I'm grateful for both understanding the value of freedom and the danger of tyranny and all these isms.
And then also, on the other hand, I'm grateful for understanding what our way of life does to people
and all the externalities, the negative externalities.
And the reason why I'm grateful for that is it's given me an optimistic way forward.
I'm very fired up every day. I'm very inspired.
I would imagine most people like, wait, but you've seen all this crazy shit and you've talked to all these people.
And like, you have a very grim view of what the US role has been for a lot of other people in the world.
Yeah. Well, the answer is to reform and to improve the US.
I think we will continue to be very powerful in the future.
And I think we're going to improve actually to a dramatic degree, whereas I think a lot of other political systems are going to collapse.
And I think the difference is if you Bitcoin is such an incredible thing, because if you don't have Bitcoin,
what is your hope about the future?
Alex is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation.
He also serves as Vice President of Strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum
and has connected hundreds of dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders,
technologists, journalists, philanthropists, policymakers, and artists to promote free and open societies.
He's also a hardcore Bitcoiner and has written extensively about Bitcoin as a tool for human rights.
We cover a lot in this conversation from the potential impact of Bitcoin on global politics
and the role it can play in challenging dictatorial regimes to de-dollarization and its potential benefits for America.
To Alex's thoughts on the Bukele regime in El Salvador,
Noester as a tool for free speech and open communication, and a whole lot more.
We also had a couple of strange audio issues I haven't encountered before during this episode, so apologies.
But it appears that whoever was listening in on our conversation did not like everything they were hearing.
Regardless, I think you're going to love this conversation with Alex.
Before we dive in, if you are enjoying this show, do me a favor and share it with your friends, family, or strangers on the internet.
Or don't, Bitcoin doesn't care, but I really would appreciate it.
If you'd rather watch the show than listen, head to the show notes for links to watch on YouTube, Rumble, and now on Noester via highlighter.
But if you're like me and you prefer to just listen to your podcasts, I highly recommend you check out fountain.fm.
Not only can you send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters to give value for value,
but you can earn Bitcoin just for listening to this and other podcasts.
And if you're already ahead of the game listening to the Bitcoin podcast on fountain,
consider giving the show a boost or creating a clip of something you found interesting.
I really appreciate it.
Finally, if you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
hit me up on social media or through the website, BitcoinPodcast.net.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Alex Gladstein.
Alex, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
It's gotten the chance to meet you in person a few times, which I'm very grateful for.
And we'd like to do this in person as well, but the old video conference will have to do for now.
But thanks so much for coming on.
My pleasure.
So Alex, I sometimes I start these out in different ways, but I like to just ask a very basic question to get things going.
I think that you are pretty darn well known in the Bitcoin space and also outside of it as well at this point.
But perhaps for those who don't, can you just tell me kind of in your own words,
who who are you and how did you get here today to be doing all the incredible work that you are doing?
Yeah, very fortunate.
I certainly it's been a lot of hard work, but I had the fortune of growing up in the wealthy part of the richest and most powerful country in the world.
So I intend to make everything out of that opportunity that was given to me.
I grew up originally in middle class family in Connecticut,
East of New York City,
and I ended up going to public schools in that region, which are which are which are good public schools.
And yeah, grew up grew up there in Fairfield County and spend a lot of time as a kid in New York City in that area in that region.
And the events of 9-11 and the Iraq War played a pretty massive role in my, let's say, story of my intellectual upbringing, my worldview.
I was in 10th grade in computer science class when the planes hit the twin towers.
We were watching it on our little computers.
We had the Internet and I was a child of the Internet through and through.
Remember getting my first kind of, well, it wasn't my computer.
My, you know, our family got a computer in the early 90s.
I was born in the mid 80s.
So I was like seven or something.
We got this step this huge tower and it had a double digit megahertz counter on it.
Like that was the physical limitation of the display.
So that was that's that was pretty interesting.
So we blew by that pretty quick.
But yeah, I remember having the going through the floppy, the floppy drives.
Then the sort of the, what do we call it, the B drive, you know, we had the kind of smaller floppies and then dealt with the, you know, the advent of the Internet was so exciting.
I mean, it was really fun.
Totally consumed me as a little kid.
You know, of course, I was into video games and stuff, but I was really into the Internet.
Like we had a what like a 14k and then a 28k and then 56k.
Most of my childhood was probably spent 56k mid to late 90s.
So, you know, whenever I was doing stuff, it's like you have to wait for the download release and then, you know, go, you download it waiting for hours for the newest counter strike thing or Winamp or whatever it was that I was downloading.
But it was interesting because it was, I didn't even think about, I didn't even know that there were people critical of the Internet at the time.
I had no idea.
I mean, I was in my own little bubble of living it and using it to interact with my friends.
We would all be on AIM and we would be doing like Internet conference calls and all sorts of stuff.
But apparently, while this was all happening, there were people writing off ads being like the Internet is, you know, going to fade or something.
It's not going to work out.
It's really interesting, you know, being a child of something, being in it and just knowing that it's obviously going to be the future.
But you never, I mean, that doesn't even give you the vision, right?
Like I remember being at my friend's house and so for some time I ever saw an Amazon box.
My friend's dad had bought something on Amazon and I was like, what is that?
That's interesting.
So it was a book, so this must have been, you know, mid 90s, but even as a creature of the Internet, I had no idea that what would come later, right?
So we have no idea what's coming, but at least we know that these technologies are here.
I mean, it gives us the confidence to know what we know.
Like, I know when I've seen something, do you know what I mean?
So grew up in that era, went through the whole Y2K thing.
That was fun.
I remember that I was in eighth grade for that.
Everybody was convinced the world was going to end.
That was really interesting.
I know that there were some things that happened, but generally the world did not end.
And yeah, I mean, lived through some really intense political moments.
I mean, the 90s were interesting.
There were a lot of spirited political debates at the time, but it seems like the issues were a little less intense.
And then you hit the 2000s, right?
And it's like, okay, 9-11.
You have the Iraq war buildup and that was just so heavy.
The 2000 election, the hanging Chad, all of that stuff was really intense.
And in general, I think people have forgotten that.
It's like people today are like, oh my God, look at all this crazy shit that's happening.
And it wasn't any less crazy than, trust me, we didn't have the internet really to the same level we have today.
We didn't have social media, that's for sure.
But I mean, first of all, the 2000 election was completely nuts.
And then the 9-11 and America coming to grips with understanding its role in the world and then just being gaslit into the invasion of Iraq was really something.
I remember as a junior in high school, I was on the debate club.
So I had to get up, they had to do this thing where we got up on the stage.
This was 2003.
Standing in front of everybody in the whole school, so a thousand people.
And we had to debate both sides, which is really crazy.
And at the time, it was like, oh, this is so cool.
And I would be sitting there and it's like, I have a partner and we're, you know, the resolution is we're going to invade Iraq or whatever.
And it's like, this must have been February 03, you know.
And, you know, I had to sit there and I understand it was like both sides.
But it's just wild to me that they had kids get up there and make an argument to other kids that we should go invade this other country in retrospect.
It's completely insane.
But, you know, those are the times we're living in.
I think one of the best time capsules to actually revisit that moment is a great book by Ian McEwen.
It's called Saturday.
It's really great.
It's one of my favorite fiction books.
And it's one day in the life of somebody in 2003.
And it's like, it's a surgeon in London and it's just his life in one day and they cover all this stuff.
But basically one of the plot lines is that his kid is like a left-wing activist who's against the war.
And he's like for the war for all these like moral reasons that seem fine on the outside.
But you end up kind of seeing the rot.
Let's put it that way.
But anyway, yeah, I mean, what a crazy time.
Got me very interested in the world around me.
I, one of the graduates of my high school came in one day and she talked about how she was studying the Middle East.
And this was this was this was after the invasion.
So this was probably three.
And I thought that was really interesting.
And I was like, huh, you know, I've learned a lot about other parts of the world so far, but maybe not that part of the world.
So I was very interested in that.
And she came in and it's really interesting.
She's now the president of NPR.
This is someone went to my high school.
Oh, wow.
And she used to be she's to be the head of the Wikimedia Foundation.
But she came in as a kid, you know, she was just probably a sophomore in college or something.
But she came in to and I remember this and she was like, hey, I'm studying Arabic.
It's really interesting.
I was like, okay, seems relevant.
We're like invading this region.
It would be interesting to know more about it.
So I ended up going to a liberal arts school in Boston.
I am called Tufts and again, very privileged, basically like a country club for kids where you just get to hang out and party.
There were good intellectual opportunities.
But I wonder how long that model goes.
I guess is my question.
But I, you know, I took out a lot of loans to do that and it took me a while to pay those off.
But, you know, probably in retrospect, it was worth it.
But it's the higher education is an interesting model.
We'll leave it at that.
But I remember I was just sufficiently interested in this.
So I originally went to school to be an engineer Tufts has an engineering school, but they have this interesting year one where you can, which is actually kind of nice where you can sort of figure out like what you're going to do.
So I originally enrolled in the engineering school, but there's some flexibility and I ended up after the first, I think semester deciding I'm going to stay in the liberal arts school.
And I'm actually going to shift to international relations.
So I took a lot of coursework in that area, got me very interested in the world around me.
I was terrible at economics.
I got like a C Econ.
So that's that's funny.
But and there seems to be wide agreement that that's not a bad thing.
Not not doing well in, you know, mainstream economics is not really a bad year.
Yeah, it's not really a predictor of your future.
Let's say understanding of how it works.
But I ended up going to London for a year and studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies, which was mind blowing for me.
It's a totally different experience than going to like a neoliberal art school in America.
It's like hardcore.
You get Marxists over there and like Islam Islamists.
There's a lot of people from different parts of the world there.
It was very interesting and I opening and I was like, okay, this is interesting.
This was also as heavy.
It was like, oh, seven.
So there was a huge flare up in Israel, Palestine at the time.
And again, people forget they're like, oh, like clearly like in terms of deaths, this is this is sort of the big one.
