcoins and they've done an incredible job making a lot of money from these shitcoins. And this is what it eventually came down to. This is really what it was all about. And nothing has changed in terms of government spending. In fact, if anything, they've put the foot down on the pedal even faster. The debt is growing enormously. We're on the verge of $40 trillion in debt and it's growing really fast. And war is back on the table. There's more war and war is just continuing to become more and more complicated. It's a quagmire that continues to draw in more and more weapons and resources. So the case for bitcoin just continues to get stronger and stronger and stronger. And I think, you know, they was, there was the threat of gold, which, you know, I've always maintained the one real or the biggest threat to bitcoin is gold. I still don't think it's a real threat. I still don't think it's going to succeed. But it is the one that I think is the most serious. It's not, definitely not the dollar, definitely not the shitcoins, definitely not CBDCs or stable coins or any of that stuff. If anything, it would be gold. And you know, they had a pretty good bull run over the past few years going from like $2,000 to $5,000 in a few years. But now it's been what, almost a year or maybe eight months or so of essentially a bear market with the price declining. So it's again more and more bodies float by the river as just bitcoin sits there and all these competitors fail. You know, I remember gold bugs used to write so many newsletters about how gold is going to go to $5,000 and then the world's going to end because everything will collapse. And you know, all these newsletter doomsday scenarios about what happens when gold is at $5,000 and you know, you better stock up on canned food and bullets because that means the end of the fiat world and the end of governments and the end of law and order. We're going to live in a max world. L $5,000 gold has come and it' and it's about as monetarily consequential as copper going up or nickel going up. Hasn't really made a difference. I think it's really again emphasizing the value proposition of bitcoin because with gold, even if you pump it, as long as people can't really use it as money as long as they can't transact with it, as long as they have to continue to liquidate it, and as long as they can't, you send it internationally because you don't have gold banks. It's, to borrow a Keynesian phrase, it's a, it's a pet rock. It can't really function as money in a digital advanced world economy. So, you know, I think this is shaping up very nicely now. You know, bitcoin has its cycles and now we're at the bottom. So now the field is clear. The idea that the dollar or gold are going to be serious threats to bitcoin I think are gone. They are just going to continue to make more and more gold, they're going to continue to make more and more dollars, but they're not making more bitcoin, they're making very little bitcoin at current prices. They need, well at the top, gold needed something like $700 billion of new demand every year just for the price to hold, to essentially to buy up all the new mining output. But with bitcoin, because bitcoin is smaller and because the output from the, the bitcoin mines smaller, we only need something like 10, $14 billion at current prices to maintain this price. So it's a lot more bullish for gold, for bitcoin moving forward. I don't think, I don't think gold can keep up with bitcoin. They've had their run in 17 years. They've got a couple of years in which they outperform bitcoin, but doesn't look like it's happening. I think we're back to the serious competition being bitcoin, that's, it's really the only alternative. There are no other alternatives.
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Corey Klippenstein
Yeah, lot lots to unpack there and I I'm really happy to be speaking with someone that actually understands gold deeply. And you know, I know you were really into gold and a gold bug before discovering Bitcoin and understanding bitcoin thoroughly. And so you know, my dad was a bit of a gold bug, but it never took with me so I didn't spend any time on gold until after I got into bitcoin personally. And so I have always just, you know, from first principles. It just seems as more people understand what bitcoin is and understand its many inherent advantages over gold, and understand the history of gold as money and why it failed as a medium of exchange time and again, and why it centralizes because of its physical nature. And that tokenized gold doesn't do anything for you because now you're in the censorship regime and they can just stop you and reverse your transaction and confiscate your wealth, et cetera. So essentially the only thing would be just this dramatic reversal to literally ocean carrying vaults with destroyers alongside transporting the gold vault to vault to these gold banks around the world. The recreation of a network like that would be the only way to go back to some semblance of a gold standard. But of course then you wouldn't be able to audit the supply, certainly wouldn't be able to audit the supply yourself with a laptop or a Raspberry PI the way you can with bitcoin. And so it just suffers from all these disadvantages the one advantage that it does have is just the longevity and the history and we all know that and talked about it ad nauseam. But, but it is such a big deal that I do think that you will have gold continuing, you know, at least through the rest of this century as a, a pretty decent store of value. And I, I also, you know a lot of people have been out there if we want to talk about the dollar and Treasuries and kind of that network effect for a little bit. You know, I have believed for the last 20 some years that the 21st century is really the American century, that it wasn't the 20th century, that the extension of American power and kind of how large America and the United States will loom in the globe just by virtue of being the cleanest shirt in the dirty laundry as authoritarian creep kind of takes over the UK and Europe and China and all the would be competitors, you know, our geographic and demographic and sociopolitical advantages and just kind of the foundation of, of the protocol in the Constitution supporting of individual freedom such as they have survived to some degree the last 250 years just give this country such great advantages that we're not going to see a retrenchment or a slide back. You're not going to see dollar go way more hyperinflation. What you are seeing, and I really want to get into this with you a little bit is a shift in how the dollar's network affects, is maintained and extended. Because we've obviously seen a big pullback in the purchase of Treasuries which back the dollar by foreign governments, central banks around the world. Really it's declined since 2014. So we're like 12 years into the decline and they have to replace that demand with something. And that I think is where Wall street and D.C. got together with the crypto industry and decided that they were going to turn all of American finance and Wall street and fintechs and crypto into dollar merchants, dollar marketers. And that's why you see the loosening of OCC Charters and all these crypto companies getting bank charters and being able to launch stable coins. And you saw bridge was anybody can launch a stable coin. And then they got bought by Stripe and then you have OUSD open USD launched. And again these things are just going to be marketed as dollars because they fall under a regulatory regime where they're relatively confident that the backing assets are there and they're going to be watch and the five eyes and the three letter agencies and everybody is in the database Tracking the baddies and making sure that they can censor your transaction and that you have to ask for permission to move your money just like they have it today. So this is the launch of global CBDC is marketed under a stablecoin brand. And you know, this is where they're replacing the diminishing demand from central banks just by putting dollars in the hands of the people under those regimes all over the world that used to buy a lot of treasuries. They're just buying dollars and then the companies. So it's a public private partnership between the Fed, treasury state and the entire fintech and Wall street apparatus to become dollar merchants and sell dollars to everybody all over the world, all the time. And so it seems extremely clear that while bitcoin has won the war against would be bitcoin competitors that kind of lasted seven years, it was a seven years war from 2017 inclusive of 2023. And then it bas of had the nail in the coffin by the launch of the Bitcoin ETFs that just kind of proved to media markets, investors everybody that hey, there's nothing here. And when I do a panel with a bunch of crypto execs, they're basically what we would have called bitcoin maximalists five years ago. They think there's bitcoin and there's financial IT and digital rails things going on and that's it. And they have no thesis or belief whatsoever in altcoin value. And so I think we really have launched into that three horse race of bitcoin, gold and the dollar. And that's the world that we'll be living in for the rest of this century. Is that three horse race.
