We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC231: Bitcoin Nation State Adoption Paradox - A Trojan Horse w/ Alex Gladstein (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Alex Gladstein unpacks the hidden power dynamics of financial privilege, the shifting terrain of surveillance, and why Bitcoin might be the most unexpected tool in the fight for human rights IN THIS ...EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 08:23 - Why self-custody is essential to the philosophical core of financial freedom 13:12 - How grassroots Bitcoin movements are reshaping power dynamics 14:02 - The complex role of social media in Bitcoin advocacy 14:27 - What recent developments are challenging or reinforcing core beliefs 16:07 - How Bitcoin acts as a stealth disruptor of corrupt systems 17:29 - Real-world humanitarian uses of Bitcoin, including crisis response 18:49 - The implications of rising financial surveillance—even in democracies 19:43 - Why financial privilege blinds many in the West to global monetary injustice 21:07 - Where the next frontier of Bitcoin and human rights may emerge 49:03 - How writing a full-length book reframed the guest’s understanding of scale and resistance Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Alex’s X Account. Human Rights Foundation. Related Video: Princess of the Yen. Bitcoin Is A Trojan Horse For Freedom by Alex Gladstein. Alex’s books: Check Your Financial Privilege and Hidden Repression: How the IMF and World Bank Sell Exploitation as Development. Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our Premium Feed.   NEW TO THE SHOW? Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. Check out our Bitcoin Fundamentals Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Get smarter about valuing businesses in just a few minutes each week through our newsletter, The Intrinsic Value Newsletter. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: SimpleMining Hardblock AnchorWatch Human Rights Foundation Cape Unchained Vanta Shopify Onramp Abundant Mines Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Transcript
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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 bring back the one and only Alex Gladstein to talk about all the incredible things happening with Bitcoin around the world. During the show, Alex talks about his new book, which is a collection of his writings called A Trojan Horse for Freedom. We also talk about the incredible traction that we're seeing from politicians, media, and other unexpected types.
Starting point is 00:00:25 Finally, Alex talks about the paradox of nation-state adoption, how some people are very confused by members of the community cheering on government adoption while others are upset about it. So without further delay, sit back, relax, and enjoy this really fun conversation with Alex. Celebrating 10 years, 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, sir.
Starting point is 00:01:07 Thanks for having me. So, Alex, we were just in Bedford, had an incredible time. I think we'll talk about like what's changing there. But before we do that, I want to go straight to your speech that you gave. It was titled The Human Rights Paradox of Nation State Bitcoin Adoption. Tell us about this. I think this is really controversial. In my opinion, a lot of bad takes on this particular topic.
Starting point is 00:01:31 So walk us through it. Yeah, well, ever since the earliest days of the Bitcoin message boards, people have speculated on what's it going to look like in the future with Bitcoin. And there were some threads here and there which had talked about a kind of Virgin Horse type dynamic where people had written way back when, like essentially early 2010s on Bitcoin talk stuff, you can find kind of anything we've discussed today was once discussed back then. But people were like, hey, wouldn't it be something if the existing financial system just started to eat Bitcoin, but then Bitcoin managed to transform it.
Starting point is 00:02:09 By being adopted, it would change the system that was eating it. And that was something I picked up on. And I ended up writing an essay in 2021 called, you know, the Trojan Horse for Freedom, basically, that Bitcoin is a Trojan horse for freedom. And it was the first essay I did in a series of essays that later turned into a book and other books and my writing career. And now, yes, you're holding it in your hand because last year I decided to, to turn all of that work, which amounts to 600 pages or so of writing, into a anthology that I would create only 100 copies of and distribute to a handful of people who have really
Starting point is 00:02:47 helped me on my journey like you. Thank you so much for having me along the way so many times and giving me an audience. I've been so grateful for that. And then the other 50, we auctioned at Scar City, which is super fun. So we're about to mail those copies as well. But for now, Now, there's no other plans to put that writing anywhere else. And what's fun about that book, Trident Horse for Freedom, is that it's been brought up to date. So it has a new intro by me from last year, last summer. And all of the stuff I wrote 20, 21, 22, 23, I had to go back and update, which was interesting. It was a lot of, like, exchange rate stuff.
Starting point is 00:03:20 Like, this particular national currency was worth this much BTC. And it's like today, it's not doing so well in its own right. So Bitcoin's grown a lot since then. But, you know, I wanted to go back to the cover of it, the Trojan Horse for Freedom, right? And the theme of it, which is what we talked about in Bedford on stage. And it's interesting because when I first put out the thesis, it was 2021. And, you know, things were heating up, right? So you had micro strategy had started, right?
Starting point is 00:03:47 About maybe eight months earlier. You had Block bought some Bitcoin. You had Tesla bought some Bitcoin. And we hadn't, El Salvador hadn't happened yet. That happened a couple months later. But you were starting to get inklings of some of that we would maybe get some nation-stated option. So my thesis was at the time that eventually, I just thought that Bitcoin was going to become this obvious reserve asset for the global financial system and that it would start slow,
Starting point is 00:04:14 start here, start there, but eventually build into something that everybody would want and would want to have on the balance sheet, whether you're a sovereign or a large corporation. And I think that has largely happened, right? So what's interesting is that the thesis has played out in terms of global adoption. It's been pretty crazy. I mean, I don't know if I would have predicted that within four years, you'd have the United States government, the world issuer of the world reserve currency, establishing a national strategic Bitcoin reserve. I mean, that's pretty wild. By the way, check out this time.
Starting point is 00:04:46 I got said. Yeah, I actually have one as well. It's a great hat. I love that one. For people just listening, it's like a, it says strategic reserve. It's got a three star. almost like a three-star admiral or general. Yeah, we've got one too.
Starting point is 00:05:02 We'll put on the strategic reserve, brilliantly designed by Skyler. But I mean, it's, it kind of happened kind of suddenly. It was, we went from a time where Bitcoin was so niche. We had this long bear market. And, you know, all of a sudden, 2020, you started to get micro strategy happened. And then everything else happened. And then there was kind of a lag, right? I mean, we had another bear market, right?
