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Alex Gladstein is a monumental figure in the Bitcoin world.

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When most of us are looking at the issues that temporarily present themselves to us as problems,

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whether or not our financial advisor will allow us to invest in Bitcoin,

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whether or not we get taxed in order to buy a steakburger,

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Alex Gladstein is looking at the reality of the world.

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seven out of eight people across the globe are living under regimes where they do not have

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financial freedom. They can have their money taken away, seized, frozen for political views,

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for protesting, for doing something that in the United States and most of the Western world we

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simply take for granted. Alex Gladstein has been focused on alleviating the pain of financial

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repression for those people. As the leader of the Human Rights Foundation, he was working hard to do

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that through traditional means. And when he discovered Bitcoin, he realized that it was

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the greatest tool of freedom that he could use in order to help bring people away from these issues.

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And so he's changed the focus of his charitable efforts in order to bring freedom to these people.

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The author of Check Your Financial Privilege and Hidden Repression, which we may get to in due time,

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And Alex has recently published an article in the Journal of Democracy that we feel warrants discussion.

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And to lead us on that conversation, Mr. Grant Reckon.

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Hey, thank you. That was an excellent intro.

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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.

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And Gladstein is mine. This is the first book that really got me to understand Bitcoin, check your financial privilege.

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or rather to understand why Bitcoin is a revolution, why it's important.

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One amendment to your introduction, because I think Gladstein would say that he was here,

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he's, in a sense, he's the leader of the Human Rights Foundation, but he's the chief strategy officer.

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So, you know, it's a huge foundation with a lot of effort going into it, I'm sure.

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As a chief strategy officer, I don't know what a chief strategy officer does,

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but I assume they strategize, and so in some sense leads.

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Call them the plays.

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Yeah.

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So we're reading, discussing why Bitcoin is freedom money by Alex Gladstein.

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as Lucas mentioned, in the Journal of Democracy.

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We've probably all heard of pro-democracy activists,

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activism of the need to spread democracy,

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of the evils of censorship, election rigging, political prisoners.

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But what Lucas was talking about, financial repression,

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monetary repression, that's less discussed.

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How often do we hear those same sources, pro-democracy advocates,

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talk about the corrupt monetary systems of other countries of our own?

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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.

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Authoritarian leaders can inflate currencies to fund their police states, wars, lavish lifestyles.

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The censorship of a journalist, maybe the kind of prototypical concern of a democracy

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advocates, is undoubtedly important, but financial repression affects every member of an authoritarian

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society, including that censored journalist, obviously.

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And it's indeed one of the ways financial repression then that authoritarians cement

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their authoritarian rule.

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This essay gives specific examples of how financial repression occurs, how Bitcoin can serve

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as a powerful tool against financial oppression and how pro-democracy advocates who may have

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previously not given enough focus can integrate Bitcoin into their operation to further their

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purpose of preserving democracy, civil liberties, etc. The essay, I think, can kind of be divided

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into two parts. The first part talks about how financial oppression is occurring across the world

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and how Bitcoin has already been used to address that. And the second part addresses some of the

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concerns or questions that kind of might say Bitcoin curious pro-democracy advocates might have

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about how they can use Bitcoin integrated into their existing operations. So embarking on a

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discussion of the first part then, or rather a summary, as Lucas and I always do, first we'll give

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a summary, a substantive summary of the article, which I've already begun doing, so that we can have

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on the table the actual substance of the article. So when we talk about it, we're not just talking

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about some straw man confection of what we think the author is talking about. So,

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How does financial repression occur?

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First, financial repression can occur in the form of debanking.

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5.7 billion people in the world live in, or under rather, authoritarian regimes where

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the monetary rails, the ability to do transactions, use the money, are compromised or controlled

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by the state.

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Democracy advocates in these countries can't really fundraise, pay their employees, or save

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money for future endeavors.

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and it's tough for foreign donors to get money to them into that authoritarian state.

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The foreign government is going to see that a grant arrived into a bank account

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if it arrives in traditional financial ways and can then freeze, seize, and then arrest the holders of the account.

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But Bitcoin, of course, doesn't require a bank account.

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A nonprofit can send directly to advocates in the authoritarian country,

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which can then use those funds in a way without permission.

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Second, financial oppression can occur through the operations of a patriarchal culture

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that denies financial freedom, for example, to women.

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Gladstein gives the example of Roya Maboub, an Afghani humanitarian and entrepreneur

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who started a software company.

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And we previously discussed her when we talked about Lynn Alden's Broken Money.

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She also mentions the work that Roya did and does.

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So Roya starts a software company that employs women in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001, sometime after that.

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Payments are difficult even at that time.

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PayPal and Venmo are not available, and she can't just give cash to her female employees because the male relatives will confiscate that.

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But she was able to pay in Bitcoin.

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And we see other cases, other use cases also emerge from Roya's story.

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So one, she can pay in a way that's not confiscatable by people within this patriarchal culture.

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Another one is Afghanistan still was unstable.

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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.

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Didn't have to carry cash in her person, didn't of course have to bring her real estate with her.

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so we see the importance too

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just in the recent history of Afghanistan

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the quick fall of Afghanistan

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after the US withdraws

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people who didn't already

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have existing funds in a foreign

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bank account or in the form of Bitcoin

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they couldn't quickly

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liquidate their house, their family

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jewels, whatever, they were stuck in Afghanistan

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or if they left they were

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stuck leaving all of their things in Afghanistan

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but if you had Bitcoin you could again

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flee as a refugee with all of your possessions

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on your person in the form of a seed phrase.

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And even today, Gladstone notes,

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Roya continues to fund underground schooling

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for girls in Afghanistan through Bitcoin.

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Third, in addition to Bitcoin then fighting debanking

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and enabling pro-democracy activities,

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even in like patriarchal cultures

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where there's a culture of financial repression

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towards women, we see financial repression

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that also occurs as a history of colonialism

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and how Bitcoin remedies that.

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So in this essay, Gladstone gives the example of Togo,

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Togo is a former French colony in West Africa.

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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.

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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.

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That leader, though, was then a few days before passage of a law that would have changed the situation.

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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.

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And there still is that neocolonial called the Cifa Frank.

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It's a colonial money, again, that's controlled by France.

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And there's also kind of strong-armed, favorable trade arrangements toward France.

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So there's this colonialism leading to monetary financial oppression in Togo.

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Presently, there is an individual, Farida Naburima, and apologies if I pronounced the name wrong, who is an activist seeking monetary freedom in Togo.

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She's pushing back against the colonial frank and the dictator's economic control, and she's using Bitcoin to do that.

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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.

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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.

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So the common man in the street, not just the advocate, is affected by financial oppression.

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Gladstone, Gladstone gives the example of Cuba

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which has a sort of two-tiered monetary system

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where people earn in kind of a normal peso

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but then this can only be used to buy certain very basic goods

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and things, for example, that doesn't include meat and electronics

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for that you would need this other special type of account

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which usually has to be funded with foreign money

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which the regime then harvests and gives people this fake money

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that they can use to buy these other goods like meat and electronics.

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So that two-tiered system obviously sucks.

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It's obviously a way that the government steals from people.

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So in Cuba then, people begin and increases to save in Bitcoin.

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And Gladstein notes that they began in a period, for a certain period of time,

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saving in Bitcoin in which the peso went down 90% and Bitcoin went up 2,000%.

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So there are now underground schools in Cuba that teach people how to safely use Bitcoin

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and remittances to Cuba are also being sent in Bitcoin to allow people to opt out of that corrupt two-tier harvesting system

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that the government has imposed as a means of financial oppression.

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Fifth, financial oppression doesn't also, of course, just affect the common person.

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It also does directly target that traditional object of concern of maybe the pro-democracy movement,

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like the journalist and the explicit pro-democracy advocate.

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They are explicitly targeted by authoritarian regimes through financial oppression.

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These people can now turn to Bitcoin.

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So Gladstein gives many examples of this.

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The essay is really worth reading just as a catalog of what people are doing around the world.

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And that is, again, how I was orange-pilled by Check Your Financial Privilege.

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It was the first time where I saw use cases, like people actually using Bitcoin out of necessity

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and not as some sort of hobbyist kind of fascination with the technology.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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So they can't receive payments through many other kind of traditional means.

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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.

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democracy advocates are teaching individuals there and civil society folks how to use bitcoin

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this targeted and retaliatory financial oppression is only going to become more common

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glassy notes that there are 110 countries currently contemplating experimenting with or

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implementing central bank digital currencies money that is digital money that is issued directly by

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the state and so controlled by the state.

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Digital, so you can program into it

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nefarious functions, prevent people

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from using it for certain things, implement

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social credit scores that

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interface with the money, prevent people

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from using it if they've done certain actions, things

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like that. So as

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Guy's seen as cataloged, we see how Bitcoin

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addresses financial repression

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for those who are

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reading the Journal of Democracy, they're concerned about

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democracy. We see now

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he's laid out the ways that financial repression

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is definitely a thing that

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authoritarian countries use and bitcoin is definitely a way that people are using to

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redress that so again financial oppression is a form of debanking financial oppression is a form

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of kind of just the texture of a patriarchal society the norms that function as a form of

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debanking when women are not allowed to have cash in that society third is a form of continued

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colonial control as in togo fourth is a way to steal directly from citizens as in the two-tier

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system in Cuba, and then last as a way to directly target pro-democracy advocates, journalists,

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etc.

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So before we move on to the second part of the essay, I want to discuss all of this.

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This is a lot of information, a lot of really good examples of the way that Bitcoin, again,

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is actually used in the here and now.

