Bitcoin is the Perfect and Only Money

Feb 24

with Alex Stanczyk

Intro

In this episode, Brad teams up with Alex Stanczyk — an avid Bitcoiner, a daily Bitcoin chat host on Twitter spaces and a former gold and silver trader who now works as private team MD at Bitcoin savings company Swan Bitcoin. Alex's Bitcoin backstory as someone in those capacities and who only recently had an epiphany about Bitcoin is teeming with interesting tidbits.

What's more, he's a former co-host of "The Gold Chronicles with Alex Stanczyk and Jim Rickards" podcast with popular American lawyer and economist Jim Rickards. Tune in and listen to him and Brad talk about all things Bitcoin, how he landed a role at Swan Bitcoin, his relationship with Pickard, the concept of "alien money," and more!

Time Stamps

00:00:00: Brad on his own history and relationship with Swan Bitcoin

0009:41: Jack Dorsey's, Cory Klippsten and Michael Saylor's roles in Bitcoin

00:15:29: Delving into 2022's bankruptcies including BlockFi and FTX

00:25:52: Introducing Alex and diving into his role at Swan Bitcoin

00:32:31: Alex's long road to Bitcoin

00:37:59: Is the gold market manipulated?

Orange pilling people about Bitcoin

00:45:50: Is intrinsic value a thing? What makes something money?

01:05:32: PayPal's $2,500 fine debacle in the face of Bitcoin

01:15:02: Circling back to Alex's beginnings in Bitcoin and Swan Bitcoin

01:23:12: The fascinating contrast of Jim Rickard's background and his activism

01:24:39: God's law vs man's law on

money plus Bitcoin's virtues

01:31:03: Why you need to listen in to Alex's show

01:34:48: Closing out

Find Alex Stanczyk on:

Alex Stanczyk Twitter

The Cafe Bitcoin Podcast on Apple

The Cafe Bitcoin Podcast on Spotify

The Gold Chronicles with Alex Stanczyk and Jim Rickards

Find Brad Mills on:

Brad Mills Twitter

Magic Internet Money Twitter

Magic Internet Money Facebook

Magic Internet Money Instagram

Transcript of Episode 64:

[00:00:00] Alex Stanczyk: Even on Bitcoin, I could see a future where there's all kinds of derivatives built on top of Bitcoin, but what is the thing out of all the things that is gonna best store purchasing power moving into the future? Like it's the thing, it's, it's the only thing with a that we've ever seen that is mathematically enforced scar.

[00:00:27] The market has changed from, from from speculators to allocators. Magic

[00:00:32] Brad Mills: internet sent me down the rabbit bowl. Looking into, this is Brad Mills. Thank you for tuning back into the Magic Internet Money podcast with Alex Stanek. I hope I pronounced that correctly from Swan Bitcoin. Alex has been running spaces every day for the last year, at least on Twitter, and it's actually a really great spot where you can kind of.

[00:00:54] Drink your morning coffee and maybe listen in your drive to work or just throw on in the background or come up and ask questions. To, uh, bitcoiners that range from, um, high net worth individuals and fund managers to just regular, average, normal people. Just kinda asking regular questions about what's going on with the economy and what's, what's causing inflation and, um, just what wallet should I use.

[00:01:20] So really been been a big fan of Alex starting up that space. He got hired on, I think a year and a half ago at Swan Bitcoin previously had some experience in the markets with I think gold. I think he was, uh, managing funds in a gold fund or something like that, uh, which we talk about in the episode, but he doesn't really go on a lot of podcasts, but he just basically runs a, a podcast that goes for two hours every single day.

[00:01:47] So I figured it would be great to kind of give him a time to come on and. , just give him some space to talk and talk about hi his story and, um, how he got into Bitcoin and talk about different subjects and get his thoughts on it, where typically he's kind of giving the mic to other people. Uh, most of the time.

[00:02:08] Alex works for Swan Bitcoin. As I said before. I'm not sponsored by Swan Bitcoin. I'm not sponsored by any, uh, company. I actually don't take sponsors. Um, and if you'd like to kind of help me out, you could leave me a review on rate this podcast.com/bitcoin. Um, it means a lot to me to pretend that it means a lot to me if you leave the review.

[00:02:32] I really don't give a shit if you leave the review. It just helps me with the algorithm. I'm just kidding. I do like to see the messages. , it does help me with the algorithm. I do appreciate when people send me the messages on the on, on the reviews. Rate this podcast.com/bitcoin or hit me up on, uh, Twitter at Brad Mills can or find me on Clubhouse at Brad Mills can as well there always on Clubhouse.

[00:02:56] And just let me know what you think of the show or if you have any suggestions. Um, personally, I, like I said, I'm not sponsored by Swan Bitcoin. I actually had the opportunity to invest in Swan Bitcoin as a seed investor back in 2019 when Corey was first starting it up. It was called Give Bitcoin. And, um, you know, back then it was, it was like a gifting project and I had some respect for Corey and what he was doing and the, the, the people that he had gotten together.

[00:03:23] That was what kind of like made me initially start paying attention to Corey was the, the other Bitcoiners, the, the principled sort of like technical bitcoiners and, uh, economic experts and stuff in the bitcoin space that he managed to get together to create this company. And so I was very interested in, in helping him, uh, with that mission in terms of investing.

[00:03:45] But. I kind of went back and forth about it because I was like, look, he's, he's, he's not using Bitcoin, the technology, like the Bitcoin network. He was building a, an exchange that was really, uh, like a, an onboarding tool to be able to help with Bitcoin adoption. And that I was very supportive of. I figured they were gonna be successful because of the team that he had assembled back then in the early days.

[00:04:08] And I was very interested in this idea of gifting and creating time, locked gifts for family friends and creating an onboarding tool for people where they could learn about Bitcoin. And he seemed to be doing that with give Bitcoin. And, um, yeah, I've never told this story before. I don't know why I'm telling it now, but I'm in the middle of it, so let's keep going.

[00:04:28] So I didn't end up investing because my, my hangup was that they were using, uh, a custodian and that they were onboarding people to a custodian. And I was kind of very critical and still am critical of a lot of crypto exchanges that custody or Bitcoin. I'm like, uh, Uh, a self custody maximalist, right? I want people to own their own Bitcoin and hold their own keys.

[00:04:49] And so I decided that, well, I was gonna be publicly supportive of what Corey was and the team was doing. I was just gonna invest separately into projects like, uh, Hexa Wallet, which Corey also was, was a, eventually became an advisor. And I'm not sure if he's an investor, but he's definitely an advisor of Hexo Wallet, uh, which is like a similar type of thing.

[00:05:08] You can do gifting and, and, uh, multisig and it's custodying your own Bitcoin, holding your own keys in a social way with, with gift features and stuff like that. So I was more interested in trying to invest in entrepreneurs like that were using the Bitcoin network, um, more than using custodians and man, I kind of regret that decision because I don't regret it really.

[00:05:35] It's just I got some fomo because, uh, obviously Corey and Swamp Bitcoin have become super instrumental. And very really, uh, like I, I, I really respect what they're doing over there. They're probably one of the strongest, um, developing network effects for Bitcoin adoption, in my opinion. Cory's a great leader and principled, you know, like he came into the space through the 2017 ICO bubble and people criticized him a lot for that because he was, uh, working with like EOS and stuff like that back in 2017, and they're like, so people just don't have like a nuance understanding of Yeah, not everybody's gonna come to Bitcoin first.

[00:06:20] They're not gonna come into the space and just instantly pick Bitcoin and understand the whole entire space and see, oh yeah, Bitcoin's the thing, everything else is a shit coin or, or grift or whatever. But I really respect people who come into the space from some other field, whether it's VR or ai, or entrepreneurship in general, or technology or whatever it is, investing.

[00:06:42] and maybe they dabble with coins and ICOs and they go down the Ethereum rabbit hole or whatever it is, and they do a survey and they look at all the stuff that's happening in that space and they realize that this is not helpful. This is not building something meaningful for the world. And they, they, they're driven more by the, the principles and rather than the profits.

[00:07:05] And so I really respect people. I think maybe even more so like Corey who went into the top, they came into the top of the funnel and kind of didn't get sorted right away into Bitcoin, but somewhat quickly realized like, this is a lot of unethical stuff that's happening here and I'm gonna focus my energy on Bitcoin.

[00:07:25] And so that's what the last bubble brought us, the last crypto ICO bubble in 2017. It caused a lot of people to come into the space and they kind, it was like a Plinko game, right? You're just dropping chips at the top of the thing and they eventually find their way down and. , you know, bouncing around all over the place.

[00:07:43] And some of them will find themselves in Bitcoin, except this is more like a funnel. I, I see it more like a funnel, because if on a long enough timeframe, you know, in the Plinko board, everything settles to the bottom. But then it's almost like there's a second Plinko game and it's the rug pole. And then when all the, like, all the people that were stuck into like the edges, which is all the crypto stuff, the, the bottom gets pulled out from under it and like all the Ponzi collapsing and all that stuff, it causes the chips to get re resorted again.

[00:08:13] And they fall further down into eventually just basically two buckets. Like you get it or you don't. And the people that get it find their way to Bitcoin. They either become kind of frustrated and pissed off by what happened with crypto. They realize it's all VC grifts and profit maximalism and it's not building something useful or productive for the world, or they actually just kind of become.

[00:08:37] More like that profit Maximalist person who's just like, look, I'm just trying to make money. They, they, they kind of get nihilistic about it, or they've made so much money off of it that they, like, they've launched their own coins or they've start their own fund and they actually do well and they avoid all the pitfalls that it compromises their morals and their principles and clouds their judgment.

[00:08:55] And then like, they convince themselves that what they're doing is actually useful. And so there's a lot of people that came into, come into the top of the bubble and they become significant network effects for shitcoin narratives and like tyrannical, sort of like OFAC compliant defi protocols that are just like controlling everything and have this massive pre mine treasury that they, they're just siphoning value, but they're convincing themselves that like they're doing something useful for the world.

[00:09:23] And that like crypto is the thing to pay attention to and that defi is actually real and NFTs are life-changing technology that's gonna. Enable all kinds of use cases beyond just speculation. So they convince themselves of all these narratives, and it really frustrates me when friends and stuff go down that rabbit hole.

[00:09:41] But when you have these massive hype cycles and bubbles form in crypto, you get the Corey Eclipsys and the Michael Sailors and the Jack Dorseys. You get people that they come in, they're not, they don't instantly find themselves to Bitcoin. I mean, Michael Sailor back in 2013 or 14 said, Bitcoin was a Ponzi scam that was gonna blow up

[00:10:02] So, you know, not everybody gets, and now Michael Sailor is out there really doing his best to educate high net worth individuals and reasonable rational people and, um, regular people as well. Just, just, just about what really value is, why Bitcoin is so important, how Bitcoin is different than everything else happening in crypto and giving people sound advice and kind of building.