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Saifedean Ammous
Yeah, I mean I think I agree, although I'm probably a little bit less pessimistic I guess or optimistic. Depends on where you look at it, on the ability of stablecoins to really move the needle when it comes to all this ext extra dollar demand. Because even though it's, I mean it sounds, it sounds impressive when you think okay well tether is maybe, what is it now? The, the 15th largest holder of Treasuries, which sounds like a lot but foreign holdings of Treasuries are becoming less and less significant and issuance of Treasuries is just taking off. So the increase in debt is increasing at a much faster pace than stable coins can catch up. So this was the topic of my talk at the bitcoin conference last year and I just think even in the most optimistic scenario for the uptake in the stablecoin adoption, yes, it can add more demand for debt and that's going to bring down the cost of borrowing and it allows for the issuance of more debt. So it gives the Ponzi a little bit more Runway, but it's still not going to really change much. It's, there's no stopping this train. The train is not going to take off no matter how much Runway you give it. If we go to butcher metaphors, what's
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Corey Klippenstein
your, I don't know if you could even get to like a majority base case, but like a most likely like a plurality of outcomes ends like this. And you know, I know a few years ago you were talking about kind of a soft landing, certainly as a hoped for outcome, but is it still kind of your most likely scenario that the dollar, just the number of dollars out there declines as, as bitcoin rises is that there's like, like what percentage chance do you put on a cataclysm for the dollar and the treasury in the West?
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Saifedean Ammous
You know, it's, it's difficult to tell because, you know, every day new things happen. I think the, the last year, watching Doge and all sense of fiscal responsibility go out the window, watching the Pentagon budget go up 50% in the first year, watching the Iran war now likely to drag on and become a major quagmire, you know, yesterday I think it was Trump was saying, well, it's only been four months. We were in Vietnam for 19 years. So now we are already setting the bar as, as long as it's not 19 years, then we're winning. Then I think all of these things make it more and more likely that we're headed towards something nasty. And I think, you know, you look at the treasury yields, they're just been going up. So before the war it was something like 3.96 on the 10 year and today it's about 4.6. That's 0.65 on the 10 year is an increase in yields. It's huge. It's already cost the treasury something like in the order of tens of billions of dollars in extra borrowing costs and then that's just going to likely continue to go up. So just that, you know, eats up all the new treasury demand that comes in from stablecoins. You know, just one tiny little war adventure in the Middle east and all of this stablecoin 5D chess that people have been counting on to save the dollar, it makes it all look like a rounding error. So I think so where I agree with you.
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Corey Klippenstein
Let me just step in because I think I used to make the same exact point about the, the unlikely basically that that tether and circle wouldn't really be a drop in the bucket. It just wouldn't matter versus the deluge of debt and having to roll over these treasury terms and, and keep expanding that. And I agree with that. I think what is yet to be seen now with the explosion of these bank charters and kind of just the welcoming into the Wall street establishment of so many new firms and then so many existing firms now launching their own sort of dollar marketing efforts, I don't even think that we need to talk about stablecoins anymore. These are just dollars. Their digital dollars were already digital. They were just entered with a keystroke. As, as former Fed chairs have said, we just print it with a keystroke. So I think it's all just the same thing at this point. And stablecoins are kind of irrelevant as a term. It's just dollars. I do not think that we had ever really taken the gloves off and allowed all the fintechs globally and all of the Wall street banks to market dollars to people and companies and in other countries to the degree that we're going to see over the next couple of years. So that's research that I personally haven't seen anybody kind of talk about a real study of how that might develop. I think when you just look at, you know, the law of large numbers, small numbers, whatever, it seems really obvious they weren't going to allow, you know, kind of a shady offshore wannabe country like tether to do it. That was never going to happen. But now that they've opened it up to everybody, I do wonder how effective this could be. And again, it's just a matter of like, how much further you can kick the can down the road. Obviously, eventually it's unsustainable. And so you're just talking about like, does this thing collapse in 2035 or do they make it to 2060 or something.
