[00:01:25] 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. [00:01:32] 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 trojan horse type dynamic where people had written way back when, like essentially early 2010s on Bitcoin talk stuff. [00:01:55] 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. [00:02:11] And that was something I picked up on. And I ended up writing an essay in 2021 called the, you know, The Trojan Horse for Freedom, basically that Bitcoin is a Trojan horse for freedom. 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. [00:02:49] 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. [00:03:07] So it has a new intro by me from last year, last summer, and all of the stuff I wrote, 2021 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 with was worth this much BTC. And it’s like today it’s not doing so well in its own right. [00:03:25] So Bitcoin’s grown a lot since then. But you know, I wanted to go back to the cover 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? [00:03:43] So you had, MicroStrategy had started right about maybe eight months earlier. You had BlackRock, 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 are starting to get inklings of some of that we would maybe get some nation state adoption. [00:04:01] 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. [00:04:24] 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’ve 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. [00:04:44] Preston Pysh: By the way, check out this time I got sent. [00:04:46] Alex Gladstein: Yeah, I, actually have one as well. It’s a great hat. I love that one. [00:04:50] Preston Pysh: people just listening, it says strategic reserve. It’s got a three star, almost like a three star Admiral or general. [00:04:58] Alex Gladstein: Yeah, you 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. All of a sudden 2020, you started to get MicroStrategy happened, and then everything else happened, and then there was kind of a lag, right? [00:05:18] I mean, we had another bear market, right? It 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’ve just otherwise gone wasted. Blown down the river, and not done anything instead, they captured that. [00:05:44] So you have large scale mining adoption, you have treasury adoption, you have people being exposed to companies like MicroStrategy all over the world. 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 is Freedom Money. That it would get adopted by Wall Street and the government. [00:06:14] His sort of thesis was 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, like it’s the Trojan Horse. Wall Street will adopt it, whether it likes freedom or not, simply because of Bitcoin’s NGU properties. [00:06:33] And what would later happen is. Bitcoin would go into the city walls and seek 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 activists, 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 a, what’s the right word? Quasi cheerleaders. not what’s, the word? When you commit a crime and someone helps you. [00:07:11] It’s like, an accomplice. An accomplice. Yes. They become, there you go. Thank you. So they become accomplices to Human Rights Act activism, whether they like it or not. Yeah. Like it’s funny when you have BlackRock and the Trump administration and even Quele and any of these governments, mining any of these dozens of companies now launching, you know, derivative products that, that connect to Bitcoin in some way. [00:07:33] Almost none of them are doing it, like really to like help vulnerable people, but inevitably because they’re pushing Bitcoin, the brand Bitcoin. Is this big open network, right? They’re 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. It’s almost like, so it’s like this feedback loop. [00:08:06] Preston Pysh: It’s almost like freedom is this emergent property of what’s taking place with it all. Is that what you’re really getting at is like everybody’s coming at it with a self-interest, but we should put on the table. [00:08:16] Alex Gladstein: Like it’s true that the Salvador and government tried to push vo, 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. 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. [00:08:40] They’re still pushing Bitcoin. The word Bitcoin is very powerful. If you notice, like it’s not like Michael Sailor 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, the tweets about Bitcoin every day that the word Bitcoin, right? [00:08:56] And same thing B, Bitcoin, BlackRock. There are people always talking about Bitcoin. 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. [00:09:29] 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 mulatto to escape inflation or currency devaluation. So the more they push, and I understand that it’s not some clean, black and white thing where. [00:09:46] Correct. 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? 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. [00:10:08] 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. [00:10:25] Yeah. 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 to 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. [00:10:40] It was trying to separate money from state, you know, and you get a lot of like people criticizing the. Cipher punks or libertarian Bitcoins, 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, Wait a second. I. We’re winning. You don’t understand like, 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. [00:11:23] You know, 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? I think the government’s going to ban Bitcoin. Like I really, think it’s going to ban. That’s what we heard every day. [00:11:36] Yeah. People would say that and now people are like, that would be the criticism. They’re going to ban it, or China’s going to ban it, or China’s going to do. So this was like on repeat, you and I would’ve to battle people on internet every day. Right? Every day For you. Just years. It was just like. Now they’re like, the government’s adopting Bitcoin. [00:11:54] This is terrible. That’s bad. What are we going to do? Yeah. And it’s like, incredible. So you know what next is, you couldn’t frame, find something else. [00:12:02] You could not frame this, but it’s really funny 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. [00:12:10] Yeah. 