[00:10:27] A good, a good base of knowledge that we can share to others to help educate them about, about Bitcoin. So Jack Dorsey another one, right? Like he came in through the tech space and he was very interested in Bitcoin because it's like the money of the internet and decentralized. And he, you know, he started Twitter as a kind of a activist app to help organize activists, I think it was around San Francisco, to gather and share information without being surveilled or, or, uh, shut down their communications.

[00:11:00] And, you know, that was kind of their mission at the beginning of Twitter was to build this activist tool for the Arab Spring and like all these different things where they, they could allow activists and, and people to kind of coordinate and communicate and help, uh, bring about change. And then it ended up becoming so impactful that he kind of got, you know, captured by the surveillance state.

[00:11:23] And he ended up building Twitter into something that I think he regretted because Twitter was, was like a negative tool in the end because he had to comply with the government's, uh, censorship requests and all this stuff. So in 2000 or 20 or so, he started getting more into Bitcoin and he was tweeting about Bitcoin.

[00:11:46] He added Bitcoin to his Twitter profile, and we were, a lot of us were excited, but worried that he was gonna start doing Ethereum and crypto and stuff. And then somebody commented on, on one of his posts where he talked about Bitcoin, he said, oh, and next you should talk about Ethereum. And then he just replied with one word, no,

[00:12:02] So we were like, all right, okay. He gets it. And so that was exciting to see somebody principled, like Jack Dorsey, who was kind of having this conflict internally of like, he created a tool that was supposed to end up being a net positive for the world, ended up being forced into this position where he has to become the sensor and like the tool of the state.

[00:12:22] You know, this, this tool of the state to like suppress free speech. And you could see that he was his mission of like putting his energy towards helping, uh, spread free speech to the world and censorship resistance through Bitcoin was inspiring. And he eventually, and I think it was like late early 2021, he was at a conference and he, he said something that was super exciting.

[00:12:47] He said that, so he felt that Bitcoin was such an important technology and an important tool for the world, that if he felt like it needed it, he would quit Twitter to focus full-time on Bitcoin. And when I heard him say that, I mean that gave me a lot of excitement and confidence and I started paying a lot more attention to what the, the Square and Cash app teams were doing in Bitcoin.

[00:13:09] And man, they've hired so many people. They've hired, I think they've got hundreds of developers now working just on Bitcoin related projects. They started spending millions of dollars sponsoring Bitcoin, open source development, Bitcoin, um, design and user experience with the Bitcoin design community.

[00:13:26] They started working on integrating Lightning Network into Cash App. Jack got the Twitter team to focus on adding Lightning Network into Twitter. And you know, it culminated with the January 6th events in the United States where I think it was the seventh they banned Trump from, from Twitter. And then days later, Jack Dorsey resigned from Twitter.

[00:13:51] He left Twitter and he, he put this big post out about how, basically explaining like he's gonna focus on Bitcoin because free speech is so important. And he basically is constrained at a public company that like has to put these limits on free speech. That he feels like the only solution is to decentralize everything.

[00:14:09] So he is gonna start spending all this time on decentralizing things and the money is the most important. So, you know, that's what we got in 2017 from the, from the big, crazy insane ICO bubble where there's a lot of scams and fraud and a lot of people got hurt and a lot of bad information got put out there.

[00:14:26] A lot of scammers got rich, and then most of the people that bought into all the scams got absolutely wrecked in 2018 and 19 down 99%. And very little of them got punished. Barely any of them got fined. But there was a lot of clarity put out into the markets that all this stuff was illegal, it was unethical, it was like unprincipled and immoral.

[00:14:48] A lot of those crypto stuff. And most of the opportunists and charlatans that were there just like pre premin tokens and pumping them and dumping them on the markets, they all kind of like got nervous and left. Or they even got wrecked themselves holding Ethereum, which went down like 95. . And so by late 2019, you had, what was left was like all these Plinko chips, right?

[00:15:10] These like million Plinko chips had like sorted themselves into the two camps and most of 'em actually fell off the side of the board. like just were gone, um, into the, into the, into the, uh, into the reject pile or whatever. Like they just disconnected completely because they got burnt so bad by, by crypto and ICOs and stuff that it, we were left with like a lot of people that found their way to Bitcoin through getting absolutely wrecked.

[00:15:35] And that's what I think we're gonna go through right now. I think we're ha I think it's happening right now. There's been probably 50 to a hundred million people came into quote unquote crypto, uh, in 2021 and 2022. And a lot of them sort like, they fell into the buckets of like yield generating and defi and NFTs and crypto, not bitcoin.

[00:15:59] So a lot of these people were in Celsius and they were like convinced they were drinking the Kool-Aid, that like Bitcoin is too expensive and it's slow and it can't do smart contracts. It has no utility. It's a good coin. You should have some Bitcoin. But like, look, you can have all these other coins and there's this wide cornucopia of coins to collect and these, all these people are ended up getting completely wrecked in most cases with things like Celsius blowing up Terra Luna, the avalanche ecosystem, Solana ecosystem with EDA and FTX collapsing.

[00:16:29] All these layer one coins with all these yield schemes and all these Defi Ponzi, and a lot of centralized lending platforms like Block five and nexo and crypto.com and all this stuff. They were all like in the cesspool of crypto yield, which was mostly valueless extraction and incentivized ponz nomics from VC funded pools of money that were basically market making and pumping.

[00:16:58] Shit coins and that was all pretending to be like financial innovation and yield. So that's all blowing up right now and you have a lot of people finding their way to Bitcoin. And so thankfully we have people like Corey Sson from Swan, and they've expanded and they've been doing some amazing work, not just with Alex in these sort of spaces, but they've been hiring RIAs to educate, uh, high net worth individuals in creating programs for RIAs.

[00:17:29] He runs Bitcoin or Jobs, which is like a website that collates all the jobs in Bitcoin, uh, which competes with like crypto jobs, which is just like this vc like Ethereum and crypto VC funded funnel to try to get young people to go join Web three Grifts and like work on pumping and dumping tokens, where Corey's like helping to get these smart folks placed at Bitcoin companies.

[00:17:55] Cory also runs Bitcoin Ventures, which is a, a very like ethical Bitcoin, um, venture fund that does like no carry for the LPs. And it's like, I think they do a syndicate as well on Angel List with Stephan Lavera, um, where you can invest in Bitcoin companies. Um, me and Corey work together sometimes on doing, uh, investments and like kind of vetting deals.

[00:18:19] So I work together, uh, sometimes with Bitcoin ventures. Um, but yeah, there's all kinds of stuff that Swan Bitcoin does. I, I think they're one of the best companies in Bitcoin, hands down. They're, what they really are is a Bitcoin media company, a Bitcoin education company, and a Bitcoin, uh, talent scout , like, Corey's, like the Bitcoin talent scout cuz he's finding people before they blow up and even after they've blown up and become popular and are proven out to have great, you know, reach.

[00:18:51] And he's placing them in these, in this like, Very well oiled machine of, of effective Bitcoin education, and he's doing very well to compete with the crypto people that are out there, uh, spreading false narratives about how valuable web three is, or like how it was just an FTX problem. Like crypto is not the problem.

[00:19:12] It was ftx. And so like Cory's out there helping to amplify the real sound, like information that, not the noise of crypto, but the, the signal of Bitcoin going on like CNBC and influential podcasts, uh, helping great people like Natalie Brunelle with, with like getting real information out. And also ran the Pacific Bitcoin Conference, which was one of the best bitcoin only conferences that's, that have ever been, uh, put on.

[00:19:43] I heard from a lot of people that went that it was great. No, uh, crypto web three N F t Defi, Ponzi crap at that conference. It was. Just, uh, sound information about Bitcoin and, uh, you didn't have to worry about people trying to show you coins and garbage. So this is, uh, I guess all to say that I wish I was sponsored

[00:20:05] I'm just kidding. . So this is an inter, this is a, an interview , I guess an interview to get sponsored. Please Swan sponsor me. I'm just kidding. I, I don't, I don't need to be sponsored. Um, I wouldn't take it because then I wouldn't feel, if Swan starts to do things that I feel are not good, then I wouldn't feel like I would be able to criticize.

[00:20:27] I don't think SWAN is gonna do that. One thing that I am excited to see if SWAN is gonna solve is the problem with Bitcoin custody. Because currently SWAN uses, I think Prime Trust. And Prime Trust. While they're a great company, they're just like a neutral custodian. They will custody anything. They'll custody Ethereum and whatever other coins.

[00:20:46] So I would really love to see Swan Bitcoin or somebody create a Bitcoin focused. Institutional custody solution where it's just Bitcoin, they don't help strengthen the network effects and dilute their value of like mind share and technical debt of like trying to keep up with all the latest, whatever's going on with all the forks and all the different crypto coins and getting caught up in maybe the, the, uh, exploits and hacks and all this stuff that are happening in other crypto coins.

[00:21:16] And, you know, just, I just like the idea of Bitcoin only companies that are focused on if they're gonna integrate with quote unquote crypto, that it just be Bitcoin. I mean, cash App is I think a Bitcoin only company in terms of their crypto, uh, side of things because they don't do Ethereum or Light Coin or, you know, any of this other stuff.

[00:21:39] They're dollars, you know, they're a regulated, uh, challenger bank type of app like Venmo or, or whatever, where they're doing US dollars obviously, but they're also Bitcoin, so they're like, They're a Bitcoin only fiat company, however you want to call that. But they've, they're not gonna add any other coins.

[00:21:58] And that's a great signal to the world because a lot, a lot of VC funded companies end up saying, yeah, we're gonna add Bitcoin. And then like, like PayPal, they'll just add everything. They like Robinhood, like they add everything because these guys just make, make money off the fees. And then what you end up with is this like, so bad.

[00:22:18] Like it's just so dumb. You see Robinhood allowing people to buy like literal garbage Sheba, INU coins and just like joke coins. And people spend so much money speculating and waste so much time, like being misinformed about what's important here in the space. When you support crap, when you support like proof of steak or just general dog token nonsense.

[00:22:47] It's like just don't. Because that, that will send people down the rabbit hole of learning more about all that crap. And it really is just like digital aluminum. In the end, all this stuff like Bitcoin is digital gold. All this stuff is like digital zinc and digital aluminum. And in some cases, not even that, it's just like a scam.

