What Bitcoin Did - BITCOIN: A TROJAN HORSE FOR FREEDOM w/ Alex Gladstein

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Alex Gladstein is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation and author of Check Your Financial Privilege, Hidden Repression and The Trojan Horse of Freedom. In this episode, we discuss whether Bitcoin’s adoption by governments and Wall Street threatens its original mission, the Trojan Horse theory of Bitcoin and why nation-state adoption may be essential to separating money from state. We also get into the IMF’s decades-long role in global debt traps, the potential endgame of Bitcoin as a global reserve and debate quantum threats to Bitcoin. FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles & https://primal.net/danny Alex Gladstein: https://x.com/gladstein or https://primal.net/gladstein THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd CASA: https://casa.io/ LEDGER: https://www.ledger.com/ ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/

The people who control the existing system willingly let in the Bitcoin because they see NGU or number go up technology. But what they don't see is that they're empowering freedom go up technology that's inside. A signal of Bitcoin's failure would be nobody's using it. And there is no nation-state adoption. And there is no corporate adoption. And it remains a niche technology with no value that a handful of people use. We're seeing this thing go from a few million dollars to $2 trillion. We're seeing it being adopted by Wall Street and governments.

and at the same time they aren't able to neuter its power. This is how we separate money from state is we get everybody to adopt it. And if you get enough people to adopt it, they'll realize one day that they can no longer print the money in the same way that they can today. It's over for the fiat currencies. People are going to want Bitcoin.

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or harnessing AI compute power, iron is setting the standard. Visit iron.com to learn more, which is iri-en.com. Whether quantum is real, whether it's going to happen, whether it can kind of break Bitcoin is way above my pay grade.

I think it will. I assume at some point it will. It won't break Bitcoin. Well, it'll mean those addresses can have the... There will be vulnerable addresses. Yeah. What do you do with them? Exactly.

That's the interesting part. Or do you even presume that you can do something with them. So why do you say that? Because I presume you can. Well, the two sides of the debate I've seen so far are, don't do anything. Let the quantum attackers take the coins and distribute them back into the economy. Yeah.

The other side says, no, we shouldn't allow people who develop a completely unrelated technology first to just enrich themselves in that way. Yeah. And, you know, we need to basically create a fork scenario where after a certain date, those coins are unspendable. And the argument there is basically that, hey, those people have already decided, well, they've either lost their keys or, you know, they're going to be victims in some way.

Yeah. And the other side of it says you can't tell the difference, obviously, between someone who's just saving for a very long time and inactive and someone who has lost their keys, you can't tell. I think it's fascinating because I think there's good arguments on both sides. But I do think it's becoming really obvious and clear that at some point, some set of Bitcoin, maybe a couple hundred thousand or maybe even about a million Bitcoin will be vulnerable in this way.

Yeah. You know, in as much as they won't move to safe addresses and they'll be vulnerable. And I guess the question is, who do you think the attackers would be at that point? Well, probably nation states and large criminal, you know, or, large criminal enterprises, right? Yeah. So they're going to get all that. Now, I'm personally, I think I would tilt towards sort of the don't touch, let's just let them go.

Because I think they're just going to sell them back into the economy. And I think that's okay. What are they going to do? It's not like they're going to huddle them. Yeah, exactly. So I think they were discussing on this show. It was like on the Bitcoin Optech Review. It was interesting.

But it was basically they were talking about Parker Lewis's position was kind of the one I just laid out where it's kind of like, well, let the attackers go for it. Whereas I think a lot of developers are saying, no, we should make those coins unspendable. So I think that's going to be a big conversation. But it's sort of interesting. Like, I don't know. At the moment, I don't feel super strongly one way or the other. Like, I just, I'm going to be curious to see how it plays out.

Yeah. But it's definitely going to happen. My, that's clear. That is clear. My kind of visceral reaction to it is we have to, you have to. not touch anyone else's coins. And so when I was speaking to Odell, I kind of made the analogy,

which he said is a horrible analogy. But I think I kind of convinced him a little bit. What side is Adele? We didn't really get down to which side he fell on. We just kind of laid out both sides. But I think there is a pretty clear comparison between the Dow hack and what potentially would happen here.

Oh, interesting. Now, like, for me, I don't think you can touch the coins. I think that has to be just accepted that they're stolen. But the really interesting part, I think, is with all the new players that we now have in Bitcoin, like Sailor, BlackRock, they're almost certainly, I think, going to fall on the side. You're saying forking to make them unspendable is sort of like rolling back the chain. I think there's an analogy there. Yeah, I think there's something loosely political about it that I don't like.

I like the fact that Bitcoin's apolitical and that we can't really mess with it. And this seems to just kind of cross over that line. You know, it's making a decision about a particular set of UTXOs, you know, without the owners getting to weigh in. And I'm not that comfortable with that. No. And I understand it's not great if like a couple large nation states and criminal enterprises or whoever's going to have access

to the fastest, best, quantum, basically, is going to take those couple hundred thousand or million coins, which in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, whenever this happens, is going to be enough to buy like an entire country. That's going to be an enormous amount of wealth, right? But, you know, I don't, I think there may be something poetic about some of those lost coins coming back in.

And I just, right now I'm on the side of just kind of let's see what happens and let people secure themselves if they're able to. And that kind of fits with the opt-in nature of Bitcoin. And I would hate to see someone like, like think about someone who's, I don't know, like for whatever reason in a coma or tapped out or frozen or, you know, whatever. And they have their coins, though, but they can't move them. And we're just going to delete those coins from the UTXO set. I don't like that. So, so, so I don't know, but it's a fascinating debate. Yeah. It's, we're like, what's interesting is we're obviously

a ways away from it. But at the same time, it's like going to become a pretty clear debate, I think. for sure. And I think like it seems to me that that's, I can't see a way that that's not a violation of property rights if you do that, even if you think you're doing it with good intentions. Yeah, because like think of it this way. You know, Saylor has said he wants to burn his coins when he dies or whatever. I don't know if he's joking or not, but that's what he said, right? Okay. And he's, he's kind of, I think, going along the lines of what Satoshi said, which is that it's a gift to everybody else. So you're going to undo that? That's not, that's, that's, that's also a violation of property rights.

Like what if people have chosen to burn coins? A lot of people chose to burn coins for one reason or another. So you're gonna undo that decision for them. So that seems also. That's interesting. Yeah. So I don't love the, we're gonna make this decision for everybody else and sort of the new Bitcoin is going to not recognize those coins.

I'm just, yeah. And I guess Parker makes an economic argument that it's better, in an economic sense to, to allow the coins to circulate again. I haven't dug too deeply into that, but it's just fascinating. So, you know, this is going to become a major topic moving forward.

Very quickly. Like by this summer, it's going to be, everybody's going to have an opinion on it. Yeah, I think so. It went from, like, nothing to, like, all of a sudden, everybody's going to have an opinion on it. Yeah. And nothing really has changed.

It just people have become more aware. So it's like a six-month thing. Literally last fall, there's nobody talking about this. And by next fall, everyone will need to have an opinion on it. Because that's what big blocker or small blocker. And the funny thing, are you confiscate or not? Because Peter Wola, I mean, who's one of the most decorated, obviously, developers ever in Bitcoin history, he said, of course we have to confiscate them.

So there's already some really strong opinions. If I was going to bet on it as well, I think I would be on the side that would lose in that scenario. I think the most likely scenario, at least right now, and this will massively change, I'm sure, is that I think confiscate probably seems to have a bigger kind of sway. So confiscate. Yeah, I think so.

But I think it's like they are, that the confiscate side is gonna really need to get the majority of the opinion because that's a much bolder action than to just let it be, right? So the confiscate side is really gonna have to get get massive consensus to win. Whereas the other side simply can play a kind of like, you know, like let chaos rain and debate and argue

and just kind of drag it out, you know? Because they'll win if nothing happens, they win, right? The narrative is the confiscate side is the one that has to do the change, right? But the narrative on the confiscate side, I think is an easy narrative to sell to most Bitcoiners. Because I think a lot of Bitcoin is that are- What do you think all these Wall Street people,

like, like, Saylor, he's basically already said as one of the largest holders and more powerful people in the ecosystem, right? He's already said he wants to burn his coins. But I guess my point on the narrative side, though, is that I think most people in Bitcoin still just want number go up. Oh, okay, I see.

And I think the narrative on that side is stronger if you confiscate because you're not putting a million coins or whatever it is back into circulation. Yeah, I mean, it is true that, yes, you're gonna have a bunch of coins being sold. The price will temporarily go down for sure. But I guess I'm... Are you going to be not okay with that?

I mean, that's just part of, I guess, part of what end up happen. I mean... But you're certainly not a number go up maximalist. That's not all you care about here. Well, but Parker is, kind of, right? He's arguing that it's better for the economic value of the Bitcoin network long term. But I think Parker's a better thinker than the vast majority of Bitcoin is. I think he's thinking of second, third order consequences of it.

Not immediate consequence of it. Yeah, I just don't love the idea of getting political and having a small group of people decide what to do. That sounds like Ethereum. Exactly, yeah. So it'll be fascinating. But anyway, that's not what we're going to really talk about. But I do appreciate getting to chat a little bit about it at the outset.

It's definitely interesting. But I want to talk very quickly before we get into this about Bedford. Bedford was great. It was incredible. Thank you for, we're having us. Well, thank you for putting on such a cool. We had like over an hour of just HRF programming. Worked well.