Starting point is 00:05:22 It was kind of tough for a lot of people. But a lot of stuff kept pushing, right? Mining is fascinating. You have a lot of different countries mining now at the nation-state level. Yeah. Ethiopia, Kenya, Oman, Bhutan. I mean, this little country, Bhutan has mined a billion dollars of Bitcoin. It's incredible on water. Water that would have just otherwise gone wasted. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:44 Blown, blowed down the river and not done anything. Instead, they captured that. So you have large-scale mining adoption. You have treasury adoption. You have people being exposed to companies like microspreads. all over the world and sovereigns and all sorts of things happening now and states and governors and it's getting pretty crazy. And I remember I had this debate somewhere along the way. I think it was in 2021, 2022 with Ben Hunt, who writes Epsilon theory. And we debated over whether or not this was bad for Bitcoin as freedom money, that it would get adopted by Wall Street and government. His sort of thesis was that Wall Street would kind of eat Bitcoin and that it would kind of, I guess,
Starting point is 00:06:25 render it pretty useless as a freedom technology. And my thesis was the opposite. I was like, no, no, no, it's the Trojan horse. Wall Street will adopt it whether it likes freedom or not, simply because of Bitcoin's NGU properties. And what would later happen is Bitcoin would go into the city walls and seek out at night and rewire the city and make it more free. And I really feel strongly about my thesis winning out as of today. I mean, I really feel like what you're going to have happened is Bitcoin be adopted by all these institutions, which clearly most of them are not, we're not sitting here and claiming Black Rock is some kind of human rights activist, you know, clearly not like they're in it to do one thing and that's to make money. But what's fascinating
Starting point is 00:07:08 is they all become kind of what's the right word? Quasi cheerleaders. Not what's, what's the word when you commit a crime and someone helps you? It's like an accomplice. An accomplice. Yes, they become, there you go. Thank you. So they become accomplices to human rights activism. whether they like it or not. Yeah. Like, it's funny when you have BlackRock and the Trump administration and even Buckele and any of these governments mining, any of these dozens of companies now launching, you know, derivative products that connect to Bitcoin in some way, almost none of them are doing it,
Starting point is 00:07:40 like, really that like help vulnerable people. But inevitably, because they're pushing Bitcoin, the brand Bitcoin is this big open network, right? They are inevitably becoming accomplices to making the world more free. And of course, there's nuance there that we need to be careful of. But the reality is, the more they push Bitcoin, I mean, the bigger network effect Bitcoin gets, the more valuable Bitcoin gets, the more people enter Bitcoin. And the better freedom tool it becomes. So it's like this feedback loop.
Starting point is 00:08:12 It's almost like freedom is this emergent property of what's taking place with it all, right? Is that what you're really getting at is like everybody's coming out of it, the self-interest. We should put on the table like, yeah. It's true that the Salvadoran government tried to push Chivo, which was more of a control mechanism. And it's true that BlackRock is pushing an ETF, which is not self-custody Bitcoin. And it's true that strategy is pushing a stock in its company as opposed to self-custody Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:08:39 And it's true that, you know, a lot of these miners don't even stack. They just sell. But that, you know what, that doesn't really matter. They're still pushing Bitcoin. The word Bitcoin is very powerful. If you notice, like, it's not like Michael Saylor sits around and doesn't talk about the word Bitcoin. It's not like he's only talking about strategy stock. He's always talking about Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:08:58 In fact, he tweets about Bitcoin every day. The word Bitcoin, right? And same thing, Buckele, Bitcoin. BlackRock, there are people always talking about Bitcoin. And this is super powerful because, you know, whether they like it or not, they can't differentiate what they're doing from this kind of rising tide that's lifting all boats with like the Bitcoin ecosystem, right? So whether they like it or not, whatever they're doing is making it easier for two people in Nigeria to do a Bitcoin cash trade, is making it easier for the Human Rights Foundation to send a Bitcoin grant into some authoritarian country, is making it easier for a woman
Starting point is 00:09:34 in Afghanistan to take a class or do an underground school paid for by Bitcoin, right? So all of Bitcoin's incredible freedom properties is making it easier for someone in Malawi to escape inflation or currency devaluation. Yeah. So the more they push, and I understand that it's not some clean black and white thing where correct, they're not pushing non-KYC, self-custody, cash economy. That's true. What I guess I'm saying is like, they kind of are like in the end, right?
Starting point is 00:10:04 Like if they're pushing Bitcoin, they're pushing Bitcoin. Like they're not pushing USC. They're not pushing visa credit. They're not pushing a treasury bond system. They're pushing Bitcoin. So I guess, again, this all plays into my thesis of the Trojan horse. They are pursuing their own aims, totally self-interestedly, which I think is the way we need to expect the world works, right, whether we like it or not.
Starting point is 00:10:27 But the cool part is Bitcoin transforms that self-interest into freedom for other people. That's the unique machine inside of it. So that's what I explore in the book. That's what I talked about on stage in Bedford. And I'll be doing that talk more often in the future. But I think it's interesting because you get a lot of critics now where we're like, oh, yeah, look, Bitcoin is betraying its mission. It was trying to separate money from state.
Starting point is 00:10:49 You know, and you get a lot of like people criticizing cypherpunks or libertarian bitcoiners. And they're like, look at the state. Everything you promised is a lie. It's all a betrayal. You're just trying to see your bags go up or whatever. Yeah. I mean, you see a lot of that coping from like the mainstream media. And it's like, no, no, no, wait a second.
Starting point is 00:11:08 We're winning. You don't understand. Like if we were losing, there'd be no nation state adoption. Bitcoin was dwindling into a nothing. If nobody was using it, if it was dying, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So I guess my point is that adoption by these big, bad entities or whatever, is an indicator of success, not an indicator of failure. You know, it's really funny. We went from this world where like four years ago even, right, when you were doing the show four years ago, let's say, people would say,
Starting point is 00:11:37 Preston, you know what? I think the government's going to ban Bitcoin. Like, I regularly think it's going to be. That's what we heard every day. Yeah. would say that. And now people are like, that would be the criticism. Yeah, right. You're going to ban it or China's going to ban it or China's going to do something. This was like on repeat. You and I would have to battle people on every day.