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Saifedean Ammous
Yeah, and I think one point that I made in that talk at the Bitcoin conference is that people treat all of this extra new demand for stablecoins as if it's extra new demand for dollars, which is not entirely true because a lot of that is displacing existing dollar demand, whether it's physical cash or, you know, other forms of money and bank accounts that are backed by dollars. So when people in Argentina or Turkey or Brazil start using stable coins, they're moving away from their local shitcoin. But. And that means that their local central bank is now buying fewer dollars and fewer treasuries. So it's not all new demand. And when you think about it this way, the world's already saturated. Maybe not saturated, but the world's already got a lot of dollars there. There's an enormous demand, there's an enormous amount of dollars out there. So stable coins could 10x and still not really generate much new demand because they could just be displacing other forms of demand for $. Now granted, stable coins are a more efficient mechanism of transmitting demand for dollars because the local central banks are not taking a cut. So, you know, the Turkish central bank will have, I say, a billion dollars of Treasuries and it issues against it several billion dollars of Turkish liras. But with stablecoins, a billion dollars of stable coins translates to roughly close to a billion, a much closer number of, much closer number to a billion of stablecoin demand. But still there's an enormous amount of dollar demand already existing. And this is the thing, the, I think the dollar bullish scenario just overestimates how much demand there can be for dollars because it assumes that it seems to think that the dollars just exist in the US and now we're inventing this new thing called international demand for dollars. But I think international demand for dollars is already very large. The dollar market is already enormous. So there's just not that much room for growth the way that I see it. As you said, I think it doesn't really fundamentally alter the dynamic. But of course the, the bullish case for me remains that there are no fiat alternatives to the dollar that are incredible. Of course, the yuan could be, I think the yuan would probably be able to displace demand for dollar very quickly. But the Chinese government does not want that. You know, they are very clearly not interested in replacing the dollar because if they wanted to, the, you know, they would just open up Chinese capital markets. And if you do that, then large capital holders would be able to hold yuan and Chinese government treasuries because they'd be able to get in and out of them quickly. But by having capital market controls. If you're the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, if you're the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, you just can't hold significant amounts of money in China or in Chinese debt or in Chinese currency. So your choices then are just the dollar or what I like to call dollars plus country risk, which is other fiat currencies.
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Corey Klippenstein
Right. So there's got to be something to the idea that, you know, the yuan, the yen and the pound and the euro all trade over the decades in a band around the dollar anyway. So they're almost just like non pegged floating dollar coins anyway. And it's only truly disconnected regimes that allow their currencies to actually float. And that's, that's a worse bargain as you see by all of them essentially hyper inflating over some period of time, whether it's the lira or the peso or whatever. They just do worse if they aren't really truly part of the club.
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Saifedean Ammous
So yeah, no fiat currencies have outperformed the dollar sustainably.
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Corey Klippenstein
So one of the, yeah, my point being there is that there's not a bunch of people in Euros where the Euro is always kind of stable against the dollar anyway that are like rushing into dollars. So you really only are talking about a handful of hyperinflationary type regimes like Turkey, Argentina and a few other where there would be supposedly all this incremental demand. But as you said, most of these people are kind of storing their assets not in the local currency anyway. I always make the joke about Turks stack flats instead of stacking sats. Everybody's retirement program is owning some apartments that, you know, relatively keep pace with inflation. And that's how old people retire is by collecting those rents in their, in their advanced years. And it's very similar in Argentina. Like you just, you have to own a bunch of apartments and housing as your savings. So yeah, it is hard to see, you know, how this makes a massive dent in where we're headed. So then, you know, the other option is to grow your way out of it. And this is why there's such a huge bet on AI and it's why the politicians that, that are smart enough to latch onto a marketing angle are, are promoting that we could see GDP rise, you know, or GDP growth rates rise a lot more than they have in the last few decades. And that if you could get back to a world where you're growing 6%, 7%, 8% a year, you could basically grow your way out of this debt burden and outpace it. That's a heck of a bet to make. And of course anybody making that promise and making that prediction will pay no penalty for being wrong. I'm curious how you see the, hey, we're going to grow our way out of it. I think Trump came out and said he thinks that we'll grow 12 or 13% per year at some point because of technological advancement.
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Saifedean Ammous
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Yeah, I mean I I'm sympathetic to the bullish AI view. I think it's going to increase productivity. I don't buy into the AI doom scenari. I don't think it's going to cause mass unemployment and it's not going to cause massive social destruction. I think it's just another way in which we increase our productivity and that's a good thing.
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Now the extent to which it's going
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to increase our productivity and increase growth is not clear. I think it'll be substantial. But can it shift the US economy from 2, 3% to 10 12%? I highly doubt it. I think there is enormous room for growth, but I, I'm skeptical that it can make that big of a difference. I just think, yeah, there will be productivity gains, but again, the, no matter how much productivity gains there are, inflation just stands there ready to eat it all up. There's just so much demand for inflation and there's so much political constituency for inflation in all forms, whether it's war, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, buying elections, whatever it is. I think they're just going to be eating up whatever slack AI creates, whatever breathing room AI creates. The political process has gotten to a point where it's going to eat all of that up. We have so much entitlements, we have so much demand for inflation through all kinds of forms, healthcare, war, and these things just are going to get worse. I don't really see it ultimately making that much of a difference. I think the I, I think the fundamental scenario is that there's just going to be more and more inflation, there's going to be more devaluation of the dollar. Whatever happens with AI, whatever, you know, AI is going to increase productivity, which you would expect to raise the market price or the market value of dollars, but still, and you know, so AI, stable coins. Think about all of these bullish scenarios for the dollar. I still think they are no match for the money printer. The money printer will eat it all up. And the question of how much is it going to eat and how much demand and how much growth is a difficult one to answer. But I don't fundamentally think there's anything going to, that anything is going to change. I think what happened with Trump and Musk is really the most optimistic scenario possible for stopping the train of runaway spending. You know, you had Trump, who won, and it was a pretty huge victory. I had a giant mandate. He had Congress, he had the Senate, he's got the Supreme Court, and he had Elon Musk and the billionaires and the tech Bros, and they were, you know, posting Hayek essays about reducing spending. And Milton Friedman memes that moment is not going to come again. You know, they blew it all on wars and all kinds of stupid things, and they made absolutely no difference into governments.
- [36:37]
Corey Klippenstein
Two months left. Two months left for what? To get, to get something done. Anything that was still left on the table. They've got two months left because it's summer. They have September and October, and then it looks like, they'll probably, you know, lose the House in November, at the beginning of November.