One of the coolest things that came out at the conference is that article in the Bedford Independent. It was so cool. So this is obviously like small local media. But he wrote an article basically saying, this conference changed how I view financial freedom. And he, I think he probably, by the sounds of it from the article, he came in thinking this was going to be a load of like Bitcoin bros. And he left with a whole new perspective.

Yeah. Well, I think to credit you guys, and especially the way you laid it out in the program, because it was about an hour, right? But you made it look like more than an hour. Well, you had a lot of stuff. The program, it was like, it looked like a small chunk. in the morning, but it was probably like two hours.

And then it was like a small chunk in the third part of the program, but it was really probably an hour and a half. Yeah. And then ours was bigger format-wise, because we had so many people. Exactly. But we liked that format. It's a nice format we've been experimenting a while. I'm talking about a four-minute talk, basically, where in an hour you can go through a ton of content.

So we essentially had, yeah, I mean, I gave like a 20-minute talk to set the stage, and then we had, I think a, we'll call it a 15-minute fireside with like four people. And then we had a whole bunch of four-minute talks. And then we had a closing fireside, I think, of like 12, 15 minutes. But we managed to go through like a dozen or even 14, 15 different perspectives in an hour. And I think people like that. So it's good content.

I would encourage more people to steer that way, which content generally. like four minutes is a great short talk you can work on it you can convey an idea that's very powerful and the audience will learn something you know whereas you don't need a 45 minute talk necessarily four minutes

to demonstrate an idea is pretty good and I think we should be going more towards talks generally in conferences than panels I mean as a conference organizer has been doing this for almost 20 years like I understand the desire to do the panel is because you can fit all your friends or sponsors or whatever. Just like, we got to fit people here.

And it can be okay if the moderator is really good. Yeah. Like, but you have to have, but usually they don't practice. It's not like people view a panel as something you can just stick people on if they're not ready or willing to give a talk. But I don't think that's smart because, you know, at the end of the day, it should be practiced and considered just as thoroughly as a talk if the panel's going to be good.

And usually what happens is like the people meet backstage. They haven't practiced. They haven't done a phone call really. And they're just like, oh, okay, let's hang. And it's not that high impact, right? I feel so seen. Yeah, no, but I've done this. Like, again, I've made this mistake many, many times.

So we've kind of come around to the idea of like, we want to do fireside chats, which are ideally two or three people max. Yeah. Where the moderator has worked closely with the interviewees and knows what they're going to say. And it's powerful. and four minute talks. Or we have a 12, our other 12 to 50 minute keynote talk.

So that's what you're going to see from us. But thank you for letting us do that. And yeah, obviously there was an impact. A lot of people were moved by it. Especially that journalist in particular said that his opinion was completely changed. So thanks for letting us partner on that. And we're going to do more.

You know, the day before we had launched this thing in London called the Bitcoin Humanitarian Alliance, which I've been talking with, friends about for years. Because in our work at the Human Rights Foundation, we've been seeing Bitcoin rise as a humanitarian tool. And yet there's just not that much recognition of that in the media, right?

In the mainstream media. Or even really in the Bitcoin media, to an extent. So what we did is we went to the frontline club, which is awesome. It's like where Julian Assange would leak stuff and announce things. And many, many, many other very famous war reporters and investigative journalists. very decorated place you can fill the history in there it's really cool and there's just these awesome photographs and signed pieces by all different kinds of historic figures inside and uh we

launched the bitcoin humanitarian alliance which you can check out at bitcoinhuman alliance.org and it's basically 12 organizations to start which do different things around the world ranging from like the civil liberties stuff that we do to um save the children is involved to a group that spreads classic liberal thought in the Arab world to an environmentalist group in South America. So just different groups doing different things from a human rights or humanitarian perspective. But we all use Bitcoin operationally. And meaning we really use it. Like we receive it for donations. We hold it. We spend it. We allocate grants in it. We do payroll, et cetera, et cetera. So we all got a chance to talk to the audience about this and explain what we do. And the room was completely packed.

standing room only and there were tons of journalists there and policymakers and it was a great launch and then we just kind of got on a bus and went straight to bedford which was that was the party bus i saw that turn up and there's just like 30 bitcoin is piling out of this that that was fun so then and then we tried to rip what we did is we gave everybody who spoke very briefly at the press conference in london you know a little bit longer to talk about their work but no it was great and you can tell um that people people liked that i was looking at some of the feedback and i think I think you guys did a good job designing a really nice balance of different kinds of content that appeals to the average person. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

It's interesting that you say, like, the media is not covering this side of Bitcoin, and even like Bitcoin media, probably not enough. Do you think that's starting to change in like the classic mainstream media, though? Because I saw recently the BBC went out and visited Gridless in Africa. They did a pretty pro-Bitcoin. That was awesome. Well, we can thank Ian Burrell for that. He's amazing. Who came with us on the track in Africa.

Yeah. A year and a half ago. I didn't know he was involved with that piece though. Well, he, well, no, because he wrote the original piece in the media on what they were doing in unheard. Yeah. And then that was what sparked the economist piece. And that's what sparked wider interest in gridless.

I see. And I think we could credit Ian and something. I mean, obviously we have to credit the gridless team 95%. Yeah. If you're going to credit anyone else, it'd be Ian because he helped mainstream media start to understand how fascinating. and transformative it was what they're doing there and then i think that led eventually to more media coverage and they were on npr bbc it was amazing yeah in fact the guy who wrote the piece for

the bbc was in the room with us the alliance oh cool and now he's interested in this side of things i gave him a quote we'll see what happens see if there's a story but it's like um it was really interesting um he asked me which is which is actually germane to what we're going to talk about uh i think he asked me does all a lot of the Wall Street adoption of Bitcoin and the nation-state adoption of Bitcoin betray the freedom, money, value proposition that you guys were speaking so passionately about on the stage.

Because he saw us talk about how Bitcoin's a liberation tool, how it's peer-to-peer cash that can empower people. And he's basically like, isn't what's happening in Washington and in Wall Street betraying that. And I, of course, told him no, that this is part and parcel of what's going to happen. along the journey and that, you know, oh, and he was asking about the danger of centralized exchanges in KYC. And I was like, well, we don't really touch that infrastructure with activism.

We teach a very peer-to-peer way to use Bitcoin where we're not entering our personal information to some giant database. We're doing real peer-to-peer movement of value pseudonymously through the Bitcoin network. People are not using finance or Coinbase or whatever when they're doing the kind of work that the activists are doing. And I guess in general, my thoughts to him are like,

it's way easier to actually do this today than 10 years ago. For sure. Way easier. It's way easier to use Bitcoin is free to money today than 10 years ago is the point. Way easier without a question. And people are like complaining and I get it. Like, well, what about the strategic Bitcoin?

Bitcoin Reserve and micro strategy risk and BlackRock and Ibit. And this is also concerning that all these huge institutions are getting into Bitcoin. But it's kind of like, to me, it's like a manufactured concern because the reality on the ground or on your phone or on your computer is that it's easier to use Bitcoin as freedom money than it was 10 years ago. So how do you explain that? If you're trying to argue that it's corrupting Bitcoin in some way or betraying its value, set. Show me the evidence. There is none. It's actually way easier to use today. And that's because the value's higher. It's more widely accepted. There's a bigger network effect. There's more people who've come into the field to a graphic designers, or Ux designers, or product designers,

because of the higher value. And it's just like this feedback loop that keeps going and going and going. This episode is brought to you by River, the best place for Bitcoiners and businesses to buy Bitcoin. With River, you can set up zero-fee recurring buys, making stacking effortless. And while you're waiting for the perfect buying opportunity, River lets you earn daily interest on your cash balance paid in Bitcoin, which outperforms most high-yield savings accounts. What really sets River apart is their unmatched dedication to security. You have peace of mind knowing the River has monthly proof of reserves and holds all Bitcoin in multi-sigold storage. And with US-based phone support, you'll always have someone ready to help. To open an account,

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I also want to give a quick shout out to the Human Rights Foundation's Financial Freedom Report. This is their weekly newsletter that drops every Thursday and it covers how authoritarian regimes use money as a tool for control and how people are pushing back against that using privacy tools and of course, Bitcoin. It's an amazing newsletter, it's pure signal, and you can subscribe for free at Financial FreedomReport.org.

That's interesting, because I think they're really important questions that he asked you. And especially... Great questions. Yeah, and especially on like the nation... I think what you're saying there, you may be able to convince me on my actual stance on this here,

because in terms of whether the nation state adoption actually threatens some of the kind of principles of Bitcoin, It's something I've been probably annoyingly on the fence about because I don't exactly know. I see the concerns on both sides. Totally. So maybe we should start by getting you to give a high-level overview of you the talk you did in Belfthid.

And just to finish the last piece, let's credit Gridless for starting to get some of these journalists interested in the humanitarian human side of Bitcoin. That narrative is very strong. And it starts maybe with the environment piece, with the mind. which is fascinating. Because at the end of the day, electricity is human rights. If you don't have electricity, you don't have freedom.

So I think it makes sense that it starts foundationally there with the work that like groups like gridless are doing and you're gonna see a lot more of that. And that's where the journalists might start to be like, oh, that's kind of interesting. But to your original point, you still very, very rarely see a story in the media about Bitcoin being used for human rights, for activism.

