My name is Phil Gibson (AKA @MrPseu). 

Above is the music video to my latest song, ETF. If you haven’t guessed by the lyrics yet, I’m all about sound money. I am a Bitcoiner. No doubt, (otherwise I would have released this through ShitcoinersDaily.eth or some crap, instead of the amazing Citadel21).

I’m on a mission to plant economic earworms of the Sound Money Revolution into peoples’ ear-holes through musical fusion world-wide.

What exactly do I mean by that?

Simple: education of freedom-based principles focused on Bitcoin by changing the culture through fun, entertaining mediums (specifically in my case, music).

Getting Orange-Pilled Pod by Pod

I wasn’t always a Bitcoiner though. Like many hodlers, I came from the Libertarian world, so the Bitcoin transition was pretty seamless. 

How’d I get there? The short answer is podcasts (and buying a VPN), specifically Part of the Problem hosted by the great comedian Dave Smith, and the Friends Against Government podcast (FAGCAST), hosted by the always hilarious and whimsical Bird and Car. FAGCAST were the ones who inspired me to start my own podcast, A Boy Named Pseu.

It was also the FAGCAST where I first heard Guy Swann talk about Bitcoin in a way that truly spoke to me. His words lifted technical veil that surrounded Bitcoin which initially intimidated me from learning more about it. That episode was the catalyst which inspired me to grock Bitcoin and debunk all the FUD I could about it. After bingeing years-worth of the Cryptoconomy (now Bitcoin Audible), I slowly crawled out of my shallow, short-lived bcash grave and went 100% Bitcoin Maximalist.

As for the VPN part, Bitcoin also introduced me to the notion of embracing self-sovereignty and increasing my privacy.

While at the checkout of NordVPN, both my credit and debit cards were not going through. After patiently waiting on hold for 20 minutes, I was informed by my nice customer service bank lady I needed to ask my branch for permission. That’s right. I had to ask somebody else if I could use my credit card to spend what I thought was MY money to buy a VPN (as if the money was actually in my checking account.

Let’s not kid ourselves now. My patience was pushed to the fullest. I hung up the phone, bought Bitcoin on CashApp, and used said Bitcoin to buy my VPN.

Just like that. 

It was done. It worked like magic. Seamless. Permission-less. 

This is what commerce SHOULD feel like. This was freedom. The ability to own this digital bearer instrument that was truly mine, and could not ever be confiscated from me.

Only by the barrel of a gun to my head could you force me to reveal this secret that only I know, to access my wealth. And should the trigger be pulled, my aggressor has accomplished nothing but embarrassment, and made me a martyr.

This was the power of cryptography; it guarantees protection of truly independent property rights. No piece of paper written by old dudes 200 years ago could every come close to such Liberty.

This was true self-sovereignty, and Bitcoin is one helluva drug.

By November 2019, I was officially orange-pilled!

Medium + Presentation = Message

The medium of podcasts exposed me to the hard-hitting ideas of liberty: free-market principles, economics, foreign policy, and philosophical creeds around property and human rights (most notably the Non-Aggression Principle, or the “NAP”). If you’re unfamiliar with the NAP, I’m happy to ELI5 it for ya:

“Don’t hurt, don’t take their stuff.”

You know, like what you learn in kindergarten (do they still teach that in kindergarten?). Without this open allocation of entertainment and ideas, I may not have found Libertarianism or Bitcoin at all.

However, it wasn’t the content/genre of the podcasts alone, but how the information was delivered and presented by hosts. Dave Smith is professional comedian, and while hilarious, he’s able to communicate complex ideas in his standup that the average pleb on the street can understand, learn something new, and be entertained all at once.

The FAGCAST accomplishes this goal as well, but just on a more relatable level for me personally via having met them in person and being closer to their age.

What these shows share in common is understanding this notion: if you want to make the world a better place, you need to change the culture. Your message has to be entertaining and easy to understand. Make the message fun for the audience, give them an escape from their daily grind. Give them a reason to care about what you have to say while they unintentionally learn something new that can improve their lives (or at least make them think outside the orthodoxy of statist, corporatist propaganda).

But Bitcoin wasn’t my first instrument of freedom I learned how to play...

Truth In Song

Before I was exposed to Libertarianism or Bitcoin, I was, and always will be, a musician first. Music was my calling.

I started playing guitar when I was 10 after being inspired by bands like Guns N’ Roses, Green Day, Led Zeppelin, The Ramones, blink-182, The Replacements, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, just to name a few...

Out of these gems, Green Day influenced me the most. As a young, rookie guitarist, not only were their songs short and easy to play, but their melodic and catchy hooks captivated me. They were like a drug, and I would listen to them on repeat. Not just the singles, but entire albums from front to back, giving the music time to creep into my ears and lay their ear worm eggs to hatch during my sleep, and play throughout my day at school, dinner, and at night again to sing me back to sleep and start the cycle all over again.

Thanks to earworms, every day was a holiday.

