Alex Gladstein is a monumental figure in the Bitcoin world.
When most of us are looking at the issues that temporarily present themselves to us as problems,
whether or not our financial advisor will allow us to invest in Bitcoin,
whether or not we get taxed in order to buy a steakburger,
Alex Gladstein is looking at the reality of the world.
seven out of eight people across the globe are living under regimes where they do not have
financial freedom. They can have their money taken away, seized, frozen for political views,
for protesting, for doing something that in the United States and most of the Western world we
simply take for granted. Alex Gladstein has been focused on alleviating the pain of financial
repression for those people. As the leader of the Human Rights Foundation, he was working hard to do
that through traditional means. And when he discovered Bitcoin, he realized that it was
the greatest tool of freedom that he could use in order to help bring people away from these issues.
And so he's changed the focus of his charitable efforts in order to bring freedom to these people.
The author of Check Your Financial Privilege and Hidden Repression, which we may get to in due time,
And Alex has recently published an article in the Journal of Democracy that we feel warrants discussion.
And to lead us on that conversation, Mr. Grant Reckon.
Hey, thank you. That was an excellent intro.
I really appreciate it that we get a chance to discuss this because we all have our orange pill story if you're in the Bitcoin space.
And Gladstein is mine. This is the first book that really got me to understand Bitcoin, check your financial privilege.
or rather to understand why Bitcoin is a revolution, why it's important.
One amendment to your introduction, because I think Gladstein would say that he was here,
he's, in a sense, he's the leader of the Human Rights Foundation, but he's the chief strategy officer.
So, you know, it's a huge foundation with a lot of effort going into it, I'm sure.
As a chief strategy officer, I don't know what a chief strategy officer does,
but I assume they strategize, and so in some sense leads.
Call them the plays.
Yeah.
So we're reading, discussing why Bitcoin is freedom money by Alex Gladstein.
as Lucas mentioned, in the Journal of Democracy.
We've probably all heard of pro-democracy activists,
activism of the need to spread democracy,
of the evils of censorship, election rigging, political prisoners.
But what Lucas was talking about, financial repression,
monetary repression, that's less discussed.
How often do we hear those same sources, pro-democracy advocates,
talk about the corrupt monetary systems of other countries of our own?
And yet, new digital currencies can be used to surveil the economy at a very granular level, now technologically capable of doing it for the individual transaction, seeing what you're buying.
Authoritarian leaders can inflate currencies to fund their police states, wars, lavish lifestyles.
The censorship of a journalist, maybe the kind of prototypical concern of a democracy
advocates, is undoubtedly important, but financial repression affects every member of an authoritarian
society, including that censored journalist, obviously.
And it's indeed one of the ways financial repression then that authoritarians cement
their authoritarian rule.
This essay gives specific examples of how financial repression occurs, how Bitcoin can serve
as a powerful tool against financial oppression and how pro-democracy advocates who may have
previously not given enough focus can integrate Bitcoin into their operation to further their
purpose of preserving democracy, civil liberties, etc. The essay, I think, can kind of be divided
into two parts. The first part talks about how financial oppression is occurring across the world
and how Bitcoin has already been used to address that. And the second part addresses some of the
concerns or questions that kind of might say Bitcoin curious pro-democracy advocates might have
about how they can use Bitcoin integrated into their existing operations. So embarking on a
discussion of the first part then, or rather a summary, as Lucas and I always do, first we'll give
a summary, a substantive summary of the article, which I've already begun doing, so that we can have
on the table the actual substance of the article. So when we talk about it, we're not just talking
about some straw man confection of what we think the author is talking about. So,
How does financial repression occur?
First, financial repression can occur in the form of debanking.
5.7 billion people in the world live in, or under rather, authoritarian regimes where
the monetary rails, the ability to do transactions, use the money, are compromised or controlled
by the state.
Democracy advocates in these countries can't really fundraise, pay their employees, or save
money for future endeavors.
and it's tough for foreign donors to get money to them into that authoritarian state.
The foreign government is going to see that a grant arrived into a bank account
if it arrives in traditional financial ways and can then freeze, seize, and then arrest the holders of the account.
But Bitcoin, of course, doesn't require a bank account.
A nonprofit can send directly to advocates in the authoritarian country,
which can then use those funds in a way without permission.
Second, financial oppression can occur through the operations of a patriarchal culture
that denies financial freedom, for example, to women.
Gladstein gives the example of Roya Maboub, an Afghani humanitarian and entrepreneur
who started a software company.
And we previously discussed her when we talked about Lynn Alden's Broken Money.
She also mentions the work that Roya did and does.
So Roya starts a software company that employs women in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001, sometime after that.
Payments are difficult even at that time.
PayPal and Venmo are not available, and she can't just give cash to her female employees because the male relatives will confiscate that.
But she was able to pay in Bitcoin.
And we see other cases, other use cases also emerge from Roya's story.
So one, she can pay in a way that's not confiscatable by people within this patriarchal culture.
Another one is Afghanistan still was unstable.
One of her employees fled Afghanistan, was able to take the entirety of her wealth with her in the form of a seed phrase, which is kind of like the personal password to a Bitcoin account.
Didn't have to carry cash in her person, didn't of course have to bring her real estate with her.
so we see the importance too
just in the recent history of Afghanistan
the quick fall of Afghanistan
after the US withdraws
people who didn't already
have existing funds in a foreign
bank account or in the form of Bitcoin
they couldn't quickly
liquidate their house, their family
jewels, whatever, they were stuck in Afghanistan
or if they left they were
stuck leaving all of their things in Afghanistan
but if you had Bitcoin you could again
flee as a refugee with all of your possessions
on your person in the form of a seed phrase.
And even today, Gladstone notes,
Roya continues to fund underground schooling
for girls in Afghanistan through Bitcoin.
Third, in addition to Bitcoin then fighting debanking
and enabling pro-democracy activities,
even in like patriarchal cultures
where there's a culture of financial repression
towards women, we see financial repression
that also occurs as a history of colonialism
and how Bitcoin remedies that.
So in this essay, Gladstone gives the example of Togo,
Togo is a former French colony in West Africa.
After its nominal independence, it's still subject to kind of neo-colonial French rule, you might say, through the colonial franc, which is money that's controlled by France.
So an early pro-democracy leader championed an independent currency, realized how bad of a thing it was to not have its own sovereign money.
That leader, though, was then a few days before passage of a law that would have changed the situation.
That leader was murdered by French paramilitaries and a dictator was installed who is currently or whose family still is in control of power, in power in Togo.
And there still is that neocolonial called the Cifa Frank.
It's a colonial money, again, that's controlled by France.
And there's also kind of strong-armed, favorable trade arrangements toward France.
So there's this colonialism leading to monetary financial oppression in Togo.
