We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC169: Bitcoin Changing Africa's Energy and Finance Incentives 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 Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, I have back by popular demand, Mr. Alex Gladstein. The thing I love about Alex is he's the living example of proof of work. While most of us are here just talking about Bitcoin and what it might bring to the world, he's actually out there in far off parts of the world, seeing and responding to real use cases and interactions as they impact all the parts of the world. During today's conversation, we talk about some of the amazing things he saw firsthand happening

Starting point is 00:00:34 in Africa and how Bitcoin mining is changing the local culture, education, and energy grid. This is a conversation you will not want to miss. So here's my chat with Alex Gladstein. Celebrating 10 years. You are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here with the one and only Alex Gladstein. Welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me back, Preston. It's always really fun.

Starting point is 00:01:17 So you write these just amazing pieces and I go through it and I'm reading this and I'm just thinking this has to be turned into some type of audio. This article needs to be in some type of audio format or podcast discussion. Your latest stranded how Bitcoin is saving wasted energy and expanding financial freedom in Africa. The stories in here are just miraculous. They're just so inspiring and so exciting to hear. So I think I know the answer to this question, but give us the impetus for writing this article. Like what event happened, what travel happened, like just walk us through the impetus of it. Yeah, well, to go all the way back, I started getting really interested in like the planetary impact that Bitcoin mining would have, the social impact,

Starting point is 00:02:07 the planetary impact, how it would change our relationship with energy and electricity. And that was really kindled and inspired by actually Ross Stevens letter that he wrote to shareholders at Stone Ridge in 2020. And most of that letter was talking about, you know, obviously Bitcoin as a money, as a currency, as an investment. But there was a part of it that talked about Bitcoin is kind of like a civilizational infrastructure where people used to kind of settle and do activity where there was water and that Bitcoin mining might make it possible for them to do it where there's other kinds of energy sources that are currently like basically isolated, stranded. And I thought that was very powerful. And it inspired me to do some earlier

Starting point is 00:02:53 writing on Bitcoin and how it might impact renewable energy and the environment. And I wrote this three years ago, and it went into my book, Check Your Financial Privilege, where I looked at how the Barunga National Park in the DRC in the Congo had these dams that were built by foreign donors that were not able to use their capacity. Basically, the park was only able to use a small percentage of the capacity of these dams. So there's a lot of curtailed, wasted energy. And some enterprising Bitcoin folks, went down there, started up some conversations. The park started mining the Bitcoin, I think, in 2020, and obviously it's done extremely

Starting point is 00:03:38 well for them. So it's now become vital infrastructure for the park for all the animals and plants, the biosphere protects, and the 5 million people that live in the area of the park. So that captured my imagination. And I was just looking at videos of just like the miners in the middle of the jungle, I was like, this is crazy. They're turning flowing water into capital. This is awesome.

Starting point is 00:03:58 I had an opportunity to get involved at the Africa Bitcoin Conference. HRF was a kind of a founding sponsor of the event a couple years ago. And this year's edition was coming up. Probably about a year ago, I was talking with my friend Eric Hursman from Gridless, a company that does off-grid mining on mainly hydro and geothermal in East and Southern Africa. And Eric, I've known for a long time, but he, he, he, he, kind of reached out to me several years ago, and we reconnected around Bitcoin. Like, I'd known him from his previous career doing humanitarian work and social enterprise

Starting point is 00:04:36 and basically like information and internet infrastructure in Africa. That's what his career was in. And I knew him from that world. And then all of a sudden, like, we realized we were both Bitcoiners. And that was like an amazing moment. And ever since then, we were like, you know, collaborating and doing stuff. And I thought it would be super fun for gridless and H-RF to team up to. to maybe visit some of the sites that they had operating in East and Southern Africa,

Starting point is 00:05:04 maybe bring some friends of ours from different backgrounds. I won't be specific, but we'll just put it this way. Some of these folks are Bitcoin developers. Some of them are entrepreneurs making tools for people to use Bitcoin in Africa and elsewhere. Some of these folks are investors or philanthropists. And then some of these people were like educators or journalists. And we put together a nice little group and we went down there. And I think it just so blew my mind.

Starting point is 00:05:30 I mean, I kind of knew what I was getting into. I knew that it would be very profound. I think that's the word I was using. I knew it would be very profound. But I was not prepared for, I guess, the sinking realizations that you have when you go visit these sites. And in particular, we visited two sites. One was a microhydro project in Malawi, which, by the way, is a very remote place. Like, everybody in Kenya that we were talking to, they were like, you're in Malawi.

Starting point is 00:05:53 Like what? Why would you ever go to Malawi? Like, Malawi is very, very remote. place. And then we saw geothermal site on the shores of a lake in Kenya. And both were very different, but equally blew my mind in terms of what I think this is going to do to the world. And it helped me kind of understand that in almost all cases, not Bitcoin mining is a waste of energy. And I think that's obviously a deep kind of thing to realize. You almost have to say that again, because that is such a profound statement. I'm serious. That is such a profound statement. Not Bitcoin mining, not

Starting point is 00:06:27 Bitcoin mining is a waste of energy. Yeah. Which is the exact opposite of what the mainstream media and governments want you to think because they've been telling us for a decade plus that mining Bitcoin is wasting energy. The reality is that almost every single power generation source in the world does not use all of its capacity all the time. And often it cannot sell the excess. In Western countries and in advanced societies, in advanced energy infrastructure,

Starting point is 00:06:57 structure places, it usually can sell more of it, right? Because we have grids and energy markets. But in a lot of the world, in what we would call the global majority, where most people live, there really aren't like energy markets and grids, like in Africa, for example, but there's no grid, there's no grid. So if you've got a site on the shores of a lake in Africa, I mean, just picture this in Kenya, where there's geothermal everywhere. I mean, I was talking to the foreman of this geothermal plant. And this plant was, I think, like, 1.4 or 1.5 or like a 2 megawatt plant, relatively small. But in the region, there's up to a gigawatt of geothermal that's being harvested in this

Starting point is 00:07:36 one area of Kenya. And the guy was telling us that there's probably 10 gigawatts of potential energy there, but just no one's figured out a way to, yeah, it's figured out a way to capture it yet. There's been no incentive to do so. But you have this beautifully clean, consistent geothermal power. which is basically they dig a hole in the ground, goes down 2,000 feet or so or a little more, and the stuff that comes up out of it powers a turbine. I mean, this is, you know, very sustainable.