But like it's not like it was chilled before.
Like it's just that we have this social media stuff.
But at the time it was really intense.
Um, oh, six, seven was I mean, Hamas had just taken over.
It was it was wild.
So that really colored a lot of the experience being there.
And it was different because like Tufts was probably, you know, the the M.O.
There was just being pro-Israel probably, but being so ass is completely different.
Right.
It's the total opposite.
So that was it was very interesting for me to see see both sides of that.
And I remember I took this course called Islam and democracy and 40% of the class could recite the Quran from memory from start to finish.
So that was really interesting because the teacher would be like, okay, basically we did a was a year long course.
We did a third Western philosophy, a third Islamic philosophy and a third looking at countries and how they grappled with these ideas.
And it was interesting.
So the teacher would be like, oh, what is it?
What does the Quran say about this?
The student would just say, you know, he just freaking read it out in Arabic and then he would give us the translation.
Really interesting.
So again, I had a really different experience.
I also had the unique opportunity of interning at British Parliament, which was really eye-opening and neat to be able to like just take the tube in a suit and just be in Parliament.
And I had interned for a Liberal Democrat, Scottish guy named Michael Moore, actually, not the Michael Moore who was famous at the time, but different Michael Moore.
He was like six, five huge guy, very nice guy.
And I was responsible for helping brief his like form trips.
You could go like go to Indonesia and I would help do some research on that.
But it's a little office.
I was looking at Big Ben.
It's in this place called Colas House.
It's really interesting.
We got to be you went downstairs and you sat down like Tony Blair's like there with Gordon Brown.
It was it was interesting.
It's a very interesting time.
I love London's a great place and I loved living there for a year.
It was awesome.
I like going back.
It's killer.
So I enjoyed that.
That was enriching.
I ended up coming back to the States doing one more year finishing Tufts and when I was in London, I had applied for an internship at a basically a nonprofit startup called the Human Rights Foundation, which had been started like 18 months earlier by a Venezuelan activist.
I got the internship.
So I came back spent the summer in New York in 07, which was of course we were we were the writing was on the wall for the great for the financial crisis.
Right.
So again, really heavy time.
Really crazy times.
I remember I got at the end of my internship at the end of 07 in the summer.
They gave me a general bumper.
So I had a job on first was great.
So I could just post through the senior year.
It's the best.
So did that.
And it took took advantage of some of the intellectual stuff like Tufts has a diplomacy school called Fletcher.
That was kind of cool.
I got to take some graduate level coursework there.
But I knew what I wanted to do.
It was going to work for this human rights group.
That was very educational for me.
Very foundational actually for a lot of what I would do later.
I think in a big way.
And then, you know, I get the job.
I go to New York.
It's 08 and then over the next six months.
Things start to really unravel.
Obviously, lemon brothers, everything was crazy.
And I was living in New York 08 or 910 11.
I mean, I watched the whole thing in terms of like some of my friends were working as like interns on Wall Street.
And they were, you know, carrying shit out boxes.
Like I saw all that happen.
That was wild.
So the time I was like making no money at all.
I mean, I was making enough barely to split a four bedroom place in Brooklyn.
You know, but it was awesome.
It felt like, you know, it was everything, you know, to be there at that time.
Really cool.
So I was able to get position at this org as it was growing.
It was just created.
So now it's like this larger organization where we have 50 employees and a $25 million budget and we have work all over the world.
And we're very prominent in many ways.
But at the time it was just this little idea.
So it's been very cool to be there for that transformation.
And yeah, I would say in general, like my life at HREF, let's say that first decade before I started really getting into Bitcoin,
which was like, let's say early 2017 is really when I really fell down the rabbit hole.
But, but it was a great education in a free society, basically.
And like what, why individual liberties matter and why dictatorship is bad.
And, you know, of course there's nuances, but I think that, you know, it's helpful because a lot of this other stuff, you know,
a lot of these ideologies are very intoxicating.
But statism is bad folks.
It's not good.
You know, it can provide, right?
It can provide.
And I'm going to sit here and tell you that the Chinese Communist Party didn't lift, you know, a lot of people out of poverty.
They did.
Now, how did they do it?
And who's responsible is the debate?
Like, did they do it by getting out of the way and giving people individual rights?
Probably.
But, you know, a lot of these isms are very intoxicating.
Strong men ism, you know, populism, Marxism, neoliberalism, socialism, I mean, all of them.
All of the isms can be very intoxicating.
And I learned about all that.
And I saw what was interesting is I saw freedom, individual freedom fighter activist type people kind of fighting all different versions of this same monster.
It had a different mask, but it was the same monster in the end.
Sometimes it was a left wing monster.
Sometimes it was a military monster.
Sometimes it was a capitalistic kind of right wing monster.
It underneath the mask was a status the whole time.
So it's amazing watching all these activists struggle to get, you know, honestly, one percent of the freedoms that I have today, right?
It's very humbling and it's very important.
And I really wish more people in the Bitcoin community would get a chance to get out of the bubble.
And when I say that, I mean, very particularly American and European Bitcoiners.
I think one of the best ways to do that is talk to global Bitcoiners, talk to other Bitcoiners from other countries.
They will they will give you some, you know, good perspective on what it's like.
But, you know, you have people who exaggerate on both sides, right?
In America, you have, you know, as much as I don't like Donald Trump, you've got people saying like that he was a dictator or all these things.
I mean, it's totally ridiculous.
And same thing on the other side.
Oh, Biden's a dictator.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Well, I mean, not really, actually, if you actually look at it, you know, we have a lot of problems in the U.S.
And I've written extensively about those.
But it's very important to have moral clarity on like, what is like, what is tyranny?
Like, what does it look like?
How does it work?
What is what is this?
What is a, you know, what is a fear society and what is a free society?
And I understand the whole Chomsky thing, but it's different.
Like, I understand that we manufacture consent in the United States.
I'm not an idiot.
Like, I understand this.
The whole, holy last year of supporting the the massacre of people in Gaza has shown me this, right?
I get it.
But yeah, it is not the same thing living in China as it is living in the Carolinas.
Like, this is different.
Like, and a lot of people lose sight of this.
Like, they don't get it.
And, you know, there's so many different aspects to that.
But like, there are simple ones that you can bring up to help people understand.
For example, like, I just watched John Stuart totally roast the president of the United States today.
It was really enjoyable.
I actually love John Stuart.
He's killing it.
Amazing segment on Biden today.
You should watch it.
It's devastating.
But anyway, he gets paid really well to make fun of the leader of our country.
That's completely illegal in most countries.
Like, this is a very basic simple thing that a lot of people don't understand.
And like, I can sit here and I can, you know, we can say, the New York Times can say Biden should step down and the people doing that are not like afraid that they're going to get like black bagged later tonight.
That's not going to happen.
Now, I understand that like, we've built that freedom at the cost of others and all these other things.
But like, the reality is we have a relatively free society where we can do stuff like that.
People in these other places don't.
And there are a lot of defenders of that other model and that's fine.
But this needs to be acknowledged.
Like, like there are obviously upsides of every society, Singapore, China, Rwanda, Egypt, El Salvador, Dubai, in terms of the UAE, Saudi.
Yes, of course, there's positives in every place.
Every part of human culture and society has positives.
But this fear free society thing is very important.
Like you can't, you would not be able to do it.
John Stuart just did in El Salvador, in the UAE, in Saudi Arabia, in Russia, in occupied Ukraine, certainly, in Singapore.
I mean, I know a guy in Singapore is an opposition leader who's an asterisk for a decade plus for doing anti-corruption work.
So there's a way to balance this.
Like, you can't even do that in Israel anymore.
I'm pretty sure that if you go and you criticize BB, you get tossed in jail.
So I think this is quite important.
In very few societies, can you confidently criticize the government and really exert yourself freely and have confidence that the government's actually going to respect things like property rights, free speech.
So to conclude the opening of this, the idea is that my career taught me about that.
And if I didn't have that, I'd be very lost.
I would be so many, I'd be so intoxicated by all these isms and visions and rogue leaders.
And this is just how people end up supporting Che Guevara.
You know, it's very romantic.
And a lot of these leaders are very romantic.
These are very romantic ideas.
But thankfully, I've spent 15, 16, 17 years now with very brave people from all different political stripes.
They don't agree on very little.
They don't necessarily agree on, well, what role should the state play in healthcare?
Who knows?
Transgender rights, no idea.
I don't know what everybody's opinion is on all these little, you know, all the different miniaturs that make up the collective experience.
What I know is they don't like dictators and they don't want somebody telling them that all of their life.
They might be left wing, they might be right wing, whatever.
And I've seen that.
And that's what I want to do with my life is help build that and help be part of that resistance movement that is truly global.
So that was, I would say, the first part of my career.
And that's been, again, super helpful because it's like an antidote to blindly believing in isms.
And then the second part of the career is the Bitcoin part where I ended up learning about how the world works, you know, and then understanding all the rot on the other side.
And it's funny because like, you know, my framework has very much gone from...
It's like you read Confessions of an Economic Hitman when I'm in college and I'm like, oh, this is insane.
It's kind of fun, but probably not true.
And then I'm like, oh, I need to be like a mature person and not believe that, right?
This is sort of this neoliberal thing we get sucked into, at least in the, let's say, nonprofit DC, New York kind of establishment nexus.
You're like, that can't be true.
And then you go a very long time believing that.
And maybe most people obviously grow their whole lives with believing that that can't be true or, you know, those things can't be true.
And if it weren't for Bitcoin, I might be, I might be still over there, stuck over there with the blue pill.
I don't know, maybe.
But you learn about Bitcoin and, you know, it taught me all these things about the way the world actually works.
And it taught me to ask the right questions.
And, yeah, then you learn all that shit.
And I think that maybe the way he told it may be not true, but all the things he's describing definitely happen all the time and hasn't been for decades.
So that was sort of my other part of my career was understanding, you know, the externalities of our way of life, basically.