Presently, there is an individual, Farida Naburima, and apologies if I pronounced the name wrong, who is an activist seeking monetary freedom in Togo.
She's pushing back against the colonial frank and the dictator's economic control, and she's using Bitcoin to do that.
So an example of a pro-democracy advocate helping a pro-democracy movement arise that is undebankable, that uses Bitcoin so it can't be debanked as a form of monetary oppression by an authoritarian regime.
Fourth, we see how the common person suffers from financial oppression through the monetary system designed to steal from them and how Bitcoin fixes that.
So the common man in the street, not just the advocate, is affected by financial oppression.
Gladstone, Gladstone gives the example of Cuba
which has a sort of two-tiered monetary system
where people earn in kind of a normal peso
but then this can only be used to buy certain very basic goods
and things, for example, that doesn't include meat and electronics
for that you would need this other special type of account
which usually has to be funded with foreign money
which the regime then harvests and gives people this fake money
that they can use to buy these other goods like meat and electronics.
So that two-tiered system obviously sucks.
It's obviously a way that the government steals from people.
So in Cuba then, people begin and increases to save in Bitcoin.
And Gladstein notes that they began in a period, for a certain period of time,
saving in Bitcoin in which the peso went down 90% and Bitcoin went up 2,000%.
So there are now underground schools in Cuba that teach people how to safely use Bitcoin
and remittances to Cuba are also being sent in Bitcoin to allow people to opt out of that corrupt two-tier harvesting system
that the government has imposed as a means of financial oppression.
Fifth, financial oppression doesn't also, of course, just affect the common person.
It also does directly target that traditional object of concern of maybe the pro-democracy movement,
like the journalist and the explicit pro-democracy advocate.
They are explicitly targeted by authoritarian regimes through financial oppression.
These people can now turn to Bitcoin.
So Gladstein gives many examples of this.
The essay is really worth reading just as a catalog of what people are doing around the world.
And that is, again, how I was orange-pilled by Check Your Financial Privilege.
It was the first time where I saw use cases, like people actually using Bitcoin out of necessity
and not as some sort of hobbyist kind of fascination with the technology.
So, Gladstein gives many examples. Belarus is one where the regime has systematically debanked media and the opposition and where Bitcoin payments are now a normal part of activism, he says, safer than carrying notes across the border in your pockets.
Obviously, if you want to get money into Belarus, you know, you get stopped at the border with a bunch of foreign currency. That's not going to be good.
Hong Kong, there, Gladstein notes, pro-democracy advocates have been debanked and so are now being subsidized directly through Bitcoin payments because they can't open a bank account.
So they can't receive payments through many other kind of traditional means.
He mentioned Nicaragua. Interesting because there, Daniel Ortega, the leader, has debanked church and universities, kind of a wide debanking of civil society outside the state.
democracy advocates are teaching individuals there and civil society folks how to use bitcoin
this targeted and retaliatory financial oppression is only going to become more common
glassy notes that there are 110 countries currently contemplating experimenting with or
implementing central bank digital currencies money that is digital money that is issued directly by
the state and so controlled by the state.
Digital, so you can program into it
nefarious functions, prevent people
from using it for certain things, implement
social credit scores that
interface with the money, prevent people
from using it if they've done certain actions, things
like that. So as
Guy's seen as cataloged, we see how Bitcoin
addresses financial repression
for those who are
reading the Journal of Democracy, they're concerned about
democracy. We see now
he's laid out the ways that financial repression
is definitely a thing that
authoritarian countries use and bitcoin is definitely a way that people are using to
redress that so again financial oppression is a form of debanking financial oppression is a form
of kind of just the texture of a patriarchal society the norms that function as a form of
debanking when women are not allowed to have cash in that society third is a form of continued
colonial control as in togo fourth is a way to steal directly from citizens as in the two-tier
system in Cuba, and then last as a way to directly target pro-democracy advocates, journalists,
etc.
So before we move on to the second part of the essay, I want to discuss all of this.
This is a lot of information, a lot of really good examples of the way that Bitcoin, again,
is actually used in the here and now.
People are like, what does Bitcoin do?
What are the use cases?
I mean, this essay is so rich in that.
And so this first part, I mean, it's, you know, give this to somebody who says that Bitcoin is useless.
Yeah.
When I read the first part of it, the thing that was the overlaying theme to me was I kept going back to these terms of democracy and freedom, which they've been bastardized, I would say, in Western culture.
democracy is being claimed more by the left as everything's a threat to democracy.
By the right, everything's a threat to freedom.
And democracy can certainly exist without freedom.
And we see examples of that in places around the world,
especially where the United States has installed pro-democracy governments
through CIA overthrows or through wars.
and even to a large extent in the United States where you have democracy.
But in the last decade or so, we saw an erosion of freedoms,
an erosion of the freedom of speech, an erosion of the freedom of expression,
a freedom of assembly.
And so I think that it's important to kind of reframe those terms
in what they truly mean, which is that freedom enables a true democracy.
You can't have the benefits of an actual democracy
if you don't have the freedom of your money.
And Gladstein, I think, gets really to the heart of the matter here
in understanding that the ability to have control over your own money
is paramount when it comes to expressing those freedoms.
I can be a journalist who exposes corruption,
but I can't do it if I have no funds in order to publish what I'm doing
or move in order to report on stories.
And so I think that was something that,
because I know we have primarily a Western audience,
And so those are freedom and democracy are somewhat triggering terms.
I know most people don't associate themselves with like MAGA or WOKE, but they also are inherently kind of aligned with the values of one or the other.
And so they're kind of drawn more towards whatever is the accepted flag being waved by their side, whether it's freedom or democracy.
And so I think, yeah, it's really important to kind of like elucidate what those terms actually mean.
No, definitely. And don't be put off by the term democracy here if one does tend to look at the word democracy as merely a label hurled in a political debate.
Yeah. Right. This the Journal of Democracy, I was reading a bit about it.
it does seem to, within its pages, include critiques of maybe not democracy as such,
but some of the things that are problematic about instituting democracy.
I think what you note is the most important thing,
that regardless of one's belief about whether any one particular country is a strong democracy,
regardless of how one views current critiques of certain particular policies,
like the United States, as anti-democratic or something like that,
It's undeniable that financial oppression is not consistent with a form of democracy.
If democracy, broadly speaking, is like everybody has a vote or there's some large percentage of the population that does have, that is franchised with the vote,
then being able to transmit and possess value is really essential to developing,
having the means to develop the sort of opinion and views necessary to reasonably exercise that vote.
Money is just, I mean, as every Bitcoiner knows, you see how it is the lifeblood of everything.
Like these currents of value that flow really do all of this structure built on top of it is an outflow or kind of an outcropping of whether those are trustworthy, immutable flows of value or whether those are corrupt and manipulable flows of value.