Starting point is 00:08:04 It's going to deliver the same amount of power for the next 50 years. And the thing is, they build this thing and then a company buys power to run a water pump on the shore of the lake, which takes the water from the lake and moves it to a field to irrigate the field to grow flowers to sell. Kenya is the world's largest exporter of cut flowers. I'm sure there's like a tulip joke in there somewhere, but the point is a lot of those flowers you see in supermarkets in Europe are grown in Kenya, actually. So this is a big business for Kenya.

Starting point is 00:08:34 And you think about the mechanics of it. So I'm sitting there at this water pump, but I'm thinking like, wow, there must be thousands of these all over this country. Industrial power generation sites similar to this where they're powering water irrigation, right? And you're thinking about what's in front of you, like you're sitting at this lake looking around. and there's this beautifully consistent geothermal power coming down to power the water pump and it delivers a base load all the time.

Starting point is 00:09:00 And then the water pump, though, is not consistent. Water pumps using power sometimes. Sometimes it's off. Sometimes it's on. Sometimes it's pumping. Sometimes it's not. But that doesn't change the fact that there's always the same amount of energy

Starting point is 00:09:12 of electricity rather being delivered to the pump. So the rest is waste. Okay, so there's this enormous amount of waste that is happening. Less so, perhaps, in Western countries, but still, like, during at night, like, there's all kinds of waste, even in rich countries, but especially in rural areas and poorer countries, the amount of electricity waste is so profound, it's so staggering. And then I'm looking to my left, I'm looking at the solution, and I'm looking at this gridless hut, which is all

Starting point is 00:09:42 custom-designed, everything's built by Africans, everything's made in Africa, except for the miners themselves. And you're looking at this, It's got a starlink on it. It's like totally solar punk. You're like sitting on this lake side. And it is the Bitcoin network buying 100% of the electricity that the water pump is not using. So you are using all of the electricity that the earth is creating through geothermal energy in this one particular instance.

Starting point is 00:10:12 This is the Bitcoin network eliminating waste and turning it into capital. And this is extremely powerful. So you're watching this thing happen. And Eric's showing me on his phone, the actual data in terms of, you know, like what times of day are they getting, you know, a lot of power to run their miners? What time of day are they not? Are they curtailing, et cetera. So it's very dynamic. They write all the software for this.

Starting point is 00:10:35 It's a 375 kilowatt operation. So it's basically like they're basically eating about, let's call it a third of the baseload on average every day, which again, roughly otherwise just would have been straight up waste. But again, it's not linear. It's like changing dynamically. You have to be clever about how you do this. But basically the point is that you're going to start seeing Bitcoin miners adorn every kind of possible power generation site almost anywhere. I mean, the gridless folks were really great at explaining to me both Eric Hursman,

Starting point is 00:11:09 Philip and Janet that like in the near future, if you're building a variable demand site, like you will build it with a Bitcoin miner because otherwise you're going to be losing money. you won't be competitive. This will just be a normal thing that happens with a variable demand power generation site. Like it just, yeah, you will have a Bitcoin miner that goes along with it. It'll be part of the infrastructure. So you start to understand this is going to just be part of infrastructure for energy

Starting point is 00:11:33 everywhere. And that's what I didn't realize before going. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating suns, on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering

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Starting point is 00:15:59 There's actually a green Africa mining alliance. So Gamma and gridless is part of it. And there's tons. I mean, there's a lot happening. Really? I mean, yeah, I mean, look, we're, there's a lot of interesting things happening in Bitcoin right now. So there's, there's, well, the reasons on. On Wall Street, right?

Starting point is 00:16:13 But there's like, I mean, there's big sites coming online. There's smaller sites coming online. There's people doing stuff in Ethiopia. There's stuff happening in Nigeria now that the government over there basically changed the law so that states inside Nigeria can decide energy policy instead of the federal government. So that's opening some interesting doors. So this is just going to take time. But basically, yeah, gridless is leading the charge in terms of, I think,

Starting point is 00:16:37 showing that you can have a profitable business that is going to grow and scale all across Africa. I think there's hopefully going to be a lot of copycats. They do a really good job. They have an incredible team. They're going to be hard to beat. And they're picky about their sites, things like that. But they are very committed to this to solving a problem. I mean, yes, they, of course, they want to run a good business and make money. I mean, of course, this is not a nonprofit. But the problem that eats away at them every day is this problem of 600 million Africans don't have electricity. Are there any nonprofits that are competing with gridless in Africa?

Starting point is 00:17:11 I mean, not in terms of eliminating wasted energy with Bitcoin mining to my knowledge. There are, of course, I mean, every single, almost every single power facility in rural Africa was done with what's called concessional financing, which is essentially just like aid, right? The thing about these projects is that they take a long time. There's no kind of profit motive, so everything's slow. Everything's at the discretion of the donor. It's a very dependent relationship.

Starting point is 00:17:36 It creates dependency. Like, there's no sovereignty for the law. I mean, you're kind of at the whim of the sky. Scottish government or whatever. The site we visited, the microhydro site we visited was originally built in Malawi was originally built by the Scottish government. So it was great. But, you know, they tend to like give a certain amount of money.

