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BTC231: Bitcoin Nation State Adoption Paradox - A Trojan Horse w/ Alex Gladstein (Bitcoin Podcast)
01:06:25
Exploring the paradoxes of Bitcoin adoption in nation-states and its radical role in human rights, freedom, and financial sovereignty.
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- [00:01]
Preston Pysh
You are listening to tip.
- [00:03]
Peter McCormack
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, I bring back the one and only Alex Gladstein to talk about all the incredible things happening with bitcoin around the world. During the show, Alex talks about his new book, which is a collection of his writings called A Trojan Horse for Freedom. We also talk about the incredible traction that we're seeing from politicians, media and other unexpected types. Finally, Alex talks about the paradox of nation state adoption, how some people are very confused by members of the community cheering on government adoption while others are upset about it. So without further delay, sit back, relax and enjoy this really fun conversation with Alex celebrating 10 years.
- [00:46]
Preston Pysh
You are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the investors podcast network.
- [00:51]
Peter McCormack
Now for your host, Preston Pysh. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here with the one and only Alex Gladstein. Welcome back, sir.
- [01:08]
Alex Gladstein
Thanks for having me.
- [01:09]
Peter McCormack
So, Alex, we were just in Bedford, had an incredible time. I think we'll talk about, like, what's changing there. But before we do that, I want to go straight to your speech that you gave. It was titled the Human Rights Paradox of Nation State Bitcoin Adoption. Tell us about this. I think this is really controversial, in my opinion. A lot of bad takes on this particular topic. So walk us through it.
- [01:33]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah. Well, ever since the earliest days of the bitcoin message boards, people have speculated on what's it going to look like in the future with bitcoin. And there were some threads here and there which had talked about a kind of virgin horse type dynamic where people had written way back when, like essentially early 2010s on Bitcoin talk stuff you can find, kind of anything we discussed today was once discussed back then. But people were like, hey, wouldn't it be something if the existing financial system just started to eat bitcoin? But then bitcoin managed to transform it. By being adopted, it would change the system that was eating it. And that was something I picked up on. And I ended up writing an essay in 2021 called the Trojan Horse for Freedom. Basically that bitcoin is a Trojan horse for freedom. And it was the first essay I did in a series of essays that later turned into a book and other books and my writing career. And now, yes, you're holding it in your hand because last year I decided to turn all of that work, which amounts to 600 pages or so of writing, into a anthology that I would create only 100 copies of and distribute to a Handful of people who've really helped me on my journey, like you. Thank you so much for having me along the way so many times and giving me an audience. I've been so grateful for that. And then the other 50 we auctioned at Scarcity, which is super fun. So we're about to mail those copies as well. But for now there's no other plans to put that writing anywhere else. And what's fun about that book, Trojan Horse for Freedom is that it's been brought up to date. So it has a new intro by me from last year, last summer, and all of the stuff I wrote, 20, 21, 22, 23, I had to go back and update, which was interesting. It was a lot of like exchange rate stuff, like this particular national currency was worth this much btc. And it's like today it's not doing so well in its own right. So bitcoin's grown a lot since then. But you know, I wanted to go back to the COVID of it, A Trojan Horse for Freedom. Right. And the theme of it, which is what we talked about in Bedford on stage. And it's interesting because when I first put out the thesis, it was 2021 and you know, things were heating up. Right. So you had microstrategy had started, right, about maybe eight months earlier. You had Block bought some bitcoin, you had Tesla bought some bitcoin and we hadn't. El Salvador hadn't happened yet. That happened a couple months later. But you were starting to get inklings of some of that. We would maybe get some nation state adoption. So my thesis was at the time that eventually I just thought that bitcoin was going to become this obvious reserve asset for the global financial system and that it would start slow, start here, start there, but eventually build into something that everybody would want and would want to have on their balance sheet, whether you're a sovereign or a large corporation. And I think that has largely happened. Right. So what's interesting is that the thesis has played out in terms of global adoption. It's been pretty crazy. I mean, I don't know if I would have predicted that within four years you'd have the United States government, the world issuer of the world reserve currency, establishing a national strategic bitcoin reserve. I mean, that's pretty wild.
- [04:45]
Peter McCormack
By the way, check out this I got sent.
- [04:47]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah, I. I actually have one as well. It's a great hat. I. I love that one.
- [04:52]
Peter McCormack
For people just listening, it's like it says strategic reserve. It's got a three star Almost like a three star admiral or general.
- [05:01]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah, got one too. So we'll put on the strategic reserve brilliantly designed by Skyler. But I mean it's. It kind of happened kind of suddenly. It was. We went from a time where bitcoin was so niche, we had this long bear market and you know, all of a sudden 2020, you started to get microstrategy happened and then everything else happened and then, then there was kind of a lag. Right. I mean we had another bear market. Right. Was kind of tough for a lot of people, but a lot of stuff kept pushing. Right. Mining is fascinating. You have a lot of different countries mining now at the nation state level, like Ethiopia, Kenya, Oman, Bhutan. I mean this little country Bhutan is mined a billion dollars of bitcoin. It's incredible on water. Water that would have just otherwise gone wasted. Yeah. Blowed down the river and not done anything. Instead they captured that. So you have large scale mining adoption, you have treasury adoption, you have people being exposed to companies like microstrategy all over the world and sovereigns and all sorts of things happening now and states and governors and it's getting pretty crazy. And I remember I had this debate somewhere along the way, I think it was in 2021, 2022, with Ben Hunt, who writes Epsilon theory. And we debated over whether or not this was bad for bitcoin as freedom money, that it would get adopted by Wall street government. His sort of thesis was that that Wall street would kind of eat bitcoin and that it would kind of, I guess, render it pretty useless as a freedom technology. And my thesis was the opposite. I was like, no, no, no. Like it's the Trojan horse. Wall street will adopt it whether it likes freedom or not, simply because of bitcoin's NGU properties. And what would later happen is bitcoin would go into the city walls and sneak out at night and rewire the city and make it more free. And I really feel strongly about my thesis winning out as of today. I mean, I really feel like what you're going to have happen is bitcoin be adopted by all these institutions, which clearly most of them are not. We're not sitting here and claiming BlackRock is some kind of human rights activist. You know, clearly not like they're in it to do one thing and that's to make money. But what's fascinating is they all become kind of. What's the right word?