And so I think Gladstein really does a good job of laying out here, you know, financial refraction as a form of debanking.
That's obviously going to make somebody, you know, they're not going to be able to participate in democracy if they don't have a way to store value.
They're not going to be able to get to the voting booth.
They're not going to be able to get out there and spread their opinion to get people to vote for their candidate if they can't put gas in their car.
If there a culture of course that has norms that are inherently repressive and that those are embedded in government that just tend to subjugate a certain portion of the population prevent them from having value or giving value to others That also again like this financial oppression you know it such it interesting
Like one of Glassine's big points here is, I think, I wouldn't want to say impose on him a frustration,
but there's a concern that pro-democracy folks aren't focusing enough on financial oppression
and maybe are focusing on some of the facile concerns with everything is anti-democratic
or everything is a challenge to our democracy when it's a political position you don't disagree with,
you don't agree with, right?
Yeah, and we're more concerned with who goes into what bathroom and who gets to play what sport.
There's this whole culture war thing in the United States.
That kind of thing, and that's so secondary, tertiary to the actual issue,
which is the abstract like we grew up in this world and we think of money we have this recursive
definition of like money is the dollar the dollar is money and what is it used for well it's what
you use to buy stuff and it's what people give you when you work but the abstract understanding
of money is that money is energy that money is um an abstraction of the energy that it takes to do
work. And so it stands as a representation of that. And when there's something that you want,
that you have the choice of, I can expend my personal energy in order to gain this thing,
or I can trade some of the energy that I've already been rewarded for in the form of money
in order to acquire it, to have that kind of understanding.
This weapon of financial repression is taking away the energy of the movement
of people who are trying to exhibit pro-democracy action,
who are trying to bring more fairness to the world,
especially in the United States.
Again, another term that I think that we should really make sure that we sort of clear the air on is this idea of a patriarchy.
We hear talk of a patriarchy in the United States all the time.
But, you know, women are senators.
Women are billionaires.
Women are doctors and lawyers.
There are countries where a patriarchy actually exists.
And the patriarchy is such that you can't go to school.
You can't have a bank account.
You can't vote.
You can't drive.
These are things that we take for granted as these basic things that no one could ever infringe upon.
But it's very easy to see that there are countries where, Afghanistan in particular, Iran, where those are freedoms that people used to have.
And then a patriarchal government is installed or installs themselves and removes those types of freedoms.
And, you know, for someone who I have four sisters, I consider myself an actual classical feminist.
I want women to have the opportunities that men have and to be able to make those choices, whether it is to be a mother or a lawyer or a doctor.
when you remove that choice
then that type of oppressive regime
is something that
I think it's just misunderstood
when we use the term patriarchy
to describe
what we see in the United States
as compared to what happens in the rest of the world
this is such a good point you're making
because it goes to a consistent theme
in Gladstein's work
check your financial privilege
when we're thinking about things like democracy,
patriarchy, we tend to look at it
through our own western lens
from the United States, and so we tend
to pattern onto that the challenges
to those concepts
that arise from within our society
that tend to be much more
much smaller in
scope than what we see maybe in
other countries like the Taliban in Afghanistan,
which, I mean, I don't even know if they're
patriarchal, maybe you would say it's like
theocratic or something, but whatever it is,
like the type of financial oppression that they have towards women is something that is not
occurring in the United States. And so with Bitcoin, then a common argument against Bitcoin
is why do we need this? I can just like send you something through Venmo or PayPal. I can just go
open a bank account. And so, I mean, this whole catalog of countries where these things are not
possible, check your financial privilege. If that's your response that we don't need Bitcoin
because I don't need Bitcoin, because I live in a society where Bitcoin is not necessary for me.
Check your financial privilege.
Check the perspective that you have on the world as a product of who you are.
Broaden that perspective, considering what is happening in Nigeria, Turkey, Russia,
even Canada with the truckers' protests where they froze the funds to that particular protest.
In the United States with PayPal, with Airbnb.
Airbnb has taken away people's ability to book a room because they posted something on social media that Airbnb disagreed with.
PayPal said that if you post something on social media, we'll just take, I think it was up to like $2,000 out of your account.
And this is where Charlie Munger's advice of invert the problem really matters because we don't think that these things are a problem as long as we're on the side or we are falling in line with whatever power is instituting these controls.
but invert the problem, like assume that the people that you disagree with are going to eventually take power and take control.
And when they do, will they not simply use the same rails, the same instruments, the same tools in order to attack you?
And nothing lasts, you know, we have such a short term view.
This is why Natalie Smolenski, this was the thing that she noted was the most impactful change in her life coming to Bitcoin was that it lowered her time preference, that it made her look further into the future.
And we need to look further into the future. We need to understand that what we exist under today is essentially a bully regime, whether you're in the United States or China or wherever.
It's this temporary hierarchy of power that is, if you zoom out, you can simply look at it as it's a bully that's standing on the neck of someone pulling money and power out of their pockets.
and eventually that bully is going to have to release that hold on the neck or the neck is
you know the person is going to rise up and what we want is to be able to exist in a world where
regardless of who is in power we still have the same freedoms we still have the same opportunities
we still have the same ability to exist as individuals and that's simply not the reality
It's not the reality in Togo, and that's very clear.
It's not the reality in Cuba.
That's very clear.
But it's also not the reality, even in what we consider to be the most free places in the world in the United States.
And we need to recognize that what we live in, if we're aligned with who's in power, it's merely a temporary thing.
And that can all change in the blink of an eye.
It can change in an election.
It can change overnight.
Yeah.
Some of this is covered, I think, in the second part of the essay. So I'm going to move on to the summary of the second part. We're going to get back to some of these topics.
So after Gladstein goes over the way that financial oppression occurs around the world and then how Bitcoin in these specific instances is used to as a means to remediate the difficulties that activists and individuals experience in the face of monetary oppression.
He continues on to advance the Bitcoin debate in the second part of this essay for the sorts of political scientists, academics, pro-democracy advocates who might read the Journal of Democracy, where this essay is published, who might now be open to Bitcoin's functionality.
They've reviewed the first part of the essay to see that it is being used by activists, but who might still have some reservations.
So to these people, to this crowd, and of course to anybody else reading, Gladstein first makes the point, Bitcoin, not crypto or blockchain.
So nearly 100% of so-called crypto tokens, he observes, are launched with the intent of enriching the creators.
We've all seen these scams, and this is October 12th, 2025.
We're in the wake of the biggest wipeout of the crypto market in history.
Bitcoin, mainly unaffected, but many of these scam tokens just plummeting to near zero.
