Bitcoin Is Entering Its Most Important Phase Yet | Cory Klippsten

Summary

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Market Disruptors Podcast

Episode: Bitcoin Is Entering Its Most Important Phase Yet

Guests: Cory Klippsten (Swan)
Hosts: Mark Moss & Jake Roque
Date: July 31, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the current state and future of Bitcoin, touching on macroeconomic trends, the evolution of Bitcoin market cycles, custody and inheritance solutions, industry controversies, and the socio-political crossroads facing both traditional finance and the crypto industry. Cory Klippsten, CEO of Swan, brings an insider’s view on how institutions and individuals are navigating this most pivotal phase for Bitcoin, revealing lessons from market booms/busts, regulatory battles, and the philosophical divide in a “kleptocracy versus communism” world.

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Key Topics & Insights

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1. Bitcoin Cycles: Where Are We Now?

[05:00–16:20]

• Discussion on Bitcoin’s Four-Year Cycles:
  Cory explains that each Bitcoin cycle has seen diminishing amplitude (both in run-ups and corrections), attributed partly to law of large numbers and broader adoption. Drawdowns are getting less severe, peaks less explosive.

  • Past drawdowns: 93%, 85%, 77%
  • Current drop (2025 cycle): ~54%

• On Market Psychology and Self-fulfilling Prophecy:
  – “Fibonacci lines on trading charts are bullshit, but they're a meme... everyone has the same lines...so you can trade them.” (Cory, [11:46])
  – The four-year cycle persists as much because traders expect it, as any underlying fundamentals.

• Macro View – Three Asset Race:
  “There's three horses in the race: dollars/treasuries, gold, and there's bitcoin... Bitcoin's the fastest horse in the race.” (Cory, [15:37])

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2. From Banker to Bitcoiner: Cory’s Personal Journey

[18:40–29:45]

• Background:
  Cory shares his pivot from mainstream finance (Morgan Stanley, Google) to angel investing, then being drawn to Bitcoin via the 2017 bull run and "crypto noise” in Silicon Valley.

  • "I had at least three swings and misses before it finally took.” (Cory, [22:39])

• Bitcoin Education & Building Swan:

  • Observed huge signal-to-noise problem in industry—lots of “crypto,” little solid Bitcoin content pre-2018.
  • Swan’s breakthrough: making education its marketing, building direct relationships with users and using content-driven acquisition strategies.
    • “We built a really great owned media distribution network... If you have a new product to launch, it automatically has a good install base.” (Cory, [28:12])

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3. Bitcoin Custody, Wealth, and Inheritance

[29:45–36:23]

• Swan’s Approach:
  Cory outlines a five-step custody spectrum from full self-custody (do it yourself), to collaborative (multi-sig), to fully-delegated (River model), to multi-institutional (for family offices, businesses).

  • “What I love about collaborative self-custody is, with me having two keys... if Swan goes away, my other key is out of state in a vault somewhere.” ([32:24])

• The Inheritance Question:
  Mark Moss highlights a major risk: few bitcoiners ensure heirs can access their Bitcoin (legally and technically).

  • “Knowing where the keys are isn’t the same as knowing how to use them... bitcoin that isn’t properly retitled could end up in probate.” (Mark, [17:48])

• Generational Wealth Tools:

  • Products like Swan’s "Generations" allow for gifting/estate planning with age triggers (kids receive at 18–25).
  • "Vigil Protocol" — an AI-driven family financial orchestration tool, aimed at affluent “one to thirty million” net worth “not ready for a full family office but needing real coordination.” ([35:04])

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4. Prime Trust, Tether & Industry Turmoil

[36:23–46:00]

• Prime Trust Meltdown:
  Cory calls out failings at past custodian Prime Trust, citing “criminal new management” and botched crypto management leading to “an $85 million hole,” forcing Swan to transition to stronger, regulated partners.

  • “They tried to basically trade their way out of it... evidently they blew something like an $85 million hole.” (Cory, [37:01])

• Tether Conflict:

  • Swan Mining had a JV with Tether; Cory alleges Tether “poached the team, infrastructure, the IP, the code” and set up a rival company, leading to lawsuits.
  • “Tether was our big investor... The reason that we’re suing them... is basically about that—they poached the team...” (Cory, [42:15])

• Regulatory Uncertainty:

  • Tether “is a CBDC,” says Cory. He claims US agencies have full visibility/censorship over its database.
    • “Tether is a CBDC and the five eyes and every three-letter agency is in the database.” ([46:09])

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5. Bitcoin vs. “Crypto”: Where the Line Now Lies

[47:30–53:35]

• End of Altcoin Era:
  • “We spent seven years battling altcoins and that’s basically over... Bitcoin is a real thing over here. And that’s it.” (Cory, [48:20])
  • Massive regulatory and reputational drag from celebrity meme coins and Trump’s crypto engagement.
    • “If the Trumps had stayed completely out of bitcoin and crypto... bitcoin would have gone well above 200k in 2025... as crazy as this is, if Kamala were president, I think the bitcoin price would be higher today.” (Cory, [49:02])

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6. Societal Crossroads: Kleptocracy, Communism, and the Third Way

[51:32–55:40]

• The Political Zeitgeist:

  • “What do you want, kleptocracy or communism? Those seem to be the choices. And Bitcoin is the third way.” (Cory, [52:04])
  • Cory argues both US parties are fundamentally “the Uni Party”—print-for-themselves and their friends.

• Engaging Socialists/Marxists:

  • Jake describes using common ground (“You’re right about people getting rich off the fiat system... but your remedy is worse than the disease.”) to introduce Bitcoin as an apolitical solution.

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7. Techno-Surveillance, AI, and Erosion of Freedom

[57:20–61:20]

• Emerging Tech & State Power:

  • Cory is alarmed at acceleration of surveillance—ID required for social media, AI tools, chat surveillance in the UK/EU, VPN bans, “chat control.”
    • “A lot of these things that are happening now are coming earlier than I would have thought... Those are the types of things I thought... wouldn’t come until the 2030s and they’re here now.” ([58:07])

• CBDCs Are Already Here:

  • “Stablecoins and the digital dollar... already are CBDCs in everything but name.” ([61:38])

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8. Crypto Lobbying vs. Bitcoin Advocacy in Washington

[62:27–67:22]

• Crypto Industry Influence:

  • Most crypto lobbying is aimed at regulatory “clarity” to benefit crypto tokens and stablecoins—Bitcoin riding on the coattails, sometimes with mixed results.

• On Policy Priorities:

  • “I welcome this era where it's actually just about databases with private keys that they want to call blockchain or crypto... I don't really care what you call it.” ([67:22])

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9. Strategy (STRC), Leverage, and Derivatives: Marketing vs. Reality

[70:38–83:27]

• On MicroStrategy, Strive, and the Leveraged Bitcoin Equity (LBE) Model:

  • “MicroStrategy put their hand in the fire... baked in years of gains into the price...”
  • “LBEs make perfect sense. So really all we’re quibbling over is how you market it and how you talk about Bitcoin.” ([82:00])

• On Mislabeling Derivatives as ‘Digital Money’:

  • “I think it's dangerous... If you can't do the hard work to actually do this through the actual securities regime... you're proving there's adverse selection and only dumb money and scammers are interested.” ([80:00])
  • "It’s not digital money. Bitcoin is digital money. Stop talking about a derivative with all kinds of risk as being digital money. It's not." (Cory, [83:14])

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Noteworthy Quotes & Moments

• On Four-Year Cycles:
  "There will be people that will start averaging out of bitcoin in the second half of 2029 no matter what.” — Cory, [12:48]

• On Policy:
  “Where I'm at probably now is like, which party isn't going to run the printer? And maybe that’s all that matters.” — Cory, [53:35]

• On Scams and the Importance of Clarity:
  “You have to actually start lying about bitcoin to really earn me as an enemy... I'll try to correct you first.” — Cory, [82:34]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Current Cycle & Market State: [05:00–16:20]
• Cory’s Journey into Bitcoin: [18:58–29:45]
• Bitcoin Custody & Inheritance: [29:45–36:23]
• Prime Trust, Tether, and Industry Scandals: [36:23–46:00]
• Bitcoin v. Crypto Maximalism: [47:30–53:35]
• Societal Crossroads & Political Philosophy: [51:32–55:40]
• Techno-Surveillance Threats: [57:20–61:20]
• Crypto Lobbying vs. Bitcoin Advocacy: [62:27–67:22]
• Leveraged Bitcoin Equities & Derivatives: [70:38–83:27]

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Closing Thoughts

In a candid, sometimes combative, but always deeply informed discussion, Cory Klippsten and the hosts map a landscape in which Bitcoin’s future leadership must balance technical innovation, ethical communication, regulatory challenges, and big-picture social change. The episode is a down-to-earth masterclass in Bitcoin’s real-world adoption, industry infighting, defending against the creeping statism of CBDCs and surveillance, and why bitcoiners must insist on clarity and truth—no matter how messy the path.

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Contact Cory:
“Email me: [e-mail]... Happy to help out, whatever you’re trying to get done in and around bitcoin.” ([88:53])

Find more: swan.com | @coreyclipston on Twitter

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Transcript

[Jake]

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[Corey Clipston]

He knows he's going to call me Hemroid Lloyd tomorrow. I know it.

[Jake]

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[Corey Clipston]

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[Jake]

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[Jake]

93%, 85% and then 77%.

[Corey Clipston]

They won't diminish forever. As crazy as this is. But like if, God forbid, Kamala were president, which I would have hated, I think the bitcoin price would be higher today. What do you want, kleptocracy or communism? Those seem to be the choices. And bitcoin is the third way.

[Jake]

And I know, like, you guys are having a relatively serious beef with Tether.

[Corey Clipston]

We're suing them in multiple jurisdictions and the executives that conspired with Tether to steal the business.

[Jake]

What do you think the probability is between the United States government trying to show of a CBDC down our throats versus a bitcoin friendly path? Welcome back to Market Disruptors. Today I'm joined by Corey Clipston of Swan. Thanks for coming on the show, Corey.

[Corey Clipston]

Hey, Jake, how's it going?