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People are like, what does Bitcoin do?

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What are the use cases?

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I mean, this essay is so rich in that.

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And so this first part, I mean, it's, you know, give this to somebody who says that Bitcoin is useless.

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Yeah.

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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.

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democracy is being claimed more by the left as everything's a threat to democracy.

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By the right, everything's a threat to freedom.

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And democracy can certainly exist without freedom.

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And we see examples of that in places around the world,

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especially where the United States has installed pro-democracy governments

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through CIA overthrows or through wars.

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and even to a large extent in the United States where you have democracy.

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But in the last decade or so, we saw an erosion of freedoms,

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an erosion of the freedom of speech, an erosion of the freedom of expression,

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a freedom of assembly.

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And so I think that it's important to kind of reframe those terms

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in what they truly mean, which is that freedom enables a true democracy.

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You can't have the benefits of an actual democracy

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if you don't have the freedom of your money.

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And Gladstein, I think, gets really to the heart of the matter here

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in understanding that the ability to have control over your own money

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is paramount when it comes to expressing those freedoms.

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I can be a journalist who exposes corruption,

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but I can't do it if I have no funds in order to publish what I'm doing

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or move in order to report on stories.

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And so I think that was something that,

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because I know we have primarily a Western audience,

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And so those are freedom and democracy are somewhat triggering terms.

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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.

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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.

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And so I think, yeah, it's really important to kind of like elucidate what those terms actually mean.

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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.

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Yeah. Right. This the Journal of Democracy, I was reading a bit about it.

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it does seem to, within its pages, include critiques of maybe not democracy as such,

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but some of the things that are problematic about instituting democracy.

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I think what you note is the most important thing,

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that regardless of one's belief about whether any one particular country is a strong democracy,

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regardless of how one views current critiques of certain particular policies,

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like the United States, as anti-democratic or something like that,

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It's undeniable that financial oppression is not consistent with a form of democracy.

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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,

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then being able to transmit and possess value is really essential to developing,

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having the means to develop the sort of opinion and views necessary to reasonably exercise that vote.

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Money is just, I mean, as every Bitcoiner knows, you see how it is the lifeblood of everything.

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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.

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And so I think Gladstein really does a good job of laying out here, you know, financial refraction as a form of debanking.

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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.

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They're not going to be able to get to the voting booth.

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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.

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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

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Like one of Glassine's big points here is, I think, I wouldn't want to say impose on him a frustration,

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but there's a concern that pro-democracy folks aren't focusing enough on financial oppression

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and maybe are focusing on some of the facile concerns with everything is anti-democratic

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or everything is a challenge to our democracy when it's a political position you don't disagree with,

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you don't agree with, right?

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Yeah, and we're more concerned with who goes into what bathroom and who gets to play what sport.

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There's this whole culture war thing in the United States.

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That kind of thing, and that's so secondary, tertiary to the actual issue,

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which is the abstract like we grew up in this world and we think of money we have this recursive

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definition of like money is the dollar the dollar is money and what is it used for well it's what

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you use to buy stuff and it's what people give you when you work but the abstract understanding

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of money is that money is energy that money is um an abstraction of the energy that it takes to do

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work. And so it stands as a representation of that. And when there's something that you want,

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that you have the choice of, I can expend my personal energy in order to gain this thing,

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or I can trade some of the energy that I've already been rewarded for in the form of money

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in order to acquire it, to have that kind of understanding.

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This weapon of financial repression is taking away the energy of the movement

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of people who are trying to exhibit pro-democracy action,

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who are trying to bring more fairness to the world,

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especially in the United States.

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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.

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We hear talk of a patriarchy in the United States all the time.

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But, you know, women are senators.

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Women are billionaires.

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Women are doctors and lawyers.

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There are countries where a patriarchy actually exists.

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And the patriarchy is such that you can't go to school.

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You can't have a bank account.

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You can't vote.

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You can't drive.

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These are things that we take for granted as these basic things that no one could ever infringe upon.

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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.

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And then a patriarchal government is installed or installs themselves and removes those types of freedoms.

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And, you know, for someone who I have four sisters, I consider myself an actual classical feminist.

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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.

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when you remove that choice

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then that type of oppressive regime

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is something that

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I think it's just misunderstood

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when we use the term patriarchy

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to describe

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what we see in the United States

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as compared to what happens in the rest of the world

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this is such a good point you're making

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because it goes to a consistent theme

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in Gladstein's work

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check your financial privilege

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when we're thinking about things like democracy,

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patriarchy, we tend to look at it

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through our own western lens

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from the United States, and so we tend

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to pattern onto that the challenges

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to those concepts

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that arise from within our society

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that tend to be much more

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much smaller in

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scope than what we see maybe in

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other countries like the Taliban in Afghanistan,

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which, I mean, I don't even know if they're

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patriarchal, maybe you would say it's like

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theocratic or something, but whatever it is,

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like the type of financial oppression that they have towards women is something that is not

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occurring in the United States. And so with Bitcoin, then a common argument against Bitcoin

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is why do we need this? I can just like send you something through Venmo or PayPal. I can just go

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open a bank account. And so, I mean, this whole catalog of countries where these things are not

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possible, check your financial privilege. If that's your response that we don't need Bitcoin

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because I don't need Bitcoin, because I live in a society where Bitcoin is not necessary for me.

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Check your financial privilege.

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Check the perspective that you have on the world as a product of who you are.

305
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Broaden that perspective, considering what is happening in Nigeria, Turkey, Russia,

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even Canada with the truckers' protests where they froze the funds to that particular protest.

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In the United States with PayPal, with Airbnb.

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Airbnb has taken away people's ability to book a room because they posted something on social media that Airbnb disagreed with.

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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.

310
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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.

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but invert the problem, like assume that the people that you disagree with are going to eventually take power and take control.

312
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And when they do, will they not simply use the same rails, the same instruments, the same tools in order to attack you?

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And nothing lasts, you know, we have such a short term view.

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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.

315
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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.

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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.

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and eventually that bully is going to have to release that hold on the neck or the neck is

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you know the person is going to rise up and what we want is to be able to exist in a world where

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regardless of who is in power we still have the same freedoms we still have the same opportunities

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we still have the same ability to exist as individuals and that's simply not the reality

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It's not the reality in Togo, and that's very clear.

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It's not the reality in Cuba.

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That's very clear.

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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.

325
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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.

326
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And that can all change in the blink of an eye.

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It can change in an election.

328
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It can change overnight.

329
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Yeah.

330
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Yeah.

331
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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.

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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.

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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.

334
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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.

335
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So to these people, to this crowd, and of course to anybody else reading, Gladstein first makes the point, Bitcoin, not crypto or blockchain.

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So nearly 100% of so-called crypto tokens, he observes, are launched with the intent of enriching the creators.

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We've all seen these scams, and this is October 12th, 2025.

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We're in the wake of the biggest wipeout of the crypto market in history.

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Bitcoin, mainly unaffected, but many of these scam tokens just plummeting to near zero.

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Max pain for those people, max pain for eternity, I imagine, because they're not going to come back, hopefully.

341
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but not to make light of the max pain either

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because again these are scams of the people who bought into them

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these are normal people who wanted to get out of the financial system

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and so they get into these scams unfortunately

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that's why we need to emphasize bitcoin not crypto or blockchain

346
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some of these scams

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Glass Dean mentions kind of offhand

348
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are also trying to scam non-profits

349
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imagine some token states

350
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they have some particular functionality for cross-border exchanges or something like that.

351
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The non-profit then goes with that crypto.

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Gladstein does note that stablecoins, the type of coin where the value is pegged to an established currency or commodity or something,

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are maybe in a different category than those pure crypto tokens, which tend to be scams.

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It does have some current utility, and in some countries, stablecoins are, in fact, preferred over Bitcoin.

355
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There are, though, risks with stablecoins, he notes.

356
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They're centralized, usually.

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They can be confiscated or censored for that reason by the issuer, by the corporation behind it.

358
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They can lose their peg.

359
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They can go to zero, like the Terra situation.

360
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And they also just generally, as a philosophical point, increase state power in the network effect of state money.

361
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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.

362
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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.

363
00:30:05,866 --> 00:30:08,706
So based on this, Gladstone suggests a framework for democracy work.

364
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Bitcoin, stablecoins, everything else.

365
00:30:12,006 --> 00:30:17,086
So first place Bitcoin, second place stablecoins, everything else, probably garbage.

366
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You really want to encourage people to not get into that.

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Second, Gladstein confronts three popular criticisms of Bitcoin, volatility in adoption, energy use, criminality.

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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.

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Perhaps that's even worse.

370
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And then, of course, over a five-year time frame, Bitcoin has been a great savings instrument.

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Adoption, Gladstein notes, continually increasing.

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He mentions an app called Tando, which I had not heard of, as facilitating Bitcoin payments in certain countries.

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And then energy use, we've discussed that extensively.

374
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Miners do not produce any emissions themselves.

375
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They're, in fact, more green than users of just the U.S. power grid because miners also seek out forms of stranded energy,

376
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energy at the source, hydro, thermal, nuclear, wind, sources of energy that have excess at

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certain points they want to sell to any buyer. Criminality, Gladstein makes a couple really

378
00:31:27,686 --> 00:31:34,626
good points. Large scale criminal enterprises usually have excellent banking connections

379
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in any case. And even notes to the banks that they use, HSBC.

380
00:31:38,366 --> 00:31:55,246
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.

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Bitcoin is a disaster for them, Glass Dean notes. I'll read this quote because it's phenomenal.