Starting point is 00:11:53 Every day. For just years. It was just like ban, ban, ban, ban, ban. Now they're like, the government's adopting Bitcoin. This is terrible. What are we going to do? And it's like, it's like, it's like incredible. So, you know, what next is you couldn't frame something else. You could not frame this. But it's really funny. You couldn't frame this any better. Like, it was bad before. And you know, this gets to, so back to the, your Ben Hunt comment. So as a person who's tracked traditional financial markets for more than a decade now covered it in the media space, I've known Ben. Ben is an extremely intelligent, extremely intelligent individual, right? Yeah. But when I'm looking at him and some others that you would look at and you'd be like,
Starting point is 00:12:36 this guy's so smart, he will get this immediately, right? But they're there saying why it's going to fail and all the points that you brought up earlier. And the thing that I, because I've thought about this so much, how in the world is this person not getting it? How in the world are they not seeing this? And the only thing that I can kind of come back to, and I'm curious if you would agree with this, is at the core of how they view the world, they believe that things are controlled by these entities that can never be governments, right? Or the Wall Street blob, like the small guy or the small person is never going to be able to overcome these powerful institutions because they are dominant. And it's almost like their view of the world moving forward is somewhat negative and maybe very
Starting point is 00:13:22 negative. And that is the core thing that is not allowing them to see how something like this could be an emergent property for freedom and for the world to be a better place in the future as opposed to being dystopian. Do you think that that's the thing that's why they can't put that final puzzle piece in there to understand it or what is it? Well, because I think the way the the Fiat monetary system works is it's permissioned. It's gate kept at centralizing. Right. So I think they're very much used to studying that model, but we have a different one. So in our model, the new model in Bitcoin, Wall Street can create ETFs. The government can create a stockpile. And that does not impact my ability to without my phone and send you,
Starting point is 00:14:08 a permissionless peer-to-peer payment right now. In fact, it makes it easier for me to do that because guess what? There's more apps now. They're much better designed. The technology is vastly improving in Bitcoin because of this influx of talent and interest and resources. The amount of money being spent today on Bitcoin technical development is so much more than it was five years ago. The amount of people building privacy apps is so much more. The amount of people integrating stuff like e-cash and bolt 12 and just, you know, next generation lightning stuff is just, I mean, we didn't have that stuff five years ago. So I understand what they're getting at.
Starting point is 00:14:47 They're like afraid Bitcoin's going to fall down the same trap. I mean, whether or not they actually care. You know, they might be like, you know, non-empathetically afraid, quote unquote. But their case is that Bitcoin's going to fall in the same trap as the Fiat system did or even as gold did, right? It'll get centralized and captured. I guess what they don't realize is there's a different incentive mechanism. here. And the more popular Bitcoin gets, the stronger it gets as a freedom tool. I mean,
Starting point is 00:15:13 at least that's what we've seen so far. And it's true that there might be like other things on the horizon that are coming up and mining centralization is one and like laws that can endanger Bitcoin users is another one. But at the end of the day, like our ability to use Bitcoin as a freedom tool today has never been greater. And that has come not at the expense, of or in contrast to nation and corporate, nation state and corporate adoption, but it's come almost as a result of that, you know, along those lines, it normalizes what we do. Like, if the U.S. government is doing Bitcoin stuff and Wall Street's doing Bitcoin stuff, then it makes it easier for nonprofits and activists to do Bitcoin stuff, period. So I would encourage
Starting point is 00:15:57 people to think about this as like one big giant network effect. And for the first time, it actually works in our favor to have people that we don't like adopting this thing. Like, this isn't like theat technology where it's like the Iranian government has its own fiat that it controls and it's just like only this rent seeking corruption machine that can like debase and devalue and take from you and they use violence to enforce it, right? That's the old system. The new system doesn't work like that. Like, there's no violence used to force people to use it.
Starting point is 00:16:32 It's voluntary to use it out of their own interest. People come to it. They work for it. They devote their life to it for other reasons that are not fear and being compelled, right? They do it because they love it and because it's done well for them and their family. They do it for very rational reasons. And it's just a completely different paradigm. So in any event, I guess the sum there is that the thesis of the book and what I've been talking about,
Starting point is 00:16:58 I feel like, you know, is stronger than ever. And it gives me great hope for the future. And the stuff you saw in Bedford, I should mention, in addition to my talk, I had a whole, we made sure I had a whole panel of activists from around the world using Bitcoin. Yeah. And the day before, we had done this at the frontline club in London, which is a really prestigious journalist outlet where people come to leak state secrets and break news and WikiLeaks used to use it.
Starting point is 00:17:24 And it's a wonderful club near Paddington and London. And we had an event where we launched something called the Bitcoin Humanitarian Alliance, which is a loose association of 12 organizations around the world, ranging from HRF on our end, to save the children to the World Liberty Congress to ideas beyond borders, etc. Organizations are doing a variety of human rights and humanitarian work worldwide in difficult circumstances, difficult context. And we all use Bitcoin in different ways. Maybe we use it for payroll, maybe we use it for donations.
Starting point is 00:17:53 Maybe we use this to send value where it needs to go. And we decided to launch this alliance because it's time for people to know that this tool is just becoming such a no-brainer to use for any kind of aid and assistance today. Like it's just, it is completely upgrading and displacing the bank wire. If you're trying to move money from A to D, the idea that you would use a bank wire as opposed to Bitcoin is, it's borderline crazy. So we wanted to announce that like all of us were using Bitcoin that we've all learned how to use it effectively. I had testimonies from all the activists talk about why in their context. And it was great. The media was there. The BBC was there, et cetera. And then we took that. We brought it to Cheekode to Peter's event and we had about an hour on stage and we went through some of those stories for that
Starting point is 00:18:39 crowd. And I thought that was great and people were super moved. I mean, I got so many good feedback pieces from folks and the local media wrote an awesome piece about it. It was really, really powerful. There's something that I'll read to you just quickly. The article was from a journalist who's just from my Bedford area in England near London. And the article's called how a Bitcoin conference in Bedford changed the way I see financial freedom and human rights. And I was like, okay, that's pretty cool. So he goes through it and he tells this story. And he's like, these people weren't investors or salespeople. They weren't blockchain bros chasing the next coin. They weren't even there to get the audience to swallow the orange pill.