- [07:11]
Peter McCormack
Quasi cheerleaders.
- [07:13]
Alex Gladstein
Not what's, what's the word when you commit a crime and someone helps you. It's like an accomplice. An accomplice, they become. There you go. Thank you. So they become accomplices to human rights activism, whether they like it or not.
- [07:25]
Peter McCormack
Yeah.
- [07:26]
Alex Gladstein
Like, it's funny when you have blackrock and the Trump administration and even Bukele and any of these governments mining any of these dozens of companies now launching, you know, derivative products that connect to bitcoin in some way, almost none of them are doing it like really that, like help vulnerable people. But inevitably, because they're pushing bitcoin, the brand bitcoin is this big open network, right. They are inevitably becoming accomplices to making the world more free. And of course, there's nuance there that we need to be careful of. But the reality is the more they push bitcoin, I mean, the bigger network effect bitcoin gets, the more valuable bitcoin gets, the more people enter bitcoin and the better a freedom tool it becomes. So it's like this feedback loop.
- [08:12]
Peter McCormack
It's almost like freedom is this emergent property of what's taking place with it. All right, Is that what you're really getting at is like everybody's coming at it with a self interest we should.
- [08:21]
Alex Gladstein
Put on the table. Like, yeah, it's true that the Salvadoran government tried to push Chivo, which was more of a control mechanism. And it's true that BlackRock's pushing an ETF, which is not self custody bitcoin. And it's true that strategy is pushing a stock in its company as opposed to self custody bitcoin. And it's true that, you know, a lot of these miners don't even stack, they just sell. But that, you know what, that doesn't really matter. They're still pushing bitcoin. The word bitcoin is very powerful, if you notice. Like, it's not like Michael Saylor sits around and doesn't talk about the word bitcoin. It's not like he's only talking about strategy stock. No, he's always talking about bitcoin. In fact, he tweets about bitcoin every day. The word bitcoin, right? And same thing, Bukele, Bitcoin, BlackRock. There are people always talking about bitcoin and this is super powerful because, you know, whether they like it or not, they can't differentiate what they're doing from this kind of rising tide that's lifting all boats with like the bitcoin ecosystem. Right. So whether they like it or not, whatever they're doing is making it easier for two people in Nigeria to do a bitcoin cash trade is making it easier for the Human Rights foundation to send a bitcoin grant into some authoritarian country is making it easier for a woman in Afghanistan to take a class or do an underground school paid for by bitcoin. Right. So all of bitcoin's incredible freedom properties is making it easier for someone in Malawi to escape inflation or currency devaluation. Yeah. So the more they push, and I understand that it's not some clean black and white thing where.
- [09:53]
Peter McCormack
Correct.
- [09:53]
Alex Gladstein
They are not pushing non kyc self custody cash economy. That's true. What I guess I'm saying is like they kind of are like in the end, right. Like if, if they're pushing bitcoin, they're pushing bitcoin. Like they're not pushing usdc, they're not pushing visa credit, they're not pushing a Treasury bond system, they're pushing bitcoin. So I guess again this all plays into my thesis of the Trojan horse. They are pursuing their own aims totally self interestedly, which I think is the way we need to expect the world works. Right. Whether we like it or not. But the cool part is bitcoin transforms that self interest into freedom for other people. That's the unique machine inside of it. So that's what I explore in the book. That's what I talked about on stage in Bedford and I'll be doing that talk more often in the future, you know. But I think it's interesting because a lot, you get a lot of critics now who are like, oh yeah, look, bitcoin is betraying its mission. It was trying to separate money from state, you know, and you get a lot of like people criticizing cypherpunks or libertarian bitcoiners and they're like, look at the state. Everything you promised is a lie. It's all a betrayal. You're just trying to see your bags go up or whatever. Yeah. I mean you see a lot of that coping from like the mainstream media and it's like, no, no, no, wait a second, we're winning. You don't understand. Like if we were losing, there'd be no nation state adoption. If bitcoin was dwindling into a nothing, if nobody was using it, if it was dying, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So I guess my point is that adoption by these big bad entities or whatever is an indicator of success, not an indicator of failure. It's really funny. We went from this world where like four years ago, even right when you were doing the show Four years ago, let's say people would say, preston, you know what? I think the government's going to ban bitcoin. Like, I really think it's going to.
- [11:41]
Peter McCormack
That's what we heard every day.
- [11:42]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah. Would say that. And now people are like, that would be the criticism. Yeah. They're going to ban it or China's going to ban it and China is going to do something. This was like on repeat, you and I would have to battle people on. Every day, right? Every day, just years, it was just like, ban, ban, ban, ban. Now they're like, the government adopting bitcoin, this is bad. What are we going to do? And it's like, it's like incredible. So. So, you know what next is you couldn't frame something else.
- [12:08]
Peter McCormack
You could not frame it.
- [12:09]
Alex Gladstein
It's really funny.
- [12:10]
Peter McCormack
You couldn't frame this any better. Like, it was bad before. And, you know, this gets to. So back to the. Your Ben Hunt comment. So as a person who's tracked traditional financial markets for more than a decade now, covered it in the media space, I've known Ben. Ben is an extremely intelligent. Extremely intelligent individual. Right?
- [12:31]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah.
- [12:32]
Peter McCormack
But when I'm looking at him and some others that you would look at and you'd be like, this guy so smart. He will get this immediately. Right. But they're there saying why it's going to fail. And all the points that you brought up earlier. And the thing that I've thought about this so much, how in the world is this person not getting it? How in the world are they not seeing this? And the only thing that I can kind of come back to, and I'm curious if you would agree with this, is at the core of how they view the world. They believe that things are controlled by these entities that can never be governments. Right. Or the Wall street blob, like the small guy or the small person is never going to be able to overcome these powerful institutions because they are dominant. And it's almost like their view of the world moving forward is somewhat negative and maybe very negative. And that is the core thing that is not allowing them to see how something like this could be an emergent property for freedom and for the world to be a better place in the future as opposed to being dystopian. Do you think that that's the thing? That's why they can't put that final puzzle piece in there to understand it or. Or what is it?