382
00:32:01,726 --> 00:32:06,026
Ultimately, it is dictators who are the biggest criminals, and for dictators, Bitcoin is a disaster.

383
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Satoshi's invention puts money back into the hands of the people, giving them free speech, property rights, and open capital markets.

384
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This is exactly what dictators fear most, because they need censorship, confiscation, and closed capital markets to survive.

385
00:32:22,006 --> 00:32:27,566
This is why you see tyrants such as Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin criminalizing Bitcoin payments.

386
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tyrants do not like money

387
00:32:29,906 --> 00:32:31,326
they do not control

388
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and then the third

389
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before I go on to that

390
00:32:35,406 --> 00:32:37,846
there's a lot of new things

391
00:32:37,846 --> 00:32:38,866
new content there

392
00:32:38,866 --> 00:32:41,926
the criminality

393
00:32:41,926 --> 00:32:43,946
energy use, volatility

394
00:32:43,946 --> 00:32:45,846
adoption has popular

395
00:32:45,846 --> 00:32:47,066
criticisms of Bitcoin

396
00:32:47,066 --> 00:32:48,966
and then of course

397
00:32:48,966 --> 00:32:51,226
Bitcoin not crypto or blockchain

398
00:32:51,226 --> 00:32:53,226
do you have any

399
00:32:53,226 --> 00:32:55,686
yeah one thing that

400
00:32:55,686 --> 00:33:00,946
I've been suspicious of stablecoins since they came out

401
00:33:00,946 --> 00:33:07,306
because I look at stablecoins merely as a compressed way

402
00:33:07,306 --> 00:33:15,566
for an issuer of a stablecoin to arbitrate

403
00:33:15,566 --> 00:33:22,466
against the user's benefit of using Bitcoin.

404
00:33:22,466 --> 00:33:30,326
Like stable coins, it's a multi-billion, I think soon to be a multi-trillion dollar industry.

405
00:33:30,746 --> 00:33:32,526
And how do they make that money?

406
00:33:32,626 --> 00:33:37,506
Well, they make that money because you hold their stable coin while Bitcoin goes up in value.

407
00:33:38,206 --> 00:33:43,786
And so over time, you certainly lose and they certainly gain.

408
00:33:44,346 --> 00:33:51,666
Naval Ravikant recently tweeted that stable coins are merely central bank digital currencies with extra steps.

409
00:33:52,466 --> 00:33:53,686
And they truly are.

410
00:33:53,786 --> 00:33:55,026
It's programmable money.

411
00:33:55,206 --> 00:33:55,946
It's centralized.

412
00:33:56,546 --> 00:33:58,006
Someone else is in control.

413
00:33:58,006 --> 00:34:01,806
It exists in one place, not decentralized.

414
00:34:04,126 --> 00:34:13,566
And so there is short-term utility, sure, for if you really think that you have knowledge about the market

415
00:34:13,566 --> 00:34:18,266
and maybe you want to hold your position while you think it's going down.

416
00:34:18,266 --> 00:34:27,286
But as we saw two days ago, good luck picking those events because it can happen in 45 minutes.

417
00:34:28,626 --> 00:34:35,966
And so he does a good job of elucidating the difference between Bitcoin, stablecoins, and cryptocurrencies.

418
00:34:36,506 --> 00:34:41,366
But at this point, I would really even just say it's just Bitcoin.

419
00:34:41,366 --> 00:34:49,406
stable coins sure they might have this short term use but in the grand scheme and this has been

420
00:34:49,406 --> 00:34:58,826
Vladimir Putin's advisor recently talked about this that stable coins are a scheme that will

421
00:34:58,826 --> 00:35:04,946
allow for the United States to take all of their debt push it into the cloud and make the rest of

422
00:35:04,946 --> 00:35:11,626
the world responsible and also give them the opportunity to issue ungodly amounts of more

423
00:35:11,626 --> 00:35:17,786
debt and continue to raise and push that, you know, $37 trillion that we're currently

424
00:35:17,786 --> 00:35:19,546
in debt to even higher levels.

425
00:35:21,386 --> 00:35:27,186
You know, the predictions are that by 20, even the government's own predictions are that

426
00:35:27,186 --> 00:35:30,966
by 2030, we're going to see that number approach like $100 trillion.

427
00:35:30,966 --> 00:35:36,806
And so you do have to zoom out.

428
00:35:36,886 --> 00:35:39,506
That's why I think these conversations are so important.

429
00:35:39,706 --> 00:35:44,226
Yes, it's incredibly unfortunate that so many people lost so much money.

430
00:35:44,806 --> 00:35:51,506
$1.65 trillion was taken out of the crypto economy in a day.

431
00:35:52,046 --> 00:35:58,646
But that's why education is so important to understand why you don't want to have your money in Atom,

432
00:35:58,646 --> 00:36:02,266
why you don't want to have your money in Ethereum or Solana,

433
00:36:02,906 --> 00:36:08,006
because it can and will and will happen again,

434
00:36:08,126 --> 00:36:09,786
that it will just disappear.

435
00:36:11,366 --> 00:36:16,566
The power of open source and the power of decentralized

436
00:36:16,566 --> 00:36:22,686
is that everyone benefits equally and everyone suffers equally.

437
00:36:22,686 --> 00:36:32,506
And those are not traits that you see in crypto and they're not traits that you see in stablecoins either.

438
00:36:32,506 --> 00:36:42,866
Yeah, and it's useful, as you mentioned, as education for people as they're contemplating investing in crypto or whatever.

439
00:36:43,166 --> 00:36:57,746
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.

440
00:36:57,746 --> 00:37:03,946
particularly that people understand that Bitcoin is not crypto, is not these other scam tokens.

441
00:37:04,426 --> 00:37:09,686
I mean, we can see in this newest market wipeout, people are also going to use that against Bitcoin.

442
00:37:09,866 --> 00:37:12,766
People who just kind of glance at the news are going to think, oh, Bitcoin's at it again.

443
00:37:13,386 --> 00:37:19,346
So being rigorous in your terminology, in your explanation of concepts,

444
00:37:19,346 --> 00:37:23,946
when you talk clearly disambiguating Bitcoin, stable coins, not crypto,

445
00:37:24,446 --> 00:37:27,846
There's lots of funding going out by certain parties right now.

446
00:37:27,906 --> 00:37:32,066
You can see billboards up around town talking generally about cryptocurrency.

447
00:37:33,306 --> 00:37:36,626
There's one that has a cowboy on it, cowboy-looking dude, and it says,

448
00:37:36,986 --> 00:37:40,966
crypto is for me, to create the image that crypto is for every person.

449
00:37:43,446 --> 00:37:46,326
There's lots of funding going in trying to make it ambiguous,

450
00:37:46,326 --> 00:37:50,866
trying to get people to ride in on the good graces of Bitcoin.

451
00:37:51,046 --> 00:37:53,826
It's preservation of value. It's steady accumulation over time.

452
00:37:53,946 --> 00:37:57,126
of value so that they can market their other coins.

453
00:37:57,286 --> 00:37:59,786
So this is just such an incredibly useful point,

454
00:37:59,886 --> 00:38:00,026
not,

455
00:38:00,186 --> 00:38:00,286
I mean,

456
00:38:00,346 --> 00:38:01,166
for nonprofits,

457
00:38:01,346 --> 00:38:02,666
nonprofits also,

458
00:38:03,086 --> 00:38:03,366
you know,

459
00:38:03,386 --> 00:38:06,746
need to know when they talk with activists in other countries,

460
00:38:06,746 --> 00:38:08,226
when they try to transmit value to them,

461
00:38:08,566 --> 00:38:12,366
maybe be able to explain why they're not going to send some crypto and

462
00:38:12,366 --> 00:38:14,066
instead why they're going to send Bitcoin.

463
00:38:14,066 --> 00:38:15,266
If some sort of,

464
00:38:15,326 --> 00:38:15,466
you know,

465
00:38:15,506 --> 00:38:22,866
digital payments requested just such a useful terminological kind of set of

466
00:38:22,866 --> 00:38:26,326
words to have in your mind and know the difference between it.

467
00:38:26,526 --> 00:38:26,646
Yeah.

468
00:38:26,646 --> 00:38:27,106
It's also,

469
00:38:27,106 --> 00:38:37,892
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

470
00:38:37,892 --> 00:38:46,752
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.

471
00:38:46,892 --> 00:38:52,872
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.

472
00:38:52,872 --> 00:39:01,232
and you can't make these large rationalizations based off of one singular experience because that

473
00:39:01,232 --> 00:39:06,532
singular experience is just simply not definitive of the whole if i found a severed finger in my

474
00:39:06,532 --> 00:39:10,392
food i wouldn't go back to the restaurant particular experience just a bad day for one

475
00:39:10,392 --> 00:39:16,232
chef dude just a bad day for one chef it could only be 10 bad meals here it's gonna have a hard

476
00:39:16,232 --> 00:39:20,632
time finding gloves for the rest of his life yes wearing mittens did you have any thoughts on the

477
00:39:20,632 --> 00:39:26,352
aspect of this first part of the second half that we discussed which is gladstein's response to

478
00:39:26,352 --> 00:39:32,652
typical arguments against bitcoin too volatile that its adoption is not sufficient enough only

479
00:39:32,652 --> 00:39:40,232
criminals use it that energy use um is bad when it's done by bitcoin and not by other things so

480
00:39:40,232 --> 00:39:48,732
too volatile um energy use and criminal criminal use so the first thing too volatile we first need

481
00:39:48,732 --> 00:39:56,872
to recognize that everything is relative and that the volatility of Bitcoin is upward and the

482
00:39:56,872 --> 00:40:03,612
volatility of even the most stable government issued currency, which is the US dollar, is

483
00:40:03,612 --> 00:40:11,972
downward. And so you are guaranteed that over time, if you keep your money in the dollar, in

484
00:40:11,972 --> 00:40:17,632
the yen and yuan and in whatever government currency you have, you're guaranteed to lose

485
00:40:17,632 --> 00:40:22,472
all of your buying power eventually at some point in the future.

