We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC071: How Fiat Blinds Bitcoin's Importance w/ Alex Gladstein (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where we're talking about Bitcoin. On today's show, I have backed by popular demand, Mr. Alex Gladstein. Alex is the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation and is generally just a wealth of knowledge when it comes to all things Bitcoin. On today's show, we're going to be talking about Alex's new book, and we're talking about the humanitarian impacts that Bitcoin is having all around the world.

Starting point is 00:00:25 One of the major themes in Alex's book is how financial privilege can blind many markets participants to the real impact that Bitcoin is already having all around the world. And based on all of his firsthand account stories that he shares during this interview, you'll quickly see why he has that opinion. So without further delay, here's my conversation with Alex Gladstein. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone. So like I said in the introduction, I'm here with Alex Gladstein. Alex, Welcome back to the show. It's great to see you again.

Starting point is 00:01:13 We haven't chatted for a while and excited to get into this today. Yeah, pleasure to come on, talk about the book and current events and all the crazy things that have happened in the last 10 months or so since the last time I was on. So you're writing this book and you're locking it down with your publisher. How much has played out? I'm just curious. How much has played out since locking down your book in World Events? I mean, from week to week, we pretty much have like a,

Starting point is 00:01:40 decades worth of things that are happening. When did you submit to your publisher and when did they take everything to print and like that timeline process? Yeah, so we began the editing process in maybe October and we locked texts in January, like kind of very end of January. And, you know, in the past six, seven weeks, we've seen two things happen in the world that were, that are kind of progressions from the themes I was riffing on in the book. The first one, of course, relates to the fact that many of the chapters in my book relate

Starting point is 00:02:16 to people who use Bitcoin as almost like a human rights tool where their bank accounts are frozen or their activities have been restricted because of who they are, whether that be their beliefs, their ethnicity, their religion, whatever. I tried to really globe trot and go to different parts of the world, whether it be Latin America or Africa or the Middle East, Asia, to do that. And what was most astonishing to me was. first was the Canadian government's reaction to the trucker convoy's fundraising. And that whole episode, um, that was an unbelievable, you know, it was an unbelievable episode and it continues to play out, but it very much is a growth from some of the things I was observing in the book around,

Starting point is 00:02:57 for example, anti-police protests in Nigeria. And, you know, the Nigerian feminists getting kicked off their fintech apps and having to use BTC pay server instead. Like, that happened in the of 2020 and that totally starts to foreshadow what happens in Canada. The most shocking thing about that, of course, was that Canada is regarded as like a liberal democracy, one of the most open societies in the world and really underlined, I think, for everybody that, hey, if it could happen there, it could happen anywhere. And I think, you know, at least pre-Russia invasion of Ukraine, there was this really widespread sentiment on social media in the Bitcoin community, in the wider cryptocurrency community

Starting point is 00:03:35 of like, hey, we've been like focusing on price for the last two years, but like this is actually what it's all about. Absolutely. People were like, it was kind of almost refreshing to get like a community focus on this. Like this is what it's actually about money that the government can't control. Now, did the truckers screw up dissemination, distribution? Yes. And, you know, we get into that.

Starting point is 00:03:58 But the point is that like, and Lynn Alden had an awesome threat on this back in February. But like essentially when you raise funds with Bitcoin, even if you screw up, the government has to put all this work into finding you and doxing you and serving you in a court or whatever. Whereas when you raise funds with GoFundMe, it's like a one one button click or a phone call. So even though these folks really screwed up and they used a static address and they did a bunch of things that I think are problematic, a lot of the Bitcoin still got spent and distributed. So I mean, it's kind of funny that like, you know, even when you have that opsec, it's just such a different paradigm than the legacy financial system, which is built for control,

Starting point is 00:04:42 right? You know, Bitcoin is built for freedom, but it's nation and you got to know what you're doing and you can screw up. And these truckers sort of did screw up in some ways. But at the end of the day, it's not built for control. So the Canadian government still has to do a whole bunch of stuff and continues to have to do a whole bunch of stuff to try and work through the court system and try to get these guys and try to get these funds. And as of today, they've only gotten a small percentage. And I just think that speaks volumes about Bitcoin's efficacy as a protest fundraising tool. And then, like on the 24th of February, you know, Putin invades Ukraine. And I mean, man, this is obviously the big topic that has changed the world. It will be

Starting point is 00:05:25 in history seen like the U.S. invasion of Iraq or with all the Berlin Wall. This is like that level of importance of event for a variety of reasons. And one of the interesting things, of course, was that there was a fog of war and not a lot of people thought it was going to happen. I mean, I think there was a widespread obvious focus at the time. Like, we had the Olympics in China and people were kind of like, hmm, you know, our chairman at H.R. F. F. Gary Kasparov had this old joke about, well, like, what do you think happens when the enemy encircles your country? Like, what do you think happens next? And we could see it on satellite image, but, you know, people understandably were skeptical of U.S. government intelligence.

Starting point is 00:06:00 You know, a lot of people, especially in the Bitcoin community, you don't trust the U.S. government. I didn't think it was going to happen. I mean, I kept seeing the report, so I was like, they're not going to invade. No, and there are incredible Russian journalists who work for like the Guardian, New York Times who didn't think it was going to happen, who live in Russia. I mean, so it's like, who are Russian. So, you know, there was a lot of fog of war stuff going on, but ultimately Putin invades and then the West freezes the Russian Central Bank reserves, right?

Starting point is 00:06:29 And there's been some really great discussion on this, especially by Luke Groman on the William's show and by other folks, but really a watershed moment, you had the memo by Zoltan at Credit Suisse come out and, you know, look, things take time, but like clearly the last eight months are a watershed moment in terms of understanding inside versus outside money. I mean, first you had Afghanistan, you had the fall of Kabul and you had the United States government just simply just freeze the reserves of that particular sovereign. And then you had this. And, you know, it seems like Putin probably knew this was going to happen.

Starting point is 00:07:06 And he had certain plans in place. But for a one superpower to like just be able to freeze another superpower savings because the other superpower chose to save in its rivals liabilities, you know, is now something that is a global discussion topic, whereas it just wasn't before. Okay. So now you're thinking about China, the CCP. Okay, what happens if they invade Taiwan later this year? Well, guess what? You know, trillion dollars of their assets are going to get frozen. So they've got about

Starting point is 00:07:37 $1.1 trillion of American securities that they say that they've saved, right? So I think that causes pause and hesitation. And the realist view, which I have a couple different hats, but I mean, obviously I'm a human rights activist, but I'm also trying to have this realist view of monetary economics and the way the world works from that perspective. The realist view, quite obviously, is that over the next few years, and especially over this decade, big powers are going to diversify their savings away from the U.S. Treasury. And that was the other theme that I wrote about a lot in my book was monetary history and how essentially we went from gold as the reserve currency to essentially the U.S. dollar or the U.S. Treasury as the reserve currency and how I think

Starting point is 00:08:21 eventually we're going to go to Bitcoin. And that was sort of a big part of a couple of the chapters in my book that tried to do a retrospective on that. So to come out of the book publishing process and see just like a super vivid use case, obviously for Bitcoin as like a freedom money at the micro level. And to see all these critics come out and say, I was wrong on Bitcoin, like, we need it. You know, all these telegram groups I'm in with all these kind of trad-fi people. They were like, oh, I mean, hey, you know, obviously, I guess we need Bitcoin. And then to see the macro effect of what I had been talking a lot about with regard to the trajectory of the dollar system, start have a clearly historic milestone.

Starting point is 00:09:05 And, you know, we're living in history right now as you and I speak. So we'll see what happens, obviously. But to have those two things happen right after was pretty amazing. And it felt like the process of writing, which started for me in 2020, you know, during early 2020, during, Two things happened. Obviously, we had COVID, the sort of COVID shut down. I was at home all the time, doing a lot of reading. I made a pledge to myself to learn more about the bond markets because I thought that was really kind of interesting. And I didn't know much about it. And I spent two years learning about that. And then I started to interview people in the space that I thought were interesting. And I had this book project in mind. And that's when I interviewed, for example, Adam Back and a few other folks. So I did a bulk of the research and kind of early writing in 2020, and then in 2021, I started putting things together in a series of kind of reportage for Bitcoin magazine that would later start to create the skeleton for the book. So I really like the way it all came together. And the cool part is some of, you know,

Starting point is 00:10:10 some of the book obviously was published as chapters. They were later edited, you know, and ordered in a way that I think makes a narrative sense. But the cool part is a lot of those stories had been out there and I got so much feedback. from people. So I was able, you know, because like thousands and thousands of people would read the stories and a couple would say, hey, maybe you got this wrong or whatever. So I kind of like Wikipediaed or kind of crowdsourced some of the things that maybe I had gotten wrong or whatever.