And that culminated in my book, Hidden Repression, where I'm basically like telling you that the way that we live is built on exploiting other people.
That's to be realistic about it.
And, you know, a lot of people don't like to hear that.
They don't believe it.
I think it's a crazy conspiracy.
No, there's other reasons, other factors.
And the reality is it's absolutely true.
Well, first of all, I've got this guy sitting right here.
Thank you for that intro, because I just, I think it's really important to know, not sound cliched, but like to know where somebody came from to understand why they're doing that.
Understand why they're doing what they're doing today, why they are passionate about the things that they're passionate about.
And I've got to say, the work that you did both with a check your financial privilege and then with Hidden Repression, I think both of which started out as articles, right, like longer form articles and then turned into books.
But those were both so eye opening for me.
First of all, kind of this is to what you were saying earlier on the check your financial privilege side.
It is really hard for people who have like I was lucky enough, I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, but I still grew up in the richest, most powerful country in the world.
I still grew up with an amazing amount of privilege that I did not fully appreciate.
And I think most people don't appreciate.
And it's like they look at the US and they're like, this is all terrible. This is awful. And yes, there are terrible things happening.
There are awful things happening.
But to your point, that's kind of been happening for a while.
We just have so much more access to that information now.
But you travel around the world a little and you see how others live and what they have to deal with.
And you realize, oh my God, like, yeah, the US may be, you know, it's still a horse at the glue factory, but it's like the prettiest horse at the glue factory.
It's the last one being turned into glue.
Like it's still okay, you know.
And that was really like those stories about Roy Maboub and Frida Nabarrema.
I think those were just incredible.
And, you know, maybe I'd love to ask you, I've heard you talk about this idea of like the golden billion when it comes to checking one's financial privilege.
Can you kind of explain that in the context of checking your financial privilege for anyone who's not familiar,
maybe hasn't read this book or article, I'll link them in the show notes.
But can you explain that like I'm, let's say, Elizabeth Warren, with the context of Bitcoin being actually a tool that provides something that no fiat currency can?
Look, I think the important part is that as we dive into these, let's say use cases, that the intellectual journeys I've gone on, given to me by the people I've met, have taught me a couple of things that I'm grateful for.
And again, I'm grateful for both understanding the value of freedom and the danger of tyranny and all these isms.
And then also on the other hand, I'm grateful for understanding, you know, what our way of life does to people and all the externalities, the negative externalities.
And the reason why I'm grateful for that is it's given me an optimistic way forward. You know, I'm far fired up every day, I'm very inspired.
And that's a weird thing if I would imagine most people like, wait, but you've seen all this crazy shit, and you've talked to all these people and like you have a very grim view of what the US role has been for a lot of other people in the world.
Yeah, well, the answer is to reform and to improve the US. I don't necessarily know we're like a horse at the glue factory. I think we will continue to be very powerful in the future.
And I think we're going to improve actually to a dramatic degree, whereas I think a lot of other political systems are going to collapse.
And I think the difference is if you Bitcoin is such a incredible thing because if you don't have Bitcoin, what is your hope about the future?
I don't know. I don't know what ism you would believe in because what ends up happening is if you go back in time to the 60s, 70s and 80s, you had all these lefty people who were accurately pointing out problems in whatever the American Empire,
the American Empire, Dollar, Hegemony, all the Cold War stuff we pulled. And they were being like, hey, that's really bad. Like, don't do that.
You know, my dad was freaking sent to draft it at 22 and sent to Vietnam in the 60s.
And Kennedy was killed. He was sent off to the early part of the war. Or at least he was drafted at that point and sent off in 63 to 65 is when he was over there. And it's like, can you imagine being like 23 and being put on a tin can plane to fly south east Asia to fight for a war you absolutely did not believe in?
Just this crazy shit. And he never wanted to talk about it. And he was just like grateful that I never had to do that. And he's like, as long as you don't have to do that, I'm good was basically his thing.
And yet and yet we still have that happening here, right? We still have lower class people who are, you know, basically, you know, lured in with benefits and jobs and there are like mercenary fighting force and they go to Central Asia and they go to
Northern Africa and they go to all these places and they and they fight, you know, it's very grim. So, you know, you think about all this stuff.
But the cool part about our ism Bitcoin ism is it actually there's it gives us a way out, right? There's like this thing where if you don't have Bitcoin, you end up becoming you either becoming a jingoistic pro empire person.
Ultimately, whether you believe it or not, you basically have to basically acknowledge you end up acknowledging that this is the way things are. And we shouldn't fight it. And I should just live my life and support the system and is what it is.
That's like a toned down version of the reality, which is like, okay, you're basically like, you know, pro this machine and what it does to people.
Or you become a Marxist, you know, essentially, like that's really what it was, you know, for Bitcoin, I mean, these were these were the two different sort of end directions you were pulled into, which was which was really bad, right?
Like, you know, communism kills killed tens of millions of people. Now, I'm a structural adjustment also killed a lot of people, probably tens of millions. But, you know, the point is, you either became intoxicated with our own worldview, that it was the right way to do it.
And you didn't really want to look at the nasty parts. That's how most people live their life in the West, right? They don't even know about it. They're either ignorant about it or they're blind, or they don't want to know.
Especially people who work at those institutions like the IMF World Bank, whatever. Most Americans are shielded completely from all that stuff. They may read a book or see an article that gives them a little bit of a, it's like the matrix.
I mean, it gives them a little bit of a peak, but they don't want to, they don't want to go. They don't want to, that didn't feel great. I'm not going to go down that road.
And then what happened before is all the people who did want to go, most of them became Marxists, you know, or like, you know, communists or whatever. Because that was the rallying point against the West, right?
That was the rallying point against the American capitalistic empire or whatever. But today we have something different. And Balaji actually came up with this idea, you know, at least the name, you know, not maybe the fully thought out idea, but definitely the name.
And he was like, well, we had the Washington consensus, right? So we had like the Soviet communism, and then we had the Washington consensus, which was like, essentially American economic empire, like we would come in and restructure your economy and make you a slave of us.
And this is what we're doing all the time, right? And serving the interests of the 1%, not the average American whose life is actually arguably in many ways not improved a whole lot over the last 30 years for the bottom 50% of our population in many, many ways.
But for the 1%, it's been a fricking ride since the 80s. I mean, wow. So basically, and the data all backs that up, like more and more wealth going from the bottom to the top, basically.
So you basically have these two consensus, you had like the Soviet and the Washington. Well, now you have the Nakamoto consensus, right? And now you have this idea that we can opt into something different where my currency system is not funding, you know, blowing kids up in some other country.
Guess what? I can opt into that. I can choose to be part of that. I can choose to gradually become more and more and more part of that. And that that's what's really cool. And it's nice because it allows you to have the humility to understand that that we are very imperfect, at least as speaking to Americans here, in terms of our societies at home locally, nationally.
I mean, look at the financial, I mean, look at the drug epidemic, look at all these things we're dealing with at home, can't even have a reasonable political race. I mean, there's just very little that, you know, there's not a whole lot that can inspire right now, I'd say.
But even beyond that, like, you know, for every good thing we do abroad, it seems like we do three bad things. So, you know, I think there's, you know, it gives you this view of, okay, you could be humble about a role and, you know, maybe understanding there's a lot of not so great stuff.
Not so great stuff that we're involved in. But it gives you the confidence in individual freedom, and that we actually have a tool that can expand this for anybody.
You know, one of the biggest problems with human rights activism is it's like, well, we're here in the West and we're going to promote human rights. And, you know, what does that really mean? I mean, you know, what does that look like in Togo or something like that?
I mean, is that actually credible? Can we actually do that? What is the tool that we're going to do that with?
And, again, I just think for so many years you lacked a valid sort of third way. You didn't have a third way.
Like, inevitably, if you were against some American backed dictator somewhere, you're going to be a communist or, you know, a Sanity Star or, you know, Marxist or some sort of socialist.
I mean, that was the reality. And that polarization really was unfortunate. I think it broke a lot of people apart who would naturally be together.
And that's just the outcome of the Cold War. I mean, that's the outcome of our planet having two empires that fought each other with, you know, essentially different ideologies, right? That's what happened.
But now we've got this third route, right? Where, like, anybody from any country can opt into this new system. Doesn't mean we have to agree on everything far from it, but at least we agree on some important things.
And it really unites. I mean, it really unites. And maybe we're in this romantic early era and it's not going to be like this in the future. I don't know.
But it's pretty cool that you can just, like, walk into Chiang Mai in Thailand and anybody listening to this obviously is very into Bitcoin.
And you can just go and just find the Bitcoin spot and just sit down and just have a great conversation with somebody and just talk about Bitcoin. It's fine.
Just talk about whatever you want. But I mean, inevitably they're going to be friendly to you because you believe in this thing. It gives us this shared kinship. It's really interesting.
And it's obviously not always like that. Like, you know, I'm always involved in all kinds of, you know, online altercations.
But in person, people are really nice actually. Even people who've like had really nasty things to say about me online.
I end up having really fun time usually in person with them. I mean, I've had people, I mean, probably the most intense thing for me was when I was, when Putin invaded Ukraine and I was standing up for Ukrainians.
Not necessarily saying that we should send them weapons or anything, but just being like empathetic. Like, that really sucks. Like, wow, they're getting killed.
I feel really bad for them. And, you know, there were so many people who were just on the other side of that, that were, like, let's say, digital friends of mine.
It got really heated. And of course, like six months later, they didn't care and they don't post about it anymore.
But like for the first few months, man, it was intense. This was like, obviously, like early 2022.
And then one guy in particular, he was so nasty to me. And I'm sure I was, that wasn't exactly kind back. I mean, I'm not usually going to start something.
But if you come at me, I'm going to come back at you like I'm not, I'm not going to just take it. So, you know, he's spreading all these fake news things.
I'm pointing out how they're fake. He gets all pissed. But then I run into him. Ironically, I believe at a beef steak.
And a shout out to beef steak Josh for making the most amazing events. And he comes up to me and he's like, he gives me a big hug.