- [13:43]
Alex Gladstein
Because I think the way the fiat monetary system works is it's permissioned, it's gate kept it Centralizing, Right. So I think they're very much used to studying that model, but we have a different one, right? So in our model, the new model in Bitcoin, Wall street can create ETFs, the government can create a stockpile. And that does not impact my ability to whip out my phone and send you a permissionless peer to peer payment right now. In fact, it makes it easier for me to do that because guess what, there's more apps now. They're much better designed. The technology is vastly improving in Bitcoin because of this influx of talent and interest and resources. The amount of money being spent today on bitcoin technical development is so much more than it was five years ago. The amount of people building privacy apps is so much more. The amount of people integrating stuff like ecash and bolt 12 and just next generation lightning stuff is just. I mean we didn't have that stuff five years ago. So I understand what they're getting at. They're like afraid bitcoin's going to fall down the same trap, whether or not they actually care. They might be like non empathetically afraid, quote unquote, but their case is that Bitcoin's going to fall in the same trap as the fiat system did, or even as gold did. Right. It'll get centralized and captured. I guess what they don't realize is there's a different incentive mechanism here. And the more popular bitcoin gets, the stronger it gets as a freedom tool. I mean, at least that's what we've seen so far. And it's true that there might be like other things on the horizon that are coming up. And mining centralization is one and like laws that can endanger bitcoin users is another one. But at the end of the day, like our ability to use Bitcoin as a freedom pool today has never been greater. And that has come not at the expense of or in contrast to nation and corporate, nation state and corporate adoption, but it's come almost as a result of that. You know, along those lines, it normalizes what we do. Like if the US government is doing bitcoin stuff and Wall Street's doing bitcoin stuff, then it makes it easier for nonprofits and activists to do bitcoin stu, period. So I would encourage people to think about this as like one big giant network effect. And for the first time it actually works in our favor to have people that we don't like adopting this thing. Like this is, this isn't like fiat technology where it's like The Iranian government has its own fiat that it controls and it's just like only this rent seeking corruption machine that can like debase and devalue and take from you. And they use violence to enforce it. Right? That's the old system. The new system doesn't work like that. Like there's no violence used to force people to use it. It's voluntary. People use it out of their own interest. People come to it, they work for it, they devote their life to it for other reasons that are not fear and being compelled. Right. They do it because they love it and because it's done well for them and their family. They do it for very rational reasons and it's just a completely different paradigm. So in any event, I guess the sum there is that the thesis of the book and what I've been talking about, I feel like is stronger than ever and it gives me great hope for the future. And the stuff you saw in Bedford, I should mention, in addition to my talk, HREF had a whole panel of activists from around the world using Bitcoin. And the day before we had done this at the Frontline Club in London, which is a really prestigious journalist outlet where people come to leak state secrets and break news. And WikiLeaks used to use it. And it's a wonderful club near Paddington in London. And we had an event where we launched something called the Bitcoin Humanitarian alliance, which is a loose association of 12 organizations around the world ranging from HRF on our end to Save the Children, to the World Liberty Congress, to Ideas Beyond Borders, et cetera, organizations doing a variety of human rights and humanitarian work worldwide in difficult circumstances, difficult contexts. And we all use Bitcoin in different ways. Maybe we use it for payroll, maybe we use it for donations, maybe we use this to send value where it needs to go. And we decided to launch this alliance because it's time for people to know that this tool is just becoming such a no brainer to use for any kind of aid and assistance today. Like it's just, it is completely upgrading and displacing the bank wire. If you're trying to move money from A to B. The idea that you would use a bank wire as opposed to Bitcoin is. It's borderline crazy. So we wanted to announce that like all of us were using Bitcoin, that we've all learned how to use it effectively. I had testimonies from all the activists, talk about why in their context, and it was great. The media was there, the BBC was there, etc. And then we took that, we brought it to Cheat Code to Peter's event. And we had about an hour on stage, and we. We went through some of those stories for that crowd. And I thought it was great. And people were super moved. I mean, I got so many good feedback pieces from folks in the local media. Wrote an awesome piece about it. It was really, really powerful. There's something that I'll read to you just quickly. The article was from a journalist who's just from, like, Bedford area in England, near London. And the article is called How a Bitcoin Conference in Bedford Changed the Way I See Financial Freedom and Human Rights. And I was like, okay, that's pretty cool. So he goes through it and he tells this story, and he's like, these people weren't investors or salespeople. They weren't blockchain bros chasing the next coin. They weren't even there to get the audience to swallow the orange pill. They were activists using Bitcoin in a way not often reported. These people had everything taken from them and they had needed to flee their homes to save their lives, but they'd find a lifeline. So he goes through it all. He tells, like, some of the stories, and at the end, he has this powerful conclusion where he says, basically, they're not using it to speculate. They're using bitcoin so their loved ones, their fellow countrymen and women can survive. Too often, bitcoin is misrepresented, dismissed as a tool for criminals, mocked as a tech pro obsession. But the people I met in that Bedford conference hall weren't selling anything. They were fighting for their lives and for others. In a world full of walls, Bitcoin builds bridges. And in the hands of these brave men and women, it's more than just money. It's hope. That was amazing. So he wrote this and he. He got it. You know, I feel like it's hard for people to get it unless you meet people from these places. And we have so much financial privilege in the west, it's hard to even fathom what it's like to be in Rwanda or Venezuela or Russia or Afghanistan or Iraq or any of the places where the speakers came from. But again, as a reminder, the average person on this planet suffers through currency devaluation. Overnight, massive inflation. Their currency doesn't work in other countries. They can't send international wires. They can't invest in the US Stock market. They can't invest in US Treasuries. It's very hard for them to invest in even just gold or Real estate, sometimes dollars or even illegal. The average savings technology for the person on this planet remains stacks of collapsing paper notes, sheet metal or cat. That's really the average human saves in. So for people to be able to upgrade to bitcoin, which by the way, and I saw this yesterday, which was amazing, there's a new chart out that shows that bitcoin has beat the S and P every year for the last 15 years or something like that. So it's like, yeah, but like only a micro fraction of the world can invest in the S and P. Everybody can invest in bitcoin. So it's like it's really shows the power of this thing. And I'm so happy to see it start to become more widely understood as a human rights and humanitarian instrument like it deserves to be. So we'll be taking that show on the road next in June to the Bitcoin Policy Institute's summit, the BPI summit in D.C. and I'll be giving a talk and then we'll have a whole bunch of testimonies from activists. There's and I think it'll be very interesting for folks in the American side of things, whether it be governors, state department officials, treasury officials, congressmen and women, etc. Folks from the executive branch to listen to this. So yeah, we couldn't be more excited about some of the activism we're doing right now. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [21:42]
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- [25:45]
Alex Gladstein
All right, back to the show.