Starting point is 00:17:52 It took eight years for them to build this site. Like, it started in, they finally got power in 2016 in this particular village in Malawi. And I think the whole thing started in 2008. So it took them so long to actually get this thing up and running. And they don't provide any capital beyond. that for, let's say, like, operational expenses, any OPEX, like, it's just any expansion, like, that's just out. So you're kind of just stuck. And what happens with all these, like,

Starting point is 00:18:21 little grid providers is that, like, these micro, mini grid providers is that, uh, you know, they have a certain amount of money that they earn from their, like, initial set of customers. And that's kind of just enough to keep the lights on. It's not enough to, like, expand or anything like that. Yeah, yeah. So you end up losing money. And remember, like, the backdrop is that the Fiat currency technology of Africa is disastrous. So, like, in theory, we want to believe that everything gets cheaper in an ideal world, right? The crazy part is, and we know in a Fiat world, that's not how it works, but especially bad

Starting point is 00:18:52 in Africa. Like, electricity gets more expensive. Like, not only because the local currency that you earn in is collapsing against the dollar, but we were in Malawi weeks after a 44% currency devaluation. Wow. Dane to think about. So all these people just had 56% less purchasing power. or rather they only had 56% of the purchasing power that they had a few weeks earlier.

Starting point is 00:19:15 On the global stage from what they had before. Yeah, they're just sitting around. They're like doing what they do and they're 44% poorer, like just because of an arbitrary decision that was made by the government. It's crazy. It's a crime against humanity, in my opinion, and it doesn't really get talked about like that. But that's kind of the context is that the currency is very poor quality.

Starting point is 00:19:33 There's very little incentive for expanding electricity access. And we're stuck. And that's why only 15% of people in Malawi have. access to electricity. And this is this big problem that Eric and his team talk about. And they're like, you can't even comprehend it. Okay, imagine a thousand boys and girls without power. Okay, now imagine 10,000.

Starting point is 00:19:55 Okay, how about 100,000? Okay, maybe we could start to imagine that. A million. And then 600 million, you can't, it's impossible to even imagine the scale of this catastrophe. It's so bad. And we talked with people in this village who lived through not having power and then having power.

Starting point is 00:20:13 It's like we forget, you know, like everything, like medicine, like charging your phone. Like, you know, just micro interesting social stuff. Like the men would all leave to go to the town next town over to watch football and stuff and they wouldn't be with their families at all. And now when they have power, they stay at home and they're with their family. Like there's all kinds of, I mean, schooling like the, I mean, because the kids, they start most of the time, right? So it's like they can't really study.

Starting point is 00:20:39 It's very hard. they have to use, like, paraffin lamps, which are dangerous. There's a lot of indoor air pollution that's incredibly lethal for kids. And when they got electricity, the rate at which the kids at this village got accepted to the more elite sort of national school system really skyrocketed over a period of time. Really? Yeah, because now the kids can study at night, like, no problem. I mean, it really makes a difference.

Starting point is 00:21:02 So you're talking about this huge human issue that's more than just African. I mean, obviously, it's a big problem in Africa, but energy, lack of it. of electricity or like lack of constant electricity is a problem for billions of people. I mean, think about even a country like South Africa where they have electricity, they have load shedding. So even the people who have electricity in Malawi, when we were there, we're dealing with six to eight hours of load shedding per day. So even if you were in the capital with grid electricity, you weren't getting it. And the craziest part was being out in this little town of Bondo, like in the middle of nowhere, literally.

Starting point is 00:21:39 At night, you would see the mini-grid come on. So as the sun sets, you see the lights all come on. And there's no load shedding because Bitcoin balances the grid perfectly. It's incredible. So you're like thinking about this. And they think, gridless thinks, that within 30 years, Bitcoin mining will give electricity to close to 100% of people in Malawi. And it's not going to be the World Bank or the IMF or Bill Gates.

Starting point is 00:22:05 I hope they do better and I hope they do as good as they can. But like, there's no incentive there to get this done. Where Bitcoin provides the incentive because Bitcoin's like this thing. It's like this organism. It's like this creature that just hunts cheap energy. And it just goes to it. It finds it. Just relentlessly finds cheap energy, wasted energy, stranded energy.

Starting point is 00:22:28 Energy nobody else wants. The mascot they used over there is the dung beetle. It's gridless as mascot. So the dung beetle turns waste nobody else wants into value, right? So Bitcoin's, the network is like this thing. It's like this force driving humans to help them find and utilize cheap energy, stranded energy, wasted energy, orphaned energy, and turn it into something powerful. And the crazy part is you get paid in sats, like, right?

Starting point is 00:22:55 So you get paid directly in Satoshi, so you don't get paid in quacha or in shillings or any of these collapsing currencies, which is really important thing to note because a lot of people might say, well, why wouldn't you mind, why would you do like AI compute? And I'll describe why you wouldn't. But even if you could, you'd have to do like some contract, it's freaking quatra and like you'd be like a Corex and there'd be like all these like billing office stuff. And it's like, no, people mining Bitcoin on microgrids don't have to deal with that. They just get paid directly in Bitcoin. It's like credible. But either way, the AI stuff doesn't make a lot of sense because if you think about what what AI data farms are, like the chips are

Starting point is 00:23:34 very expensive, right? Very expensive. $30,000 plus for a good chip, right? And they only have like a draw of like, I don't know, something like 1,200 watts, like not that much power. Compare that to a Bitcoin mine, an ASIC, which is like way cheaper, way, way, way cheaper, and much more power hungry, like 3,500 watts or something. And maybe it's $1,200 bucks for an ASIC or something.

Starting point is 00:23:57 So the point is what you can see is that in AI compute, the price of electricity is very marginal. It's not that important. So that's not going to be a big factor. With Bitcoin, it's everything. Right. So, but it's so important.