486
00:40:23,492 --> 00:40:25,492
I'll repeat this and I'll repeat this.

487
00:40:25,592 --> 00:40:28,632
There's been 4,000 government currencies that have existed.

488
00:40:28,952 --> 00:40:32,152
3,860 of them no longer exist.

489
00:40:32,812 --> 00:40:37,032
All of the rest of them are down 99% of their original value.

490
00:40:37,032 --> 00:40:41,012
So you're guaranteed, if you have the alternative,

491
00:40:41,612 --> 00:40:45,332
that you will be not just poor but truly destitute.

492
00:40:45,332 --> 00:40:55,612
And volatility on the upside is something that I think Michael Saylor has done just such a wonderful job of reframing what volatility means.

493
00:40:55,892 --> 00:40:58,372
Volatility means that there are people that want it.

494
00:40:59,092 --> 00:41:11,672
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.

495
00:41:11,672 --> 00:41:21,712
And if that never changes, then what you're seeing is that there's no active negotiation going on.

496
00:41:22,232 --> 00:41:24,672
So stability is actually not desirable.

497
00:41:24,952 --> 00:41:26,152
Volatility is.

498
00:41:26,272 --> 00:41:32,532
We need to understand that volatility is desirable, that change is desirable.

499
00:41:33,192 --> 00:41:35,252
And we want to see that.

500
00:41:35,512 --> 00:41:37,432
I mean, it's not necessarily desirable.

501
00:41:38,212 --> 00:41:39,992
Sometimes you want a stable thing, though.

502
00:41:39,992 --> 00:41:41,432
You want something that is stable.

503
00:41:41,432 --> 00:41:43,892
Not everything needs to be stable, but...

504
00:41:43,892 --> 00:41:46,852
But over the course of time, mathematically,

505
00:41:47,272 --> 00:41:50,552
if you simply just put the actual numbers to it

506
00:41:50,552 --> 00:41:52,312
and look at it as a math equation,

507
00:41:52,932 --> 00:41:57,912
do I want this thing that goes up 100% and down 80%

508
00:41:57,912 --> 00:42:03,052
and up 100% and down 80% versus the thing that only goes down 13%?

509
00:42:03,232 --> 00:42:03,632
Maybe you do.

510
00:42:03,632 --> 00:42:04,132
Absolutely.

511
00:42:04,472 --> 00:42:07,112
Like, there's no question from it.

512
00:42:07,352 --> 00:42:07,972
On what time frame?

513
00:42:07,972 --> 00:42:08,652
If that thing...

514
00:42:08,652 --> 00:42:12,832
I mean, if that thing goes down 80% and you need to spend the money that day,

515
00:42:12,832 --> 00:42:16,072
on a small enough time frame, maybe you do need the stablest thing.

516
00:42:16,212 --> 00:42:16,312
Right.

517
00:42:16,472 --> 00:42:16,712
Yeah.

518
00:42:17,032 --> 00:42:20,792
But then it comes to now you're making the decision.

519
00:42:21,232 --> 00:42:24,532
You need to make the decision based on the probability of that occurring.

520
00:42:25,032 --> 00:42:29,452
And the probability of that occurring is 99% of the days, like with Bitcoin,

521
00:42:29,632 --> 00:42:34,472
99% of the time you're going to be in a better situation because it's going up

522
00:42:34,472 --> 00:42:36,432
and then there's going to be these short instances.

523
00:42:36,432 --> 00:42:42,632
So are you going to base your life decisions off of what is the worst thing that can happen?

524
00:42:43,132 --> 00:42:49,632
Which is, by the way, this is Nassim Taleb's idea, is that the barbell.

525
00:42:50,812 --> 00:42:59,632
Should I have my investments in the thing that is poised to break out?

526
00:42:59,752 --> 00:43:02,852
Or should I have my investment in the thing that just stays stable?

527
00:43:02,852 --> 00:43:13,992
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.

528
00:43:14,172 --> 00:43:28,532
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.

529
00:43:28,952 --> 00:43:30,012
Those are guaranteed.

530
00:43:30,212 --> 00:43:32,032
And so what can you do to avoid that?

531
00:43:32,032 --> 00:43:39,312
So you make that decision based off of the probability of things occurring.

532
00:43:39,452 --> 00:43:42,112
That's why people live in San Diego.

533
00:43:43,352 --> 00:43:44,052
It's beautiful.

534
00:43:44,252 --> 00:43:48,552
99% of the time, 1% of the time you could have an earthquake.

535
00:43:48,912 --> 00:43:52,752
1% of the time you could have something, but people still choose to live there and they

536
00:43:52,752 --> 00:43:58,812
think that it's great because they make the decision based off of what is most likely to

537
00:43:58,812 --> 00:43:59,112
happen.

538
00:43:59,112 --> 00:44:01,592
That's why people engage in relationships.

539
00:44:02,032 --> 00:44:11,532
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.

540
00:44:11,532 --> 00:44:21,372
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.

541
00:44:21,692 --> 00:44:31,652
But you don't choose not to be with someone because of one small thing that you disagree on.

542
00:44:31,652 --> 00:44:35,572
you choose to be with someone because of the 99% of things that you do agree.

543
00:44:35,892 --> 00:44:39,132
I mean, that goes far afield from like the fact that you just, in certain moments, you

544
00:44:39,132 --> 00:44:40,372
do need the most stable currency.

545
00:44:40,512 --> 00:44:45,532
As an investment thesis, sure, upward volatility is a better thing for an investor on a certain

546
00:44:45,532 --> 00:44:46,152
time frame.

547
00:44:46,312 --> 00:44:50,092
But if you need day-to-day to be sure that your bank account has a certain amount of

548
00:44:50,092 --> 00:44:53,172
money in it because you need to be able to feed your family, you need to be able to feed

549
00:44:53,172 --> 00:44:56,172
your family 100 nights out of 100, not 99 out of 100.

550
00:44:56,372 --> 00:44:57,712
You need the stablest thing.

551
00:44:58,152 --> 00:45:01,072
You don't, and if there's some things that are a little bit riskier, more volatile,

552
00:45:01,592 --> 00:45:02,912
you'll need a buffer against that.

553
00:45:02,992 --> 00:45:05,832
Maybe you have a certain liquidity reserve

554
00:45:05,832 --> 00:45:08,192
so that you can let your Bitcoin weather

555
00:45:08,192 --> 00:45:09,732
some sort of downward moment.

556
00:45:10,192 --> 00:45:11,532
Regardless, I mean...

557
00:45:11,532 --> 00:45:14,032
But the better buffer is the thing that's gone up 100%,

558
00:45:14,032 --> 00:45:16,512
and it can go down 50% and still be higher

559
00:45:16,512 --> 00:45:19,072
than the thing that goes down 13% continuously.

560
00:45:19,652 --> 00:45:20,652
I mean, that's the buffer.

561
00:45:20,972 --> 00:45:22,012
Like, you're missing...

562
00:45:22,012 --> 00:45:23,832
Like, that's the thing that you're giving up on.

563
00:45:23,912 --> 00:45:25,712
You're giving up on your dreams.

564
00:45:25,852 --> 00:45:28,292
You're giving up on your opportunity to provide

565
00:45:28,292 --> 00:45:31,032
by saying, oh, I'm just going to limit my down,

566
00:45:31,072 --> 00:45:39,212
side rather than maximize my upside. Um, and yeah, I mean, this is, this is where we may just

567
00:45:39,212 --> 00:45:45,972
have to disagree on this because if you, if you look at the history of Bitcoin, pick any five year

568
00:45:45,972 --> 00:45:52,012
period, pick any, any five year period, start on October 3rd, start on October 8th, whatever,

569
00:45:52,812 --> 00:45:58,732
um, pick any five year period. And you're not just better, um, by having Bitcoin, you are

570
00:45:58,732 --> 00:46:05,512
monumentally better. Except for if you needed to suddenly repair your car at a point when Bitcoin

571
00:46:05,512 --> 00:46:12,612
nosedived in the past. But again, it nosedived to a point that is still higher than it would have

572
00:46:12,612 --> 00:46:16,972
been had you saved in your regular currency. Not necessarily. If you start saving at a peak and

573
00:46:16,972 --> 00:46:20,512
then it nosedives and then you have a sudden purchase that you need, then you've just lost

574
00:46:20,512 --> 00:46:25,932
80% of what you invested. I mean, not a bit can wait five years for a purchase they might need to

575
00:46:25,932 --> 00:46:30,392
do you need to have sufficient reserves for a five-year period and i i don't think i this is

576
00:46:30,392 --> 00:46:34,852
where i i don't think it's a five-year period i think it's maybe it's three months um something

577
00:46:34,852 --> 00:46:39,732
like that but always continuously keeping that three-month reserve in any case like the volatility

578
00:46:39,732 --> 00:46:45,592
it's much it's the newest market wipeout shows that hopefully we can expect down more volatility

579
00:46:45,592 --> 00:46:50,272
for bitcoin to not be what it was in the past yeah some of this concern is also like here's

580
00:46:50,272 --> 00:46:55,112
there because right yeah so hopefully you know the the biggest wipeout in crypto history took

581
00:46:55,112 --> 00:46:59,632
bitcoin down less than what you're guaranteed to lose by having your money in the most stable

582
00:46:59,632 --> 00:47:05,512
government-issued currency but over a longer time period again in any case we're gonna disagree we're

583
00:47:05,512 --> 00:47:10,773
gonna end up disagreeing a little bit on go ahead and be poor i'm fine being poor as long as i'm

584
00:47:10,773 --> 00:47:16,652
stably poor i like some stability in my poverty i can't have these upward swings wait so the next

585
00:47:16,652 --> 00:47:20,692
thing that you brought up is energy usage and this is something that i've talked about continuously

586
00:47:20,692 --> 00:47:28,552
like so first off you need to understand that bitcoin is a commodity and commodities are

587
00:47:28,552 --> 00:47:36,472
wheat commodities are cattle commodities are milk these are homogenous items that are sold

588
00:47:36,472 --> 00:47:44,792
into a market and this is why we see mega mega scale farms mega scale ranches because

589
00:47:44,792 --> 00:47:51,472
when you are participating in a commodity market, the way that you are able to survive

590
00:47:51,472 --> 00:47:57,952
and profit is simply by economies of scale, which allow you to be the lowest cost producer.