- [25:47]
Peter McCormack
I love the highlight of the article there to kind of give the perspective of a person who's not intimately tied into the community. But it was observing the event because it wasn't just that. It wasn't you on stage highlighting all of these practical use cases from all over the world, right? It was. So you have that level and then you have literally Liz Truss coming on stage.
- [26:12]
Alex Gladstein
He was the former Prime Minister of the British Britain.
- [26:16]
Peter McCormack
And I, I had a quote that I posted on X and it was hilarious how so many people didn't, I guess, really dial into the quote itself and why it was significant. Instead, it was a bunch of comments of people saying, oh, yeah, she was the prime minister for 10 seconds, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then a bunch of political opinions of like her background and her party and everything else. But this is why I thought her being there was so important she became the Prime Minister. She steps in and she does these mini, but immediately does these mini budget cuts with unfunded tax cuts. And what it did in that very short time that she was there was it effectively was blowing up their bond market in the uk. And this is within days, right? So she goes in there, she does this policy, the bond market goes crazy, it sells off to, to a pace that was so profound that the financial deep, let's just call it the financial deep state. That's probably a bad way to frame it, but let's just say the financial deep state steps in and removes her from office and puts the next person in within days or whatever. And trust me, folks, I'm a total idiot when it comes to UK politics. But from my vantage point across, across the pond, looking at what happened, they couldn't allow her to be in there and still play these fiat games that have dominated our past financial system. They couldn't have these types of policies because it would just melt down the market. And so she was immediately removed. So now take us back to Bedford. Last week, the former Prime Minister comes to Bedford, up on the stage at a bitcoin conference and literally says, bitcoin takes power away from the governments on stage. And I'm sitting there watching this and I'm thinking, Peter McCormick, right? Like everybody who knows Peter knows he's just here having fun. And it's like I'm looking at what's happening in his town, what's transforming. You got a former Prime Minister up on stage. We're having people like yourself, Alex, on stage telling these stories all from all over the globe. And then watch his football team, right? Three promotions three years in a row. He can afford any player he wants to get on his team for the league that he's in because he took the. The proceeds of the investments in the club, put them in the bitcoin.
- [28:30]
Alex Gladstein
And his treasure, amazing.
- [28:32]
Peter McCormack
His treasury is growing at a pace that nobody can even remotely compete with him on getting talent on the team. The field was packed. It was twice as many, three times as many people as there was the last year when I would watch them win the year.
- [28:48]
Alex Gladstein
It was crazy.
- [28:49]
Peter McCormack
It's crazy. So I'm looking at all this and, like, the energy is really hard to explain in an audio podcast format if you're not seeing it firsthand.
- [29:00]
Alex Gladstein
Wild.
- [29:00]
Peter McCormack
But your letter that you. That you read is just like a sliver of, I think, what the outsider is seeing. And they're saying there's something here. Like, what is this? What's happening? What I've been told is not the truth. There's something way deeper to this. All right. It was crazy.
- [29:16]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah. And I had my friend Ian Burrell, who's a legendary journalist in Britain who I've known for a very long time because of his human rights recording. A few years ago, I convinced him to come on a trip to Africa with me and a handful of people to see bitcoin mining. And, you know, at the beginning, he was a little skeptical. I didn't. I didn't know if he was even going to write anything, but I wanted him to see it personally, just to hang out and get to connect to some folks. But we were visiting this mine in Malawi, and I saw him start taking out his notepad, and I'm like, oh, my God, it's going to do something. So he writes this piece, and it was about what Gridless was doing. And the Economist, a few days later, copied it, kind of inspired by it, did their own piece. And that set Gridless off quite the trajectory in terms of its international image. And recently you've seen Gridless on npr, BBC, like, they're just. They continue to crush. But the point is, Ian knows this is not a fad. And he came up to Bedford and he was there, and he's doing a piece for one of the big papers on the club, on Peter and on the club and on Bedford and what's happening there. And I thought it was very smart for them to call the conference the cheat code. Right. Because that's essentially what they're doing with the football club. It's a cheat code 100%. And, you know, HRs been using the same cheat code with Bitcoin. And it's incredible, the kind of transformation. You've seen the, let's say, the Bedford football community, which is now like on a bra, to professional football. I mean, it's incredible. Now it'll take a couple more promotions to get up to the professional status, and then maybe one day they compete for champions or even Premier League, who knows? But the point is they're on a trajectory to get up to some of the higher levels. And all of a sudden now they're going to have the. The tailwinds of the massive Universal Studios complex coming in. And it's. It's just beautiful to watch. But the point is that cheat code is accessible to anybody. And what I've seen bitcoin do to a lot of these human rights activists that have adopted it is incredible, because human rights activism is a little different than running a football club. It can be super dark. It's depressing. You lose people. It's. You don't have many allies. You just kind of are against all odds all the time, right? So bitcoin adds this element of hope. It's really powerful. It's very important. And it gets them like me. I mean, it fills me. It inspires me. It makes me think of a better future. It makes me know that there's a better future ahead. And it just makes us much more dangerous when it comes to the existing system and our efforts to dismantle it and put something else in its place. It's just the best possible thing to light. It's fuel for our fire, basically. And some of these activists had just been kept being completely transformed by Bitcoin. Like they are just. They're going to be unstoppable. I mean, that's really. That's what we call our webinar that we do with, with Ben Parent at BTC Sessions. It's called Become Unstoppable. And it's a webinar we teach at, you know, nonprofit groups to help them integrate Bitcoin. And, yeah, I mean, like, when a government or a bank debanks you, that. That pretty much stops you. I mean, if you can't pay your payroll, you can't pay your people. You can't reach the folks you're paying out to help you with your work, like, you. You're frozen, you're disabled. Right? You're done. So if we can teach you how to effectively