Starting point is 00:10:38 And that means the book is pretty polished from that perspective. And I'm really happy and confident about everything that's in there. But anyway, to conclude the opening here, what a time to publish the book. And I mean, wow. I mean, what a time. And again, it reminded me of the process of writing because I had written one of my chapters is about how Bitcoin adoption works globally and how sort of like this Trojan horse for freedom.

Starting point is 00:11:04 And I write this chapter. I'm thinking a lot about it. And then all of a sudden I see this like, you know, populist leader in Central America, like a top Bitcoin. And I was there in the crowd when Jack Muller announced it. It was so astonishing. And then just to start to see that, you know, unfold and then to get to go down there. and do a big piece on that, I thought was important. But yeah, we're just, we're just living

Starting point is 00:11:28 history right now. And this El Salvador story continues to be important. I mean, just today, we saw that the Honduran government, which clearly had been mulling Bitcoin adoption, because the central bank put out a statement about Bitcoin adoption today. Like, the central bank of Honduras put out a statement about Bitcoin adoption today. I mean, wow. So that, they put that out, and they basically said, you know, cool your ideas. We're going to do a CBDC. It seems. So we'll see. I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if, again, you see some things happening in Central America.

Starting point is 00:11:59 It just seems inevitable. But for now, this new government, leftist government in Honduras, which I obviously thought would be really interesting if they did something with Bitcoin because ultimately, I think leftist governments will. But, you know, that comes out today. And you've got the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee going after this bill that they want to pass that like basically mandates the State Department and other agencies to like do a thorough investigation of El Salvador's Bitcoin adoption. And it's like, let's talk man.

Starting point is 00:12:31 Let's get into that before we go to the book. I want to, I want to talk more about this because I read this on Twitter today. And I also wanted to just comment. I think Twitter is the best peer review for anything that you can possibly write on the planet. The academic peer review process is totally dead. Just posted on Twitter. And you'll get real feedback. You'll, You might not like the tone that the feedback comes in, but you'll get real feedback. Okay, so this announcement, this Senate plan to direct the State Department to investigate El Salvador's Bitcoin adoption. This is a four-page document that goes into a very specific definition of, at least my interpretation

Starting point is 00:13:11 of what I read was they want to fully understand the benefits and potentially detriments of having a Bitcoin legal tender system in a country, what impacts that has on businesses, individuals, you name it. And then the very last portion of this four-page document, it said that the U.S. government wants a study conducted on what the ramifications of that might mean to the existing dollar reserve system. It's just like a maybe two-sentence comment about a study on that particular topic. So this just came out today. Like, what the heck does this mean? And the turnaround time was, what, 90 days or something like that, Alex?

Starting point is 00:13:55 Yeah, so look, I did a comment for Politico about it this morning. But essentially, I would imagine you would agree that the sort of big takeaway is like, wow, the U.S. government's extremely serious. It's how I'm a second of an adoption in Central America. Like, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is making this a massive priority. Even the president of El Salvador seemed pretty shocked based on his comment on Twitter. Yeah, I can't believe. Hey, we're some little country.

Starting point is 00:14:17 like, this is crazy. And no doubt with prodding of Treasury and FinC and OFAC and all the rest. But look, I think that's the big takeaway is that the U.S. government's taking this extremely seriously. That's the general takeaway. But look, I think could we get some interesting new data from such a study? Yes, definitely. I mean, there could be another data point. Okay. A U.S. government data point, which we also, we should take with a grain of salt. But it'll go in there and they will, I imagine, try to figure out like percentage of adoption. They'll try to suss out some of these claims that Bokele is making. It can't hurt to have another data point.

Starting point is 00:14:52 So that's one thing. But, you know, when you read through this memo or this potential bill, it just strikes me that it's kind of set up to produce a negative outcome. Like it starts out by talking about how, how will this challenge essentially like, you know, the travel rule type financial drag net rules that the United States has in place. Like how will this challenge the KYC. AML regime and how will it challenge the World Bank and the IMF and how will it challenge the existing monetary order is essentially the questions I think they're really trying to ask.

Starting point is 00:15:22 I don't think necessarily they're trying to figure out like, oh, is this good and should we do that? I think obviously they know where they stand on that. They don't want to do this. I think what they're trying to do is, you know, can by throwing their weight around here, maybe can they discourage other countries from doing it, right? And, you know, maybe Honduras is evidence of that. We don't know. But obviously that government was mulling it clearly if the central bank would put out a statement.

Starting point is 00:15:46 I mean, there's no reason the central bank would feel the need to put out a detailed statement about Bitcoin adoption if they hadn't been discussing it internally. So, you know, maybe the U.S. government put some pressure there. I'm not sure. I think Kamala just, you know, went down there and, you know, they seem pretty tight. So I'm not really sure what's going on there. But could we get something interesting out of it? It may be.

Starting point is 00:16:07 But I think the big takeaway is simply that the U.S. government's very concerned. that a Bitcoin model could break the current system. And yeah, wow. The irony for me is that the way that you phrased that last sentence is how I think most of the world is going to perceive this is that Bitcoin broke the old system. When in reality, the old system is breaking itself. And there's just this thing over here that just happens to be ready to catch all of the broken pieces and kind of piece it all back together again.

Starting point is 00:16:40 Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, Bitcoin's the life rafts, not the iceberg. Right? Exactly. No, and I agree with that, of course, but I'm just, I'm the vibe I got. No, but the vibe I got from reading what they're saying is what I'm kind of trying to conclude here with is that the bill is set up for a memo or a finding that says Bitcoin's the iceberg. That's all. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right.

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Starting point is 00:21:12 Back to the show. And even if it does, and I agree with you, and I think even if it does say that and it comes back with, hey, this is really bad, everything's going to. I think the critical question that has to be asked when a person would read that report is, so what? What can you do to prevent that from happening or to prevent that from evolving in that direction and do you have that authority to prevent that? And I think you and I both know the answers or we suspect we know the answers to both of those very difficult questions that any individual

Starting point is 00:21:45 company government body is going to have to ask itself as they're trying to understand and wrap their head around this. And the answer is, no, you can't. You don't have a unilateral authority to prevent this thing on a global scale for every single participant to not participate. And as long as that, what I just said is a true statement. If that's a true statement, well, then you have to choose to participate, right? So. Yeah. And I also think that, look, I think it also just helps us re-center and realize how exceptional the Al Salvador move was. And look, obviously, I've been very critical of Buckele, taking a lot of heat on Bitcoin Twitter for being critical of Buckele. But whatever, man. I think that, you know,

Starting point is 00:22:33 know, if he plays his cards right, he could do great things for his country. But, you know, I went down to El Salvador with people from Venezuela and with Ecuador, from Ecuador, Nicaragua. I went with people who'd seen this movie before, you know, like all the telltale signs. Like when I first started worked for the Human Rights Foundation in the mid-2000s, guess what Chavez did? Well, you know, he sacked the Attorney General. He restacked the Supreme Court. He changed the law so he could keep running in office. And this is like an obvious blueprint. Like, we know where this is going. Maybe Buckel is the exception, and he's doing all these things without a goal in mind. That just seems like a stretch.