And he's like, you know, we're good. I'm like, okay, really interesting. But that often happens.
I mean, that's why I think the in-person things are so important. And partly why the pandemic zoom era was so damaging for so many people.
And you know, let's face it, caused a lot of a lot of psychological damage for a lot of people, probably, you know, for kids stuff that you'll never we won't even ever, you know, know, really, or be able to recover from.
It'll just be this like dark time for, you know, a couple of years that had a massive negative impact on billions of people.
But, you know, I think that that makes it a little easier to have confidence in this thing and allows me to be able to point out all this fucked up shit, basically, and have the humility to understand that my government is very much part and parcel of a lot of that.
But on the other hand, have confidence and optimism about the future, like really excited about where we're going.
And I think I'm not one of these blackpilled doomer people, like I don't think that like America is going to collapse and China is going to be the new empire. And I think that's crazy talk.
And I think it's, Putin is evil. And I think the Saudis are awful for what they do. And I don't want to live in a society built on literal slavery, like the UAE and I could go on and on.
But like, there are a lot of people who are just like done with America. I'm on to the next thing.
And I think it's a little dangerous for a couple reasons, but mainly because I don't think America is going anywhere. Like, I think we're going to really be able to take advantage of Bitcoin in many ways because our founding values are very aligned with Bitcoin's founding values.
And guess what? The Saudi king is not. And neither is Putin, neither is Xi Jinping, and neither is Paul Kagame. And honestly, at the end of the day, neither is Bokehle.
Like, what is Bitcoin? I've said this many times, it's free speech, property rights, open capital markets. And what do all those people ultimately need in the end?
Well, they need some level of censorship, confiscation and closed capital markets. They can't do what being a strong man is not ultimately compatible with the Bitcoin ethos.
And, you know, there are ways that they can try to paper that over, but eventually I think it'll become exposed and Bitcoin will become an irritant to them and a real problem.
Some are small enough where maybe it's fine and they can find a way around it, maybe more like the Singapore's and the El Salvador's will be able to find a way to survive in that era.
But these big, big, big dictatorial empires, Bitcoin is so bad for them because it gives people a way out. And people want out. I mean, people want out.
I mean, for all the bad shit that some people still say, just totally fair about America, like, people aren't running the other way.
Like, Europe is the same way. I mean, Europe's facing a lot of the same issues as America. And some ways they're facing even worse issues.
They don't have energy sovereignty. They have electricity crises all the time. They're much more vulnerable in many ways to some of the stuff that America is going to be more protected from, given our geographic positioning and our food sovereignty and our energy sovereignty and all these things that other countries don't really have.
Europe's like, we'll see. And yet it's like, where do you think the refugees are going? They're not going to Eritrea or to Syria. They're coming to Europe, you know?
So let's not, let's not sort of forget that. But in any event, I'm pumped. I'm working on a new potentially, we'll see, maybe it'll be an essay, maybe it'll be a book.
But my vision for it is very clear. It's going to be called the red, white and blue pill.
Why D dollarization is good for America. And it's going to be in three parts. The first part is going to be blue pill. I'm going to basically explain dollar hegemony and try to steal man myself and explain why it's good.
And I'll talk about the stablecoin stuff and all that stuff. Then the second part, part two will be red pill, why it's bad.
And I'll rehash a lot of what I've already written about. I've got lots of content on. And then part three is white pill. Bitcoin fixes this.
So I really think that's the way we're going to go here. I think D dollarization in the end is actually good for America.
I think it frees us up from some of the most parasitic and exploitative behaviors we have.
And it'll make us much more collaborative with the world rather than exploitative. It's not going to fix everything, but it'll, it'll really fix some of the alignments on a lot of the stuff in terms of global, global trade, jobs, labor markets, etc.
It'll, it'll really prevent a lot of this exploitative stuff where we can have people over here in this country on this shitty fiat currency and we can like help, we can work with the local dictator base and pin them in and debase them so we can get for, you know, cheaper shit.
It's much harder to do this on a Bitcoin standard if we're all speaking the same monetary language. That's really difficult to do.
So in general, makes it a lot harder. I think hopefully do a lot of this exploitation will be much more collaborative.
I think it'll usher in basically, I mean, it's basically the Alan Farrington thesis. I really, the Bitcoin is Venice thing. I mean, I think it's going to usher in this beautiful age of Renaissance type activity, scientifically, artistically.
And obviously look, it's not going to be a utopia and it's not black and white. But I think generally speaking, getting off the dollar hegemony, moving to a more Bitcoin based economy,
I think it's going to be great and very beautiful. And I think we'll be very powerful as a Bitcoin power. I think America will be a very strong Bitcoin power.
I mean, again, I think it'll help reform us. But at the end of the day, the answer isn't the tyrant. That's not what you want. I mean, it's not what you want.
I mean, there's some intoxicating allure to it that you could believe that this man is going to save you. I understand the basic human impulse to believe in a populist tyrant.
Billions of people have been fooled. We've seen it all. We've seen Hitler, Mao, Stalin, we've seen all of them.
And many and many who never got there because they were restrained in some way by some sort of democratic process or a bullet or something.
But we've seen these psychopaths do all this stuff in the name of good. Right? At the end of the day, remember, even Hitler was telling his people that this was for good.
And that the Jews were, you know, this thing, we got to get rid of them. We got to like expand our land and fuck the Soviets. And Stalin was saying the same thing.
Capitalism is evil. All these reasons, like, all of these psychopaths have, they all have good on their side. Right? That's what they tell people. All of them.
And they're out there fighting for the right thing. Never ends well. So just be careful out there. It's very unnerving to see people, you know, I think the right way is to call your government to account, be humble and open and honest about the crimes we commit and the problems we create for people.
Let's try to like improve that and fix that and reform that as opposed to ditching and go and support some, yeah, some dictator somewhere else. It's not the right way to go.
Bitbox O2 Hardware Wallet. Then get your Bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self custody. The Bitbox O2 is honestly easy as hell to use whether you are brand new to Bitcoin and it's your first hardware wallet or your season to psychopath and this is like your 69th.
It is Bitcoin only. And again, it is fully open source. You can head to their GitHub and verify that for yourself. Please do not feel the need to trust me or to trust Bitbox.
And when you go to bitbox.swiss, slash Walker and use the promo code Walker, not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this fucking podcast. So thank you.
Now, a lot of you listening to this show may already be deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. But if you're listening to this podcast and feeling a bit overwhelmed, don't sweat it. Bitcoin consulting dot US has you covered.
Some people go down the rabbit hole completely solo, but others want someone to guide them on their journey. So if you're one of the latter, again, go to Bitcoin consulting dot US, whether you're an individual and you want someone to help you with your personal Bitcoin strategy and getting everything set up and moving,
or your company and you want help integrating Bitcoin payments, implementing private projects or even need general contractor services, Bitcoin consulting can take care of you.
So if you go to Walker consultation, go to Bitcoin consulting dot US. Again, that's Bitcoin consulting dot US.
So there's a lot to unpack there. But three things that that jump out initially, I think you are spot on with the idea that increased polarization is often the result of not having something to actually work towards not having the, the
whole white pill of Bitcoin, like you see people going to either ends of this political spectrum. And I think so many times it's because they their side is proposing a solution to the perceived evils of the other side and the same things, you know, it's you know, there is no red,
there's no blue, there's the state and there's you as I say too often to the annoyance of my lovely wife. But you see more of this polarization because they don't actually have a real, a real solution to go around.
They have band-aids to the problems that they the state itself has caused. Let's fix the prices. Hey, merchants, don't do that. What could possibly go wrong?
But these are time and memorial promises that these leaders have made. And it is alluring. I understand. Like in pissed. Don't forget vengeance is one of those powerful human animators, right?
I mean, I meet all these Cubans and they're pissed because they lived in Cuba and Cuba had a Cuba was a rich country by many standards, you know, in the 40s and 50s, and they had relatively good life and they were in the certainly the upper classes probably and they were landowners and it was all great, great.
And then then there was the Soviet inspired revolution and Fidel and he chased them out, killed them and took their land and they're pissed. They don't. But their priority is, I hate to say it for a lot of them, it's not necessarily human rights and justice for all.
Their priority is vengeance on the people who took their land and I understand that I empathize with that, but that's not that helpful. So what's that that has led to is a vengeance driven foreign policy fueled by our electoral system, which basically is now going to change, I believe, but for a long time, you had to go to
Florida and bow down to this particular community and what they wanted overwhelmingly was the embargo, which is a very, I think, sort of immoral thing. But the idea was like, let's just starve and check out this this government basically and then it'll have to be it'll be it'll
be forced to come to the table and do what we want. Well, that didn't happen at the embargo for many, many decades and Cuban dictators are still there. So who has suffered the Cuban people and their families in the United States.
So that's that's what a vengeance driven world view gets you. It doesn't get you very far. And that's the quote one of the most beautiful things about Bitcoin I ever saw was how it just cut right through all that nonsense and how it just allows families to connect, how it allows
effortless transaction of value between Cuba and the rest of the world and America and New York, Miami, whatever doesn't care doesn't matter. It just allows this flow and people can connect and they're unhindered, unbothered, unburdened by all this crap, right, they can just connect with each other.
That's very, very powerful. And I remember being on a phone call and it was like I was invited to be a participant on this phone call between all these Silicon Valley companies and then various arms of the US government as like a human rights observer.
It was like some zoom call with 10 people and it was like Airbnb, Google, you know, maybe one of the big PayPal type companies, then it was like OFAC Treasury, and they were just arguing for like an hour. This was after Biden had been elected.
So post Trump, maybe 2021. And they were all pissed with each other because Obama had like quote unquote opened Cuba to some of the American companies, right, Uber had gone in, you know, Airbnb.
And then Trump reversed it, right, he actually got rid of like tens of, well, I don't know exactly how many, but tens or hundreds even I think it was hundreds of brick and mortar Western Union stations inside Cuba.