Starting point is 00:24:10 That's going to make it a economically wise decision, right, to go and mine Bitcoin and Bondo using this water flow that's going to happen anyway, right? And literally, it's going to be like the setting the lowest price of energy purchasing is going to be the Bitcoin, a Bitcoin. Everything else will be more expensive. You're not even... It doesn't work the same way.

Starting point is 00:24:30 Yeah, you're not even getting into the latency of if you were peeing that server. And it can't be a grid balancer because it's, for the most part, AI does not work like Bitcoin where you can just turn it on and off without harming the process. Most industrial processes cannot do demand response the same way. Because, I mean, you have like a steel factory. You can't just like turn it off. Like Bitcoin is uniquely powerful as an energy buyer in that sense. Obviously, it can be anywhere in the world.

Starting point is 00:24:54 I mean, it can be anywhere and it can be turned on and off at a whim. So it really helps with balancing grids, which is going to be huge. So it's not just that it's going to help get. It's not just the A, it's going to. help eliminate waste everywhere. It's also that it's going to help grow off-grid power, which is important for different reasons. But it'll also help stabilize big grids. So I think they're kind of excited about all these things. And obviously, the grid list team is in its name telling you what kind of grid it likes best. But it wants to be these off-grid sites. And

Starting point is 00:25:24 that's the really crazy part as you think about it. And without even getting into the financial freedom stuff, like the way that Africa is going to help Bitcoin, right? Because everybody's like, oh, well, Africans need Bitcoin. I think Americans need Bitcoin, Africans need Bitcoin, Latin Americans need Bitcoin, Asians need Bitcoin. Everybody needs Bitcoin. But I think you could argue that Africans especially need it because the currency technology is so poor. But I think that Bitcoin needs Africa too. And a good example is mining. So in Troy Cross said something pretty profound to me that I put into the essay that I love this quote. I literally have the note right in front of me here. It's awesome. Kind of like in the last cycle,

Starting point is 00:26:02 access to cheap capital kind of drove Bitcoin mining, like Wall Street would just fund this stuff. But increasingly, he's thinking in the next cycle, that's going to be dictated by access to cheap power. And the cheapest power is wasted power, stranded power, power no one else wants, right? And Africa's got a lot of it, right? Like tons of it, like thousands of gigawatts of it. So we'll see. But basically, if a higher and higher percentage of the network's hash rate is being powered

Starting point is 00:26:30 by completely disconnected, off-grid, decentralized operations across Africa or the wider, you know, global south or whatever, that's really good for Bitcoin. Because what we don't necessarily want, obviously, is like all of the mining being done in centralized, central point of failure, you know, Western setups where governments can come and easily turn it off or confiscate it or hold up a gun and try to force folks to censor stuff. So this is going to be really good for the network. So that's cool too. Like this is a mutual conversation here.

Starting point is 00:27:07 Isn't it fascinating? It just seems like every time you look at how there could potentially be a vulnerability, it just presents itself in a way that, oh, yeah, no, you really can't do that because 10% of Bitcoin mining is now being done in Africa in a way that has, you know, really incentivized them to do it in a off-grid kind of. away. It's just, it's mind-blowing to me. I'm curious, Alex, from the vantage point, you know, hearing these stories, you would think that the word would really get out and politically, it would start to become very popular. Is that the case? And if it isn't, what's the reason

Starting point is 00:27:45 why? Look, I think, you know, history rhymes and people take time to learn. I mean, at one point, we killed whales to get... Noils. Yeah. And, and... while it was all around us in the ground, we didn't really know. And it took time to learn, right? It took time to learn. And even when the first people started realizing there was stuff in the ground, we were still killing the whales. Like, you know, same thing with horse and car and any technological innovation. Like, there are, people get used to stuff and it takes time to shift.

Starting point is 00:28:17 And I think we're being, maybe we're asking a lot for people in 24 months to go from not knowing what Bitcoin is to realizing that they need to change their energy and infrastructure. I think that's going to be a little more than 24 months, right? So a lot of these conversations in Bitcoin started. I mean, obviously, everything in Bitcoin was once discussed, like, within the first three years on Bitcoin talk. But like, Hal even in the first, in the year, first year was talking about how Bitcoin might help address this issue. But let's just say a lot of this, a lot of the energy stuff didn't even really start till 18, 19, right? I mean, maybe it's maybe been five years from concept.

Starting point is 00:28:58 to roll out and we're seeing rollout, right? So I think the next two, three years are pivotal. And I'm thinking about governments like Kenya. And once they realize that there's this other thing they can do, because think about what a government has to do, like, if it needs money, like it can borrow from the IMF with all of its conditions that we've discussed, not ideal. It knows that doesn't want to do that.

Starting point is 00:29:21 It can try to sell bonds, like not like a very appetizing thing right now for global investors. A lot of these countries can't even, like Malawi, this bond market is shut. Like, it can't do that anymore. So that's hard for a lot of these countries. It can reduce fiscal, which is not popular. Like, people don't want that. It can raise taxes, which is also not popular. So there's, you know, they're kind of like stuck and they end up usually doing the easy thing,

Starting point is 00:29:49 which is inflating. But there is, there's, of course, eventually can't do that, like without the people realizing. But the point is, there's another road here where. these governments could basically take one last Fiat loan from whomever and just send a team around their country and just figure out, well, how much energy are we wasting at just existing power generation sites? Like, let's do a three-month survey. Let's send three dozen people around the country. Let's figure it out. How many A6 do we need? How many gridless type sites do we need? And let's do it. Like, let's borrow that amount of money. And then we will then,

Starting point is 00:30:28 and buy Bitcoin mining infrastructure and build it. And within whatever, two, three years, they'll have paid back the loan. And then they'll be like earning huge amounts of sovereign currency, which I do believe will become the next global reserve currency. I mean, I don't know how long that takes. You're the master that wrote the book, literally, on how the IMF will tether, you know, strings attached to the loans. And they would never provide a loan if they knew that.