Max pain for those people, max pain for eternity, I imagine, because they're not going to come back, hopefully.
but not to make light of the max pain either
because again these are scams of the people who bought into them
these are normal people who wanted to get out of the financial system
and so they get into these scams unfortunately
that's why we need to emphasize bitcoin not crypto or blockchain
some of these scams
Glass Dean mentions kind of offhand
are also trying to scam non-profits
imagine some token states
they have some particular functionality for cross-border exchanges or something like that.
The non-profit then goes with that crypto.
Gladstein does note that stablecoins, the type of coin where the value is pegged to an established currency or commodity or something,
are maybe in a different category than those pure crypto tokens, which tend to be scams.
It does have some current utility, and in some countries, stablecoins are, in fact, preferred over Bitcoin.
There are, though, risks with stablecoins, he notes.
They're centralized, usually.
They can be confiscated or censored for that reason by the issuer, by the corporation behind it.
They can lose their peg.
They can go to zero, like the Terra situation.
And they also just generally, as a philosophical point, increase state power in the network effect of state money.
If they're a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, you're increasing the network effects of the U.S. dollar through the use of stablecoins.
So as an advocate or an activist with a bigger picture in mind, maybe you want to look into a decentralized money without a state issuer or corporate issuer like Bitcoin.
So based on this, Gladstone suggests a framework for democracy work.
Bitcoin, stablecoins, everything else.
So first place Bitcoin, second place stablecoins, everything else, probably garbage.
You really want to encourage people to not get into that.
Second, Gladstein confronts three popular criticisms of Bitcoin, volatility in adoption, energy use, criminality.
Volatility is interesting because, for the pro-democracy advocate, compare the volatility to the volatility of the currency in the country where someone is holding Bitcoin.
Perhaps that's even worse.
And then, of course, over a five-year time frame, Bitcoin has been a great savings instrument.
Adoption, Gladstein notes, continually increasing.
He mentions an app called Tando, which I had not heard of, as facilitating Bitcoin payments in certain countries.
And then energy use, we've discussed that extensively.
Miners do not produce any emissions themselves.
They're, in fact, more green than users of just the U.S. power grid because miners also seek out forms of stranded energy,
energy at the source, hydro, thermal, nuclear, wind, sources of energy that have excess at
certain points they want to sell to any buyer. Criminality, Gladstein makes a couple really
good points. Large scale criminal enterprises usually have excellent banking connections
in any case. And even notes to the banks that they use, HSBC.
Yeah, right. And also, I just love this too. At the end of the day, the dictators are calling individuals who use Bitcoin criminals because, of course, they have a vested interest in criminalizing the very pro-democracy advocacy that Bitcoin is funding.
Bitcoin is a disaster for them, Glass Dean notes. I'll read this quote because it's phenomenal.
Ultimately, it is dictators who are the biggest criminals, and for dictators, Bitcoin is a disaster.
Satoshi's invention puts money back into the hands of the people, giving them free speech, property rights, and open capital markets.
This is exactly what dictators fear most, because they need censorship, confiscation, and closed capital markets to survive.
This is why you see tyrants such as Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin criminalizing Bitcoin payments.
tyrants do not like money
they do not control
and then the third
before I go on to that
there's a lot of new things
new content there
the criminality
energy use, volatility
adoption has popular
criticisms of Bitcoin
and then of course
Bitcoin not crypto or blockchain
do you have any
yeah one thing that
I've been suspicious of stablecoins since they came out
because I look at stablecoins merely as a compressed way
for an issuer of a stablecoin to arbitrate
against the user's benefit of using Bitcoin.
Like stable coins, it's a multi-billion, I think soon to be a multi-trillion dollar industry.
And how do they make that money?
Well, they make that money because you hold their stable coin while Bitcoin goes up in value.
And so over time, you certainly lose and they certainly gain.
Naval Ravikant recently tweeted that stable coins are merely central bank digital currencies with extra steps.
And they truly are.
It's programmable money.
It's centralized.
Someone else is in control.
It exists in one place, not decentralized.
And so there is short-term utility, sure, for if you really think that you have knowledge about the market
and maybe you want to hold your position while you think it's going down.
But as we saw two days ago, good luck picking those events because it can happen in 45 minutes.
And so he does a good job of elucidating the difference between Bitcoin, stablecoins, and cryptocurrencies.
But at this point, I would really even just say it's just Bitcoin.
stable coins sure they might have this short term use but in the grand scheme and this has been
Vladimir Putin's advisor recently talked about this that stable coins are a scheme that will
allow for the United States to take all of their debt push it into the cloud and make the rest of
the world responsible and also give them the opportunity to issue ungodly amounts of more
debt and continue to raise and push that, you know, $37 trillion that we're currently
in debt to even higher levels.
You know, the predictions are that by 20, even the government's own predictions are that
by 2030, we're going to see that number approach like $100 trillion.
And so you do have to zoom out.
That's why I think these conversations are so important.
Yes, it's incredibly unfortunate that so many people lost so much money.
$1.65 trillion was taken out of the crypto economy in a day.
But that's why education is so important to understand why you don't want to have your money in Atom,
why you don't want to have your money in Ethereum or Solana,
because it can and will and will happen again,
that it will just disappear.
The power of open source and the power of decentralized
is that everyone benefits equally and everyone suffers equally.
And those are not traits that you see in crypto and they're not traits that you see in stablecoins either.
Yeah, and it's useful, as you mentioned, as education for people as they're contemplating investing in crypto or whatever.
But it's also just useful as a larger point to disambiguate Bitcoin and crypto so that people don't withdraw entirely from anything that uses encryption in order to create a new form of money or commodity or something like that.
particularly that people understand that Bitcoin is not crypto, is not these other scam tokens.
I mean, we can see in this newest market wipeout, people are also going to use that against Bitcoin.
People who just kind of glance at the news are going to think, oh, Bitcoin's at it again.
So being rigorous in your terminology, in your explanation of concepts,
when you talk clearly disambiguating Bitcoin, stable coins, not crypto,
There's lots of funding going out by certain parties right now.
You can see billboards up around town talking generally about cryptocurrency.
There's one that has a cowboy on it, cowboy-looking dude, and it says,
crypto is for me, to create the image that crypto is for every person.
There's lots of funding going in trying to make it ambiguous,
trying to get people to ride in on the good graces of Bitcoin.
It's preservation of value. It's steady accumulation over time.
of value so that they can market their other coins.
So this is just such an incredibly useful point,
not,
I mean,
for nonprofits,
nonprofits also,
you know,
need to know when they talk with activists in other countries,
when they try to transmit value to them,
maybe be able to explain why they're not going to send some crypto and
instead why they're going to send Bitcoin.
If some sort of,
you know,
digital payments requested just such a useful terminological kind of set of
words to have in your mind and know the difference between it.
Yeah.