591
00:47:58,712 --> 00:48:05,532
And so in a commodity market, in order to be a lowest cost producer, when you apply

592
00:48:05,532 --> 00:48:11,392
that to Bitcoin, Bitcoin is the commodity, you need to minimize your inputs.

593
00:48:11,952 --> 00:48:13,032
And what are your inputs?

594
00:48:13,032 --> 00:48:18,212
Your inputs are the miners and your inputs are the electricity that feed the miners.

595
00:48:18,692 --> 00:48:24,472
And the miners are also a commodity because by and large, there's only a couple of them that you can get.

596
00:48:24,612 --> 00:48:26,152
Everybody runs the same ones.

597
00:48:26,292 --> 00:48:28,812
And so that you can't differentiate yourself there.

598
00:48:29,312 --> 00:48:34,212
But the energy, that's the input that you can differentiate yourself on.

599
00:48:34,212 --> 00:48:52,572
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.

600
00:48:52,572 --> 00:49:00,932
And these are sources of energy, to be very, very clear, these are sources of energy that are not currently used.

601
00:49:01,092 --> 00:49:02,632
They're not part of the grid.

602
00:49:02,773 --> 00:49:07,232
They're not taking away energy from the grid.

603
00:49:07,412 --> 00:49:10,592
They're not making it harder for you to turn on your lights.

604
00:49:10,712 --> 00:49:12,832
They're not making it harder for you to charge your car.

605
00:49:12,952 --> 00:49:19,752
This is natural gas that's being flared into the environment and burnt and just wasted.

606
00:49:19,752 --> 00:49:28,092
These are waterfalls in remote areas that it's just energy that's coming down that's not being used.

607
00:49:28,952 --> 00:49:37,492
And Bitcoin mining is now over 50% green in terms that it's using these types of energy.

608
00:49:37,712 --> 00:49:44,432
It is, I believe, the greenest market that exists in the entire world.

609
00:49:44,432 --> 00:49:54,972
it's fascinating because in 2022 there was such a narrative around the energy usage of Bitcoin

610
00:49:54,972 --> 00:50:00,892
and it turns out that the forcing function of being involved in a commodity market

611
00:50:00,892 --> 00:50:03,773
where you have to find the cheapest source of energy

612
00:50:03,773 --> 00:50:07,832
Bitcoin is the thing that is driving us towards cheaper energy

613
00:50:07,832 --> 00:50:11,872
it's driving us towards energy that is abundant

614
00:50:11,872 --> 00:50:20,792
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.

615
00:50:20,792 --> 00:50:49,032
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.

616
00:50:49,032 --> 00:50:55,732
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...

617
00:50:55,732 --> 00:50:57,652
That argument's been killed pretty hard.

618
00:50:57,892 --> 00:50:59,372
People like you have done a good job.

619
00:50:59,832 --> 00:51:02,852
The last thing that you brought up is the criminality part of it.

620
00:51:02,872 --> 00:51:03,112
Yeah.

621
00:51:03,932 --> 00:51:16,472
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

622
00:51:16,472 --> 00:51:23,212
that is going to replace the current traditional system,

623
00:51:23,692 --> 00:51:26,812
it's always adopted by the people that are outside of that system.

624
00:51:27,012 --> 00:51:29,273
It's always adopted by the criminal enterprise

625
00:51:29,273 --> 00:51:33,952
that is excluded from participating in the traditional system.

626
00:51:34,972 --> 00:51:37,952
That's why you saw during Prohibition,

627
00:51:38,612 --> 00:51:43,612
when people were running moonshine from place to place,

628
00:51:43,612 --> 00:51:50,652
those were the guys that first adopted the car because a car can outrun a horse and so was the

629
00:51:50,652 --> 00:51:57,392
car an instrument of criminality it was just a tool yeah you know and a tool is something that

630
00:51:57,392 --> 00:52:03,312
it can either be a weapon or it can be something that is used to your advantage i can take this

631
00:52:03,312 --> 00:52:07,052
hammer and i can pound it in a nail and i can build a house or i can take this hammer and

632
00:52:07,052 --> 00:52:15,552
And like my high school classmate, who is now known as Jimmy the Hammer, murdered his stepfather with it, right?

633
00:52:15,672 --> 00:52:21,812
These things are, depending on how you use them, like a tool itself is agnostic of purpose.

634
00:52:22,072 --> 00:52:22,332
Yeah.

635
00:52:22,552 --> 00:52:23,932
We give it purpose.

636
00:52:23,932 --> 00:52:34,072
And Alex does a great job of explaining and identifying HSBC as this is the bank that the criminals use.

637
00:52:34,072 --> 00:52:36,972
I just and I told you about this

638
00:52:36,972 --> 00:52:38,852
I just finished watching this movie

639
00:52:38,852 --> 00:52:40,492
called I think it's called Infiltrator

640
00:52:40,492 --> 00:52:41,652
or The Infiltrator

641
00:52:41,652 --> 00:52:44,632
and it's a true story of the

642
00:52:44,632 --> 00:52:45,792
cocaine trade

643
00:52:45,792 --> 00:52:48,512
Pablo Escobar and

644
00:52:48,512 --> 00:52:49,952
the Customs Border Patrol

645
00:52:49,952 --> 00:52:52,752
setting up this sting operation in order

646
00:52:52,752 --> 00:52:54,632
to go at the

647
00:52:54,632 --> 00:52:56,952
funds and what they found

648
00:52:56,952 --> 00:52:58,932
when they were able to bring this down

649
00:52:58,932 --> 00:53:00,712
was that they crashed

650
00:53:00,712 --> 00:53:02,852
the 7th largest private bank

651
00:53:02,852 --> 00:53:09,212
in the entire world because the criminals not only exist outside the system,

652
00:53:09,612 --> 00:53:13,872
they run the system, the dictators and the people that they put in power.

653
00:53:14,132 --> 00:53:18,512
And so they're the ones that are able to use those rails to their advantage.

654
00:53:18,632 --> 00:53:22,412
They're the ones that are able to obfuscate the true nature of their purpose

655
00:53:22,412 --> 00:53:27,332
and do it in plain sight and take advantage of using banks

656
00:53:27,332 --> 00:53:36,952
and using laws to get around the things that hold back you and I from engaging in criminal enterprise.

657
00:53:37,132 --> 00:53:43,032
But when you're at the top and you can make the rules and you're the one that sets the map,

658
00:53:43,773 --> 00:53:45,972
then you know how to get to the X.

659
00:53:46,112 --> 00:53:51,312
Yeah, and not only that, when you're at the top, you define the category of criminality as such.

660
00:53:51,312 --> 00:53:54,012
the very notion of transgression

661
00:53:54,012 --> 00:53:56,273
is defined by the authority who defines

662
00:53:56,273 --> 00:53:58,492
who are the transgressors, what is the transgression

663
00:53:58,492 --> 00:54:00,092
so if you have the ability to

664
00:54:00,092 --> 00:54:01,773
define a particular

665
00:54:01,773 --> 00:54:03,252
pro-democracy

666
00:54:03,252 --> 00:54:05,852
advocate's activities as

667
00:54:05,852 --> 00:54:08,112
per se criminal, as criminal as such

668
00:54:08,112 --> 00:54:10,132
then Bitcoin begins to look criminal

669
00:54:10,132 --> 00:54:12,312
because people who are promoting liberty and freedom

670
00:54:12,312 --> 00:54:14,472
are using this criminal technology

671
00:54:14,472 --> 00:54:16,192
of Bitcoin, the criminal

672
00:54:16,192 --> 00:54:17,632
purpose of trying to

673
00:54:17,632 --> 00:54:19,972
reduce authoritarian control

674
00:54:19,972 --> 00:54:33,773
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.

675
00:54:33,773 --> 00:54:34,092
Right.

676
00:54:34,632 --> 00:54:39,572
Rules are the things that are put in place by the people that are creating the illusion that we live under.

677
00:54:39,692 --> 00:54:43,792
But laws are the things that we cannot avoid.

678
00:54:43,792 --> 00:54:53,972
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.

679
00:54:54,952 --> 00:54:57,932
And so everyone has to abide by that code.