Starting point is 00:19:16 They were activists using Bitcoin in a way not often reported. These people had everything taken from them and had needed to flee their homes to save their lives, but they'd find a less. So he goes through it all. He tells like some of the stories. And at the end, he has this powerful conclusion where he says basically they're not using it to speculate. They're using Bitcoin so their loved ones, their fellow countrymen and women can survive. Too often Bitcoin is misrepresented. Dismissed as a tool for criminals, mocked as a tech brob session. But the people I met in that Bedford conference hall weren't selling anything. They were fighting for their lives and for others. In a world full of walls, Bitcoin builds bridges. And in the hands of these brave men and
Starting point is 00:19:52 women, it's more than just money, it's hope. That was amazing. So he wrote this and he got it. I feel like it's hard for people to get it unless you meet people from these places. And we have so much financial privilege in the West. It's hard to fathom what it's like to be in Rwanda or Venezuela or Russia or Afghanistan or Iraq or any of the places where the speakers came from. But, you know, again, as a reminder, the average person on this planet suffers through
Starting point is 00:20:16 currency to valuation overnight, massive inflation. And their currency doesn't work in other countries. They can't send international wires. They can't invest in the U.S. stock market. They can't invest in U.S. treasuries. It's very hard for them to invest in even just gold or real estate, sometimes dollars or even illegal. The average savings technology for the person on this planet remains dacks of collapsing paper
Starting point is 00:20:37 notes, steep metal or cat. That's really the average human saves in. So for people to be able to upgrade to Bitcoin, which by the way, and I saw this yesterday, which was amazing. There's a new chart out that shows that Bitcoin has beat the S&P. every year for the last 15 years or something like that. So it's like, yeah, but like only a micro fraction of the world can invest in the S&B. Everybody can invest in Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:21:00 So it's like it really shows the power of this thing. And I'm so happy to see it start to become more widely understood as a human rights and humanitarian instrument like it deserves to be. So we'll be taking that show on the road next in June to the Bitcoin Policy Institute's summit, the BPI summit in D.C. and I'll be giving a talk and then we'll have a whole bunch of testimonies from activists there. And I think it'll be very interesting for folks in the American side of things, whether it be governors, state department officials, treasury officials, congressmen, women, et cetera, folks from the executive branch to listen to this.
Starting point is 00:21:35 So, yeah, we couldn't be more excited about some of the activism we're doing right now. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. 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 saunas 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 its 18th year bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history. This is where you hear firsthand
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Starting point is 00:25:50 You know, I love the highlight of the article there to kind of give the perspective of a person who's not intimately tied into the community, but it was observing the event. Because it wasn't just that. It wasn't you on stage highlighting all of these practical use cases from all over the world, right? It was, so you have that level and then you have literally Liz Truss coming on stage. Yeah. It was the former prime minister, the British, who was, Britain. And I had a quote that I posted on X and it was hilarious how so many people didn't, I guess, really dial into the quote
Starting point is 00:26:27 itself and why it was significant. Instead, it was a bunch of comments of people saying, oh, yeah, she was the prime minister for 10 seconds, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then a bunch to political opinions of like her background and her party and everything else. But this is why I thought her being there was so important. She became the prime minister. She steps in and she does these mini, but immediately does these mini budget cuts with unfunded tax cuts. And what it did in that very short time that she was there was it effectively was
Starting point is 00:26:58 blowing up their bond market in the UK. And this is within days, right? So she goes in there. She does this policy. The bond market goes crazy itself. off to a pace that was so profound that the financial deeps, let's just call it the financial deep state. That's probably a bad way to frame it. But let's just say the financial deep state steps in and removes her from office and puts the next person in within days or whatever.
Starting point is 00:27:24 And trust me, folks, I'm a total idiot when it comes to the UK politics. But from my vantage point across the pond, looking at what happened, they couldn't allow her to be in there and still play these Fiat games that have dominated our past financial system. They couldn't have these types of policies because it would just melt down the market. And so she was immediately removed. So now take us back to Bedford last week. The former prime minister comes to Bedford up on the stage at a Bitcoin conference and literally says Bitcoin takes power away from the governments on stage. And I'm sitting there watching this and I'm thinking, Peter McCormick. Right. Like, everybody who knows Peter knows he's just here having fun. And it's like, I'm looking at what's happening in his town, what's transforming. You got a former prime minister up on stage. We're having people like yourself, Alex, on stage, telling these stories from all over the globe. And then watch his football team, right? Three promotions, three years in a row, he can afford any player he wants to get on his team for the league that he's in because he took the proceeds of the investments in the club, put him in the Bitcoin. And his treasure.
Starting point is 00:28:34 Amazing. His treasury is growing at a pace that nobody can even remotely compete with him on getting talent on the team. The field was packed. It was twice as many, three times as many people as there was the last year when I would watch them win the year. It was crazy. It's crazy. So I'm looking at all this and like the energy is really hard to explain in an audio podcast format. If you're not seeing it firsthand.
Starting point is 00:29:03 Wild. But your letter that you read is just like a sliver of, I think, what the outsider is seeing and they're saying there's something here. Like, what is this? What's happening? What I've been told is not the truth. There's something way deeper to this all, right? It was crazy.
Starting point is 00:29:19 Yeah. And I had my friend Ian Burrell, who's a legendary journalist in Britain, who I've known for a very long time because of his human rights recording. A few years ago, I convinced him to come on a trip to Africa with me in a handful of people to see Bitcoin mining. And at the beginning, he was a little skeptical. I didn't know if he was going to write anything. But I wanted him to see it personally just to hang out and get to connect to some folks. But we were visiting this mine in Malawi and I saw him start taking out his no pet. And I'm like, oh, my God, it's going to do something. So he writes this piece and it was about
Starting point is 00:29:50 what grid list was doing. And the economist a few days later copied it, kind of inspired by it, did their own piece. And that set Gridless off quite the trajectory in terms of its international image. And recently you've seen Gridless on NPR, BBC, like they're just, they continue to crush. But the point is, he knows this is not a fad. And he came up to Bedford and he was there and he's doing a piece for one of the big papers on the club, on Peter and on the club and on Bedford and what's happening there. And I thought it was very smart for them to call the conference the cheat code, right? Because that's essentially what they're doing with the football club.
Starting point is 00:30:25 It's a cheat code. And, you know, HR has been using the same cheat code with Bitcoin. And it's incredible. The kind of transformation you've seen the, let's say the Bedford football community, which is now like on a rack to professional football. I mean, it's incredible. Now it'll take a couple more promotions to get up to the professional status. And then maybe one day they compete for champions or even Premier League, who knows?
Starting point is 00:30:49 But the point is they're on a trajectory to get up to some of the higher levels. And all of a sudden now they're going to have the tailwinds of the massive Universal Studios complex coming in. And it's just beautiful to watch. But the point is that cheat code is accessible to anybody. And what I've seen Bitcoin do to a lot of these human rights activists that have adopted it is incredible because human rights activism is a little different than running a football club. It can be super dark.
Starting point is 00:31:18 It's depressing. You lose people. You don't have any allies. You just kind of are against all odds all the time. Right. So Bitcoin adds this element of hope. It's really powerful. It's very important.