There's very, very few in the mainstream media on this almost none recently the only one i could think of recently was when the ukraine war started there was a lot of talk about yeah yeah there was a lot of talk about that and that and but it's like that that hasn't gone away in fact that that those use cases which has gotten even stronger and the ability to send bitcoin into war zones and to help people where no one else can is unparalleled to doing it myself the other day it's just like amazing how easy it is and you know so the point is we did the launch and I think it did well and and now there's a resource for any nonprofit around the world that wants to get more involved in Bitcoin they can contact the alliance we can put them in

touch with one of the one of the experts in the alliance and people can start to do more you know it's our goal at least at the human rights foundation last year we onboarded close to 200 movements and civil society organizations and human rights groups worldwide amazing this year we want to get to a thousand so we're on our way and i think that's significant because it's it's it's not like you're just onboarding a person each individual taking one of our webinars for example that we do every quarter that are free and online or doing a private training with us um teaches then their group which might be 10 people and might be a million people i mean some of the people we work with are part of enormous national organizations right so it's it's it's quite exciting um

I mean, I'm not going to name names for different reasons. Some of these organizations are funded by millions of people who subscribe to them. And those people may not have a particularly positive viewpoint of Bitcoin right now. So some of these groups are not going to be public about how they use Bitcoin. I can imagine the kind of groups you're talking about. Yes, but I can tell you that these are brand names and they're using Bitcoin. You know, not Greenpeace. Well, actually, probably Greenpeace.

Yeah. Maybe Greenpeace in India. I mean, but groups like that are using it. It's just you might not hear about it, and that's fine. There's no, no, who cares? It's not needed. The important point is they're realizing it's the best way to move money or value from A to B. But yeah, so I gave this new talk at the conference, which coincided with the publication of a new book that I have.

That's, you know, it's not a widely available one. We made it. I worked with Skyler Westby. designer. He's amazing. And he did this beautiful anthology of all of my writings. And we called it a Trojan Horse for Freedom, which is one of the chapters of Check Your Financial Privilege, a book that I came out with and was writing in 2019, 20, 20, 20, 2021. It came out in early 2020. So three years ago, it came out. But the original essay was written four years ago in early 2021. And the idea of the original essay was that Bitcoin was a Trojan horse for freedom,

just like the original Trojan horse was a subtle way that the Trojan, that the Greek forces could gain access to the city of Troy, where brute force didn't work. So we go back to the slide roundabout way, quote, I think it was Milton Freeman. He said that, you know, basically the Fiat credit super system that emerged after the night. 1960s and 70s that is taken over the world with all of its different arms, the Euro dollar, the Petro dollar, all these different things, you're not going to defeat that by force. You're not going to defeat it in a brute attack. It's going to have to be a sly roundabout way. I think it was Hayek. It was Hayek. Okay, you're right. You're right. It was Hayek.

So sly roundabout way is Bitcoin, right? So my thesis was, and of course it was inspired by writings that had been on Bitcoin talk a decade earlier. people had been playing with this idea. But I tried to put it into a framework of, again, just like the Greeks, it's impossible for them to take Troy. So Minerva implants this idea in Ulysses' head to build this massive horse and leave one soldier behind with this beautiful thing in the warfield outside of the city.

And the Trojans looked at it and they were like, well, that's kind of cool. And a couple of the Trojans were like, no, no, no, no, this is obviously a trick. Don't bring it in. But they were dismissed. and they brought the horse in. And of course, at night, the Greeks come out of the horse

and open the gates and the army that was hidden, you know, comes inside. They take the city. So it's an example of how something can use trickery or subterfuge to win as opposed to just brute force. So I think that Bitcoin is a Trojan horse for freedom in as much as the people who control the existing system willingly let in the Bitcoin

because they see NGU or number go up technology and they're greedy or self-interest which is totally fine, I understand why. But what they don't see is that they're empowering the freedom go up technology that's inside. That's the thesis of the essay, and we turn that into a book that includes a bunch of stuff from Check Your Financial Privilege

from my second book, Hidden Repression, where again you're gonna see this, like basically that the IMF and World Bank system it can't be defeated in a war or whatever. It only has to be a slide roundabout way. And I do think that way is going to be Bitcoin, because people can peacefully opt out from that system today, whereas they couldn't before.

Like if you were in the 1980s and you were being structurally adjusted in one of these countries, and your wages were crashing, and you were over time able to buy with your hours of your labor, even though you were getting maybe more efficient at your job, you were buying less and less rice or milk or wheat or whatever, or certainly gold or real estate, with each hour of your time.

because of these structural adjustment policies. This is insane because the technology you were getting paid in, the wage technology was being crushed. Today you can escape that. You can convert your wages into Bitcoin, and over time, they can become stronger in terms of purchasing power. So there's a way out there, and then I also included some other essays,

but we basically packaged this thing up, and then we use some of the imagery that Skylar created to do a, a, a, a, a, presentation at Bedford. So it was the human rights paradox of nation state Bitcoin adoption was what I gave the talk on. And again, we begin with the idea of separation of money and state. Hey, isn't this what we were going for? What's the deal? Why are governments getting involved? This is sketchy. I'm worried. This is what people are talking about. That's probably the thing that I've been most of them. Yeah. And what the funniest thing to me, and we made a

cool chart of it. It's like kind of how the arguments have changed over time. At first, people were like ignoring Bitcoin and they're like, then they're like, this is not going to work. And then they're like, well, it's too slow or it uses too much energy or whatever. Finally, they're like, no, governments are just going to ban it. Okay. Now the worry for a lot of people is that governments are going to adopt it, which I just find hilarious. Like, okay, so, and then at the end you win, you know, sort of like the thing. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you end, right? So it's sort of the idea.

So the point I wanted to try and make is that you can't have a technology like Bitcoin that you believe will eventually be peer-to-peer money for the world or some sort of savings technology for anybody and choose who uses it. Its power is in its permissionless nature and its failure to be able to describe. That's its superpower. And I'm sorry, but there's just no world where Bitcoin becomes like a dominant global currency where large institutions and nation states don't adopt it. And my point is that almost this is sort of, if there was, you know, a plan, there's obviously no plan,

but if you look at Bitcoin like an organism that's growing, this is part of how it grows because it basically takes over these large institutions and, and, you know, and transforms them. It's kind of like, I don't know, I mean, I guess, you know, calling it like a virus is not the ideal metaphor, because I'm- That's pretty good. But because it's, or a fungus, right?

Because it's a positive thing. When you think about some of these fungi that take over insects, right? And then you see like the skull break out, right? Some people eat those in tea, by the way, the Tibetans, it's kind of interesting. Corticeps. It's the plot line for Last of Us, right?

Many of these, you know, zombie thrillers. But the point is, that's what it's doing. It's taking over the institutions and transforming them is the idea. So it's like a freedom virus is the idea. So my point is you're not, I'm sorry, but there's no world where Bitcoin does really well. It succeeds. And it's wonderful freedom technology for cypherpunks. But nobody that you don't like is allowed to use it.

Of course, this is money for enemies. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So my point is that this was always the plan, or at least this was always the way it was going to go. If Bitcoin were to succeed, it had to be adopted by nation states and it had to be adopted by institutions. It was the only way you can't get from here to here

without it in the middle happening in some way. So while I don't necessarily think we need to sit here and cheer individual actions, we do need to recognize that this is a symbol or a signal of its success, not its failure, a signal of Bitcoin's failure would be nobody's using it. And there is no nation-state adoption. And there is no corporate adoption.

And it remains a niche technology with no value that a handful of people use. That would be a pretty good signal of failure, right? That's not what we're seeing. Like, we're seeing this thing go from a few million dollars to two trillion dollars. We're seeing it being adopted by Wall Street and governments. And at the same time, they aren't able to neuter its power.

That's the key, right? So if we're sitting here and it was impossible for me now to send you, Danny, a peer-to-peer payment with Bitcoin where someone could selectively see that I'm making the payment and say, I don't want Alex to do that and they could censor it, okay, then I would agree we've failed. But that's not at all what's happening here. In fact, far from it.

I know we have our issues with mining centralization, which we're actively trying to work against at HRF and other things, but that's just not the world we're living in. Like, not only can I send you an on-chain transaction where no one can stop us, partly because they don't know it's us like that's the beauty of the permissionless part of it unless i literally pair my real world my real world identity with an on-chain address they don't know and even if i do do that they can only make assumptions but if we are just

doing like a cash trade i mean they have no freaking idea who we are you know but that but that's not even counting all the new technology that's come in e-cash i mean even just take something like the aqua wallet which you know i think is is a work in progress but I mean you can like send on-chain Bitcoin there and swap it into liquid Bitcoin and then send it to someone on Lightning I mean it's just like there's all these swaps involved where it's not possible to tell what's going on right

and that's not even talking about e-cash you know you can go to boardwalk cash now send a little bit of Bitcoin and create a perfectly private bearer instrument currency that then you can trade around so I think clearly privacy tech has improved so much in Bitcoin versus 10 years ago. It's actually usable on mobile devices, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I'm excited by the fact that even as we get more global adoption, this thing's power as a freedom tool continues to grow. And I would need to see a serious decline in people's ability to use this thing as a freedom tool for me to admit that my thesis was wrong. Yeah. So my thesis, again, is that Bitcoin's a Trojan horse for freedom, that there is no real paradox of nation, state adoption from a human rights point of view. It's kind of a false paradox.

This is how we separate money from state is we get everybody to adopt it. And if you get enough people to adopt it, they'll realize one day that they can no longer print the money in the same way that they can today. So I put up a slide at the end of my talk of Uncle Sam, symbolizing fiac money creation from central banks and he's sitting on a branch of a tree and he's sawing off the branch that he's sitting on so this is the idea like they're like the trump administration is establishing an sbr i mean regardless of how much bitcoin they have where they're getting it from how big it is it doesn't matter like that's clearly not good long term for the idea of the dollar

as a money and a savings instrument anyone who says otherwise is just fooling themselves they're like, oh, this is going to be good for the dollar to back it with Bitcoin. What are you talking about? Like, this is them giving a jolt to a competitor. I would agree a self-inflicted wound. Why are they doing it? I'm not quite sure, but I think it's great.