It's also,
it also just like a general lesson that we should apply in our lives which is that you don form your opinion about everything based on one experience
You walk into a restaurant and you have one bad meal and you assume that that restaurant is horrible and that you'll never go back.
Or you walk into a bar and you see one pretty girl and you think that that's the place that the pretty girls go to.
and you can't make these large rationalizations based off of one singular experience because that
singular experience is just simply not definitive of the whole if i found a severed finger in my
food i wouldn't go back to the restaurant particular experience just a bad day for one
chef dude just a bad day for one chef it could only be 10 bad meals here it's gonna have a hard
time finding gloves for the rest of his life yes wearing mittens did you have any thoughts on the
aspect of this first part of the second half that we discussed which is gladstein's response to
typical arguments against bitcoin too volatile that its adoption is not sufficient enough only
criminals use it that energy use um is bad when it's done by bitcoin and not by other things so
too volatile um energy use and criminal criminal use so the first thing too volatile we first need
to recognize that everything is relative and that the volatility of Bitcoin is upward and the
volatility of even the most stable government issued currency, which is the US dollar, is
downward. And so you are guaranteed that over time, if you keep your money in the dollar, in
the yen and yuan and in whatever government currency you have, you're guaranteed to lose
all of your buying power eventually at some point in the future.
I'll repeat this and I'll repeat this.
There's been 4,000 government currencies that have existed.
3,860 of them no longer exist.
All of the rest of them are down 99% of their original value.
So you're guaranteed, if you have the alternative,
that you will be not just poor but truly destitute.
And volatility on the upside is something that I think Michael Saylor has done just such a wonderful job of reframing what volatility means.
Volatility means that there are people that want it.
If you have something that is completely stable in price, markets are a place where people come together and they determine value through an agreement.
And if that never changes, then what you're seeing is that there's no active negotiation going on.
So stability is actually not desirable.
Volatility is.
We need to understand that volatility is desirable, that change is desirable.
And we want to see that.
I mean, it's not necessarily desirable.
Sometimes you want a stable thing, though.
You want something that is stable.
Not everything needs to be stable, but...
But over the course of time, mathematically,
if you simply just put the actual numbers to it
and look at it as a math equation,
do I want this thing that goes up 100% and down 80%
and up 100% and down 80% versus the thing that only goes down 13%?
Maybe you do.
Absolutely.
Like, there's no question from it.
On what time frame?
If that thing...
I mean, if that thing goes down 80% and you need to spend the money that day,
on a small enough time frame, maybe you do need the stablest thing.
Right.
Yeah.
But then it comes to now you're making the decision.
You need to make the decision based on the probability of that occurring.
And the probability of that occurring is 99% of the days, like with Bitcoin,
99% of the time you're going to be in a better situation because it's going up
and then there's going to be these short instances.
So are you going to base your life decisions off of what is the worst thing that can happen?
Which is, by the way, this is Nassim Taleb's idea, is that the barbell.
Should I have my investments in the thing that is poised to break out?
Or should I have my investment in the thing that just stays stable?
And he proves, which is fascinating because he's been waffling on his opinion on Bitcoin, but he proves mathematically that you lose if you stay in the middle.
Because what happens is that because of the nature of the system that creates bubbles, because we have government interference in markets that sends bad signal, sends noise, there will be, like, those bubbles are guaranteed.
Those are guaranteed.
And so what can you do to avoid that?
So you make that decision based off of the probability of things occurring.
That's why people live in San Diego.
It's beautiful.
99% of the time, 1% of the time you could have an earthquake.
1% of the time you could have something, but people still choose to live there and they
think that it's great because they make the decision based off of what is most likely to
happen.
That's why people engage in relationships.
There's going to be a time when you find yourself in disagreement with someone, but the majority of the time you're going to find that things are wonderful.
That's why when you enter a relationship with somebody, you don't just look at, oh, I find myself pulling things out of conversations.
But you don't choose not to be with someone because of one small thing that you disagree on.
you choose to be with someone because of the 99% of things that you do agree.
I mean, that goes far afield from like the fact that you just, in certain moments, you
do need the most stable currency.
As an investment thesis, sure, upward volatility is a better thing for an investor on a certain
time frame.
But if you need day-to-day to be sure that your bank account has a certain amount of
money in it because you need to be able to feed your family, you need to be able to feed
your family 100 nights out of 100, not 99 out of 100.
You need the stablest thing.
You don't, and if there's some things that are a little bit riskier, more volatile,
you'll need a buffer against that.
Maybe you have a certain liquidity reserve
so that you can let your Bitcoin weather
some sort of downward moment.
Regardless, I mean...
But the better buffer is the thing that's gone up 100%,
and it can go down 50% and still be higher
than the thing that goes down 13% continuously.
I mean, that's the buffer.
Like, you're missing...
Like, that's the thing that you're giving up on.
You're giving up on your dreams.
You're giving up on your opportunity to provide
by saying, oh, I'm just going to limit my down,
side rather than maximize my upside. Um, and yeah, I mean, this is, this is where we may just
have to disagree on this because if you, if you look at the history of Bitcoin, pick any five year
period, pick any, any five year period, start on October 3rd, start on October 8th, whatever,
um, pick any five year period. And you're not just better, um, by having Bitcoin, you are
monumentally better. Except for if you needed to suddenly repair your car at a point when Bitcoin
nosedived in the past. But again, it nosedived to a point that is still higher than it would have
been had you saved in your regular currency. Not necessarily. If you start saving at a peak and
then it nosedives and then you have a sudden purchase that you need, then you've just lost
80% of what you invested. I mean, not a bit can wait five years for a purchase they might need to
do you need to have sufficient reserves for a five-year period and i i don't think i this is
where i i don't think it's a five-year period i think it's maybe it's three months um something
like that but always continuously keeping that three-month reserve in any case like the volatility
it's much it's the newest market wipeout shows that hopefully we can expect down more volatility
for bitcoin to not be what it was in the past yeah some of this concern is also like here's
there because right yeah so hopefully you know the the biggest wipeout in crypto history took
bitcoin down less than what you're guaranteed to lose by having your money in the most stable
government-issued currency but over a longer time period again in any case we're gonna disagree we're
gonna end up disagreeing a little bit on go ahead and be poor i'm fine being poor as long as i'm
stably poor i like some stability in my poverty i can't have these upward swings wait so the next
thing that you brought up is energy usage and this is something that i've talked about continuously
like so first off you need to understand that bitcoin is a commodity and commodities are
wheat commodities are cattle commodities are milk these are homogenous items that are sold
into a market and this is why we see mega mega scale farms mega scale ranches because
when you are participating in a commodity market, the way that you are able to survive
and profit is simply by economies of scale, which allow you to be the lowest cost producer.