[00:23:07] Most cases it's just like a Ponzi scam or something like that. . So I love the idea of a Bitcoin only custodian, and if I were a betting man, I would bet that Swan and like Corey is already thinking about this and, and working on that. So very excited to see what's ha like 2025 is the year that I'm excited to, uh, to kind of see all of the, who settles down into the, the final Bitcoin bucket and what, what like amplification of Bitcoin that they're gonna be res uh, impactful on and responsible for.

[00:23:40] Because like I said, we had. people like Jack Dorsey, Michael Sailor, Corey Clipon come up into this like, you know, from the last bubble to, to currently being very significant network effects for Bitcoin. And it seems to happen every time there's like a hype cycle and a mass adoption phase, uh, where it does get frustrating to see people of like finding their way to like garbage after a few years.

[00:24:04] A lot of, a lot of value, um, comes from that in terms of Bitcoin network effects because people find their way to Bitcoin, they realize most of the other stuff is garbage, and they start to focus their time and energy on long-term thinking and helping to educate people about Bitcoin and try to prevent other people from making the same mistakes they did because it really does suck to think like you are this early to Bitcoin, but you got distracted and you went down this.

[00:24:33] Off-road trip and like fell off a cliff and like took you a year to climb back up onto the road and then another year to like retrace your way back to the main road. And you know, now you've like lost half your body weight and you can barely , you can barely move. And you could have been on the Bitcoin path for like two years.

[00:24:53] He could have been dollar cost averaging your way to Bitcoin, but now you're just starting from, from like a negative 90% portfolio value or just wasted time. The price is higher, whatever it is. Yeah, it sucks to see that happen, but whatever. It happened, and I'm very motivated and uh, and inspired by people like what, you know, Alex is doing at Swan and what Corey's doing at Swan.

[00:25:21] Happy, happy to have you guys listening in on these rants. Hopefully it's not too long. Uh, maybe this is like a group therapy session or something. I'll just get to process some of the things I'm thinking about, but hopefully enjoy it. If you enjoy the podcast, let me know. Yeah, Alex is, uh, you can find Alex on the, uh, the, the Twitter space pretty much every day.

[00:25:44] And, uh, hopefully you enjoy this episode with Alex.

[00:25:52] Welcome to the Magic Internet Money Podcast. Alex, you're gonna have to help me with that. Stan stanza. Hard to pronounce when you're looking at it. Yes, it is. So I've been invited onto your show multiple times, uh, that you run every day on Twitter spaces. Thank you for, uh, for always trying to include me into the conversations.

[00:26:14] You bet. Um, and I figured, you know, like we w. Bitcoiners have not heard the other side of the story, I don't think. I don't know if you've been on anybody else's podcasts or not yet. I've done one other one. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I wanted to have you come, come on and chat with me because you, you had some, some previous experience in the gold industry in the, in the financial markets.

[00:26:38] Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . And, uh, I'm always interested in talking to people who found their way into Bitcoin from other industries like that. So, uh, microphone has flipped here.

[00:26:48] Alex Stanczyk: Right on. It's been a cool, um, ride, really like, uh, I sort of held out, uh, I'm new to Bitcoin basically. I mean, I didn't really start buying it seriously until 2019 or so.

[00:27:04] And then, uh, I didn't really figure out, like the light bulb didn't really go on until 2020 for me, so, so still relatively, I guess, new compared to some guys like yourself. And other guys who I considered OGs been around for a really long time.

[00:27:20] Brad Mills: Well, what, so people know, like you're, you're currently working at Swan Bitcoin, I think as head of private.

[00:27:27] So for high net worth individuals that are looking to acquire Bitcoin, they can go to Swan Bitcoin, which is like a Bitcoin only exchange to buy Bitcoin in the United States and expanding to different areas and, and you kind of work, uh, like as a white glove bespoke service to help high net worths be able to allocate to Bitcoin.

[00:27:49] So I'm

[00:27:50] Alex Stanczyk: one of the guys on Swan Private. I'm not the head of Swan Private, but I work with about six other dudes doing the same thing. Uh, and we, we kind of have different areas of specialization, but um, yeah, uh, helping high net worth, ultra high net worth, kind of like a white glove concierge. The idea is, let's say you have some assets or you have some investible capital and it's a big chunk.

[00:28:13] and you, you want somebody to kind of walk you through everything like A to Z, you know, entry points, you know, allocation strategies, deployment strategies, self custody, multisig, all that kind of stuff. Like our team will, will basically personally guide you through all that kind of stuff. So it's different obviously than an exchange in that, with an exchange, there's a very , it's like sink or swim, get in there, figure it out and, and if you, you know, you can't figure it out.

[00:28:42] Well, too bad. Like with Swan, the whole idea there is, is that we're gonna, we're gonna kind of be your wing man and we're gonna, we're gonna hold your hand through that whole process,

[00:28:51] Brad Mills: right? That's an awesome service to provide because most of the other exchanges, uh, like Coinbase and Gemini and all that, they kind of have a mandate to sell other coins to people and get them into other products cuz they make higher fees on.

[00:29:09] Selling all kinds of stuff to people, like they make their money. Mm-hmm. typically on trading fees. Yep. So it's awesome that we have a service, multiple services. It's not just Swan doing that, but Swan's doing an awesome job where you don't have to worry about, like, if I wanna refer one of my entrepreneur friends to acquire some Bitcoin, cuz they wanna start saving a Bitcoin, protecting them selves against the basement of the money supply, I'm not gonna have to worry about sending them somewhere where then they're gonna get email autoresponders convincing them to go by dog walking coin because it's faster than Bitcoin.

[00:29:42] Yep. A hundred percent. That's now,

[00:29:45] um,

[00:29:46] Brad Mills: you also run the, uh, daily show that WAN Bitcoin puts on. Well, kind of like you put it on, you're the host of it and, uh, it's a Twitter spaces and that's, that's an awesome show. It get brings people together. You have lots of interesting guests coming on, dropping in, dropping out.

[00:30:02] It's, it's kind of cool actually, this whole Twitter Spaces Club host thing, it allows you to kind of make a show. where maybe you don't even need a guest list cuz you know, people are just gonna come in and then you can kind of make it up on the fly. . Yeah.

[00:30:16] Alex Stanczyk: Yeah. Well I think that's how most Twitter spaces are run, and that's how ours was run in the beginning.

[00:30:21] It's gone full blown. Like we're, we're trying to get it more in the direction of a professional production. We have a paid producer, we have people on the team who are responsible for research and news. Oh, wicked. So like, yeah, we actually have a schedule. So the, the format nowadays is the first hour of the show, we just talk about whatever's going on in Bitcoin and that's, you know, uh, we, we tend to have all kinds of people drop in for that part of the segment.

[00:30:48] I mean, uh, everybody from like Greg Foss to occasionally like, uh, you know, we'll, we'll see a Mark Moss in the room, or we'll see a lavish or a la or Breedlove or we had sailor the other day and just talk about what's going on in kind of the. The whole world as it pertains to Bitcoin. And then the second half of the segment, we try to do some kind of featured guest or featured theme or topic.

[00:31:11] So some of those themes revolve around things like we're doing this new thing called, we are calling macro strategy, kind of in homage to micro strategy, but it's Lawrence Lepar, James Lavish, Greg Foss, Jeff Ross, and just talking about like really kind of high level macro stuff from their level of experience.

[00:31:31] And another examples we're gonna be starting up like a an an Energy and bitcoin mining kind of themed discussion. And then we've got another one coming up this week where we're doing inheritance planning in Bitcoin. So we're gonna deep dive that. We've got one guy coming on by the name of Matt McClin talk.

[00:31:48] He worked, he, he's the founder of Bespoke and he is got a couple of, well, I'm not gonna say how much, but they're huge whales, Bitcoin, whales that he's developed custom trusts for, and. Another guy by the name of Paul Tarina who runs a trust company. So these guys are used to managing a lot of wealth when it comes to building trusts and, and kind of custom structures for trusts and very wealthy families.

[00:32:13] So we're gonna be doing a kind of a long series on that. Uh, so yeah, that's kind of the direction that's gone. We, we try to specialize in certain things when we can and we get really smart people on there to, to help us talk about it.

[00:32:26] Brad Mills: Awesome. So that's cool to hear that you've got a producer and a team and schedule and all that.

[00:32:31] It's evolving. So I, I'm curious, let's talk about like the, before Bitcoin, what were you, what were you doing in the gold industry and like what, what's your, do you want to give us your kind of professional career or just, uh, yeah, sure. Personal interests, like how'd you get into. and what have you, what did you discover working in that industry and then leading into Bitcoin?

[00:32:55] Like how did you get to Bitcoin to be now where you are at Swan doing the private stuff in the Daily show?

[00:33:02] Alex Stanczyk: Sure. So I've had kind of a couple of different careers. I, when I, right outta high school, I'm, I'm a self-taught dude. I literally, cuz I like dropped outta high school and, uh, I went in the military, earned A G D D while deployed overseas.

[00:33:16] We had a dude embedded in our unit who helped me do that. He was a college professor running around with us, . Uh, and so did that, got out, went into the IT world for, I wanna say about 12, 13 years or so. I went down to Panama, central America and just kind of to check out of stuff for a while. And then I met some guys in the gold industry down there and they helped me understand what inflation was really, cuz I didn't really understand it prior to that.

[00:33:46] And, uh, that blew me away. So I started buying gold. Um, and then eventually

[00:33:52] Brad Mills: What year about was that?

[00:33:53] Alex Stanczyk: That was around 2007,

[00:33:54] Brad Mills: I think. Okay. So you had been serving for like a decade and then you went to uh, to Panama. Got into gold around 2007. Yeah. What was the price of gold around that time? Was it like 800 bucks or something, or is it already higher?

[00:34:12] I think

[00:34:12] Alex Stanczyk: I was starting to buy gold around six 50 and I think I was buying silver, I want to say at around 11 ish, if I'm remembering right.

[00:34:20] Brad Mills: And the, uh, the total dollar supply was probably half of what it is right now, I imagine. Oh,

[00:34:27] Alex Stanczyk: it's crazy how much it's blown up since then. We used to freak out, we

[00:34:31] Brad Mills: used to let, you know, I think the national debt was 10 trillion at that time, maybe.

[00:34:34] Or 10 or 12.

[00:34:35] Alex Stanczyk: Yeah. It's like tripled, you know? And it's like 31 just pasted 31 trillion last week. It's so

[00:34:42] Brad Mills: crazy. You got into gold around 2007 as a, as like a, uh, hedge against inflation. Like how did you learn about this? Was it just hanging out with these gold guys? They were kinda, yeah. Hanging out these gold

[00:34:55] Alex Stanczyk: dudes.