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 a, an extremely intelligent, oh yeah. Individual, right. Yeah. But when I’m looking at him and some others that you would look at and you’d be like, this guy’s so smart, he will get this immediately. [00:12:33] 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, because 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. [00:12:49] 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 they, their view of the world moving forward is somewhat negative and maybe very negative. [00:13:17] And that is the core thing that is not allowing them to see how something like this could be an emergent property for freedom. For the world to be a better place in the future as opposed to being dystopian. Do you think that’s the thing, that’s why they can’t put that final puzzle piece in there to understand it? [00:13:35] or what is it? Well, because I [00:13:36] think the way the fiat monetary system works is it’s permissioned, it’s gate kept, its centralizing, right? So I think they’re very much used to studying that model. But we have a different one, right? Yeah. Completely. So in our model, the new model Bitcoin. Wall Street can create ETFs. [00:13:55] The government can create a stockpile, and that does not impact my ability to whip without my phone and send you a permissionless. Peer to peer payment right now. Yeah. In fact, it makes it easier for me to do that. Yeah. 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. [00:14:19] 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. Yeah. The amount of people integrating stuff like Ash and Bulk 12 and just, you know, 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. [00:14:41] They’re like, afraid Bitcoin’s going to fall down the same trap. Whether or not they actually care. You mean they, they might be like, you know, 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. [00:14:58] 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. [00:15:19] 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. [00:15:40] 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 stuff. [00:15:49] 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 ST thing. [00:16:03] 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 dease and devalue and take from you. They use violence to enforce it, right? That’s the old system. [00:16:21] The new system doesn’t work like that. Like there’s no violence used to enforce people to use it. It’s voluntary. People use it outta their own interest. People come to it, they work for it, they devote their life to it, or 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. [00:16:42] 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, you know, is stronger than ever and I, and it gives me great hope for the future. And the stuff you saw in Bedford, I should mention, in addition to my talk, I had a, we re had a whole panel of activists from around the world using Bitcoin. [00:17:06] Yeah. 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. [00:17:25] 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 context. [00:17:42] 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 is, 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. [00:18:06] 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. 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. [00:18:24] The media was there, the BBC was there, et cetera. 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, went through some of those stories for that crowd and I thought that was great and people were super moved. I mean, I got so many good feedback pieces from folks and the local media wrote an awesome piece about it. [00:18:42] It was 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’s called How a Bitcoin Conference in Bedford changed the way I see financial freedom in human rights. And I was like, okay, that’s pretty cool. [00:18:59] So he goes through it and he tells this story and he is 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 had needed to flee their homes to save their lives, but they’d find a lifeline. [00:19:18] 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 bro session. [00:19:37] 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. Wow. That was amazing. Wow. So he, wrote this and he, got it, you know? [00:19:52] Yeah. 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, you know, again, as a reminder, the average person on this planet. [00:20:10] 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. [00:20:26] 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, was amazing. There’s a new chart out that shows that Bitcoin has beat the S&P every year for the last 15 years or something like that. [00:20:47] So it’s like, yeah, but like only a micro fraction of the world can invest in the S&P. Everybody can invest in Bitcoin. So it’s like, it’s really shows the power of this thing. 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. [00:21:05] So we’ll be taking that show on the road next in June to the Bitcoin Policy Institute’s Summit, the BPI summit in DC. I. I’ll be giving a talk and then we’ll have a whole bunch of testimonies from activists there. 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, women, et cetera, 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. [00:21:33] Preston Pysh: You know, 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 that it was observing the event, because it wasn’t just that, it wasn’t you on stage, like highlighting all of these practical use cases from all over the world. Right. So you have that level and then you have literally Liz Truss coming on stage. Yeah. Who was the former Prime Minister? Former Prime minister. [00:21:59] 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. [00:22:25] She steps in and she does these mini Bud immediately does these mini budget. Cuts with unfunded tax cuts and what it did in that very short time that she was there. 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. [00:22:45] It sells off 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. 