[Jake]

It's going good, man. I'm excited for this chat. It's been a crazy past 24 hours. I mentioned you right when we hopped on. We got the sailor retweet of the Samson Mao conversation yesterday and it's been a spicy time on X. A lot of opinions flying around. I'm trying to keep up with it all, trying to keep learning. It's exciting. It's exciting and it's exhausting kind of too, but it's cool. It's cool to be on the right.

[Corey Clipston]

You've been around for a while, but now you're in it. You're in it with two feet. And we bitcoin old heads and medium old heads. They're seeing Jake and obviously you're working with Mark on, on the channel and everything and you know, I, I can't remember the last time I reached out and was like, hey, I want to do your show. I. It's probably been years, but I was like, oh, shit. Like, I haven't talked to Mark in a minute. I think I was on in the Q1 or something and yeah, I definitely wanted to come and see what it's like talking to someone he felt worthy of sitting in the chair.

[Jake]

Yeah, I appreciate that, man. I, yeah, and I appreciate you reaching out. I definitely, I'm trying to come into it with humility and be like, listen, man, I get it. I know I'm an idiot. I'm like digging in. I'm trying to figure it out. You know, I've learned so much over the past five years, but also I'm really aware of everything that I don't know. So I'm trying to bring that like, humility into the conversations and be like, I think this is what's going on. This is what it looks like to me. But I know I don't know it all. Like, you know, look, stand open to perspective.

[Corey Clipston]

That approach. Obviously one data point doesn't mean everything, but that approach is what was used by Peter McCormick and that's the biggest and best bitcoin podcast of all time. Right. So I'd say that's, that's probably good to be following in his footsteps with that kind of approach. It does work.

[Jake]

Yeah, yeah, right on. Well, yeah, I appreciate that. I wanted to start off with just some like weapons grade pleb slop before we go into some of the deeper stuff. So we were talking about like price where we're at right now. You know, the where we're at in the cycle kind of justifications for the four year cycle, which a lot of people thought wasn't going to play out yet. Here we are, it looks like we're going right on schedule. So. Yeah, like where do you think we're at? Just in the current state of the market macro and. Yeah. Where bitcoin price is headed the rest of the year and next year.

[Corey Clipston]

Sure. So yeah. So four year cycles for anybody that may be just tuning in for the first time and learning about these things. We've had bull market, bull market peaks basically in late 2013, late 2017. And frankly the real retail peak in 21 was actually April, but there was kind of an echo institution, kind of a scam peak in, in November of 21. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So that was kind of like a altcoin driven pump that dragged bitcoin up as well. And then in 2025 there was a peak obviously in October we hit 126k. So that cycle, that four year cycle each time has been followed by a pretty rough bear market. What's nice if here at you know, 64K right now, and I think we touched 57 something last week. You know, if, if the ultimate bottom of this cycle is somewhere in the 50s, even the high 40s, like if we had just a disgusting liquidity driven flush next month or something before we start heading up again, that decline is going to be a lot shallower than it has in previous bear markets, which is kind of what you want to see. So you know, back in the day, I mean there was, there was a bear market that went, you know, down 86%. Something like that was the fall from 1100 to 180. Then there was basically another 85% drop from 19,700 was the peak in December of 17, December 2018 it hit 3150, 3150. And then the drop from the peak in 2021, I think we hit 69,400. We bottomed out after the FTX collapse. It was like 15:5, 15,500 in December of 2022. And so, yeah, I mean if we, we have gone up since then to 126, you know, right now the, the max drawdown has been like 54% or something like that. So it's a lot shallower. And so the, the amplitude of these, these rises and falls, as you'd expect, just based on the law of large numbers and continuing adoption of bitcoin by different types of, of investors and types of believers and levels of belief and you know, sovereign nations and ETFs, et cetera, et cetera, these cycles should diminish. These cycles in the early days could, you know, pretty logically be attributed to the havings and just the fact that basically leading up to the having the price has kind of risen because the price rises with adoption. So the miners make more money, a bunch of them pile in, but there's a lag in piling in with capital and actually being able to get capital back out through the mining of bitcoin. So you put pay the costs up front and so there's like a lag there. And then basically after the halving, that block reward every 10 minutes is half as much as it was before in bitcoin terms. And so then a lot of them end up out over their skis and they were exuberant and not all of them are great operators. There's a lot of dumb money that comes in and says, hey, I'm going to mine bitcoin at a discount, et cetera. And, and they end up being forced sellers and they kind of puke it out. That happened in this cycle. Interestingly, it's funny because a lot of these treasury companies talked about mining bitcoin through financial markets. So it was almost the same framework and of course it was really frothy in the bull market and there was a lot of new capital coming in and essentially mining financial markets to buy a lot of bitcoin. And a lot of them ended up puking up their bitcoin because they didn't hit scale and couldn't pull it off and couldn't actually become a fully fledged leveraged bitcoin equity like strategy only strive in the US actually accomplished it. And there were a bunch of attempts in, in 2025 of trying to basically really all it is is just tranching bitcoin returns into a senior tranche and a junior tranche and you have a senior tranche. That's some Preferreds. That adds leverage for the junior tranche that should, if managed well, be more volatile, but also have higher returns than bitcoin. That's literally all it is. They've been doing this without calling it a Treasury company or a leveraged Bitcoin equity, just with tranching bitcoin returns. They've been doing that in Japan since, like, 2017. So there wasn't really anything new here. And there's nothing magic about it, and there's nothing inherently good or bad about it. It's just tranching the returns of an instrument that has an expected growth path in purchasing power over time. So, like, calling it evil is silly. Calling it genius is silly. Like, it's just tranching of returns. We've been doing this forever, so. But a lot of people couldn't quite pull it off because you have to get to a certain size of like, you know, 800 million or a billion dollars of unencumbered bitcoin net asset value before you can lever up with perpetual preferred. And very few. Again, only one new entrant actually got there, which was Strive. And they got there by.

[Jake]

How many do you think tried?

[Corey Clipston]

Well, there were. There were four or five, like, credible entrants in 2025. And the US is all I'm really looking at. I'm not looking at the. The tiny ones that may have tax advantages here or there, you know, be good for retirement accounts or something like that in. In Europe or whatever. But in the U.S. you know, there were only four or five that actually had, like, large raises and actually got. Got in the game. And the only one that actually made it and succeeded was Strive. So it was like Naka and sequins and Pro Cap and Empery. I think that's the ones that so far have failed and Strive succeeded.

[Jake]

Interesting, interesting. So that's that.

[Corey Clipston]

But again, I think this, again, like, there's. There's just. In a bull market, there's a lot of capital that flows in essentially trying to get cheaper. Bitcoin somehow, whether it was mining, whether it was treasury companies, they get out over their skis and they end up being forced sellers. And I think that's why we kind of saw an extension of the cycle thing. The other thing you have to know is like, you know, you got a lot of traders that watch this channel and people that, you know, swing trade or day trade or whatever, you know, Fibonacci lines on trading charts are bullshit, but they're a meme and everybody has the same lines. And the software comes prepackaged with the lines and so you can trade them.

[Jake]

And so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

[Corey Clipston]

Becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And so there's a lot to be said for this four year cycle now. It's just become a self fulfilling prophecy. And there's a lot of people that just believe that you, you basically buy the year after the bull market peak and you start averaging out of it, you know, somewhere in the second half of the year of, of these four years. So there will be people regardless of whether cycles are true, regardless of whether any of us were actually right about it being driven by havings and, and minor exuberance and forced selling in the past or you know, treasury companies now or whatever, there will be people that will start averaging out of bitcoin in the second half of 2029 no matter what.

[Jake]

Yeah, and I think it's, I really think it's a combination.

[Corey Clipston]

And there will be people that start buying in the second half of 2030 no matter what.

[Jake]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And I think it's, I think it's a combination of the technical elements and then you know, maybe like half and a half technical elements and just the psychology of the investor to, to repeat that and just recognize the patterns. Like you said at the beginning. I think I saw these numbers recently. I think this is right. I think the past bear market drawdowns we've seen have been 93%, 85% and then 77% on the past three. And so it's like okay, if you continue that trajectory, we look at maybe a 70 drawdown this time that puts us in like you said that like low 50s, high 40s range, you know, and it would make sense to me that, and even if it, even if there weren't technical things contributing to that, the psychology of it could just be enough of just people. These are their expectations. So that's what they plan for and it, yeah, it fulfills itself.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah. My, my, let me see what the, what the number was. Yeah, I mean my, before the peak in which was a muted peak in my view, I thought 126 was low for a peak. I thought we should have done something like 180. You know, I would have been happy with like, as anything less than a 70% drawdown peak to trough. I wouldn't be happy with that now because we didn't get as high a peak as, as what we did. So like I'd, you know that would, that would take us from 126 down to 40 basically. I don't want to see 40 flat. So I'd be happy with like let's like what's 126.5 times like 0.4. Yeah. So like, interestingly, you know, a 60% drawdown would be just above 50K. So I think I'll be happy with the performance of bitcoin if we never see a 4 as the first digit ever again.

[Jake]

That would make me happy. That sounds reasonable.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, that's. That seems reasonable. That means we max out at a 60% draw down and that would be fine.

[Jake]

Especially with the, with the. What really felt like muted upside, you know, on the way up. It was only an 8x from the previous cycle. Yeah, 8x from the bottom, 2x from the previous.

[Corey Clipston]

And I do think you have to measure it the same way each time. But yeah, yeah, it's, it was, it was definitely less than some of us hoped. I do think there's a decent chance that we see something like, you know, much, much larger at some point in the future. Like inevitably there will be some cycle where the percentage rises higher than a previous cycle. They won't diminish forever. We've already.

[Jake]

There might be a cycle when it goes to infinity. Yeah, returns go to infinity.

[Corey Clipston]

I don't know about that.

