It's always been about freedom

Hi again from the mountains of Slovakia where I’m spending the summer.

I last signed off at the end of last month mentioning I was planning a daily email for August - oh the best-laid plans!

A couple of weeks ago, I posted in Patey Club how I wanted to focus the (150 max) community around a goal to unite around.

39 comments on the post later, and I’ve realised that there has always been one overarching reason why I chose entrepreneurship and then moved into investing.

Let me explain through the passage of time and the Wayback Machine…

The first podcast I ever did was on Kevin Koskella’s Freedom Lovin’ show back in 2013. I met Kevin through the Dynamite Circle community.

We met up in Boulder, CO with another name you may recognise if you’ve been following since then, Ben Perove who I hosted the Bootstrap Duel podcast with.

Kevin is an OG internet marketer and Bitcoiner and has always been about building ‘personal, political, and psychological freedoms’ (as he states in his excellent book he published a couple of years back).

Back then I was living the nomad lifestyle and was focussed on location freedom, which can be seen in the H1 on my richardpatey.com wordpress site Location independence through internet marketing (archive.org).

In 2018 I see I’d changed my focus to financial freedom with the tagline Get FREE Access to the Best Content and Strategies for Starting & Scaling Your Online Business to Achieve Financial Freedom (archive.org).

And in 2019, my focus moved more to investing where the H1 became Investing in Online Assets to Achieve Financial Independence (archive.org).

This focus on making money has served me and my family well, but recent political developments in the UK are now widening my focus.

I’m extremely concerned with the recent crackdown on free speech by the UK government, a continued trend towards authoritarianism by the state.

People are being arrested for posting (or now even reposting other people’s) views on social media which could cause offence (Link).

You may have seen that most of my content recently on X has been about politics and freedom of speech rather than business (btw if this isn’t for you, all my content on Linkedin is pure business, nothing political).

This has seemingly offended people so much so that I’m no longer involved with Swwwap, and I felt the need to remove a member of Patey Club. Both a real shame.

The way I see it, if you advocate for freedom of speech, you are tolerant of other people’s points of view (unless they are threatening violence or harm to others).

It is an odd situation to be called out as being intolerant from those I view as being intolerant of my views!

Both sides think the other is being intolerant. That society will be harmed if the tolerant tolerate the intolerant - this is the paradox.

So who is correct?

For me it comes down to whether you are trying to censor that which people have the right to say.

I propose that the side that tries to close down debate is in fact the intolerant party.

And that nothing good comes from censorship and restricting freedom of speech.

So now Patey News is about striving for financial & personal freedom in an unfree world.

And Patey Club is now a supportive community building financial and personal freedom through online business, digital assets, and diversifying citizenship.

Cheers!

Richard

ps if you want just a business newsletter, that’s what my Digital Asset Investor delivers.