And so in a commodity market, in order to be a lowest cost producer, when you apply
that to Bitcoin, Bitcoin is the commodity, you need to minimize your inputs.
And what are your inputs?
Your inputs are the miners and your inputs are the electricity that feed the miners.
And the miners are also a commodity because by and large, there's only a couple of them that you can get.
Everybody runs the same ones.
And so that you can't differentiate yourself there.
But the energy, that's the input that you can differentiate yourself on.
And that's why we see that the Bitcoin mining producers of the commodity of Bitcoin, the ones that are able to survive are the ones that are being innovative in finding sources of stranded energy and sources of wasted energy.
And these are sources of energy, to be very, very clear, these are sources of energy that are not currently used.
They're not part of the grid.
They're not taking away energy from the grid.
They're not making it harder for you to turn on your lights.
They're not making it harder for you to charge your car.
This is natural gas that's being flared into the environment and burnt and just wasted.
These are waterfalls in remote areas that it's just energy that's coming down that's not being used.
And Bitcoin mining is now over 50% green in terms that it's using these types of energy.
It is, I believe, the greenest market that exists in the entire world.
it's fascinating because in 2022 there was such a narrative around the energy usage of Bitcoin
and it turns out that the forcing function of being involved in a commodity market
where you have to find the cheapest source of energy
Bitcoin is the thing that is driving us towards cheaper energy
it's driving us towards energy that is abundant
And it's going to give us the opportunity to participate in a world that's much more abundant simply because we have more energy.
Yeah, no, that's an excellent summary of like, we read some really good essays in national security in the digital age. And some of what you were saying, reminded me of some of the securing America's future in the age of the electron by James McGinnis, Bitcoin energy security by Lee Bratcher and Pierre Rochard. There was a lot of I mean, you did an excellent summary of a lot of different disparate points from those essays. But I think we've extensively talked about energy use of Bitcoin.
And I really don't see people in the know who are against Bitcoin really even raising those arguments anymore because they've been pretty...
That argument's been killed pretty hard.
People like you have done a good job.
The last thing that you brought up is the criminality part of it.
Yeah.
And when I taught this in the money inflation and Bitcoin series, the way that I framed this is you first need to understand that any innovative new technology
that is going to replace the current traditional system,
it's always adopted by the people that are outside of that system.
It's always adopted by the criminal enterprise
that is excluded from participating in the traditional system.
That's why you saw during Prohibition,
when people were running moonshine from place to place,
those were the guys that first adopted the car because a car can outrun a horse and so was the
car an instrument of criminality it was just a tool yeah you know and a tool is something that
it can either be a weapon or it can be something that is used to your advantage i can take this
hammer and i can pound it in a nail and i can build a house or i can take this hammer and
And like my high school classmate, who is now known as Jimmy the Hammer, murdered his stepfather with it, right?
These things are, depending on how you use them, like a tool itself is agnostic of purpose.
Yeah.
We give it purpose.
And Alex does a great job of explaining and identifying HSBC as this is the bank that the criminals use.
I just and I told you about this
I just finished watching this movie
called I think it's called Infiltrator
or The Infiltrator
and it's a true story of the
cocaine trade
Pablo Escobar and
the Customs Border Patrol
setting up this sting operation in order
to go at the
funds and what they found
when they were able to bring this down
was that they crashed
the 7th largest private bank
in the entire world because the criminals not only exist outside the system,
they run the system, the dictators and the people that they put in power.
And so they're the ones that are able to use those rails to their advantage.
They're the ones that are able to obfuscate the true nature of their purpose
and do it in plain sight and take advantage of using banks
and using laws to get around the things that hold back you and I from engaging in criminal enterprise.
But when you're at the top and you can make the rules and you're the one that sets the map,
then you know how to get to the X.
Yeah, and not only that, when you're at the top, you define the category of criminality as such.
the very notion of transgression
is defined by the authority who defines
who are the transgressors, what is the transgression
so if you have the ability to
define a particular
pro-democracy
advocate's activities as
per se criminal, as criminal as such
then Bitcoin begins to look criminal
because people who are promoting liberty and freedom
are using this criminal technology
of Bitcoin, the criminal
purpose of trying to
reduce authoritarian control
And so it's just such a good point that dictators are the biggest criminal. Tyrants do not like money. They do not control. What they call criminal is almost certainly going to be, in certain cases, something that promotes liberty and freedom.
Right.
Rules are the things that are put in place by the people that are creating the illusion that we live under.
But laws are the things that we cannot avoid.
The laws of physics, which are that which power Bitcoin, and also the laws of code, which is rules that are instantiated in a way that cannot be changed.
And so everyone has to abide by that code.
everyone has to play by the same rules as opposed to simply being able to you know the example in
the movie was uh that the drug dealer's money had been frozen by the united states government
and they wanted to get it out and all they had to do was go to the head of the bank and say hey
change the date of the deposit and put it before the freeze went into place and now those funds are
open. And so if you control the system, you can do that, but you can't do that. Um, if you're
fighting against the laws of physics and you can't do that if you're fighting against the laws of
decentralized code. Yeah. Now spoken very well are the resident natural law jurist here, Lucas
Maddy on the nature of ruling law. That's pretty good. Man, I've just broken a lot of bones and I
know that it hurts. We'll move on to the final part of this essay. There's two final sections.
In the next one, after we got moving sequentially forward, Gladstein gives a practical guide for non-profit or human rights groups that's just getting started with Bitcoin.
I'm not going to go into the mechanics of that.
It's a good blueprint if you do have a non-profit and you do want to send a grant to an authoritarian country or something like that.
I mean, this isn't a step-by-step how-to.
More of a, here's some resources to look at.
HRF, Human Rights Foundation, offers webinar.
There's something called the Bitcoin Humanitarian Alliance,
which I guess is a group of nonprofits that are using Bitcoin.
An interesting one, there's the World Liberty Congress
by the Venezuelan activist Leopoldo Lopez
that looks like they use NOSTER to in some way
fuel the educational website
or as infrastructure for this educational website
for democracy advocates.
So some interesting stuff to look into.
You read this if you want to see tools for your toolkit, if you're on the board of a nonprofit or interested yourself in doing some sort of activism.
Well, and that's real quick, NOSTER, because even within the Bitcoin community, there's not a whole lot of people who understand what NOSTER is.
NOSTER stands for notes and other stuff transmitted by relays.
So this is a decentralized protocol that is built on top of Bitcoin that allows effectively, if you want to think about this in terms of your traditional everyday life, you've got your Spotify account to listen to music, your YouTube account to watch videos, your Kindle account to read books, and your Audible account to listen to books.
All of these different things, and they're all different companies, and they're all siloed in their information.
You can't take your Facebook followers and import them to your Twitter account.