raise funds and do payroll and buy stuff in Bitcoin, you're unstoppable. Like, you can no longer be turned off that way. It's similar to the Canadian trucker thing where it was like, okay, well, there was this big red button and the government could just like, freeze all centralized payment processors and stop them, and that's the end of that. And maybe they go, maybe that ends up being unconstitutional or whatever in the end. And they get. But the point is, they can just arbitrarily choose to end that now. Whereas all the bitcoin that was being raised. No, no, they had to, you know, go get an injunction. They had to get a search warrant. They had. It took all this time. And by the time they actually got to the people, something like 50 to 70% of the Bitcoin had made it to the intended recipients. So it's a brilliant example of how. How this can be such a powerful tool for social change. And I'm just. Yeah, I mean, the kind of excitement and euphoria you see in Bedford, this little town, is the fame thing you're seeing in these human rights movements. Like, bitcoin is transforming them. You ever seen that cartoon of like, it's like two people. One person's depressed, the other one's happy looking out the street. She kisses the person and it's like this orange thing and it like, lights up the world, right? That's what bitcoin is like. Literally, it just. It lights you up. It gives you a completely different support network. Like, and this probably is only in the early days in any adoption era, right? But all of a sudden, if you're using bitcoin for pretty much anything, even if the person doesn't like what you're doing, they will probably be excited to help you, right? It's like, it's kind of funny. Like, you might have two people who completely disagree politically. This could exist, right? Where it's like two viciously opposed political people will like, hey, if you're using bitcoin, I'll teach you how to set up a BTC BT space server. Just don't tell anybody. You know, it's like, you know, it forces people to be allies. It's pretty amazing. So, yeah, we're really fired up about this, and we want to obviously onboard as many people as we can, because again, the more we onboard, the bigger the network effect and the more unstoppable we become. And that goes for nation states and corporations too. It's interesting. I mean, I guess I get it when people are saying, we don't want the nation state adoption. We don't want the corporate adoption, but I think that's naive. There was no world where Bitcoin's going to go from zero to global reserve currency, or even just dominant global currency, or even just currency that you can use anywhere unless everybody's using it. It's not going to be something where like only cypherpunks are using it or only good people that you like are using it. That's the same thing as saying like with email or signal or cell phones. You know, there was some world where like only good people could use those things. No, guess what? Criminals, bad people, people you don't like, they use email and cell phones and signal. It's more about the impact of the society that it has. It's not necessarily that Putin and Xi Jinping can trade a message on signal. Oh, that's so bad we shouldn't use signal? No, no. It's the fact that like hundreds of millions of people who live under their reins and rules can now use signal and communicate privately without the government seeing. So Bitcoin is in a long line of asymmetric technologies like this that empower the individual at least slightly more than it empowers the state. Right. So while it's true that Bitcoin adoption is hard to stomach in some aspects, especially if they've stolen the bitcoin in the first place. But the point is, whatever can get us closer to a society where the average person self custody is their own bank goes, you know, their merchants say painting in Bitcoin you can pay for most goods and services, in Bitcoin you can save in Bitcoin. None of this is illegal. The closer we can get to that world, the better. And it's not going to be like a smooth, easy line. Right. And it's unfortunately, yeah, it's going to mean that people you don't like, institutions you don't like, adopt this thing. But as long as your ability to use it as freedom, money doesn't get hurt or impinged upon or even lessened in any way. What's the problem here? We're rolling. Right, let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [36:08]
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- [39:45]
Alex Gladstein
All right, back to the show.
- [39:47]
Peter McCormack
This is going to be a long question, so I apologize, but there's a lot to this that I think is important to talk about. So in the back of your book here you have this quote. I love this quote. I'm going to read it for folks here. As human rights activists know well, it can be hard to effectively promote freedom in a society that willingly sells morals out for profit. Bitcoin sneaks in and rewires the system from the inside, aligning profit seeking with permissionless financial liberation. When we look at what's played out over the last call it 40 years. Ray Dalio wrote this article last week talking about how the tariffs and everything that's happening with tariffs is actually a shadow of this much bigger thing which is de globalization. When we look at like one of the big mechanical things that enabled globalization over this 40 year period of time, at the heart of a lot of it was the World bank, the imf, and these incentives that you have better than anybody I know, Alex laid out in gory detail in your writings of how this takes place in order to create this big giant global mechanical system that really feeds the west and gives the west this huge advantage. It creates this giant dollar network effect around the world and it causes intense harm to so many of the countries that are taking these World Bank IMF deals in order to monocrop or extract resources out of areas that are good for the people in power and pretty much bad for everybody else inside of those countries. When you, if anybody wants to dig deep and they haven't read Alex's material, you got to read his material and it goes into gory detail explaining all of this and how it all works. But my question for you is this. With all of that, I told you this is a long question. The question is, is as this starts to spin the other way, because that's what Dalio is saying, is that now we are going into globalization. How does that look for these countries that are so reliant on these? It's almost like this mechanism that it seems like they can't gracefully come out of this without some type of bitcoin strategy. And we're seeing that starting in El Salvador. But we are also seeing it's hard for El Salvador to do it. And. And there's. I'm sure there's many others that you can give us examples. I'm just kind of throwing that one out because that's what a lot of people were aware of. Them stacking a bitcoin treasury and trying to work their way out, but yet they're still taking more IMF loans. And it's like that machine just still has their hooks and their tentacles still in all of these countries. So how do they bridge that or how do they transition out of that in a way that is graceful, that is meaningful and valuable for the. For all the. And citizens? Walk us through that.