It wasn’t until much later, after finding Libertarianism and going down foreign policy rabbit holes, that the political messages of Green Day’s monumental album, American Idiot, truly began to sink in.

The lyrics of a disenfranchised generation (and all of Earth if we’re being honest), victimized through class/economic warfare, driven by actual warfare fueled by an imperial agenda executed through the military industrial complex and twisted political rhetoric through manipulation of mainstream media, the music became much more poignant.

The earworms that brought me back to the music of my roots as a child helped fill in the knowledge gaps. From my obsessive rabbit hole research, I also learned the root of the problem was the Federal Reserve’s corrupt influence on monetary policy. The so-called experts closest to the money spigot artificially and arbitrarily manipulate price signals, enabling the elasticity of money to continually fuel this madness by creating both global dollar hegemony and the booms and busts in the market economy. Bitcoin seemed like the only antidote available to remedy this chaos.

If only more people had pet earworms to show them the treasonous truth in an empire of lies...

Like money, I believe music is a universal language.

The arts in general can communicate vivid messages well understood by multitudes of diverse people world-wide, but there's something explicitly special about music: the earworm.

A Crash Course on Earworms

Definition:

• a song or melody that keeps repeating in one's mind  

• a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person's mind after it is no longer playing

• phrases used to describe an earworm include "musical imagery repetition" and "involuntary musical imagery”.

According to research done by the American Psychological Association, there are certain characteristics that make songs more likely to become earworms:

• fast-paced tempo

• easy-to-remember melody

• unusual intervals or repetitions that make them stand out from other songs

• played on the radio more than other songs and are usually featured at the top of the charts.

Some of the most frequently named earworms during this study were: “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga, "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey, "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Goyte, "California Gurls" by Katy Perry, "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen, and my all time favorite, “Gives You Hell” by The All-American Rejects (okay, it wasn’t on the list, but it damn well SHOULD HAVE BEEN!)

With an ear worm, you remember it whether you want to or not. 

It's trapped in your sub-consciousness. With everything crazy going on in the world of 2020, like a pandemic, riots, a market crash followed by stimulus recovery, a twitter hack, countries facing inflationary death spirals, and Bitcoin hitting the spotlight like never before; what better time to come up with a fun, catchy earworm of a song related to all these events that can indirectly spread truth to the people?

The facts are there, and the writing is on the wall. The earworms are primed for this moment to crawl into the people’s minds and spread the truth of sound money principles, open their hearts to Bitcoin, and lead the sound money revolution.

Art as Information Warfare

Art is ultimately a form of data. It is simply information. Information is distributed. Information is best distributed via mediums that connect to the masses, and particular platforms ripe for accelerating network effects. This has been best executed through entertainment and culture, just as any successful form of propaganda like war, campaigns, marketing and advertising, etc.

Bitcoin is also information. Your private key is your secret weapon that empowers you to express value, and store/grow your wealth in a safe haven free from manipulation.

With Bitcoin, we are now able to store our life savings in our heads, and go anywhere in the world, be it because we are refugees fleeing authoritarianism, seeking asylum in our Citadels to start anew, or simply vacationing in France.

It is this code that enables us the freedom to express our individuality. This tool of independent property rights allows the global expression and protection of human rights.

We know this freedom of wealth expression stimulates Bitcoin’s network effect. What would happen if we pair this formula by adding more variables, like memes and music that people naturally gravitate towards?

The sky is truly the limit, and we are still so damn early...  

Writing the Anthem of the Sound Money Revolution

Times are weird... really weird. People are distracted, and either unaware of the questions that need to be asked, or simply afraid to ask them in the first place. To be super cheesy and quote Bob Dylan, "the times, they are a changin'.”

Indeed, a change is coming. I for one, would like to be on Bitcoin's side of that change. Bitcoin may fix this, but a change in culture must happen first, and the best way to change the culture is by entertainment. So my goal is to write the anthemic record, the soundtrack, filled with earworms, of the Sound Money Revolution.

You can help write it too and be apart of the process by heading on over to ETF615.com. If you wanna help, just look for the BTCPayserver button on the page. The team over there is truly doing Satoshi’s work and are the REAL rockstars by truly making Bitcoin digital cash.

No matter how this thing shakes out, I will feel truly blessed and forever grateful to anybody who thinks my music is even worth anything.

As Gigi says,

"Bitcoin changes you before you change it."

I can vouch for that... I am definitely not the same person I was a year ago, and Bitcoin has changed me for the better by expanding my curiosity on the inner workings of the world, and has humbled me by lowering my time-preference and meeting so many wonderful people in this passionate community.

Saying that I am truly thankful for all of this, would be an understatement.

As good Austrians, we all know that value is subjective. Let's spread the word. Let's make it fun. Let's have a party at the edge of the world where everyone is invited. At the end of the day, Bitcoin doesn't care who you are. It just is, and that's why it works for everyone.

Let's get down to business. Let's get weird, and let's End the Fed... or at least just opt-out, buy Bitcoin, and rock out to Bit-Rock freedom tunes.

Stay humble. Stack, sats, and thank you.