[Jake]

But I mean in dollar terms, if the dollar goes to zero.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah. I'm not a do doomer. I think the dollar network effect is getting stronger right now and I think there's, there's three horses in the race. It's dollars, slash treasuries, there's gold and there's bitcoin. And you know, again I'm kind of with Druckenmiller from 2020 when he came out and said that bitcoin's the fastest horse in the race. But I think it's only, it's, it's a three asset race and the, everything else is just so dirty and weak. It, it's reasonable to expect bitcoin and gold to rise in purchasing power. But the dollar network effect to strengthen versus other fiat currencies for a couple of decades here potentially totally makes sense.

[Jake]

Yeah, we're going to see a lot of the weaker currencies fall into, into the dollar before I think we see that transition for more capital from dollar

[Corey Clipston]

into bitcoin or just continue to take trade in like tighter bands around the dollar. I mean, let's be clear, like the pound and the euro and the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar and the Y trade in bands around the dollar anyway because they're all just kind of dollar proxies. And underpinned the whole western system kind of just wants to keep those currencies relatively stable against each other. So you rarely see them get kind of way out of band. The only ones that get way out of band are the ones that are outside the system, you know, that we would call autocracies because they're the baddies and they get, they, their population gets screwed. Because that's where you see the Argentine peso and the Turkish lira. Just hyperinflate, basically.

[Jake]

Yeah. 70% year over year, 50% year over year. That sort of stuff that just. You're done for. Yeah. Can't imagine just working for like 40, 50 years and thinking that, you know,

[Corey Clipston]

they don't, they're not stupid, they don't steal it, they don't store their value in that currency. You know, we always talk about stacking sats in bitcoin. I made this joke, but it's actually like true in Argentina and Turkey they stack flats.

[Jake]

Yeah.

[Corey Clipston]

You know, like your retirement plan is owning enough rental units that relatively well keeps up with inflation and people will pay that rent. And that's your retirement. So everybody in Istanbul owns a few flats.

[Mark Moss]

If you hold bitcoin, I want you to think about something just for a second. Not how you store it, but who gets it when you're gone. Most self custody bitcoiners have never tested if their family could access it if they were gone. Knowing where the keys are isn't the same as knowing how to use them. That's a technical side. But what they most often miss is the legal side. So even if your family found the keys and they knew how to use them, there's no legal structure telling them the bitcoin is theirs or how it's supposed to pass to them. You see, bitcoin that isn't properly retitled and documented could end up in probate. So it's not one problem, it's two. Yes. Can your family physically access it? But is there a legal framework that says it's theirs? So if you want to find out, take a short two minute quiz and get your inheritance readiness score. Just go to unchained.com markmoss again, that's unchained.com markmoss and it's definitely worth two minutes to find out that it's actually handled or not.

[Jake]

I wonder if we could go back a little bit in your story to like when you got into the bitcoin space, why you got into the bitcoin space. And then coming forward to today, like what are the things that you're most focused on addressing or working on in Bitcoin as well.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, sure. So just by way of background, I used to work for big companies, worked for Microsoft and Morgan Stanley before B school, University of Chicago. Didn't quite get to the Austrians, but I did get to the monetarists. So like Milton Friedman and Freedom to choose or Free to choose, stuff like that. I didn't really see much. I was kind of aware of Mises at least, but I didn't get into like Minger and Hans Hermann Hoppe and stuff like that until I was into bitcoin. Much later I went to McKenzie, did some private equity and then finally, you know, I think it was basically the global financial crisis got me kind of looking at like what I was doing with my life and where I actually wanted to spend time. And that's where I finally made the conscious decision to get back into tech and that I actually wanted to angle toward early stage tech. Having worked at Microsoft and interned at Microsoft in the late 90s, I had a lot of friends in New York is where I was working for Microsoft that were in the dot com boom and bust. A lot of them stuck it out, went all the way down and then all the way back up and were doing well. And I think the iPhone came out in 2007 so that was exciting. Social network and the GFC people were aware that tech was cool and you could make money in it and it no longer became cool at all to be a banker because of the global financial crisis and they were kind of the villains. So I think there was kind of a generation of people that had angled toward New York and Wall street that then looked toward Silicon Valley and looking west, et cetera. So I took a job with Google because I didn't know what I was doing in startup land yet. And from Google is where I kind of did all my, my studying up and my kind of apprenticeship and started going to VC happy hours and going out to Silicon Valley a lot. And I had a bunch of teams that I managed out there. So I spent a lot of time on the West Coast. I started angel investing and advising some CEOs before I left Google. Transferred with them out here to LA at the beginning of 2013 and by that summer I jumped out and then I spent the next seven years as a full time angel investor and advisor to Silicon Valley Venture backed CEOs. So that was kind of the period mid 2013 till early 2020. That ended when I launched Swan with the team in March of 2020. The second half of that was getting into bitcoin. So I got pulled in like a lot of people with a big price rise in the spring of 2017.

[Jake]

Second half of 2013. Okay, gotcha.

[Corey Clipston]

The second half of that seven years was like me getting drawn further and further into bitcoin. So I had kind of like a seven year apprenticeship of how to run a tech company and you know, be a tech investor, et cetera. And then bitcoin kind of was overlaid on the second half of that. So yeah, it was all the noise in the first half of 2017 that drew me in. I had had some swings and misses before, so don't feel bad if it didn't take. I had one of my friends who actually wrote my, wrote my recommendation letter. One of them to get into University of Chicago was mining bitcoin back in like 2012. And I went and looked at my calendar. It was like late 2013 when he told me all about it and tried to get me into it and I just ignored it. Somebody gave me some bitcoin at a tech conference in January of 2014. I downloaded an app. It was like an eighth of a Bitcoin. Didn't do anything with it, lost the app, lost the password. Uh, somebody else asked me to put together like a slide, like a pitch deck for a series LLC where he bundled up a bunch of his, his startup shares and advisory shares and angel investments and, and two of them were bitcoin related companies. So I like actually made four slides about bitcoin and, and related companies and just in one ear out the other. So it, you know, I had at least three swings and misses before it finally took. And you know, it wasn't because I necessarily understood something. It was just there was so much noise in my social and professional network about bitcoin and unfortunately about crypto. All the altcoins was just kind of taking over Silicon Valley in 2017. And you know, everybody was in like this was the most credible companies in the space. It was Sequoia and Andresen, you know, going full on marketing shitcoins and creating huge funds to, to pump and dump shitcoins. And we didn't know that. We thought that all this stuff was innovation at first. Yeah. So I, you know, when did you figure that out?

[Jake]

Because I remember you talking about warning, like shitcoin warnings. 2020, 2021. I remember seeing that stuff and that was good for me.

[Corey Clipston]

Realistically. It was, I, it was definitely by April of 2018, probably around March of 2018 that I realized, you know, oh my God. One of these is like dramatically different than the others. But it took a while and I didn't even meet a bitcoiner in that space. I didn't meet a bitcoiner that, you know, actually had an opinion on on altcoins and the rest of crypto until the end of October. So I was like studying and meeting people for over five months in 2017. I was on Twitter, I was on Telegram, I was like on everything. And I didn't even meet a bitcoiner in for five months. I met Jimmy Song at a blockchain conference in Santa Monica at the Air Museum over there by the airport. And that was the first time I met a bitcoiner and like I found his show with Tone Vase where they would live stream and like little by little I think they started pointing me to Andreas Antonopoulos. I remember, you know, take. And I had, you know, I had kids and so I'm just like trying to fit in podcasts and YouTube stuff in between, like working and taking kids around and stuff like that. And it started to seep through and I started to get it safe. Dean's book came out I think March of 2018. So that was kind of like one of the final nails in the coffin that really helped a lot, the bitcoin standard. And so yeah, then it was, yeah, so that was basically when I figured it out. I was already like consulting to a bunch of freaking crypto companies and like just spent the next few months trying to wash out of that. And then by the time I was on summer vacation in, in Turkey, like August is, I came back, you know, essentially what, what, what Vitalik would call a bitcoin maximalist and I would just call a bitcoiner and completely focused on that. But then it was, you know, six months of like, oh, okay, like if I'm going to do this full time, you know, I'm probably going to have to start a company because there's nobody to work for. There is no bitcoin only industry. There's a huge crypto industry. But there like is. There weren't any really bitcoin companies and there weren't bitcoin funds. There was nobody to seed that investment in a bitcoin company back then. That infrastructure and that ecosystem is all new since 2020. So I had the idea for an education focused on ramp and I'd say the initial insight was really something I had done and seen for years in non bitcoin startups which was content led acquisition. So it was basically producing Educational content as you're marketing kind of originates, at least in becoming really popular in tech circles with 37 signals, which then became Basecamp. So this is like Jason Fried and David Henemeyer Hansen. They wrote Remote and Rework and some of those books. So they were always, you know, their marketing was their blog. It was signal versus noise that they started in 2001 or something like that, and, you know, probably run it to this day. And so a lot of startups picked up on that and started doing that, but nobody was doing that in bitcoin. And you had this situation where, like, you could get into crypto and not. And I'm social and reading, and I could be in the space for five months and not meet a bitcoiner. So it was just from a. From a signal versus noise. It was all noise and there was almost no signal. You know, the Tales from the crypt started in mid 2018. Stefan Lavera podcast started mid 2018. So these, like, there wasn't a lot of bitcoin education. I think Guy Swan got his, you know, the crypto economy back then. Now it's bitcoin audible. I think that was mid-2018 as well. So there was a. There were some educational things starting up in a. In a big way, but it was really hard to find them. And so I just felt like we could come out really with like an education department, have education be the marketing. And we built a really great owned media distribution network, basically doing our own shows, doing our own newsletters, doing our own, you know, social media and tweeting, et cetera. And, you know, the industry kind of grew up around that. But we were the first ones to do it in a big way, which is why, you know, to this day, we have the most YouTube views of any Bitcoin channel in. On YouTube since inception. You know, others will surpass us at some point for sure, but it's kind of a cool feather in the cap at some point to have that. And, you know, and it was a great way to do it. I think everybody does it now, and there's so much AI slop, and there's probably like a hundred times more hours of bitcoin content on YouTube and Twitter than there were, you know, six years ago. But that was a really good way to establish a brand and get going and kind of understand where the market was and, you know, when. And we have a huge owned audience now where. Where we can communicate directly to hundreds of thousands of people. And so when we were. Whenever we have, like, a new product to launch it automatically has a good install base. And that's when you can get into that positive feedback loop of you have enough people to get feedback and then you build according to their feedback and then you get more feedback, you know, so we always kind of, you know, 0 to 1 is the hard part. With a new product, we can always start at one. We always get enough users to get into the feedback cycle. And so that's, that's a good spot to be. And then as far as Swan and like what we do, I would say, you know, we're basically all about securing your financial future through bitcoin. And so obviously it's, it's getting people to establish a position. We try to map our product set basically to the customer journey of somebody getting into Bitcoin. And so, you know, you start with spot buys, limit buys. We'll talk a little bit about our newest product that launched a few weeks ago called rbx, the real bitcoin exchange that lets you exchange a bitcoin ETF for real onchain bitcoin without paying cap gains tax. Huge deal for gbt.