Starting point is 00:23:12 He can hope that he doesn't take the big steps and that he sees the wisdom in restraint. I mean, that's the hope. He still has a way out. I think that he could still be this like forever remembered figure who was the first to understand the Bitcoin standard. I mean, this is very much in the cards. But he's got to cool it with the getting rid of his riot. and cracking down on dissent. Otherwise, I think he'll disrupt the legacy and he'll be more remembered

Starting point is 00:23:39 for other things, unfortunately. So we'll kind of see. But just generally speaking, I think that it's such a powerful reminder of the fact that what he did was so unique. And even though I have, again, strong criticism of what he's doing in a broader sense politically, I did credit and even cheer the fact that he chose Bitcoin because he didn't choose a CBDC. And that was, remarkable and it continues to be remarkable. Very much so. I'll continue to give them credit for that. And when you look at the fact that the Honduran government's kind of saying, well, maybe

Starting point is 00:24:14 we're just going to go the CBDC route. Like, wow. I mean, you're talking about the difference between a monetary system of freedom versus a monetary system of control. And ironically, seven hours ago from when you and I are talking right now, the Fed, the Fed's Twitter, the Fed having a Twitter account, by the way, is hilarious. But, okay, so the Fed tweets, why is the federal resolution? considering a hashtag CBDC now, one out of three thread.

Starting point is 00:24:40 What a wild statement to make on this very day. And they have a graphic and everything going on. So it's like, they're setting it up. The Fed is going to roll out of CBDC at some point. I mean, we're hearing from Powell. We heard from today that, oh, it would have to, he's like, it's got to have privacy, but also identifiability. Okay.

Starting point is 00:24:59 Well, that means that it's not going to have privacy. You notice how they're definitely not talking about it for a peg, right? Which, like, this, the whole thing is about having a unit that is not being debased, that pegs and holds everybody to a monetary standard without debasing it and shoving it into the hands of a select few, you know, group of people. So that's the thing that I think so few get when you get into the CBDCs is first and foremost, it has to be pegged. It has to have a fixed supply that can't be manipulated by a single point or, you know, a few people in a room. And no CBDC is going to do that.

Starting point is 00:25:41 Yeah. Yeah. No. And look, I, like, to answer the Fed's question, why is the Fed considering a CBDC now? Well, I have three answers. Number one, to replace cash for the tool surveillance. That's like the writing's on the wall for that one. Number two, to establish limits on, on who can use dollars.

Starting point is 00:25:59 you know, another big one that's kind of obvious. But number three, and to your point, yeah, it's to make it easier to conduct expansionary and repressive monetary policy. I mean, they can do helicopter money, they can do programmable money. You know, we've been in all these debates the last few years of like, you know, does QE cause inflation? And in my latest essay, I tried to really break down how I thought that there's just tons of evidence to show that, that, you know, basically government intervention in the bond markets, QE causes massive asset inflation. I think that's really, really clear and has all kinds of externalities, but it doesn't necessarily cause consumer price inflation, okay, directly. However, the Fed has accounts directly with

Starting point is 00:26:39 Americans. This is a different ballgame. And the CBDC would basically marry the Fed's ability to do QE and eat up, you know, sovereign debt with the ability to directly credit, basically bank reserves into people's pocketbooks, which is spending into the real economy and, will be really inflationary. So we're talking about like programmable stimies, right? So I think that this idea of CBDCs is far beyond just the sort of surveillance tech piece. I think it's we have to talk about negative interest rates. We have to talk about expiration dates on money. We have to talk about the monetary piece 100%. It's essentially going to be as a tool to disincentivize savings and to incentivize consumption and spending because that's what our economy kind of requires right now. That's what

Starting point is 00:27:26 the powers that be want, right? The whole Greenspan Fed model that was so brilliantly described by this journalist Christopher Leonard and his new book, The Lords of Easy Money, which I definitely recommend people read, is that they basically said, we're going to do three things. They said this in the 90s after the recession in the early 90s. They're like, we're going to fight price inflation. We're going to ignore asset inflation and we're going to bail out the economy and it crashes. I mean, that's basically the Greenspan playbook. And guess what? they did all those things. And now they're going to have to fight price inflation because that's where we are. But I think that the CBDC just plays into the macro story here in a really big way.

Starting point is 00:28:07 And ultimately, one of the chapters of my book relates to the cypherpunks. And they saw this coming. Like, that's what Bitcoin was invented to fight was the CBDC. I made a joke the other day about how I thought that, you know, maybe there's this theory of Satoshi being kind of like someone sent back in time from a dystopian future to kill off the CBDC in the same way that the Terminator was sent back, you know, to save John Connor so he could fight SkyNet, et cetera, et cetera. But like you kind of get the idea that like it is this incepted idea that was literally nothing more than a blog post essentially on a message board and a little bit of code that has now grown into a not just a serious contender to a CBDC, but something I think that will help

Starting point is 00:28:52 us fight and defeat it, which really amazing. So I'm super into the, you know, this being the legacy of the cypherpunks in the 1980s, them seeing the writing on the wall, Neil Stevenson even writing about it in his books in the 80s, knowing that like electronic control of money would lead to both surveillance and sort of that easy monetary policy, programmably easy monetary policy. And then literally them designing a thing that could fight back. And that's where we are today. And we're lucky to live in a, you know, one of, you know, one of the many different parallel universes. We're lucky to live in one of them where Bitcoin did get invented and we do have a tool to fight back. Otherwise, I wouldn't be super, super bullish or optimistic about the future as I am now.

Starting point is 00:29:39 But anyway, really great day to talk. Lots happening. You know, very, very clear that we're about to see this battle kind of unfold, you know, even domestically between CBD, and Bitcoin, and, you know, we'll be here for that. I like the three points that you lay out in that response to the central bank, because each of those three points that you make, which obviously, I don't think anybody can even argue any of those three points, but each one of them is a breakdown and trust. They lead to a breakdown and trust of the user of that CBDC because you're putting

Starting point is 00:30:19 optionality into the currency that can just totally usurp their buying power at no notice if you tick somebody off or if somebody doesn't like what you're doing or whatever. And I've been following this guy. I love this guy, Fed guy, Fed, Joseph Wang, you know, writing about his experiences working as a trader at the Fed for years and years and years. And I've been noticing that he's like increasingly, I don't know, he's on like, he's on the right side here, which is really interesting. And he tweeted today, a CBDC is just a surveillance tool and has no place in a free society.

Starting point is 00:30:55 I'm like, hell yeah. That's the right take. That's like, it's amazing that that's somebody who worked inside the beast, you know, for a decade or whatever, that's his viewpoint. Like he saw how this sausage is made. And he was like, nah, we don't want this. This is not good for us. And he told me that I talked to him and I read a lot of his stuff in preparation and during research

Starting point is 00:31:17 for a recent essay that I wrote on basically foreign policy and QE, which I think is like a very overlooked topic. But essentially, he was essentially saying something like the fact that, you know, usually the bond market plays a, is sort of a check on government power, just like the Senate and the House are a check on the executive branch. And just like the Supreme Court is a check on the executive branch, well, the bond market's a check on government power too. And that actually, basically, through the Fed's actions, they took that check away. Okay. So I think that somebody who saw that all go down post 2008 and realized like, wow, there's just like all the centralized power coming together sees that a CBDC is just like the worst possible thing. I mean, it's like adding kerosene to the fire. I mean, it's like anything they can do now. I mean, man, if they can just program stimulus, you know, it'll be abused. I mean, and democratic politicians aren't necessarily at fault. There was a guy, Jack Reff, he wrote, a lot about gold standard and the US moving off the gold standard in the 50s, 60s,

Starting point is 00:32:22 and 70s, French writer, French diplomat, I believe. And he talked a lot about how in the Democratic society, the politicians are always going to choose inflation. They're not going to choose the strength. It's just, it's like they're designed to do so. So if our democratic system has this Fiat central banking model where there are no restraints. And what I'm describing is literally just history, in fact. They will continue to run up a deficit, especially if you're the reserve currency. I mean, look, our debt is now $31 trillion, $30 trillion. And, you know, Fed's talking about raising rates.