Starting point is 00:31:28 And it gets them like me. I mean, it fills me, it inspires me. It makes me think of a better future. It makes me know that there's a better future ahead. And it just makes us much more dangerous when it comes to the existing system and our efforts to dismantle it and put something else in its place. It's just the best possible thing to light. It's a fuel for our fire, basically. And some of these activists had just been kept being completely transformed by Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:31:52 Like they are just, they're going to be unstoppable. I mean, that's really, that's what we call our webinar that we do with, that would then pay. parent with BTC sessions. It's called Become Unstoppable. And it's a webinar we teach at, you know, nonprofit groups to help them integrate Bitcoin. And yeah, I mean, like when a government or a bank debanks you, that pretty much stops you. I mean, if you can't pay your payroll, you can't pay your people, you can't reach the folks you're paying out to help you with your work. Like you, you're frozen. You're disabled, right? You're done. So if we can teach you how to effectively raise funds and do payroll and buy stuff in Bitcoin, you're unstoppable.
Starting point is 00:32:28 Like, you can no longer be turned off that way. It's similar to the Canadian trucker thing where it was like, okay, well, there was this big red button and the government could just like freeze all centralized payment process and stop them. And that's the end of that. Maybe they go, maybe that ends up being unconstitutional or whatever in the end and they get, but the point is they can just arbitrarily choose to end that now. Whereas all the Bitcoin that was being raised, nah, no, they had to, you know, go get a injunction. They had to get a search warrant. They had, it took all this time. And by the time they actually got to the people, something like 60 to 70% of the Bitcoin
Starting point is 00:32:59 had made it to be intended recipients. So it's a brilliant example of how this can be such a powerful tool for social change. And I'm just, yeah, I mean, the kind of excitement and euphoria you see in Bedford, this little town is the thing thing you're seeing in these human rights movements. Like Bitcoin is transforming them. You ever seen that cartoon of like, it's like two people, one person's depressed, the Ellen's happy. Looking out the tree.
Starting point is 00:33:23 This is the person and it's like this orange thing and it like lights up the world, right? That's what Bitcoin is. Like literally, it just, it lights you up. It gives you a completely different support network. Like, and this probably is only in the early days in an adoption era, right? But all of a sudden, if you're using Bitcoin for pretty much anything, even if the person doesn't like what you're doing, like they will probably be excited to help you, right? It's like it's kind of funny.
Starting point is 00:33:48 Like you might have two people who completely disagree politically. This could exist, right? where it's like two viciously opposed political people will like, hey, if you're using Bitcoin, I'll teach you how to set up a BT space server, just don't tell anybody. It's like, you know, it forces people to be allies. It's pretty amazing. So, yeah, we're really fired up about this and we want to obviously on board as many people as we can because, again, the more we onboard, the bigger the network effect and the
Starting point is 00:34:13 more unstoppable we become. And that goes for nation states and corporations too. It's interesting. I mean, I guess I get it where when people are saying we don't want the nation state adoption. We don't want the corporate adoption. But I think that's naive. There was no world where Bitcoin's going to go from zero to global reserve currency or even just dominant global currency or even just currency that you can use anywhere unless everybody's using it. It's not going to be something where like only cypherpunks are using it, only good people that you like are using it.
Starting point is 00:34:43 That's the same thing as saying like with email or signal or cell phones. You know, there was some world where like only good people could use those things. No, guess what? Criminals, bad people, people you don't like, they use email and cell phones and signal. It's more about the impact of the society that it has. It's not necessarily that Putin and Chezhen Ping can trade a message on signal. Oh, it's so bad. We shouldn't use signal. No, no, no. It's the fact that like hundreds of millions of people who live under their reins and rules can now use signal and communicate privately without the government seeing. So Bitcoin is in a long line of asymmetric technologies like this. that empower the individual, you know, at least slightly more than an empowers the state, right?
Starting point is 00:35:23 So while it's true that Bitcoin adoption is hard to stomach in some aspects, especially if they've like stolen the Bitcoin in the first place. But the point is, whatever can get as closer to a society where the average person self-custodies is their own bank, goes, you know, their merchant's sake paying in Bitcoin, you can pay for most goods and services in Bitcoin, you can save in Bitcoin, and none of this is illegal. The closer we can get to that world, the better. And it's not going to be like a smooth, easy line, right? And it's unfortunately, yeah, it's going to mean that people you don't like,
Starting point is 00:35:56 institutions, you don't like adopt this thing. But as long as your ability to use it as freedom money doesn't get hurt or impinged upon or even lessons in any way, what's the problem here? We're rolling, right? 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,
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Starting point is 00:39:31 This is going to be a long question, so I apologize, but there's a lot to this that I think is important to talk about. So in the back of your book here, you have this quote. I love this quote. I'm going to read it for folks here. As human rights activists know well, it can be hard to effectively promote freedom in a society that willingly sells morals out for profit. Bitcoin sneaks in and rewires the system from the inside, aligning profit seeking with permissionless financial liberation. When we look at what's played out over the last, call it 40 years, Ray Dalio wrote this article last week, talking about how the tariffs and everything that's happening with tariffs is actually a shadow of this much bigger thing, which is de-globalization. When we look at one of the big mechanical things that enabled globalization over this 40-year period of time, at the heart of a lot of it was the World Bank, the IMF, and these incentives that you have better than anybody I know, Alex, laid out in gory.
Starting point is 00:40:31 detail in your writings of how this takes place in order to create this big, giant global mechanical system that really feeds the West and gives the West this huge advantage. It creates this giant dollar network effect around the world. And it causes intense harm to so many of the countries that are taking these World Bank IMF deals in order to monocrop or extram. interact resources out of areas that are good for the people in power and pretty much bad for everybody else inside of those countries. When you, and if anybody wants to dig deep and they haven't read Alex's material, you got to
Starting point is 00:41:13 read his material and it goes into gory detail explaining all of this and how it all works. But my question for you is this with all of that. I told you this is a long question. The question is, as this starts to spin the other way, because that's what Dahlio is saying is that now we are going into de-globalization. How does that look for these countries that are so reliant on these? It's almost like this mechanism that it seems like they can't bracefully come out of this without some type of Bitcoin strategy.
Starting point is 00:41:44 And we're seeing that starting in El Salvador, but we're also seeing it's hard for El Salvador to do it. And I'm sure there's many others that you can give us examples. I'm just kind of throwing that one out because that's what a lot of people were aware of them stacking a Bitcoin treasury and trying to work their way out. out, but yet they're still taking more IMF loans. And it's like that machine just still has their hooks and their tentacles still in all of these countries.