[00:34:55] Yeah. Like one night we were out like, uh, these guys

[00:34:57] Brad Mills: and what are they, what are they like? Uh, they, they like got gold teeth and they're wearing gold necklaces. Like how do you tell a gold guy? Nah, just a normal

[00:35:05] Alex Stanczyk: looking person. They're just normal looking dudes. Okay. It's like a, it's like me. It's really, honestly, it's like meeting a bitcoin.

[00:35:11] Like, you know, you get to know 'em a little bit and then you start to figure out, oh, these guys know some stuff about some things that you may not have learned about before . That was my case cuz I didn't know nothing about a gold or, uh, you know, monetary to basement or any of those kind of things. And so, yeah, I used to hang out with this guy real late at night.

[00:35:30] Um, at our house, uh, we used to live in this area called Vera Cruz up on the side of the mountain in the jungle, basically overlooking the ocean. And these guys used to come over on the weekends and. , we drink wine and they used to teach me stuff and they, they basically red pilled me about , monetary debasement and inflation and all that other kind of stuff, which was a huge wake up call for me.

[00:35:50] And then just kind of seeing what was going on leading up to 2008, I just was real concerned about what was happening in the, in the economy because I was studying monetary to basement and you know, it led me down these paths of economics and all these other kind of things that I never cared about before.

[00:36:07] You know, the history of money and what is money and all that kinda, I never cared about any of that kinda stuff prior to that. But, you know, it was kind of a rabbit hole of its own, you know, spent a lot of hours studying it and started becoming a really concerned about what was happening in the, in the global economy in 2008.

[00:36:23] So, uh, yeah, I just sold, I sold equities, sold property, uh, was buying gold and silver and yeah, I was doing that for years. . Um, and at one point around the 2012, 2013 timeframe, launched a physical regulated physical gold fund, um, with some dudes who , by the way, they've turned out to be not as honest as I thought they were, but, uh, I closed that up a long time ago for, for my part of it.

[00:36:51] Anyway. Anyway, we were, we were operating outta Switzerland and uh, we uh, you know, we just buy the physical gold from the refiners over there, stored 'em over, stored it over there, all that kind of stuff. And I was aware of Bitcoin back in 2011. Didn't really become a serious investor. Didn't take it seriously, cuz I always thought the government would shut it down.

[00:37:10] That was my big thing, you know, the government would shut this down anytime they want to. And then, uh, bought some in 2017, sold it again end of 2017. And then 2019, I was looking at the charts. I'm thinking to myself, this thing is gonna run again. So I started buying more and started studying it more. The thing that bothered me in the back of my mind that I could not figure out about Bitcoin was why hasn't the government shut this down already?

[00:37:36] Why is this still here? And, uh, after studying it for a while in 2019, that's when I came to the conclusion that's when the light bulb went on. Oh dang. Reason it's still here is cuz they can't shut it down. Oh, . And that was a huge moment for me. And then there were other things that happened that kind of flipped my switch as far as realizing that Bitcoin's way better money than gold.

[00:37:59] Brad Mills: So during that period of, uh, 2008 to 2012, after great financial crisis and gold, I'm pretty sure gold had a run, but then kind of stagnated after the initial run. I can't remember. Yeah, the exact price performance of gold. But was it. Was it something that like folks in the gold industry were, I mean, I know a lot of people in the gold industry say that the market's manipulated, and that's why the price of gold is not $10,000 an ounce.

[00:38:32] But I mean, like, what was your experience with that? Was there a lot of, a lot of, uh, a lot of that, or, or people were like,

[00:38:39] Alex Stanczyk: well, people, some, some people say it's manipulated and thus the price, I don't know. I think that it's impossible to prove. I, I, the fact that it's manipulated is not really in question.

[00:38:49] I mean, that's not really debatable. Like the biggest bull banks in the world are getting fines. Every, you hear about it every two, three years. They're, they're always being fined for manipulating the gold markets. It's not like it's a secret. Everybody knows it's happening. Can they manipulate it to the degree where they've suppressed the price from 10,000 announced down to where it is?

[00:39:08] I don't really know. I don't think you can prove that. What I do know is that it was incredibly disappointing. You know, if you bought gold at the prices I was buying it at in 2007 and you sold it today, you'd, you'd be up maybe 270 ish something percent. Right. But if you bought Bitcoin at the very beginning to today, you did the same exact same calculation from the 2009 timeframe, then now, I mean, it's up over 28000000% that's not even close to being in the same category.

[00:39:41] Yeah. You understand what I'm saying? Like, not even by any stretch of the imagination. So like, yeah, I, I think gold's a great way to store value and always will be. But will it leverage up as much as Bitcoin? No way, man. I don't think so.

[00:39:55] Brad Mills: Yeah. A lot of people don't understand how big gold is and how small Bitcoin is when you look at the market cap.

[00:40:05] Mm-hmm. and like the total value for sure. I did a survey a couple of years ago where, where I. Commissioned Hots Specs Research, which is like a scientific research company that does surveys. And I wrote this, uh, 21 question survey, which basically educates people along the way about the financial markets.

[00:40:26] And one of the, the surprising findings in there was how many people thought they'd already missed Bitcoin because they thought it was bigger than gold already. Yeah. And it was like 70% of the people or something crazy like that responded that, and this was like towards the end of the survey as I'm kind of like orange peeling them without, you know, obviously doing it.

[00:40:45] Just kind of like educating people about the destruction of the value of the dollar over time. And, uh, the adjusted for inflation returns of things like the s and p 500 since the 1970s. It's actually not that great when you, when you adjusted for inflation and purchasing power destruction. Yeah. And so by the end of the survey it was like, what do you think Bitcoin is at this price?

[00:41:07] Do you think it's. about the same value as the total amount of gold in the world. A 10th of the value of all the gold in the world, or more than the value of all the gold in the world. And the most of the people thought Bitcoin was already more valuable than most of, than all of the gold in the world. So therefore they felt like, I don't wanna pay attention to it because I've already missed it.

[00:41:26] And then when I told him, would you be surprised to find out that, you know, gold is 20, 25 x times the size of, uh, the market cap of Bitcoin, would you be more interested in kind of like learning the saving Bitcoin? Mm-hmm. . And of course, like from the start of the survey to the end of the survey, the biggest, uh, the delta between the boomer generation was actually 370% by the, at the beginning when they felt like they didn't know much about Bitcoin, they wouldn't choose Bitcoin.

[00:41:54] Mm-hmm. where at the end they learned about Bitcoin stocks gold, and then they would choose Bitcoin like a lot more Sure. Um, towards the end of the survey.

[00:42:04] Alex Stanczyk: So yeah, that's a great survey. Those questions are like

[00:42:06] Brad Mills: on point. I took it from, uh, Ron Paul's thing. He's been doing this for the past four years or so.

[00:42:12] He tweets just a Twitter poll where he says, if you were g uh, gifted, uh, $10,000, but you had to choose to keep the, the money locked up for 10 years, what would you choose? Would you choose cash, gold, bitcoin, or real estate? I forget. I think the fourth one is mm-hmm. . And so then he, he asked that question every year, and of course, Bitcoiners are gonna like, retweet it and get all their friends to go and, and type Bitcoin or whatever, choose Bitcoin.

[00:42:39] So it, it's not really that effective of a survey. So I was like, you know what? I'm gonna spend a bit of money and get this done scientifically and design a real questionnaire. And yeah, it was pretty much the findings were, were what we thought. A few things were surprising to me. Like the boomer stat was very surprising to me.

[00:42:55] Obviously at the very beginning, the boomers were the least likely to choose gold, uh, Bitcoin, they were the most likely to choose gold. But then at the end of the survey, like the boomers were still the least likely to choose Bitcoin between Gen X, millennials, gen Zs, and boomers. But the percentage that had switched their answer was massive.

[00:43:15] It was the biggest percentage shift of all the, the demographics. And that surprised me. Yes. So I was curious, like in your work with, uh, Swan and your previous work in gold industry, what do you find the sentiment is like between the different generations and are, are you finding that there's certain arguments that work better to kind of knock gold bugs at other Oh, well, Gold's intrinsic value, God created gold, so therefore that's the perfect money.

[00:43:43] Like what are you finding now that you've been in both industries has been an effective sort of like conversation to Yeah. Get people to sort of open their mind to like digital stuff in value's? That's a

[00:43:54] Alex Stanczyk: great question. I think really it comes down to the person receiving the message, not the messenger.

[00:44:00] like y you know, if the question is, is there any specific message you could give to a gold bug to get them to change their mind? I think the answer is no. I think that it depends on the gold bug. Like if the g, okay, I've met two types of gold bugs now. One is open-minded. They, they wanna learn. They're constantly like, you know, I want to know like, what's new?

[00:44:23] What's the truth? What's the truth? Right? Those guys, I find if they do the, the, the research and they do the work and they ask the questions, they will pick up and figure out what Bitcoin is like. There's some really good examples of that, like Ronnie Stofer for example, who runs increment. Very intelligent gold guy.

[00:44:42] He's, I think he's figured out big, right? Another guy, Larry LA part, same thing. Very intelligent gold guy with an open mind. I think he's figured out Bitcoin. There are others who. Just it, it doesn't matter. Like the facts don't matter. There's, there's a, there's, there's a, there's a level of either, I don't know whether it's confirmation bias or some cost bias, but some of these guys, they just don't really want to know the truth and like, you'll never get through to those dudes.

[00:45:08] So I think you gotta look for the ones who want to know, right? And the ones who wanna know, surprisingly, they're a lot easier to orange pill than, than norm's because they already understand the basement of currency. They already understand the, sort of, the evils, so to speak, of dishonest money. They already understand all that stuff.

[00:45:28] So convincing them about that, or teaching them about that is, you don't have to, they've already got, like the typical bull gold bug, in my opinion, has probably got a master's degree in economics by now. You know, just by all the stuff that they read and listen to. Um, but that doesn't mean they, they really get what Bitcoin is.

[00:45:46] That's a, that's a different thing, right? So, .

[00:45:49] Brad Mills: Yeah. I find too that like the gold bugs that are, they go down to the fundamental level of things like intrinsic value and constitutional money. Hmm. And when you, when when you go down to that level of constitutional money or you know, where you believe that the constitution is the thing that gives something value or you believe that God is the thing that gives something value, it's very difficult to, once you've been like studying that for 10, 20 years and you've kind of like made a brand around it or whatever, like that's your framework of thinking now.