Starting point is 00:30:58 use of funds would be. That's this. Well, and the whole IMF system is tied up in the dollar system, like that these countries need to get dollars. Therefore, they need to try to have this relationship with Europe or the United States so that they can sell things to us so they can earn dollars.

Starting point is 00:31:15 They can pay back their debt and buy fertilizer and whatever. So this is how we get out of that system, right? So this is how these countries start to earn on their terms. A currency, which today is not a reserve currency. But I do believe that in the next decade or so, that Boeing or whatever will, I think they'll accept payment in Bitcoin for airplanes. I think you're going to start seeing Bitcoin accepted for payment for fertilizer, oil, airplanes,

Starting point is 00:31:42 whatever governments need. Whereas like the local fiat currencies are not accepted today. So Kenya cannot use shillings, generally speaking, to go to like Lockheed Martin and buy stuff. They're going to be like, no, I see what you're taking shillings. I see what you're saying. So like, Kenya has to trade. Kenya can't print dollars.

Starting point is 00:32:03 Lockheed Martin only takes dollars, right? Or maybe euros. That's about it. Like, they're not going to do a contract in like quacha. So these countries have to basically sell stuff to the United States or Europe in order to earn dollars so that they can buy stuff from Lockheed Martin. And that creates dependency because then they have to do what we want. Because if they don't do what we want, then we won't do those deals with them anymore.

Starting point is 00:32:24 And they, in a dollar world, they'll starve. So basically the idea is let's change that and let's have countries be able to create the currency by which international trade is done through their own electricity reserves. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customers

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Starting point is 00:35:43 carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. Is the limitation for grid list to grow or any other for-profit entity over in Africa, like what is their limiting factor for growth right now? Like, is it access to capital? Because it's very hard, intensive? Is it them just finding the right sites that they feel like they can trust? What's the limiting factor? I mean, I think it's very exciting for them right now and they're all fired up and everything's wide open and things are happening fast. So I went early December in the time since

Starting point is 00:36:31 they've set up two new biofuel plants. This is very interesting too. Okay. Because in addition, I mean, all the energy sources we can talk about. Like we just only covered two hydro and geothermal. I mean, wind is interesting to them. I mean, in as much as like if a government does decide to build wind, usually the wind farm just sits there for whatever, however long before they can hook it up. The gridless's team, I had put this in the essay,

Starting point is 00:36:56 but the kind of the founding conversation was many years ago. And they were working on a different company, but they were talking about how insane it was that the Kenyan government had built this 40 megawatt wind farm called the Turkana wind farm. And the government, in order to like get it done, the government had to agree to pay a particular rate for electricity to the people who built the wind farm.

Starting point is 00:37:16 And for years, the government was paying this rate for nothing. No one was using electricity. And they're like sitting there being like, this can't. Like, how do we solve this? Do we bring up an aluminum mine there? Like, do we process metal? Like, and then they started to realize, well, we could just mine Bitcoin. And they, you know, you get the sense that they were laughing about it then.

Starting point is 00:37:34 This was like, whatever, 10 years ago or something. But finally, they realized, no, this is actually a good idea. It just took a long time to quit. their jobs, like start a new one, like get people to actually sign on, incorporate, like, get expertise on board, like write the software. So I think these things just take time, right? So right now, this is growing. And now they're doing the biofuel stuff. So the idea is that like any sugar processing facility or any sysl process, a sys like kind of like create something that looks kind of like burlap, not burlap, but more like you'd make a like a strong fiber kind

Starting point is 00:38:09 of bag or fabric out of it. It's like, it's like, like, create something. like pretty rough stuff. It's like jute or whatever. The point is that there's a lot of this happening in that part of the world and all these facilities have this waste matter, which is considered actually, I guess, like green energy because it doesn't like, it's like carbon neutral or whatever, right? Carbon goes into the plant gets released when it gets burned, right? But the point is that the, the sysl or sugar stuff, it gets burned. They burn it. They burn it. They burn the waste because it's waste is sitting there. They can burn it. and it can obviously heat water turn a turbine, right?

Starting point is 00:38:45 The problem is that there's no grid in Africa, so these places are usually pretty remote, and there's usually nobody to buy the electricity. So oftentimes there's this like energy, there's megawatts of energy sitting there that are stranded. No one could buy them. So it's like, it's sad.

Starting point is 00:39:00 So now gridless is coming in, and they are now buying all that, the Bitcoin network's buying all of it. And what the other interesting thing is, there's going to be energy issues in the West. where like you might have a storm in Texas, right? Or you might have cold weather in Texas or, you know, anything that we've seen recently, like skyrocketing energy prices.

Starting point is 00:39:22 And the people like mining off grid in Kenya, they don't care about that at all. That's just totally irrelevant to them. And you may even in some cases, sometimes, you know, we have a difficulty adjustment. But like, yeah, make more in the interim. Yeah, like sometimes it'll be fine for them. And if the West has an energy crisis, they might even earn more Bitcoin. Who knows? But we'll see.

Starting point is 00:39:45 So it's crazy to watch. I think that like there is no block. It's just a matter of how fast can you grow while keeping the quality of your company high in a place where it's not office work. Like they have to like go out. It's like their part of site in Zambia that's like takes like two days to get to. Like it's not. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:40:03 It's not it's not like office work. So I think their team's amazing. And I think they're going to pave the way, hopefully for a lot more copy. cats. And over the next decade, I think you're going to start seeing so many of these projects come online. And again, not just in rural Africa. There was that tremendous reason video that came out a couple months ago, which is a short documentary looking at starting with a spa in Brooklyn, where the owner of the spa realized that instead of using a traditional heater to heat his spa, I mean, he just buys grid energy in Brooklyn, but he instead bought ASEX. And now he,

Starting point is 00:40:39 uses the grid energy to power the ASICs, and the externality of that is the heat, and the heat heats his spa. And the interesting thing about ASICs are they're very efficient heaters, very constant. So basically he said, I was in a panel discussion with him, with Thomas from Pupke and a few other people a couple months ago

Starting point is 00:40:58 when the reason debuted, the little mini documentary. And he said, told the audience that he's actually paying less money today to the grid for the energy to heat his spa, and he's earning Bitcoin. So this is where you start to really realize that this could be helpful everywhere. There's any kind of need for heat for like basically an ASIC is a space heater.