Starting point is 00:33:02 Well, guess what? They raise rates, I mean, rates, for every 1% in rates that they raise, you get another $300 billion that we owe in payments, right, this year. So our federal budget's only $6 trillion. So if we go up 3%, you're talking almost another trillion dollars of payments. And this is this literally bankrupt the country. So it's going to be very interesting to watch this all play out. And all of these things around CBDCs kind of come out of what I learned about and

Starting point is 00:33:38 wrote about in the book because they dovetail those two themes that neatly dovetail with the Canadian truckers and what we've seen with regard to the U.S. policy versus Russia and the sanctions, which is the micro and the macro, which is the Bitcoin as this like tool for individuals to fight back against repression, right, and to do protest money, let's say, okay? And the macro being this potentially new outside money, neutral digital reserve asset. Right. So those were the two, ideas that I was most taken by and fascinated by and puzzled by as I was writing the book. And the chapters all moved through kind of both of those themes, the micro and the macro. I can just say for people listening to this, your first person accounts and stories throughout

Starting point is 00:34:27 the book are absolutely phenomenal. Just reading those first hand accounts is just like, I don't know how to really describe it. It just, it really put a a face to this movement and just made it so real for me. And when you start off the book, you have a title here, some like subtitling in the start of the book. And the subtitling was just, when I read it, I just sat there and I'm like, this is such a powerful statement because it encapsulates so much of my day-to-day interactions on Twitter and people in this space are pretty much with Americans and people who live here stateside, right? I don't see. see the actual impact that this is having because so much of what our conversations revolve

Starting point is 00:35:15 around is an investing number go up discussion point. But this is the subtitle. You say, how financial privilege blinds dollar users to Bitcoin's importance. And I read that and I just thought to myself, my God, that is so true. And I tried to just kind of put myself in any other person around the world, and you provide so many, you talk about Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, you list all these countries throughout the book that you have done firsthand account interviews with people that are bitcoins in these nations. And their point of view, and my God, what a powerful read. I mean, it's phenomenal.

Starting point is 00:35:57 So I guess in there, the question for me is, what account for you? just sticks out in your head. Like, first and foremost, as I ask that, like, what person or which story or situation just kind of jumps out at you is just being a really powerful example of all of the... I'm telling you, folks, there's not one. There is, this book is just full of these accounts. What do you got?

Starting point is 00:36:27 Yeah, so for me, I think I'll say general thing, and then I'll mention someone specifically, but the collective, when you're, breathe in the book if you're able to read check your financial privilege and get a sense of what Preston's been talking about, which of course I'd be very grateful for and welcoming of your feedback. I think the collective TLDR is just like, wow, humans are so persistent and resilient. And these people who are stuck in situations that are so unimaginably bad and so much worse than like someone like me could imagine and who are, I mean, I am so privileged just.

Starting point is 00:37:05 especially financially privileged, but all kinds of privileged over a lot of these folks. And they're able to find this hope in this new kind of money is just, and it's not like a geographic thing. I've got chapters on Togo and Palestine and Cuba and we go to Nigeria, we look at El Salvador, we really go around. And Afghanistan, and we go to all the different continents. And it's just really neat and fascinating that all these totally disparate people who literally have nothing to do with one another, they all have this common thing that has changed their life and gives them optimism for the future.

Starting point is 00:37:45 And that, to me, is just like one of the big takeaways. It just made me so optimistic writing the book. As for a specific person, one of the interviews that I started to do in 2020 was with my friend Roya Mahfub, who's one of Afghanistan's first female tech CEOs. And I'd actually known Roya for a while before I realized she used Bitcoin. I think I met her in 2013 or 14. And it didn't really come up until a couple years later when I was in an event with her and we're just chatting.

Starting point is 00:38:11 And I just somehow the word Bitcoin came up. And she was like, oh, yeah, you know, I've been using that for a while. And I'm kind of like, wait what? Tell me more. And, you know, my story about her was, I kind of got the chance to dust it off, go back and talk with her extensively and do a piece writer. around the fall of Kabul. This was like a few weeks after Kabul fell. So for me, it was a chance to go back, kind of get the message out about why she originally used it, which was so fascinating,

Starting point is 00:38:38 because, you know, she's in this society where women are either legally or socially sort of not permitted to use money at the same level as men. The husband's, brothers, uncles of folks, you know, they take the cash when women come home. They, they don't, you can't really open bank accounts. I mean, you can, but it's discouraged, et cetera. whatever's not illegal is sort of socially, you know, pushed back against. So she had this company that she started and I detailed the whole story in the book, but it was really amazing as is called Citadel, which is this theme in Bitcoin, right? So I thought what was really funny about my interviews with her were that,

Starting point is 00:39:19 number one, her company was called Citadel, which is, of course, this kind of idea in Bitcoin of like where we're all going to live after the Bitcoin, after hyper-Bitcoinization. But that's her company name. And the other thing was that she got her start building something called the Silk Road for the U.S. government in Afghanistan, which, of course, I also thought was really funny. But basically, she starts hiring women to work for her. And they're trying to figure out all these payment options.

Starting point is 00:39:44 And they don't have an M-Pa-Sat type thing in Afghanistan. All the fintech that we use is censored. Their currencies are not doing so well over time. So look, somebody points out Bitcoin to her. This was in like late 2012. I guess. And she's like, she got an open mind. She says, let's do it. So throughout like the spring and summer of 2013, the fall of 2013, they're like, she's paying these women in Bitcoin. And then like, it gives them the sense of financial freedom because they can actually own the asset that she teaches

Starting point is 00:40:13 them how to set up a wallet. They were of course much more rudimentary back then, but they worked basically the same way. And whenever the women wanted to spend, Roya's sister made like a side business, you know, buying the Bitcoin back, you know, either for, for goods or for cash. And that's just this is like little ecosystem she built. And over time, like hundreds and even thousands of women and girls learned about this in this way. Now, of course, the crazy part of the story is that Bitcoin price crashes at the end of 2013, like dramatically. So she has to make everybody whole. It's a huge setback. Everybody accuses her of being a crook. Like it's really, it makes you think about those early years when you

Starting point is 00:40:54 literally were crazy for using it. Like, you know, Bitcoin. risk was was so high that no one took you seriously. I mean, today you and I can have these serious conversations because we have all this price history under our belt and people take it seriously because it is serious. It's a trillion dollar asset, et cetera. But back then, it was not serious. So she risks it all. And afterwards, though, she can't like, she can't shake it. She's like, there's something there that's so cool that we could have this money that women could be equal in, like, essentially, that does not discriminate based on gender. And, And two stories she told me that I include there are, first of all, the fact that her

Starting point is 00:41:33 sister, that side hustle turned out to be very lucrative because she held on to the Bitcoin and she ended up paying for her education to Cornell with it, which was amazing. So that was like the first thing. Like this Bitcoin that these women earned ended up being like a huge treasure later on and they like, you know, saved it. And then this other person who worked for her, fled the country, brought her Bitcoin with her, made it all the way to Germany, you know, across Iran, Turkey, the whole thing, you know, boat flipping over, you know, the horrible stuff that Afghans have to go through to get

Starting point is 00:42:01 to a better life makes it to Germany, has brought the seed phrase with her, ends up having this nest egg, and 2017 is able to sell some of it and start a new life in Germany. And that's where she is now. And like, these two stories I thought were really something else. And the last thing I'll mention about that piece, which is, yeah, I just thought this, Roya herself was the specific person that remained in my mind is kind of the most interesting. although all of the people I talked to were awesome and fascinating in different ways was the fact that she had gone to Kabul about a year ago and tried to convince her parents to buy some and to diversify into it.

Starting point is 00:42:41 They were like, it wasn't like that they didn't believe her because she became kind of world renowned for her work in this area. It was that they just were uncomfortable, procrastinating. And the craziest lesson is that they ended up not doing it. And then similarly to the way that when Putin invaded Ukraine, everybody was shocked. It was kind of a surprise. Like, you saw all those things on social that I saw. People were hanging out in Kiev partying, like, until the day it happened.

Starting point is 00:43:08 Similar to, like, to come. I mean, people knew that the army was coming, the Taliban were coming. But, like, it was extremely sudden, right? And my parents had to flee. And guess what? Couldn't bring their savings with them. So she has this regret that she wasn't able to sufficiently persuade them to do this. Because had they just diversified a little bit to Bitcoin, they could have brought some of their wealth with them.

Starting point is 00:43:30 And that's a theme that I've seen all across all the writing I've done is like, and stories that didn't make it into the book that will be maybe for a future book about Syria, Venezuela, other places. Like, what a powerful thing. Yeah, and now Ukraine. I mean, there was a great CNBC piece out there by one of the journalists there, McKenzie, who's Sigelos. She's been really, really great on the Bitcoin beat lately. And I talked to her a lot in that story, gave her some sources, and she ended up writing about a young guy who fled Ukraine with 40% of his life savings intact, whereas most people lost everything.

