Alex Gladstein - Bitcoin Obliterates Financial Privilege & Is A Trojan Horse for Freedom

Full transcript: Alex Gladstein on London Real

2:34 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is… This is London Real. I am Brian Rose.

2:46 Yesterday is Alex Gladstein, the Human Rights Advocate, Lecturer, Author, and Bitcoin Evangelist. You have served as the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation for the last 15 years. Much of your work focuses on connecting dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, technologists, journalists, and policymakers in an effort to promote free and open societies. As an educator, you’ve spoken at universities including MIT and Stanford, while also advising the European Parliament and the U.S. State Department.

3:14 Your views on human rights and technology appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. In your latest book, Check Your Financial Privilege, you argue that anyone born into a reserve currency, like the euro, yen, or pound, has financial privilege, and you describe Bitcoin as a Trojan horse for freedom, which offers the opportunity of a lifetime for human rights activists.

3:35 Brian Rose: Alex, welcome to London Real.

3:36 Alex Gladstein: Thank you for the generous intro.

3:38 Brian Rose: You’re welcome. It’s great to have you here. I would love to jump right into financial privilege, because I think it’s something that you articulate very specifically that I haven’t heard from anyone else. And it actually quickly reminded me of a couple video clips I saw coming from Omaha, Nebraska at the latest Berkshire Hathaway meeting, where we saw, you know, Charlie Munger, I think he said, quote, in my life, I try to avoid things that are stupid evil and make me look bad in comparison to someone else.

4:04 Bitcoin does all three. And then of course, Buffett chimed in and said, if you told me you owned all the Bitcoin in the world and you offered me for $25, I wouldn’t take it. And, you know, I’ve been involved in the blockchain space for a few years. And sometimes it’s hard for me to watch these kind of financial professionals just not even engage with this new protocol. I’m just curious, how do you view those statements and how do you view it through a lens of financial privilege?

4:30 Alex Gladstein: Just disconnected from reality. You know, the reality is something that is obscured from most Americans and Europeans, Japanese, folks in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, people who have a strong currency at home, which might inflate, but not usually, until about a year ago, not usually in a noticeable way in modern times in the last three, four decades. You’re kind of insulated from the abuse of monetary policy and you are privileged by the kind of like this deep global architecture of the world, which is still built in kind of a colonial way.

5:13 If you think about the way the global economy works, you have developed countries which import raw goods from the emerging markets and which manufacturer finish those goods and then send them back, right? In many, many ways, the West still imports things like metals, oil energy from like less developed countries. And they kind of accrue a lot of those benefits and their currencies in many ways, therefore, are much stronger because currencies like the dollar end up pricing the energy markets and end up being the bedrock of the financial markets and the dollar and euro and yen end up being the reserve currencies that central banks want and that banks wanna work with.

6:05 They, they accrue so many benefits that that just aren’t there for the rest of the world, only about a billion people, a little more than a billion people live in a country with a with a native reserve currency. So, close to seven billion. Don’t have that right so about 87% of the world lives in a country that either is an authoritarian regime, or you don’t have property rights, you know, no FDIC insurance, no one’s going to, you know, protect you in court.

6:34 You know, protect you in court. Courts are owned by the state, right? Or you live in a country with a weak currency. And I think that people like Buffett and Munger are just sort of shielded, either intentionally so. They’re looking the other way.

6:49 Or they’re just kind of blind to the fact that they have this just enormous privilege over most of the world. And that for the average person on this planet, you can’t trust your fiat currency. You can’t really trust your bank. It’s very difficult for you to connect financially abroad if you have family. Things like capital restrictions, capital controls, frozen bank accounts, these are real.

7:15 These are real things that people face on an everyday basis. And the average person’s daily life is actually one of having problems and difficulties with the financial system, where for people like Buffett, it’s easy, whatever. They can get a credit card or a line of credit, they can borrow or they can use Venmo or PayPal or you know, they again, they live in the reserve currency of the world, the dollar, they don’t have to worry about, you know, their nation defaulting, etc, etc, etc. So I think it just comes from being in a bubble, if that makes sense.

7:50 Brian Rose: Yeah, I was just talking to Jimmy song recently about this. And he said, you know, we kind of laud them. But they’re kind of masters of this fiat system. And again, and a reserve currency, a fiat, and they managed to play this one game really well. But I guess if you zoom out, it’s just a game.

8:07 And when you look at it in comparison to the rest of the world or a Bitcoin perspective or the rest, you’re like, all right, they’re really good at kind of gaming this system or maximizing this one piece, but is it really the value creation and how does it really tap into the rest of the world? Is that the way you look? The way that certain people are kind of celebrated in like the dollar financial system or other ways?

8:31 Alex Gladstein: Well, I mean, I’m not sure I’d call it a game.

8:34 I mean, it’s the base reality of how the world functions. And I think it’s something that Jack Dorsey said recently was very interesting. In an interview he had with Michael Saylor, he was pointing out that he thought it was fundamentally unfair that people in Nigeria, a country of 200 million people, you know, had to sit there and get the price their money changed by arbitrary decisions of like a small group of old elite, you know, white people in Washington at the Federal Reserve, you know, board, right? Like, these people aren’t even elected by Americans. And they come from a very kind of similar background. They, you know, you look at Powell, he comes from private equity, like that, that’s, that’s, that’s who’s deciding literally the price of money for the whole world, like the price of the dollar, the borrowing rate for the dollar determines literally every other price of money in the whole world. So I kind of look at it like in a hundred years, I think we’ll look back in time at this age where this literally tiny group of people control the price of money for the whole world. And we’ll look at that as kind of medieval. I mean, it’s crazy when you start to think about it that way.

9:46 Brian Rose: And you mentioned like a hundred years from now if we kind of go back not a hundred years But like I say 80 some years you kind of get to I guess like 1944 and Bretton Woods and the petrodollar and like you’ve talked earlier about Creation of the UN and how like kind of our current reality was all formed around that kind of power struggle there I was wondering is that something you talk to people about to try to bring them into what our base reality is and how do You how do you talk to people that don’t necessarily know the origins of where we are now?

10:18 Alex Gladstein: Well, when I’m doing human rights advocacy, or I’m talking about, let’s say, Bitcoin, you don’t really need to know any of the backstory. You don’t need to know any particular economic doctrine.

10:29 You don’t need to read a book of Austrian economics or anything like that. You don’t need to know any history, actually, really, at all. You just need to empathize with somebody whose money doesn’t really work well. And it should be pretty easy for you to make the conclusion that, wait a second, this new monetary protocol where I can just reach them in minutes or in seconds using the Lightning Network. They might be in the West Bank or in Havana or in Tehran or wherever, and we can just connect. We can be human and connect with each other. And there’s no one that can stop us, no government or corporation. And I think to me that just should be a pretty obvious and immediate and incredible realization for folks. And not only do you have that direct human connection. But with Bitcoin, specifically, you have the trust in the system and the rules of the money. We just saw a cryptocurrency hyperinflate yesterday. Terra Luna, this token went from having a couple billion units to having many, many trillions. So that’s not going to happen in Bitcoin. So you have kind of this promise of cryptocurrency, of this digital currency that that can operate outside the control of the state and of corporations, married with an inability for small groups of people to manipulate and mess with the money rules.

11:53 That’s the magic because it puts us all in the same footing. It doesn’t make everybody equal when it comes to, for example, like wealth or anything like that. I don’t really think it changes that so much, but it gives monetary equality, you know, a quality of monetary opportunity. So the billionaire and the refugee are the same in the eyes of the protocol. And I think, you know, these are things that you can understand, you know, without needing to do all the history.

12:23 But look, yeah, doing the history makes it a lot more obvious. I didn’t know the history when I first started getting into Bitcoin of money and where it came from and how did the dollar become so dominant? Like, I just didn’t know any of that history. But learning about that history and writing about researching it for the book, certainly helped me clarify my passion for Bitcoin and why I’m kind of so excited about its potential for humanity. In the book, I kind of have two sections where I chart the history of the dollar. Of course, the world once ran kind of on the gold standard. And I guess what I mean by that is that nations used to save in gold and they would balance payments with each other in gold. And then I have this very elegant mechanism, which makes a lot of sense where if you’re a country, and you are very successful at making something, you start exporting a lot of it, your industry starts picking up, your currency is going to start to appreciate. And, you know, that’s going to actually start to slow down your exports, because the price of your labor will get less competitive, right? So it’s like this natural balancing thing, your currency will then weaken. So it prevents any one nation’s currency from becoming too weak or too strong. If your currency becomes too weak, then your exports get really cheap and then you can start building your capital account back up again. This is kind of a natural

13:50 Thing that was happening in the gold standard and it’s how nations would balance their payments with each other. When you have the dollar hegemony, you have this like hack that the US government and figured out where they, you know, basically since the sixties and especially since 71, we’ve just gone deeper and deeper and deeper into debt without ever having to balance because everybody else needs dollars. We figured out a way to swap the dollar with gold.