- [36:53]
Saifedean Ammous
And then starting then, is there going to be impeachment and politics and it's
- [36:57]
Corey Klippenstein
literally just going to be two years of hearings uncovering, unfortunately, the massive crimes and fraud of the first two years of the administration. There have been good things, there have been things in the pro column, but there's been a lot in the con column, pun intended this time.
- [37:13]
Saifedean Ammous
You know, you, I mean, it's, it's not.
- [37:15]
Corey Klippenstein
You have to stop for my dad joke. I said there's been a lot in the pro column. There's been a lot in the conversation column. I gotta get my dad jokes in there somewhere.
- [37:28]
Saifedean Ammous
I'm becoming the dad who doesn't get these jokes. No, but I think, you know, it's, it's, it's bearish for you if you're a Trump supporter, but it might actually be bullish for the dollar because deadlock really is the best thing that can happen for the dollar because it's going to be much harder to get into a new war if Congress and the Senate are keeping the President busy with impeachment hearings and with all of these things. So, you know, deadlock is what is the, is the best thing that can happen to inflation because it makes it harder for government to spend. So this might be the case, but again, the spending is baked in the, all of the major things are just on autopilot and there's no way of stopping them. Maybe Musk might have maybe had the best chance in decades and four decades of making a difference in that. But I don't think that that's, that that's going to be repeating.
- [38:26]
Corey Klippenstein
Hey, they are, they are digitizing the, the federal pension or like the federal employee records, the mines, you know, they have these giant tunnels because that's the only space that can house these documents accumulated over the decades. That's, like the one thing that apparently did survive from Doge and that team actually did basically figure it out and have these football fields of documents digitized now, which is crazy. So there were some bright spots and some things that carried forward. And, you know, we'll, I do feel like we'll get back to it because it was so popular and it's just so obvious. I think when it was so rushed, it was harder. But the obvious logic of making government more, you know, efficient and technically savvy, I mean, it just, it, it's popular with everyone on both sides of the aisle because the people on the dole that get the Benefits, they get them faster. And the people that want to spend less, you get to spend less. So everybody's kind of actually aligned on both sides of the aisle, making that more efficient. And the people who do the work want it as well. And they actually were open to the help. You know, obviously, the downside there is if everything is digitized and it's all controlled, it's much easier to kind of have under the thumb of somebody that gets authoritarian and wants to steal. So, you know, careful what you wish for. On the Trump thing, when I just kind of, you know, read the tea leaves and see what happened, I do think it's interesting that, you know, his. His IRS deal that he, you know, his own lawyers cut the deal with his own lawyers that he had installed at the IRS that got tossed out either yesterday or Friday. So his IRS deal is nullified, and then finally one of his own lawyers screwed him over.
- [40:14]
Saifedean Ammous
Is that what happened?
- [40:15]
Corey Klippenstein
Basically, no. He installed his own Trump Organization lawyers on the IRS side when he came in, and then he had his lawyers cut a deal with his old lawyers to get him off the hook forever so that he could never be audited. And of course, finally, a judge actually looked. Looked at what they had done and saw that this was just a rigged con job and disallowed it. So he is subject to audits and IRS penalties in the future. And. And for the crimes that he's committed since taking office. And then this morning, this morning, one of his most famous rape cases, one of the women that he raped back in the day, finally got her civil judgment, and he's been ordered to actually pay out the civil judgment. You know, so obviously it happened way too long ago for it to be criminal. Way past that. But he did lose that and has to pay her now.
- [41:07]
Saifedean Ammous
I can't even keep up with it. But I think one of the most interesting ones is the shitcoins for pardons scheme. I don't know how familiar you are with that one, but apparently.
- [41:16]
Corey Klippenstein
What do you think? Safe I have Here come Corey T shirts and hats. Do you think I've been on top of the pardons thing?
- [41:22]
Saifedean Ammous
Yeah, I know, I know. Who am I talking to? But. Yeah, but apparently, basically, a lot of the people who got pardons got their pardons and also happened to buy significant stakes in some significant.
- [41:35]
Corey Klippenstein
Yeah, Justin sun and CZ both got their pardons the same way. They just lined the pockets of the Trumps. And that's how you get pardons. Yeah, but specifically this is how like. And you've got The. You've got Trump connected people getting this. There was some kind of. I wasn't even aware of this. It was so, so shady and out of our area. But there was some kind of $722 million Bitcoin mining Ponzi that ran for a few years, and they got the, they had, they hired Trump affiliated lawyers and got that tossed out this week.
- [42:17]
Saifedean Ammous
Is, I mean, it's so, it's all so blatant that it's, it's, it's difficult to believe that there's no hidden plan to get away with it somehow. Are they just going to cancel elections? Are they going to appoint him into king for life and then have.
- [42:33]
Corey Klippenstein
I don't think so. I think he's just kind of, you know, he's 80 and he's just going to try to amass as much power as possible, as much money as possible. And, you know, if they come after him, he has enough money at this point, you know, thanks to his crypto crimes, Trump has enough money to just tie it up in courts, and he has enough popularity among his base to always make it unpopular and sort of, you know, choke the media and choke social media with his supporters until he dies. So this is kind of like, you know, what is it? What is it? What's the thing that rich people always do? They say, like, build, borrow, die or something. Yeah, like you borrow and then you die. Right. And so I think he just, you know, built himself enough of a kitty now. It was actually ambiguous when he first took office whether he even had a positive net worth in 2016. I think he clearly does now from, you know, two or three billion dollars of crypto profits the last year and a half. Has a, has a very positive net worth. And I think that's enough to see him through the end of his life. Just be being able to insulate himself and, you know, MAGA popularity and expensive lawyers kind of staving things off. So I don't. He won't see prison time, and I think that will be wildly unpopular to pursue him, you know, criminally. What's that?
- [43:54]
Saifedean Ammous
What about his sons?
- [43:57]
Corey Klippenstein
I wouldn't want to be. I wouldn't want to be Eric or Don Jr. For the next 10 years, that's for sure.