680
00:54:57,932 --> 00:55:04,773
everyone has to play by the same rules as opposed to simply being able to you know the example in

681
00:55:04,773 --> 00:55:10,892
the movie was uh that the drug dealer's money had been frozen by the united states government

682
00:55:10,892 --> 00:55:15,372
and they wanted to get it out and all they had to do was go to the head of the bank and say hey

683
00:55:15,372 --> 00:55:22,273
change the date of the deposit and put it before the freeze went into place and now those funds are

684
00:55:22,273 --> 00:55:28,152
open. And so if you control the system, you can do that, but you can't do that. Um, if you're

685
00:55:28,152 --> 00:55:32,452
fighting against the laws of physics and you can't do that if you're fighting against the laws of

686
00:55:32,452 --> 00:55:38,952
decentralized code. Yeah. Now spoken very well are the resident natural law jurist here, Lucas

687
00:55:38,952 --> 00:55:43,212
Maddy on the nature of ruling law. That's pretty good. Man, I've just broken a lot of bones and I

688
00:55:43,212 --> 00:55:47,552
know that it hurts. We'll move on to the final part of this essay. There's two final sections.

689
00:55:47,552 --> 00:55:59,793
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.

690
00:56:00,192 --> 00:56:01,732
I'm not going to go into the mechanics of that.

691
00:56:01,812 --> 00:56:09,852
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.

692
00:56:10,112 --> 00:56:11,832
I mean, this isn't a step-by-step how-to.

693
00:56:12,232 --> 00:56:15,252
More of a, here's some resources to look at.

694
00:56:15,252 --> 00:56:18,012
HRF, Human Rights Foundation, offers webinar.

695
00:56:18,273 --> 00:56:20,472
There's something called the Bitcoin Humanitarian Alliance,

696
00:56:20,592 --> 00:56:23,232
which I guess is a group of nonprofits that are using Bitcoin.

697
00:56:24,332 --> 00:56:26,972
An interesting one, there's the World Liberty Congress

698
00:56:26,972 --> 00:56:29,273
by the Venezuelan activist Leopoldo Lopez

699
00:56:29,273 --> 00:56:34,372
that looks like they use NOSTER to in some way

700
00:56:34,372 --> 00:56:37,712
fuel the educational website

701
00:56:37,712 --> 00:56:40,612
or as infrastructure for this educational website

702
00:56:40,612 --> 00:56:42,092
for democracy advocates.

703
00:56:42,252 --> 00:56:44,132
So some interesting stuff to look into.

704
00:56:44,132 --> 00:56:51,172
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.

705
00:56:51,172 --> 00:56:59,773
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.

706
00:56:59,952 --> 00:57:03,332
NOSTER stands for notes and other stuff transmitted by relays.

707
00:57:03,332 --> 00:57:28,192
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.

708
00:57:28,192 --> 00:57:34,752
All of these different things, and they're all different companies, and they're all siloed in their information.

709
00:57:35,392 --> 00:57:41,432
You can't take your Facebook followers and import them to your Twitter account.

710
00:57:41,592 --> 00:57:57,558
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

711
00:57:58,358 --> 00:58:02,919
And that is the thing that you can use to navigate all of these other apps.

712
00:58:02,919 --> 00:58:10,338
So imagine a world in which you don't have 12 different apps on your phone in order to

713
00:58:10,338 --> 00:58:14,419
listen to music and watch videos and read books and do all these different things.

714
00:58:14,419 --> 00:58:19,698
You simply have one app and that one app coalesces everything.

715
00:58:20,558 --> 00:58:27,778
And not only are you able to have a consistent identity, not only are you able to avoid this

716
00:58:27,778 --> 00:58:34,218
annoyance of having 30 different passwords for 30 different things, you're also able

717
00:58:34,218 --> 00:58:45,958
to take the asset that is your online presence and use it across these different formats.

718
00:58:46,558 --> 00:58:48,919
And not only that, get rewarded in Bitcoin.

719
00:58:49,078 --> 00:58:49,938
And we've seen this.

720
00:58:50,158 --> 00:58:57,318
We're now putting this Bitcoin Study Sessions podcast on Noster and growing a community there.

721
00:58:57,738 --> 00:59:03,978
And the difference is that when we have it on YouTube, we need to have a thousand subscribers

722
00:59:03,978 --> 00:59:07,598
and 4,000 hours of total video time.

723
00:59:07,778 --> 00:59:11,558
And then we have to apply and then we have to go through a process

724
00:59:11,558 --> 00:59:14,698
where they make sure that we're not doing anything that they disagree with

725
00:59:14,698 --> 00:59:16,818
and wait another three months.

726
00:59:16,818 --> 00:59:24,038
And it could literally be years before you could earn one cent from a podcast

727
00:59:24,038 --> 00:59:25,958
or from your work on YouTube.

728
00:59:26,478 --> 00:59:32,458
Whereas literally within the first 45 minutes of having this podcast on Noster,

729
00:59:32,458 --> 00:59:39,538
we were able to receive value, actual value, where someone watched the podcast.

730
00:59:39,718 --> 00:59:44,118
We've got 68 total listens to this podcast on Noster.

731
00:59:44,278 --> 00:59:52,278
It's insignificant, yet we've actually made real money, Bitcoin, from someone who listened to it

732
00:59:52,278 --> 00:59:55,919
and they said, oh, this is something that I find value in.

733
00:59:56,018 --> 00:59:57,518
I'm going to reward the creator.

734
00:59:57,518 --> 01:00:11,439
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.

735
01:00:11,439 --> 01:00:20,598
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.

736
01:00:20,678 --> 01:00:21,919
This is my favorite artist.

737
01:00:22,078 --> 01:00:23,878
This is the best thing that I've ever heard.

738
01:00:24,018 --> 01:00:28,558
And there's no way for them to reward me for providing them value.

739
01:00:28,998 --> 01:00:33,998
But with 68 listens on, I have the same amount of listens as we have podcast listens.

740
01:00:34,498 --> 01:00:39,758
With 68 listens on Noster, I'm able to have one person go, oh, I like that.

741
01:00:39,758 --> 01:00:41,238
I'm going to give this guy five bucks.

742
01:00:41,439 --> 01:00:44,518
So, you know, it's incredible what it allows for people.

743
01:00:44,718 --> 01:00:45,919
This is a really good summary of Noster.

744
01:00:46,278 --> 01:00:52,558
This essay is called Why Bitcoin is Freedom Money, the role that Bitcoin plays in pro-democracy,

745
01:00:52,778 --> 01:00:57,518
could play pro-democracy, well, does and could play in pro-democracy activism and activism

746
01:00:57,518 --> 01:00:58,718
against financial oppression.

747
01:00:59,178 --> 01:01:03,058
If there was a similar essay about Noster, what would the title be?

748
01:01:03,218 --> 01:01:06,478
Just to summarize, if you could summarize Noster in one sentence, why Bitcoin is freedom

749
01:01:06,478 --> 01:01:09,758
money, would the essay be why Noster is freedom?

750
01:01:09,758 --> 01:01:15,398
I would say NOSTER is freedom for the creativity and for creators.

751
01:01:15,398 --> 01:01:18,198
And it's not just creators of art.

752
01:01:18,358 --> 01:01:20,898
It's also what Alex Gladstein is doing, right?

753
01:01:21,018 --> 01:01:32,158
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.

754
01:01:32,618 --> 01:01:36,778
As opposed to, you know, currently what's the way that you support?

755
01:01:36,778 --> 01:01:38,698
You know, you buy the book, right?

756
01:01:38,698 --> 01:01:40,298
and

757
01:01:40,298 --> 01:01:42,378
why Noster is freedom of contract

758
01:01:42,378 --> 01:01:43,698
why Noster is a free market

759
01:01:43,698 --> 01:01:45,278
freedom of market

760
01:01:45,278 --> 01:01:48,658
and it inverts the current

761
01:01:48,658 --> 01:01:50,538
it inverts the current

762
01:01:50,538 --> 01:01:51,818
reward system where

763
01:01:51,818 --> 01:01:53,658
all we need to

764
01:01:53,658 --> 01:01:56,419
do to understand how much

765
01:01:56,419 --> 01:01:58,478
value is being extracted from creators

766
01:01:58,478 --> 01:02:00,338
is to take the market cap of

767
01:02:00,338 --> 01:02:02,198
YouTube and Spotify and Instagram

768
01:02:02,198 --> 01:02:04,378
and Facebook and Twitter

769
01:02:04,378 --> 01:02:06,378
and add that up

770
01:02:06,378 --> 01:02:08,178
because their

771
01:02:08,178 --> 01:02:15,439
product is simply the platform. It's, you know, the actual, the actual value of that product

772
01:02:15,439 --> 01:02:20,838
is the network and the people who put things onto that platform. And they're the ones that

773
01:02:20,838 --> 01:02:27,578
currently capture all of that benefit as opposed to the creator. So, you know, what is that? You

774
01:02:27,578 --> 01:02:34,578
know, it's literally trillions of dollars that is creator value that is being captured by the

775
01:02:34,578 --> 01:02:41,058
creator of the platform right um and nostor flips that and it allows for i would dearly love to see

776
01:02:41,058 --> 01:02:45,158
a similar essay in the journal of democracy or anywhere if somebody wants to write the essay

777
01:02:45,158 --> 01:02:51,958
what is nostor's role currently in activism what could nostor's role be in activism if democracy

778
01:02:51,958 --> 01:02:58,958
or other advocates seized on it so to move on to the conclusion of this essay so glassy concludes

779
01:02:58,958 --> 01:03:05,158
with a section describing how Bitcoin is increasingly becoming freedom money, even though it's,

780
01:03:05,238 --> 01:03:08,738
as we talked about, kind of somewhat been ignored by human rights activists, by that

781
01:03:08,738 --> 01:03:09,278
whole community.