14:17 And it wasn’t a market-based phenomenon. I mean, a lot of people are like, well, obviously the US was just like powerful economy. No, no, no, this was like a political thing. Like we sat there Bretton Woods, as you mentioned in 44, Keynes wanted to do the bank core, right? The Brits wanted to have an internationally managed money system for the world to rebuild after World War II.

14:35 And the US government was like, no, we got all the gold. You guys are gonna use dollars. And that’s gonna create enormous demand for dollars. We’ll redeem them for gold at $35 per ounce, trust us. But you gotta use dollars.

14:50 So the whole world went from like kind of just saving in this neutral decentralized asset, gold, outside money that couldn’t just be canceled or whatever. They went from saving an asset money to debt money. It’s just an incredible transformation. And all of a sudden everybody’s post 44 increasingly around the world saving in dollars. Dollars and gold are very different.

15:11 Dollars can be canceled. Dollars are liabilities, dollars. Dollars are inside money. Dollars can be frozen as we’ve seen most recently with Russia and Afghanistan. So I think that you can’t overestimate that the impact this had on the world.

15:25 And of course, a few decades later, We rubbed pulled everybody and said, just kidding. We’re not gonna redeem these little pieces of paper for gold anymore. No way. So the dollar started to devalue as a result of what Nixon said. If you actually look at it between 71 and 74, the dollar lost half its value against the mark, the German mark.

15:44 That just gives you an idea of like, how weak the dollar got. We had crazy inflation in the United States. Now, Nixon at the time and Kissinger, they had to figure out a way to like stop this, collapse of the dollar. So they were like, how can we get other nations to start propping up our currency again? So they hired a guy off Wall Street, William Simon.

16:07 He was a bond salesman, because they needed to sell bonds. And they hired him and he became treasury secretary. And they were like, well, who’s gonna buy our bonds? Who’s got a lot of money? The Arabs, the Saudis.

16:19 They had just been the beneficiary of a big political transformation where energy and oil, the lifeblood of our world was run and controlled by Western corporations for a long time, right? The seven sisters. Okay, well, after the sixties, there was decolonization and nationalization and these Arab countries took control. So the OPEC nations now controlled the economic lifeblood of the world. They had 80% of all the world’s oil, okay?

16:44 So we sent Simon over to Riyadh, to Jeddah. The crown prince came to Washington. This was all in the newspapers. This is no conspiracy. This was like very, very open.

16:54 It somehow has been memory holds. But in 73 and 74, we basically created what’s known as the petrodollar. And it was quite simple. The agreement was such, the Saudis would agree to price all energy sales in dollars only, meaning if you’re Malawi, you can’t print your own currency to buy oil, you have to go get dollars. So this is just like increasing global demand for dollars, because everybody needs dollars to get the oil they need to run their country and to improve.

17:21 So, number one, they had debt price energy in dollars. And number two, this was the more tricky part that was actually somewhat secret and was declassified later in the 90s. They had to buy with the petrodollars, the earnings that they received in dollar payments from around the world in these bank accounts that they had, usually in Europe, they had to recycle them into US debt. So they would take the dollars and convert them into treasuries. And this would prop up the US government’s debt financing and all this other stuff, right? So what you had was that was one half of the deal and the other half of the deal was the Americans. We would sell them weapons and we would protect them and we did protect them. We protected them in the Gulf war. We protected them in the Iraq war.

18:07 Anytime there was a threat in the region against the Saudis, we’ve come and we’ve saved them and that was our end of the deal. And they’ve, until recently this deal has held up and it’s really been the defining characteristic of the last 50 years of the global political economy has been the petrodollar system. Now, it’s coming under, it’s starting to crack now. But I think it’s worth noting that, you know, a lot of people call this the petrodollar euro dollar system, which is actually, I think, pretty accurate. And it’s just worth noting briefly that because of the petrodollar mechanism, there was this enormous inflow of money into these, like, European dollar denominated accounts, euro dollars, basically. A euro dollar is a dollar that’s outside of the Federal Reserve’s power. It’s outside of the US banking system. It’s a dollar contract somewhere else. Today, now, there’s more euro dollars than dollars. There’s just this huge floating market. But it wasn’t always like that. It was a creation of the Cold War where Soviet countries wanted to, or Eastern Bloc countries wanted to do business in dollars. They didn’t want it frozen by the US government. So they would open a dollar account of France or London or something like that.

19:14 That. But basically, the petrodollar system gave steroids to the euro dollar system. And as a result, you had two things happen. The dollar, which was floundering seriously in the early 70s, became the bedrock and the numeraire for energy and for finance. That’s the petrodollar, euro dollar system. So this allowed the US government to do a lot of things over the last few decades. We were able to do things no normal country could do. Fight forever wars, export our manufacturing abroad, basically come to a political arrangement where the only thing we really exported was in some ways was dollars. We’re exporting dollars to the world and we get all kinds of stuff in return. Through this system, we had to have a buyer for our debt in this system. And again, it started really with the Arabs and the West Germans.

20:14 In the 80s, we forced the Japanese to buy a lot of our debt through the Louvre Accord, the Plaza Accord. And then in 2000, 2001, Clinton’s like last hurrah was getting China into the World Trade Organization. Okay, so all of a sudden, we had a new buyer, like, you know, China could do a lot more business with us. They were they were selling a lot of stuff to America in that first 2000 to 2010, massive amounts of stuff opening up their economy. And guess what they did with the dollars they earned? They bought treasuries, they bought a trillion dollars of treasuries in that decade. So you had this like constant pressure over the decades as a result of the system, a buying pressure for US debt. And again, this allowed the US government to go, we’re now in $30 trillion in debt. And it’s because we have this external foreign demand for our debt, regardless of our economic performance, regardless of the fact that we’re so indebted. This is highly unusual and will be seen as an aberration in history. So today, the system is coming under pressure. Number one, you have foreign governments buying more gold than treasuries. You have China and Japan, the two largest holders of treasuries.

21:24 They stopped their rate of buying and they’ve essentially been disheartening. They’ve been reducing their total stock of treasuries in favor of other things. You have countries starting to talk about pricing energy and other currencies, whether it be the Saudis selling to China, that’s their largest client, they sell 25% of their oil to China, why would they use dollars? They’re going to start selling that in RMB. You’ve got Israel, an ally of the US, selling off dollar reserves to buy Chinese reserves. So this whole petrodollar euro system is coming under pressure. And to me, the thesis of my book in many ways is number one, just charting the rise of global Bitcoin adoption as told through stories of people, but also charting this history of money where we went from like essentially the reserve currency, the world being gold, to being U.S. Treasuries, essentially. And then I think it’s going to be Bitcoin. It’s going to be next. So that’s my thesis.

22:16 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a massive, the way you describe it, you see it’s just this massive power play, the dollar, that started off in the ruins of Europe. And you know, I’m in London here, and we know that all these countries destroyed each And then the US kind of walked in and made the rules and then kept pushing that power play and all these various forms Into where we are today. The funny thing is Alex is it I studied economics at MIT Sloan School of Business

22:41 I went to Wall Street and they never taught me this stuff, you know, most people in finance don’t necessarily, right? They don’t necessarily even know the history of the world they’re in And they don’t know all the connotations of it

22:54 Alex Gladstein: You know what’s really interesting is that this whole like the petrodollar thing was just glaringly obvious And of course, it’s now being discussed at length by Credit Suisse analysts and all kinds of people where everybody’s now talking about, oh my God, what happens if energy gets priced in a different currency? Even a year ago, when I first came out with this research on the petrodollar, I mean, and certainly before that, it was considered like conspiracy theory stuff that like Ron Paul would do. And, you know, it’s crazy because you go back to the 70s again, Again, this was like a totally talked about thing.