[00:46:23] Oh well gold is value because it's been valuable for 5,000 years. Yeah. But that becomes dogma

[00:46:28] Alex Stanczyk: now. That's now an ideology that's no longer, yeah,

[00:46:30] Brad Mills: it's hard. It's hard to like accept the information that Bitcoin is valuable. It wasn't declared money by the Constitution. . I

[00:46:40] Alex Stanczyk: think where you gotta go with that is you have to go to, to.

[00:46:44] how to deter, how do humans determine value in the first place? Right? So if you think about you gotta go past gold, silver, you gotta look at all the different forms of money that human beings have used, right? And if you do that, if you, if you look at those things, it's obvious that intrinsic value isn't even a thing that's like made up.

[00:47:05] Mm-hmm. , right? Because think about it, what have humans used as money? We've used glass beads, we've used shells, we've used feathers, we've used sticks, we've used rocks. And I'm talking real rocks. Not like pet rock or gold or shiny rock gold. I'm talking like a literal rock, like a limestone, rh stone rock, right?

[00:47:30] So do those things have intrinsic value? I think probably not really. What is it that determines whether those things are money or not? Human beings agreed on it. Full stop. If you and I, you know, were to go out in somebody's backyard and point to an old used tire and, and you and I truly agree that that's gonna be our money, and we chose to ha use that as a store of value or a medium of exchange, just the act that the human beings are doing, it is what makes it money.

[00:48:04] Right? Right. If you took the humans off the planet, are those things gonna be money by themself? Just remove humans from the equation. You just got the planet earth and there's gold and there's rocks, and there's sticks. Are those things money? Do they have intrinsic value now? No. What makes them have intrinsic value?

[00:48:20] Because humans want to use them for something. That's it. Mm-hmm. , right? So it's the human, it's that human, um, vector, really that determines it. So to me, that intrinsic value argument, by the way, which is shift's major argument. It keeps coming back to that. It's, it's nonsense. It's been, it's been proven to be complete.

[00:48:42] Dogma for, for a long time now, I think.

[00:48:45] Brad Mills: Did you follow Peter Schiff very much when you were getting into gold? Like when you bet it was like o occupy Wall Street days, like after the financial crisis. You bet.

[00:48:54] Alex Stanczyk: Duck da dude.

[00:48:56] Brad Mills: Like is this Peter Schiff's fault that you didn't get into Bitcoin early ?

[00:49:01] Alex Stanczyk: I wouldn't say my own fault.

[00:49:03] Okay. It's my own inability to see what Bitcoin was. I mean, I'm, I would just like, I was like every other person who, who poo poo's Bitcoin in the beginning, you know, I was like, this is a bubble. Uh, you know, the government can shut it down. I had all these reasons why I thought it wasn't gonna work, but the truth was

[00:49:21] Brad Mills: that's because of, of going through the history of money and becoming a, and being a gold bug and probably being exposed to things like Austrian economics and stuff like that.

[00:49:33] There's some arguments that like you create this foundational framework of thinking around money that. Closes the door to something new like Bitcoin. Like the idea that value comes from medium of exchange first, like a, a money is, is meant to be used as a medium of exchange before it can be a store of value.

[00:49:55] That's like a, one of the Austrian economists Achilles heels for why they didn't get into It's a logical fallacy. Yeah. And, and why so many of them poo-pooed Bitcoin for so long because they were thinking, well, this is not being used as money right now, so therefore it's, it's worthless and I shouldn't pay attention to it until it's being used as a medium of exchange.

[00:50:14] But like then you're not protecting yourself.

[00:50:17] Alex Stanczyk: Well see, they're thinking, interestingly enough, they're gold bugs, so they're trying to get away from pure fiat, right? Yeah. But that's fiat thinking. There's two ways money becomes money. One is by government decree and the other is by the choice of the market.

[00:50:35] and the choice of the market is an evolution. It's not something that happens overnight. How long did it take for gold to become money? I, I don't know how many, how many thousands of years were humans around? Probably a while trying to figure that out. Probably a while, right? took a minute. Right. So like buy government decree, you can instantly make something money if the government says it's money by law.

[00:50:57] But natural selection money may take a minute. And the interesting thing that's different between every other form of natural selection money in history is, is that because it's a technology as well, it will more probably closely follow the technology adoption curve than the, than the natural market money adoption curve.

[00:51:18] Which is fascinating if you think about it. The rate of adoption's way, way different animal.

[00:51:23] Brad Mills: I mean

[00:51:24] there's

[00:51:24] Brad Mills: a conversation that is interesting around this adoption curve. Market selection and government decree. Relating to Bitcoin and Altcoin because the same way that gold bugs were close-minded to the idea that something like Bitcoin can disrupt gold and be used as money.

[00:51:47] I find we sometimes get into that same logical fallacy or whatever you want to call it, blind spot regarding the adoption of stablecoin and NFTs and Ethereum and all these altcoins that are showing that whether it's the right thing to use as money or not. Millions of people have chosen to gamble on JPEGs, , and Yep.

[00:52:15] You know, billionaires and the Silicon Valley elite and the central bankers and uh, and commercial banking cartels, like they've all chosen to use something like Ethereum and, um, that is being pushed. top down by these super wealthy folks that are actually incentivized by owning, you know, like a, a share of maybe a pre mine thing built on top of it or whatever.

[00:52:45] But whatever the like, ethical, moral, principled, logical explanation is for why Bitcoin is better than other coins. Mm-hmm. , the reality is that there are other competing monies in this space and um, I wish that we had the conversations more about that in a real way, , because it turns dogmatic, it turns into like Bitcoin maximalism versus Shitcoin and like, while that's where I land on the philosophical scale and what I want to use as money and what I think is good for the world, I feel like there's a ton of people out there that maybe aren't confused by this argument.

[00:53:30] and they look at us sometimes, like we look at those staunch gold bugs that like just shut off their minds to Bitcoin. That the idea that something digital can have value because it's not declared by the Constitution or God or whatever their, their, uh, reason for choosing gold. Gold. She said it therefore it is

[00:53:48] Yeah. So it's like, you know, a lot, a lot of bitcoiners typically don't have the conversation about all coins versus Bitcoin in this way. And I think it's a little bit of a problem because you, you can have a principled moral, like rational base for why Bitcoin is the best money and also discuss the free market choosing to go and gamble on Altcoin.

[00:54:14] Sure. JPEGs or choosing to use ETH as their money. You know, some people are doing. A lot of people are

[00:54:22] Alex Stanczyk: doing that. I feel like, I feel like a lot of Bitcoiners have already gone down that pathway though. Like, you know, you get to the Max's, they've already gone down that pathway. They've already had those conversations.

[00:54:31] They've already looked at the options. And the reason that they're Max's is that they have looked at the options and they've rejected the other ones. And I agree with you. Yeah, I think ultimately I'm a free market guy. I think, you know, as, as many of these things as want to be out there, let 'em be out there.

[00:54:49] I don't have a problem with that. And the market will decide, you know, just look at the network effects. Are the network effects of any particular thing growing or not? Are they growing to where they're probably gonna displace Bitcoin? That's the next question. And then for me, you know, kind of where I draw the line between Bitcoin and, and Altcoins and all these other things is when they use Bitcoin as an affinity scam, that's where I'm like, yeah, no, I'm not good with that because.

[00:55:17] They try to claim in many ways that they do the things Bitcoin does, but they don't really, and that, that's kind of where I'm like, yeah, let, let's not, let's not do that. Because that's, that's kind of, you know, that's getting into the realm of untrue. Oh yeah. And a lot of people lost a lot of money from, from that kind of stuff.

[00:55:38] Brad Mills: There's so much sort of like misinformation out there into, into the market. And even the people that are choosing to use ETH or whatever as their money and exercising that free market, right. To choose an inferior money over what we have over, we using it . But even those people are not doing it in a honest, truthful way.

[00:56:01] They're saying, we're not trying to compete with Bitcoin. We're for smart contracts and we are for this and that. Right. And then when you try to actually, like I find, I do this all the time anyways. I say no, E is competing with Bitcoin. Everything is competing with Bitcoin. Right. And. , and therefore, like when you analyze from the foundational principles of what gives Bitcoin value, e fails to compete sufficiently with Bitcoin's decentralized properties, and it's predictable scarcity, it's long-term, credible scarcity and all the other properties of money like that.

[00:56:38] Like sure, there's things that Ethereum and maybe some other alt coins have, like there's multiple, many pillars of value that give something like a, a commodity or something mintiness and yeah, there's, you know, seven, eight different pillars of this Parthenon of value and Bitcoin has all of them. And Ethereum may have three really strong pillars, but it doesn't have predictable scarcity.

[00:57:08] Credible scarcity. It doesn't have decentralization. So, This is like, you know, and I think about this, and I talk about this a lot because I always have friends of mine that are kind of listening to my podcast or just, no, I'm the Bitcoin guy in the circle or whatever, or entrepreneur friends that are just like, yeah, I don't really know the difference that much between them.

[00:57:30] So I'm 50% Bitcoin, 50% east, and I'm just gonna kind of like do that. Right? And so , so it's like, you know, how do you, uh, how do you, how do you like, give, you know, what it advice reminds somebody to,

[00:57:44] Alex Stanczyk: it kind of, it kind of reminds me of the, uh, the.com craze, right? the.com boom. There was like a.com, everything, you know, dog booms.com, whatever, dot com.

[00:57:54] And it was kind of like that. And people, there was a huge misallocation of capital, right? People were throwing money at everything. If it had.com, at the end of it, thinking it was gonna be like, . And at the end of the day, it wasn't. I think what happens in, in Altcoin land is, is that people really don't understand the importance or the idea of the base layer.

[00:58:15] You know, they've got all these different kind of quote use cases that they say they're great and that's wonderful. Like, I'm not saying there's no market for some of the stuff that these guys are, are suggesting, but like, okay, the way I think of it is this, have you ever heard of Exeter's pyramid? No.

[00:58:32] Alright. A lot of gold people will understand this. So, Exeter's pyramid, John Exeter was a, I, I believe he worked for the Fed, if I'm not mistaken about that. But anyway, he had this pyramid where, where it showed it was an inverted pyramid. So think of a pyramid that's upside down and at the point of the pyramid, at the base layer, the thing holding the whole pyramid up was gold.

[00:58:52] And then you've got all these financial derivatives built upon gold. Cause originally the United States dollar was constructed as, as a gold species money. And then over time you, you know, , you constructed stuff on top of it to where today you've got all these really layers of derivatives of products and different kinds of things to, to address every possible conceivable use case that humans would want in, in finance.

[00:59:18] Right. And I kind of think of, of Bitcoin in a little bit in the same way, because to me, with the advent of lightning and now the advent of tarot, which you can essentially tokenize theoretically anything and and run it over lightning, which ultimately runs over Bitcoin. Bitcoin is that foundational base layer that you can build.