[Jake]

It's a great idea. I'd love to hear how you're doing it, but I saw that this morning and I was like, that's a good idea.

[Corey Clipston]

Cool. Yeah, let's, let's loop right back to that. After I just kind of lay out the product set. So rbx, limit orders, et cetera. And then as people kind of tick over like half a percent or 1% of their liquid net worth in bitcoin, they really start to think about, okay, are there other ways that I can buy this? So we have like IRA accounts, we have trust accounts, business accounts, and then they also start to think about custody. And I think about bitcoin custody basically being on a spectrum of like, you know, go at your own or kind of delegating responsibility to an institution of some sort. Right. So I think there's five steps on the custody spectrum and there's like total self custody where you have the keys and you just doing it yourself. We have Swan Sovereign, which is like supported self custody where you have a rep and you can do key ceremonies, but you actually have all the keys, but you have somebody to call and help you with device selection and you know, just, you know, what's a key ceremony that would just be like making sure you can actually move your coins.

[Jake]

Okay.

[Corey Clipston]

You know, or maybe helping you, helping you figure out how to, how to use like, man, I did not get enough sleep last night. But basically being able to use different, different Bitcoin custody tools and technologies and, and so supported self custody we think of as the second stop where you're like mostly on your own but you have some help. And then there's multisig, which we call collaborative self custody. And so that's where the client has two keys and we hold one for them. That's what I use, that's what I like. What I love about that is with me having two keys, I can just keep one on my desk. Nobody can do anything because that key happens to be there. Like they need my biometrics and everything to be able to sign with my Swan key in my app or my account or if Swan goes away, my other key is like out of state in a vault somewhere and nobody knows. Right. And I should never have to access that, but it's there if I need it. And if I lose my key that's on my desk, I can go get that and still sign and move my coins with that second key and the Swan key, right. And so that's something that you know, bit and go really innovated on a ton starting probably 12 years ago. Casa does it very well. Unchained does it well. We have, I think the, the simplest and easiest and best supported of these types of products. And that's, that's the Swan vault, which I highly recommend. And then there's fully delegated. Custody is the fourth stop on the spectrum. And that's basically where you have the ability to withdraw your coins at any time, but they're with a custodian, right. And so that's the, that's like the river model where they, you know, custody your coins for you. We have that, we call it Swan Safe. In our case, we prefer to have those coins with an OCC charted regulated custodian where there's two ledgers, where we're watching them, they're watching us. It's basically like the separation of brokerage and custody, which is how it works in the financial world. You don't let the exchange also custody the assets because they can fuck around with it. Which has historically been the problem with crypto exchanges in general is they lie about their ledger like ftx, Mount Gox, et cetera. So we've always changed.

[Jake]

You guys do proof of proof of reserves like River.

[Corey Clipston]

Our custodians bitcoin backed. Neither of them do that. They don't, they don't do proof of reserves. There are there, there's no downside to proof of reserves. There are a lot of over claims on what it actually does for you. Because if you, if you don't also publish your liabilities, then your assets don't really matter.

[Jake]

Yeah.

[Corey Clipston]

So, you know, I, I, I love,

[Jake]

I've seen River do both and I'm like, that seems like a great idea.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, I like it. And I think you kind of have to do that. It's probably table stakes if you're going to have your customers assets on the same balance sheet as your company's assets, which they are by definition. That's why you see all the scary language in the coinbase terms. It's like in the event of a bankruptcy, these assets of yours are actually on our balance sheet, which is obviously what happened to Celsius and Voyager and Blockfi, et cetera. So I'd much prefer them actually being protected by trust structures and outside of

[Jake]

a company or you guys seem to be good pushers of self custody.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean that's, that's the thing.

[Jake]

Start there.

[Corey Clipston]

You talk about, you talk about this and by the way, that just real quickly, like the fifth stop is like multi institutional custody. So that's really good for companies, family offices and that's basically where you have three keys split across three companies. And so Bitgo does that. Anchor Watch is just about to launch that on ramp. That's the only way they do custody, I think. And then we'll be launching that later this year, early next year as well. So then we'll kind of have like all five stops on the spectrum. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So that's kind of the way I think about that. And then the third stage is basically like you've been through a cycle, you have a lot of bitcoin or you're really deep into it and then you start to think about passing it on to the next generation or like making sure your family's good to go. And that's where like swan.com generations so generational gifting and a tax advantage way with an ascendancy age for the kids or the nephews or the grandkids or whatever, where they get the coins at a year of your choosing between 18 and 25. That's where we built Vigil Protocol. So like VigilProtocol AI is about family financial orchestration. It's for bitcoiners, but also for anybody that has some financial complexity. So it's kind of squarely aimed at people with like 1 to 30 million of assets where you don't have your own family office that costs 10, a quarter mil a year to run. And you're not quite maybe or you don't want to have ultra high net worth team taking some percentage of your assets every year at Goldman or Morgan. But you do need help coordinating across your accountant, your lawyer, your fa, your insurance, your real estate, your private equity and venture capital. And you just want to know for sure that you have it handled and that you can prove it to yourself that everything's going to go to the right place if something happens to you. So that's what Vigil's about. So that's kind of the way I think about it. It's like, you know, building your wealth, increasing your wealth, preserving your wealth.

[Jake]

What I was thinking was in terms of four with like the custody and trust sort of stuff. So I know, I'm curious to hear your side of the story on a couple things and I don't know if they're actually connected at all or not, but I know like the, the issues you guys ran into with Prime Trust and then the issues. And I know like you guys are having a relatively serious beef with Tether and Cantor and I don't know how much you can talk about this. I do not envy you. I hope that I never one day find myself beefing with Tether and Cantor in a legal battle. But I'm curious what you can tell me about it and like your side of the story, you know, like.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, here's what I would say though. So what I, what I will say is I think the model of separation of brokerage and custody is the right model. I, in retrospect, given that Prime Trust, obviously, you know, the new management that came in, in early 21 or whatever ended up basically being, I think I can say this like, I mean, basically criminal. Okay. And it was, it was Keystone Cop stuff. It wasn't, it wasn't like they were stealing. They basically. There was a hole where I think Abra had been sending Ethereum to an address that Prime Trust had burned the key and like they told them not to send it there anymore, but they ended UP sending like 8 or 9 million dollars worth of Ethereum into an address that nobody had the key to. And this is all, this is all in public. So I'm not giving anything away here. And I guess what happened is, I think the, the new management that came in. So this was after Purcell went on to start Fortress and left Prime Trust. The new management under, I think it was Tom Pageler, if I recall. I met him once briefly. He was very stressed out. That should have been an indicator. I think they tried to basically trade their way out of it. And I think they. They didn't do it well. And evidently they blew something like an $85 million hole in their balance sheet. So that is what eventually caused them. And then they were, like, late.

[Jake]

They were able to pass some of that along to. To you guys or, like, how. I mean, I don't know.

[Corey Clipston]

No, I mean, yeah, I. I probably shouldn't get into too much detail, but basically. Okay, you know, the. We had decided to go multi custodial just for, you know, risk mitigation. We were getting big and, like, it just made sense not to be dependent on one custodian. So we started doing that in, like, I'd say, like, mid to late 22, and we were moving some stuff over to Bitgo and building with them all through the first half. I think I even put out a big blog post about going multi custodial in early 23. And then Prime Trust started losing states. And in particular, there was one. It's okay if you. Like. Like, they lost Texas, which sucked, so they couldn't operate in Texas anymore. And that was like 15% of our business. They had already lost New York, which at the time was like 30% of our business. So you're talking about, like, what does that.

[Jake]

What does that mean? Like, customers in the states couldn't.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, they couldn't serve customers anymore.

[Jake]

Anymore.

[Corey Clipston]

So basically in. In 2020, when we launched Swan Trust, companies had reciprocity in all 50 states, which basically meant if you were a trust company from South Dakota or Wyoming or one of these, then New York would recognize that. Basically New York ended that reciprocity at some point in, like, 21. I think we even missed part of the bull market in 2021 for New York customers. Either that or, like, we lost it in early 2022 or something like that. But it was like a big hit because it was, you know, what happened

[Jake]

to the existing customers. Like, did they.

[Corey Clipston]

So this was the thing. So with New York and Texas, they could stay and just keep their coins there, and it was no big deal. And they could, like, withdraw them later if they wanted to. They just had to stop trading. And that was fine. That was orderly. And, like, you know, it was sucked for us on the revenue side, but it didn't have a big effect on the customers. The big problem was we got wind at some point in spring of 23 that they were going to get kicked out of Connecticut and Connecticut was going to force them to sell their coins. They weren't going to let Prime Trust Continue to custody the coins. And so that's why we left and that's when we went to Fortress and then eventually found much, much better custodians that are occ chartered that are public companies that are like really well known, well backed, well run and we've, we've gone to backed in Bitco which I love and the retirement accounts with Equity Trust which has been around since the 70s and you know august institution out of Cleveland and you know hosting golf tournaments and they have like huge rooms full of paper filers and you know they basically invented alternative assets in IRAs. They, they invented that for real estate in the 70s. So they kind of like everybody that, you know Kingdom Trust and Choice and all this like it all basically that all started with, with Equity Trust back in the 70s. So I love our partners now. It's great. Like the model I think is superior but again in a model it's only as good as the inputs and the inputs have to be good. And I think that was the, that was the great learning of, you know you maybe would have, if they hadn't screwed up you'd be fine. But they did screw up and so you know obviously we paid the price for that and that sucks on the Tether stuff. There's not much I can say other than that, you know it's, it's in the public domain that Swann under my leadership with the Swan mining team built the fastest deployment of hash rate in bitcoin history. So we went from like 0 to 12x a hash in 11 months and you know, obviously we've publicly charged the former executive.