23:29 Like the petrodollar thing was there’s tons of JSTOR academic research on it for whatever reason it got memory hold in the 2000s. And in my book, I suggest, you know, a provocative thesis that that that may be part of why it was memory hold. You know, in the end of the 90s, there was a challenger to the dollar is the euro, right? So you had all the nations of Europe coming together. go back to the late 90s, early 2000s, like people were legitimately concerned that the euro would take over the dollar, right? I’m sure you saw this from your perspective. All the newspapers were, I mean, even if deep down fund managers didn’t believe it or whatever, certainly it was an op. It was like out there and discussed. And when the euro came out, it was quite strong against the dollar. Everybody remembers this. And look, one of the things that started to happen was the petro euro was born, this idea of like oil countries selling and denominating currency in euros. And this is very important. It’s not just about the sale. If you think about it, there’s so many things that happen in an oil transaction. There’s not just a sale. It’s the insurance you have to pay, right, for your shipment. It’s the derivatives on top. For every barrel of oil, there’s like way more derivatives, like an order of magnitude more than the barrel itself. So you’re talking about all those things start to be priced in other currencies. That’s an enormous network effect pulling demand away from the dollar, right?

24:55 So the US government saw this clearly. Saddam Hussein announced at 99 he would do this, right? And then he did it. And he was selling billions of dollars and billions of dollars worth of oil in euros to Germany, France, European countries in 2000 and 2001, 2002. I think he sold something like $25 billion worth of energy, you know, over that time. And in euros, and I think his country was like, you know, at the time, you know, definitely a top 10, but maybe even a top five oil producer. Okay, so what’s really interesting is if you just look at it from from sort of first principles, the petro euro was a thing and it could have easily started to spread, right?

25:46 Other countries that produce oil in the region may started to look at this, okay? And then after the invasion of Iraq, what’s one of the first things that happened? And this is again, in the mainstream media noted, this is not like some conspiracy theory. In June of 2003, the new Iraqi government went back to selling oil and dollars again. So, I mean, you can say that it’s coincidence or whatever, but the reality is that Saddam was selling oil in euros, created the petro euro, just a rival to the petrodollar.

26:18 And then he got taken out. And maybe you wanna say it’s coincidence, but you know what, like the Iraq war is so crazy. As someone who was in high school during 9-11 and who watched the whole Iraq war thing really shaped my worldview. Like there is no good explanation for the Iraq war, Just none, like clearly wasn’t for democracy. No one could possibly believe that.

26:38 It wasn’t to push back against Iran. Iran got a lot more powerful in the region afterwards. Quite obviously, because we took out the Sunnis and the Shias now run the country. I mean, literally like Saddam was the one that we were funding to fight the Iranians in the 80s. So that doesn’t make any sense.

26:55 Definitely wasn’t WMDs, that was all a lie. And you know, this idea that it’s, You know for terrorism was also a joke. There was no connection at all in fact, the invasion of Iraq later created like ISIS in Iraq like so All the power play none of the official explanations make any sense So there’s still this like search for why did we invade? No one no one really knows I mean that we speak of it in vague terms and it wasn’t about oil per se like America didn’t get very much, by that point, like the US got most of its oil from its own oil fields from Canada, from Mexico, from Venezuela, like it, it got a very tiny percentage of its oil from the Middle East, I mean, Europe was more reliant, but we just weren’t that connected.

27:48 But if you start to think about the architecture of the petrodollar system, well, we had to protect the Saudis, that was part of the deal. And I very much think that it makes as much sense as anything else, that we wanted to protect the system that made possible our geopolitical power projection. What made possible our geopolitical power projection was the fact that energy was priced in dollars and therefore finance was priced in dollars. And that’s going to start to crumble and, you know, we won’t be able to do the same power projection.

28:22 And in a recent essay that I wrote after the book came out, I really explored this idea of quantitative easing and war and how they’re connected. And it’s so interesting because historically, at least in America, my country, but also it’s pretty similar among most democracies. Wars used to be fought with taxation and war bonds, or they would call them liberty bonds or whatever. So when Keynes came out with his book, How to Pay for the War, like in World War II in Britain, I mean, it was about taxation. And you go back and you read Kant and Mill and Smith and all these people, and they said you shouldn’t, governments shouldn’t borrow for war, but if they have to, they really need to tax for it. So you had this situation where like, at least in America, like World War I, World War II, Korea, all these wars were paid for by taxation and borrowing. The American people during World War II, 85 million Americans bought liberty bonds to the tune of what is now $3 trillion. So Americans, what I’m saying is that they were very involved in war making, even if they didn’t go themselves and they did go themselves. We had conscription, obviously. Everybody knew someone abroad. It was very different. And even if you didn’t fight, you were paying for it and you knew it. So these wars, the people were connected to the war, like it was a thing that we were connected to. But after the 60s, Johnson tried to raise taxes for the Iraq war, ended up being one of the last things he did. And then he had to,

29:56 He left office. I mean, he made him very unpopular. So since 68, there’s never been a war tax in the United States. And we’ve never done any significant Liberty bond sales again. And all of our war since have been paid for on credit cards, called the credit card wars, all the post-9-11 wars were paid by borrowing. And this is really only possible if your interest rates are low, right? So if your interest rates are high, you can’t afford these wars. I’ll give you an example. So we’re seeing this now, right, in the last few months. But like when the interest rate was point, when the Fed overnight rate was like what, 0.08%, which was a few months ago. Okay, so it meant that bonds were 1% or 2% or whatever. For every 100 basis point increase in the interest rate, if you have $30 trillion in debt as a country, that’s $300 billion more that you have to pay this year to your bondholders. So you start talking about a 2%, a 3% increase in rates.

30:57 Okay, that’s almost another trillion dollars. The federal budget for 2022 that Biden has is projected is 6 trillion. And we only have 4.3 trillion of that covered by revenue through taxation, et cetera. So we already have an overhang of 1.7 trillion. This will mean less- 30 trillion.

31:17 So this will mean less wars, the more expensive- Yeah, my thesis essentially is that as we move away from the dollar hegemony, things like unnecessary forever wars in exotic places become not affordable. Like we’re fighting this war called Operation Inherent Resolve that most Americans don’t even know about, including me until recently. It’s been active since 2014. It’s a $10 billion war. And I mean, it’s in three countries.

31:46 It’s in Libya, Syria, Iraq. Like most Americans have no clue about this war. This stuff is impossible. This is only possible using this like exaggerated version of fiat money as a base layer of the financial system. So as we head to a world of higher inflation, higher interest rates over time, I think it’s gonna be interesting the way it shapes the world.

32:07 I think America becomes probably less aggressive. I think that we build more industry at home and that there’s more promise for the people. And Bitcoin to me represents a lot of hope because if you go back to the thirties, I mean, FDR took gold away from Americans. Like literally, executive order 6102, as I’m sure many of your guests have mentioned, I mean, look- Couldn’t own it, right? They made it illegal, and it wasn’t legal again until the 70s.

32:35 So when we had all this time of financial oppression, like in World War II, for example, where they had yield curve control, and basically like any dollar asset was just getting crushed, because inflation was so much higher than interest rates. What was your option as an American? You couldn’t go to gold, And gold, gold was like, obviously skyrocketed in value over those decades. And in real terms, it ended up, if you look at it by the 70s, it was like, you know, it definitely wasn’t $35 an ounce, man.

33:04 It was hundreds of dollars an ounce by the time that they really started lifting the restrictions on it. Um, a lot of gold people say it’s still repressed today. A lot of people say the real price of gold is much higher, right? You know, so today it’s different today. They can’t do that anymore today.

33:21 You know, if we enter this period of financial depression, guess what? Americans are going to have access to Bitcoin and and and so will everyone else in the world. And that gives me a lot of hope.

33:31 Brian Rose: So let’s talk about Bitcoin. You know, do you think it’s a coincidence that Bitcoin is now so prevalent that it came about when it did?

33:38 Or was it born out of this financial need? Do you ever think about it and zoom out and think it could literally not be here and then we wouldn’t have this parallel word world to observe this current world in or have you ever thought about that? And then your thoughts on Bitcoin also from the human rights perspective and how it’s like evolved with you.

34:00 Alex Gladstein: Yeah, I mean, look, we have our world and we live in this potential world. I mean, there might be parallel worlds, but I think that Bitcoin was almost inevitable because if you look at the way it was designed and I have a chapter in the book on its sort of prehistory and where it came from, people knew that the digitization of society would lead to a government overreach and surveillance and control.