Starting point is 00:44:07 And that idea of refugee money is extremely powerful. So anyway, I thought that story was a big takeaway for me in the book. But yeah, I mean, to me, the Cuba and the Palestine pieces were the ones I went the deepest. And they were, they were, I knew a lot about those two areas, but I, I learned so much in doing the research and writing this like, each piece is very long and detailed and covers a lot of history about each because I felt like it was so important to have a nuanced view. And I really, really changed my own mind about a lot of things as I, as I wrote those pieces. And I just, it's two very different scenarios, but, you know, two situations where people are trapped,

Starting point is 00:44:48 you know, between two kind of almost external forces. Like in both cases, they have the local corrupt government, whether that be the Cuban dictatorship or the Palestinian Authority. And then they have this like foreign presence, whether it be the Israeli, the IDF, or the U.S. and the U.S. embargo. And both of them are putting this pressure on them and hurting their ability to do commerce and to save and transact and to enjoy the things that you and I have as privileged Americans. And I just thought the dichotomy of both of those stories was quite powerful. So I definitely am very proud of those two chapters as well, especially just given that, like, I mean, such a Bitcoin is just badass.

Starting point is 00:45:30 Like it's like, it's like this one thing that they can like say, I'm going to use this and I don't care what you have to say. And one of the women I interviewed in the, you know, Cuba chapter, it's like, I found her on like Max and Stacey's like telegram group. And it's just like it's amazing. But she's now doing well. She got in in early 2020, and she's doing well enough now that she's like supporting one of her family members in America, like, you know, with big coin.

Starting point is 00:45:56 She's like a, you know, Cuban middle class, meaning extremely poor medical worker who works for the state in that country. And she just was stacking stats and learned about it that way. And everybody can do that. And it just gives me a lot of hope. So, yeah, I mean, the book covers a lot of ground. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination.

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Starting point is 00:49:46 think I have. You talk a little bit and you write about the birth of the cypher punk movement and how it was the seeds into Bitcoin and you talk about interviewing Adam and you cover the whole cast of characters that were part of the cypher punk movement. Can you cover a little bit of this research with my audience and just kind of give them a background of how this all kind of sprung out of that movement in the timeframe, does this happen decades ago, but give them kind of an idea of when this really kind of started kicking off and a little bit of the backstory, because I don't think that we've ever covered this on our show. Yeah, so I think, you know, I tried to set up the book with a couple, as you say,

Starting point is 00:50:27 kind of immediate characters to show you people who are using Bitcoin around the world in ways that might surprise you. And then I try with Chapter 2 to bring it back to like, before those people even had thought about a money that their government didn't control, there was a whole group of folks working towards providing that tool for humanity. And they were the cypherpunks. And look, the research goes through a lot of books writing that was done in the late 70s, 80s, and 90s. And there's a veritable treasure trove of reportage from Wired Magazine from the 90s. That's so phenomenal on this, especially by this guy, Stephen Livy.

Starting point is 00:51:06 But like Wired magazine in the 90s was amazing. Like if you read this stuff, it's like so, so cool. I mean, they were living a similar moment to what we're living now. And what's funny is, of course, Adam back, I asked him about this. And he's like, oh, today's like way crazier than that because he was like a frontline soldier in the crypto wars in the 90s. And I mean, now it's like even way more wild. But at the time, yeah, I mean, again, I think what you had was this collective realization that as things digitized in society and as especially communication, and money became electronic, that that was going to open up new paths for governments to

Starting point is 00:51:43 surveil and control people, especially in conjunction with large corporations. And cypressurunks were extensively about this. And one of the characters in that story is David Chom, who I had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with one day a few years ago, kind of spending a day with him and just talking to him about his life and what he's up to. But, you know, he was one of the first who really, really saw the need for. not just encrypted communications, but encrypted money. And essentially, like, in the 70s, scientists came up with ways for two individuals to trade a secret on the internet. This was done

Starting point is 00:52:18 out of research at Stanford University. And it was really, really groundbreaking. But, you know, this sort of, you know, concept to practice takes time. And actually, it took about 15 years to get from the sort of what we would call like the RSA paper based on Whitfield and Diff. these work around public key encryption in the mid-70s to having an actual device that could allow me and you to have essentially an encrypted message online. And that obviously was, you know, PGP. So the PGP project, Phil Zimmerman, right, pretty good privacy. You know, that was that, that kind of came out in the early 90s, but it was built on the back of all this stuff by all these academics who had been exploring these issues, David Chom, not least among them. And you look at,

Starting point is 00:53:03 you read, you go back, you read his stuff from the 80s and 90s. And he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, knew it. He was like, look, this is going to be this Orwellian state. We got to stop it. And they knew back then. And basically, the cyphorpunk movement is that is sort of the validation of a realization that there's two ways to protect our rights. We can ask the government for them or we can seize them ourselves through open source code. And this is always what I'm thinking about today with these debates around CBDCs, Fed coin, whatever. Like back then, yeah, you could like go to the U.S. government. I mean, same characters. I mean, Clinton was, was, was, President, Senator Biden, was very involved in cracking down on free speech on the internet

Starting point is 00:53:41 and on encryption. Same people that are leading our country today back then did not want Americans to have privacy on the internet for the same reasons that they don't want us to have Bitcoin today. Whatever, child porn, terrorism, crime. They make up anything. They just didn't want to give up the power, right? They wanted the clipper chip. They wanted a device in every American's, you know, consumer technology, you know,

Starting point is 00:54:01 piece of equipment that would allow them to have like basically a key into, into the private messages. So I think what was so interesting is just seeing the cyperpunk ethos is that, no, we're just going to go ahead and seize our rights with open source code and ask for forgiveness and not permission. And that was essential. I mean, they had to do that because you weren't going to lobby your way into freedom back then.

Starting point is 00:54:24 And you're not going to do it today either. And that's why I think Bitcoin is so important. Like we're not going to be able to like, there's a lot of these people who a lot of them my respect, you know, they think that we can convince the government to make like private cash. Like, there's just a lot of reasons why that's not going to work. And I think I was inspired by the cypherpunks in that they saw that this was such a kind of existential threat. And, you know, after kind of making it possible to have encrypted messaging, which was kind of like the first battle, the war or like the Holy Grail, I guess, was eCash.

Starting point is 00:54:56 And it was this thing that had always been talked about in sci-fi writing. Again, Neil Stevenson, his books were so formative for a lot. I think a lot of these people. and you go back and Reason did a really good kind of video series on the cypherpunk early years, but you look at these people like Tim May, John Gilmore, the other folks, Eric Hughes, the Cypherpunk Manifesto, like all this stuff, they got together in the early 90s, and they decided, you know, we're going to fight back. And Adam Back was part of that. And Adam Back was, you know, it was no coincidence that he was the first person to get an email

Starting point is 00:55:27 from Satoshi Nakamoto. Like he had decades of experience in distributed systems and cyber money. Like he was very much a part of that. And so my essay, you know, my second chapter in the book goes through all these characters and we learn about what, you know, David Chom and what he tried to do with Digi Cash, why it failed. And then kind of people like Adam Back and Waydie and, and others kind of Nick Sabo, kind of like looking at why it failed and then kind of get this realization that I felt was lacking in the genre of, although I, Aaron from Bitcoin magazine, Bon Weirdem has done a really good job describing this as well, that it wasn't just about the privacy piece.

Starting point is 00:56:12 We need to remember that Satoshi did not unveil Bitcoin after a surveillance scandal, like a Snowden files. He or she, whoever it was, unveiled Bitcoin after the great financial crisis and after government bailouts of banks and after moral hazard was established. And, you know, I think that, you know, it's very powerful that they choose to like kind of integrate 6102 and the executive order 6102, which made holding gold illegal in America into kind of these key numbers in the Bitcoin code and that they chose a birthday of April 5th, which was the date that FDR issued that order. And like all this stuff about monetary history

Starting point is 00:56:49 is sort of littered throughout Bitcoin. And it really gives you the clues that you need to understand, not least the Genesis block and Chancellor on the brink of bail out of banks. you know, again, that Bitcoin was not just about e-cash and the title of the white paper, right? It was not just about privacy. It was about that. And the cyberpunks, that's obviously kind of where they started. But you get this kind of realization from Adam and others that what was really essential was to actually create a money system that the government didn't control.