He like had them closed down. So Trump was like the opposite of the Obama policy on this. They both were trying to mess around with this. But basically these companies were pissed because the US government had told them, hey, you can go to Cuba.
And then the US government under New Regime had told them now you have to leave. And this was an hour of them just arguing with each other and no progress. And I'm like, wow, this is like the fiat machine.
And meanwhile, this was by the way, this is this was when things aren't better now. I mean, the peso is hyperinflated in Cuba. But basically, this was during the summer of I think it was 2021.
I mean, this was the summer when Cubans were starving to death. And they were just they weren't going to help anybody. I'll tell you that much. And yet Bitcoin I could see was just while they were arguing, you know, it's like doing this other stuff and watching Bitcoin help people.
And that was that was quite cool. So that was that was very inspiring. So yeah, it's this like third third way.
I love that. You know, one of the other things I wanted to ask you about because I know that you have spoken very clearly and plainly about this and this is one of those things you've probably gotten a lot of flak for, especially in the digital realm is is your criticism of the Bukele regime.
And I wanted to ask you because I've I've read not everything you've written, but I've read quite a lot of it and I very much enjoy your writing and have learned so much from it.
And from also you've spoken at so many things have been privileged enough to hear them in person or at least stream them online. One of the things you've emphasized so much is that Bitcoin is really bad for dictators.
Like, like it isn't something that is it disrupts their power structure. At the same time, I've I've seen, you know, the arguments you've made. And I think, you know, some of them have a lot of merit about Bukele's regime and the fact that that from a human rights perspective is worrisome to you.
And so I'd I'd love to kind of know, what do you think? How do you think this plays out? Because you have so much more experience than 99.99% of the world in learning about how these things actually happen on the ground, how dictatorial regimes go down, how they oppress people, how they strip away their freedoms and the ultimate freedom being the freedom to transact freely.
Because without that, you can have your other freedoms don't don't don't really matter if you don't have that baseline. So I'd love to know just how you see this playing out. Because I've been I've been well solved for a couple of times.
I've I talked with as many people as I could. People are understandably happy with the changes that have been made because there, there's not, you know, there's not the violence. There's not the institutionalized gang theft.
But obviously, at the same time, there's things that are concerning. And so I'd love to just kind of know your, your perspective on that. Where you think this goes, because I think a lot of nuance is lost in, you know, Twitter debates and things like that.
So like, what what is most concerning to you? And how do you see this situation? You know, do you see a way that this can end very favorably where you would say, you know what, okay, he has taken X, Y and Z action and that has caused me to change my position versus here is the the case that I think but hope doesn't play out because obviously people would that would ultimately be harmful to people.
I'd love to know because again, I appreciate that you know so much more about this and how this goes down than I do. And again, I think a lot of nuances lost online.
Try to be you have to be nuanced about it because there's it's not a black and white thing.
And it also might prove to be way more unique than we thought but I'll get to that in a second. In general, I've always said from the beginning, and I have lots of receipts but essentially that I always thought that Bitcoin law was awesome.
I didn't understand the libertarians who were against it. I look if we're going to have legal tender.
People should have a Bitcoin option. This is this is very clear to me. If you're going to if you're going to force one currency you should at least give them the Bitcoin option as well.
So I thought the Bitcoin law was great. I still think it's great. I don't believe that it's some sort of, you know, violent imposition of Bitcoin. I always thought that was cope from people and usually anti Bitcoin people they were the ones really pissed off about the Bitcoin law.
So most, you know, a lot of the Bitcoin stuff I was pretty excited about.
I mean, you had to be and it was very, and you know, you lose it a little bit, but I mean, 1020 years from now I think it'll be properly recognized. I mean, I was right there in the audience with Jack Mahler's had his talk.
I went down to El Salvador that summer, you know, visited Elzante. I just think what everything that transpired there was so incredible. And I obviously tried to put that into my book and writing on this, where I have this chapter in my book called The Village and the Strongman where I really tried to, you know, focus on what an incredible story this was that this little village.
I mean, this, this nothing village that this when I was re blast there had no paid roads or I mean people had tarps for roofs and it's just really very little infrastructure that this could somehow be the touchstone in like changing the world financial system.
I just thought was such an incredible stranger than fiction story, you know, and talking to the people down there who even though we might disagree on Bukele, I still love very much and we still work together and do all kinds of fun stuff together, like Mike and Roman and all the guys down there.
And all the other people doing great work down there. I mean, me premier Bitcoin was born out of El Salvador with John and Adam and their team is doing it's just amazing. So there's a lot of great stuff coming out of there that I've always tried to support different ways.
I mean, I have been very supportive of me premier Bitcoin and, you know, some of the ideas were cool as well. Like obviously I always thought the volcano bond thing was cool.
But, you know, totally surreal. I was listening to this the other day I still have a recording of the spaces that Nick Carter had with Bukele on the night they passed the Bitcoin law.
And yeah, I remember just being up there on the stage was like 25,000 people. And, and someone messages me and they're like, Hey, can you ask him about Bitcoin mining?
And I was like, I knew I probably had one or two shots to say something and I really wanted to ask him about self custody. And I did and he said he wouldn't restrict that and he hasn't. So that's good.
I do appreciate that. I was worried about, you know, I was the main worry was that they were going to basically really restrict everything except for Chivo.
And that that has not been really the case at all. So that was, I guess, an unfounded concern.
But the other question I asked was, of course, the mining one and it was really interesting because he's basically like, No, we're not, you know, not doing that at all.
Then you could just like hear the gear shift in his mind. And he was just like, Actually, you know what, we have this thing. And like 18 hours later, he was to he was at the site of a geothermal mine and taking pictures of it and putting sketches about how they were going to do all this stuff.
I mean, that was that was pretty wild. And I'm a huge fan of geothermal mining. I think it's very important. I've seen really effective geothermal mining in Africa on the Rift Valley.
I continue to think it'll be really positive for Central America. All of South and Central America have just this huge untapped kind of Rift line along the Pacific Rim of Fire where they have volcanoes after volcanoes after volcanoes going all the way down to Chile from Mexico.
So, you know, I was excited about that. You know, I think it's fair to say that that is not really panned out the way that we had hoped. I mean, there's a sense of sensibly one sort of site.
It's very secretly guarded. They don't really allow people in. They don't really share that much information about what the mining is like, how they've mined, what are the economics of it.
So that's been unfortunate. But in general, I think cool idea. And I thought the big I thought the volcano bombs was really interesting. And I continue to think that's really interesting.
Giving the IMF a middle finger saying, hey, we can borrow against this sort of new capital, essentially we have, which is our untapped, stranded renewable energy reserves and creating an asset to borrow against that.
It's really cool. So I always thought that was interesting. That obviously is also proven difficult.
Now the Bitcoin city thing I thought was dumb. And obviously that's not gone anywhere. And I couldn't believe that people actually thought that was going to happen.
But we'll see. I mean, I think in the Bitcoin area, it's a mixed bag. I mean, obviously I pointed out some cool stuff. Chivo is not cool.
Admittedly, the US government has not created a Bitcoin wallet for its people, which I point out in my essay. So you got to give them that.
But it was poorly constructed, not that secure. It appears to have been the victim of a massive hack. Just in general, I think the state should stay out of Bitcoin wallets.
I don't know. Is that some crazy libertarian opinion? I'm not sure. But people seem to be fired up about it. And look, their dad is there.
I mean, everybody signed up to get their 50 bucks or whatever it was, 30 bucks. And then they stopped using it pretty much.
And there's been like the slow simmering small percentage of Bitcoin use there. That's non-trivial. And that grows. And I think that's good.
And I think that especially all the work that NPB is doing. I mean, I think the work that the villages are the village in the book, in the stories doing is going to pay massively like Bitcoin Beach inspiring all these other Bitcoin economies and NPB what is doing,
like doing what the government can't do or won't do, which is educate all the kids in Zalsevador about Bitcoin. Like they didn't have a plan for it.
And then NPB at first was like, Hey, we're going to do it. And they were like, I'm not so sure. And now they're actually getting behind it. So now in PPB is like out there doing dozens of different districts and schools.
And look, I think in a Bitcoin world, I think El Salvador is going to be more privileged in that respect because the young people hopefully, if NPB gets its way, will be fluent in this new language.
And that's going to be so awesome for them. So I'm very excited about that. We'll see how that goes.
So, you know, mixed bag on the Bitcoin side. But, and of course, the irony in the end is that the country in Spanish, obviously, it's the savior, right? So it's like, I just thought that was fun.
And yeah, just being able to just break away from this US dominated exploitative model that that Central America has been trapped in for so long that I try to detail in my story.
I mean, it's been quite bad going back to the 30s, agricultural exploitation, then of course the Cold War, horrible shit we did down there.
You know, El Salvador had the second largest embassy in the world, US embassy after India in the 80s.
I mean, it was the site of all of our anti communist activity. And we committed the most horrible massacres there, meaning we backed these paramilitary groups, trained them in the United States.
And I mean, it's crazy shit. Like, there's people want to read about it. They can read, go look up the story in the New Yorker from the early 90s about El Mazzotte. It's a town there. I mean, you won't recover from that.
So, and then of course, you know, the Clinton era kind of sort of creating the gang problem. So, you know, all through it, we've really screwed up this country.
So, I appreciate that people, you know, obviously are excited that the country's going in a new direction. I understand that.
I think the big again, the Bitcoin stuff to put a pin on that spin a mixed bag parts of it's been exciting parts of it and disappointing.
But the other stuff is not that exciting to me. I mean, you know, and you know, call me an American or whatever you want to do.
But in general, it doesn't work out so well when you have a leader who centralizes power completely, like, you know, absolute power perhaps absolutely is is something we've known ever since the Roman Empire.
Like, it's true. You know, I think that we've been in this romantic phase with Bukele.
And here's where it starts to get tough over the next couple of years.
You know, I think the true believers are the people who basically were fine with him ripping up the Constitution to run for another term.