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. [00:23:08] But from my vantage point 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 markets. And so she was immediately removed. [00:23:27] 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. [00:23:48] 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. 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, proceeds of the investments in the club, put them in the Bitcoin, in his treasury. [00:24:14] His treasury’s 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. It was crazy. 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 are not seeing it firsthand but your letter 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. [00:24:57] Alex Gladstein: Yeah. And I had, my friend Ian Burrell is a legendary journalist. In Britain, who I’ve known for a very long time, does his human rights reporting. 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 even, 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. [00:25:20] 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 write this piece and it was about what grid list was doing and. The Economist a few days later copied it kind of inspired by it did their own piece and that set grid list off quite the trajectory in terms of its international image. [00:25:38] And recently you’ve seen grid list on N-P-R-B-C, like they’re just, they continue to crush. But the point is he knows this is not a fad. And he came up to Bedford and he was there and he’s doing a piece or one of the big papers on the club on Peter and on the club and on Bedford. And what’s happening there? [00:25:55] 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. [00:26:04] Well, [00:26:04] Alex Gladstein: hundred and you know, HR has 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. [00:26:14] Which is now like on a brack to professional football. Yeah. 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 tailwinds of the massive universal studios complex coming in and. [00:26:39] 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. [00:26:57] 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. 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. [00:27:21] It’s just the best possible thing to light. It’s fuel for our fire, basically. And some of these activists have 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. We do it with then parent with BTC sessions. [00:27:38] It’s called Become Unstoppable, and it’s a webinar. We teach, act, you know, nonprofit groups to help them integrate Bitcoin. And yeah, I mean, like when a government or a bank de banks 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. [00:27:57] 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. 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. [00:28:18] 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. Nah, no. They had to, you know, go get a 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 60 to 70% of the Bitcoin had made it to the intended recipients. [00:28:39] So, it’s a brilliant example of 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 up the tree and she kisses the, person and it’s like this orange thing and it like lights up the world. [00:29:06] Right? That’s a 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 an 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, like they will probably be excited to help you. [00:29:25] 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. Hey, if you’re using Bitcoin, I’ll teach you how to set up a BT space over, just don’t tell anybody. You know? [00:29:39] 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. [00:29:55] It’s interesting, I mean, I guess I get it where 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. [00:30:13] Unless everybody’s using it. It’s not going to be something where like only cyberpunks are using it. 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. [00:30:30] No. Guess what? Criminals, bad 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, I. Can trade a message on signal. Oh, that’s so bad. We shouldn’t use signal. No, It’s the fact that like hundreds of millions of people who live under their reigns and rules can now use signal and communicate privately without the government seeing. [00:30:53] So Bitcoin is in a long line of, asymmetric technologies like this that empower the individual, you know, 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 like stolen the Bitcoin in the first place. [00:31:09] The point is, whatever can get us closer to a society where the average person self ies is their own bank goes, you know, their merchants say, pay me 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. [00:31:27] 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. As long as your ability to use it is freedom. Money doesn’t get hurt or imp upon or even lessened in any way. What’s the problem here? [00:31:45] We’re rolling right? [00:31:46] Preston Pysh: 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’d 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. [00:32:05] 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 deglobalization. [00:32:28] And 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. [00:33:00] 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. [00:33:23] When you, and 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, as this starts to spin the other way, because that’s what Dalio is saying, is that now we are going into deglobalization. [00:33:46] 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 there’s, I’m sure there’s many others that you can give us examples. [00:34:09] 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. It’s like that machine just still has their hooks and their tentacles still in all of these countries. [00:34:24] 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 people and citizens, like, walk us through that. [00:34:34] Alex Gladstein: Yeah, I mean, well, like 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. [00:34:48] 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. [00:35:12] 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. Fall and a lot of it’s rise and fall related to the looting and pill of India. [00:35:35] 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 straw man