- [42:35]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah, I mean. Well, the short answer is bitcoin provides a new way for people to opt out peacefully, where they don't have to get exploited and torn up by this old system and its dynamics anymore. I mean, the old system going back hundreds of years is essentially the ebb and flow of empires and their rise to power and their fall from power. And when you have the global political economic system and you have an empire, rise and fall, even if that empire was bad in your mind, like they're falling from power, tears up a lot of infrastructure and breaks a lot of things. Right. So if we just look at, let's call it three times the Western economic, let's say financial empire rose and fell over the last century and a half, we can look at the British Empire and its rise and fall, and a lot of its rise and fall related to the looting and pillage of India. Right. So there's, like, a lot of data on this. Yes, of course, the British had many things that they pioneered themselves. Of course, no one's arguing that. You know, I wouldn't want to get in, like, a strawman argument here. There's a. As an aside, there's a. There's a very entertaining podcast people should watch between Dave Smith and Douglas Murray on Rogan this week, which is a long exercise in strawmen. Basically, one of the guys, Douglas Murray, keeps trying to paint his opponent as saying something he didn't paint. And the other guy is consistently saying, no, that's a straw man. I didn't say that. You know, so when you're arguing, you always want to avoid this. But, no, I would never say that. That obviously, like, Britain and Western Europe as a whole obviously innovated so many amazing things, including Enlightenment ideals and industrial revolutionary technology. But at the end of the day, a big part of it was also the fact that they got all this super cheap labor and goods from India, which was the world's richest place in the world, then they started to pilfer and elude it. And very violent, very violently, of course. Now when that started to slow down the flow of resources from India, even though that might be good in some people's eyes, right? Okay. End of an empire, end of this rapacious kind of exploitation, okay? It still kind of just starts to tear up and break the system. So a lot of researchers believe that one of the reasons we entered this economic crisis in the 20s and 30s was actually because the reigning global economic system, the British Empire and all of its appendages, started to collapse, started to basically lose its subsidy. Its subsidy being all this cheap stuff from India and other territories. And the end of the beginning of the end of colonialism. So that's one time we've seen, you could call it, quote, unquote, de globalization. And what that meant was obviously a massive economic crisis in the west, right? So people everywhere were hurt. The second time would be in the 70s. So you had, again, the West, Western financial empire had subsisted on control of energy. So all of the oil in the world was essentially controlled by Western companies, the Seven Sisters. Anyone can go look that up. Through the end of colonialism, right? The Western countries lost that. So through the 60s and early 70s, the people who actually lived in the places where the oil was started to take control, and they no longer were just like giving it up for close to nothing to the West. So again, you had another economic crisis in the form of the 1970s, which was massive inflation stagflation in the West. And now you're seeing, I would say history rhymes, right? So you're seeing a third chapter here, which is again, new kind of empire, different one, not as sort of brutal, I guess, openly, as the British one, like, let's say, or the colonial one. Now you have the Western financial empire, let's say, and it's starting to break down, right? So even though maybe there's good reason to want to see empires fall or whatever, you're going to see disruption and you're going to see it hurt people. And that's usually expressed in the form of inflation, in higher cost of living and in sometimes more adversarial circumstances. So I think you're seeing that now normally what would happen is just like this long period of chaos and inflation, and then the system would kind of rebuild in some way with some new power. And maybe if we didn't live in a world of Bitcoin, maybe that happens. And Maybe it's Europe, maybe it's China. I don't know. It's hard to say. Right now. I feel like the US Is still very much in control despite all this stuff happening. Who knows? But the good news is we don't have to deal with that anymore. We have an escape route. We can start building a new system and we can put our energy and time into Bitcoin, both as individuals, communities, families, football clubs, nonprofit organizations, corporations, nation states, whatever. So we can, like, drain energy from this old system, which is just sort of merciless in the way it would go up and go down and go up and go down. And I get it, it was going up and down in a general upward trajectory, obviously. True. Like today, people live longer, they live healthier. It's more peaceful than we were 300 years ago. No one's arguing that. But the problem is that it's not equally distributed. And I don't mean that in, like a Marxist sense. I just mean that in a simple equality of opportunity sense.
- [47:38]
Peter McCormack
Yeah.
- [47:39]
Alex Gladstein
And the system really keeps other people down at the expense of some of us. Right. What is without question, and Americans are going to see this depending on how these tariffs go. Like, what is without question is that our life and the stuff we buy and the food we eat and the services we do subscribe to are cheaper because they're from other places with weaker labor laws and cheaper currencies. Let's just be very clear about this.
- [48:02]
Peter McCormack
Yeah.
- [48:03]
Alex Gladstein
If the iPhone was completely manufactured inside the United States with all of our labor laws and restrictions, it would cost $10,000, not $1,000 or whatever it costs. We're talking about inputs to our system being 10x cheaper or whatever. Or maybe more than that.
- [48:18]
Peter McCormack
Maybe more than because of globalization. Yeah, maybe more.
- [48:21]
Alex Gladstein
Right. So we're seeing maybe a forced ending to that. We'll see. I have a feeling it's going to mellow out a little bit here. But the scepter has been raised. You know, Americans have been put on blast and on warning, hey, we're going to do this. We're going to forcibly change the system and we're going to be cutting off some of these subsidies. They're not going to say it like this, but they're going to be cutting off some of these subsidies and Americans are. They're basically the government. The current government in America is basically threatening an austerity period which normally is reserved for those countries that the IMF restricts. Right. So finally they're saying, no, no, we're going to go through an austerity period ourselves. And maybe it does result in. Look, I saw the newspaper headline today. Nvidia is going to build supercomputers here. Okay. I don't know. Maybe it does result in supply chains coming back to the US and a re industrialization in some way. And maybe that doesn't mean you're working on a factory line. Maybe it means you're working in a job where you're using robotics in AI and it's actually really exciting. I don't know. But it's going to be very expensive either way. Like the forcible relocation of all that stuff. So normally without bitcoin we would again we'd be going through a 1920s or 1970s era where things would just get very expensive for a lot of people and it would be hard. And I think bitcoin is the cheat code, right? It like it's going to allow us to navigate this period of time and do really well. I hope that that helps.