782
01:03:10,078 --> 01:03:15,258
He cites the global Bitcoin adoption index produced by the Cornell Brooks School Tech

783
01:03:15,258 --> 01:03:19,258
Policy Institute, which has found that more than a quarter of citizens in countries such

784
01:03:19,258 --> 01:03:23,738
as India, Kenya, Nigeria, Russia, and Turkey report having used Bitcoin.

785
01:03:23,738 --> 01:03:29,919
more than one in four people in these countries report having used Bitcoin,

786
01:03:30,198 --> 01:03:33,338
and yet the technology is still somewhat ignored by the human rights community.

787
01:03:33,838 --> 01:03:36,038
Bitcoin conferences springing up around the world.

788
01:03:36,198 --> 01:03:39,998
Bitcoin conferences, from my external viewpoint on these conferences,

789
01:03:40,958 --> 01:03:43,678
conferences that are grassroots, run by people in the community,

790
01:03:43,858 --> 01:03:49,038
not some person, I mean, to use kind of some leftist vocabulary,

791
01:03:49,218 --> 01:03:51,378
not some white savior coming in and like,

792
01:03:51,378 --> 01:03:53,738
I'm going to do a conference for you and teach you guys everything.

793
01:03:53,998 --> 01:03:58,718
And then it's people in the country, people in these countries building like their own systems,

794
01:03:58,818 --> 01:04:03,419
their own ways to do things, how Bitcoin is going to be integrated according to the way markets work in there

795
01:04:03,419 --> 01:04:06,078
and the way the norms for association, et cetera.

796
01:04:07,878 --> 01:04:11,658
Gladstein knows something interesting, kind of, you know, I don't know how much he puts into this,

797
01:04:11,718 --> 01:04:15,458
but say there's a 10, we might say there's a 10 year activist adoption curve.

798
01:04:15,458 --> 01:04:22,618
If you look at Signal and What's Up, 2010, some activists were beginning to use these kind of technologies, not widespread.

799
01:04:23,618 --> 01:04:25,058
They're ubiquitous by 2020.

800
01:04:25,258 --> 01:04:28,058
So this is 10-year adoption curve for activists.

801
01:04:28,378 --> 01:04:32,998
Bitcoin, then, we might say 2020, it's being used, but rarely am I activist.

802
01:04:33,258 --> 01:04:39,898
So maybe the activism curve for Bitcoin adoption is 2030, if you like kind of adoption metrics.

803
01:04:39,978 --> 01:04:41,198
I thought that was an interesting one.

804
01:04:41,198 --> 01:04:44,358
Bitcoin is also in itself

805
01:04:44,358 --> 01:04:46,419
a movement, a form of protest

806
01:04:46,419 --> 01:04:48,378
against a failing monetary system

807
01:04:48,378 --> 01:04:49,338
that's why Satoshi

808
01:04:49,338 --> 01:04:53,018
put the machine in motion

809
01:04:53,018 --> 01:04:55,118
wound it up and let it go out into the world

810
01:04:55,118 --> 01:04:57,198
its adoption is itself

811
01:04:57,198 --> 01:04:58,118
a form of protest

812
01:04:58,118 --> 01:05:00,278
and Gladstein states it this way

813
01:05:00,278 --> 01:05:02,318
to quote an excellent quote here

814
01:05:02,318 --> 01:05:04,698
the tens of millions of self-custodial

815
01:05:04,698 --> 01:05:06,778
wallet downloads and more than 10 million

816
01:05:06,778 --> 01:05:08,698
cold storage devices sold

817
01:05:08,698 --> 01:05:15,258
help us understand the shift away from using traditional money toward Bitcoin

818
01:05:15,258 --> 01:05:19,478
is probably the biggest peaceful protest in history.

819
01:05:19,858 --> 01:05:22,798
I love that. Bitcoin, the biggest peaceful protest in history.

820
01:05:23,318 --> 01:05:26,238
And I'll conclude this just reading in its entirety.

821
01:05:26,378 --> 01:05:27,598
I think this is the concluding paragraph.

822
01:05:27,838 --> 01:05:30,058
And if not, it's a paragraph I quoted

823
01:05:30,058 --> 01:05:33,098
because it summarizes so beautifully what Glassene is talking about.

824
01:05:33,998 --> 01:05:37,618
Every day Bitcoin's reach inspires, even in the darkest of places,

825
01:05:37,618 --> 01:05:50,518
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.

826
01:05:51,078 --> 01:05:58,798
Bitcoin is providing property rights, connecting people to the world, and keeping resistance alive, often in places where nothing else can reach.

827
01:05:59,478 --> 01:06:06,598
In January 2009, when Bitcoin launched, Satoshi Nakamoto may have never guessed where the invention would lead.

828
01:06:06,598 --> 01:06:12,078
But today, we can say, at the very least, it has earned the name Freedom Money.

829
01:06:12,498 --> 01:06:12,618
Yeah.

830
01:06:12,858 --> 01:06:13,098
Yeah.

831
01:06:13,419 --> 01:06:13,638
Yeah.

832
01:06:14,798 --> 01:06:20,718
Without going too far backwards, I do want to say that one of the reasons I think why

833
01:06:20,718 --> 01:06:26,378
Bitcoin probably has not been adopted by many of these philanthropy organizations is that

834
01:06:26,378 --> 01:06:32,978
we're now seeing that many of these philanthropic organizations really are not truly philanthropic

835
01:06:32,978 --> 01:06:42,419
And they're existing as a front or they're existing as a means of washing or hiding funds.

836
01:06:43,378 --> 01:06:55,078
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.

837
01:06:55,078 --> 01:07:08,058
where it's becoming more and more obvious that using Bitcoin is the way to enable this sort of action

838
01:07:08,058 --> 01:07:09,919
and participate in this peaceful.

839
01:07:10,738 --> 01:07:17,058
If you own Bitcoin, you're not just an advocate for sound money.

840
01:07:17,198 --> 01:07:19,798
You're not just somebody who is trying to get wealthy.

841
01:07:19,798 --> 01:07:24,978
You are participating in the largest peaceful revolution that has ever occurred.

842
01:07:25,078 --> 01:07:32,978
And you are, as Jason Lowry frames it as digital 1776, it is a revolution.

843
01:07:33,818 --> 01:07:35,658
And we're all in this together.

844
01:07:35,919 --> 01:07:38,318
We're all moving in the same direction there.

845
01:07:39,578 --> 01:07:41,138
It's a beautiful thing.

846
01:07:41,838 --> 01:07:49,238
Before we close out, I want to give a heartfelt thanks to Alex Gladstein.

847
01:07:49,238 --> 01:07:56,959
I did intend to mention this during my introduction and Grant did bring it up.

848
01:07:57,158 --> 01:08:06,138
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.

849
01:08:06,138 --> 01:08:11,419
and people that are not financially motivated,

850
01:08:12,419 --> 01:08:21,358
people that are not simply looking for a way to change their life monetarily,

851
01:08:21,578 --> 01:08:25,378
but people that are looking for, in an altruistic manner,

852
01:08:25,559 --> 01:08:28,479
they're looking for an opportunity to make the world a better place.

853
01:08:29,138 --> 01:08:31,418
Bitcoin is an avenue for that.

854
01:08:31,598 --> 01:08:36,038
And it's becoming more and more obvious that it is the avenue for that.

855
01:08:36,138 --> 01:08:40,519
that freedom of money is freedom of expression.

856
01:08:40,519 --> 01:08:43,718
It is freedom of the ability to move

857
01:08:43,718 --> 01:08:45,858
and freedom of the ability to assemble.

858
01:08:47,738 --> 01:08:48,998
And so, yeah, thank you.

859
01:08:49,078 --> 01:08:53,858
Thank you to Alex for this incredible work

860
01:08:53,858 --> 01:08:56,098
that he's done and continues to do.

861
01:08:56,678 --> 01:09:00,818
And really, in Bitcoin,

862
01:09:01,098 --> 01:09:03,038
there's so many people that hold off

863
01:09:03,038 --> 01:09:05,818
of participating in Bitcoin because they're waiting.

864
01:09:06,138 --> 01:09:09,218
They're waiting for their government to allow it.

865
01:09:09,298 --> 01:09:11,898
They're waiting for their financial advisor to allow it.

866
01:09:11,939 --> 01:09:13,198
They're waiting for their company.

867
01:09:13,698 --> 01:09:19,818
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.

868
01:09:20,818 --> 01:09:23,559
They're waiting for the billionaires to come in.

869
01:09:23,559 --> 01:09:26,818
They're waiting for BlackRock to make it part of an ETF.

870
01:09:27,758 --> 01:09:34,519
And this is against what Natalie Smolenski talked about, which is the bottoms up movement.

871
01:09:34,519 --> 01:09:38,278
You know, there's so many people that are always waiting for permission.

872
01:09:38,278 --> 01:09:43,559
They're waiting for the top-down authority in order to give them cover to participate.

873
01:09:44,418 --> 01:09:56,378
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.

874
01:09:56,378 --> 01:10:08,998
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.

875
01:10:09,718 --> 01:10:18,258
And he has been making a difference in the lives of people that are not celebrated on social media.

876
01:10:18,418 --> 01:10:23,698
They're not celebrated on traditional media because they have not had a voice.