argument here. There’s a, as an aside, 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 straw man. [00:35:55] Basically one of the guys, Douglas Murray, keeps trying to paint his opponent. Saying something because 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 obviously like Britain and Western Europe as a whole, obviously innovated so many amazing things, including enlightenment ideals and industrial revolutionary technology. [00:36:17] 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. And they started to pilfer and ute 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? [00:36:37] 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. A lot of researchers believe that one of the reasons we entered this economic crisis in the twenties and thirties was actually because the reigning global economic system, the British Empire and all of its appendages started to collapse, started to basically. [00:37:02] Lose its subsidy. Its subsidy being all this cheap stuff from India and other territories. And the end of center, the beginning of the end of colonialism. So that’s one time we’ve seen, you could call it quote unquote deglobalization. And what that meant was obviously a massive economic crisis in the West. [00:37:17] Right. So people everywhere were hurt. The second time would be in the seventies. 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? [00:37:35] The western countries lost that. So through the sixties and early seventies. 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 this 1970s, which was massive inflation stagflation in, the west. [00:37:57] 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? [00:38:16] 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. Right. 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. [00:38:35] Normally what would happen is just like this long period of chaos in 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 with Bitcoin, maybe that happens, and maybe it’s Europe, maybe it’s China. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. [00:38:50] Right now, it’s like 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. Like we have an escape route. We can start building a new system, right? And we can put our energy and time into Bitcoin, both as individuals, communities, families, football clubs, nonprofit organizations, corporations, nation states, whatever. [00:39:11] 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. [00:39:28] 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. Yeah. And the system really keeps other people down at the expense of some of us, right? [00:39:42] 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 to subscribe to are cheaper because. [00:39:55] They’re from other places with weaker labor laws and cheaper currencies. Yeah, like let’s just be very clear about this. Yeah. If the iPhone was completely manufactured inside the United States with all of our labor laws and restrictions, it would cost $10,000, not a thousand dollars or whatever it costs. [00:40:11] yeah. We were talking about inputs to our system being 10 x cheaper or whatever. Or maybe more than that. Maybe more than that, you know, because of globalization. Yeah. Right. So we’re seeing, you know, 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 mourning, Hey, we’re going to do this. [00:40:32] We’re going to forcibly change the system and we’re going to be cutting off some of these subs. They’re not going to say it like this, but they’re going to be cutting off some of these subsidies. 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? [00:40:49] So finally they’re saying, 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’s going to build supercomputers here. Okay. I don’t know. Maybe it does result in supply chains coming back to the US and a reindustrialization in some way. [00:41:05] 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 and ai and it’s actually really exciting. I don’t know, but it’s going to be very expensive either way. I think 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. [00:41:26] And it would be hard. 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 helps. [00:41:35] Preston Pysh: 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? [00:41:47] 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 skyhigh prices and all this because every individual can access Bitcoin if they, you know, yes. 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. [00:42:10] And so I think if you get enough participants that are seeking salvation in it, call it Country X, Y, Z, 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. [00:42:34] 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 [00:42:42] Alex Gladstein: movement. And we don’t have to, I mean, Americans, this hasn’t really happened to us recently before, like maybe our parents or our parents’. [00:42:48] Parents, right, of course. Yeah. But Americans have been pretty insulated and many Europeans as well, actually in the last 2, 3, 4 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. [00:43:04] There’s a guy who, and you’ve been to our global Bitcoin summit where we have people from 56 to 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. Doula Bond, which is a educational organization in Lebanon, helps people learn about Bitcoin. [00:43:22] 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. [00:43:39] Okay. But regardless, it’s going to be tough. But regardless of whether it becomes overly dramatic or not. Forcibly changing the global economic system is a 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 policy makers 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 in a comparative advantage, whatever, they just want the stuff in our country, fine. [00:44:04] 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. [00:44:20] So that’s why my commitment, regardless of what happens in this economic time with 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? [00:44:38] Yeah. And we’re going to see so much more of that in the future. But yeah. Just remember, it’s not the iceberg, it’s the life rack. Yeah. 