Starting point is 00:41:18 And we were discussing this in Africa as well because like what may make sense in a cold climate, there'll be different uses for that heat in a warmer one. So for example, in Malawi, in Bondo, what they were, because you put your hand out the back of the microhydro station where the ASICs are and spearing blast of heat. So what do you do with that? It's free. It's an externality, right? well, there's two crops that are really grown there.

Starting point is 00:41:41 One is pineapple. So the original idea was to just dry the pineapple, which obviously is helpful, makes another business. Or the other one is tea, so it's not a tea plantation. And one of the things you do with tea after you harvest it within the first day or so is you got to dry it and use warm air. So they have like a building there that's like literally a tea processing facility that just dries tea leaves.

Starting point is 00:42:01 And it's like that could be, the waste there could be eliminated. Like the Bitcoin mining can be drying the tea leaves. is an idea. So we'll see. But I mean, I think that I've seen stuff. I've seen people dry seaweed. I've seen people dry wood with the externality. Obviously, a lot of people heat their homes,

Starting point is 00:42:18 their entire cities in certain parts of the world that do this now. I think that eventually, as we learn more about this, that will be part of the deal. And like, it would just be like crazy talk to do any sort of heating or cooling or whatever using, like not using ASICs. But basically the guys in Varunga in the DRC, I met them.

Starting point is 00:42:36 I just got a chance to catch up with them at the Africa Bitcoin Conference of Ghana before I went to Kenya. And they're telling me by March 1st, so like a month from when we're talking now, they're going to have this new setup where basically they convinced where they were talking with the park rangers. And the park rangers were going to buy like $200,000 of industrial heaters to help heat the cocoa, cocoa beans that they process there. Because currently it's crazy, they just lay them out on the ground in the sun. And it takes a long time and like animals come and eat. them. It's a huge mess, tons of labor. So instead, they're going to buy this heater and these heaters would kind of heat them in batches and be much more efficient. And they were like, no, no, no, no, just buy $200,000 of A6. And then we will, we will just heat the cocoa with the A6. That's what's

Starting point is 00:43:24 going to happen. So this is going to happen. This is happening. And then the chocolate that they make from the cocoa will be sold. And it'll be like Bitcoin powered chocolate. And I predict it's going to do well. I just love this. Like everything about it is great. Like the external. The functionality of mining will change depending on what part of the world you're in. Like it'll depend on what your community needs. I just think it's fascinating. If a policymaker from Africa was listening to our conversation, what would be your advice to them right now? Well, again, just like, look, no one wants to cut fiscal, raise taxes, inflate, borrow from the IMF.

Starting point is 00:43:57 Why don't you try this? Like, figure out a way to finance this one-time thing and research how much energy your country's wasting. and do it now and start mining. And you will have a very powerful recurring source of income that is probably totally disconnected from the world's power narrative in terms of the price of electricity. It's probably be off-grid. It'll be probably baseload power.

Starting point is 00:44:24 It'll give you sovereignty. It'll allow you to hedge against all sorts of things. And one day it'll allow you to buy anything you need without having to negotiate with people. You'll just have whatever, the premium. currency. I think that that's very important for people to do it. In America too, though, like, America should be, America should be Bitcoin mining all of its wasted energy and use that to fund public works. I mean, this is why I think it's like the green, the real Green

Starting point is 00:44:50 New Deal is Bitcoin, right? Like, if you want, like Bitcoin is that this is how the government should be getting the revenue for doing public works, not through debt monetization. So anyway, that's the idea. If you were going to go into one of the towns, where these Bitcoin miners and energy hubs are set up, and you talk to 100 people inside the town? First of all, are they even aware that the Bitcoin mining is taking place? And if they are, what would be the general consensus that they would have in reference to it taking place? Yeah, I mean, obviously, I have a small sample size that just visited a few sites, but generally speaking, no, the local community doesn't really know.

Starting point is 00:45:30 In the case of Bondo, it's the power company that knows, because the power company in the Bondo case used to subsidize, still subsidizes the energy so that it's not like insanely expensive. Power in Africa's like can be three to four times the price it is even in in a place like California where it's already expensive. The idea of mainly being like let's say you have a generation site that produces a, I don't know, like five megawatts or something like that. That's a lot. But let's just say for the purposes of this example, but you only have one megawatt of demand. Well, then really to make yourself whole, you end up having to make that energy five times more expensive than it might otherwise be. Bitcoin mining comes in, buys the other four megawatts.

Starting point is 00:46:16 And then the price that everybody pays that the people who are using the one megawatt pays goes way down. So it makes energy cheaper for people. People do not understand this. This is super important. So when I'm hearing that and I'm thinking about, gridless. Gridless is a huge beneficiary of this. Oh, for the community. But are they giving back in a way that makes it more harmonious for the people as opposed to them just benefiting from that? So the power company is called Mega down there in the Bondo area. And it was really like this guy

Starting point is 00:46:47 who's responsible for the surrounding area. It looks like Yosemite. It's insane. It's this incredible mountain range called Mulange and Mount Mulanj and the area is just stunning. So I think it's like the best rock climbing in Africa or something. but it's very remote, not many people there. And he's kind of doing everything by himself. So he was subsidizing some of the power for people so that it wasn't like 90 cents a kilowatt hour or something. He was bringing it way down out of his own pocket, though.