Starting point is 00:42:09 So how do they bridge that or how do they transition out of that in a way that is graceful, that is meaningful and valuable for all the people and citizens? Like, walk us through that. Yeah. I mean, well, like the short answer is Bitcoin provides a new way for people to opt out peacefully where they don't have to get exploited and torn up. up by this old system and its dynamics anymore. I mean, the old system going back hundreds of years is essentially the ebb and flow of empires and their rise to power and their fall from power.
Starting point is 00:42:44 And when you have a global political economic system and you have an empire rise and fall, even if that empire was bad in your mind, like they're falling from power tears up a lot of infrastructure and breaks a lot of things, right? So if we just look at Let's call it three times the Western economic, let's say financial empire rose and fell over the last century and a half. We can look at the British Empire and its rise and fall. And a lot of its rise and fall related to the looting and pillage of India, right? So there's like a lot of data on this. Yes, of course, the British had many things that they pioneered themselves.
Starting point is 00:43:27 Of course, no one's arguing that. You know, I wouldn't want to get in like a straw man argument here. There's a, as an aside, there's a very entertaining podcast people should watch between Dave Smith and Douglas Murray on Rogan this week, which is a long exercise in straw men. Basically, one of the guys, Douglas Murray keeps trying to paint his opponent as saying something as he didn't paint. And the other guy is consistently saying, no, that's a straw man. I didn't say that, you know. So when you're arguing, you always want to avoid this. But no, I would never say that, that obviously, like, Britain and Western Europe as a whole, obviously innovated so many amazing things, including Enlightenment.
Starting point is 00:43:58 ideals and industrial revolutionary technology. But at the end of the day, a big part of it was also the fact that they got all this super cheap labor and goods from India, which was the world's richest place in the world. And they started to pilfer and elude it. And very violently, of course. Now, when that started to slow down the flow of resources from India, even though that might be good in some people's eyes, right? Okay. End of an empire. End of this rapacious kind of exploitation, okay? It's still kind of just starts to tear up and break the system. So a lot of researchers believe that one of the reasons we entered this economic crisis in the 20s and 30s was actually because the reigning global economic system, the British Empire and all of its
Starting point is 00:44:42 appendages started to collapse, started to basically lose its subsidy, its subsidy being all this cheap stuff from India and other territories and the end of the beginning of the end of colonialism. So that's That's one time we've seen, you could call it quote unquote, de-globalization. And what that meant was obviously a massive economic crisis in the West, right? So people everywhere were hurt. The second time would be in the 70s. So you had, again, the West, Western Financial Empire had subsisted on control of energy. So all of the oil in the world was essentially controlled by Western companies, the seven
Starting point is 00:45:16 sisters. Anyone can go look that up. Through the end of colonialism, right? The Western countries lost that. So through the 60s and early 70s, the people who actually actually, you know, they're going to She lived in the places where the oil was, started to take control. And they no longer were just like giving it up for close to nothing to the West. So again, you had another economic crisis in the form of the 1970s, which was massive inflation,
Starting point is 00:45:40 stagnation in the West. And now you're seeing, I would say, history rhymes, right? So you're seeing a third chapter here, which is, again, new kind of empire, different one, not as sort of brutal, I guess, openly as the British one, like let's say or the colonial one. And now you have the Western financial empire, let's say, and it's starting to break down, right? So even though maybe there's good reason to want to see empires fall or whatever, you're going to see disruption and you're going to see it hurt people, right? And that's usually expressed in the foreign oath inflation in higher cost of living and in sometimes more adversarial circumstances. So I think you're seeing that now.
Starting point is 00:46:20 Normally what would happen is just like this long period of chaos and inflation. And then the system would kind of rebuild in some way with some new power. And maybe if we didn't live in a world with Bitcoin, maybe that happens. And maybe it's Europe, maybe it's China. I don't know. It's hard to say right now. It's like I feel like the U.S. is still very much in control despite all this stuff happening. Who knows?
Starting point is 00:46:41 But the good news is we don't have to deal with that anymore. Like we have an escape route. We can start building a new system, right? And we can put our energy and time into Bitcoin, both as individuals, communities, families, football clubs, nonprofit organizations. corporations, nation states, whatever. So we can drain energy from this old system, which is just sort of merciless in the way it would go up and go down and go up and go down.
Starting point is 00:47:03 And I get it. It was going up and down in a general upward trajectory. Obviously true. Like today people live longer. They live healthier. It's more peaceful than we were 300 years ago. No one's arguing that. But the problem is that it's not equally distributed.
Starting point is 00:47:17 And I don't mean that in like a Marxist sense. I just mean that in a simple equality of opportunity sense. Yeah. And the system really keeps. other people down at the expense of some of us, right? What is without question? And Americans are going to see this, depending on how these tariffs go. Like, what is without question is that our life and the stuff we buy and the food we eat
Starting point is 00:47:35 and the services we do to subscribe to are cheaper because they're from other places with weaker labor laws and cheaper currencies. Like, let's just be very clear about this. If the iPhone was completely manufactured inside the United States with all of our labor laws and restrictions, it would cost $10,000. Not a thousand dollars or whatever it costs. We're talking about inputs to our system being 10x cheaper or whatever, or maybe more than that because of globalization.
Starting point is 00:48:04 Yeah, maybe more than that. So we're seeing, you know, maybe a forced ending to that. We'll see. I have a feeling it's going to mellow out a little bit here. But the Scepter has been raised. You know, Americans have been put on blast and on warning, hey, we're going to do this. We're going to forcibly change the system. And we're going to be cutting off some of these subs.
Starting point is 00:48:22 They're not going to say it like this, but they're going to be cutting off some of these subsidies. And Americans are, they're basically, the government, the current government in America is basically threatening an austerity period, which normally is reserved for those countries that the IMF restricts, right? So finally they're saying, no, no, no, we're going to go through an austerity period ourselves. And maybe it does result in, look, I saw the newspaper headline today, Nvidia is going to build supercomputers here. Okay. I don't know. Maybe it does result in supply chains coming back to the U.S. and a reindustrialization in some way. And maybe that doesn't mean you're working on a factory line. Maybe it means you're working in a
Starting point is 00:48:53 a job where you're using robotics in AI and it's actually really excited. I don't know. But it's going to be very expensive either way. I don't think the forcible relocation of all that stuff. So normally without Bitcoin, we would, again, we'd be going through a 1920s or 1970s era where things would just get very expensive for a lot of people and it would be hard. And I think Bitcoin is the cheat code, right? It's going to allow us to navigate this period of time and do really well. I hope that that helps. No, it does help because the question I was looking at it more from like, what are these governments, like these smaller countries that have been impacted by this globalization process? How are the countries going to be able to deal with it?