Starting point is 00:57:19 That was a decentralized mint, as Adam puts it. And that's what Satoshi figured out. So you can kind of see in Satoshi's work that they were standing on the shoulders of these cypherpunk giants who fought for free speech on the internet, but also that they had seen what happened to gold and how it got killed as a money and how the US government basically managed to defeat it and replace it with its own debt as the world reserve currency. That clearly was on the mind of these folks. And, you know, against Satoshi, you know, sits at the end of a long line of them. They all contributed. And at the end of the day, I thought what was so powerful

Starting point is 00:57:57 was that, you know, it's really a monetary innovation and not necessarily like a technological innovation. And that really my thesis essentially of that chapter is that I don't think you could have had Bitcoin or a decentralized money without the kind of the monetary policy focus. Like the 21 million piece is like what makes everything else possible. So that's, I loved, I just loved going through all that history and doing that piece with Adam was great to get a lot of his time to be able to just learn about all these interesting things that he did when he was younger. It's like completely amazing. It's miraculous. It really puts on a showcase of, you know, if there was one person or this was multiple people, the amount of foresight research knowledge that was there with like

Starting point is 00:58:45 just the hints that you were talking about that are embedded into a lot of this stuff. And I mean, that is just at the, his surface level as you can get compared to everything else that's underneath the hood that's going on. It's just, it's miraculous. Yeah, and you really get a sense, especially from Hal Finney, who, you know, how Finney worked at Digi cash, you know, or rather he, Nick Nixaba worked at Digi Cash. Howell, what I was trying to say is howell worked at PGP. Like, Howell was one of the first contributors to Phil Zimmerman. And they were all part of this community that they were fighting the surveillance state, you know? But Hal and others realized that to really, to fight the surveillance state, you got to fight central banking. But they realized

Starting point is 00:59:26 It's just got an astonishing conclusion, which most people just would have completely missed, I think. And still to this day, the like digital liberties activist groups in the world are just not tuned into like why Fiat central banking is a problem. Like that's just not on their radar at all. And, you know, we can thank, we thank God that Satoshi figured this out. But like, it wasn't just him or her or whoever it was. It was many people who through trial and error, you know, figured this out. But Hal especially, you know, you can see that he, he kind of took some of Nick's ideas about Bitcoin and married them with some away dies ideas. And he had his reusable proof of work thing in 2004, which was really the last big innovation

Starting point is 01:00:08 before Bitcoin. And yeah, I mean, he, you know, what a legend. I mean, dude, he was running Bitcoin right away. Unbelievable. Within a few days was like, oh, this could be worth like a $10 million. Yeah, the post. I know the post. I love this book, the book of Satoshi, as we're talking about books.

Starting point is 01:00:24 that goes into all the old posts and just you can go back and you can read what these guys were saying at the Genesis block at that point in time. And it's just miraculous. The accuracy of their foresight is just unbelievable. Yeah. And now a big thing in Bitcoin today is, and to which of course Hal kind of predicted, he's like, look, in the future I think it's going to be Bitcoin banks and Bitcoin will be the reserve currency and we'll all use these like sort of, let's say, paper, paper

Starting point is 01:00:54 paper Bitcoin or Fiat instruments on top of the bit. And you know what? I think you got to at this point say that that's definitely a possible scenario for where we're headed. But a lot of foresight there. But I wanted that to be like the right there at the beginning of the book to help the audience understand kind of socially, politically, where did this thing come from, this tool that all these people are now using all around the world?

Starting point is 01:01:16 Where did it come from and why was it created? And then to then marry that, I go right in from that chapter, right into the chapter about the petrodollar and just to think about like monetary history. Which is phenomenal, by the way, which is. Thank you. People have not. I appreciate that. I want to ask one other, believe it or not, Alex, we're already at an hour.

Starting point is 01:01:37 The petrodollar piece of your book is phenomenal. I would make the argument for people that maybe are not intimately familiar with how it arose, what it means, more importantly, what it means for like policy decisions and policy trends that we've seen over the past four decades. What an amazing piece inside the book just to kind of understand all of those dependencies and trajectory that kind of came out of that. The thing that I know you get hit up a lot about transitioning and pivoting here that you get hit a lot by is in the privacy space for people that look at Bitcoin and they say there's better privacy solutions. And as a person that works in human rights, we think that you, Alex,

Starting point is 01:02:27 Gladstein, should be a much bigger proponent for the other solutions that are out there. You have a chapter in your book that's titled, Talk to, that's titled Bitcoin's Privacy Problem. Tell us your thoughts here and give us a little insight into the way that you view this. Yeah, well, I think, again, a lot of this was colored by my talks with Adam back and other cypherpunks. But there were kind of two ways to approach eCash. One is to focus on privacy and one is to focus on basically monetary policy. And I think Adam and I and many others agree that Satoshi made the right call, focused first and foremost on monetary policy on like creating a predictable, credible,

Starting point is 01:03:12 monetary policy that the whole world could appreciate and understand quite easily, and that had an incentive structure that would protect it over time as more and more people joined it, as opposed to got corrupted over time, which is what would happen in like a proof of stake type scenario. So I think that one of the interesting things Adam mentioned to me is that he was glad that he didn't tell Satoshi about this, like, one particular paper that was kind of focused on zero knowledge proofs, which would later give rise to Zcash. And the reason why is because it would have made Bitcoin too bulky. Like these, at least, let's say, up until now, these kind of highly, highly encrypted transactions are just larger in terms of just the information that they carry.

Starting point is 01:03:56 And one of the key, key things about Bitcoin, and I've mentioned it in different places in the book, but is that essentially there was this, there's been obviously attention. over the years. It's largely over now, but there was definitely a really existential moment in Bitcoin history, 2015 to 2017, where there was essentially a fight over how kind of big the blocks would be in Bitcoin. And this all has to do with this idea of like being able to run the Bitcoin software at home or having to trust a server somewhere else to do it. And I think that Adam knew even then that like he kind of focused on privacy tech at the base. it would make the transactions really big, and people wouldn't really be able to run the software

Starting point is 01:04:41 at home to verify for themselves everything, and they'd have to trust somebody else because you'd need very specialized hardware to do this. That was the right decision to focus on, like, making things so that anybody could operate Bitcoin at home. And that necessitated, like, you know, vulnerabilities and privacy. Like, again, Bitcoin pseudonymous. Obviously, we know all about chain analysis and how, if you're not careful, like, somebody can just watch what's happening. But I think the right call was made in terms of, like, we can, we can develop privacy as we go. And of course, the people who create other alternative cryptocurrencies that focus on privacy would argue the opposite. But, hey, I mean, you know, my general take as to why I think the most important thing is to help

Starting point is 01:05:27 privacy in Bitcoin, there's two reasons. Number one, I just don't think that these altcoins are going to last. Like, I just, they might be useful tools today, sure. And you see that. You see like Samurai Wallet allowing its users to do swaps with Monaro. Okay. Well, like, maybe it can be a useful tool today. But who knows what it's going to be like in a year or two years?

Starting point is 01:05:48 We just don't know. And the thing is, some of these privacy coins are going to get basically canceled from exchanges. Like, that's what happens. Like, you know, like how many exchanges except Monaro? which I think most kind of cyperpunk types would say would be like the most legitimate privacy coin. The answer is not very many. And there's a reason for that because, you know, law enforcement is like not so sure about Manaro, right? Okay.

Starting point is 01:06:15 So it doesn't really pass the K-Y-C-A-ML regime and exchanges aren't really interested in that fight, right? But guess what? Bitcoin can't be canceled. You can't cancel Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency exchange operator, right? It's like the whole reserve asset of the whole system. So there's this approach that I think. I think people like Greg Maxwell had where they basically said, look, we're just going to over time add privacy.