Like, you know, the idea that you should be, I mean, from a pure perspective of we need to get to a world where people are able to use Bitcoin as their money to be their own bank, to do transactions, to pay merchants. even to pay taxes. You need to recognize things like the SBR and nation state mining adoption and corporate adoption as part of the road to get there.

Yeah. It's it. Let me lay, I want to lay out some of my kind of tentative concerns, but before I do that, one thing that I think is really interesting is the supply schedule of Bitcoin plays exactly into your thesis, I think. The fact that by the time we had like real Wall Street adoption ETFs a little over a year, ago. We had 15 years to front run this thing with a massive amount of supply. I don't know, 85% of the supply was already there.

Close to, yeah, more than 90 now, right? More than 90 now, yeah. So I think that's really cool in terms of like promoting this grassroots adoption. But one of the things that I think hasn't sit perfectly with me is the incentives behind the US doing this. And let me explain why. So when El Salvador did it, they had like first mover advantage. The incentive for them to do, that's pretty clear. Like they were at the whim of the fair. but with none of the kind of perceived benefits of the Fed. Yeah. On like the Bhutan side, a relatively poor nation with tons of hydro, mining made perfect sense for them.

Yeah. What my concern with the US doing it is I don't exactly know their incentive for doing it. And it's now becoming part of like the geopolitical game. So even if like long term, I would probably agree that this is, I mean, it's certainly inevitable. It's probably going to be a good thing for Bitcoin. Yeah. It's like what happens in the interim while they're kind of like toying with this as a geopolitical thing. It's hard to know.

It seems like a lot of people at the top of the administration don't know the difference between Bitcoin and crypto. Just like Miele, obviously in Argentina, has no, can tell you, he has no idea. I mean, he thinks any private money that's outside the state's control is great. He doesn't care if it's the worst shit coin in the world. He's happy to smile and take a picture with it.

I mean, yeah, seriously. It seems like people at the top of the Trump administration get the difference in the same way that a lot of like influencers on crypto Twitter seem to get the difference. Whereas right now, and you're kind of in this crazy bear market for altcoins, but Bitcoin as of our recording is at almost $89,000,

you know, extremely bullish Bitcoin, right? But very bearish on some of these altcoins, which are below their 2017 highs, right? Or at least way below their 2021 high. Even Solana, which is considered like, you know, the best performing major altcoin at this point, is that like what? It's like 120 or 130.

I don't even know. It's peak was like way, but it's, no, but its peak was way beyond 200. And then you put it compared to Bitcoin, it's even worse. Right. No, no, no. All of these coins have done poorly over the last cycle compared to Bitcoin, which surprised me.

I think, I thought it was gonna take a couple cycles, but I mean, I knew they were all gonna go to zero against Bitcoin, but it's just a question of, it's been kind of surprising to me to see the separation in the last few months. And I think that colors the market, that colors the commentators, the pundits and it colors the government.

You know, let's say, so you've been placed as David Sacks has as like the AI and cryptos are. Well, really like when you remove Bitcoin, what are you really the sorrow? But I think they were confused. I mean, look, this is one of the sons of Trump was pumping Eath at the beginning of February. So anyone following his advice has lost like half their money,

which is pretty crazy. Yeah. So clearly like, I think the people on the inside didn't really have, they weren't on the same page on this. what they had was a bunch of Bitcoin that was what that they had from confiscation. So there's moral issues there. And they were basically going to say, I guess they didn't lose anything by saying,

we're going to make this a reserve. But they were getting pushed in that direction by so many people. But people have to realize that's the product of democracy. Like, you can't, it was really funny. I think someone on Twitter the other day was saying, you know, the US dollar was doing so well. Like, why did, you know, if it hadn't been for the Trump administration, and the tariff thing in the Mar-a-Lago Accord,

the dollar would be just as strong as it was before. But you can't say that. They are a product of the system, right? So politicians are a product of the system. They're connected to the economy. If you have enough inequality, and if you have enough real wage loss over time, people get pissed and they elect populists into power,

whether they be right-wing or left-wing. You're either going to have a Bernie Sanders or a Trump. You're going to have someone who's going to say, say, I'm going to fight for you, and I'm going to take back what they took from you. One way or the other, whether you're coming from this kind of more nationalistic, a nativist point of view, like Trump, or more of a socialist point of view, where it's a class war thing. It's either, you know, us versus them, you know, foreign versus domestic, or it's an us first them, class war thing.

So it's really clear that when economic conditions become difficult over time, over the last hundred years, when inequality is the highest and when the average person's doing relatively not as great as they were in the previous cycle, populism gets more popular. You can just see this. It was really popular in the 20s and 30s.

Now it's getting popular again. It was not popular in the 50s and 60s. So it's really interesting to watch this. But the point is that the politicians are like a product of the system in many ways, right? So in that sense, yeah, I mean, the system in the Bitcoin space is that they're reacting to is that, yeah, Bitcoin is taking this sort of surprising, strong dominance in the Bitcoin crypto dominance indicator stuff where a lot of these coins are just clearly going to zero. And I think people are starting to understand that.

I don't think we're out of the woods yet, clearly. I think there will always be cryptos in as much as there are penny stocks today that people love to trade and mess around with. there's always going to be that. But I think the, you know, maybe the age of like, oh, here's my token white paper. I hope that's over. I mean, I don't know if it is, but I mean, the world coin might have been the last big,

giant, unbelievably crazy scam, you know. I don't, I mean, you know, I say that and we just had a Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump and Melania scan, you know. So I want to, you know, I want to say we're moving in the right direction, but we're not out of the woods yet, right? The scams have changed, though. Like, the, it's gone from the,

They're more obvious now. They're more obvious, yeah. I think the big change will be when the VCs in Silicon Valley realize that Bitcoin's the only thing to care about. But they can still see if they can still eke out their kind of... Time to liquidity kind of. Yeah, if they can still dump on the market even a little bit, they're still going to do it.

So even though obviously nobody actually thought Melania coin was going to be worth anything in the near future, there was an ability to create Melania coin and have a seniorage, essentially. like create it for cost of X and dump it for cost of Y where Y was higher than X and take the rest. And people are going to do that until that

gap goes away. And it may never really fully go away, right? So I think you're always going to see that stuff. But I think, again, the games have changed a little bit as you point out. It's no longer like, oh, yeah, here's our new cryptographically secure privacy token that you need. Let me explain to you in seven white papers

why it's important. It's like Pikachu is our protest. Yeah, no, now it's like fart coin. Yeah. Like, you know, it's not important cryptographically, but like, eh, you know, maybe people will ape into it. So we'll see. But I do feel like there's this moment where the government is starting to grasp that

Bitcoin is different. And that's a slow thing that the whole world is going to go through that, right? And the only way to, in many ways, the only way to go through that process is to burn your hand on the stove, right, which people have done at all levels. I mean, a lot of these corporations that now have Bitcoin stuff, they lost a lot of money on all coins at one point or another, right? So, you know, I guess we'll see, but I mean, to your point about the concerns, like, you know, in what is driving these people,

I certainly don't think they understand that Bitcoin could, I don't know. So Luke Grumman has this interesting thesis that he thinks what we're going to do is kind of, tank the market a bit, tank the dollar, tank treasuries. This is all happening, by the way, as we speak, right? I mean, the Dixie is like in the 90s, like it's plummeting. Tank general economic activity

happening, check. Check all these boxes of his thesis, which is why it's interesting. And get China to buy gold, lots of gold happening, and then kind of rug them with Bitcoin, which is a very interesting thesis. I mean, I think you would see the price go like,

that kind of buying of Bitcoin would, I just would imagine would be putting us into the triple digits solidly. But I have no idea, you know. So I don't think we're quite there yet, but it's an interesting thesis. We're just going to rug China with real gold, with digital gold as opposed to the analog kind.

Let them buy all the analog gold, go for it. And then we're just going to pump Bitcoin. That's what he's basically recommending we do. Yeah. Which is really interesting. If there was one person that I thought would have a plan like that, I could believe that the Trump administration would go for it. Yeah, maybe.

The problem that I have with that is I'm with you in that I don't think the Trump administration truly understand Bitcoin. So I don't think that's maybe likely. But I hope it is true because that'd be amazing. What timeline. But with the, like, BPI, I've done some amazing work in terms of getting good information to the Trump administration. A lot of their work has come down to Bitcoin actually,

solidifying the US dollar. I don't know if that again is like another Trojan horse really just to get big. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I'm not, I don't get that one. But what I do appreciate what BPI's doing is they are helping the government understand the value of Bitcoin. But at the same time, they are unapologetically pushing for one of the few groups pushing for the P-to-P private nature of Bitcoin. Yes. Like they're, they have a fund you can donate to to help the samurai case, for example, which is one of the most important cases right now in the world for Bitcoin. which is the ability to, again, use open source software that allows people to achieve privacy in Bitcoin.