Starting point is 00:49:32 But your answer kind of actually addresses that because you went straight to the individual. And you said the individual can protect themselves from sky high prices and all this, because every individual can access Bitcoin if they put forth the effort. And what's fascinating and what we've seen to date being in Bitcoin is that, it percolates from the bottom up. And so I think if you get enough participants that are seeking salvation in it, call it country XYZ, they're going to be more likely to influence their local politics
Starting point is 00:50:06 because so many participants are using it and finding that it's helping them manage their situation. Right. And so it's this percolation up that I think we're going to continue to see in all these regions. It doesn't mean it's going to be easy, but I think that if we're just talking about what's the reality of like, how it unfolds, I think that it's just going to continue to be this bottom-up movement. We don't have to, I mean, Americans, this hasn't really happened to us recently before. Like maybe our parents or our parents' parents, right?
Starting point is 00:50:34 Of course. But Americans have been pretty insulated and many Europeans as well, actually, in the last two, three, four decades from this. This is something that the average person on the planet has dealt with all the time. Like in the Middle East, look at Lebanon, like, we already have evidence of this. There's a guy who, and you've been to our global Bitcoin summit where we have people from 50, 60, 70 countries coming in to talk about how they use Bitcoin and organized with Bitcoin, educate people with Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:50:58 Last year, he couldn't come. He's from Lebanon. He's the one who founded Bitcoin Dula Bon, which is an educational organization in Lebanon, helps people learn about Bitcoin. He was displaced because of air strikes and stuff like that. Terrible. This year, he's going to come back and he's going to give the keynote in person. And he's got this incredible story of how Bitcoin basically saved his life.
Starting point is 00:51:17 And again, we may not have gone through that dramatic period yet as Americans. And I hope to God we don't, okay? But regardless it's going to be tough. Regardless of whether it becomes overly dramatic or not, forcibly changing the global economic system is, in case of what I'm saying is it's always difficult. It's always going to come at a cost. Even if at the end of the day that our policymakers believe it's actually going to benefit us
Starting point is 00:51:40 if we don't have to import cheap goods from other people and they're trying to flip the whole Adam Smith thing on its head, I guess, a comparative advantage, whatever. They just want the stuff in our country. Fine. Maybe they're right. I don't know. I'd probably disagree.
Starting point is 00:51:51 But it is what it is. I'm powerless over here on that front. What I'm not powerless about is teaching both people about Bitcoin because it's going to allow us to pass through that period of time in much better shape and even maybe come out on top, which is really exciting. So that's what my commitment in it, regardless of what happens in this economic time of turmoil, let's continue to educate people, bring them into Bitcoin, and it'll allow them to have a life raft. Now, of course, people are going to blame it on people. People have already started to do this, if you noticed. Different people are already trying to blame the economic disruptions on Bitcoin, right?
Starting point is 00:52:23 And we're going to see so much more of that in the future. But just remember, it's not the iceberg. It's the life rack. I mean, this system does it to itself. This is an inevitable outcome of a system that goes in cycles. And when you have these different empires rise and fall, and the average person just gets hurt every time, right? Even though they're generally on an upward trajectory, it's pretty brutal.
Starting point is 00:52:45 And this is our way of saying, no, I choose something different where we don't. don't have this like endless, brutal cycle. And when we can all be on an open network with each other and collaborate instead of fight each other, I just think it's very beautiful. Taking a step back as you synthesized all this writing that you've done through the years and pieced it all together into this book, what would you say is your cohesive narrative or like your key takeaway, you know, you take a step back and you look at it and you're like, wow, I wrote a lot here.
Starting point is 00:53:16 There's a lot to all this. What's your so what, I guess, as you look back and reflect on the whole process of piecing it all together? Sure. Well, the book really covers a couple threads. It looks at the rise of the global Bitcoin resistance, we'll say, in all these different countries. It looks at the history of the dollar system and how it got to where we are today.
Starting point is 00:53:37 And then it also looks at the outcomes of that dollar system and what it's done politically to different groups around the world. And I think that, again, the theory of change in the book is stronger than ever now, right? That we have this old system. In many ways, it exploits. It's built kind of on control and it's built on this idea that there should be essentially like a caste system in the world with currencies. And that's kind of how it operates in many ways, in the same way that your iPhone is cheaper
Starting point is 00:54:07 today because we can exploit lower labor, right, somewhere else and cheaper goods somewhere else. Another thing that subsidizes our way of life is this 180 currency system where we have this premium currency we issue and use in our daily lives. But other people use these other currencies. And through the IMF, another bilateral or multilateral organizations like that, we come in and we force devaluations of those other currencies against our currency to make it easier for us to import their goods more cheaply. Yeah. So well said. Good God. That was such an amazing quote. Yeah. Thank you. Well, but it's true, right? And you go back and you look at the history. And now Asia is always interesting to look at Asia because it's a little different than East Asia. It's a little different from the traditional way the IMF World Bank would kind of seek to subsist off of like Latin America or Africa or Southeast Asia or Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Korea, a little bit different ballgame. But you see some of the same things like Japan and the 80s. I mean, everybody should watch Princes of the Yen. It's unbelievable. This documentary for free on YouTube. It's unreal. Princes of the N. It tells the story. It tells the story.