And I get it. They're like, well, if he doesn't do it, then these corrupt people will come back and yeah, well, that's what everybody says.
That's what Chavez said. That's what everybody said. Everybody who violates the limit to run longer says that if they don't do it, then the bad people will come back.
That's obviously what everybody will always say. But that's not a great sign. Like, people who rule for life don't have a particularly great track record, like all things considered in the last few hundred years.
I'm not talking about some figurehead Queen Elizabeth thing. I'm talking about, like, people who are actually in control of the economy and the military and the media.
And I have to say, yeah, it's worrying. Like, you know, it's almost to the point where it's hard to imagine, like, you know, him willingly leaving.
Like, it doesn't really seem to be in the cards. Like, he's totally re-engineered the court system to favor him. He's re-engineered the political system to favor him.
There's really no one who's this critic who has any sort of leg to stand on.
You should chase out most of the critics in terms of the media, or he has them under constant Pegasus surveillance on their phones, which is crazy.
I mean, that's just that should cause you to take a beat. Like, think about that. Like, the people who've been looking into corruption stuff, they have Pegasus on their phones.
Well, that's not that ideal. You know, totally, you know, crunched down on a lot of the critical reporting that was looking into what he was doing.
And yeah, I mean, like, I get it, it's a small Latin American country that's had the crap beaten out of Banyan State. It's nice to see an underdog story.
But these ideas that, like, that we get from critics of our own system still apply, like the whole Assange thing, the government shouldn't spy on the people, the people should spy on the government.
It's not like that doesn't apply in El Salvador, just because it's a small, poor country. No, it's the same, same maxim. It's the same idea.
The Salvadoran people should be spying on him, not the other way around. And it's very secretive. We don't really know what he's doing. Like, where's the Bitcoin?
Like, okay, he showed an address recently. I mean, it's not his money. It's the people's money. And I guess that's more of a general criticism of representative government.
But like, everything's a state secret. You know, no one's really been, he has the technology now to like show, okay, so he showed he has some Bitcoin somewhere.
Well, who's got it? Is that like in some sort of Bitcoin wallet in some other country? Is it controlled by Max? Like, what? Like who owns the keys?
Like, it's probably him and his brothers, but like, it's just, it's a lot of Bitcoin, man. I mean, it's a lot. I mean, if that's true, if they control the key to that address that they showed, that's going to be a totally transformative amount of Bitcoin.
So, I mean, geopolitically speaking, I mean, look, Germany just sold all theirs. Like, so, so, so I think it's right for the citizens of El Salvador to be like, well, where is it? How?
Like, do we get a say like, like, do we are we going to get to say how that's spent? Or is that just for you to just decide? And I think really that's, I think where it comes down to.
So now we're in like phase two, phase one was the romantic era, like, okay, you know, he did deals with the gangs to get them to stop killing people. Nobody disagrees with that.
Totally fine. I have nothing against doing deals with the gangs to stop them to get killing. No issue with that at all. That's great. Love to see there's less violence.
But now is the phase two. Now it's where like, mask is off, he trampled the Constitution, he's going to run forever.
And then you're going to start seeing stuff like, Oh, price controls, like he probably regrets saying that.
Because he knows that I think a lot of his international support is sort of more part of this internet sort of libertarian Bitcoin crowd.
So he probably that was probably a faux pas.
And, you know, he was quick to try and defend himself. But like, I mean, that wasn't great. Like, you don't threaten state violence against merchants for any reason.
But that's that's what's that's what's going to happen. There's going to be he's going to run into trouble. And he's going to guess what what is the tool in his toolbox.
It's power. That's what he he's always done this if you watch him. I mean, he went when he was winning power.
He marched the freaking army into the into the assembly with guns to force them to do stuff.
And I understand that his supporters are like, Well, those people those other people were so bad, this had to happen.
It's like ripping off a bandaid. This was the only way. It's like, OK, well, you look the British Empire was pretty fucking bad too.
And George Washington didn't stay in power forever. He recognized and respected the idea of individual rights, rule of law, and a republic where he would not be a king.
And he stepped down. And Bokehle is not doing that. So so we'll see.
Like, I would say that the American territories versus the British Empire.
I mean, it's not even like we're in conflict. I mean, El Salvador and the US government are becoming closer and closer and closer.
If anything, if you've been watching what's going on, there's not like a caucus and there's like a special thing in Congress announced two days ago.
And we have a military alliance like they're basically part of I mean, they're part of the broader American influence in the region.
This isn't at all like the revolution or anything. But at the end of the day, yeah, I mean, like I thought it would have been awesome if he did his thing, did the Bitcoin law, did all this stuff.
And then when it came to the end of his term left and became like a roving, like, I don't know, like a global Dalai Lama figure for Bitcoin, I thought that would have been the fucking best outcome by far.
And he could go and go to Ukraine and go to Russia and go to China and go to all countries regardless of politics and you can sit down with them and just be like, here's why you should Bitcoin and here's the blueprint.
And that would have been a really good outcome. And that that would have been really that would have been really cool.
But he didn't do that. And now now we're going to have to see how it goes.
I don't think it's going to be particularly pretty politically.
So we'll see. But yeah, I mean, like, to conclude, like, it's possible it was a one off like I was wrong.
I thought there was going to be like a whole bunch of other countries that sort of followed. There's a bunch of reasons why that's not even true.
And Mila is not particularly pro Bitcoin, if people have noticed.
He's had every chance to be and he's not really.
So, you know, we haven't had copycats. It was might have been a one off, you know, can a can a dictator appear cool by by sort of being pro Bitcoin.
I don't know if that's going to happen again. We'll see. We may have been a little quick to jump the gun on that one.
But I think it's a very unique thing that will go down in history. It deserves a lot of nuance.
And, you know, I empathize with people who who who are excited about their country. I'm right. That's great.
I'm worried about, you know, centralization of power.
I first of all, I appreciate the context and the nuance from your perspective because again, you have a lot of experience looking at these things.
And I'm, you know, optimistically, I'm really hoping you know, next next term comes around and he's, you know, ready to to bow out.
And to, you know, open his country up to another leader.
Realistically, it'll probably be somebody, you know, maybe it's maybe it's his brother, maybe it's somebody else, you know, close to them, somebody else in the party.
So I don't know how how much things actually change.
But, you know, I appreciate the context and the nuance there because again, a lot of that gets lost.
And people obviously feel very strongly about this and something I try to be very conscious of myself is, okay, am I having a knee jerk pro or anti reaction to something based on the principles that I try to judge everyone by,
or am I giving some selective bias to a particular thing because I like one area of what they're doing a lot.
And I found myself guilty of that in in multiple areas and perhaps this is one of them.
Again, I'm very, I hope very much that the story of El Salvador is a really positive one.
Like that we look back 20 years from now and we say like, wow, that country lifted itself up out of poverty and out of violence and was able to, you know, go back to or get to for the first time, I guess, a place where it was really a wonderful,
a wonderful place for people to live and be from where they were not needing to flee from it, you know, I do say that.
I do see, you know, the Salvadoran diaspora starting to come back from what I've seen anyway from people that I've talked to.
So that's a positive sign.
And I will say, I think it's still early.
You know, that's easy.
Like we're still early here.
There's there's still a lot to be figured out on that side.
I would agree with that centralization of power is a thing that should be avoided.
And that the centralization of power often leads to very bad outcomes.
In this case, so far, I think that it's it's led to some good outcomes as well.
But to your earlier point, I think it's really important to highlight the grassroots bottom up effect that happened in El Salvador and how much of the change that was really responsible for it was, you know, like with me,
Premier Bitcoin with with El Azante, with all of the education that's happening, like that's that's starting from the bottom up.
This wasn't something that started from the top down.
It was the top down picking up a movement that was happening.
And that's great.
But then, you know, like I remember trying to cheat.
Chivo is not the best.
And it's so exciting that there are these initiatives coming out of El Salvador that are teaching the rest of the world.
And I want to do whatever can help those.
While at the same time being just very skeptical of this sort of very obviously authoritarian leader.
You know, we, you know, and in the folks need to this is some real shit like so there was a guy.
And I know people are going to want to compare it to oh what about this country killed way more people I get it.
But like just just for like a real story.
So there was a guy who was an advisor to Kale who was very pro book Kale and worked with them and he was part of the early Bitcoin team there.
And he he was messaging me and he was like, oh, we should talk and I'm like, I don't really want to know like, you know, so I have these messages on a signal chat and he's like, let me tell you about this new wallet we're building all this stuff.
And, you know, I don't really engage very much and then some time passes and then he's like, see, I have it here.
It's pretty wild.
Here he is.
So he's working on me he's working on me.
And then he says this was in 2023 in the spring.
And you know, at first he's kind of like, hey, the day we go to the day I'll sell it or it goes to the rubbish bin I'll be the first one to inform you.
And he's like, you know, trying to tell me about all the sacrifices he's made and he's basically disparage this media group Alpharo that I was I was I was following.
And he's like, they're not, you know, they're not real, you know, they're not doing good work.
And he's like, I would know if there's something going bad here is what he's basically saying.
And then.
Many says.
He's you know, he's trying to like win my trust and he's saying I you think I don't know there's corruption going on certainly there is.
I'm not covering up corruption and in time it might be me the one exposing it you think people in the government like me.
You think the book a list brothers talk to me I've been ghosted sidetracked for speaking the truth in front of them.
Only NB talks to me if I'm not ghosted. In fact, I've been considering you as one of my trustees of my digital daily journal. If I get whacked, you get all the info out to the world.
I was like, okay.
And then he keeps going, like maybe sometime later and he's like, my story is long and complicated in person we can discuss.
Here it's not the land of the free but it's not like Alpharo says it is.
That was the last knee said to me. And then yeah, I mean, shortly thereafter he was detained.
Tortured and basically murdered. So he's dead. So it's like pretty wild.
Looks like that was a pro pro Bitcoin pro Duquelet insider.
And apparently he you know and officially I can't remember what it was but he committed some sort of thought crime and something, you know, they'll say he was corrupt.