[00:59:40] Really, I don't see why not in time any use case on top of. So the real question becomes is do you have a strong enough base layer, a strong enough main chain, a strong enough argument for a network that's gonna continue to grow organically to support your thing? Or are you X, Y, Z. Web startup sales company that's gonna try to compete with Amazon, can you as sale the network effects of Bitcoin or not?

[01:00:06] And I think if, if you can't, if you don't have a solid plan to do that, it's kind of a non-starter. It's stillbirth.

[01:00:13] Brad Mills: Yeah. I, you know, I even think that there's, there's an argument that's a good argument for some people, but I even can think of a world where they do create those network effects for Ethereum.

[01:00:29] And then it is the settlement blockchain for all of the world's notional value of derivatives. And there's like a quadrillion dollars of vet value settled on the Ethereum blockchain. And in that world, even, I still think the ETH asset is not gonna compare with the btc. , even if the Bitcoin blockchain doesn't settle as much notional value of derivatives and stocks and real estate transactions and all that stuff.

[01:01:01] And I, and I look at it kind of like a little bit like what you were saying about with the technology, the technology curve. I mean, just when we're talking, it just reminded me of the period in history when aluminum was, there was this aluminum craze where they discovered aluminum and they thought, oh, this is like gold.

[01:01:19] Except it's better because it's shinier and it's lighter .

[01:01:23] Alex Stanczyk: Right. It's just different properties. Right. It had different properties.

[01:01:27] Brad Mills: Yeah. It was like, oh, this is gold. The evolution of gold. Look what it can do. It can do so much more is lighter. We can make more things out of it. It's stronger. Right.

[01:01:35] Alex Stanczyk: So, and at the end of the day, it had a completely different use than gold.

[01:01:40] Well, did,

[01:01:41] Brad Mills: did you know the story about how the, you know, like in Napoleon used to serve the, uh, the servants. with the gold plating, the gold silverware. And then when he had esteemed guests, he would serve them with the aluminum silverware because that was like, I've not heard of that. No. Oh yeah. There was this, so at almost like a technology adoption curve, but back in the day when aluminum was started to become a form of money, there was a massive bubble in the price of aluminum.

[01:02:09] It was being used more as, more than gold as money for a period of time. And I think the price soared like a hundred x or something like that. And then eventually, as technology caught up with, you know, mining technology and, and refining technology caught up with, um, this craze, the price of aluminum cratered like 99%.

[01:02:31] Meanwhile, you know, as a money, as an investment, aluminum itself was just a destruction of capital, generational poverty for people who had believed in aluminum as a store of value and a money better than gold and. in the end, like during World War I, world War ii, you can look at how much aluminum was important for the world.

[01:02:57] Like something like 50 to 60% of all of the world's. Like G D P at one point I think was like based on aluminum, like production of weapons and tanks. Wow. And buildings and stuff like that. And yet the price of aluminum itself, like the commodity was cratered and was dropped lower and lower and lower while its utility got bigger and bigger and bigger.

[01:03:19] And I think that's the right analogy for Ethereum. Like in a world where even if, you know the, the financial elites or whatever, the central planners want to elevate e the Ethereum network over the Bitcoin network because they know they can easier contr, more easily, control it or whatever the reason might be.

[01:03:37] Even if we get into that reality where the Ethereum network is like the dominant blockchain for settling of derivatives and, and financial contracts and stuff like that. . The ETH asset I think is like digital aluminum, where the Ethereum network is like aluminum where it can become one of the most used things in the world.

[01:03:55] And still the value of the ETH can be like tiny compared to the value of Bitcoin because Bitcoin's primary purpose B T C is to be perfect money. And if we succeed at Bitcoin adoption and educating people about Bitcoin, then even if the Bitcoin network doesn't defeat other blockchains in terms of usage for all these different use cases like taro and things like that, the BTC asset still can become a million dollars per coin and settle two 20 trillion of val or like be worth 20 trillion competing with gold.

[01:04:31] And the other ones can compete with each other and they're more like digital aluminum . That's my, that's my recent sort of, uh, thought on that.

[01:04:40] Alex Stanczyk: That sort of makes sense. I mean, I don't know that these. Competing things will ever go away. You know, some people ask me, well, you know, do you think Bitcoin's gonna replace the dollar?

[01:04:49] Well, it, no, actually, I'm not sure that it will. But I think what's more important is what's gonna hold value over time. And I think that is gonna become more and more of a thing. You know, it's like you have, you have huge portions of the population that are having trouble right now because of inflation, right?

[01:05:10] I mean, there are, there's a huge chunk of the population in the US where like you increase their, over their monthly costs by 750 to, you know, $2,000 a month because of inflation and they're in big trouble, like big trouble. And, um, so because of that, um, I think naturally it's gonna, it's just gonna, I, the question becomes, you know, what, what are people gonna choose?

[01:05:32] What's in their own best interests? And I think humans largely will choose what's in their own bench best interests. What reminds me or makes me think about that is, is that you have incumbent systems like. PayPal, you know, that's the whole thing this weekend. Like, everybody's losing their shit on Twitter about PayPal, what's going on with PayPal, right?

[01:05:50] Brad Mills: Yeah. Do you wanna explain that just in case this is a month delayed from getting released and people don't understand what happened? Oh,

[01:05:56] Alex Stanczyk: sure. So, so I guess it was on Friday, PayPal came out and they made an announcement. Somebody caught that. They, well, it wasn't even an announcement, somebody caught it and they, they changed their, their terms of use or acceptable use policy.

[01:06:08] I guess, and I'm gonna summarize it from what I understand, I mean, I might be not precisely correct, but this is what my understanding of it is, is that essentially anything that you do that they don't like, they can, they can, um, charge you $2,500 per instance, . Okay? So it's like if you're using PayPal to, to either sell or buy things that they don't like, whether it's ammunition or tobacco or whatever, all the different things they've listed theoretically.

[01:06:43] that is a violation of their, of their acceptable use policy. And for every violation, their new policy is that they can take $2,500 from you for every time you do it. And by the way, the new policy that they have just since walked back, but you know the whole, all of Twitter is at this point, it's like, oh, well you say you're walking it back, but we know what your plans are is essentially if you say anything that they don't agree with.

[01:07:12] So if you're out there using what they what, and they're the sole determining factor, like they're the final arbiter of what is hate speech, what is harassment, what is whatever they get to decide. And if you're out there in public and you say something they don't like that they can take $2,500 free you for every instance.

[01:07:29] And like all of Twitter is losing their shit about that. .

[01:07:32] Brad Mills: Yeah. It was like David, David Marcus was, and Elon Musk, the two of the co-founders of PayPal. Both were, yes. Kind of like, you know, basically saying like, get rid of, get, get off PayPal. It's

[01:07:44] Alex Stanczyk: it's time. Yes. Yes. It's mind-blowing. So the question becomes, so this is a really good example of the question becomes, well, do you use PayPal because it's got this massive network effect?

[01:07:55] Or do, or do, or do you get off? Because in your view, they're doing something harmful to you. And I think that's ultimately the question of Bitcoin or US dollars or a controlled network. By controlled, I mean, you know, is it, is it controllable? Is it truly decentralized or is it centralized in a way where some authorities or some corporate interests can come after it and say, okay, well we can do whatever we want with this thing now.

[01:08:20] Brad Mills: Yeah. That question is something that even like I probably was naive about until maybe the last couple of years. I mean, I've been in Bitcoin now for 11 years and I'm just, I'm always learning about the financial system and about like, you know, what's likely to happen. And I used to think more that, yeah, the Bitcoin's gonna replace the dollar.

[01:08:46] That was the thing. It was that the dollar would be replaced, Bitcoin was going to be a black hole of value that would suck in everything, you know, all of the extra value in real estate stocks. All that would, and, and Fiat currencies would all just go to Bitcoin and then we would just use Bitcoin as money.

[01:09:05] And, um, I don't know. It's the, it seems like that's a bit of an extremist view to take. Yeah. It's hard for people to grip on that concept. Because it's like, oh yeah, also,

[01:09:16] Alex Stanczyk: it's never

[01:09:17] Brad Mills: happened before, right? Yeah. We've never had that, you know, like that's never, that's not happened.

[01:09:21] Alex Stanczyk: Yeah. We've never done anything like that before.

[01:09:23] Right? Like even though, you know, the US dollar is still the quote reserve currency of the world, you still have Swiss francs and you still have other currencies and you still have gold and you still have silver and you still have all these other things like, you know, you could be argued stockpiles of copper or whatever.

[01:09:38] Right.

[01:09:38] Brad Mills: So yeah, maybe it's just a naive thing or just an excitement when you, when you get so excited, when you learn about what Bitcoin is and how it can help the world and how it can fix a lot of broken monies in the world. You just sort of like think, yeah, of course we're gonna use a better money and governments will get on board and then they'll just own some Bitcoin and then they can, you know, like be part of it,

[01:10:02] But it's definitely not gonna happen, I don't think, in my lifetime where the only money that we'll use is Bitcoin. I think like the more logical, more likely, less extreme position. Easier to accept position is that Bitcoin will be a global reserve asset along with whatever else emerges in this post.

[01:10:25] Sort of like us reserve currency paradigm. It'll

[01:10:29] Alex Stanczyk: probably, in my mind, be the, the best way the, okay. If you think of it across as you have all these different things and all these different instruments, and all these different vehicles and all these different derivatives and all these different things that store monetary energy.

[01:10:42] Let's frame it like that. Could be copper, could be gold, could be silver, could be Swiss francs, it could be rubles, it could be US dollars, it could be whatever. You know. Think of any derivative, financial derivative, just cuz you have Bitcoin. Are all these financial derivatives or things that store value gonna go away?

[01:11:00] Probably not, right? They're probably. Always be that kind of stuff. Even on Bitcoin, I could see a future where there's all kinds of derivatives built on top of Bitcoin, but what is the thing out of all the things that is gonna best store purchasing power moving into the future? And I think that thing, you know, until , until something else is discovered that's better than Bitcoin, which may be never, because I don't know if that's a once in a lifetime discovery or not, probably.

[01:11:30] Like it's the thing that, you know, it's like it's, it's the only thing with a that we've ever seen that is mathematically enforced. Scarcity. That's the only thing.

[01:11:42] Brad Mills: Everything else. Yeah. And everything else is copies of it. All the other things that are like, yeah, we're Bitcoin, but for smart contracts and we're Bitcoin, but more private.