34:24 And this was predicted back in the 70s, 80s. There’s books written in the 80s about the rise of the computer state. And at the time there were two, let’s say camps of how do we deal with this? We know there’s gonna be overreach when stuff starts to get digital, governments can basically do and execute their dreams much easier. Think about what Mao had.

34:50 Mao would kill to have the technology that Xi Jinping has, you know, today. Just think about that, right? In terms of surveillance, social engineering, you know, DNA profiling, all that stuff. He didn’t have that, you know, he had to do it all brute force. So if you think about it, what we kind of have here is two strategies.

35:11 One is begging the government, basically lobbying, saying, please, don’t take our rights away. us our rights. So there’s another camp of people who said that’s not going to work. And that first strategy is still the popular one. Like people are like, how do we prevent Facebook from violating our rights or whatever, let’s get the US government to like, you know, regulate them. That’s still the dominant worldview is that we should get the government to fix the problem. The problem I have with that strategy, of course, is number one, most people live under an authoritarian regime. So you’re gonna get the government to do anything like if you live in China, this is not going to happen. So that’s a privilege you have of of living in a democracy, maybe it’s possible. Obviously, in the United States, we’ve seen that our government is not interested in respecting civil liberties by our citizens. Look at all the revelations of Snowden. It’s crazy. They were surveilling it on us in a mass way, totally warrantless wiretapping, all that stuff in collaboration with companies like all the telecoms, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that like, please, government, don’t violate our rights thing, it didn’t work out. So there were activists in the 70s and 80s and 90s called cypherpunks. And they came up with a different model of seize your rights with open source code, basically make it impossible for them to violate your rights and ask for

36:27 Forgiveness, not permission. And that’s the Bitcoin way, because that’s where Bitcoin came from. The first wave of cypherpunks focused on free speech on the internet, on privacy on the internet. And the kind of consumer level app that was launched off two decades of research was PGP in the early 90s by Phil Zimmerman. And he came under a lot of pressure. I mean, Senator Biden, President Clinton, all attorney general, everybody was going after him. They were saying encryption was for pedophiles and terrorists. Same thing people say and criminals, same thing people say about Bitcoin today. And they were saying, we can’t have privacy for Americans, we need a backdoor, we need a clipper chip, we need like a way in. Well, you know what, they were defeated by cypherpunks, by businesses, by an alliance of people. And, you know, for the better, and it’s crazy, the cultural shift today, you have people like Michael Hayden, who was chief spook during 9-11. He’s saying encryption is a right, a human right for all Americans. So, so we’ve gone this incredible cultural shift. And, you know, I would say encryption is more or less one. I mean, there’s still threats, but it’s, it’s, it’s been standardized in society. It seems like unlikely that we’d go backwards from that. I know that the Brits were trying to like, you know, have a, have a, have a third key into a peer to peer chat and things like that. And we’ll always have that pressure, but signal’s pretty dominant now as a, as an

37:53 Upgrade for mobile phones, you know, on the PGP technology. And I think it’s just becoming more part of our lives. But, you know, that was their first achievement was making sure that you and I could communicate privately on the internet, which was huge, huge. Second, second achievement in their holy grail was electronic cash. That’s really what they wanted. And it was in culture, it was in science fiction in the 80s and 90s, like Neil Stevenson wrote amazing books about the future and money actually played often a significant role in his storytelling, the type of monies that would exist, digi-cash, digibucks, whatever. Then it also was there in business. You had David Chom, who was a researcher at Berkeley in the 80s. He came up with this idea of like blind signatures for payments and later turned it into a company called DigiCash, where you would swap your dollars or euros for basically this fully anonymous currency. Now, Now, DigiCash failed because it was centralized.

38:52 So a lot of these cypherpunks like Adam Back and Nick Sabo and others, and Nick Sabo actually worked at DigiCash, they kind of saw like the promise of DigiCash and then they saw why it failed and they were like, okay, so the mint, the thing that creates the money has to be decentralized. Okay, well, how’s that going to work? So it was a tough problem and it took decades, but eventually Hal Finney had a little bit of a breakthrough in 2004 with his reusable proof of work. And then 2008, we get Satoshi.

39:23 And, you know, as I write in my book, like Adam Beck gets this email, like summer of 2008, this dude named Satoshi or whoever names Satoshi. And they’re like, Hey, can you look over this thing? I’m gonna I’m gonna publish and Adam was like, Sure, here’s some feedback. And, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s crazy, Adam had such a, you know, he was so built for this career, given his, his personal history and what he had been through, PhD in distributed systems and studied economics.

39:50 And he came out with hash cash and thought about this way of tying digital work to real world energy. I mean, he basically pioneered a lot of the stuff that went into Bitcoin. And we talked about that in the book, but essentially this was the big breakthrough. And we have it now. We have digital cash. But the cool part is we have something even better.

40:15 We have digital gold too. And this relates to the human rights part. But I think Satoshi again realized that to make digital cash work, the mint had to be decentralized. So there could be restraints or there needed to be restraints on monetary production. It couldn’t be something that like the group of people could just change. I mean, then you’d be back to just the old way of doing things. Because don’t forget, you can censor in two ways. You can censor by freezing or censoring, right? You can also censor by demonetization or devaluation. You can make the currency worthless. So Bitcoin needed to protect against both of these things. So it’s no coincidence that was released during the great financial crisis, not during some surveillance scandal.

40:55 And if you look at the Genesis block, obviously, in Bitcoin, it references that bank bailouts in Britain chancellor on brink of second bailout of banks. So, you know, people like me believe that Bitcoin was ultimately, look, Satoshi stood on the shoulders of giants who were questing for digital cash, e-cash that we could use on the internet without government control. But really, I think what they figured out is what was more important was replacing central banking. So people like me believe that Bitcoin is actually a competitor to central banks and that it will ultimately be the reserve currency of the world. The cool part is it’s not just going to be for governments. Everybody can own it. So it’s this ultimate check on government power. And that’s what you observe today when you look around the world and see the tens of millions of people who use Bitcoin in Cuba, in Nigeria, in Argentina, in Iran, in China, wherever, they’re able to have a little bit of freedom, regardless of how tyrannical their government is. They’re able to take their work and time and energy and turn it into something that can’t be stolen or confiscated or debased, and they’re able to have the freedom to interact with that currency, their lifeblood, with anyone in the world, and it can’t be stopped. And I think it’s remarkable and much needed. And in some ways, again, inevitable, I guess, to close on the question you asked, it’s kind of like the system created Bitcoin, because the system was headed in

42:28 Such a repressive direction, and humans are, you know, just very creative. And, and, you know, you see this often in dictatorships, like dictatorships often create very often lay the groundwork and environment for like very creative art, like amazing art and film come out of repressive conditions. So I think, like, as the world was becoming more digital and repressive, something like Bitcoin was almost inevitable to happen. There’s other theories about where it came from. But to me, the most likely one is that it was the work of human rights activists.

42:58 Brian Rose: And Bitcoin and the SE cash concept in your mind is is the same thing as free speech and human rights It’s all kind of wrapped up in one because it’s all about control and and freedom and That’s something I go ahead

43:12 Alex Gladstein: I think you just give me an example like Alex Navalny is an opposition politician in Russia, right? So what’s one of the ways that Putin has been going after Navalny? Well, not recently, he’s poisoned them, he sent them to Siberia, whatever.

43:28 But over the years, that organization was relentlessly attacked at the financial level. Their bank accounts were frozen, right? So if you freeze an activist group or an opposition politician or a newspaper’s bank account, you basically disarm them, right? So that’s like a tactic of government dictatorship, a deplatforming, you could say, right? You deplatform them.

43:48 Well, guess what? You can’t deplatform Bitcoin. So, you know, they were raising money in Bitcoin for years. They raised almost 700 Bitcoin over the last seven years. And apparently Bitcoin and cryptocurrency account for 10 to 15% of their monthly income.

44:02 So in terms of revenue, donation flow. So I think it’s been a lifeline for them and it’s been a lifeline for many other groups around the world. And that will just increasingly become the case as more people learn about it.

44:15 Brian Rose: Yeah, you mentioned how the typical response is to say the government fix our tech platforms and make sure that they’re free. and that’s probably the wrong way to go around it.