Starting point is 01:06:40 And if Bitcoin had debuted as Monaro, you wouldn't even have survived. You wouldn't have been able to roll the horse into the... Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it starts out very imperfect, but man, we're getting there. Like you can... And it's, look, it's not to the point where oligarch can... can do, you know, trillions, billions of dollars or even $100 million and get away with it.

Starting point is 01:07:08 This is one of the reasons why I think I've seen a lot of interesting stuff on, you know, sanctions and Bitcoin. Yeah, I've seen, yeah, there's some of the biggest. Yeah, just to be brief on it, Bitcoin's really good for like the masses. And you can actually privately use, like, you can use the Lightning Network and you can use free and open source wallets. And you can withdraw Bitcoin from Cash App via Lightning to a Moon Wallet, for example. And you can tip somebody in the privacy, there's a.

Starting point is 01:07:32 extremely strong. Like sending lightning in Bitcoin has very good privacy right now. So there are ways to achieve privacy pretty simply, but you can't do $100 million in lightning, right? So it's like, it's kind of limited to kind of like daily interactions and like smaller things. The bigger you get in Bitcoin in terms of size and you have that need to convert it into dollars or different currency, that's where you're going to get caught, right? So that's why it doesn't, you know, it doesn't make sense for Russian oligarchs to use because all of those on-ramps and off-ramps are tightly policed. And that's why these like BigFandex thieves got caught, right? They were getting caught in the liquidation process. Now, it's a different world maybe Preston in 10, 20 years when we could

Starting point is 01:08:16 buy big stuff, everything with Bitcoin. Now, that's a different world. But we're not there yet. And today we are where we are. So I think that the right move was to develop Bitcoin's privacy slowly over time. And it's really getting there. I think in the next couple of years, it's really going to get there. And I think that I just think our energies are best spent. This is our best shot. This is our one best shot. So, you know, why not the altcoin, you know, the privacy altcoins? Because we should all be focusing on Bitcoin because it's our best shot. Like for all the cool stuff that the Monaro people have done, Manaro is not going to become the neutral reserve asset of the world. It's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen. So Bitcoin could do

Starting point is 01:08:52 that though. And it could really be the standard for everybody. I also just think that like Bitcoin mining is such an important part of what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin. And all these other alt-coin privacy tokens are all moving to a proof-of-stake thing. So I think they're moving away from like the proof-of-work thing, which is such a critical part of Bitcoin. So at the end of the day, I think that there's a lot of really good reasons to just kind of focus on Bitcoin privacy. But hey, yeah, if you need to use something like Monaro, I mean, go for it. I mean, there's risks with all these things. But I'm really excited about what we're going with Bitcoin privacy. And obviously so is Adam back. I mean, he invented Blockstream.

Starting point is 01:09:27 or launched it, literally to try to make Bitcoin more private. And you know what? He has. He has. Blockstream has done a lot of work on Lightning. It's done a lot of work on liquid and confidential transactions. And he continues on his quest. And I think we should continue on ours. Yeah. I've got kind of not a Bitcoin specific question. So I recently read this book red-handed. And I don't know if you're familiar with the book or not. But in general, it goes around and it talks about all the perverted incentives that have matured in the past two decades, I would say, between China and all of these people in charge running from Wall Street to academia, definitely on the politics side.

Starting point is 01:10:14 It covers both political parties. And how, and it covers in Canada with Trudeau and just. All of these people that are leading all of these various facets of society and how they're moving towards this socialist dictator-like power or they're, I don't want to say that they are, that they're all for it, but they're much more accommodative or sympathetic to it, I think is probably the better word. They're sympathetic to it. We saw this with Charlie Munger recently talking about it.

Starting point is 01:10:53 You see a lot of Ray Dalio's comments. You see, and I could just go on and on. And the book is, I walked away from reading this book and just disgusted, like absolutely disgusted. And I guess meaning more about like the corporate complicity with China or more about the general sort of trust in centrally planned systems, which is a little bit of both. A little bit of both. And just I just don't understand how people that have been the beneficiaries of a free and open

Starting point is 01:11:21 system for so many decades, right, could basically be turning their back on the thing that supplied them with all of this. I'm going to use the word power, but it might not be the right terminology. And they're looking at a system in China of just this total control, this absolute communist control. And almost, in Zuckerberg was also talked about in the book, where they're almost admiring it. And I don't understand what's driving that? What do you think? Because at the end of the day, it's all about centralization and control. It's like absolute control. What is driving so many people that are controlling the world today to be promoting this or sympathizing? It's very Hobbesian. It's very Leviathan, right? It's like ordering chaos, right? And they're feeling that their society

Starting point is 01:12:16 is breaking down and they're looking at this kind of. It's the whole weft narrative. It's the people with the wealth, you know, the world economic form for people that aren't familiar with it. Yeah. No, no, I just mean that like the people who are starting to suck up to China or started to portray it in a good light are taken by this idea of order and order being most important. And like we just, you know, our families need order.

Starting point is 01:12:42 And the most important thing is like enough food to survive. and just social order as opposed to freedom and innovation and disruption. That's where they're trending and there are things that make them feel that way. And that's very unfortunate. And I think that again, the cool part is that we have this like uniting global technology that's being developed by people all over the world. That's the total opposite. And they see that as chaos.

Starting point is 01:13:09 They see that as chaos. Yeah, I mean, there's no better tell of what Bitcoin is. then the fact that the CCP banned Bitcoin infrastructure right before its 100th annual anniversary last summer. I mean, it fears Bitcoin. There's no bigger tell of what Bitcoin is than the fact that Putin didn't incorporate it into his post-sanction plan. He's working with gold and India and China and control. He's working on the fact that he knows that the West will basically allow him to keep making his bond payments and to keep selling his oil. But he did not incorporate. incorporate Bitcoin. And there's a reason. He's afraid of it. He's unsure about it. It's not good for

Starting point is 01:13:51 tyrants. It's not great for central planning and not great for stateism. And I think it's good for humans, though, and it's good for open societies. And one of my chapters in the book talks about how I think it just resonates with American values. And I don't mean the American experiment and how it's played out. And I don't mean slavery and what happened and genocide with Native Americans. And I don't mean all those things. What I mean are the founding ideals, the sort of Jeffersonian and kind of ideals of the original Declaration of Independence and the ideas that made America powerful. And it still make it for all of our warts, like a place where a lot of people want to come to, obviously, right? And that still leads the world in a lot of ways.

Starting point is 01:14:30 And I think that that is really important because those ideals are things like free speech property rights and open capital markets. And that's what Bitcoin represents. And that's not going to work for the CCP. They can't have free speech property rights in open capital markets. The yuan will never be a reserve currency because it can't be fully open. It can't be fully convertible because they can't have that. They need control. So I just love the way it kind of sets us up for the next decade where it pits like different

Starting point is 01:14:57 styles of governance against each other. I think it's going to be really, really interesting to watch. And it makes me bullish about America. Like I think that America can be very, we talked about this before, but I mean, America can be can really dig in and resonate with Bitcoin. And look, it may be the thing that secedes the dollar system. And there are things there that are going to change our lives for sure. But I think for the better over time, I think for the better over time for sure. I thought one of the more interesting things that Jack Dorsey said in his recent interview with Michael Saylor was at the

Starting point is 01:15:28 beginning of their chat in February was that he thought it was unfair that like basically a handful of people in Washington get to set the price of money and the rules for money for the people in Nigeria and he just thought that was just a broken system. And that's just very deep. Like, that's what is profound about all the things I learned about when I wrote Check Your Financial Privileges. How did that happen? How did that come to be and how are people fighting back against that? And that's what Jack's obviously dedicating his career to with BeTrust and Spiral and everything he's doing at Block. You can really kind of see it. Reddings on the wall that he thinks a neutral system would be better.

Starting point is 01:16:08 And I totally agree. And yeah, when you think about checking one's financial privilege, like, yeah, I mean, we are very, very privileged for a variety of reasons. And our government is too. I mean, they can just freeze. No other superpower has that ability of just like, oh, we're just going to freeze your savings just to do that. And when we do it, we spend our power down and we can't ever do that again in the same

Starting point is 01:16:30 way. And I think that a world where there's a reserve currency that's. it's neutral is ultimately going to result in actually a more fair world. But one thing I want to mention before we break is that I also coincidentally got the pleasure of writing a forward to a different book, which just came out called Bitcoin is Venice by Alan Farrington and Sasha Myers, which honestly is my, the best book on Bitcoin that I've read personally, it's just an extraordinary work about the past and future of capitalism. And I would really encourage people to read it.