[01:11:51] We're Bitcoin, but faster. We're Bitcoin only. Better . Yeah, we're Bitcoin, but like, you know, we paid a cryptographer from the 18, 1980s to put his name on it. , right? We're Bitcoin, but I'm a celebrity, so buy my Bitcoin , all of these different variations.

[01:12:09] Alex Stanczyk: Oh yeah. All these variations. And they'll, they'll come up with some cool marketing words and use some, you know, some math formula on a white paper and be like, yeah, this is better because of this dato coefficient, or whatever the hell they come up with.

[01:12:21] But you know what I'm saying? It's like , can you ever create, rediscover a discovery? It's like, can you rediscover electricity? I don't know. I dunno. doesn't

[01:12:31] Brad Mills: seem like it. Maybe you can discover a different form of generating electricity, which changes the paradigm. But yeah, electricity itself, I don't think you're ever gonna, yeah.

[01:12:45] Unless you're like into the alien stuff, you know, and you think, oh, maybe there's some element out there that has gravity as a Yeah, sure.

[01:12:54] Alex Stanczyk: But I mean, who knows? Maybe, maybe that will be the case. Maybe at some point we'll have some Yeah.

[01:13:00] Brad Mills: Alien,

[01:13:00] Alex Stanczyk: alien money. Yeah. Right. Like maybe at some point we'll have some major leap forward in

[01:13:06] Brad Mills: money.

[01:13:07] Yeah. Maybe they figured out a different way to do money that, that we're gonna have to just look at and be like, oh yeah, that's a better way to do money.

[01:13:16] Alex Stanczyk: I, I tend to doubt that it's gonna happen in our lifetime.

[01:13:18] Brad Mills: You, you use this money and it makes you live forever. Like, I'm gonna use that money. That's a good money.

[01:13:24] Yeah. I still have some Bitcoin though, I think

[01:13:27] Alex Stanczyk: instead of magic internet and the money, and now it's a magic alien money. I saw this really cool thing. It was a cartoon where there were actually, it was, it was like a sci-fi cartoon. I'm trying to remember who put it out, but with Bitcoin and, and like, The premise of it is Bitcoin was emanating out into the universe and now we're in block, like 369 million something, something, something.

[01:13:49] And just like projecting it through, through space, it becomes the money of the universe or whatever. I don't know. I thought it

[01:13:56] Brad Mills: was interesting. Well, that is a, that is like a very interesting topic as well to, to kind of think about. I recently read that book, something deeply Hidden. Mm-hmm. It, it is like Sean Carroll, I think is the author.

[01:14:11] It's all about quantum physics and the multiverse potential, uh, potentialities and stuff like that. And then you see that there's actually some bitcoiners that are doing like legit research into like, how could you use Bitcoin as a currency on Mars? Like how could you use Bitcoin right? In space where you have to factor in things like gravity and the speed of light and stuff like that.

[01:14:33] Alex Stanczyk: Now you, now you have to have quantum entanglement for it to even work. Right. Things like that. .

[01:14:38] Brad Mills: Yeah. So. You know, we're going, we're going a little bit too far for this episode. I think we're getting beyond our depths here in terms of, uh, aliens alien money. Yeah, yeah. And quantum physics and things like

[01:14:52] Alex Stanczyk: that.

[01:14:52] Reminds me, it reminds me of Cafe Bitcoin sometimes now, because we, we cover all kinds of crazy stuff. We go, we go there. Not that we're really qualified to talk about it, but it's just fun.

[01:15:02] Brad Mills: So you found Bitcoin in 2019. You started getting into Bitcoin, and then how did you come across Corey and how did you get to work in with swan?

[01:15:13] Right.

[01:15:13] Alex Stanczyk: So I guess it was in 2020 that I, you know, the light bulb went on that I wanted to switch, switch industries. I think by the end of 2020, uh, I was thinking that it's probably a good idea. So 2021, beginning of 2021, I was doing research about the industry, trying to figure out, okay, well I know I wanna work in this industry, I just don't know where.

[01:15:37] and, uh, swan just kept coming up on my radar, you know, and, uh, I had shortlisted a handful of different organizations that I thought, I mean, part of me was thinking, oh, I'm just gonna start a, I'm gonna start something up myself, maybe do a fund or something like that, that buys Bitcoin. And then, you know, after thinking all that through, I was like, that doesn't even make any sense.

[01:15:57] You just, just buy the Bitcoin, right? So, yeah, I had shortlisted Swan kept coming back to it and, uh, started sending out some feelers. I saw Corey tweeted, uh, I wanna say this was around May-ish April, may timeframe, that they, he was looking for some guys that could do high net worth sales, you know, customer relationship, stuff like that.

[01:16:20] And I was like, I could do that. So, you know, I, I te I DMed him back and we started having a conversation. , basically. He was like, yeah, I can't hire you yet. I hired Stefan Lavera instead. And I was like, yeah, I get it. If I was you, I'd hired Stefan too. . And then, you know, I just kept in touch with him cuz I knew I wanted to work at Swan.

[01:16:41] I had, you know, I was talking to some other organizations or whatever, but in my heart I was like, man, Swan's my first choice. And then I guess it was the end of September, you know, Corey, he and I were talking again. He's like, okay, now's the time. And I started in October of 2021. So yeah. Nice.

[01:16:59] Brad Mills: There we are.

[01:17:00] Were you previously experienced doing like radio shows or something like that? Or is this your first, like, Swan the, the Daily Bitcoin show? Is that your first media project?

[01:17:13] Alex Stanczyk: No, I did a once a month podcast, uh, when I was in the, in the Gold World that called the Gold Chronicles. Uh, it was me and Jim Rickards, who's a really Oh really?

[01:17:23] Yeah. He's a really deeply pedigreed kind of, analyst, big thinker kind of guy. And he's also interested in gold, you know, gold guy. So he and I, once a month would do that. That's kind of was, I guess was my first media production stuff. And then really what happened with Twitter spaces and Cafe Bitcoin is, is that I, I started hanging out on Bitcoin, Twitter spaces.

[01:17:49] Cause I wanted to learn more about Bitcoin and, and what ended up happening was, is I would go into these rooms that were your typical Bitcoin Maxi, toxic Maxi Twitter spaces. And some of 'em were just like just dudes yelling at each other. . And I wasn't learning anything. I was like, come on, I'm not learning anything

[01:18:08] So at some point I was just like, man, screw it. I'm just going to do my own spaces and I won't let anybody yell at each other. Yeah. Solely is for the purpose of me being able to learn. Right. Right. And that turned into a thing where it became pretty regular. And that's kind of how it evolved. It started as this thing called Bitcoin Breakfast Club.

[01:18:26] And at one point Corey was like, you should call this cafe Bitcoin, because we, we did it over on Clubhouse. It was, it was a big thing. I was like, that's a great idea. So we started doing it and just started becoming more consistent with more, better and better speakers. People much smarter than me, really, uh, who would pop in and, and then hired a, a full-time producer, and then it, it grew from there,

[01:18:47] Brad Mills: so.

[01:18:47] Oh, that's awesome, man. But, uh, back to the, the show that you did with Jim Rick, how many shows did you end up doing with, with him? How

[01:18:54] Alex Stanczyk: long did that work? See, I don't know, man. I did that for like, I wanna say almost four years, once a month ish,

[01:19:00] Brad Mills: something like that. So whatever that, have you talked to him recently about Bitcoin?

[01:19:05] Alex Stanczyk: Not really. I mean, , you know, back in the day when I was doing shows with him, every now and then I'd be like, Hey, you wanna talk about Bitcoin? He'd be like, ah, I hate Bitcoin. I don't wanna talk about Bitcoin . And I'm just outta respect for him, cuz I like him. He's my friend. Like, I don't wanna make him talk about stuff he doesn't wanna talk about.

[01:19:21] So I was like, all right, no worries. Yeah, I, I, to this day, I, I still considered him one of the smartest dudes I've ever known. And I think at some point he'll figure Bitcoin out. He'll be a Coiner. He is a Bitcoin. He just doesn't know it yet, in my opinion.

[01:19:35] Brad Mills: Yeah, he's, I've read all of his books. I think I maybe didn't read the last one or two cuz I got busy with other books.

[01:19:42] But him, and I'd say Michael Covell, I read nearly all their books about money. And Michael Val Covell writes a lot about trend following because I was trying to like figure out portfolio management and stuff like that. And he, you know, interviews and profiles, lots of different risk managers in the trend following space.

[01:20:08] So his books were really good and Jim Rickers books were really good. And, uh, yeah, Jim Rickers is so interesting. Like his, his, uh, his story of how he used to work for L T C M and he lived through that crisis and then he started consulting with the government to do like financial war games and, you know, he's, he's an insider outsider.

[01:20:32] Yeah. And, um, smart guy close to the action. Yep. And recognizes all the flaws and problems with the way that the money's been des based and set up to be destroyed over, like valuation perspective over time for people's savings and how it creates tons of bubbles that end up hurting. and that were leading towards a world of censorship.

[01:20:56] And he calls it Ice nine, I don't know if he calls that still, but where they just freeze everything. Mm-hmm. . And like, I remember, I, I used to tag him sometimes on Twitter and sometimes he'd react or sometimes he'd reply or whatever. And then he went through this thing where he like was blocking Bitcoiners.

[01:21:13] Cuz I think he was getting triggered because Bitcoin was just ripping and he was not really into Bitcoin. Yeah. But then over again recently Yeah. With the trucker convoy and, and uh, the Emergencies Act being declared in Canada, a couple of us were tagging him again. Like, Hey look, it's like Ice nine coming true here from your books.

[01:21:30] They're actually freezing people's money Right. Based on their political views. Right. And he kind of seems to be back again into the like, oh, I guess I'm open to Bitcoin. Cuz he's like, Bitcoin fixes this Bitcoin and gold. He said that recently in one of his tweets, he said that, yeah, yeah, Bitcoin and gold is a solution to this problem.

[01:21:48] Yep. So yeah, like he's, he, he's a super smart guy. and, uh, e everybody should be reading his books. Currency Wars is an amazing book.

[01:21:58] Alex Stanczyk: Yeah. He coined the term currency wars, like everybody uses it as part of the normal lexicon now, but he's the guy that came up with that I think,

[01:22:07] Brad Mills: I'm pretty sure. Uh, I mean, like he, he popularized it anyway with that book.

[01:22:11] Yeah, for sure. Really good book. Yeah, man, that's awesome that you used to do a show with him. Yeah, you should probably, uh, you try to get him on a, do a podcast again and see if, if cool . I mean, not, not a lot, don't like ambush, but you

[01:22:25] Alex Stanczyk: know, it's been in the back of my mind for a while. You know, I, I, um, I have a lot of respect for that guy and, uh, you know, he and I, I consider to be good friends, so like at some point Yeah, I hope

[01:22:37] Brad Mills: so.