- [44:05]
Saifedean Ammous
Yeah, that's, that's the tricky part, because they're also involved in the crypto business.
- [44:10]
Corey Klippenstein
Oh, yeah.
- [44:11]
Saifedean Ammous
Yeah.
- [44:11]
Corey Klippenstein
I mean, so many, so many different things. And I think you'll see a big backlash against Poly Market and Kalshi, the prediction markets as well, which I Think both of them have Don Jr. As an advisor. And you know, they basically gutted the CFTC so that these guys could launch and make a ton of money because there's no enforcement lawyers at the CFTC anymore. I think they fired five and the sixth one quit. So there's just no enforcement basically going on over there anymore. And they've just been trying to move as much, as much as many of the industries that they're invested in that they've promoted, whether it's crypto, whether it's prediction markets, they've moved them over to the CFTC and away from the SEC deliberately because there's no enforcement there and they'll be gone with their winnings and they'll sell secondaries in the next $20 billion calci round or whatever long before they ever actually face any repercussions from this. So anyway, I think what is actually more interesting, and I wanted to talk to you about this because I think it's tied to the kind of the rise of the DSA. Democratic Socialists of America party has 120,000 card carrying members now. They openly, you know, hashtag communism on mostly blue sky, I'm sure. But you see it on Twitter as well. You have Mamdani's acceptance speech talking about, you know, we can get you out of the frigidity of infinite rugged individualism and welcome you into the warmth of collectivism and get elected on that, while having Bernie Swearman and, you know, AOC officiate. You know, it's just, I think when you have taken capitalism past the mark, where it's about, you know, freedom and individualism and letting markets run and you get to the place where it's kind of cronyism and kleptocracy, which is clearly where we are right now, that's when you open the door for crazy backlash, you know. So I think these things go in cycles and you know, we deserve what's coming to us because we allowed capitalism to metastasize into theft with no honor, no shame. You have Lutnick out there palling around with Epstein and lying on national TV constant, constantly and like every other country still has some shame. And these people resign. They're either pressured to resign or they do out of disgrace and nobody ever resigns or steps aside in the U.S. it's just like, can I get away with it legally or can I make more money? They're all running an equation where they're like, can I make enough money that when I get penalized or have to pay for lawyers to cover this up or like fend it off, will it be net positive for my net worth? And that's the calculation. It's not. And I see this on Twitter all the time too. I never used to see this six, seven years ago. I see it constantly, people just cheering on people that get over on other people and play kind of like zero sum games where they're basically stealing. So you have this whole class of people that just run online marketing campaigns, whether it's for crypto shitcoins or whether it's for brain powders or whether it's for, you know, ingestible GLP drugs that don't actually work. But if you, you know, sell enough of it and there's no shame in promoting and cheering these people on for stealing a bunch of money from other people. And that I think is kind of new and culturally rotten. And I think just as, you know, wokeness and all the, you know, identity politics has had a big backlash and is, thank God, finally in retreat. I think we are seeing a massive spike in just the complete removal of like morality, shame, integrity, honor from the middle of discourse. And we're very kind of spiritually rotten in the USA right now. And it's really gross. And I do think it's largely because the guy at the top operates that way and it makes it kind of okay for everybody that was kind of a sheep to just fall in line and think that that's okay too. So unfortunately what you're going to see is you're going to, you know, you obviously have some factions of the Republicans in the right, so you have like, you know, David and Club for Growth that actually are like honorable and high integrity and it's like an ideals based organization. But more you're going to have people just kind of indignant about how gross and criminal it all is and how nasty it just seems out there now that we're not playing win win games, we're playing win lose games. And you get rich by taking and stealing from other people and getting over on them. And so the backlash is, you know, those guys that are screwing everybody back to the kibbutz, let's go. Let's go. Socialism, communism again. And I think that is exactly why the DSA is rising is because this all looks so gross and criminal.
- [48:55]
Saifedean Ammous
Oh, I agree entirely. I think this is, this is really the, the real cost of the failure to cut down on government spending, cut down on war, cut down on all of this insanity is that it's just completely discredited the idea that there's anything worthwhile in free market ideas. And I'm, you know, I say this with a lot of bitterness because I'm going to be paying the price for this in terms of my intellectual credibility, in terms of my book sales. It's just completely discredited the notion that free markets can work. It's very difficult for me to keep a straight face when I'm trying to talk to a socialist now, because in their mind, free markets means Trump's shitcoin scams, Melee's inflation scams, all of these right wing people who use this rhetoric and then get in and then just do the same thing. But, and you know, it's actually worse than the, I mean, it's less morally defensible than the communist and socialist idea, because the communist and socialist idea is, all right, we're going to rob you of your money so that we can give it to the poor. I think that's theft. I think it's criminal, I think it's destructive. I think it'll destroy society. I think it's even more destructive than theft. You know, just from economic perspective, if you're handing out money to everybody, you're going to destroy the currency. If you're having only a few people at the top steal, you can still maintain the currency. But morally, it is much more appealing to people to tell them, we're going to rob the rich to give the poor. And it's much more defensible to argue that, you know, if the choice is we're going to destroy the currency, we're going to inflate the money supply, we're going to print them a whole bunch of money, but we're going to hand it out to Trump and his friends and his cronies versus we're going to hand it out to single moms and poor downtrodden communities and all of that stuff. It's really difficult to stand there and, you know, hold up my Hayek and my Rothbard and tell them, no, no, no, no, actually your guys are going to just destroy the currency and destroy the ability to perform economic calculation. Here's what happened in Russia and here's what happened in Cambodia. It's going to be very, very, very difficult. And, you know, I think there's also another angle to it, which is that. But if you look at Latin America, for instance, I think this is, this, this can be quite disconcerting. If you look at a place like Brazil, Brazil has got a president who claims to be a communist and Argentina's got a president who claims to be a capitalist. They're both liars, they're both just politicians. But ultimately, you know, where would you rather live? For me, I don't care what the president is lying about. The really, the thing that matters the most is than what's happening with the money supply. That really is the ultimate measure, because anybody can say whatever they want. They can lie about whatever they want. You can call yourself a capitalist, you can call yourself a communist, you can call yourself a libertarian, you can call yourself a socialist. Whatever it is doesn't matter. What matters more than all of that stuff, than all of these cliches, all of these old college room discussions? What matters is the money supply. What are you doing with the money supply? Is the money supply going up a lot or a little? And if you look at over the last couple of years, you know, the communists in Brazil have done a much better job with inflation. Not just the last couple of years, actually. Lula, surprisingly, has done an incredibly good job with maintaining the value of the currency over the terms in which. In which he's been president. It's actually astonishing. You know, I have this. I have this standard dunk format where whenever a politician anywhere says something bad about bitcoin, I just go and look at the time in which he was in office, and I look at the exchange rate of his currency against the dollar, against gold, or against bitcoin.