[Jake]

Where'd you source those chips? Your asics?

[Corey Clipston]

They're almost all Bitmain.

[Jake]

Okay. Yeah, just had the capital to buy a bunch quickly and get them Tether's capital. Oh yeah.

[Corey Clipston]

So Tether was our big investor and, and we built mining with Tether and we did a joint venture with them and basically the lawsuit, the reason that we're suing them in multiple jurisdictions and the executives that conspired with Tether to steal the business is basically about that. So the mining team, they just poach?

[Jake]

I don't know.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, no, that's it. I mean they poached the team and the infrastructure and took all the relationships and the IP and the code and the documents and, and everything and like walked out the door and set up with the Swan mining team a total copycat company and just walked out the door. So that was, that's what that dispute is about. This. The thing is, what's Cantor's relationship Cantor is. I mean, it's just because Lutnik basically works for Devasini. So Giancarlo Devasini controls Tether unilaterally, and something like 80% of Lutnik's net worth is Tether stock. And a lot of his company's revenue is managing Tether's treasury assets. And, you know, Lutnick is the Commerce Secretary, but it's come out in public that, you know, when he supposedly, like, transferred control of his Canter shares to his kids, there had to be payment for that. Well, Tether is the collateral agent for that loan. So basically, Tether lent the money to Howard's kids so they could buy him out, almost guaranteed. If you're. If you're smart at all. You know, no money actually changed hands. And this is just like a ledger entry on the Tether side and some documents that none of us will ever see. But, you know, Cantor and the Latinx are completely tied and beholden to Tether, it appears, allegedly. And we basically have, like, a shady offshore behemoth operating out of El Salvador pretty much controlling the Commerce Secretary.

[Jake]

Interesting. Yeah. I'm not sure what to make of that, but that's. That's interesting. I wonder.

[Corey Clipston]

The things we found out are just unbelievable. I mean, it's. You know, when I. When I got into business, I believe

[Jake]

there's crazy stuff going on. That's for sure.

[Corey Clipston]

The only thing I was concerned about because I didn't have any exposure to Devasini. And, you know, they obviously put Paolo out front, and he's kind of a techie guy and nerdy and stuff like that. And, like, he seems pretty dope, and I like Keat and stuff like that.

[Jake]

Yeah, he's. I've gotten, like, a positive vibe. Yeah. My very limited exposure to Paulo, but.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, well, he's. He's a beard. Right. He's a front man, and he's not the real guy.

[Jake]

Yeah, right.

[Corey Clipston]

He's not the CEO and anything other other than title, he does. He can't do anything without Giancarlo saying go. So what you basically learn, All I cared about was whether they had the backing assets for usdt, because that was always the controversy, and that was everything that bitcoiners were ever concerned about. And even before I put a lot of my own wealth into bitcoin, I wanted to understand that for myself. And I basically got to some point in 2019ish where I thought, yeah, I'm pretty freaking sure these guys actually have the assets. And that while they may have lied about it in the past. There were reasons for that. They were able to work their way out of the hole and they actually have the backing assets. And I believe that to this day. So this to me is not being like a Tether truther and thinking that they don't have the assets backing usdt. I don't have any reason to disbelieve. Even though they can't actually get an audit done, I think these attestations are probably pretty accurate. And like that's not the issue. The real issue, it turns out, is like how they do business.

[Jake]

What do you think their relationship is with the United States government? Because I know it's a series like

[Corey Clipston]

Tether is a CBDC and the five eyes and every three letter agency is in the database and they can censor everything and reverse everything and they know exactly who everybody is. And it's a giant honeypot trying to like either keep people, you know, sort of manageable because they, they just gather the info until they need to pull the trigger or they just block it if it's already an enemy like they keep doing with Iran. Right. But I mean, let's be clear, like the Iranian economy runs on tether because the local currency is dog and they can't get enough cash dollars. So like it's Tether on Tron is how you actually get around and do things and buy things in Iran and

[Jake]

you have the trade off of the censorship risk versus your currency sucking. Yeah, basically.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, pretty much. And you know, they're not going to dip in and like censor your, you know, purchase of some bread or you know, rent or something like that. They're going to block $500 million of weapons payments,

[Jake]

which, you know, Treasure or Tether has been, I think the number one purchaser of U.S. treasuries. I don't know if that's right. I think I heard some. They're like for a duration of time.

[Corey Clipston]

Number 15 or something.

[Jake]

Number 15. Okay.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, yeah, they're raising, they're.

[Jake]

But I know they're buying a lot. Yeah, I know a lot.

[Corey Clipston]

The country's list, look, the era that we're moving into and you know, we talked about this a little in the pre show. You know, we spent, we spent seven years battling altcoins and that's basically over. That was kind of the 2017-2023 era inclusive of the rest of 23 kind of ended with the launch of the Bitcoin ETFs. And you know, I think Meme coins and Trump crypto Scams kind of just gave the lie to the whole non bitcoin crypto space. And you know, frankly, I just did a bitcoin, Did a. I'm sorry, did a digital assets banking conference last month in New York and I'm on stage with three crypto executives and they all sound like bitcoin maximalists. It's basically just bifurcated into bitcoin and like over scammers. I don't know, no okay.

[Mark Moss]

Infrastructure.

[Corey Clipston]

So that's all they see. Like, they don't, they don't. They don't do anything with altcoins at all anymore. They have no thesis on altcoins ever being worth anything, especially not as a basket. And so it's basically just about, you know, financial rails and incremental improvements to financial IT over here and bitcoin is a real thing over here. And that's it.

[Jake]

Yeah, it does seem like the, the Trump stuff was the nail in the coffin, which I think did a lot of damage to the, you know, public perception. And just bitcoin as a whole, I think there's a lot of thing, you know, I think there was. That was very damaging in ways that a lot of bitcoiners might not even understand because they don't understand how the normie mind views the crypto space as a whole. Right.

[Corey Clipston]

I think if. I think if the Trumps had stayed completely out of bitcoin and crypto financially, then bitcoin would have gone well above 200k in 2025. And I do think that was a massive drag. And I think if, you know, frankly, as crazy as this is, but like, if, God forbid, Kamala were president, which I would have hated, I think the bitcoin price would be higher today.

[Jake]

Totally. I totally agree.

[Corey Clipston]

You never know how these things go though. And I just, I don't think you ever want to give an inch to a socialist and you know, so I.

[Jake]

Dangerous game.

[Corey Clipston]

I'm. I'm okay. I'm okay. Giving, giving up a little bit of price progression, knowing that in the long arc of history, like freedom is better and you know, unfortunately, this version of capitalism is, is maybe even past cronyism and into just kleptocracy. It's just kind of theft by the political class is kind of where we're at, you know, but even that, well, it's probably morally less defensible than socialism for humanity. It's better like if you only have to pay off a few people at the top and let them kind of crime and grift their Way to riches. That's better than stealing from everybody. Way more.

[Jake]

Well, and shutting down a free market, you know, if you have some grifters plus free market versus totally centrally controlled, centrally planned economy. Yeah, the first ones.

[Corey Clipston]

But you get how hard it is

[Jake]

likely better for everybody.

[Corey Clipston]

Polite conversation, right? Like, I was talking to, I did Safe Show, I think yesterday or the day before. And he was like, I just the way that, the way that the west is just grifting and criming and how open it is and how much it's kind of cheered on and just like there's no shame and there's no resignations and you know, nobody pays any, any penalty for all the crime. And in fact, they can buy themselves pardons just by like knowing the Trumps are a Trump lawyer. You can't win an argument at a party with a socialist anymore. Safedin, the smartest, best writer, best speaker basically in bitcoin, can't win. He told me, you'll see it on the show, it's live podcast out today. Like, he said he can't win an argument with a socialist anymore because the morality in western capitalism is just so fucking rotten right now.

[Jake]

Yeah. And they see this. Okay, well, they, they present their concept as the alternative to what we have. And it's like, no, no, I'm not saying what we have is what we want, but, but yeah, I don't want what you're proposing either.

[Corey Clipston]

We're arguing a hypothetical and they're saying we're Robin Hood.

[Jake]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, it's all about the story. It's all about feelings.

[Corey Clipston]

Doesn't it? Like when I, when I say, oh, no, no, just capitalism isn't being done right right now, doesn't that sound like all the communists saying, like, well, it's never really been done.

[Jake]

Real socialism. Yeah, real communism. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

[Corey Clipston]

It's really, it's a really rough, brutal time. You know, I, I, I don't even think I was actually being fious, putting out a poll a couple days ago that said, like, who you got? You know, kleptocrats, communists. Like, what do you want, kleptocracy or communism? Those seem to be the choices. And bitcoin is the third way. And you know what's great about bitcoin is like this, the small minority on the left that is classical liberals. Classical liberalism is perfectly aligned with bitcoin. Classical liberalism is what this country was actually founded on. I'd say all of the founders of the United States and basically everybody that signed declaration 250 years ago are defined as classical. Classical liberals within the right, which has fascists and kleptocrats and crypto scammers and all this other bullshit. There's a small minority of true conservatives that just want to protect the things that we've done well and life, liberty, property. Just go crazy and figure out like not everything needs to progress. Like learn from history. Some things you just want to preserve and they want, you know, both of those are really kind of the same and they just want us not to run the printer. And so, you know, where I'm at probably now is like, which party isn't going to run the printer? And maybe that's all that matters. And I don't care where they are on the spectrum.

[Jake]

Well, and we don't have one. Both the parties are running the printers, you know.

[Corey Clipston]

Exactly. That's why they call it the Uni Party, because their whole goal is just to keep on printing money for them and their friends and to just keep on grifting. Right.