You can take your YouTube subscribers and put them into your Instagram subscribers But with Noster you have one login and one digital online identity
And that is the thing that you can use to navigate all of these other apps.
So imagine a world in which you don't have 12 different apps on your phone in order to
listen to music and watch videos and read books and do all these different things.
You simply have one app and that one app coalesces everything.
And not only are you able to have a consistent identity, not only are you able to avoid this
annoyance of having 30 different passwords for 30 different things, you're also able
to take the asset that is your online presence and use it across these different formats.
And not only that, get rewarded in Bitcoin.
And we've seen this.
We're now putting this Bitcoin Study Sessions podcast on Noster and growing a community there.
And the difference is that when we have it on YouTube, we need to have a thousand subscribers
and 4,000 hours of total video time.
And then we have to apply and then we have to go through a process
where they make sure that we're not doing anything that they disagree with
and wait another three months.
And it could literally be years before you could earn one cent from a podcast
or from your work on YouTube.
Whereas literally within the first 45 minutes of having this podcast on Noster,
we were able to receive value, actual value, where someone watched the podcast.
We've got 68 total listens to this podcast on Noster.
It's insignificant, yet we've actually made real money, Bitcoin, from someone who listened to it
and they said, oh, this is something that I find value in.
I'm going to reward the creator.
And I give the example of putting my music on Noster where in four days of having my music on Noster, I made more with three songs than I did in four months of having my music on Spotify with five albums.
And the difference is because that 30,000 people can listen to my music on Spotify and all 30,000 of them could say, I love this.
This is my favorite artist.
This is the best thing that I've ever heard.
And there's no way for them to reward me for providing them value.
But with 68 listens on, I have the same amount of listens as we have podcast listens.
With 68 listens on Noster, I'm able to have one person go, oh, I like that.
I'm going to give this guy five bucks.
So, you know, it's incredible what it allows for people.
This is a really good summary of Noster.
This essay is called Why Bitcoin is Freedom Money, the role that Bitcoin plays in pro-democracy,
could play pro-democracy, well, does and could play in pro-democracy activism and activism
against financial oppression.
If there was a similar essay about Noster, what would the title be?
Just to summarize, if you could summarize Noster in one sentence, why Bitcoin is freedom
money, would the essay be why Noster is freedom?
I would say NOSTER is freedom for the creativity and for creators.
And it's not just creators of art.
It's also what Alex Gladstein is doing, right?
Where he puts this essay up on NOSTER and people can read it and they can directly send HRF, Bitcoin, in order to support that.
As opposed to, you know, currently what's the way that you support?
You know, you buy the book, right?
and
why Noster is freedom of contract
why Noster is a free market
freedom of market
and it inverts the current
it inverts the current
reward system where
all we need to
do to understand how much
value is being extracted from creators
is to take the market cap of
YouTube and Spotify and Instagram
and Facebook and Twitter
and add that up
because their
product is simply the platform. It's, you know, the actual, the actual value of that product
is the network and the people who put things onto that platform. And they're the ones that
currently capture all of that benefit as opposed to the creator. So, you know, what is that? You
know, it's literally trillions of dollars that is creator value that is being captured by the
creator of the platform right um and nostor flips that and it allows for i would dearly love to see
a similar essay in the journal of democracy or anywhere if somebody wants to write the essay
what is nostor's role currently in activism what could nostor's role be in activism if democracy
or other advocates seized on it so to move on to the conclusion of this essay so glassy concludes
with a section describing how Bitcoin is increasingly becoming freedom money, even though it's,
as we talked about, kind of somewhat been ignored by human rights activists, by that
whole community.
He cites the global Bitcoin adoption index produced by the Cornell Brooks School Tech
Policy Institute, which has found that more than a quarter of citizens in countries such
as India, Kenya, Nigeria, Russia, and Turkey report having used Bitcoin.
more than one in four people in these countries report having used Bitcoin,
and yet the technology is still somewhat ignored by the human rights community.
Bitcoin conferences springing up around the world.
Bitcoin conferences, from my external viewpoint on these conferences,
conferences that are grassroots, run by people in the community,
not some person, I mean, to use kind of some leftist vocabulary,
not some white savior coming in and like,
I'm going to do a conference for you and teach you guys everything.
And then it's people in the country, people in these countries building like their own systems,
their own ways to do things, how Bitcoin is going to be integrated according to the way markets work in there
and the way the norms for association, et cetera.
Gladstein knows something interesting, kind of, you know, I don't know how much he puts into this,
but say there's a 10, we might say there's a 10 year activist adoption curve.
If you look at Signal and What's Up, 2010, some activists were beginning to use these kind of technologies, not widespread.
They're ubiquitous by 2020.
So this is 10-year adoption curve for activists.
Bitcoin, then, we might say 2020, it's being used, but rarely am I activist.
So maybe the activism curve for Bitcoin adoption is 2030, if you like kind of adoption metrics.
I thought that was an interesting one.
Bitcoin is also in itself
a movement, a form of protest
against a failing monetary system
that's why Satoshi
put the machine in motion
wound it up and let it go out into the world
its adoption is itself
a form of protest
and Gladstein states it this way
to quote an excellent quote here
the tens of millions of self-custodial
wallet downloads and more than 10 million
cold storage devices sold
help us understand the shift away from using traditional money toward Bitcoin
is probably the biggest peaceful protest in history.
I love that. Bitcoin, the biggest peaceful protest in history.
And I'll conclude this just reading in its entirety.
I think this is the concluding paragraph.
And if not, it's a paragraph I quoted
because it summarizes so beautifully what Glassene is talking about.
Every day Bitcoin's reach inspires, even in the darkest of places,
It has helped people to survive under siege in Aleppo, kept families afloat in Lebanon, gotten aid into Gaza, Burma, and Sudan, and even helped to rescue North Korean refugees stuck in northeastern China.
Bitcoin is providing property rights, connecting people to the world, and keeping resistance alive, often in places where nothing else can reach.
In January 2009, when Bitcoin launched, Satoshi Nakamoto may have never guessed where the invention would lead.
But today, we can say, at the very least, it has earned the name Freedom Money.
Yeah.
Without going too far backwards, I do want to say that one of the reasons I think why
Bitcoin probably has not been adopted by many of these philanthropy organizations is that
we're now seeing that many of these philanthropic organizations really are not truly philanthropic
And they're existing as a front or they're existing as a means of washing or hiding funds.
And I think that one of the things that we're going to see with Bitcoin is we're going to see some clarity into that industry, into that sector.
where it's becoming more and more obvious that using Bitcoin is the way to enable this sort of action
and participate in this peaceful.
If you own Bitcoin, you're not just an advocate for sound money.
You're not just somebody who is trying to get wealthy.