44:25 In 2020, we got kind of de-platform for broadcasting some things on YouTube and it spun into then accounts being pulled and PayPal and Dropbox and I went into this whole exploration of what freedom of speech means and how the technology platforms play out with that. But one of the things they started doing was obviously taking away kind of our ability to communicate but also the monetization of that which then restricted our communication and it went into this loop. and we were able to try to connect with our community and find another way around it.

44:55 We didn’t really have crypto as an option then. How do you see kind of the current state of digital free speech? And this maybe gets into even tracking people digitally and maybe even gets to AI at some point and how that relates back to Bitcoin. Was Bitcoin becomes more prevalent? Will we see these companies being less powerful or is this something we’re always gonna have to keep checking?

45:20 Alex Gladstein: I think it’s a check on corporate and government power. Ultimately, as more people around the world learn about Bitcoin, they don’t have to be slaves to the system. We can make our own stuff. We can make our own ways for podcasters and journalists to connect with their audience so you can publish and you can receive income from your audience in a way that can’t be stopped. Now, ultimately, states still have tremendous power, of course, and they’ll use that power.

45:54 But if too many people are using it, it becomes impossible to stop. This is more evident in a democracy, like the United States, for example. So what’s happening now is this idea of this money that can’t be canceled or whatever is very compelling. And it’s starting to really seep into the political structure of our country. It’s just amazing.

46:16 Like three years ago, this would have blown me away, but I mean, you’ve got senators, you’ve got congressmen, Warren Davidson, Cynthia Lummis, Ted Cruz, you got all these young Democrats running for office that want to be pro Bitcoin. Like I think in four or five years, there would be political suicide to be anti Bitcoin. And you think about how many Americans use it, hard to say exactly. I mean, CNBC ran a poll that said 20% of Americans have used Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

46:42 You look at filings from companies like Coinbase, I mean, they’ve got, and you add that to Kraken and a couple other companies, you’re looking at 50 million Americans who probably use this thing. I mean, this isn’t going away. And at the end of the day, those people are gonna vote people into office who are gonna protect their ability to use Bitcoin, I think. And I think it’s something that young people are more into rather than older folks, just for different generational reasons, but younger politicians seem much more excited open about it. And I think eventually it’ll be pretty bipartisan. I try to make the progressive case for Bitcoin. I think that it’s incredible we have this asset that’s non-discriminatory and open to all, and it can’t be racist or whatever, or misogynist. It doesn’t know.

47:35 It literally doesn’t know. It’s beyond its capability to be racist or misogynist. So that is not something you can say about the legacy financial system. The legacy financial system is usually racist and misogynist. In fact, I live in a place in the United States where my neighborhood was so infamous. The banks that operated in my neighborhood were so infamous for for red lining mortgage applicants who were black that that that the government had to come in and basically impose like a super low fixed rate mortgage for this area, for everybody, regardless of who they were, simply because the practice was so systemic.

48:18 And, you know, our country has been built on the backs of exploiting labor of African-Americans, right? So you go back and you look at like the repression of people from a financial point of view, all their stuff was stolen, right? All their land was taken, their economic agency was taken from them. So whether you talk about Native Americans, blacks, others, people put in, Japanese put in camps, like, you name it, like, there’s been so many violations even in our country. And I think that, you know, people, especially of those backgrounds, like the CNBC poll said 40% of black Americans had had interacted with Bitcoin or cryptocurrency seems high to me, but still, like, point is, this is higher than the average, right? They’re gonna look at something like once they start to grasp what it is. They’re going to be like, oh, this is cool. Um, guess what? Like Bitcoin can’t be colonized, you know, like that’s awesome. Like, um, and I’m seeing this geopolitically around the world where, uh, people who are living under monetary colonialism, returning to Bitcoin is like a, you know, a freedom tool, but like even in America, it’s like, I mean, how cool is it that you can have? I mean, look, the thing goes up and down.

49:24 There’s no question, but you know what? It goes up over time and it can’t be controlled the banks. And I think that’s amazing. So, you know, anyone can access it. You don’t need an ID or a bank account or a passport or a particular level of wealth. I mean, it’s insane in America.

49:41 You have to like, be really rich to have the best investment opportunities. The system’s rigged. You have to be an accredited investor to invest in startups and things like that. It’s nuts. It just means that the rich are going to get richer. So Bitcoin kind of breaks that.

49:56 And not only is it open to everybody, but it performed better than all that stuff. You’d be better off the day that Uber, the moment that a company like Uber over the last 15, 20 years was founded, you would have been better off just buying Bitcoin on that day than by writing an angel check, like the first check for Uber, literally, like it’s crazy. So, and I know that’s hard for people to understand because Bitcoin, you know, it goes up, it goes down. Okay, you know, it’s down 50%, something like that from its from its November high right now. So you’re like, ah, this thing’s terrible. They forget that it’s up like 20x in the last five years, like it’s not, you know, people people don’t, you know, they tend to not appreciate, like, the longer term view. They want everything now. And the reality of these, Bitcoin’s not our get rich quick scheme. It’s a protect your freedom and long-term wealth scheme, right? That’s really what it is.

50:54 Brian Rose: And how does that play out in, say, five years, 10 years? What do you think it’ll look like in America in 2032? You mentioned the political landscape. I think Anthony Scaramucci has been on this show, we’re on Skybridge Capital. He recently said, I think it was 73 million Americans had exposure to crypto, and it takes 40 or 50 million just to elect someone.

51:14 Reckon the next president will be pro-crypto. So obviously we’re seeing the government being more pro. A lot of groups like you said are seeing that maybe it’s something that is non-discriminatory. But what does that look like then five, ten years from now in America and in countries you’ve talked about like Nigeria and Sudan and Ethiopia, which is a different reality, but still it’s the same tool.

51:35 Alex Gladstein: Yeah, well, Bitcoin in the whole industry that it spawns just gives people a different way of of doing things.

51:41 They don’t have to sit there and participate in this system that props up just this massive inequality and that serves up bailouts for the wealthy and the connected at the expense of the people. They can join a new movement, a new system and I think they’re going to and I think it’s just a matter of time. It’s just a slow, gradual grind. But I think what likely starts to happen is that more companies, more corporations, more individuals, more nation states.

52:12 We just had another nation stated off Bitcoin in the Central African Republic. They’ll see the promise. They’ll want to be earlier, they’ll get in. And it’s just like this wave, right? And I certainly want to do whatever I can to make sure human rights activists of the world are early in the wave and that grasp at first, doing the Oslo Freedom Forum at the end of this month in May on the 23rd to 25th in Norway.

52:39 Going to be gathering some of the most amazing human rights activists in the world. And we’re going to have a Bitcoin component to the program so that they can learn from the world’s best Bitcoin educators. Because we want them to be equipped with this tool. We want them to use it to fight, in their quest for freedom. We want them to have this arrow in their quiver. It’s very, very important to have knowledge of this tool. But I think that at the individual level, at the micro level, it’s just going to give people a way to protect their wealth and to protect their free speech, which is so, so important in this day and age. At the geopolitical level, again, I think that Bitcoin becomes basically the numeraire. Eventually, it replaces the dollar, essentially, in terms of being what we all price energy in, eventually being the asset which central banks save in, being the premium financial collateral, the most dear financial collateral for the financial markets. I still think that at least for the near to medium future, next few decades, that fiat currencies are issued and exist. I just think they’re more restrained because I think they’re going to have to be, it’s going to be like the Bretton Woods thing, where you had the dollar, but you could redeem it for gold. It might be like that, where the US dollar has a value that can be redeemed for a certain amount of Bitcoin at any time. That’s a possibility. The cool part is that it wouldn’t just be foreign governments that have the privilege.

54:17 Obviously, individuals could just do it. And if the government starts messing around with the value of the dollar, there would be a black market that would emerge. So it’s really interesting the way that it would check the government. But I think the governments will always issue debt, and we’ll still have fiat. I think it’ll just be more restrained. And then over time, just over many decades, it might emerge that Bitcoin is just the most elegant money there is, and maybe we don’t have a use for fiat. And that’s a very different world from today that no one can really speak about with authority, obviously. But the main difference to take away is that gold is a very bad medium of exchange. It’s a great store of value. Honestly, the same amount of gold that bought you a loaf of bread in biblical times buys you a loaf of bread today.

55:04 It has preserved purchasing power. I think the same amount of gold bought you a beer in ancient Rome as it buys you a beer today. Gold has preserved purchasing power because it has a very, very low inflation rate and it can’t speak. There’s no alchemy. right? So the thing is, you know, and it transfers value over time pretty well, but it’s horrible at transferring value over space. It’s a rock. You can’t like email it or whatever, obviously. And even pre-digital age, it was like inconvenient because it was like, what are you going to do? Like have this like, you know, chest you’re carrying around.