[Jake]

I wonder what you think of this. I've talked to a lot of some of the. We both lived in LA for a while. I'm in Orange county now. But, but I was surrounded. I was kind of in academic circles for a little bit, political circles for a bit. And you know, I was surrounded by a lot of the, you know, it was hot to be a commie, especially like five years ago. I feel like, you know, the socialist, Marxist, communist states and there's still a lot of it. Maybe my circles have changed a bit. But I found that with that group, I. The more like Marx, explicitly Marxist leaning group, I found that you could like, as a bitcoiner, I could come to them and like throw them a bone of like, hey listen, Marx got maybe a couple things right. I think he's a really, really terrible guy. But, but you could say, like you can point to what's wrong with the capitalist systems that we've had that have been built on fiat currencies. 1 Centralization of power is like a law of nature to some degree. So it's, it's natural. You'll. You'll see it flow throughout hierarchies and structures. But also too, it's like, okay, when you have that on top of broken money, that allows for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. As the rich become more powerful, they get more control over the control system, you know, more control over that. And then they line their own pockets and so you can come to them and throw Them the bone and be like, hey, hey, this thing that you feel that pisses you off. I'm totally on board with you on, like. You're totally right about a diagnosis of the problem here. The only issue is that your remedy is worse than maybe the problem you're diagnosing to begin with. But then you can start with, like, hey, I'm actually like, you know, kind of puts you on the same team a little bit in terms of we both want to solve this problem now. Here's your solution. Here's what's wrong with your Solution. Here's why 100 million people died in the last century as a result of, like, Marxist policies. Maybe we should not try that. Maybe we should try, you know, this alternative route. Let me talk to you about Bitcoin, that sort of thing.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, it's. It's. It's apolitical. I'm fortunate not to have been exposed to the types of circles that you just mentioned. That sounds awful, but, you know, I

[Jake]

think some nice, artsy, creative weirdos, you know, I kind of. I kind of. I'm a. I'm a Southern California boy. Some of that group I like. My spirit is with you to some degree. But you guys are like, the tactics are off.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, well, I was. I was born in Marin county to parents that met on Haight Ashbury, so I feel, like, pretty well inoculated against it. I'm just, like, allergic to all that shit at this point. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how many people have, like, traveled as far from, like, parents met on Haight Ashbury to going to University of Chicago. Like, it's. It's pretty. Pretty far from end to end on the spectrum. You were.

[Jake]

So you were talking a little bit about, like, the. The attacks on freedom. And I wonder if we can dig in, because I know that's something that's important. You and someone you're paying attention to in terms of overseas, in Europe, things that we're seeing here. I mean, across the western world, broadly, we're seeing significant encroachments on freedom. That seems supported by the technological advancements that we have. The surveillance state, AI Palantir, you know, Anthropic has partnered with the United States government in terms of, like, national defense. But we all know, like, our most. A big portion of our wars now are psychological and information. And we still have our kinetic wars going on too, unfortunately. But yeah, I wonder just what seems most important to you in terms of the advancements against freedom. What are you trying to Stop. What do you think will help us avoid some of those problems here in the United States?

[Corey Clipston]

Look, the problems are already here in the United States and they just usually get a little bit of a different marketing span and they're always lagging behind by a few months to a few years, versus the much more socialist and kind of like welcoming of tyranny vibe over in Europe. What I would say, broadly is a lot of these things that are happening now are coming earlier than I would have thought. So I think from requiring your ID to be linked to your social media accounts, where you can't post in the UK and now the eu. So UK a few weeks ago, EU this week. Those are the types of things I thought that we might be able to avoid completely or that if they came, wouldn't come until the2030s and they're here

[Jake]

now, so you, you can't, like, have an anon account there, basically. You have to, like, be like, hey, here's my identity.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, of course, in the UK now

[Jake]

I'm allowed to post.

[Corey Clipston]

And of course in the uk, they passed it under the guise of protecting the children. So if kids, of course, 16 aren't allowed on the social media networks, how are you going to prove that you're over 16? Well, there's only one way to do that, which is to verify your ID and do a face scan. Right. So that's how they did in the uk. They're doing it the same thing in the eu. I think they just passed it earlier this week. So I saw the announcement from Ursula von der Land, but I got to double check that for sure and see if it was like an announcement of an attempt or a schedule for doing it. But they're planning to do it and they will jam it through one way or another. The, the members of Parliament will jam it through as we've seen them do with chat control. They will jam it through chat control, which is them being in your. In your messages and checking it for content and forcing the tech companies to actually do that. It's not, it's not that they can, it's that they have to. And it failed five times. It failed five times. Even with the socialist tyrannical representatives, the MPs of the EU, they, it failed five times, they brought it back a sixth time, flipped the language so that it had to be a majority of people voting for it, of, of the entire assembly, not just the ones present, and forced the vote to happen like the first week of summer vacation. So it still passed by a wide majority, but it wasn't a majority of total mps, it was just a majority of the people that were there. So it failed. And now there's chat control in Europe and there's, and there's no, there's VPN bans coming, word, getting at it through AI. So they're restricting AI to only like no AI apps for kids. So you have to verify, otherwise you get a different version of it for the kids. So if you actually want these tools for work or for home or whatever, you have to verify your ID with these different Claude and ChatGPT, et cetera. On the CBDC angle, the EU has announced that they're like definitely launching the digital Euro. It's coming as fast as possible on the US side. Tether and circle and open USD and all of these, they already are CBDCs. They already are reversible, censorable. They're monitoring it constantly. They're just, you know, basically using all of global fintech and Wall street as dollar merchants. And that's really just to replace the falling demand from central banks around the world. So they're just replacing that with demand from individuals and companies instead of central banks and trying to kick this can down the road and roll over the debt a couple more cycles. It's still unsustainable and it's still a drop in the bucket versus the budget deficit and how much debt we owe and the fact that the biggest line item in the federal government is going to be treasury interest next year. But you know, they'll kick the can down the road a little bit through this dollar marketing.

[Jake]

What do you think the probability is between the United States government trying to shove a CBDC down our throats versus them, us like taking a, a bitcoin friendly path?

[Corey Clipston]

No, we already have CBDCs, the stable coins and the digital dollar that like it already is CBDC in everything but name. Like they're already tracking everything all the time. Like what else do you need?

[Jake]

I wonder what would happen if, and you know, there's a. The world's complicated, it's hard to say, it's hard to see. But I wonder what would happen if we had an RFK like figure taking over the government this last cycle instead of Trump or something like that, you know, and if there was like a genuine reception of bitcoin at the executive branch level, at the, you know, at the highest level, I wonder. It might be just delusionally optimistic, you know, but I wonder what could happen. Like that played out.

[Corey Clipston]

He didn't write his own speech. He's Surrounded by crypto people. RFK2.

[Jake]

Yeah.

[Corey Clipston]

Did not, did not write his own speech, doesn't really understand it. Did a bunch of crypto crapto. He's surrounded by crypto crapto people. His kid is a big shitcoiner. Like, there was nothing special about RFK either. The thing it did do is it spurred Trump to be able to see that that was a winning political issue. And you know, you could look, there are, there are two sides to the coin with almost anything that happens, right. Like, it's great the ETFs came early. It's sad that a bunch of, you know, lettuce hands, institutions and retail got easy access to bitcoin without learning about it. And so they're motivated sellers if the price drops because they don't know what they own. So it's good, easy to buy bitcoin. Bad is that it's easy to buy bitcoin with the politics thing. It's similar. It's nice that they try to do some bitcoin legislation, but they're not really committed to it. And of course, as soon as there's a wedge in with bitcoin, as always, the crypto people plow through. And essentially if there's two sides negotiating, there's basically D.C. new York and crypto negotiating. The only thing they both wanted was stablecoin proliferation.

[Jake]

Right.

[Corey Clipston]

Because that was good for the US Government and our debt and it was good for crypto crypto people. So that passed first. Next up is obviously it's great for crypto people to stay out of jail. So they want, you know, clarity, clarity act and they want to put moats

[Jake]

around, which has nothing to do with bitcoin. Just to remind everybody it.

[Corey Clipston]

There's again, this is where we have this, we have this conversation about like if everything passes, but it includes one good thing for bitcoin, like brca. Is it worth it? And it might be, I don't know, I don't know.

[Jake]

What is that?

[Corey Clipston]

Brca, that's like the blockchain developers protections. So basically like making it safe to, you know, safe to develop open source software and not have them come after you for money transmission, for how people use it.

[Jake]

Yeah, right, yeah.

[Corey Clipston]

It wouldn't protect the samurai people or most of these people that have been put in jail because they profited off of it and actually ran businesses like, with this.

[Jake]

Okay.

[Corey Clipston]

You know, depending on who you believe may or may not have encouraged money launderers to use it, whatever. So that, you know, I don't know how much BRCA would protect them. But certainly lots of open source developers that are purely just creating technology. Just like the Internet and email can be used for bad things. Like these things can be used for good things or bad things. It's just technology and it at least protects that. If you're doing crime, it doesn't protect you just because you're a developer. But if you're not doing crime and you're just developing software, it protects you. So that would be a very good thing. And that may be more than enough to be a supporter of clarity. If you're a bitcoiner, makes sense. But it's having trouble passing because that's not necessarily in the interest of New York and DC. So the crypto people paid, they paid 50% over 50% of the donations in the last election cycle. They really paid it for clarity. Nobody paid for Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. That was like the marketing sauce to try to get bitcoiners on board and you know, let Trump to the bitcoin conference and stuff like that. Like it's just not, not something that anybody really cares about.

[Jake]

Centralized groups are much more efficient at that sort of thing too, you know, at the lobbying, at the like vying for their own interests because they're like, it's like they're much more coordinated and together where bitcoiners are. You know, although we have much more value on the network, there's not this as coordinated of an effort by design, you know, very intentionally. But, but there's some drawbacks. I don't know if drawbacks is the right frame, but there's.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, there's. There's this many people spending money on crypto and there's this many people benefiting from it. And there's this many people like spending yeah. On bitcoin advocacy and there's this many people that benefit from it. It's just completely inverted. And so it always sounds like if you're in D.C. or Wall street, it just seems like there's this big crypto digital asset thing that fucking matters and you know, is super awesome. And historically it was basically just the spending of ill gotten pump and dump gains that built that industry. I welcome this era where it's actually just about, you know, databases with private keys that they want to call blockchain or crypto or whatever. I don't care what they call it, it doesn't matter. There's nothing wrong with innovation to financial rails and, and digital it. Like financial it. Like it's cool. I'm pro innovation. I don't really care what you call it?