- [52:44]
And then I post the chart and
- [52:46]
I say, hey, this guy who's telling you that bitcoin's bad, here's what happened. Here's what he's done to his currency. And he's. No wonder he doesn't like bitcoin. So I've done this with Erdogan. I've done it with Karstens, who was the chief of the Mexican Central Bank. And then I remember, I one day, someone in Brazil, or I think it was, maybe, I'm not sure if it was Lula or whoever it was, but somebody in Brazil said something bad about bitcoin or they passed a law that was bad about bitcoin. So, you know, I whipped out the old tried and tested method of dunking on them. So I went. And I was like, all right, let's see what Lula has done with his currency. And to my surprise, over the term, over his term, his currency had actually appreciated next to the dollar for a significant period of time. And so I couldn't make the dunk.
- [53:30]
Corey Klippenstein
And.
- [53:30]
Saifedean Ammous
And it was really, I think, a very telling moment because for all of my talk about capitalism and communism and the problems of socialism and communism, none of that stuff matters. If you're destroying the currency, none of it matters. You know, no matter what cliches you repeat, no matter how passionate you are, when you speak in your speeches, as Milei does, if you're quadrupling the money supply in two years, it's game over. Nothing matters, you know, and if you're not quadrupling the money supply, as the Brazilians are doing, then you're doing a much better job. So it's, I think, you know, as you said, the backlash against woke. I think we're going to see something similar, unfortunately happen to free market ideas over the coming years. It's going to be devastating. I think in the us, In Europe and in Latin America in particular, I think they, these ideas are just going to be completely discredited. All that happens when you vote for free market people is the president and his cronies make a lot of money. At least when you vote for the communists, you know, you get, you get the illusion that things are going to be better for a few years, but they won't. But at least you can pretend that they might.
- [54:45]
Corey Klippenstein
It's definitely, I mean, that, that has been always like the, the feel good thing, especially for young people that don't study much history and they don't get much history in school anymore. And so it takes till your 30s or 40s and 50s or whatever, maybe never before you actually wake up to the fact that this will inevitably fail and that, you know, feeling good and pretending to do good or thinking that you're doing good ends up really harming a lot of people with these authoritarian centralized policies. So I think what we're headed into, and I think it's already kind of kicked off and it's really changed the way that I'm kind of talking about bitcoin and how I'm selling bitcoin and educating people about bitcoin and kind of pointing my, my company and media partners and everybody toward it is really just about bitcoin being freedom money and being something outside the system. And kleptocracy isn't good, and you want to have some bitcoin and communism isn't good, you're going to want to have some bitcoin. And so it's almost getting back to like the easiest sale ever again to just point out that you might want to have some just in case. And every single new piece of news that I see about, you know, essentially the de facto CBDCs accelerating in the U.S. to the real CBDCs that are called that accelerating in the EU to, you know, needing an ID to use social media in the U.K. and the EU, needing an ID to use AI in the U.S. vPN bans in Europe and the U.K. and in Utah and I'm sure coming to a state near you in the U.S. you know, just kind of on and on and on. You're going to want to have some real bitcoin and you really want to have it in self custody. You don't want to have to ask permission for it. And so I think, you know, I've often talked and I think I first started writing and talking about a sovereignty multiple for bitcoin in probably 2023 and just this idea that there's a multiple that everybody kind of has in their mind but actually is probably more shown by how you actually invest and where you store your wealth. And I've been able to kind of prove to myself on paper that for me, you know, I could mentally say like, oh, bitcoin is like 5x but really when you look at my financial decisions and where I actually, you know, make trade offs, I do have something like a 1.5 to 1.75 multiple for Bitcoin. Like I'd much rather like I would literally sell, you know, $175,000 worth of stock for $100,000 worth of Bitcoin. And I've proven that to myself over the years that I have like a sovereign self custody sovereignty, real on chain bitcoin sovereignty multiple for myself. If you're in Turkey it could be a lot higher. If you're in a repressive regime, if you're in Burma or something like that. I want to slag something I'm not super up to speed on but if you're in a very repressive inflationary regime, your sovereignty multiple might be a lot higher. For some Lebanese it might be 10x, you know, could be a lot higher. And that's really changed, you know, our product development roadmap at Swan and like what we really care about. So we're going like way harder at custody. You know, we have three different flavors of self custody now. We have way tighter controls on delegated custody with Bitgo and with Bakkt and make it way easier. We've always had free withdrawals since inception. We're just kind of teaching people much more. You know, it's, it's, I think people have gotten really comfortable since the launch of the ETFs and kind of the rise of microstrategy. Of having like bitcoin price exposure, which is not bitcoin ownership. So that's kind of where I'm at. That was the whole thesis behind launching, building. It took like a year and a half to build rbx, the real bitcoin exchange, which launched a couple of weeks ago and it's just taken off. But that lets you actually trade a bitcoin ETF for real on chain Bitcoin without paying cap gains tax. Obviously not financial advice, check with your advisor. But we've done the work and we've been able to kind of democratize for everybody. Something that only really rich people and funds were doing with their own lawyers out of New York for the last couple of years, since the launch of the ETFs. Mostly relevant obviously for holders of GBTC Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. So if you've got some old GBTC from when bitcoin was three and four digits and they're kind of soaking you with the one and a half percent fees per year, very cynically just keeping you trapped there because they won't