- [49:36]
Peter McCormack
No, it does help because the question I was looking at it more from like what are these governments like these smaller countries that have been impacted by this globalization process? How are the countries going to be able to deal with it? But yeah, but your answer kind of actually addresses that because you went straight to the individual and you said the individual can protect themselves from sky high prices and all this because every individual can access Bitcoin if they put forth the effort. And what's fascinating and what we've seen to date being in Bitcoin is that it percolates from the bottom up. And so I think if you get enough participants that are seeking salvation in it, call it country xyz. Yeah, they're going to be more likely to influence their local politics because so many participants are using it and finding that it's helping them manage their situation. Right. And so it's this percolation up that I think we're going to continue to see in all these regions. It doesn't mean it's going to be easy, but I think that if we're just talking about what's the reality of like how it unfolds, I think that it's just going to continue to be this bottom up movement and we don't have to.
- [50:44]
Alex Gladstein
I mean Americans, this hasn't really happened to us recently before, like maybe our parents or our parents. Parents. Right, of course. But Americans have been pretty insulated and many Europeans as well actually in the last two, three, four decades from this. This is something that the average person on the planet has dealt with. All the time, like in the Middle East. Look at Lebanon. Like, we already have evidence of this. There's a guy who. You've been to our global bitcoin summit where we have people from 50, 60, 70 countries coming in to talk about how they use bitcoin and organize with bitcoin, educate people with bitcoin. Last year, he couldn't come. He's from Lebanon. He's the one who founded Bitcoin Dulaban, which is an educational organization in Lebanon that helps people learn about bitcoin. He was displaced because of airstrikes and stuff like that. Terrible. This year he's going to come back and he's going to give the keynote in person and he's got this incredible story of how bitcoin basically saved his life. And again, we may not have gone through that dramatic period yet as Americans, and I hope to God we don't. Okay? But regardless, it's going to be tough. Regardless of whether it becomes overly dramatic or not. Forcibly changing the global economic system is. I guess what I'm saying is it's always difficult. It's always going to come at a cost, even if at the end of the day, that our policymakers believe it's actually going to benefit us if we don't have to import cheap goods from other people. And they're trying to flip the whole Adam Smith thing on its head, I guess, and a comparative advantage, whatever. They just want the stuff in our country. Fine. Maybe they're right. I don't know. I probably disagree. But it is what it is. I'm powerless over here on that front. What I'm not powerless about is teaching both people about bitcoin because it's going to allow us to pass through that period of time in much better shape and even maybe come out on top, which is really exciting. So that's what my commitment is. Regardless of what happens in this economic time of turmoil, let's continue to educate people, bring them into bitcoin, and it'll allow them to have a life raft. Now, of course, people are going to blame it on. People have already started to do this. If you noticed different people are already trying to blame economic disruptions on bitcoin. Right. And we're going to see so much more of that in the future. But just remember, it's not the iceberg, it's the life raft. I mean, this system does it to itself. This is an inevitable outcome of a system that goes in cycles. And you have these different empires rise and fall, and the average person just gets Hurt every time. Right. Even though they're generally on an upward trajectory, it's pretty brutal. And this is our way of saying, no, I choose something different. Where we don't have this, like, endless, brutal cycle and where we can all be on an open network with each other and collaborate instead of fight each other. I just think it's very beautiful.
- [53:15]
Peter McCormack
Taking a step back. As you synthesize all this writing that you've done through the years and pieced it all together into this book, what would you say is your cohesive narrative or your key takeaway? You take a step back and you look at it and you're like, wow, I wrote a lot here. There's a lot to all this. What's your. So what. I guess as you look back and reflect on the whole process of piecing it all together.
- [53:39]
Alex Gladstein
Sure. Well, the book really covers a couple threads. It looks at the rise of the global Bitcoin resistance, we'll say, in all these different countries. It looks at the history of the dollar system and how it got to where we are today. And then it also looks at the outcomes of that dollar system and what it's done politically to different groups around the world. And I think that, again, the theory of change in the book is stronger than ever now. Right. That we have this old system in many ways, it exploits. It's built kind of on control, and it's built on this idea that there should be essentially like a cast system in the world with currencies. And that's kind of how it operates in many ways. In the same way that your iPhone is cheaper today because we can exploit lower labor. Right. Somewhere else and cheaper goods somewhere else. Another thing that subsidizes our way of Life is this 180 currency system where we have this like, premium currency we issue and use in our daily lives, but other people use these other currencies. And through the IMF and other bilateral or multilateral organizations like that, we come in and we force devaluations of those other currencies against our currency to make it easier for us to import their goods more cheaply.
- [54:53]
Peter McCormack
Yeah. So well said. Good God, that was such an amazing quote.