55:37 So the cool part is Bitcoin is even better than gold at carrying value through time. And it’s better than fiat at moving value through space, right? It’s instant. Like literally when you use the Lightning Network, it’s astounding. It’s like if you’re using a good wallet and the other person in wherever, in West Bank or Poland or Ukraine or wherever, I’ve done Bitcoin transactions using the Lightning Network in less than three seconds to people in Cuba, Palestine, Ukraine, all over China, um, and you know, whatever it like the network doesn’t care about where they are. So I just think that’s kind of remarkable. So we don’t have to be constrained by like what history was like with the gold, with the gold standard and how the gold standard like, of course we like Fiat would emerge because we needed Fiat because you can’t do daily commerce and modern finance with gold, right?

56:34 Like it’s a rock, like it doesn’t work. So fiat was necessary because we needed something that was much faster and dynamic. Well, guess what? Bitcoin is even faster and more dynamic than fiat. So I think you’re gonna maybe get this future that borrows a little bit from the gold past in terms of having more restraint on governments and there won’t be one government that’s like hugely privileged over the others, right?

56:56 Like it’ll be this natural balancing effect I mentioned at the beginning where America, our currency is gonna get less valuable and our rates are gonna go up. But guess what? That means our exports are gonna get a lot more competitive. We’re gonna be able to build stuff again. We’re gonna be able to onshore, pharmaceuticals, cars, all kinds of stuff that have gone away.

57:17 Like in the COVID crisis, Americans realized that we were reliant on China for like everything. This is horrible. From like just even just nationalists should even understand this, it’s crazy. So with a weaker currency that’s not constrained by the burden of the reserve currency, of being the reserve currency of the world, the Triffin dilemma, if that goes away, we’ll probably shift into a weaker currency, but we’ll have a stronger export base. I think it’ll be good for the average American.

57:42 It’ll be bad for the coastal elites. Yeah, if you’ve been getting rich off finance and defense and real estate, like that’s gonna slow down, I think, but I think the average person will benefit quite a bit. I’m looking forward to that. I mean, I think really you start to look at a world where everything’s overinflated in value, like in purchasing power. Like gold, I think, has a $10 trillion market cap.

58:08 Only 2 trillion of it is industrial use. So the rest is just money, like store value. Real estate is an absurd market. I mean, totally inflated. In China, I think $60 trillion, Chinese real estate.

58:21 I’m sure the market value of that’s like 10, right? The rest is just money. People aren’t actually living in it. It was used as money. is used as a store of value or whatever, right?

58:30 So I think that over the next decade or two, all that value from like real estate, not all of it, but a large amount of, obviously houses will always be valuable. It’s just, I think they’re overvalued in terms of purchasing power, like goods and services power. So I think you look at gold, real estate and negative yield in government bonds. And I mean, this is currently the worst year in American history for bonds, which is crazy. But I think that’s predictable.

58:55 So negative yield in government bonds, even a lot of stocks that are overinflated, definitely real estate and gold, that’s just all gonna float to Bitcoin over the coming decades as like the obviously best store of value that was also a medium exchange. I think that’s gonna have incredible effects on the world.

59:15 Brian Rose: You mentioned education in Oslo. You’re trying to teach people about Bitcoin. Can you just talk about how we’re educated with money?

59:24 I mean, I had Robert Kiyosaki in the studio, author of Rich Dad, Port Ad, and he always tells a story that he raises his hand when he was going to school in Hawaii and said, when do we get to learn about money? And they said, no, no, we don’t teach you money in school. And he said, well, why? You’re teaching me chemistry and Latin and history. And it’s part of the premise of a lot of his book.

59:41 Where are we in the state of teaching money to our children? I mean, we’re in the UK, where the education system was probably born out of the Industrial Revolution, where we were teaching workers, kids, to become workers, right? Yeah, where are we in the state of money education and where do we need to go?

59:56 Alex Gladstein: We’re very far from where we need to be. I mean, as you and I just discussed, like we didn’t even know about the petrodollar and we went to good universities and studied history and political economy.

1:00:06 Like it’s the reality has been hidden from us. The average American, including me until relatively recently had no idea how money was created or how it works. And it’s not easy to even find out. You have to do enormous amounts of research and try to find, like the people who operate the money system don’t even really wanna be found like there’s one guy who worked on the Fed trading desk who’s been willing to turn his career into like a window and he’s like Fed guy on Twitter and he’s great.

1:00:33 And he has blogged about his experiences. He’s educating people about how the Fed works. Like, but there’s like very little of that and it’s all behind closed doors. And most Americans just have no clue how the money system works. It’s not taught in schools.

1:00:48 I mean, even just being responsible with credit card usage is not taught in schools. Like, so I think the cool part about Bitcoin is it brings back financial literacy. Like once you start understanding what Bitcoin is, it’s such a great educational starting point for people to educate themselves. And they’ll do it just cause they’re curious, right? People are curious.

1:01:07 So once you start, you’re like, wait, how does this work? Wait, wait a second. So, so no one can change the amount. Like, well, then you start asking, well, why can people, who can change the amount on our currency? Like you just start asking the right questions.

1:01:19 So Bitcoin is the ultimate teacher for learning about money. Even if in the end of the day, you don’t end up really going all in on Bitcoin or whatever, it’s such a good way to learn about money and monetary history by studying it. And it just makes you ask the right questions. Like, why didn’t something like this exist before? Like, what happened in 1971?

1:01:40 Like, how is it possible that we lived in a world where everything’s backed by just a promise and not an actual asset? Like, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I’m excited that learning about Bitcoin will be something that really, I think, creates a much more enlightened future generations.

1:01:57 Brian Rose: And is that way in a way that you say Bitcoin is the Trojan horse for freedom? Because it kind of starts that conversation about your current financial system, and then kind of advances it a little bit when you start to think about the freedoms you don’t have in that system.

1:02:13 Alex Gladstein: Yeah, a little bit. I think the main thesis is that people who don’t care about freedom or even hate it will be forced to use Bitcoin anyway over time and therefore support this freedom tool. So it requires no altruism to operate unlike philanthropy today. Like people get involved with Bitcoin because they think it’s gonna make them rich, right? Okay, or it’s gonna protect their wealth.

1:02:36 Very self-interested reasons. You can say even greedy reasons, fine. Doesn’t care, I don’t care. People on TV talking about Bitcoin over the last few years, these billionaires, hedge fund guys, they don’t care about cyberpunk values or privacy Maybe they do, but it doesn’t matter, we should assume they don’t. The point is that this is the mechanism.

1:02:58 It’s like a machine that turns greed into freedom. We all want Bitcoin for our own personal self-interested reasons, and more and more people will over time want it, right? And they’re not bad reasons, they’re just self-interested reasons. They want their family to do better. They want to put more food on the table with their family.

1:03:14 They want to have a brighter future, whatever. So they’ll go to, they’ll integrate Bitcoin into their lives, right? But they can’t do that without strengthening the network, making it more resilient, making it more strong against the tax, making the network effect larger, bringing in more talent. I mean, as Bitcoin grows, it’s like this feedback loop, right? Like the bigger it gets, the more people know about it, the more people come in.

1:03:43 So a very, very tiny percentage of the world’s creatives and designers have entered the Bitcoin space. So wallets today, there’s only a couple wallets that are like really beautiful and elegant and easy to use, right? That’s going to be, that’s going to change like in an incredible way over the coming decade. I think it’ll be the kind of thing where you have companies like Apple, where you walk into an Apple store and you pick up like ceramic like a beautiful ceramic set of five little like disc or you know I don’t know little stone like beautiful little pieces of technology that essentially are like you’re multi-sig for your family and like you and your brothers and sisters or your family or your lawyers or whoever’s in your family or company, you each hold one of these things. And in order to spend, you have to like, I don’t know, do the equivalent of like the Power Ranger thing, you have to put them all together. And then you can like unlock the money. This is like, I think going to be something that’s like, very, very common. I think even mining, Bitcoin miners, I think will be in like Walmart in the future, going and buy a wall, buy a freaking miner at Walmart, like that’ll be a thing like, like people today go to AutoZone and geek out over their cars. People are going to go to Bitcoin mining stores in the future and geek out over Bitcoin mining. It’s just going to be something that most Americans can just do at their house,

1:05:09 Especially if you live in a sunny place, you could just mine with solar. So I think it just becomes more integrated into our lives. And I think that that’s a good thing.