And currently, under the previous regime, the US government was going after these tool builders, like the blacksmith in a stabbing, right? So if I make a knife and you stab that person over there with it, in today's criminal justice system, I don't get in trouble. Because I made a knife and I'm selling them for you to cut your meat with and chop up bread. Yeah.

what the U.S. government was trying to do was go after these tool builders and try to tar them with the crime. So ethically, this makes no sense at all. Legally, I mean, you know. So thankfully, it seems like we're moving in a better direction. Okay, so Phoenix, which is a wonderful lightning mobile app

that I recommend people check out. They're back in the U.S. now. Yeah, they left the U.S. a year ago, which was scary. And a lot of people are like, well, they shouldn't have left. Whatever. That's not my decision to make. I don't work there.

I don't have, you know, there are a lot of personal concerns that come with like this. And we're seeing these concerns now. And they're a French company that... Yeah. Like, if the developer of that thinks that he may get in trouble with you,

like, I understand the decision. Well, they may have employees in the US and look what the Trump administration is doing now with like foreigners in the US. Yeah. It's crazy. So I get it, but the good news is they're back, meaning they've deemed it safe to be here,

which is wonderful. I think America should be a safe place for people to develop freedom technology. And I think PPI is pushing for that. Yeah. which is super commendable. Now, at the same time, they are engaging in the U.S. and teaching them about the value of it.

You know, I don't know. I mean, if you look at the monetary history piece, like, I guess there is a world where maybe it makes sense that, so we went from a gold standard to a dollar standard backed by gold, to a dollar standard backed by nothing. Well, really oil, but, you know, no gold at least. It makes sense that we would go from pure gold to dollar backed by gold to just pure dollar, maybe to dollar backed by Bitcoin, and then eventually Bitcoin.

Now, people should note that the dollar backed by gold standard lasted for about 15 years. Like, basically, it was sort of, it was kind of like proposed. And what I mean by this is like government settling dollars with each other instead of gold. So like previous to like World War I, you know, obviously there were fiat currencies, but governments didn't settle with those fiat currencies. What was promoted after World War II in 44 at Bretton Woods was the idea of settling in dollars, not settling in gold, settling in dollars. So all of a sudden you had this massive exportation of dollars to the world.

And countries were settling their trade balances. with each other, buying and selling things with dollars. So that really took a little while to get implemented. So it was 44. So it was really the early to mid-50s when it was actually being used and implemented. And it started to break down in the early to mid-60s, and it was completely broken by 71.

So anywhere from 15 to 20 years is how long the dollars backed by gold actually lasted, right? So maybe we could expect something similar where policymakers try to recognize Bitcoin's value and maybe say, hey, we're going to back our current with it. Maybe that's what they're doing. I mean, maybe they actually believe this. It's clearly not going to last very long, though. Because why would I want your dollar backed by Bitcoin when I can just have Bitcoin?

With gold, it was different. It's just completely impractical for you and I to do transactions, especially in the modern age with gold. For sure. It's a rock. And even back then, it was not that practical because we had the telegram, we had the phone, we had the airplane. I mean, what are you going to put something on a boat and send it to Europe? It's ridiculous. And they did, they did try. The French tried to take their gold back from America in the summer of 71, one of the things

that precipitated, you know, the Nixon shock. But this idea that gold was going to be, the currency just was never workable. Like Lynn Alden does a great job explaining this in her book, like the scientific evolution of money. Like gold was like 100 times, 100 times going to lose to Fiat just because it can't teleport, among other reasons.

But now that we have this other system, why would I want your... It's kind of like, why would you... You know, why would it Bitcoin who understands Bitcoin truly and deeply? Why would they want MSTR or like Ibit? Now, maybe they're forced to have some for tax reasons or something like that, maybe.

But like they want self-custody Bitcoin in the same way that like everybody else is going to want that too. The micro-strilege you want maybe is a little different because it's essentially like leverage, sure. But like as far as a long-term savings play, Correct. Meaning if you have like your family's wealth

and then you have like maybe some money for speculation, yeah, maybe you play with the derivatives with the speculation. But you shouldn't be putting all your savings or reserves in MSTR. That's not what it's for. It's literally as Saylor says, it's to basically gamble with the price of Bitcoin.

You can get a lot more volatility out of MSTR than you can't have spot Bitcoin, right? Now, Ibit might be slightly different. because of laws and regulations, it's hard for institutions to just like custody Bitcoin themselves. Maybe it's even not permitted by their board or whatever. But guess what, they can buy Ibit?

So we're going through a little bit of a transformational phase there. But the point is, there could be this interregnum where it's like, okay, maybe some fiat start to essentially have a reserve of Bitcoin and try to base their fiat on that. But it's like an asset liability mismatch in the end. And it's like ultimately, like it's like the terra luna thing it's like eventually it doesn't work if you have bitcoin and dollars

and most people have studied this understand this doesn't really work so maybe it can last for a while and maybe we will have an age of like governments holding bitcoin and still using their fiats who knows how long that will last but at the end of the day uh it's it's like the you know so so you kind of have the gresham's law thing now right where Generally speaking, I know it's not a perfect reading of Gresham's law, but you get the idea, is that the bad money drives out the good. And this comes from the age of kings and coin clipping, where you'd have circulating metal money in society, and the devious king would clip a little bit of the gold or the silver out of the coin

and have it reforged and pretend, you know, and not say anything about it, recirculate it. People aren't dumb, they would weigh it, and they would realize the heavy, one is worth more and they would save the heavier ones and they would try to spend the cheap ones, right? Because it was all nominally the same. Okay. Well, same thing today. Like, nominally, you know, one dollar of Bitcoin might be worth one dollar of paper money, but people aren't stupid. They're going to save the Bitcoin and try to spend the fiat. Now, eventually you get to a different economic paradigm, which is the tiers law thing, which is that the good money drives out the bad completely. And that's what happens in dollarizing.

countries, right? So it's, yes, it's true that people in Venezuela want to save in dollars. But guess what? The merchants don't want the bolivars. They want the dollars too. So they're not going to allow you to pay in bolivars. No, take your wheelbottle somewhere else. Give me dollars. So once merchants and maybe tax authorities at some point demand Bitcoin, it's over for the fiat currencies. People are going to want Bitcoin. Now, maybe those are, maybe those are Bitcoin denominated credits, maybe. Maybe that's something like e-cash or even some sort of government-issued fiat credit or whatever.

But they're not going to want a dollar, they're not going to want a fiat-denominated thing, is my point. And that's where we kind of would eventually go to is my sort of general, I think, thesis. So maybe there's this, yeah, maybe there's this time where you have both. You know, fiat's backed by Bitcoin, but eventually people are going to be like, why do I, I would I want that? You're going to have to pay me a lot more, you know,

meaning if I'm a merchant and I'm going to sell you something, there's a lot more risk involved in a credit instrument of Bitcoin than just the pure thing. Especially considering at this point, it would most likely be a hyperinflating fiat currency as well. Well, or just like the risk of having a not the real thing. Yeah. I mean, we see that in e-cash.

Like, I think E-Cash is in a wonderful technology. We're happy to support it. Like, you should never have more than like a few hundred bucks of e-cash. Yeah, it's suspending wallet. Yeah, because you can get rugged, even in the fetidment variety. Harder to do so, but you should never treat any sort of e-cash type thing as a replacement for

like hardcore Bitcoin. Now, with things like Arc, it gets interesting where lightning is real Bitcoin, right? Where you have unilateral control over it. You can't get rugged really if you're using lightning properly. Now, if Arc can do the same, thing and we're going to see because it's coming into production there is more interactivity with arc and some other things but essentially it promises some kind of trustless way to use bitcoin that's

cheaper and faster and more private even than lightning right so maybe even better for for purchasing things well that gets really interesting so we'll see but i'm talking about credits so like side chains things like liquid things like e-cash um obviously custodially generated derivative like I bet company shares that are basically shares of companies holding Bitcoin. You know, I understand the leverage plays, but eventually you would think that those things would trade at a discount to the real thing. I mean, we'll see. You do see that already in a way with like fully non-KYC private Bitcoin,

it tends to trade higher than normal Bitcoin. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. So I think maybe once the market sort of figures this out, which they haven't yet, obviously. I think that that may make sense. Just think about it. You as a merchant, like in 20 years,

like, are you going to want... I can say, hey, Danny, I'll pay you in this kind of sketchy derivative of Bitcoin or I could pay you in the real thing. What are you going to be like? I'll take the shitty derivative. No, I would have to pay you more. Of course.

Right? Like, you're not an idiot. So it's just going to take a while, but that's kind of where we're going, I would say. This episode is brought to you by CASA, the leading Bitcoin self-custody solution. I've been using CASA since 2019 and I can't recommend them enough. CASA have options for all Bitcoiners from a 2 of 3 multisig to a 3 of 5 and a private client option for absolute best in class security.

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that I think fits into it very closely is like the stable coin side. Just quickly before we get onto that, though, earlier you were talking about the IMF and World Bank. You obviously wrote a book on the IMF. What has to happen to kind of new to those organizations? Like, at what point do they become less, I guess, what's the word, kind of pervasive in what they're doing?