You are participating in the largest peaceful revolution that has ever occurred.
And you are, as Jason Lowry frames it as digital 1776, it is a revolution.
And we're all in this together.
We're all moving in the same direction there.
It's a beautiful thing.
Before we close out, I want to give a heartfelt thanks to Alex Gladstein.
I did intend to mention this during my introduction and Grant did bring it up.
But, you know, without the work that Alex did, I wouldn't be sitting here with Grant because this is how Grant was brought into Bitcoin.
and people that are not financially motivated,
people that are not simply looking for a way to change their life monetarily,
but people that are looking for, in an altruistic manner,
they're looking for an opportunity to make the world a better place.
Bitcoin is an avenue for that.
And it's becoming more and more obvious that it is the avenue for that.
that freedom of money is freedom of expression.
It is freedom of the ability to move
and freedom of the ability to assemble.
And so, yeah, thank you.
Thank you to Alex for this incredible work
that he's done and continues to do.
And really, in Bitcoin,
there's so many people that hold off
of participating in Bitcoin because they're waiting.
They're waiting for their government to allow it.
They're waiting for their financial advisor to allow it.
They're waiting for their company.
You know, there's a lot of people that still work for companies that if you hold Bitcoin, you're not able to work at that company.
They're waiting for the billionaires to come in.
They're waiting for BlackRock to make it part of an ETF.
And this is against what Natalie Smolenski talked about, which is the bottoms up movement.
You know, there's so many people that are always waiting for permission.
They're waiting for the top-down authority in order to give them cover to participate.
And what Alex has done bravely and courageously is go into the belly of the beast and go to the people who are suffering the most clearly on the bottom.
Those have been trampled down by oppressive regimes and financial repression has been used as the tool against their ability to live a free life.
And he has been making a difference in the lives of people that are not celebrated on social media.
They're not celebrated on traditional media because they have not had a voice.
They've simply existed in that void, and their struggles have been silent.
Their struggles have been unobserved.
So, yeah, the work that he has done, I think, is on par with any person that's ever been involved in Bitcoin and continues to do that on a large scale.
Yeah, but not to minimize Gladstein's role, because obviously it played an essential role in my own kind of orange pilling, so to speak.
but you know
I heard this was said
at the Kansas City
Bitcoin Summit
I forget by who
but you need to meet
people where they're at
as far as explaining
Bitcoin to them
the person who it takes
at the time
I was doing
human rights related
lawyering
representing individuals
seeking political asylum
people fleeing
their countries
refugees
and so that
that made sense to me
the vocabulary he was using
but it's going to make
a lot
you know
somebody who is
a pastor in a church
maybe they need
another pastor
somebody who's religious
who knows that
theology, how that interacts with the nature of Bitcoin.
You know, maybe somebody who's a police officer needs to know something else.
He's got a police officer talk to them.
So we all need our Gladstein to come at us and we all can be somebody else's Gladstein.
You know, if you're listening to this, you're pretty far down the road of becoming someone's
Gladstein, becoming that person who has the Bitcoin ethos, understands the principles,
but also has their own real world experience professionally, socially, whatever.
And that's one of the most beautiful things about Bitcoin as a spontaneous bottoms-up movement is it needs all of us because it needs somebody who has the particular experience that you, whoever you are, has because other people have that but don't yet understand Bitcoin.
And they need somebody to come to them and explain it to them in terms that make sense to them.
Yeah.
And that's why, you know, there's – here's a whole line of –
The Bitcoin bookshelf starts there.
It actually goes over here.
I don't know if it's on camera, but it continues on.
So it's a steady work in progress.
There's a lot of Bitcoin books, but there needs to be more.
And there needs to be more people writing about Bitcoin.
There needs to be someone who writes about Bitcoin for a guy who races stock cars at his local racetrack to understand it.
There needs to be Bitcoin writing and understanding and teaching for people that are professional athletes, for people that are mowing lawns.
Because everybody needs to, exactly like you said, everybody needs their Alex Gladstein.
Everybody needs, as Natalie Smolenski encouraged us, everybody needs the peer that is going to find another peer in order to meet them where they're at and explain it to them on their level.
You don't have to understand proof of work and you don't have to understand cryptography.
what you do need to understand is how bitcoin changes your life and how it changes your family's life and your friends and the people around you to make the world a better place.
So that is the message, I think, is to be the peer that is the person who brings someone else.
Yeah, and I just want you, Lucas has mentioned, quoted Smolensky, referred to things she said quite a bit.
just to plug our conversation with Natalie.
If you're listening to this and haven't listened to that one,
go back and listen to it.
And not because of anything that Lucas and I added to that conversation.
We did our best as interviewers.
We could have sat in the corner.
We could have, man.
We needed to lob some questions out to get some stuff out.
But even that, man, we're not interviewers.
Natalie did such a good job suffering our questions.
And in response to those, listen to the responses,
because there's so much good in what she says,
It's good with a capital G that goes beyond Bitcoin.
So I would just encourage people to check that out.
Yeah, it's profound, the concept of having incentives that are aligned.
We're living in a world today where it makes sense for people to do things that are almost reprehensible.
It makes sense for you to sell out.
It makes sense for you to take advantage of the deal today and not play long-term games with long-term people.
It makes sense for you to be the person who is concentrating on exits.
You know, I was at the network school, and one of the things that people bandy about as a point of pride often is how many exits have they been involved in?
How many things have they built up to a high valuation and then sold and got out before it became obvious that maybe it wasn't the best tool, the best thing, or before some other competitor came in and undercut that competitive advantage?
and you know we're we're looking at a world where we're we're moving more into this idea of
find your purpose find your ikigai find your um find the thing that you can't master that brings
benefit to the world around you that brings you joy that can support your lifestyle by providing
you income and that you can do for your life because when you do that then you can go deeper
and deeper and deeper and you can gain expertise and you can never attain, but you can search for
mastery. You can search for mastery, whether it's in playing guitar or reviewing books or
building bookshelves or fixing cars. Um, you know, that's what we, I think that's what we
as humans, we desire is to be able to be competent. Um, and that's a signal to other
people around us that we've dedicated ourselves to something. And the concept of aligned incentives
is one that continuously bubbles out of being involved in Bitcoin, where we truly are all in
this together. And we truly all do benefit by global adoption of this, because it removes us
from these oppressive regimes
or even from the ones that we don't even view as oppressive
but are slowly seeping away the economic energy that we have
in order to participate in the world
and to be our best self and express our best self.
Right on.
Yeah.
Why Bitcoin is Freedom Money by Alex Gladstein
in the Journal of Democracy.
There's a link to it.
I'm sure we'll link to it as well on Gladstein's page
on his pinned tweet.
Check it out.
It's an excellent essay.
Thank you very much.
Oh, man.