877
01:10:23,698 --> 01:10:29,858
They've simply existed in that void, and their struggles have been silent.

878
01:10:30,059 --> 01:10:31,559
Their struggles have been unobserved.

879
01:10:32,798 --> 01:10:43,918
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.

880
01:10:44,098 --> 01:10:51,479
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.

881
01:10:51,479 --> 01:10:53,498
but you know

882
01:10:53,498 --> 01:10:54,278
I heard this was said

883
01:10:54,278 --> 01:10:54,838
at the Kansas City

884
01:10:54,838 --> 01:10:55,519
Bitcoin Summit

885
01:10:55,519 --> 01:10:56,559
I forget by who

886
01:10:56,559 --> 01:10:57,778
but you need to meet

887
01:10:57,778 --> 01:10:58,658
people where they're at

888
01:10:58,658 --> 01:10:59,338
as far as explaining

889
01:10:59,338 --> 01:11:00,298
Bitcoin to them

890
01:11:00,298 --> 01:11:01,618
the person who it takes

891
01:11:01,618 --> 01:11:02,378
at the time

892
01:11:02,378 --> 01:11:03,138
I was doing

893
01:11:03,138 --> 01:11:04,138
human rights related

894
01:11:04,138 --> 01:11:04,718
lawyering

895
01:11:04,718 --> 01:11:06,858
representing individuals

896
01:11:06,858 --> 01:11:08,178
seeking political asylum

897
01:11:08,178 --> 01:11:09,458
people fleeing

898
01:11:09,458 --> 01:11:09,958
their countries

899
01:11:09,958 --> 01:11:10,439
refugees

900
01:11:10,439 --> 01:11:11,598
and so that

901
01:11:11,598 --> 01:11:12,519
that made sense to me

902
01:11:12,519 --> 01:11:13,778
the vocabulary he was using

903
01:11:13,778 --> 01:11:15,178
but it's going to make

904
01:11:15,178 --> 01:11:15,418
a lot

905
01:11:15,418 --> 01:11:16,158
you know

906
01:11:16,158 --> 01:11:17,298
somebody who is

907
01:11:17,298 --> 01:11:18,278
a pastor in a church

908
01:11:18,278 --> 01:11:18,878
maybe they need

909
01:11:18,878 --> 01:11:19,578
another pastor

910
01:11:19,578 --> 01:11:20,538
somebody who's religious

911
01:11:20,538 --> 01:11:21,178
who knows that

912
01:11:21,178 --> 01:11:24,318
theology, how that interacts with the nature of Bitcoin.

913
01:11:24,878 --> 01:11:28,378
You know, maybe somebody who's a police officer needs to know something else.

914
01:11:28,439 --> 01:11:29,858
He's got a police officer talk to them.

915
01:11:30,198 --> 01:11:34,798
So we all need our Gladstein to come at us and we all can be somebody else's Gladstein.

916
01:11:35,278 --> 01:11:39,098
You know, if you're listening to this, you're pretty far down the road of becoming someone's

917
01:11:39,098 --> 01:11:44,858
Gladstein, becoming that person who has the Bitcoin ethos, understands the principles,

918
01:11:44,858 --> 01:11:50,479
but also has their own real world experience professionally, socially, whatever.

919
01:11:50,479 --> 01:12:06,878
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.

920
01:12:07,418 --> 01:12:11,479
And they need somebody to come to them and explain it to them in terms that make sense to them.

921
01:12:11,718 --> 01:12:11,798
Yeah.

922
01:12:12,019 --> 01:12:16,479
And that's why, you know, there's – here's a whole line of –

923
01:12:17,298 --> 01:12:19,998
The Bitcoin bookshelf starts there.

924
01:12:19,998 --> 01:12:21,059
It actually goes over here.

925
01:12:21,098 --> 01:12:22,979
I don't know if it's on camera, but it continues on.

926
01:12:23,158 --> 01:12:25,019
So it's a steady work in progress.

927
01:12:25,718 --> 01:12:28,658
There's a lot of Bitcoin books, but there needs to be more.

928
01:12:28,838 --> 01:12:31,198
And there needs to be more people writing about Bitcoin.

929
01:12:31,378 --> 01:12:38,439
There needs to be someone who writes about Bitcoin for a guy who races stock cars at his local racetrack to understand it.

930
01:12:38,439 --> 01:12:48,678
There needs to be Bitcoin writing and understanding and teaching for people that are professional athletes, for people that are mowing lawns.

931
01:12:48,678 --> 01:12:56,059
Because everybody needs to, exactly like you said, everybody needs their Alex Gladstein.

932
01:12:56,059 --> 01:13:09,818
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.

933
01:13:10,358 --> 01:13:15,318
You don't have to understand proof of work and you don't have to understand cryptography.

934
01:13:15,318 --> 01:13:28,979
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.

935
01:13:28,979 --> 01:13:37,398
So that is the message, I think, is to be the peer that is the person who brings someone else.

936
01:13:37,519 --> 01:13:43,418
Yeah, and I just want you, Lucas has mentioned, quoted Smolensky, referred to things she said quite a bit.

937
01:13:43,418 --> 01:13:46,138
just to plug our conversation with Natalie.

938
01:13:46,138 --> 01:13:48,559
If you're listening to this and haven't listened to that one,

939
01:13:48,618 --> 01:13:49,678
go back and listen to it.

940
01:13:50,118 --> 01:13:53,198
And not because of anything that Lucas and I added to that conversation.

941
01:13:53,718 --> 01:13:55,098
We did our best as interviewers.

942
01:13:55,098 --> 01:13:55,658
We could have sat in the corner.

943
01:13:55,918 --> 01:13:56,798
We could have, man.

944
01:13:57,038 --> 01:13:59,559
We needed to lob some questions out to get some stuff out.

945
01:13:59,618 --> 01:14:01,778
But even that, man, we're not interviewers.

946
01:14:01,918 --> 01:14:04,318
Natalie did such a good job suffering our questions.

947
01:14:04,318 --> 01:14:07,038
And in response to those, listen to the responses,

948
01:14:07,218 --> 01:14:11,218
because there's so much good in what she says,

949
01:14:11,218 --> 01:14:13,778
It's good with a capital G that goes beyond Bitcoin.

950
01:14:14,038 --> 01:14:15,458
So I would just encourage people to check that out.

951
01:14:15,698 --> 01:14:21,178
Yeah, it's profound, the concept of having incentives that are aligned.

952
01:14:22,298 --> 01:14:30,198
We're living in a world today where it makes sense for people to do things that are almost reprehensible.

953
01:14:30,198 --> 01:14:32,059
It makes sense for you to sell out.

954
01:14:32,218 --> 01:14:38,878
It makes sense for you to take advantage of the deal today and not play long-term games with long-term people.

955
01:14:39,519 --> 01:14:45,378
It makes sense for you to be the person who is concentrating on exits.

956
01:14:46,178 --> 01:14:54,038
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?

957
01:14:54,038 --> 01:15:11,138
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?

958
01:15:11,138 --> 01:15:19,099
and you know we're we're looking at a world where we're we're moving more into this idea of

959
01:15:19,099 --> 01:15:27,138
find your purpose find your ikigai find your um find the thing that you can't master that brings

960
01:15:27,138 --> 01:15:33,818
benefit to the world around you that brings you joy that can support your lifestyle by providing

961
01:15:33,818 --> 01:15:39,939
you income and that you can do for your life because when you do that then you can go deeper

962
01:15:39,939 --> 01:15:46,238
and deeper and deeper and you can gain expertise and you can never attain, but you can search for

963
01:15:46,238 --> 01:15:52,019
mastery. You can search for mastery, whether it's in playing guitar or reviewing books or

964
01:15:52,019 --> 01:15:59,599
building bookshelves or fixing cars. Um, you know, that's what we, I think that's what we

965
01:15:59,599 --> 01:16:05,718
as humans, we desire is to be able to be competent. Um, and that's a signal to other

966
01:16:05,718 --> 01:16:13,118
people around us that we've dedicated ourselves to something. And the concept of aligned incentives

967
01:16:13,118 --> 01:16:21,298
is one that continuously bubbles out of being involved in Bitcoin, where we truly are all in

968
01:16:21,298 --> 01:16:30,318
this together. And we truly all do benefit by global adoption of this, because it removes us

969
01:16:30,318 --> 01:16:32,618
from these oppressive regimes

970
01:16:32,618 --> 01:16:36,278
or even from the ones that we don't even view as oppressive

971
01:16:36,278 --> 01:16:42,439
but are slowly seeping away the economic energy that we have

972
01:16:42,439 --> 01:16:44,078
in order to participate in the world

973
01:16:44,078 --> 01:16:47,099
and to be our best self and express our best self.

974
01:16:47,358 --> 01:16:47,678
Right on.

975
01:16:47,858 --> 01:16:47,998
Yeah.

976
01:16:48,439 --> 01:16:50,838
Why Bitcoin is Freedom Money by Alex Gladstein

977
01:16:50,838 --> 01:16:51,979
in the Journal of Democracy.

978
01:16:52,258 --> 01:16:53,038
There's a link to it.

979
01:16:53,078 --> 01:16:55,439
I'm sure we'll link to it as well on Gladstein's page

980
01:16:55,439 --> 01:16:56,678
on his pinned tweet.

981
01:16:57,158 --> 01:16:57,638
Check it out.

982
01:16:57,678 --> 01:16:58,358
It's an excellent essay.

983
01:16:58,658 --> 01:16:59,479
Thank you very much.

984
01:17:00,318 --> 01:17:04,559
Oh, man.