redeem it for cash. We've been able to get people out of that. So, you know, it's things like that, I think the ETFs and having Larry Fink and Abby Johnson talking mostly truthfully about Bitcoin, but having an inferior product that's not sovereign and where you have to ask for permission to move it and you can only sell it back for cash and pay cap gains tax and all that, like it's not as good. And, you know, I think it's a fine place for people to start. It's probably not just marginally better. It's a lot better than buying shitcoins and then getting into bitcoin. I think it's, you know, because you're already learning about bitcoin if you're buying a bitcoin etf. And, you know, so what we just generally see and what now I actually advise on is like once bitcoin price exposure, like if that is the way that you get in is through a ticker in your brokerage account, great, fine. Now read the bitcoin standard, read Broken Money, read Inventing Bitcoin, go get you some. A smattering of Stefan Lavera podcast episodes from back in the day and get up to speed and find the Twitter followers that you like that actually provide signal and care about providing signal, not just noise. And if you tick over half a percent or 1% of your investable net worth in bitcoin price exposure, it's time to start putting in the work and understanding what you own and getting into real on chain bitcoin. So I think it is a great moment in time to be a proponent of real on chain bitcoin. You will save some of your friends and family and people that you meet and it's an easier, unfortunately it's an easier conversation as we see the battle and the separation between communists and kleptocrats and very little rational in between. And they are going to just be fighting and slinging mud at each other for the next two years. The second half of the Trump administration is just going to be just disgusting and ugly and we're all going to loathe everyone all the time. And it's a great time for, you know what? I expect to be another ripping bull run over the next few years. Yeah, this is the time to learn and get into it.
- [61:15]
Saifedean Ammous
Yeah, I agree entirely. I couldn't have put it better. I think this is really, we're getting to that point where so much gloating from the, from the no coiners, we're hearing a lot of the no coiners talking about this is the end for bitcoin. There's no coming back from this. You know, every time we are near the bottom, we start hearing those sounds coming out and it's always been an excellent time to buy because nothing has changed. You know, bitcoin is still operating exactly as it always has. New block every 10 minutes. Bitcoin still works. Anybody in the world can access it and the supply is going to have in a two year, in two years. We're at a point now where I think the, you know, the, the interest is pretty low. The mania is not here. The sentiment is terrible. This has usually been the best time to buy. This is, you know, unfortunately this is not the time when any of your friends are, are calling you and asking about bitcoin. They're all going to wait for the all time high to start asking you. So I think, you know, if you're a bitcoiner and you're frustrated by the, by all of your friends who don't buy bitcoin, now is the time to go and bother them with it and tell them buy it now. Don't come to me at the all time high and ask me if I should buy because, you know, you want to tell them to buy. The answer is you should always be buying bitcoin. But if you're coming to me at the all time high, then you know, that's the, that I, I Don't feel very comfortable about telling you to buy it because we may get into another bear market and then you're just going to hate me and hate bitcoin. So now's the time to call all of your no coiner friends and tell them now's the time to buy it is 50 down.
- [63:09]
Corey Klippenstein
Let me make a quick impassioned pitch here and it'll come with a little carrot. So Swan remains the most cost effective, most most sats for your buck on ramp in the US including versus like Coinbase Pro which deep hidden in their fine print. If you haven't bought a large chunk of bitcoin from them in the last 30 days, their fees are actually double. So if you do like a market order on the Coinbase Pro exchange, it's like 1.2% plus you have to pay for network fees to withdraw. So Swan, our fees are always free. It's very transparent. We take no spread. It's a 1% fee and you know, it's obviously a great trusted place to buy bitcoin. If you have any questions. I started doing this actually on a couple of gold shows. I did this with, with Michelle McCrory on Miles Franklin and then Jeremy on, on Kitco over the last few weeks. You can email me coreywan.com c-o r yuan.com if you have any questions about bitcoin, if you have any questions about some of the resources. I've got a little list that includes safe of course of some of the best things that you can do to get up to speed a little deeper. We have Swan Private is you know the, the vast majority of the volume that we do. You actually have a rep. Our customer service team is awesome. You have questions about self custody, guided self custody, collaborative self custody with Swan Vault delegated custody on your path to understanding how to custody. You know you can store it with, with us, through, through us, with, with Bakkt or Bitgo big public companies, OCC charters, regulated et cetera in the U.S. unfortunately we're still U.S. only so we're, we're not back internationally again yet. Hopefully in the future. But for us folks, again really it's, it's not a big deal. I don't get many emails. Everything happens on Twitter and then internally in the company in Slack. So it kind of stands out when I get an email and I love to answer them. So you know here to help and we'll be responsive if you want to get in touch on, on anything. If I can help, I will. It is, it is that Time of the cycle where we're going to go and we're going to beat back the Bears. And you know, I, I love this time. This, I call it, you know, wartime CEO or wartime Corey. Like, this is when I get all jazzed up and get fired up and I want to talk to people. It's not cool to wear a bitcoin T shirt out at the, you know, at the shopping center, in the restaurant when bitcoin's at all time high. It's fucking cool when bitcoin's at like 3k. It's cool when bitcoin's at 15k and you know, FTX just collapsed and people are like, why are you wearing a bitcoin T shirt? Everybody wears a bitcoin T shirt when the price is way up. That's not cool. There's no signal in that. It's fucking cool to carry the torch when it's in the shitter. And this is a very cool time to be into bitcoin.