[Jake]

Yeah. And not everything needs to be decentralized. There are certain things that are better centralized. Money, in my opinion, is not one of them. But you know, there are things where it's like, yeah, you should have a tighter organization for this stuff. I just remember when they were talking about like, we're gonna put like real estate on the blockchain and some stuff like that, where I was like, I

[Corey Clipston]

mean, anything that actually every, every real world asset, regardless of how you record it. And it's all recorded digitally right now. So you're just talking about like a different form of recording the ownership digitally. Like it always is adjudicated in meat space. And like, you know, try kicking out a squatter because you hold a fucking real estate token. You know, you're going to need the pots and you're going to need to prove it, et cetera, et cetera. So everything from dollars to gold to real estate to art to everything is all by nature centralized and always will be and can ever not be centralized. So I think that's where you see the adoption of just saying like permissionless, you know, which is fine. I don't have any problem with that. And it's, it's much more accurate to say like, hey, you could have, you know, you as a retail trader in Indonesia or you know, an AI bot, you know, an agent. An agent just signing up and starting accounts and being able to like be seeded with some capital and, and do some shit, you know, but it's, that's all going to run into KYC AML anyway. And so then it's all going to kind of end up like they're not going to let, they're not going to let an AI agent amass a lot of assets of real world assets without it being KYC and poking all the way through the veil to find the ultimate owner. Of course they will. So this idea that there's going to just be these autonomous economic actors that aren't under the thumb of governments is kind of hilarious and will never happen.

[Jake]

What's the right question here? Like how do you go about trying to decide?

[Corey Clipston]

So permissionless? Actually not, I think through permissionless is also bullshit. Maybe it's just like slightly smoother.

[Jake]

That branding doesn't hit as well though. This is our slightly smoother offer option again.

[Corey Clipston]

That's why I've been saying since 2019 that the absolute best bull case for crypto blockchain defi is incremental improvements to financial it. It's really just about faster and cheaper and that's it. That's really all it is. Like you're just going to go and, you know, basically be an IT consultant as a company for Goldman and that's, that's your job. And that's why you're seeing just private blockchains from JP Morgan and Tempo, from Stripe, which has open USD. And like none of this stuff ever needs to touch Ethereum or Solana or God forbid, Ripple or any of this stuff. That was always just bullshit. Kayfabe, you know, WWE bullshit. And you know, WWE is probably a lot more entertaining than crypto.

[Jake]

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes crypto gets pretty entertaining though. Certainly seems that way. Let's just do this last question then quick wrap up on what do you think? Where do you think we're at with strategy and STRC right now? I heard you talking about this in another podcast just a couple days ago. But what do you make of. Yeah, the state of strategy and look what that looks like moving forward.

[Corey Clipston]

Look, I think they, you know, flew a little bit too close to the sun with getting out over this. And this was, you know, they fomented it, but it wasn't really their fault that it pumped so much in in 24. It was like fall of 24 that it hit 540 in after hours or something like that.

[Jake]

Way above their M Nav.

[Corey Clipston]

Way above their M Nav and just kind of, you know, unfortunately baked in like a number of years of forward gains and into the price right there, you know, so this thing will, as people understand it better and it will eventually develop more institutional holding and won't be so heavy in retail. It'll just be a little bit smoother and it'll trade. It'll. It'll go up a little bit more than bitcoin because it's more volatile and because there's risk, there's keyman risk execution, risk marketing, risk, regulatory risk, whatever. So it, it needs to deliver higher returns than bitcoin because it's more volatile and has more risk and it'll go down slightly more because it's leveraged. So it'll go down more in bear markets and that's okay. And you can also have intelligently used leverage, which again, that's kind of like breaking the returns of bitcoin into a senior tranche that's more principal protected and has lower expected returns versus a junior tranche that has more volatility because you're using the leverage from the preferreds and then you have higher expected returns over time, but a lot more volatility that can Work. There's never been any problem with that structure that I've correctly labeled a leveraged Bitcoin equity. That's what I've been calling it for years, lbe. It's not a bitcoin treasury company that's too all encompassing and just means Tesla and SpaceX and MassMutual and anybody that has Bitcoin on their balance sheet too, it's different. But what they're really trying to do at Strategy and Strive is be a leverage bitcoin equity with this two tranche structure that can be well managed and it can be done well or it can be done poorly. And we'll see where I think, you know, basically Microstrategy put their hand in the fire was a lot of this, you know, kind of AI slop marketing that was clearly focused at retail. Using the language of savings accounts, comparing it to money market accounts. You know, they have bitcoin so it's not bullshit like what Mashinsky had with his Ponzi scheme at Celsius. But the marketing language similarly off. And they should have never run that ad with like the hot girl in Thailand with the British accent talking about retiring on Stretch. Like the principle is not protected. There was no way for them to enforce a peg at 100 bucks. That was just a meme, you know, the market will price it.

[Jake]

Subject to the market.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, it's subject to the market. They'll price it where they want to. The market right now says the, that they want like 14 or 15% yield on this thing. So with strategy pricing it at 12% interest, the market wants to put it at 85 or 90 so that you basically just take the 12 divided by 0.85 and that's how you get the 15 that the market wants to price it at. That's, that's the calculation. Right. So they're kind of pricing it as like, you know, junk debt or even like lower end mezzanine debt. And that's, you know, deserve, that's probably where it deserves to be. And that's okay. You know, interestingly, those, those Japanese. The last one I remember there was a range basically of like 12 to 15%. So the last I looked at this was like 2018, 2019 where they had like the, the junior tranche and the senior tranche and the senior tranche. The interest on the senior tranche was like between 12 and 15% depending on when you bought in. And that's exactly the range where Stretch is now. So this isn't new. It's been around for A while. It's just well marketed and has tremendous size. With that huge pile of Bitcoin, I don't think they're going to blow up. I think it is well managed, all things considered. It's a smart team. It's a team that I like. I like Michael. I particularly like Sharesh who runs treasury and IR over there, you know, so I, I think they'll figure it out. Similarly, I like the guys, even if I don't agree with some of the marketing. Digital credit is like as a term I'm okay with it because it's really well disclosed about what it actually is and that it's hybrid equity. And like both for SATA and for strc, I'm kind of okay with that as a term of art. Even though it's not credit and it is an equity, it's a preferred equity that you bought, it kind of functions that way and they're all pretty open and honest about what that is. And it is properly disclosed in their materials. You shouldn't be talking about it in terms of like Sharpe ratio versus other things. If you don't disclose the principal risk, they won't ever do that again because they got super fucking burned, right? So they're not going to make that mistake again and they're not going to commit, you know, even semi officially to like a peg at 100 because it's not something they can actually defend and where they really, really overstepped. And this goes for my boys at Strive, like Ben and Jeff and it also goes for the whole strategy team in particular. Michael Saylor himself is referring to that as digital money. That's complete bullshit.

[Jake]

Bitcoin is digital capital, digital credit, digital money. It was STRC that they said was digital money as well.

[Corey Clipston]

So what they're saying is that they're going to then tranche STRC and give a principal protected tranche of strc.

[Jake]

That's right.

[Corey Clipston]

Where there's then like a junior tranche of STRC that sucks up the volatility and provides the capital to ensure the principal protection. You can't ensure the principal protection. You cannot. So even if it's disclosed in like the long small print, you know, any marketer of securities knows that in times of stress your correlations go to one. This is what happened with Long Term Capital Management. This is what happened with all the banks in 2008. Everything you own, if people know what you own and they will hunt all of your positions and they will not give you a bid anywhere close to your market price. And this is what you saw with the collateralized mortgage obligations in 08 is that the AAA tranche wasn't safe because it all gets hunted. And it actually was all bullshit. And so first goes the equity tranche, then goes the least safe debt tranche, then goes the next tranche. And by the way, you're taking a 60% haircut on the AAAs as well. And so you think of that senior tranche, it ain't safe either. And so thinking of that as digital money, not to mention on like how offensive it is in the bitcoin space to brand something digital money that's a

[Jake]

derivative of a derivative on digital money.

[Corey Clipston]

10 layers of risk when you already have digital money. Bitcoin is digital money. Bitcoin is not just digital capital, that's store of value. Bitcoin will also be a widely used medium of exchange in the coming decades and then sometime after that it will also be a unit of account. It's very self serving, incorrect, selfish and wrong to claim that bitcoin is only digital capital or a digital asset. And I do think that's where I differ dramatically with Saylor. And that's not how he came into the space talking when he did the podcast tour to get well known and you know, used all of us to get strategy on the map and you know, kind of did the tour in 2020, 21 and, and inserted himself into the number one slot. Superseded either.

[Jake]

Yeah, why would you, why do you think that change of heart, I don't know, change of heart, change of verbiage that he was using. Like where do you think that that came from? Because it seemed that there was some, like, there's some things that he says now that I feel like 2022, Michael Saylor would have been like, get out of here.

[Corey Clipston]

You would disagree with. You could, you could literally do a whole show just showing things that he said in 21:22 versus how he talks now. And it would be like two different people on a lot of subjects. I don't know if he got, you know, smacked down by State Department, treasury, whatever that could be. Part of it. A lot of it is just, you know, once you hit a certain size and you have a lot of investors, you know, your, your duty is to your shareholders and you're trying to make the stock price go up and you're trying to do the right thing for your shareholders. And so you use narratives that are good for the stock price and for being able to attract more capital. And you know, probably those were the narratives that were working you know, were the things that he's chosen. He's not gonna, you know, and he started getting super friendly with all the crypto blockchain people and stopped talking shit about them and kind of, you know, he used to be like, there is no second best. And now he's like nice to everybody and doesn't care if tokenized STRC trades on Ethereum and Tron or whatever. Right. So, you know, it's.