Of course, but like who knows man.
So that was unnerving. So I don't feel great about that.
So I and look he's not going to almost certainly not going to fuck with any Bitcoin is visiting El Salvador. I certainly don't want people to be afraid.
And it's highly unlikely.
I think he wants that and I think the regime wants to welcome that and they really want to sell land and internationalize and they're going to keep that kind of business inside the family if you get me.
I think is usually what happens with these governments.
But like, I just wanted to give you that information because it is important that people understand who they're dealing with here.
It's not somebody who's who has a limit on like what they're going to do to somebody who's turned on them. Let's put you that way.
So yeah, and again, like, fine, you want to oh well that's not that bad compared to what your government does.
Fine. You want to go down that road? Go for it.
But like, it doesn't make me feel great about people who are offering constructive feedback. Let's put it that way to the government.
And maybe and maybe you're right. Maybe someone else in his party takes over and we'll see. I mean, that's kind of what the Castro did.
But it is true that I do look, I will concede. Yes, of course, if like the other party somehow gets back in power.
Yeah, they're going to scrap all the Bitcoin shit. I get it. I get it. I understand that unless it's sold to them properly and then they understand it and maybe then it'll be different.
If it's delivered real tangible results to the country, they're not just going to scrap it. You know, so we'll see.
It would have to be a really positive thing that's really helped El Salvador. And then I think even some crazy left-wing party would, you know, at the end of the day, you know, they would keep it.
If it's going to deliver some sort of value to them, you know, in a frictionless way, they're going to keep it.
But I think as you say, we're too early for that. And that's why his defenders will say, look, he's got to do it. He's got to stay. He's got to stay until it's fixed.
My only warning is that's whatever your dictator says, right? Like, you know, I've got to stay until it's fixed.
And look at what's so good Chavez did. I mean, I know they come from different cuts of cloth, but you know that Bukele's hired, you know, there's all these foreign people working for him.
There's some strange connections to Venezuela. Who knows. But the point is, he's running that playbook, but on speed.
It's like it took Chavez a very long time, relatively, to stack the courts and to sort of control the Congress and to get rid of the media.
It took him like more than a decade to do that. And it's taken Bukele like three years. So it's like he's doing what some of these sort of Democrats turning people who are basically elected to dictators.
He's doing what a lot of them did over a long period of time, but he's doing it very in a concentrated fast way.
I remember being there in 2021. People were like, no, he's not going to get rid of the term limits. That's crazy talk.
And then like a few weeks after I was there or whatever, they laid the way for it. And then all of a sudden you started seeing the Bukele 2024 hats and you got reelected.
So yeah, I just I think just be careful. I would encourage people to really support the Salvadoran initiatives that are doing the good Bitcoin work. It's so awesome.
It's very, very exciting to see the country on up and up. I just think it's fair to be nuanced and to point out some concerns that maybe may arise as the result of having a power hungry strongman in charge.
So so we'll see.
I appreciate that because I think, again, for anyone listening, it's a good exercise to go through to remain skeptical and be extra skeptical of those you are least inclined to be skeptical about, because we often fall into a trap of we love, you know, we
like what this person is doing. So let's remove all suspicion. Let's not stand in their way. And I'm not just talking about, you know, El Salvador here to take, you know, Trump as an example as well. Like, and I'm not pro Biden, certainly I'm not pro Trump either nor my pro RFK.
I'm not pro any politician. And I'm especially wary of people who fall into the trap of removing suspicion, removing criticism from those elected or trying to be elected people who they particularly have for whatever whatever they're like, you know,
single issue. It's like, so stay, stay doubtful, stay skeptical, you know, like similar in some ways to left, left easier progressives that that like Bitcoin a lot that that are now watching the Republican Party become much more pro Bitcoin.
Yeah, it's not ideal for them. It sucks. And it's, it's, I guess it's on them to convince their party. I mean, that's really what we want here. If you're Salvadoran and you're anti bukele, and you but you like Bitcoin, I mean, we should be trying to educate the leaders on your side, so that if there is a
transition one day, they don't scrap the whole thing. And ditto in America what you want is for Bitcoin to become unimpeachable. I mean, you want it to become party agnostic. And I think it'll do the thing is it's always the same with Bitcoin doesn't really need our help like
Bitcoin is just going to do its thing. But like, we can expedite things and we can make things smoother. And you know, people doing real bipartisan work on this like BPI and many others are helpful because it's like our system is decentralized in various
ways. Like it is in some ways it's good and some ways it's bad in some ways it's bad because it allows like special interest groups to freaking hijack like the whole freaking government policy, we've all these special interest groups that are not elected and you know that
they're just as powerful as freaking Congress or Supreme Court in some cases. But it's positive in that like we have, you know, different parties in different regions and we have this state system where states have rights and, you know, you're going to have
governors that are way more pro Bitcoin mining than others and they're going to fight to defend those industries. You know, and that's really interesting. And a lot of countries don't have that kind of, you know, regional power structure thing going on.
It's just like one guy in the middle he makes all the decisions. Like if tomorrow Bokehle wakes up and it's like Bitcoin sucks. I mean, not that's highly unlikely, obviously, but if he did decided it would just all be over in like an instant.
Whereas in America, it's not like, well, I'm not going to, Biden's taken enough of the beating. Let's say, let's say it's either Trump or Kamala, whatever, whoever's in office next. If they wake up one morning and say Bitcoin sucks, they can't just like delete it out of the country.
Like, sorry, we have like courts and we have, you know, the media and we have governors who want to protect that business and we have special interest groups that are going to be pro Bitcoin and we have all the sorts of shit. So, you know, this is the country itself may do bad things and has done bad things.
But the infrastructure is worth celebrating. Like we want that we want there to be infrastructure so that someone can't just decide overnight one day to like just do X. Like that's usually bad at scale.
You know, unless you know the people are really behind it, it's a very important thing and then and then and then maybe but like that can even be bad as we saw over the last few years.
So you don't necessarily want this like highly centralized system that can just make big decisions for everybody without their consent really fast.
Not ideal. I mean, yeah, ideal if like we're being nuked, I guess, but like outside of a huge disaster that's real and authentic, like you definitely want regional power distribution and you want checks and balances.
And just I guess to go back to the beginning of conversation, these things are very valuable. I mean, this created a lot of human flourishing. I mean, it's true that a lot of incredible inventions, you know, were made, you know, before modern democracy.
But if you actually go back and look at those systems, those political economic systems, there was a lot of restraint checks and balances and a lot of those.
If you look at the actually how some of these Islamic sort of empires worked, like that that created all that fertile, intellectual ground, there were a lot of there were a lot.
It wasn't just like one dictator who decided everything and killed everybody didn't agree with him or whatever.
There were courts and there were different districts and there were different people in power and it was quite interesting.
And if you look at obviously obviously Europe during the Renaissance, like there was a lot of different competing groups that had dialogues and discussions.
Of course, like ultimately dictators can have technological development. There's no question. Like look at the Nazis or look at, you know, look at the Soviets or whatever look at the CCP today.
But I would say in the end, the open systems, you know, I think are truly best for this. And, you know, hopefully, we'll never I guess we'll never know created Bitcoin, but clearly a lot of the beginnings of Bitcoin was was was coded up and nurtured in in relatively free
countries and I think that's something we'll be we can be proud of in the future for sure is it is helping helping nurture that at the beginning, our societies at least.
So so let's let's let's take that and let's move forward with that like let's let's try and, you know, push this system forward.
Knowing what it's going to do, knowing that it's going to restore power back to the people a little bit and check some of this rising authoritarian, you know, reality and sentiment around the world.
And I remain extremely bullish on that.
We mentioned, you mentioned earlier kind of like the technological advancements of authoritarians and I think that in many ways technology can actually, it's a tool ready can be used for good or for bad, or can be not used at all.
But you see like the modern surveillance state as that relates to both physical and digital surveillance but also to monetary technology, the rise of CBDCs, the crackdowns on free speech around the world, you know, yes, you know, Elon has allegedly made
the ex more free speech but really that's just kind of in America and in a lot of ways it's, you know, he's bent the knee a little bit more to some foreign governments that we've seen so far maybe that'll change.
But that's where something like like no stir comes in.
And I think that there's this beautiful marriage between freedom money and free and open communication protocol like no stir and we've already seen this it's people are using it in China.
And after Domus was banned from the app store back a year and a few months ago, people were still using no stir in China and I know that HRF has obviously funded a lot of Bitcoin developers open source developers, given grants to them, but also and and and and no stir
developers.
I say how do you see this. Is this a new tool, a new technology in the in your organization's playbook and kind of are you starting to do and run education and programming around this how do you see this, helping people and does that really work right alongside
Bitcoin in terms of how you view these tools.
Well, relatively early nostril user I started when I went a lot of other people did when when Dorsey joined.
I checked it out. We went through a similar thing.
I guess it was.
Shit it was 2020 when Trump got kicked off Twitter.
Everybody went to mass mass to them. I remember that.
I guess January 2021.
And that didn't last long. I mean we were I was like on NV case thing and everybody's like, Oh, well, you know, if you can just kick out whoever he wants.
And that's the thing.
You know, there's a really great, great quote that I'll be using in an upcoming essay from Gigi that where he, you know, he's basically saying that
you know federated models they just they just make a lot of different elons, like they make a lot of different kings.
And in Nostra, there is no king. Well, you're actually the king, you know, so this is very powerful quote. It's better than that. But like everything Gigi says, it's very measured.
But I'm very precise, very hard hitting.
But the point is that, you know, I did think there was the need for this better way to communicate and interact.
That wasn't in as much as what Bitcoin did is it allowed us to start financially interacting without a third party.
You know, could there be something that really helped us do that and avoid the centralized servers where, you know, everything was about the server and not necessarily the client and
you know, I started using Nostra and, you know, for like a year I was like, this is cool.
But I think it's just going to be like a message board for Bitcoiners. I mean, that's that's that's I had a very kind of primitive understanding of it.