- [66:00]
Saifedean Ammous
Yeah. And you know, it's not just about cool. It's also, you know, when it's at an all time high, it's quite likely that it's going to stay there for a while, crash, and then it'll be a while before it recovers. So that really is the worst time to be trying to getting people new into bitcoin. You want to do that probably closer to the bottom, but then at the bottom is when everybody's laughing at you. So you don't want to wear the T shirts, you don't want to talk to people. But really now's the time to do it. Now's the time to alienate your friends by pestering them with bitcoin.
- [66:30]
Corey Klippenstein
Yeah. And look, it's just inevitable. The price is the best marketing and almost everybody comes into bitcoin near an all time high. That's when new people come in. And frankly, if you buy and hold the peak, you never end up regretting that in the long run. Like, nobody regrets buying bitcoin, a big chunk of bitcoin and holding it since Bitcoin 1100 in 2013, imagine still holding that today. A lot of people did. Nobody regrets buying a bunch of bitcoin at like 15, 16, 17, $18,000 in late 2017. If you did, you're doing great, you know, so that's just, it just is how it works. Where you do your best stacking is in the trough after you gain conviction. But it's, it's very common to gain conviction during a bull market because that's where it's, it's noisy and then hopefully you stack the bear after that. So this is great stacking territory for people that got in. Don't be scared because you're down. Like this is, this is. You're supposed to buy the whole cost curve and you'll crush it. If you have a recurring purchase plan set up with us or one of the other brokers. That's what you should be doing during the bear is just automatically buying every day or every week.
- [67:39]
Saifedean Ammous
Absolutely, I agree entirely. So what else have you guys been up to at Swan? What's new?
- [67:44]
Corey Klippenstein
Yeah, so the RBX launch is obviously super exciting. I think the other really cool product that we launched about six weeks ago was Vigil Protocol. So Vigilprotocol AI, you can check that out. It's a family orchestration, family financial orchestration software. So basically what this is, is it gives any family the kind of peace of mind that you would have if you had a very sophisticated family office working for you. That would cost you a few hundred grand a year. Or it would be like having an ultra high net worth team at Goldman or JP Morgan or UBS or Morgan Stanley where the minimum is like 30 to 50 million dollars a year of assets on platform for them to even help you. And you know, really the quandary for most families is like you start to have a little bit of success and you have like, you know, maybe a million to 30 million of assets. Your financial life is very complicated, but you have to be the one that coordinates across your lawyer for all the estates and wills and all that trusts and all that, your financial advisor, your accountant, your insurance guy, your real estate, private equity and venture capital investments, you know, it's just, it's complicated. And so having software that actually ingests all of your documents, all of your contracts, sees across them, looks for inconsistencies, audits, that tells you what to say, what to send and is, is allowing you and democratizing that level of peace and sort of being able to sleep well at night knowing your affairs are in order and that if something ever happens, you've already verified for yourself, you're not just trusting one point service pollute, solution provider to kind of have this in mind for you. You actually have like a runbook ready to go. So this is something that we wanted to do for the last couple of years. It's for everybody by the way, not just hardcore bitcoiners. And obviously we have a lot of Swan clients and bitcoiners using this. But there's lots of people using it that have no interest in bitcoin, which is kind of interesting. And the way I kind of think about it is I think the biggest source of anxiety that families have and heads of household have is like, where to store your money. And that's what bitcoin solves. And I think that's why I was probably personally so drawn to launching Swan and helping solve that problem for so many people. And it's worked amazingly well. The second biggest source of anxiety is like, will my family be okay? And can I sleep well at night? Can I take that vacation not worrying about what's going to happen with the kids? Can I take that business trip knowing that my wife is going to be able to, like, access everything and. And know that the accounts exist and kind of pass it along? So, you know, it's. We didn't launch Swann with the Sleep well at night acronym in mind, but I think, you know, between bitcoin and now the family financial orchestration platform Again, VigilProtocol, AI is where you can check that out. And again, email me if you want to know more about that, can have conversations about it. I think we're addressing the second biggest source of anxiety so broadly. It's funny. I think if Swan continues to grow and succeed, what you'll basically see as a result is a reduction in divorce rates and SSRI prescriptions. We're removing strife and anxiety through bitcoin and family financial orchestration.
- [71:06]
Saifedean Ammous
So short big pharma is what you're telling us, basically?
- [71:09]
Corey Klippenstein
Well, I think they're creating more useful things now, hopefully with the help of AI. And, you know, I'm not in the 12 to 13% camp, but I do think there's a chance that we see fairly sustained, you know, 3 to 5%, which would be quite a bit above where we've been for the last, you know, 30, 40 years. So I am hopeful that's my bull case for America and the world is that we somehow grow enough to have a soft landing and that bitcoin can peacefully displace the dollar over the rest of the century without mega global strife conflagration. So I'm really hopeful that's what happens. This is what I've always talked about, the race to avoid the war. If we can move fast enough and have bitcoin rise fast enough, we're basically trying to get there before growth slows so much that it just dies under the burden of the debt. And we need bitcoin in place and enough people understanding it and fighting for it, for bitcoin to be able to take over. And it really is going to be. I mean, it really is already existential. Maybe not for you, but for tens and hundreds of millions of people around the world, that scenario is much brighter than one in which the system fractures and collapses violently.
- [72:29]
Saifedean Ammous
Yeah, I agree entirely. And I hope, I hope your optimism is in, is proven right. Thank you for joining us.
- [72:38]
Corey Klippenstein
I have a Turk in the house to keep my feet on the ground and tell me about the downside scenarios. I get to float and just keep striving for the things that I hope will happen.
- [72:50]
Saifedean Ammous
I hope so, too. Well, thank you so much, sir, for joining us. And best of luck to you and to Swan.
- [72:55]
Corey Klippenstein
Thank you, Saif, it's great to see you. Talk soon.
- [72:58]
Saifedean Ammous
Likewise. Cheers. Take care.