Starting point is 00:47:12 It's not sustainable. So in comes gridless. Gridless is minors by 100% of the hydro power that Bondo does not consume, which of course, even if they design it like perfectly and like during the daytime, the Bondo folks are eating close to 100% of the hydro. What happens at night?

Starting point is 00:47:35 Like the town sleeps, the river doesn't sleep, right? So you always have extra. And then there's seasonality, right? There's big storms that come in, big cyclones that come in, dump tons of water. And there's so much surplus. So gridless is going to buy all that. And they pay a fee to the power company. And that's really important revenue for the power company.

Starting point is 00:47:54 Because that's revenue that didn't have before. So gridless wins. Gridless makes money, power company wins, they make more revenue, and the people win because the price of energy goes down, and now the power company can afford to expand. It can afford to hook more homes up and actually get the rest of the community online in a way where no other donor was like, you know, that was just wasn't going to happen with donations. So this is how Bitcoin like brings electricity to people. It's absolutely beautiful to see. What are we missing? What else in, uh, what else do you want to highlight that you think is important from an overall

Starting point is 00:48:27 kind of standpoint that maybe we didn't cover. Well, you're talking to folks in these communities and, you know, maybe Bitcoin can help bring them electricity, which is incredible. On its own, that's a civilizational challenge to solve. And it's not an exaggeration to say that Bitcoin fixes this. I mean, that's the crazy part. Like, it really does fix it. It is a technology that allows us to eliminate waste in electricity production.

Starting point is 00:48:53 Like, it allows us to use all. of it. And that just has not happened before. And again, like, why don't, well, why isn't everybody doing it? It's a crazy idea. Like, it's a really crazy idea that takes time to wrap your mind around. It takes time for people to explain it to you. It takes time. You have to go see it. You literally have to go see it. You have to see it with your own eyes. Like, even me who had written about this before and was inspired on it, I didn't even grasp anywhere close to the full picture until I actually went and started visiting some sites talking to people. learning about it. So I just think it's a long road, but that's just half of it, right? The other half is how

Starting point is 00:49:33 Bitcoin's going to change the sound money piece. Because civilizations need power and they need sound money. I mean, you need electricity access and you need sound money. I mean, these are two of the basic ingredients for a successful society, right? So that's the other half. It's like these countries, again, 44% currency devaluation in Malawi. Total crime. And people are going to be able to escape. into a permissionless open network that allows them to do business anywhere in the world. I mean, I met one guy, his name's Grant, a young guy who he's starting the first meetup into the country. The first Bitcoin meetup in Malawi will be like in two weeks.

Starting point is 00:50:13 It's like very exciting. I mean, we're probably talking like 2020 era for El Salvador here, like, you know, a small community here that starts small but then becomes a big, big wave later, right? I totally think that's going to happen. And the crazy part is grants, like, it's amazing for me to use Bitcoin because it's accepted everywhere. Like, I can, I can, like, I can, like, buy, like, I can't use my currency anywhere, right? So it gives them, like, the English language for money, basically, is the kind of idea he was

Starting point is 00:50:41 getting at, which I think it'll even better than that. But the other thing is he's just, these people are packed with cool ideas. And they're starting, Bitcoin trains you to start to spot all the waste, right? So now he's like, hey, there's this thing the government was going to set up where, like, it's got these terms it has to follow by foreign donors who want us to do more like EVs, right, even though like we get into all the problems with that. But okay, so there's going to be all these EV charging stations powered by solar. There's not going to be anybody with EVs.

Starting point is 00:51:07 That's not going to happen right away. So there's just going to be all this wasted solar energy. And he's just like, well, we're going to come in and we're going to hook up some A6 and we're going to split a cost with the guy who runs the gas station or whatever where they're going to set up the charter points. And we're going to make some money. And I'm like, I don't know if that's going to work. it's an awesome idea and there's a lot of other awesome ideas that are that are going to come

Starting point is 00:51:26 about as a result of this. And I think that the other part about kind of Africa helping Bitcoin is the innovations that are happening out there, like gridless, for example, are like just would never happen in New York or in London or Chicago or L.A. We don't have the same sort of lived experience issues. Like the same problems just don't really, we don't have the same problems. And the other big one is lack of access to the internet, right? So 600 million some odd Africans also don't have access to the internet. A lot more have internet poverty or whatever. Like they rarely have data.

Starting point is 00:52:00 So people use feature phones. How do you use Bitcoin? I mean, think about people who are listening. Well, how do you use Bitcoin? Well, we usually either use copy and paste or a QR code to like use Bitcoin. Well, a feature phone can't do either of those things. So you have all these people who can't really use Bitcoin. So in any of all these people who don't have data or internet.

Starting point is 00:52:18 So the question is, well, how do you solve that problem? So this incredible guy in KG or KG or Kogato, who grew up in his township in South Africa, right, like under apartheid, basically, invented this incredible innovation that allows people to use Bitcoin without the internet. And this is just so profound. So he's now got about, I think, 12,000 users across seven countries in Africa. And it uses a protocol called USSD, which is similar to SMS. And basically you just like send a message to a number. and it spits out like a decision tree type thing. And you can buy, sell.

Starting point is 00:52:56 Like, you can, it's integrated with bit refill. You can, like, buy all kinds of stuff on the internet. There's a lot of interactivity with, like, as techo. So you can go to a store with cash and you can top up your, the company's called Machin Kora. You can top up basically your Bitcoin account with cash, like, through a voucher system. It works with M-Pesa. Like, it's totally integrated and it's amazing.