I didn't get it. And it wasn't until a few months ago that I really, I really got it. Like now I'm like hyper bullish. Like this thing is unbelievable what it's going to do to the world.
And part of that was my experience at the Freedom Forum, where we had Jack Dorsey come out and deliver this amazing conversation with Lyn Alden that I'd recommend people watch.
It's really, really awesome. I was so happy they were willing to do it. And our audience really needed it.
They needed to hear this. And I'm so happy he went into detail about Nostra. Left a lot of people very curious, really good.
But basically, in Oslo, and I'll talk about this in this piece, basically reason magazine asked me to do a piece on Nostra.
So that's done, written, finalized. They are going to publish that shortly. They're also making a video on it. I'm really, really hyped. It's going to be amazing.
I'm stoked. So I'm grateful to reason. So that's going to come out soon.
And I was doing a lot of research over the last month and reflecting on my experience because when we were in Oslo, I asked Jack if he was willing to meet a lot of the other activists.
And we had this meeting. It was like a private meeting about 15 people. And it was like in our boardroom and all these activists introduced themselves.
And we were talking like, if you can add up all the followings of all the people on traditional social media, the more than 20 million people followed all the people in this room.
Like we're talking heavy, heavy, heavy hitters, really well-known people. And Jack just, you know, I wasn't really sure how it was going to go.
He was like, oh, that sounds awesome. Let's do it. And I didn't have like an agenda, so to speak. I just wanted to see what would happen.
He definitely had an agenda. He was like, all right, this is what's going to happen. Let me tell you about this. And he like walks through how Twitter didn't work and how Blue Sky didn't work and how it all got corrupted.
And, you know, you became the product and, you know, the advertising model completely broken the way the internet was built broken broken broken broken broken.
Blue Sky got corrupted, broken. And then I found Nostra. And he's just like, it's everything we were hoping for. And he explains them how it works. And he's like, giving them a playbook, basically, of like, well, you're going to do this, you're going to like,
you're going to post on your big account, whatever it is, you're going to say, hey, I'm going to keep posting here. But I'm also going to post over here. And maybe I'll do some special content over here. Join me over here.
And, you know, by the end of this thing, I mean, these people are so riveted and engaged by him because Twitter really was continues to be for all of its problems so pivotal for activists.
I mean, half the people in the room wouldn't ever have been where they were without Twitter, right? And one guy was like, he's the guy speaker we have in Gaza. And he's like, he had no profile at all on October 7th, no followers.
And now he's got like 50,000 and he's hugely important voice in the world. That's only possible because of Twitter. So it's really cool because they're very grateful for Jack for inventing this thing.
But they're also keenly aware that it's broke, the model's broken, and they need something different. And it was amazing from to watch. He's explained this and he's like, listen, you know, Twitter was once this niche thing.
And then guess who made it global? You did all the activists during the Arab Spring. You really changed everything. So it was pretty, pretty amazing to watch. And it really helped me because some of the other executives at the Human Rights Foundation where I work were in the meeting and they were like,
wow, this is so cool because, you know, Nostra doesn't have, there's a lot of friction with Bitcoin. It's like, you have the environment fud and you have the volatility fud and the criminal fud and all this stuff.
It's just hard, like, it's just a hard road. Like we're on it and we're going to win, but it's not an easy road. Nostra has none of that, man. It's just a frickin' protocol. There's no criminality. There's no energy usage issues.
There's no, you know, we're not worried about the volatility. It's not a scam. Like it's literally just a protocol. So I think the barrier for entries way lower. I think that it's going to be way easier.
I think it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. Everybody knows that social media is broken. I think it's really going to have its moment in the next 12 to 18 months. I think it's going to go crazy.
I don't know what's going to happen with the infrastructure, but I'm very bullish on all the builders. The Nostra community is incredible. The way the apps are improving is really cool.
I mean, I could not be more bullish on it. And it's just, it's a very exciting time. So we're going to be, yeah, to answer your question, double down. We're going to be creating Nostra programs.
I mean, we're already doing Nostra funding. We're doing a couple of Nostra specific events in the coming year. We're going to have a whole Nostra track at the Oslo Freedom Forum next year. So absolutely tripling down on all of it.
We had a lot of really cool Nostra devs come to Oslo. And we didn't necessarily have like Nostra content this year, so to speak. But Pablo was there and Jeff Gardner and Rockstar and a bunch of others were there.
And it was so cool to see them start purple pilling people. I mean, that's the cool part. Because the other cool part is when you purple pill someone, you're orange pilling them. They just don't know it yet.
So it's like, this thing's like a match made in heaven, I think, for activism, because it's really what activists need. Now, there are some privacy concerns that need to be addressed and that are being looked at.
Obviously, Nostra has a lot of privacy vulnerabilities. It's an open network. We need to make sure that when activists are using it, they're not exposing their IP address, things like that.
But the good news is, I think in the next six to eight months, a lot of this stuff is going to be tightened up. And I think Q1 next year is really going to be showtime. We'll see. I mean, it's going to be, we'll see.
But I think by Q1, we're going to be these apps ready to go. And I think it'll reach a boiling point. I made a bet recently that we'd have a million weekly active users by January 2026.
And I feel very, very, very bullish on that bet. So we'll see. But I also think that when it comes to the deep nature of Nostra, I think it's
ultimately, it's hard to even describe, but I think we're just got the tip of the iceberg right now. Like it's very early days.
Marty Malmy, who was one of the first, I think he might have been the first Bitcoin developer, you know, on Prague last month, he said this, he was like, I was there. And this is more intense.
Like he, you know, for him to say that is wild. Like I think that he has got this great quote that I used where he says something like, Bitcoin's the app for basically financial freedom and Nostra's the app for everything else.
Like it's the freedom app for everything else. And like, I thought that was quite cool.
I mean, and all of the people who I think have the highest signal that I respect the most in Bitcoin are totally into Nostra. That that's a big signal for me. Like when you've got Gigi and Odell, Jack and then Alden, it's like, okay, all right, all right, I guess I have to like take a second look at this thing.
And I think people are going to get it and it's going to take time and it's true that the Bitcoin communities early, but and first user kind of of it, but I mean, other communities are going to come and they're going to love it and they're going to make their own communities.
And the cool part about Nostra is that it doesn't have to have global state. They can have their own community over there. That's not connected to us. It's fine. Like that the Japanese already have this and obviously there's Chinese stuff inside the Great Firewall.
There's a piece out today about this actually that Roger has put out that's worth looking at. But man, I could not be any more bullish on Nostra. That's very exciting. And we'll do what we can to push it forward.
I love that, man. I'm right there with you on the bullishness and I had noticed your usage of it started upticking a bit more recently. I was like, okay, okay, here we go.
It's awesome. Well, Alex, I want to be conscious of your time here and thank you so much for joining. Thank you. I know you guys HR is putting on a new weekly financial freedom newsletter.
I'll link that in the show notes. Is there anywhere else you want to send people to check out? It is something we treat very seriously. Usually got five or six detailed stories about financial oppression around the world and then five or six stories about open source developments, people fighting back.
We drop in some content suggestions and then we will put in there if there's stuff upcoming that we're doing that we want you to check out.
We're doing a webinar series these days to help people on board to Bitcoin. This is with BTC Sessions. It's really fun. It's free. It's a week long. It happens once a quarter. It's like one hour a day for a week.
We did the first one a few months ago. The second one is coming up, I believe next week. If you are interested in that, you can ping me directly and I'll give you the link. That's going to be a lot of fun.
If you're coming to the Bitcoin conference in Nashville this month, I'll be there. I'm giving basically one keynote talk split into two, but I'm going to give a talk about basically the global use cases of Bitcoin.
I'm going to split that up into commerce, freedom, and power. I'm just going to basically pound away with examples of Bitcoin doing stuff that no other technology can do until the audience just can't take it anymore.
The goal is to kill it once and for all this idea that Bitcoin's useless or doesn't do anything. That will be execute that idea live on stage on the 26th and 27th. I think day one will be freedom and commerce and the second day will be power, electricity, of course.
That's going to be fun. There's obviously a first and foremost use case, but that's the one everybody knows and that's savings. I'm not going to go into that. That's obvious. These other three are ones that are less maybe talked about by the average person and so profound.
I'm excited about that. We'll be there. We'll have a booth there. My colleagues will be, I won't be there, but my colleagues will be at sort of Nostriga and Honey Badger. We'll be helping out there doing stuff.
And then I plan to be at the E-Cache conference in Berlin. It's going to be fire. I'll just put it out there, the BTC++. I'm going there. It's going to be in October. I mean, I'm about as bullish on E-Cache as I am on Nostriga. I just think these technologies are such an exciting time.
I think that E-Cache conference is going to be similar to the Lightning conference that happened about five years ago also in Berlin. It's very foundational. I would recommend going and it's going to be amazing.
And then I'm going to be at the Latin Bitcoin events this year. So I'm doing Le BecConf and SatsConf. So I will be down there in November.
My colleagues, I believe, will also be, will be at Africa Bitcoin Conference as well and wherever else we can be.
Then we've got a nice big healthy team now. So we're fired up. So, yeah, check out the newsletter. Thanks for having me on. And yeah, onwards.
Thanks so much. I'll see you at I'll see you in Nashville. So looking forward to it.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. If you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, head to bitcoinpodcast.net.
If you are enjoying the Bitcoin podcast, consider giving this show a five star review wherever you listen or sharing the show with your network.
Cut. If you're enjoying the Bitcoin podcast, consider giving the show a five star review wherever you listen or sharing the show with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet.
Or don't Bitcoin doesn't care. But I always appreciate it. You can find me on Noster by going to primal.net.
If you want to follow the Bitcoin podcast on Twitter, go to at TIT coin podcast and at Walker America.
You can also find the video version of this podcast at youtube.com slash at Walker America and at Walker America on rumble.
Or just go to Bitcoin podcast.net slash podcast and find links everywhere.
Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.