Starting point is 01:17:04 It's super, super deep and really mind-blowing. And the chapters in it are just so brilliant. And the authors bring so much, they bring so many different perspectives from so many different kinds of thinkers, from communists to Marxists all the way over to Austrians. They just kind of, they really sweep the last several hundred years of thinking into this book. And they talk a lot about the things that we know are true,

Starting point is 01:17:33 like the fact that this does not count. capitalism is one of their chapters. And like, what would you and I go out and we see is not capitalism. I mean, it's all rigged. I mean, everything is politically controlled, right? Like, obviously, the Fed is not capitalist. Like, it's not capitalist for to set the price of money is not, it's not capitalist, right? So they go into all this stuff and they have this incredibly powerful chapter on energy

Starting point is 01:17:53 and Bitcoin, which I think everybody needs to read. And it just opens with this chart, which shows so powerfully the, the, the, the, the per capita electricity use of countries in the world and their income, essentially. And it's so obvious and clear that more advanced countries use more electricity per capita. This is a very important thing for us to reflect on. Like, yeah, guess who doesn't use a lot of electricity? Guess who has a low carbon footprint? Burundi, okay?

Starting point is 01:18:23 So, like, it's very clear that as we advance as a civilization, we're going to use more energy. This is such an important point. And their chapter in that book on energy and the environment in Bitcoin is the single best one I've read. And I mean, they basically make the assertion that if you're an environmentalist, you have to support Bitcoin. And I think they back it up. It's really, really well done. I literally ordered this book while you were saying all this.

Starting point is 01:18:48 Yeah. No, and I'll just, I want to just read this one little tiny thing from it. Yeah, please. But yeah, it's, I thought this was beautiful. But this is their thesis. This is just one paragraph. And their whole thing is that Venice, as you know, or as you may know, was kind of this break from the European feudal structure of society where you had lords and serfs essentially.

Starting point is 01:19:10 And Venice really broke that. It was this time and place where like capitalism came out and meritocracy came out and cosmopolitan commerce and trade. It was not really built on a military might. It was built on ideas, right? It's a super powerful thing. So they basically assert that today we're in like a neo feudal system, that that that kind of menace has came back, essentially. And their thesis is that some parts of society can avoid

Starting point is 01:19:36 collapse by embracing Bitcoin. And they say that we are sure it seems hyperbolic to most, if not outright ludicrous, but it's actually fairly prosaic. It means that those social units that voluntarily choose to embrace Bitcoin, a global digital sound, open source, programmable money, will be in a position to accumulate long-term oriented capital at a disproportionate rate to those who do not. They will have a superior economic foundation from which to build healthy social and political institutions, which will contrast to those left behind as medieval Venice did to the remnants of the Western Empire. This is the thesis of the book in a nutshell.

Starting point is 01:20:08 And I just thought that that was so powerful and delighted that they asked me to do the forward. The Bitcoiners become the future capital allocators to rebuild the new system? No, no, 100%. And I'll just read this one other sentence that, you know, they actually, you know, they, again, they believe that this rebooted feudalism that we live under, they believe that there's Bitcoin's like this sprout coming up and it's this new model. And they believe that in the book they go through a variety of reasons why they think people around the world will be able to avoid feudalism through Bitcoin. And they have this sentence, which really hit me in the

Starting point is 01:20:44 fields where it says, we think for some, but we hope for many and we pray for all. And I just think that that is so powerful. Like that's what I think what we're doing out here, I mean, I mean, obviously, you spend a lot of time educating people about Bitcoin talking to them about it. I think that's the feeling, right? Like, we all know where this is going. And we hope that, like, people listen, but we pray for everybody. I mean, we really want everybody to be in this thing before the day comes when the big squeeze happens. And we all, that's going to happen at some point, it's going to read like some science fiction book.

Starting point is 01:21:19 But there will be a big squeeze where in a matter of 72 hours, all of a sudden, And once in a millennia. And we want to get everybody in before then that we care about. And that's our quest, right? So we do what we can. And hopefully my book will contribute to the ability of people to do so and to convince and to just dialogue with people who have fallen prey to this pounding narrative from the mainstream media and governments that Bitcoin is dangerous and risky and extremists

Starting point is 01:21:51 and criminal and all these things. And hopefully it'll show that that that's, just not the case and that it's just this powerful humanitarian tool that's a liberation technology and that we should not want to short it. We should want to invest in it. I mean, for the good of everybody. So I would say that's the, that's the, that's the TLDR. But I'm just very grateful for you giving the opportunity to come on and talk about this stuff. It's been really, really fun. Yeah, my pleasure, Alex. What an honor to have you here. And I can tell you, phenomenal book, your research, your ability to humanize stories and make Bitcoin way bigger

Starting point is 01:22:30 than number go up because it is. It is so much bigger. This is just, I think, a little bit beyond words and not even remotely comprehensible to people today as to what this thing is. And for me, your book has just done a phenomenal job of just highlighting a lot of the stuff that, especially for an American and maybe a person in a very developed economy, doesn't see. They are totally warped by what it is that they use and what they have access to on a daily basis. And I don't think they realize what so many people on this planet don't have and what they're seeing from their vantage point, Your book does such a phenomenal job doing that. So feel free to highlight anything else that you're working on or whatever, and we'll wrap it up from there. But thanks so much for making time and coming on,

Starting point is 01:23:26 Alex. Thank you. No, this was great. No, I'll see a lot of you all, hopefully in Miami in a few weeks. I'll be speaking on the main stage with three of my dearest friends, Yomi Park, an incredible North Korean who Yes, I follow her. She's awesome. I mean, she wrote in order to live and had the most dramatic escape and just as one of the bravest and most persistent people in the world. Amazing. She's gotten to tell her story on Rogan and all kinds of other places. So I get to be with her. She has some really interesting thoughts on Bitcoin, which I'm excited to share with the world.

Starting point is 01:23:57 And my friend Farida Nabu Ramah, who is a character in my book, actually, who's from a country that is still ruled by the French colonial currency system. And she kind of views Bitcoin as a currency of decolonization, which I find so fascinating. So we're going to talk about that. And then my friend Fadi from Palestine from the West Bank. And he, again, is a character in the book. And we're going to talk a little bit about why he's optimistic about this technology and how it like meaningfully and measurably improves the lives of people in Palestine.

Starting point is 01:24:28 So we get to do that panel, which I'm really jazzed about. I think they have us between Peter Thiel and Salinas. So hopefully we'll have a full room, which will be good. We'll see you guys there. And then the Oslo, I just want, I'll tease the Oslo Freedom Forum, which is going to go down. end of May in Norway. And it's a freedom conference. It's a human rights conference, but we're going to have an amazing financial freedom track sponsored by CT. And we're going to have just a variety of killer speakers ranging from a lot of the people that I've talked about in my book, who are

Starting point is 01:25:01 Bitcoin advocates from authoritarian countries in emerging markets, people like Abu Bakr, Nur Khalil, who's on Jack Dorsey's B-Trust board from Nigeria to Leonid Volkov. who's Navalny's right-hand man and the person who's been intimately involved with raising tons of Bitcoin over the years for the Russian opposition movement. And then we're going to bring them together with some of the more prominent folks in our space, like whether it be Jack Maulers or Lynn Alden or Jeff Booth or Elizabeth Stark, Matt O'Dell, et cetera. We have a really killer speaker lineup.

Starting point is 01:25:37 So I'm really, really excited about that event. So folks can go to Oslof Freedomforum.com and sign up today if they want to if they want to join us. And we'll also have a live stream if you want to tune in and at home. So appreciate the opportunity to show that too. We'll put links in the show notes for all of that and also for Alex's book. And Alex, thank you for making time. This was phenomenal. Thanks for having me, Preston. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday and I'd love to have you as a regular listener.

Starting point is 01:26:13 If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening. And I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com.

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We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC071: How Fiat Blinds Bitcoin's Importance w/ Alex Gladstein (Bitcoin Podcast)

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