[Jake]

I think there is something to like building bridges, you know, like, if you can like talk to like, you know, I'm not like, don't talk to these people. I think being nice to them is good. Think helping educate them is good if you're communicating the right ideas. It's just. Yet seems like there's some. There's. There's a big line that's gone.

[Corey Clipston]

There's a big line between being nice to humans and promoting scammers.

[Jake]

Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

[Corey Clipston]

So, you know, I just. I think it's. I think it's dangerous. I've spoken about it, I've talked about it. I don't think that it's a good idea. I don't think there's. If you can't do the hard work to actually do this through, like the actual securities regime where people actually have real protections, then I think you're proving to everyone who's watching that there's adverse selection and that basically only dumb money and scammers are interested in what you're selling. And so I'd rather see them go through like the hard work of actually gaining much more institutional adoption and not having STRC be held by almost all retail. I would like to see them actually do the hard work of figuring out how to market that to institutions and have them actually believe in it and be large holders of it before chasing retail again. And, you know, I'm hopeful that happens because again, like, I wish them well structurally and logically, LBEs make perfect sense. So really all we're quibbling at, all we're quibbling over is like how you market it and how you talk about Bitcoin. And the quickest way to get in my sites is to talk shit about Bitcoin or market false narratives about bitcoin. Digital money crossed the line for me and it was the first time that I've ever said anything critical, frankly, about strategies drive any of it. So, you know, I've been broadly supportive throughout until they started talking about digital money. And that was like way over the line for me. But, you know, that, that's always been kind of the case. Like, I, I don't usually care that much about bad actors unless they start talking about bitcoin. That's how DO Kwon got on my radar because, you know, he started doing the podcast tour for bitcoiners in, in early 22 and that I didn't care about Luna or USD or any of that stuff until he started building a bitcoin reserve. And I was like, who is the scammer that Pomp's promoting? You know, and then I dug into it and figured out it was a Ponzi scheme and told everybody, get the out in March and he was bankrupt by May and went to jail. Same thing with Mashinsky. I didn't care about Celsius until he started talking shit about bitcoiners. Frankly. I found out, you know, he had half a billion dollar user funds in Anchor over there with DO Kwon. And I was like, this dude is using the language of savings accounts. You know, be your own banker and you know, better savings accounts. Like, this guy's actually a scammer. And then he ended up, you know, trying to get everybody to send him his bitcoin, send him their bitcoin, claiming that he'd keep it safe for you because bitcoin maxis had caused the loss of 30% of all Bitcoin. Stuff like that. You know, so that's, that's what.

[Jake]

I remember you ringing some of those alarms back then. And that was. Yeah, that was.

[Corey Clipston]

But that's, that's, why like, you, you have to like, actually start lying about bitcoin to really earn me as an enemy. And even then, like, I'm going to try to correct you first. So, you know, that's where I'm at. Like, I just, I think that, I think that the, the LBEs can very easily correct course here, but they kind of do have to, they have to actually correct course and they need to stop talking about, you know, a derivative. A derivative with all kinds of risk as being digital money. It's not, you know, and this goes for my homies like NVK and Rizzo. Like, stop fucking taking ad dollars from apxy. Like, you shouldn't have that running next to your show 247 on Twitter. Like, that's, that's not a good product. It comes with tons of risk and shouldn't be marketed to retail anyway.

[Jake]

I'm not sure I know what that is. But yeah, maybe. I think we'll maybe could dig into a few more topics at another time. It was great. To chat.

[Corey Clipston]

It's a token on shitcoin chains that is that senior tranche of an STRC or a SATA.

[Jake]

Okay. Just on shitcoin chains.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah. But the point is there's a lot of risk there and you can't, you can't say that that's always going to be worth a dollar.

[Jake]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm hoping to, I, like, want to see the good in people I have. Like, you know, I, I. You also need to be, like, really careful, you know, you also need to be honest and operate in reality and be like, okay, if these people are compromised, if these people are in bed with the government in ways that are not positive, you know, I don't think that every government in the world is entirely evil. They're made up of. There's better and worse people at all these levels, you know, So I think, like, having discernment there is important I. In, you know, being careful about who you trust. But everybody can't be a bad guy. You have to have allies, you know, and so balancing that. Yeah, I hope to have a chat with Sailor or Fong or sometime in the, in the relatively near future and ask questions about things I'm confused about, you know? Yeah, maybe offer advice is probably not the right idea, but, you know, offer my perspective on certain things from, from how I can see them and concerns that bitcoiners have and.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah, you should, you should see if CJ can. Come on Chaitanya. He's great.

[Jake]

Super smart strategy. Cj. Which cj?

[Corey Clipston]

He's on their treasury team. HBS grad a couple of years ago. I probably met him three years ago. Yeah, he's. He's awesome. I don't know if he's doing podcasts right now, but he'd be a much easier get than Fong or Saylor right now. They're pretty busy.

[Jake]

Yeah, certainly, certainly. I imagine.

[Corey Clipston]

Yeah. So, again, look, I think that we're all actually brothers in bitcoin, and I think they are actually trying really hard to do something good for bitcoin and they're trying to do well by doing good. And that is truly what I think of Matt and Ben and Jeff and the Strive team, and it's truly what I think of the strategy team. We all make mistakes because we're human and it happens. And I'm not perfect and Swan's not a perfect company. And like me slinging some arrows doesn't mean that I, like, my house is completely in order at all times. Either. But you know, I'm perfectly willing to admit, you know, places where we've misstepped or things that have not gone the way that I wanted. And you know, I do think that gives me the right to be honest and try to be objective in a journalistic way. Classical journalism, not, not yellow bullshit advocacy journalism that we have today. And trying to point out, you know, where I at least think that people have overstepped or misstepped. So, you know, it's all in love and it's all in service of bitcoin, but, you know, we can all do better.

[Jake]

Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate that perspective and, and I even understand guys like Saylor who you can tell he's he's an engineer, but he's an artist too. And so you see even the way he speaks, he's like very verbally fluent. He was interested in science fiction and storytelling and that sort of stuff. And so I recognize that like he might speak in metaphor at times where like, maybe he oversteps, but he's also just like flowing as an intellectual and as a creative. And he might say something where it's like, ah, you've stepped too far there. But, but he's done such a good job at painting pictures that explain what bitcoin is for people and that sort of stuff. And I think like, I hate to see when someone contributes a lot to a certain area and then they make a couple missteps and everyone's got the pitchforks out, you know, and there's a time and place for that too. I'm not saying there's not, but you know, I think first we should like seek to understand and be loving and be like, hey, I've made mistakes in bitcoin. I wasn't running a multibillion dollar company when I made them luckily enough, you

[Corey Clipston]

know, but look, I don't think there's anybody else that's brought more people into bitcoin and gotten them in interested in bitcoin in the last five years. I think he's number one. I think Max Geyser was probably number one for the ten years before that. And since then it's been Sailor. And I think that's awesome and I appreciate it. I tend to think of his skill set and style kind of like a stand up comic where he's got material and it's constantly like changing and evolving and some of the greatest hits will still get brought out for a certain appearance or a certain show. And you're like, oh, I remember when he said that for the first time back in 22 too, you know.

[Jake]

But it's some great lines, man.

[Corey Clipston]

He's got great lines. He's like watching Sailor do his media thing is a lot like watching like Josh Johnson like roll out a new set almost daily. You know, it's. It's really special.

[Jake]

Yeah.

[Corey Clipston]

Anyway, so I appreciate him. We all make mistakes. I think they made some big ones this year. But you know, that's the nice thing about being able to adjust. And it ain't dead and it ain't dying. And I do think it's going to have a ripping bull run alongside bitcoin's bull run. And you know, everybody will be cheering again, which will be interesting.

[Jake]

Yeah. Well, hey, thanks so much for coming on. I know you guys, I'm way over.

[Corey Clipston]

My PR team kill me.

[Jake]

Well, yeah, appreciate it, man. Just everybody, you know, people will link your stuff in the description. People want to connect with you.

[Corey Clipston]

No, we will. What I would say is let me just fit this in. Like, honestly, if you're interested in any like anything from Swan, if you want to ask me a question, I tried this on Kitco and Miles Franklin in the last couple weeks and it works. You can email me so any of Jake's listeners or watchers. [e-mail] C O R yuan.com it's actually the channel that is the least NOISY because my DMs rest in peace on Twitter and God forbid, you know, otherwise it's slack with my company email. I actually see them. So shoot me a note. Happy to chat, happy to help out, whatever you're trying to get done in and around bitcoin, that's probably the best way to move. But yeah, otherwise, yeah, Corey Swan on Twitter and we're swan.com and swan on Twitter. It's probably the best places to find us.

[Jake]

Awesome. Yeah, man, just keep it up. You know, people that are building, doing the hard work, you know, the grind. You've been at this for a long time and you know, like know you having bitcoin forward, businesses encouraging self custody bridge for people.

[Corey Clipston]

There will be bitcoin, there will be bitcoin.

[Jake]

Let's end it on that. Thank you, sir.

[Corey Clipston]

Thanks, Jake.

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now, more than ever, America needs a laugh. Enter the Super Troopers to the rescue Vermont's finest and most shockingly offensive mustachioed highway patrol officer officers return to the big screen in Super Troopers 3 with more pullover pranks and more over the top shenanigans than ever. In this latest installment of the cult comedy classic, Rod Barva's wildly over the top Indian engagement to Thorny's sister spirals out of control. A debaucherous bachelor party, a wedding that Thorny is desperate to stop and a dangerous drug smuggling ring all threaten the troupe's friendships and future failure. Leader of Cole grab your buds and roll up to the multiplex for Super Troopers 3. Only in theaters August 7th. Get tickets? Meow. This episode is supported by FX's the Shards, a seductive drama from executive producer Ryan Murphy. Set in 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of glamorous, deeply entangled high school seniors drawn into a life of wealth, beauty, parties and excess. At its center is Brett, whose reality begins to unravel when the arrival of a new student co coincides with a series of mysterious murders. FX's the Shards premieres August 5th on FX and Hulu.