1:05:20 Brian Rose: I was wondering if you could just talk to us about just the state of human rights globally. I mean, you were talking about places you’re sending Bitcoin to, Palestine and Cuba.

1:05:31 And obviously we see what’s happening in Ukraine and just, I mean, you have a real finger on the pulse of the state of what is it, what are the hotspots and has it gotten better or worse in 10 years? And how do you even quantify that?

1:05:47 Alex Gladstein: Yeah, it’s dire. I mean, it’s something that you could make an argument was improving dramatically in the 80s and 90s. there’s like waves of democracies, these dictators coming down, getting tossed out.

1:06:01 But in the last 10 years, it’s really stagnated. I mean, you’ve got like more repression, obviously, and Russia’s gone the wrong way, China’s gone the wrong way, Turkey’s gone the wrong way, Venezuela went the wrong way. Many other countries have had setbacks, Thailand, Bangladesh. I mean, these are huge countries, Pakistan. So you have billions of people living in countries getting more oppressive. You have democracies turning back into authoritarian regimes. So it’s not a great time in that sense. People even feel more at threat in democracies about what they can say and what they can do, and how they’re being controlled, whatever their bodies are being controlled, how their speech is being controlled. People are worried, right? So I think that this This is a good time for Bitcoin, because otherwise I’d be pretty,

1:06:56 I wouldn’t be very optimistic about the future. It’d be pretty dark. It gives us the shield to fight back, which I think is really cool. And I think that when it comes to human rights activism, obviously I’ve done it for almost 15 years. Like I love it, I don’t regret any of it.

1:07:14 But I will say that, you know, some of it in the end boils down to virtue signaling. It’s like, you’re like free to bat on Twitter, whatever, like, what’s that really gonna do? Nothing. But if you teach it to Benton how to use Bitcoin, okay, now that’s real activism. That’s gonna lead to a meaningful improvement in their life, that’s gonna give them real freedom, right?

1:07:32 So I think that that’s kind of cool. Like this is activism without virtue signaling. It’s like Bitcoin, Bitcoin education.

1:07:40 Brian Rose: That’s a super cool way of looking at it. You mentioned some of these governments and a lot of them are using surveillance, you know, monitoring things that maybe should be private and then sometimes using AI or even restricting some of the social media platforms like in Turkey, et cetera.

1:07:58 What do you see that we should be concerned about in those ways? I mean, we talk about even going into central bank digital currencies in China and we hear about the 5G and the face recognition, but is this something that concerns you as technology improves and can AI spin out of control if in the wrong hands?

1:08:16 Alex Gladstein: Well, I think a lot of people have said something along the lines of the AI is communist and Bitcoin is kind of libertarian, right? Like I think that that’s, there’s something in there, right?

1:08:27 I think that big, it’s very hard to make a case that any sort of big data analysis for AI is good for civil liberties. I just, it might be good for improving the population of tuna in a particular area or monitoring a volcano or biomedical stuff and health. And there’s a lot of really great things that AI can be used for, but not civil liberties. I mean, it’s something that requires data. It requires oversight and control and penetration into people’s lives.

1:08:57 The largest AI experiments, of course, are in China, where the government has basically turned the Muslim population into a science experiment and puts them in prison camps and takes their DNA. and God knows what they’re doing. I mean, they’re doing organ harvesting and all kinds of stuff like, and all that’s powered by AI and big data analysis. So I’m very like bearish on AI being good for civil liberties. You want to make a case for like more kind of like zero knowledge systems, maybe.

1:09:27 I just haven’t seen the evidence. I just don’t know that governments will be in the end interested in that. Governments don’t want zero knowledge systems. The governments want full knowledge systems about their people. The US government, the Chinese government, they don’t want a privacy protecting AI standard.

1:09:46 They want full insight. Let’s not forget the same people who are leading America today, Biden, et cetera, they wanted a clipper chip. They wanted to be in your private conversations on the internet. And we fought them back through cypherpunk activism, right? People like Adam Beck fought them back.

1:10:02 So I don’t know. I think that I would not trust them to lead us in the right direction. And even if there is some technology that exists to help AI be less intrusive, I don’t know that it’ll be employed. I don’t know if it’ll be chosen. So that’s why, again, we gotta seize our rights and forget AI and banking the unbanked and ID for the world.

1:10:29 I think all those things are control mechanisms. I think Bitcoin is, is, is ultimately like something that can be used to empower people. I mean, consider this, like ultimately what people need when they like get a bank account or get ID, they want to, they want to borrow, like they want to be able to borrow this key thing about human nature. Like most money is credit, right? So that won’t change under a Bitcoin standard in my opinion.

1:10:51 But the cool part is how do you borrow today? You have to like prove everything about yourself, right? Well, if you have a little bit of the world’s pristine financial collateral, no one’s going care who you are. If you say, I want to borrow and I’m going to collateralize that with this amount of Bitcoin, you’re as good as gold, like you’ve just given them the most important money in the world. So I think that Bitcoin itself will be like ID, like you won’t need ID, you just here, here’s my sats, they’ll talk for me, you know what I mean? So I think that people kind of in vulnerable areas or just who don’t have a lot of infrastructure, If they start using Bitcoin as money and that happens in the future, I think they’ll be able to borrow and get lines of credit and start businesses without having to enter into this fricking dystopian, AI, nightmarish social engineering world.

1:11:50 I think that that’s a possible future that I’m excited about.

1:11:54 Brian Rose: And central bank digital currencies, I mean, I’ve heard some horror stories about digital You want and 60 million people are using it and then the US government’s entertaining that and I’ve had some guests on that said That the World War three will be a currency war between these two countries as they project power Things that we should think about things that you’ve seen or thought about with those concepts even with from a human rights perspective

1:12:23 Alex Gladstein: Yeah, I think so central bank general currencies are a disaster for civil liberties, I mean Obviously, they are a play against the current dominant form of money, which is created by corporations like today, banks create, they issue loans, they create deposits, they work with companies like Visa and PayPal or whatever to facilitate all of our economic activity.

1:12:46 And that’s all kind of private sector stuff, like with CBDCs, the central government gets more control. So in China, the CBDC is obviously a push by the CCP to get a little more control back from these big tech companies that had become too powerful. It’s a centrally planned money system. I mean, it’s a way for the government to take the little freedoms we have left in cash, which look, cash can still be demonetized and it can still be devalued. Fine. But when you withdraw cash from ATM, I mean, the government knows how much money is in your bank account.

1:13:20 The bank knows how much you have, but they don’t know what you do with it after that, right? It’s freedom money, basically, right? They wanna take that away. Like if you have a CBDC, there’s not gonna be an ATM anymore. Like you’ll just always be monitored, right?

1:13:32 And it’s like, that’s not a world I’d like to particularly live in. And I won’t have to live in it because we have Bitcoin, we have a plan B. Like, so I think CBDCs are coming. They’re gonna replace cash. I think kids born today won’t ever use paper money really, I doubt it.

1:13:48 When they’re 20, 30, I don’t think it’ll be a big part of their lives. Everything will be digital. And this idea we have today, we’re like,

1:13:59 The way that the public access is a direct liability of the central bank is through cash, through coins and notes, right? So that’s gonna be now done instead through a token issued by that same entity. And who knows? I mean, maybe it becomes people’s core bank account, whatever, but the fact is it’s obviously ripe for censorship, social engineering, discrimination, black listing, all that stuff. The other side of CBDCs is the monetary piece.

1:14:24 Like it makes it very easy to do like stimulus checks like at the press of a button to like millions of people. It makes it very easy to impose expiration dates on your income. It makes it easy to impose negative interest rates. It makes it easy to financially repress people and force them to spend. So it’s like a tool of both surveillance and control and easy monetary policy.

1:14:46 It’s the kind of worst of all of them combined of all these threats. And Bitcoin’s like, again, the perfect like counter because it allows us to be able to, you know, communicate and do commerce and be human with each other in a way that can’t be stopped and gives us a monetary medium that can’t be debased. So I think it’s like the perfect shield to this threat.

1:15:09 Brian Rose: Couple of final questions, Alex. You know, the war in Ukraine, What have we seen that show us about our financial system?