Well, I mean, look, these institutions, which exist to enrich the creditors at the expense of the borrowers, both economically and politically, that's what they've been doing for 50 plus years, as I outlined in my book. They basically take advantage of other countries and their resources. And it's usually a small group of advantage of advantage. rich countries taking advantage of what is called the global majority or the global majority of people and resources live in a certain number of countries,

often called the global south, the third world, etc. I think Bitcoin changes that eventually by just bankrupting that way of doing things. That way of doing things is fully financed by Fiat, where there's this currency-cast system, and basically credit money can be issued more cheaply more cheaply by rich countries, and it can be sold essentially to poor countries at a much more expensive rate, locking them into an ever-increasing debt trap, where these countries borrow

in dollars, essentially, or maybe like euros or even R&B, depending on who's issuing. and then the other country's currency performs way worse over time but they can't pay back the loan in their own currency they have to pay it back in dollars and what's more they need dollars for everything else in the world they need it to buy energy they need it to buy fertilizer to import grain to buy heavy machinery to advance their civilization to buy any kind of new power systems nuclear etc etc etc etc

so what We have a situation today where some countries can print the money to do those things, a very small handful. But most countries cannot. Most countries have to acquire those dollars elsewhere. And they can do that in a few ways. They can borrow them from like the IMF or whatever, which causes them to have to change their political system, usually in a not so great way for the people who have to live there. I mean, they can issue bonds on the open market, but those tend to be like, especially now not that well subscribed.

I mean, who's going to want essentially international junk bonds right now. For some people's, it's completely impossible. Like, who would buy a Palestinian bond? It's not, it's not, clearly that's not going to end well. You know, you could insert the name of any other sort of more country in a difficult situation. Yeah, one of the countries, who's going to buy Malawi bond? No, they can't even issue them. And one of the countries in the book that you talk about is Bangladesh, and like, no one's going to buy a Bangladeshi bond.

Yeah, I mean, it would just be like so, they would be so little demand for it, so cheap. So if borrowing is a bad idea and private market, borrowing's not really working very well, well, what can you do? You can do trade with countries that have dollars to earn the dollars. And what they end up doing is transforming their countries and their economies, Bangladesh is a great example,

to making things that we want instead of things that they need. So that's the way the system works now. So if we had a Bitcoin standard, this would start to break down. Because countries like Benchletish is, Bangladesh could harness their significant abundant renewable resources to mine Bitcoin and to generate a marginal amount of Bitcoin that they could use unilaterally without asking permission from anybody to whatever it is they need to do buy oil. This is my thesis that in the future oil exporters

will accept Bitcoin. And maybe they need to buy machinery. My thesis is that like Boeing and like these large industrial giants will accept Bitcoin. And at first, their jurisdictional, like, overseers will say no. Like, at first, the Trump administration would probably be like, no, we don't want you to accept Bitcoin Boeing. But guess what? There's a massive lobbying system. And Boeing is going to lobby and bribe its way to be able to accept Bitcoin.

So it's like the system works against itself in this way. It's like sawing the branch off, basically. So eventually, you know, a country like Bangladesh can with Bitcoin. buy what it needs. It can even borrow in a less kind of a permissioned way. It can have some collateral to do stuff with. You know, one thing is borrowing from the IMF. Another thing is using your Bitcoin or your potential Bitcoin reserves

that you're going to mine in the future with as a bond of some kind. So I think there's just going to be way more ways for these countries to develop. I think that breaks the system. That's what breaks the system. And it starts to transfer that economic activity to a new. system. But that takes place gradually. But it's very clear to me that that's a possibility. I mean, we already know it's a possibility for the individual or for the small organization. If you're Bitcoin native, you can't be structurally adjusted. Period. You have escaped.

Your wages are safe. So the question is, can the whole nation escape it. And I think it can. It's just like, it's going to take time. I think, like, because obviously one of the dynamics here is they can't pay back the initial loan. So then they have to take a big a loan of which a portion of that is used to pay back. the initial loan. Yeah. And so this is debt trap. But this is enforced by the different currencies.

Yeah. So, but you have to understand, like the Egyptian leaders, they have dollar access. They just borrowed a billion dollars or two or three billion dollars that they used to buy things on the international markets. But the people of Egypt don't have dollars. Of course.

In fact, it may be even illegal, like in Ethiopia, it's legal to have dollars. So they force you into their crappy local currency and then they devalue it and devalue it and devalue it. So you get poorer and impoverished, right, over time instead of getting richer and more advanced, which is what we should be getting, given deflationary effects,

Jeff Booth, technology, all this stuff. Fiat breaks that ability for the country to progress along with technology. It robs people and it impoverishes them. So that's only possible because we have this, whatever it is, 170, 180 currency caste system. That wouldn't be perfect in a Bitcoin standard at all, but it would be much more tightly connected

in terms of wages in different countries, in terms of capital flows, in terms of country's ability to make decisions unilaterally without having to ask permission from their bigger neighbors. It definitely smooths things out. And I think that's, you know, my evidence there is based on, again, it starts grassroots and grows bigger. It's already making it way easier for individuals

and families and small businesses to opt out completely of the old system. They can earn in a new technology. They can send and receive permissionlessly. They can mine. they can transform the energy around their property into this thing. They can even now start to borrow against it. They have financial markets. That's amazing.

So the question is, does that continue to advance and progress and sort of metastasize into a nation-state level transformation? And I think it will over time. Yeah. The other interesting part of that is, like, if you use Bhutan as an example, now I don't know if they take loans from the IMF, but just in this scenario, I assume they did. Yeah.

Like, because they're mining Bitcoin, which is hard money that can't be debase, that goes up in value, they also are less likely to fall into the debt trap because they have that to fall back on to pay off initial loans. Yeah, maybe. I would have a question for you as well on El Salvador.

It's interesting, just on that note. I mean, I think Bhutan did not necessarily want to disclose its plans at first. It was Celsius. They were leaked in a case, and all of a sudden were like, people are like, wow, they have like a billion dollars with Bitcoin or whatever.

Because they still do, borrow money. Like again, we're in this transitional time, this interregnum, right, where the old system is dying, but the new one can't be born yet. Yeah. That's a quote from Gramsci. So it's like, old system's dying, Bhutan is still on the, you know, still borrowing, but, you know, they're starting to participate in this new system. But it's not super clean yet. You know, it's going to be a little rocky. But unquestionably, they're in a much better position today. Of course. We've looked at Norway. Norway started a sovereign wealth fund. In the late, 90s that was worth a couple hundred million dollars today it's worth a couple trillion dollars so and

their currency is still collapsing imagine if they hadn't done that now now we're talking about an opportunity today in 2025 for any nation to do what Norway did now Norway has a sovereign wealth fund today that is the equivalent of like 300,000 dollars per citizen it's crazy you know there's all that math making fun of people for saying oh this is going to be 100 000 per person no no this is real if you divide like trillions by Norway's small population, you get like $200,000 per person. Now, that's because they were very smart. They invested very carefully. Hey, they even have some micro-strategy, apparently.

So, but, you know, they took their oil wealth and they did something smart with it instead of, like most dictators do, just blow it. It's funny that you say, imagine if they didn't do that. Because I think at the time, I don't know if when this exactly was. But the UK did this. So the oil in the North Sea, Norway took it and then, like, created their sovereign wealth. the UK sold it straight away. Well, the UK's becoming a developing country. It's true.

I mean, you can feel it. It's pretty crazy. Now, Norway may too, but like the point is normally would be doing way worse if they hadn't done this. But now you've got a chance for any country to copy the Norwegian model where you could expect similar returns, I think, over the next 30 years

with a Bitcoin-focused strategy. So Bitcoin's the 85K today. Okay, so you went, you know, I don't know. I think over the next 25 to 30 years, Bitcoin's going to do really well. and countries will be able to follow that strategy that made Norway like a global superpower,

basically, even with 4 million people. With El Salvador, they've obviously had a back and forth of the IMF over the last few years. The IMF has kind of imposed, I think the IMF said they can no longer buy Bitcoin, but they have been buying Bitcoin. Who is this, like, which side of this is breaking?

Is it El Salvador's kind of Bitcoin thesis? Or is it the IMF's... Well, you can tell that the IMF does not like Bitcoin. Yeah, that's the most clear thing. There's a whole unit of people now we know at the IMF, because if you read that paper, it is crazy how many times Bitcoin's mentioned. I mean, there's clearly like a whole unit of people,

a research team that's like, oh my God, we have to like stop this out. Yeah. So I think the IMF's concerned, I think from El Salvador's point of view, I mean, remember, they're a small country, they're not an economic powerhouse. I think the Bitcoin thing was helpful for Buckele

certainly still is. Now he's kind of shifted into the, prison thing that's his new thing he's selling instead of Bitcoin it's he's selling hey we'll take your prisoners and we'll see I mean certainly something I've been critical of but me too and people don't like crazy but but hey I don't think they're really that compatible like prison industrial complex in Bitcoin aren't they supposed to be like different but hey you know you do you but the point is that I think that he just had to take the IMF money I mean it's it's

it's too easy and he's gonna have to now comply with certain things that they want and maybe he's made that decision but it's like several like i think it's a couple of like a billion dollars or something it's a huge amount of money for a small country maybe it's just too tempting uh so maybe even the the you know you know this person who many thought was this hero of bitcoin while they're having they're having a hard time so it's not going to be an easy transformation at all my point is it happens slowly over time and you're seeing you know glimmers of it now for sure you know to the point of i always look at alan farrington's essay like what would it seem like if we did have an open source decentralized neutral currency go from zero to

reserve currency status well it would look a lot like this right it would look like it would start really small and very niche and only on certain message boards and among tiny little communities it would grow and it would grow into real world applications like the silk road and other stuff right then it would continue to grow and it would be volatile but over time it would grow to retail investors in a particular niche market. Okay, that was the 2017 cycle. Okay, then it would, you know, maybe crash, but then it would go and grow again,

and it would grow into institutions, and you would have mass media coverage. Then it might crash again, last cycle. But now we're seeing, okay, now we're getting nation-state adoption, the reserve currency issuers literally stockpiling it. Like, now we're getting even bigger. So each cycle, it just is going to get deeper and deeper and more kind of ingrained and entrenched.