- [54:57]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah, thank you. Well, but it's true, right? And you go back and you look at the history, and now Asia's. It's always interesting to look at Asia because it's a little different than East Asia. It's very little different than the traditional way the IMF World bank would kind of seek to subsist off of, like Latin America or Africa or Southeast Asia or South Asia, China, Japan, Korea. Different. Little bit different ball game, but you see some of the same things. Like Japan in the 80s. I mean, everybody should watch Princes of the Yen. It's unbelievable. This documentary on for free on YouTube. It's unreal. Princess of the End. It tells the story of how did Japan go from the second largest economy in the world in the 1980s, primed to overthrow the United States as the world's largest economy? How did it go from that to the lost decades and this incredible crash and kind of just depression? And a lot of that had to do with the US and its allies saying, hey, Japan, we're going to need you to appreciate your currency. Or we're essentially, we're going to devalue ours against yours and you're not going to have that export market anymore and you're going to have a big crash. And that's what happens. So this is not a conspiracy. You can go look up the Plaza Accords or the Louvre meetings in the 1980s. This is what happened. We forced Japan to appreciate its currency. So that's what we're trying to do now with China. Again, history rhymes. Like, we're trying to get China to appreciate its currency at the moment. Like, as of, you know, April 15, they're not. They're like, no, we're going to continue to devalue it and they're going to continue to widen their surplus of exports against us, which is, of course, enraging the current government in America. So there's this back and forth, but make no mistake, our goal is to devalue the dollar against the RMB and to start, try to. They want to correct that balance. Now, obviously they're not thinking of it in like a classic Adam Smith way of thinking, because if you did think like that, it's not a problem to have differences in trade. That's actually normal. But they really want to balance everything out, right? So they're going to try and do the same. So you look at this and it's really a similar game in as much as it's about what is referred to as currency manipulation, right? So usually we want to keep what we call the global majority countries, where the majority of the world's people and resources are. It's often called the Global south or the Third World or whatever. Usually what's happened is we want them to have weak currencies so that we can get their stuff for cheap, but we want our rivals usually to have stronger currencies so they can't really kind of compete too well with us. Right? So this is kind of the game you see where like the other quote unquote global north countries, like we're always accusing Switzerland of currency manipulation. Like we don't want Europe and China and Japan to have weak currencies, we want them to have strong currencies so that we can continue to like industrialize and export and but also sort of feast on the cheap currencies of the global South. This has been the game so far that's such a non cooperative game if you really think about it. If the United States had just a bitcoin standard, none of this stuff would be as relevant. There'd be a much tighter labor market globally. There wouldn't be a way to come in and just devalue some like an entire country just overnight 50%. All your wages are just worth half as much as they were yesterday. All your savings. No, no, no. If we're on the bitcoin standard then it becomes different. Like yes, you can still do tariffs, you can still tax like, absolutely, but you can't do these. The funny business with the massive inflation and currency devaluation which is so ruinous I think for so many. So I think one of the things we're going to regret in 10 years is that we didn't do more now to help expedite the world towards the bitcoin standard. And every day I'm living with that, I'm like, okay, I want to make sure that I have no regrets 10 years from now. I want to be like, I'm proud of what I did. Let's move the world as much as possible in that direction as fast as we can. And in the meantime it's going to literally look like putting out lifeboats because there's going to be some big stormy seas coming. I mean we're already feeling it. I mean we'll see. But I'm again filled with so much hope. And yeah, again the book tells it, I guess, really just sort of triumphant story of how this random software protocol ends up being relevant in a world of empires. Like it's really just wild. But it's true, 100% true. We're already at $2 trillion of value with this peaceful protocol and people from all over the world, they're adopting it and it's just kind of crazy. And yeah, I mean, I guess to conclude there is no greater Trojan horse than getting the issuer of the reserve currency to adopt it. Like I put up a slide in Bedford of it's like got Uncle Sam sitting on a branch, cutting off the branch. Because they don't know. They just don't know it. And it's like they're unwittingly doing this. And there's a lot of people, I won't name names, but there's a lot of people who are like, oh, like this will just like strengthen the dollar, or this will like strengthen the dollar system. And it's just like definitely not. Yeah, you don't get what like you, you. That's not what's happening here. There's not going to be this. Oh, like America's got a lot of Bitcoin and it's using Bitcoin and therefore the dollar will be stronger. Like that's not going to happen. So I appreciate whatever they're trying to do. Fine. Maybe it's some sort of subterfuge thing, I'm not sure. But like, clearly the rise of a new reserve asset is not good for U.S. debt. Like, I just don't get that one. What do you think? It's not going to start taking over treasuries or dollars. Like it's crazy to me, but it's kind of the ultimate Trojan horse thing. Like again, the Trojans see the horse out in the field and even though they got a couple of people inside the city saying, don't bring it in, don't bring it in, they bring it in anyway because they just can't help themselves. It looks too beautiful, right? That's the story of NGU and fgu. All these corporations and governments, they're going to need Bitcoin because of its NGU properties. But you can't separate NGO from fgu and in doing so, it's going to usher in this massive transformation. So it's very exciting. What can we say?
- [60:40]
Peter McCormack
I will say this as a person who has studied scarcity now for quite a while, the fact that you have 100 of these is going to. Are you familiar with Seth Klarman?
- [60:52]
Alex Gladstein
I mean, yeah, not deeply, but I definitely rings the bell.
- [60:55]
Peter McCormack
So he's a really famous value investor and he has a book called Margin of Safety and this book is like one of the most sought after books in the value investing space. And the reason why is he did a short run on the book and they don't produce it anymore. It was just like a. I don't know how many copies. Maybe there's 5,000 copies. I'm looking at it on Amazon right now. Buy it used for $2,500. I think you're gonna have a feeding frenzy on this book. But I want to say this for folks that want to read Alex's work, and everybody needs to read Alex's work. You can read the portions of this book online, and we're gonna have links to all of this in the show notes. So if you want to read any of Alex's material, I have books back there. And I'm not trying to, like, brag. I truly mean this, Alex. I've got books signed by Ray Dalio, Walter Isaacson, Charlie Munger, other people that I've just have been fortunate enough to get signed copies. This is an absolute treasure for me. I will truly treasure this, not just because we're close friends, but because of what you have taught me through the years on how this very complex machine works. And so much of this imf, World bank, the exporting of dollars, the inflation. And why weren't you seeing it in the inflation? All of that became crystal clear to me because of all your hard work in writing all of this. So when I look at all these books and I look at the ones that are signed and that are personal gifts, this is at the top of the list for me. And I truly can't tell you how much I appreciate what you've done to educate me and other people. And it's just a real. It's a true honor to have you on the show this many times and to have these conversations with you in person and over Zoom.
- [62:35]
Alex Gladstein
Thank you. Well, likewise. I learn a lot from what you do, and I have confidence that together we can again get as many people on the lifeboats as possible and then hopefully help create a new system. That's what we're all doing.
- [62:47]
Peter McCormack
Amen.
- [62:47]
Alex Gladstein
So, super, super grateful for that. Thank you so much, Preston. And yeah, until next time.
- [62:52]
Peter McCormack
Yep, thank you. We'll have links in the show notes for everybody and also have a link to this princess of the Yen as well. Thanks, Alex.
- [62:58]
Alex Gladstein
Yes, awesome. Take care.
- [63:00]
Preston Pysh
Thank you for listening to tip. Make sure to follow Bitcoin fundamentals on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes.
- [63:09]
Alex Gladstein
To access our show notes, transcripts or.
- [63:12]
Preston Pysh
Courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com this show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.