Starting point is 00:55:12 of how did Japan go from the second largest economy in the world in 1980s, primed to overthrow the United States as the world's largest economy? How did it go from that to the loft decades and this incredible crash and kind of just depression? And a lot of that had to do with the U.S. and its allies saying, hey, Japan, we're going to need you to appreciate your currency or essentially we're going to devalue ours against yours and you're not going to have that export market anymore and you're going to have a big crash. And that's what happened. So this is not a conspiracy. You can go look up the Plaza Accords or the
Starting point is 00:55:46 Louvre meetings in the 1980s. And this is what happened. We forced Japan to appreciate its currency. So that's what we're trying to do now with China. Again, history rhymes. Like we're trying to get China to appreciate its currency at the moment. Like as of April 15th or not, they're like, no, we're going to continue to devalue it. And they're going to continue to widen their surplus of exports against us, which is, of course, enraging the current government in America. So there's this back and forth. But make no mistake, our goal is to devalue the dollar against the R&B and to try to, they want to correct that balance. Now, obviously, they're not thinking of it in like a classic Adam Smith way of thinking, because if you did think like that, it's not a problem to have differences in trade. That's actually normal. But they really want to balance everything out, right? So they're going to
Starting point is 00:56:35 try and do the same. So you look at this and it's really a similar game in as much as it's about what is referred to as currency manipulation, right? So usually we want to keep what we call the global majority countries, where the majority of the world's people and resources are. It's often called the global South or the third world or whatever. Usually what's happened is we want them to have weak currencies so that we can get their stuff for cheap. But we want our rivals usually to have stronger currencies so they can't really kind
Starting point is 00:57:06 of compete too well with us, right? So this is kind of the game you see where like the other. quote unquote global north countries. Like, we're always accusing Switzerland of currency manipulation. Like, we don't want Europe and China and Japan to have weak currencies. We want them to have strong currencies so that we can continue to like industrialize and export, but also sort of feast on the cheap currencies of the global south. This has been the game so far. That's such a non-cooperative game. Like, if you really think about it, if the United States had just a Bitcoin standard, none of this stuff would be as relevant. There'd be a much tighter labor market globally.
Starting point is 00:57:39 there wouldn't be a way to come in and just like to value some like an entire country, just overnight, 50%, all your wages are just worth half as much as they were yesterday, all your state is. No, no, no. If we're on the Bitcoin standard, then it becomes different. Like, yes, you can still do tariffs. You can still tax. Like, absolutely, but you can't do these, the funny business with the mass of inflation and currency devaluation, which is so ruinous, I think, for so many. So I think one of the things we're going to regret in 10 years is that we didn't do more now to help expedite the world towards the Bitcoin standard. And every day I'm living with that, I'm like, okay, I want to make sure that I have no regrets.
Starting point is 00:58:13 10 years from now, I want to be like, I'm proud of what I did. Let's move the world as much as possible in that direction as fast as we can. And in the meantime, it's going to literally look like putting out lightboats. Because there's going to be some big stormy seas coming. I mean, we're already feeling it. I mean, we'll see. But I'm, again, filled with so much hope. And yeah, again, the book tells that I get really just sort of triumphant story of how this random software protocol ends up being
Starting point is 00:58:39 relevant in a world of empires. Like, it's really just wild, but it's true. A hundred percent true. We're already at two trillion dollars of value with this peaceful protocol and people from all over the world are adopting it. And it's just kind of crazy. And yeah, I mean, I guess to conclude, there is no greater Trojan horse than getting the issuer of the reserve currency to adopt it. Like, I put up a slide in Bedford of, it's like got Uncle Sam sitting on a branch cutting off the branch. Yeah. Because they don't know. They just don't know it.
Starting point is 00:59:09 And it's like they're unwittingly doing this. And there's a lot of people, I won't name names, but there's a lot of people who are like, oh, like, this will just like strengthen the dollar or this will like strengthen the dollar system. And it's just like definitely not. Yeah, you don't get it. Like you're like that's not what's happening here. There's not going to be this.
Starting point is 00:59:26 Oh, like America's got a lot of Bitcoin and it's using Bitcoin and therefore the dollar will be stronger. Like that's not going to happen. So I appreciate whatever they're trying to do. Fine. Maybe it's some sort of subterfuge thing. I'm not sure. But like, clearly the rise of a new reserve asset is not good for U.S. debt. I just don't get that one. What do you think it's not going to start taking over groceries or dollars? Like, it's crazy to me. But it's kind of the ultimate Trojan horse thing. Like, again, the Trojans see the horse out in the field.
Starting point is 00:59:58 And even though they've got a couple people inside the city saying, don't bring it in, don't bring it in, They bring it in anyway because they just can't help themselves. It looks too beautiful, right? That's the story of NGU and FGU. All these corporations and governments, they're going to meet Bitcoin because of its NGO properties, but you can't separate NGU from FGU. And in doing so, it's going to usher in this massive transformation. So it's very exciting.
Starting point is 01:00:24 What can we say? I will say this. As a person who has studied scarcity now for quite a while, the fact that you have 100 of these is going to, are you familiar with Seth Clarman? I mean, yeah, not deeply, but I definitely rings the bell. So he's a really famous value investor and he has a book called Margin of Safety. And this book is like one of the most sought after books in the value investing space. And the reason why is he did a short run on the book and they don't produce it anymore.
Starting point is 01:00:54 It's just like a, I don't know how many copies. Maybe there's 5,000 copies. I'm looking at it on Amazon right now. Buy it used for $2,500. I think you're going to have a feeding frenzy on this book. But I want to say this for folks that want to read Alex's work and everybody needs to read Alex's work. You can read the portions of this book online.
Starting point is 01:01:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to have links to all of this in the show notes. So if you want to read any of Alex's material, I have books back there and I'm not trying to like brag up. I mean this, Alex. I've got books signed by Ray Dalio, Walter Isaacson, Charlie Munger, other. people that I've just have been fortunate enough to get signed copies. This is an absolute treasure for me. I will truly treasure this, not just because we're close friends, but because of what you
Starting point is 01:01:41 have taught me through the years on how this very complex machine works. And so much of this IMF World Bank, the exporting of dollars, the inflation, and why weren't you seeing it in the inflation, all of that became crystal clear to me because of all your hard work in writing all of this. So when I look at all these books and I look at the ones that are signed and that are personal gifts, this is at the top of the list for me. And I truly can't tell you how much I appreciate what you've done to educate me and other people. And it's just a real, it's a true honor to have you on the show this many times and to have these conversations with you in person and over Zoom. Thank you.
Starting point is 01:02:20 Well, likewise, I learn a lot from what you do. And I have confidence that together we can, again, get a good. as many people on the lifeboats as possible. And hopefully help create a new system. That's what we're all doing. Amen. So super, super grateful for that. Thank you so much, Preston.
Starting point is 01:02:35 And yeah, until next time. Yep. Thank you. We'll have links in the show notes for everybody. And I also have a link to this Princess of the Yen as well. Thanks, Alex. Yes, awesome. Take care.
Starting point is 01:02:44 Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Bitcoin Fundamentals on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, before making any decision consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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