And I just, that's, what would happen. So it's like we're watching it. It's pretty cool. And to my point, the reason I'm excited is, again, it continues to be so powerful as a freedom technology. I wouldn't be excited if it wasn't.

So regardless of the nascent state adoption, I think people need to understand that the freedom aspect of it is like so powerful right now. Yeah. It's funny on the freedom side. Like I've got criticized a lot for my takes on Buckeley. I don't understand how Bitcoin is can be so pro-Based Buckeley, he's done some great things.

I'm sure he's made El Salvador a lot safer, but how they can get behind the idea of imprisoning people because they have tattoos who haven't been charged of a crime is mind-blowing to me. It's just a trade-off they're making, and I disagree. I mean, you know, if you sacrifice liberty for security, you get neither. I guess they disagree. You know, it's very clear that Buckele has secured the country

through deals with the gangs, so negotiating with the bad people. We'll see. We'll see how long that whole. holds up. There's a reason to believe that it's not as pretty as people think. I've talked to folks who are outside of the main areas, you know, of the city, and it's pretty rough. There's, there's violence and stuff outside of the Potomacan village that you get, if you, if you land there and you go to Bitcoin Beach and some of these towns on the beach, and then you fly out, it's like, you're, you're kind of protected. In fact, there's a lot of, like, apparently, especially recently,

there's a lot of um uh like national police presence and and security presence along that corridor uh but there's other places in the country that apparently are not not doing as well so i don't even know if the the the the description of the country is this like peaceful paradise is even true but but but even if it was i mean they've turned it into a crazy police state where people just get picked up off the street by roving paramilitary type vans of unidentified people in black clothing like that's insane yeah that's certainly not for you um well it's happening a little bit in the u.s too on certain people so i mean i read this i mean look i try to remain optimistic and i try to like focus on what i'm focusing on but some of it's a little distracting like i read this post yesterday

or the day before of two people from maybe not australia but from new zealand and they're like backpackers and they port of entry was hawaii they were just coming here just to tourism and they had they they got into secondary, probably randomly, whatever. But like as far as, if we're talking about racial profiling and people targeting and being worried about like Palestinians

or folks from the Middle East or from Muslim countries, okay, fine, that's one thing. These are like white people from New Zealand, right? Okay, so they get into secondary. And then they made the mistake, I guess, of saying they do some online freelance work.

so then things got really intense and they accused them of trying to work illegally here and they were said the ice people were like you're inadmissible you can't come here so they're like okay we'll go back to New Zealand like okay the flight's tomorrow so they imprisoned them for a night in a jail they strip search them is freezing they didn't have anything

they were like chained up and shit wild wild like these are just tourists so and again not like the reason that's wild is that could so easily be me. Yeah, well, they didn't, they didn't have, like, a freaking, my point is, they didn't have a Palestinian flag pin on or whatever. These were just random people from New Zealand.

Yeah. So it's like, and maybe there's more to the story, but this shit is happy, you can see it. People are starting, so, but this is part of the plan of the current administration is to, it's just a shut down foreign investment, weaken the dollar, and bring back the manufacturing to this country. And in order to do that effectively over a short-ish period of time,

you need to weaken the dollar. So like there's a guy, Fed guy, Joseph. Yeah, yeah, so he's really good. So he's pointing out, like, I think Lucas as well, everybody's like freaking out, oh my God, look, Trump's crashing the economy. No, no, no, he's trying to do that. Like his economic team wants to do that. They want a weaker dollar so that they can build stuff in America.

Yeah. It's kind of like finally the structural adjustment thing coming home. It's like, well, how do you export more? You have to have a weaker currency and you have to cut government spending. That's what they would do to these poor countries. So they're kind of trying to do it here. And it's called austerity. And Americans are going to maybe feel it. We'll see. They seem super intent about doing this. That's why, you know, he wants to get rid of Powell right now. As we speak, there's a fight between the president and the Fed chair, which is supposed to be independent, by the way.

And even if like, so with that Trump's obviously trying to find a way that you can fire the dollar more. He's trying to get it to cut rates. Of course. Trying to say there's no inflation. And he's going to find a way to fire Powell. And that position is just going to become untenable. So either way, Powell is not going to be that. He's continuing to centralize power around this idea. But this is their thing. They want to make stuff here. They don't want to rely on foreigners. They want reduced foreign flow, generally

speaking, and they want more indigenous stuff happening, like, you know, from our own country. And, you know, like, I may not agree with it, but like, I think people are making the mistake of thinking that it's chaos and they don't know what they're doing. No, they know exactly what they're doing and they're trying to achieve. And they've told you as well. Yeah, and they've told you repeatedly what they want to do.

They want a weaker dollar. And, you You know, we did this in the 80s, right? So Japan was rising power. It was the second largest economy in the world. We were terrified. People were terrified of Japan taking over and beating America, basically. So because we had the upper hand in terms of the military control in that area and our bases and everything, we had essentially helped rebuild them after the war, we were able to bring them to a table. You can look this up, the Plaza Accords, the Louvre meetings in the mid-80s.

And we were able to get them to appreciate their currency against the dollar, right? and that meant they were no longer able to export so easily. And it basically crushed their economy and led to a massive stock bubble crash and the lost decades of Japan. They never recovered. So that's what we did to them and we're trying to do that to China right now.

That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get China to appreciate its currency against the dollar or we're trying to weaken against them. It's not as easy though because we don't have the ability to just force them to do what we want. We don't have military bases all over China. They're a sovereign entity. So it's a little trickier.

And China's basically saying, hey, maybe we can do this longer than you can. We're not a democracy. We can starve our people for a long time. So we're going to see. It's kind of like a game of chicken in a way. But this administration's made it really clear. Like people should not be surprised or like chaotic or like, we don't know what's going on. No, no, no.

Like they are trying to reduce the dollar. They're trying to make it cheaper in wages and resources to build here. And, you know, I don't know. I mean, like short term, obviously the tariffs don't make sense in that respect because they make things more expensive here. But in their mind, that's the only way to do this. So it's interesting.

I think a lot of people who voted for that party did not expect this, I would say. A lot of people on Wall Street who just want their stocks to go up. They voted for Trump because they thought Kamala would be bad for the stock market. They're in for a very rude awakening, right? It's like pretty funny.

The thing that does seem clear, though, is that Trump's probably not going to allow the stock market's a language for too long. Like, he's going to try and run it hot into the midterms. To be fair, in six months or ten months, we could be looking back at this being like, we'll see. But right now it looks pretty serious.

And structurally, it's changing. Like there may be nominally the stock market may recover, but of course you know what that means. Bitcoin will go crazy. So we're seeing gold have its moment right now, right? Well, I mean, just wait until Bitcoin has it. It's pretty crazy to see this stuff happening. But, you know, hey, maybe Luke's right.

Maybe we're about to rug China. I hope so. That would be hilarious. I mean, I think what will happen is gold's going up and then Bitcoin's going to have a huge leg up. And then it'll be hard to dispute his claims, you know, basically. But it's a fascinating thesis. We've only got 20 minutes left here. So I want to make sure we touch on the stable coin piece.

So again, like the Trump admin, it has a kind of clear objective, I think, with stable coins too. I was in D.C. for the policy institutes thing a few, maybe like a month ago. And Paolo was there. first time he'd been in the US. He's obviously very close with Lutnik, so I'm sure he had some assurances of coming here and not getting black bagged.

One of the things that really shocked me, though, I've said this over and over again on the show, but it was really surprising to me is just how quickly tether is growing. 150 billion. onboarding 250,000 people a day. Yeah. It's wild.

So one of the big questions I would have around that is, is that slowing down Bitcoin adoption? Yeah, I don't think so. I don't necessarily think someone who uses a dollar stable coin would have used Bitcoin. I think they're slightly different, let's say product market fits. If anything, maybe you could argue someone who's used a stable coin on like a MetaMask wallet or even on an exchange is more likely to adopt Bitcoin than someone who hasn't. I don't know. I'm not sure about that claim. Yeah, I'm not sure.

what I would say is that like stable coins without question are entrenching the new system expanding it giving it a new way to grow in a risky time like the new system or the old system because it also strengthened the old system yeah okay that's what I mean sorry the the dollar fiat system is finding a new way to grow with stable coins so palo himself said the other day on on Twitter like this is expanding dollar hegemony yeah well he's being very clear about it like that's what they believe. So they're trying to pitch themselves as a dollar hegemonic tool to the US government.

And I think US government's gonna like that. They're gonna say, hey, this technology is expanding dollar hegemony and it's a massive buyer of our debt at the time when we need buyers of our debt, right? So we'll see, maybe they aren't out a deal. But I think people need to be, it's very important that you understand and differentiate Bitcoin from stable coins. Bitcoin is building a new system.

There was a wonderful, framing of this the other day. I should actually just, I should read it to you. Yeah, yeah. Something that Jack Dorsey posted that I thought was just extremely on point with regard to stable coins.

So I'll read this. So basically Jack Dorsey asked chat GPT to talk about Bitcoin versus stable coins. And the conclusion is that stable coins are useful, but dangerous if they dominate. They repackage fiat fragility in crypto form, offering short-term convenience but long-term control. Bitcoin is volatile, yes, but it's the only apolitical, incorruptible, borderless base layer monetary system humanity has ever had.