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. [00:44:56] Right. Even though they’re generally on an upward trajectory. It’s pretty brutal. And this is our way of saying, no, I achieve 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. [00:45:14] Preston Pysh: Taking a step back as you synthesize all this writing that you’ve done through the yearS&Pieced it all together into, this book. What would you say is your cohesive narrative or like your key takeaway? You know, you take a step back and you look at it and you’re like, wow, I wrote a lot here. [00:45:31] There’s a lot to all this. What or so what, I guess as you look back and reflect on the whole process of piecing it all together. [00:45:38] Alex Gladstein: Sure. Well, the book really covers a couple threads. It, looks to rise the global Bitcoin resistance, we’ll say in all these different countries. It looks at the history of the dollar system. [00:45:50] 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. It in many ways it exploits. [00:46:09] It’s built kind of on control. And it’s built on this idea that there should be essentially like a caste system in the world with currencies. 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. [00:46:29] 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. Yeah, but other people use these other currencies. 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. [00:46:53] Yeah. So [00:46:53] Preston Pysh: well said. You know, good God, that was such a amazing quote. Well, [00:46:57] 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 a 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 ballgame, but I. [00:47:17] You see some of the same things like Japan in the eighties. I mean, everybody should watch Princes of Theen. It’s unbelievable. This documentary on for free on YouTube, it’s unreal. Princes of Theen. 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. [00:47:35] How did it go from that to the loft 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. [00:47:57] 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, and this is what happened. We forced Japan to appreciate its currency. 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. [00:48:15] Like as of the, you know, April 15th, 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. [00:48:36] 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? [00:48:58] So usually we want keep the, what we call the global majority countries where the majority of the world’s people and resources are. That means 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. [00:49:23] Right. So this is kind of the game you see where like the other quote unquote, global North countries. 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. [00:49:43] This has been the game so far. That’s such a non-cooperative game. Like if you really think about it, 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 like devalue some, like an entire country, just overnight 50%. [00:50:00] All your wages are just worth half as much as they were yesterday. All their savings. 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. [00:50:17] 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. [00:50:35] 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. We’ll see, but I’m again filled with so much hope and yeah, again, the book tells it. I get really just sort of triumphant story of how this random software protocol ends up being relevant in a world of empires. [00:50:57] Like it’s really just wild, but it’s true. A hundred percent 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. [00:51:16] Right. Like I put up a slide in Bedford of, it’s like got Uncle Sam sitting on a branch cutting off the branch. Yeah. because they don’t know. They just don’t know it. And it’s like they’re unwittingly doing this. 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. [00:51:34] And it’s just like, definitely not. Yeah, you don’t get it. What? Like, you’re like, that’s not what’s happening [00:51:39] 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. [00:51:51] 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 us debt. Like I just don’t get that one. What do you think? It’s not going to start taking over GIES or dollars, like it’s crazy to me, but it’s kind of the ultimate Trojan horse thing. [00:52:09] Like, again, the Trojans see the horse out in the field. And even though they’re got a couple 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. Yeah. 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 if it’s NGU properties. [00:52:31] 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? [00:52:40] Preston Pysh: I will say this, as a person who has studied scarcity now for quite a while The fact that you have a hundred of these is // [00:52:48] Alex Gladstein: Yeah, not deeply, but I definitely rings a bell. [00:52:50] Preston Pysh: So he’s a really famous value investor and he has a book called Margin of Safety and Okay. 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. [00:53:05] It’s 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 going to 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. [00:53:26] yeah, We’re going to 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, it truly mean this, Alex. I’ve got books signed by Ray Dahlia, Walter Isaacson, Charlie Munger, the other people that I’ve just have been fortunate enough to get signed copies. [00:53:44] 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. So much of this IMF World Bank, the exporting of dollars, the inflation, and why weren’t you seeing it in the inflation? [00:54:06] 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. [00:54:30] Alex Gladstein: Thank you. Well, likewise, I learned 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. Amen. So super, grateful for that. Thank you so much, Preston. And yeah, until next time. [00:54:47] Preston Pysh: 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. [00:54:52] Alex Gladstein: Yes. Awesome. Take care. [00:54:55] Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Bitcoin fundamentals on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. [00:55:10] This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision professional, this show is copyrighted by the podcast network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.