Starting point is 00:53:17 So people are using Bitcoin without the. internet, like at scale. It's pretty insane. Like, I'm not sure that Wall Street is prepared for this. Like, I don't think they understand this. And the crazier part is that, well, you know, today it's a custodial lightning wallet, but that's not how he wants it to be for various reasons. Like, if he goes to vote a phone and says, do you want a partner, they're going to be like, well, we don't want to hold any funds for our customers, right? Like, so the self-custody piece is actually important. Well, how do you do that on a, without a smartphone? Well, they figured out or realized that a SIM card can just be the signing device.

Starting point is 00:53:50 So you have all these people with dumb phones or feature phones or what do you want to call them, no internet. Well, guess what? They can all be self-sovereign Bitcoin users and they can self-custody. So this is a new feature they just sort of rolled out as a pilot this month and we'll see where it goes. But I just think that's incredible. So you can be like a fully self-sovereign Bitcoin user with no internet.

Starting point is 00:54:11 It's wild. So that's the other piece of it is the like power generation and also financial freedom. Right. So, and the innovations coming out of Africa are going to make Bitcoin way stronger. I mean, who knows? But in theory, you could have many thousands, if not millions of people self-custodying Bitcoin in Africa. That obviously makes Bitcoin stronger.

Starting point is 00:54:33 And again, the power conversation, like just gigawatts of decentralized off-grid power powering the network. Like, in a world where there's just so many self-reinforcing incentives, right? It's weird, but in the world where, like, in the West, we might be lazy and privileged and, like, a lot of centralizing forces right now, right? Like, ETFs, like, you know, custodial use of Bitcoin. Like, it's easy for us, right? But it may be in Africa, it's different. So, yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:00 Anyway, it's like, it was a fascinating thing to do. I'm so fortunate to be able to do it and to get out there. And I just, I hoped that the essay could just even show people, like, one percent of what I saw. If it could just do that, then it was successful. If it could just open your eyes the tiniest bit to this, then I'm very happy that it was able to do it. It definitely does that, Alex. And the article is called Stranded How Bitcoin is Saving Wasted Energy and Expanding Financial Freedom in Africa. This is on Bitcoin Magazine.

Starting point is 00:55:31 The website will have a link to this in the show notes. I can't stress it enough. You need to read this article because the personal accounts and the stories in it are just miraculous. And just so it's really inspiring and it gives you hope in a class. ground backdrop where you just like, you don't even want to log in the Twitter and read what's next, right? It's just so it can be very parasitic to just like read some of the stuff that you're seeing. And this is just a bright light in the backdrop of all of that. And bravo to you for just always being that light in such a dark world right now. And we need more

Starting point is 00:56:09 Alex Gladsteins. We need more people highlighting these these amazing things that are happening. And I look at it just as an honor to call you a friend and to be on this Bitcoin journey with you and always thank you for your time, Alex. Is there anything else that you wanted to highlight outside of HR after that article? Yeah, just shout out to Eric and Janet and Phil and their team. Shout out to KG and Nolene and the Machinkura team. There's some other stuff we didn't get into. We can visit it later, but definitely shout out to Marcel and PTC Dada. I mean, this woman has a vision of bringing millions of African women on board to be Bitcoiners, which is something most people neglect,

Starting point is 00:56:46 which I find so deeply moving. And she's educating people in Africa's largest slum. It's incredible, like, how fearless she is. And shout out to Femi from Beatrice Builders, formerly Kala, who is helping address the issue of making sure that hopefully Bitcoin does not become this thing where Africans just consume what the West produces, which is the trap they've been in. Like, you know, cars are made in the West.

Starting point is 00:57:10 Africans buy them at a huge up mark. So they want to make the Bitcoin stuff in Africa. And to do that, you have to train people how to do it. So his program is training the devs so that they can build and do stuff like gridless and KG, like match and gridless are good examples of this. But they want to let a thousand flowers bloom in terms of African-created Bitcoin products that are made for Africans doing stuff for Africa. So like one of the things Femi says is that like in the West, we're very focused on

Starting point is 00:57:40 of value and that that's fine. I mean, Bitcoin's awesome store of value. But we're not very focused on Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, but that's really, really where it shines in Africa for a lot of different ways. So those apps are going to be, they're going to advance faster over there. Like he was talking to me about, like, even just like pension stuff. Like we have all these sophisticated pension systems here. Now, most of them are scam as we know. But over there, even just basic Bitcoin apps that do pension stuff are going to be huge in Africa. So that's going to lead the way in many cases. So anyway, shout out to those folks. I really also appreciated my friend Ian Burrell, who's a well-known journalist in Britain who came with us on the trip. He wrote his own piece

Starting point is 00:58:18 much shorter than mine, obviously. It was in the mainstream media, but it was on unheard, and it was on the same topic, and I was so grateful to Ian for coming. And I just brought him just so he could see. But he ended up writing a piece that was amazing about the same idea. And, you know, coming from a more skeptical point of view of like, well, how can you could Bitcoin possibly help in a humanitarian sense? And then once he saw it, he understood. I mean, all it takes is an open mind. But once you start to realize how powerful this is and how it's really going to fix

Starting point is 00:58:49 a lot of these issues with dependency and with waste, it's just very, very exciting. So yeah, I'll be seeing maybe some of your listeners in Madeira at Bitcoin Atlantis. I hope some of them come out to Norway for the Oslo Freedom Forum. In June, we'll have a killer Bitcoin program. And yeah, until then, thank you, Preston, for having. having me on. One real quick highlight. There's a lot of links in the article that, and this is wonderful because you mentioned a ton

Starting point is 00:59:16 of things here and I'm sure a lot of people are going to want to dig in even more. So if you don't see it in the show notes as far as the links, in the article as you go through it, there is a ton of links to many of these things that Alex mentioned is just additional highlight. So Alex, thank you for coming on the show. This was amazing and just really appreciate your time. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use.

Starting point is 00:59:41 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. 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.

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We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC169: Bitcoin Changing Africa's Energy and Finance Incentives w/ Alex Gladstein (Bitcoin Podcast)

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