If stable coins dominate, financial freedom dies quietly. The dream of an open, decentralized world is smothered by convenience and compliance. If Bitcoin prevails, sovereignty becomes a default right, not a privilege. The monetary future becomes a shared protocol, not a leveraged empire. That's amazing. Yeah, like, no, like AI is getting to the point where it can really enhance your viewpoint. I don't think it's necessarily that helpful if you have mediocre content to put into it. It's not going to like turn you into an amazing content creator, but you know what you're doing. It's an incredible tool right now. We have our own program to help

activists and nonprofits really supercharged by using AI. I'm really excited about that. But on the stable coin part, it's, I think it's true. like this is pretty black and white here like stable coins again are an extension of the current system of control of all the currency caste system stuff of dollar hegemony and and bitcoin is a completely different paradigm that promises an open borderless a political world where you can't be discriminated against i mean we'll see how far we get on that promise but that's the promise so i think it's super important that we just sort of discriminate these two things um this is why the Human Rights Foundation has Bitcoin education and Bitcoin courses.

We don't teach stable coins. Yeah. Now, we empathize and we will show you how to convert your Bitcoin into it without giving up all this personal information to some giant corporation if you need to. And we're even interested in ways to achieve a dollar price kind of hedge using Bitcoin natively. Is that like stable channels online that kind of thing? sort of thing. I mean, we're interested in it. I mean, it just seems so difficult for it to ever compete with the traditional model. But even those are still, again, supporting the system

in some way. Yeah. So I think, like, at the end of the day, it's important to just, you know, the real goal is Bitcoin is P to P money globally. The real goal is essentially, you know, what Ross Ulbrick built, but globally, like that we can all commerce with each other, regardless of who we are and that we can in a non-discriminating way have access to a global marketplace to trade, interact, etc. So that's what the Bitcoin ecosystem really needs to be about, I think, is this peer-to-peer ecosystem of growth and people buying and selling things with Bitcoin. For sure. Yeah, so that's what I'm very committed to that.

So with Tether now, obviously Lutnik's in the Trump administration. Sure. Canter Fitzgerald hold all of Tethers reserves. Yeah. Tether obviously went through a lawsuit again in New York. Do you think they are at least somewhat in the pocket of the US? And do you think there's a real threat that they kind of become the de facto CBDC? Yeah, I don't really understand the stable coin CBDC thing.

Like, CBDCs are issued by directly by government. Okay, so like... That's a very important part of a CBDDC, maybe. Private Bank Digital Commission. Well, then how is that different from a visa card? Well, I guess if they're in the pocket of the... government, the US government dictates what they can do. That's the case for Visa today. True.

Like, the reason why stable coins are different is they don't require ID. That is why they're valuable and popular. And that's what makes them a humanitarian tool. And that's what forces us to empathize with the users of them. If you're in Lebanon or Turkey or Nigeria or Argentina and you're using Tether, I totally get you. I understand. I just, I hope you're aware that what you're doing micro,

maybe that you need for your family right now, it's going to contribute to more pain in the future. Yes, it's my point. Now, a lot of people don't have the privilege of thinking long-term, so I get it. It's a complicated topic. But at the end of the day, the reason why they're useful is they don't require K.YC. The moment they get, quote-unquote, CBDC, right, they would require full biometric identification to use. And they would be freaking useless.

It would mean that they would no longer be able to be used by the refugee in Lebanon or the, you know, black market business in Nigeria or the person trying to get away from the tax regime in Argentina. These would not work anymore. It would require your name and all this other information and like the U.S. government would be aware of you and be able to cut you off and tax you and all these things. So I don't agree at all with the like stable coins are going to be the new CBDC thing. It makes no sense. If they do, then they go to zero, they don't go to zero, but they lose massive amount of their value if they become more like traditional fiat money, meaning more KYC. But in no way, I mean, they don't resemble CBDCs at all. Like CBDCs are issued directly by the

government, A, which tether is not, and which even circle with all of its ties to the U.S. government apparatus is not. And B, their whole premise is full tie to your ID stack. So I just don't see any resemblance at all between the two. Ultimately, the game for the U.S. government's going to be, how long do we promote this technology that we can't really control, but it benefits us? So we'll see. But right now, it seems like Paulo's coming back, like, they're doing meetings. Like, I wouldn't be shocked to see this thing grow to 300 billion or even a trillion dollars

in the next few years. Yeah. It just, you got to know that the moment they impose shock on, shock on K.C on the system, it just becomes a whole lot like useful for like a lot of people. And especially people in developing countries or activists or whatever, it would just become immediately not useful. So back to your timeline. If we go through a period where it's like Bitcoin plus Viat,

that's where stable coins fit. And then eventually we're going to be. Yeah, eventually the stable coin is going to be like a BTC, you know, like eCache type credit. Yeah. Right. Of Bitcoin. And that's a great question for the future, right?

In 100 years, will everybody be able to access Bitcoin as freedom money or is it only going to be affordable to some people? And that's the long-term question. 100%. That's what we're going to be looking at and focusing on for sure and thinking deeply about that because that's important. That's the number we need to pump. Yeah, and like, look, even if it's only available for a few hundred million people,

it's way better than today. Or like a tiny fraction of that can actually have real money or whatever. But, you know, again, the U.S. is only 4% of the world's population. So, this is what I was talking to Adele about. Basically, that was the whole premise of the conversation is like what percentage of the world

will be able to use Bitcoin as free-downy. Oh, interesting. And he kind of threw out 5% as a number. He said maybe that would be high. But even though that seems very low, it's a lot of people. It's a hell of a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, again,

I think there's a world where it's way more than that. It depends. If stuff like Arc works, it's really exciting. It doesn't even require a major change to Bitcoin. It could just, you know, maybe. But we'll see. see. I also think that like because of to loop it back to the beginning of our conversation today, I think Bitcoin thrives partly because it's programmable. Absolutely. That's,

that's, that's, it's, uh, one of its superpowers is it can adapt and evolve, right? And it's going to adapt and evolve in some way to, uh, overcome quantum threat, right? We don't know exactly how. We'll see. Um, but I think that is going to open the door a little bit more for some of these other changes. I think that that's going to be something that is helpful. Like there's some real serious things people want to do right now with Bitcoin that that would allow it to be more usable as money for billions of people. Whether it be with CTV or any of their tweaks people are presenting. You know, I'm not, I don't have a personal stance on any of them at the moment. You know, we did some research into cross-input signature aggregation, which is really interesting.

That does a different thing. But I mean, there's a bunch of tweaks people are proposing. But I do think the inevitability of having to change Bitcoin potentially, or at least having to roll out a new set of addresses, which would be a soft fork, right, for quantum, I think does probably help lead the way for some of these other changes. Yeah. Because maybe they get packaged together. So we'll see.

But the exciting part is Bitcoin can change. The gold cannot change. Eventually, we're going to find that asteroid in the outer space that has all this gold, and gold's monetary premium is basically just going to go to zero, right? For like a space-faring civilization, there's no, gold does not have the same value

as it has today because there's so much gold in outer space, right? Bitcoin can evolve where gold cannot, right? And that makes it, you know, someone was saying the other day, it was a great take. Maybe we closed with this, but they were saying, you know,

man created Bitcoin and can destroy it. man can't create, man didn't create and cannot destroy gold. End of story. There's some gold bucks in this. And I'm kind of like, my response was, man can definitely destroy the monetary premium of gold and is going to do so. You watch. All we have to find it.

Yeah, I mean, well, not only forget that, I mean, even if we don't find the asteroid of gold, Bitcoin is going to demonetize gold over the next several decades. Yeah. It's just without question. So it's funny because you want to, because this. person is wanting to think of it like that like oh it's like a natural thing we can we absolutely can destroy the monetary premium of gold i mean destroy is probably the wrong word obsolete is probably the word yes we will obsolete gold as money as savings technology it'll still be used for you know industrial uses

religious uses cultural uses but like no one would seriously saving it for like 20 years as opposed to bitcoin i don't think so so i guess we'll see yeah um but it'll be it'll be interesting to see how things shake out But anyway, yeah, more bullish than ever on Bitcoin is freedom money, despite all of the adoption from big, bad actors. And I guess I would say partly because of the adoption from all these actors that we don't like. I think that's partly how you have to see Bitcoin's success. You're measuring it by how many people that you don't like are using it.

And for a lot of the cypherpunks, a disconcertingly large number of people that they don't like you're now using Bitcoin. But I think that was always the, it was going to happen. It's beautiful, yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for this, Alex.

That's been great. Awesome. Great to do it in person. Yes. Where do you want to send anyone? Tell everyone about HRF. Yeah, I think for now, hey, we have the Oslo Freedom Forum

coming up soon. It's going to have a killer freedom tech and Bitcoin program. It's in Norway, so you have to go there. But tickets are available. You have to apply to attend. But I would encourage you do that if you're interested

meeting some awesome really high signal bitcoins. It is unfortunately not by our choices during the Bitcoin Vegas conference. So this is more of an appeal to folks probably in Africa, Asia, Europe, who may not be going to Vegas, but that's happening. And then our newsletter really is what I would recommend people check out. It's going to have all the information on our events, on our webinars, on everything we do. It comes at every Thursday morning, the Financial Freedom Report. you can sign up at financial freedom report.org.

It's a killer product. I spend a lot of time with it every week, and I'm very proud of what the team puts out there. So check that out. We're more than, I believe, 75 weeks in. Amazing. We haven't missed a week. It's a great newsletter.

Thank you, Danny. Appreciate you. So thanks again for having me on. No, I appreciate you. And it's one of the only newsletters that I actually read every single week because I get so many of them, but it is very good. So go and subscribe.

Thank you, Alex. It's been great. All right, dude. Thank you.