1:15:17 Obviously you saw the U.S. kind of, you know, canceling dollar assets for certain citizens. We saw the ruble get devaluated, which meant you’re a citizen of that country. You’re participating at de facto in that war. We’ve seen people in Ukraine raising money with crypto.

1:15:31 But what have you seen the most from this, or what have we realized the most by watching this conflict happen in front of our eyes from a financial perspective or a freedom perspective?

1:15:43 Alex Gladstein: Yeah, well, at least with regard to our conversation today, there’s no place in the world that’s more vivid in terms of showing the use case for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency than the war in Ukraine. Putin’s invasion destroyed a country. It froze the nation. It totally paralyzed the economic system. But when you think about the Ukrainian people, I did an interview with the government. One of the ministers told me that their estimate is that 100,000 of the 5 million refugees who fled, who are now in Europe, left with cryptocurrency.

1:16:19 And it’s interesting because, I mean, this war was very sudden and people, I mean, Ukrainians I know lived in Kiev, like that I’ve spoken to February 23rd, 24th, they didn’t think there was going to be a war. So it was really sudden. You aren’t able to bring your house if you own it, you stock market was frozen, all that stuff was frozen, like you had, if you were just trying to leave or get out like you didn’t you only had what you had right okay well if you if you if you are a bitcoin user you have your wealth with you like you just take it and you can just bring it with you wherever you want super powerful and no one will like you don’t have to worry about some other country not accepting your fiat currency everybody will accept bitcoin so it’s like it’s a super powerful refugee tool and there’s a lot of stories of refugees who not just in Ukraine, but coming out of Venezuela, Afghanistan, many other places, Syria, it’s an incredible refugee technology. There’s a video that I saw that was on television in America on CNBC of people sending some money from Florida, from Miami to a refugee in Poland, the Ukrainian refugee. She didn’t have any bank account or anything. She had a phone. She got Bitcoin in a minute or less than withdrew it from a Bitcoin ATM and had Polish slaty cash in her hands within three minutes. It’s just like this is impossible to do via the legacy system. So I think that’s being made really clear. I think companies and aid industry is making it really

1:17:47 Clear. I mean, there’s a huge amount of aid and things happening in Ukraine that be impossible to do with legacy money. Like I was involved in a few weeks ago, we have a humanitarian aid operation on the ground there, HRF. And we were trying to get some satellite phones in on a Friday night. And it’s just like, how are we going to pay for them using a bank wire on a Friday night? It’s not going to happen. So we sent Bitcoin, phones were in Ukraine, hours later, like it’s just like, it’s such an obvious, like clear upgrade. For Ukrainians, for the Ukrainian government, Ukrainian government raised over $100 million in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. They’re like in, they’re like, this is obvious. And they told me that in the first few days, which were the most important days. They raised 20 million in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency before any other nation gave them any aid. So this is like a huge revolution. Now for the Russians, the Russian people, hundreds of thousands of them, you know, didn’t want this war and they left. And guess what?

1:18:41 That now they’re stuck. Like they don’t have their old bank accounts and the new countries don’t like Russians. It’s not like if you’re in Georgia or Armenia, the population is going to be like kind to you. So you can’t even probably open a bank account. So between Bitcoin and stablecoins, it might be your only hope, right?

1:18:57 Brian Rose: You know, we’ve heard some like speculation about, so if you think about it, it’s been very positive for the Ukrainian people, for the Ukrainian government, and for the Russian people. Well, what about the Russian government?

1:19:08 Alex Gladstein: Well, you know, that’s what everybody says, oh, Putin’s going to use Bitcoin. There’s no evidence of this.

1:19:13 I mean, Putin’s afraid of Bitcoin. Putin’s opponents use Bitcoin. If Putin had a plan for Bitcoin, we would have seen it by now. The CCP banned Bitcoin last year. It’s very clear what dictators think about Bitcoin. They don’t like it very much because they can’t control it.

1:19:27 Think about it this way. One of the reasons I’m bullish about Bitcoin for America is that Bitcoin is free speech, private property, and open commerce, open capital markets. That’s what Bitcoin is. Those vibe with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, American values. What does the CCP need? What does Putin need? They need censorship, Confiscation. Closed capital markets. Bitcoin’s not compatible with what they need.

1:19:56 So you can go on and on about, oh, they could get around sanctions and this and that, maybe. These are short-term things. Very difficult to launder a lot of money in Bitcoin. It’s very good for small amounts, which is why it’s helpful for people. But, I mean, it’s almost impossible for anyone to move billions of dollars of Bitcoin quietly.

1:20:15 It’s just the system’s not built for it. Like, and anyone who tries to do it is caught. I mean, look at the people who tried to, you know, the people who feed to the Bitfinex money, like the razzle con or whatever, like those two, those two guys, that the woman and her husband, they, they were caught, they only had laundered like a couple million of the billion and they were caught. So I mean, I just don’t buy it that it’s this tool for like, you know, in rogue governments to get around sanctions with billions of dollars, just no evidence for that. But guess But guess what, there’s a lot of evidence for, the individual people who live under those regimes benefiting enormously.

1:20:54 Brian Rose: The book is Check Your Financial Privilege. How do people find it and how do they follow you? What’s the best way? Also, to get your writing as well, what’s the best way?

1:21:03 Alex Gladstein: Yeah, so Check Your Financial Privilege is available on Amazon.

1:21:06 It’s also available if you want to buy it in Bitcoin. You can buy it in Bitcoin on the Bitcoin Magazine store. Do it, buy it, leave a review, would love that. I think there’s a Goodreads page as well. You can follow me elsewhere, and on Twitter, my DMs are open at Gladstein, G-L-A-D-S-T-I-N.

1:21:25 You can follow the Human Rights Foundation at HRF on Twitter or at HRF.org, and you can come and hang out with us to see what we do at the Oslo Freedom Forum, which is coming up in Norway on May 23rd.

1:21:37 Brian Rose: Love it. Final thoughts, Alex? Yeah, for people just maybe tuning in, might not have been aware of some of the human rights issues, might not have heard this perspective. And yeah, maybe things they should be thinking about or even next steps when it comes to, you know, Bitcoin.

1:21:54 Alex Gladstein: I mean, look, everybody’s like, well, should I buy some? How much should I buy whatever? I think you should invest your time in it. Then you’ll be able to make that decision later about whether you want to invest your money in it. But invest your time in Bitcoin, learn about it.

1:22:07 You can’t lose anything by learning about Bitcoin. There’s nothing to be lost and there’s everything to be gained. And I’m pretty sure that in 10 years, if you’re listening to this, you’re gonna look back and smile about the possibilities that you had back then. And we’re gonna be filled with one thing, regret, that we didn’t do more. We didn’t educate more people about Bitcoin.

1:22:27 We didn’t buy more Bitcoin, whatever, whatever, whatever. But we have time now when very few people believe in this thing. I mean, it’s almost engineered in a way to generate disbelief. Every time it goes up, it comes down. And now Bitcoin’s dead, Bitcoin’s not dead.

1:22:41 Bitcoin’s just getting started.

1:22:43 Brian Rose: We’ll finish on that incredible message. Alex, thank you for the time. I really appreciate you putting all this stuff in perspective, especially kind of the freedom aspect into the monetary system and showing how they’re all interlinked. And again, the fact that we’re in this system like a fish is in water, and sometimes we don’t understand that we’re in.

1:23:03 I think it was Terrence McKenna that once said, I don’t know who discovered water, but it definitely wasn’t a fish. And so, again, the more that people can maybe see this reality that we’re in, that we were born into, maybe via the perspective of a parallel instrument, we can start to really see about our own freedoms and our own desires and our own value systems and maybe just get a new perspective. And that’s what I’ve loved about watching Bitcoin is that we saw that parallel universe like you see in the old Star Treks and it’s a lens to watch ourselves and our own behavior.

1:23:33 So it’s super powerful and it really chimes a lot with the things that we’ve discovered over the year just talking about information. So yeah, appreciate everything you do. Appreciate the work. Book is incredible and appreciate you continuing to write and talk about this stuff. So thank you.

1:23:47 Alex Gladstein: Let’s do it next time in London.

1:23:49 Brian Rose: And yeah, also sounds fantastic. Like have a great time in Norway and I hope people join you there as well.

1:23:54 Alex Gladstein: Thank you, Brian.

1:23:55 Brian Rose: All right, great.

1:23:56 Thank you so much. Follow this man, get this book and we’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care, bye.