[01:22:38] It'd be cool to get like even just a private dinner arranged with him and like breed love and sailor and people like that where you could just kinda let them rap a little bit and maybe Sure. CV changes his mind at all. Not that it matters, you know, it's not like we need Jim Rick to come and start saving in Bitcoin, but it would just be cool to have his mind a little bit more attuned to, to Bitcoin because he for sure, he knows the problem.

[01:23:03] He talks about the, the problems all the time, and he's very influential for sure. And Bitcoin is a solution to, to the problems he describes. Yeah, a hundred

[01:23:11] Alex Stanczyk: percent. I'll say one last thing about Jim Rickers is, is that he's an interesting guy in particular, not because he's, I mean, yes, he's extremely intelligent.

[01:23:20] He knows a lot of stuff, like he knows a lot of stuff. He's super well connected, but because of his background, he is basically from that group of people who, you know, the traditional financial system benefits the most. He's from that crowd, like, yeah, the school that he went to is the same school that crowd sends their kids to, to go work at the I M F.

[01:23:46] or go work at some huge, you know, supernational entity, like the Bank of International Settlements or something like that. He, he's from that crowd, and yet, interestingly enough, he's anti monetary, debasement, anti tyranny, anti, all that kind of stuff. I'm, I'm paraphrasing him, but that's what I think. Anyway, it's very interesting, dude.

[01:24:08] Brad Mills: Yeah. That's why he's, he's such an interesting author and great, great follow just because of his background, because he's been from that world and he's now like almost like an activist educator. Yeah. About hundred percent problems with the traditional system. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But yeah, he's, he's, he's kind of like in the, in the beginning of going back to when we were talking about like the people that were, that, that just can't open their mind to Bitcoin because Bitcoin is not, you know, doesn't have the monetary pedigree of 5,000 years of money.

[01:24:39] And the constitution didn't, doesn't say gold and silver lawful money. or, I mean, Bitcoin and gold and silver are lawful money. It just says gold and silver are lawful money. I mean, a lot of those folks kind of come back to like, well, it's intrinsic or it's constitutional money and I'm not interested in anything that's not either given value by God.

[01:25:01] Right. Or the constitution .

[01:25:03] Alex Stanczyk: Well, here's the problem with that ultimately, right? This is that there's, you know, and this is speaking directly to those folks who privilege gold as God's money, for example, or want to use the, you know, say that it's because it's constitutional money, we should therefore use it.

[01:25:20] This is my opinion, but there's a difference between God's law and man's law, and gold is subject to man's law. So let me try to clear that up a little bit. God's law, in my opinion, are the natural laws of the universe, the law of gravity, strong to click force, weak to click force. Speed of light, all these different kinds of things that are established, well understood principles of how the universe operates basically, right?

[01:25:50] Man's law is what we do with each other. So we have contract, we have like, you know, use of force when necessary. Uh, hopefully it's done by, by contract and mutual agreement, all that other kind of stuff. But gold is a hundred percent subject to man's law. This, by the way, is the, the greatest failure of gold as money.

[01:26:10] And this is the thing that switched me onto Bitcoin because I've told the story before and I was in, in 2020, around the May-ish timeframe of 2020. The policy response to C was to ground all the airplanes in Switzerland. And, uh, you know, when we were building our gold fund, we thought about every potential attack vector.

[01:26:31] We even took out like a, an extra insurance rider that we paid extra for. to ensure against things like acts of God that are not normally covered under vault coverage. You know, force majeure things like war or riots or theft by the government of the assets, confiscation of the assets. What we never planned for was a pot, uh, well, was a potential pandemic where they grounded the airplanes.

[01:26:58] So during that time, it occurred to me the light bulb went on, that if I had a client who said, Alex, I want you to deliver x number of tens of millions of dollars of gold bars to me in this other country, I couldn't do it. Even if I wanted to do it, even if I had the gold to do it, even if I had the logistics to do it, I could not do it because I was stopped by the government of Switzerland from delivering that gold cuz they said, you can't fly the planes.

[01:27:23] So that's when the, when I realized gold requires four final settlement. Gold requires the cooperation and permission of other human beings. Meaning if you don't have the cooperation of the guys operating the vaults, operating the armored cars, operating the customs, operating the ground crews for the airplanes, air crew, same thing on the other side, then you couldn't do it.

[01:27:45] Plus any one of any person in, in that process could karu it up as some dude who worked on the armored trucks told his buddy who worked for the gang that they're moving the gold, they could hit the truck. Take the gold. This works from an institutional scale down to an individual scale. If you and I agree, like we meet somewhere in a parking lot and you're gonna sell me whatever, let's call it whatever you want, and I'm gonna give you a kilo bar of gold, well, some dude could run up on us with a gun and, and interrupt that transaction.

[01:28:14] So tie that back to the whole man's law thing versus God's law and, and versus like, here's where it gold falls down. Gold can be stopped by humans. In 1971, Nixon one dude. With a pen in an executive order said Gold is no longer basically backing the United States dollar. One dude with a pen did that subject to man, right?

[01:28:41] Where Bitcoin is not subject to man. That way you can send any amount of value basically to the other side of the world almost instantly at almost no cost and no human be. You don't need any human's permission on the planet and no human can stop you at that moment. That's when I realized this is where Go Gold fails is money, and this is where Bitcoin excels.

[01:29:05] Brad Mills: That's awesome. Yeah. That's why, you know, people are starting to say things like Bitcoin is the perfect money and Bitcoin is the only money we've ever had. And the first time I heard Bitcoin Tina say that, or maybe it was John Seth or something on one of these shows, a cafe Bitcoin show or something.

[01:29:27] Initially I rejected that and thought, well, that's a little bit crazy. That sounds like Bitcoin is gonna replace the dollar. It sounds, again, like I'm saying something that like I'm, I don't want to entertain like an extremist view. That's gonna be hard for people to comprehend, but the more you think about it, if Bitcoin is the perfect money, it is the only money we've ever had.

[01:29:50] I mean, we've only had, the way John says it is we've only ever had approximations of money and Bitcoin is the first real

[01:29:58] Alex Stanczyk: money. If that's your definition of money. Yeah. Like

[01:30:02] Brad Mills: that can be, it can be settled where no one can stop

[01:30:04] Alex Stanczyk: you. Yes. It is the only form of money that has certain unique properties, unique in the history of mankind.

[01:30:10] That is true. Like, so if you think about the faster, farther, stronger thing that that sailor's always going on about like G, go for you go from rye stones. right on the island of Yap, which are these gigantic multi ton things that you can't necessarily move very fast or very far to the next form of money.

[01:30:32] In the next form of money, you go to gold and silver. Now you can move it farther faster than you go from gold to to paper money, which is farther, faster, larger amounts if you want. And then you go to electronic paper money, which is farther, faster, greater amounts. And then you've got Bitcoin, which is the farthest, fastest, most efficient ever say You got all these unique properties that are just unlike any form of money mankind's ever used.

[01:31:00] That is absolutely true. Well,

[01:31:03] Brad Mills: I, I love, I love, uh, that last little five minutes that you, that you said, so I think we should probably call it there man, cuz that was a good, a good powerful end. Awesome. To uh, down to the show. Yeah. It's been fun. If people are interested. , like we've said before, Alex runs a daily show, which I recommend everybody that's getting interested in Bitcoin and trying to build their conviction on B, why Bitcoin And is interested in hearing lots of different perspectives from Bitcoiners, from different parts of the world, from different demographics.

[01:31:43] The daily show that you do is, is great for those types of folks that are trying to understand Bitcoin more and why Bitcoin, and I see a lot of people in the audience that are like put, they've got like JPEGs as their profile pictures and they've got like card and Ripple and all these different tags in their, in their profiles and stuff.

[01:32:05] So for a lot of folks that are suffering through massive drawdowns that came into the space in 20 20, 20 21, they heard about. Cryptocurrency from a celebrity, or they follow Bit Boy or some other massively over followed YouTube shill, and they started buying into all these all coins and stuff. Shows like yours are extremely valuable, not just for the 99% of people who don't have any cryptocurrency at all, and that need to understand Bitcoin, start educating about, uh, learning about Bitcoin.

[01:32:38] But it's really valuable for the millions of people that came in through this misinformation funnel of terrible shill logic that got ends, ends up getting people wrecked because they start dollar cost averaging into dog shit . So show's been great for, for all the different folks. So anyways, people should definitely follow you on Twitter, subscribe to your, uh, to your daily show.

[01:33:06] And yeah, anybody that's my friend personally that's listening to this, like, please go listen to Alex's show at least once or twice a week. , it's worth it to go and just kind of throw it in the background and you know, maybe one day you can go up and ask some questions or something, but really love it. I love the show.

[01:33:24] We used to do it on Clubhouse all the time. We still hang out in Clubhouse, but I love that it's a, a structured scheduled thing that you're doing. Cuz a lot of, some people, you know, a lot of people need that consistency. They need to be able to know, okay, I can turn this on at 10 in the morning, go listen.

[01:33:38] Right. Whereas with club hosts, we just randomly show up whenever we're, we're not doing anything and we just jam. But um, yeah. So how can people best go from hearing this podcast to getting the brain dump, the orange pill hooked right up into their veins with your show?

[01:33:55] Alex Stanczyk: Sure. So three ways, like, uh, if you, you can follow me on Twitter, Alex Stanec, Alex Stanec, so S T A N C Z Y K like Charlie Zulu, Yankee Kilo.

[01:34:08] on Twitter spaces, we do it, you have to be on Twitter basically to do that. We do it every day as a live show Monday through Friday, and we start at 7:00 AM Pacific, 10:00 AM Eastern. We do that for two hours live and we also have it as a podcast. So we record all of those. Uh, they go up on, uh, Spotify, fountain Apple podcasts, pretty much everywhere that you get your podcast, you can just search for Cafe Bitcoin, uh, and you'll find us.

[01:34:31] We're up to episode, I wanna say 192 now. And yeah. Uh, thanks for the kind words, man. I appreciate

[01:34:38] Brad Mills: it, Brett. Awesome. Well, thanks a lot for coming on the show and uh,

[01:34:41] look

[01:34:42] Brad Mills: forward to chatting with you on Twitter

[01:34:43] Alex Stanczyk: spaces. Thanks for having me. We'll see you there. Bye-bye.

[01:34:50] You don't need to go so fast.

BitcoinEconomicsMoney

Keegan Francis