#32 - Alex Gladstein

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Alex, welcome to The Network State Podcast, thanks for being here.

Alex Gladstein (0:02)

Thanks for having me, man.

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

Awesome. So we've been friends for a while, and it's good, I think it's your first time out here in Singapore. So you have a new book out, Check Your Financial Privilege, right? Why don't you tell us about that?

Alex Gladstein (0:15)

Yeah, so I've got a couple books over the last couple years, and working on a continual theme, which is why are people turning to Bitcoin? Why is the fiat system broken? So it started with Check Your Financial Privilege, which is an exploration of mainly people in collapsing economies and in police states. Why are they adopting Bitcoin? And interviewing them, traveling, meeting them, and learning about how absolutely shattered the monetary system is for so many people. And I don't know exactly what the situation is like in Singapore, but in America and in Europe, we have this immense financial privilege where it's easy to use money, it doesn't hyperinflate, it's easy to send money to our relatives and families. You know, you can take your money out of your country if you have it in your pocket, and it works. Like I've been using US dollars to tip people here. If you live in a place like Togo or Bhutan, etc., and you take your money out of the country, it's worthless. So as the Bitcoin evolution is happening, it's been a lot harder for a lot of people in rich economies basically to understand why, because their money system works relatively well.

But only about a billion people live in a country with property rights, free speech and open capital markets and some kind of elections. The other 7 billion people live in a country that either has essentially collapsing economy or an authoritarian regime. So for about 7 billion people, money is broken every day and it really sucks to deal with, and a lot of them are starting to turn to Bitcoin. So that's the sort of narrative I explored in that book.

SPEAKER_1 (1:56)

So I agree with about 70% of that, but the 30% I disagree with is I think, the golden billion, have you heard that term?

Alex Gladstein (2:08)

That's what I'm referring to, yeah.

SPEAKER_1 (2:09)

So the golden billion, Putin has also used that term, others have used that term, it's like neutral or whatever, but it's like, let's say the US, Western Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, what people sometimes, go ahead.

Alex Gladstein (2:19)

Reserve currencies.

SPEAKER_1 (2:20)

Yeah, exactly. It's what people refer to as the international community, they're aligned with the Fed, they're basically, often US military bases are there, they're people who will be at the G7 or whatever, this overlapping list of countries. I think my disagreement with you, partial disagreement, is that if you look at China, if you look at Southeast Asia, you look at Riyadh or Dubai or even India, Russia, and Eastern Europe, and then places like El Salvador, they're really not as third world as people think they are. They've actually, in some cases, they're not third world at all, in the sense of they have modern infrastructure and they have cars. You might disagree with, you might say collapsing economies or authoritarian governments, and the or is what captures it.

Alex Gladstein (3:06)

Exactly.

SPEAKER_1 (3:08)

So maybe just as a qualifier, many of those economies are not collapsing, but you might disagree with the government. Fine, okay, great. So which is different, but it's also it's just an important distinction, right? Like it's not like only like wealth is distinct from government, if that makes any sense, right?

Alex Gladstein (3:25)

Right. And if you think about Bitcoin as digital cash and digital gold, you know, depending on your country, one use case stands out over the other. In a place like China, the digital cash part where you can get around capital controls and you can have money that's not tied to your identity is really important. Whereas in a country like maybe Venezuela, the gold part is really important because you want to escape inflation. And you know, look, a lot of countries have both. But essentially, my point was only a very small percentage of humans live in a country that's sort of protected from both. And that's again where you see most of the world's media is based there, right? So the narratives that governments have been saying for almost 15 years now that Bitcoin is wasteful and dangerous and useless, it's just a complete lie. It's the opposite. It's actually been dangerous to not use Bitcoin. Yeah.

SPEAKER_1 (4:13)

And I think I basically agree with you in the sense of, especially in some place like Venezuela or like Lebanon, where the currency basically went to zero and Bitcoin went vertical, right? Nigeria, places like Turkey, right? Turkey is an interesting one where, so the other three, I feel, are very unambiguous. Turkey, like the thing about politics being Byzantine in the Byzantines, I can't figure out Turkey myself. I probably want to have someone from Turkey explain it to me, because when I fly through the airport there, it's actually very nice, right? And yet their currency is being wrecked and so on. So that's an interesting edge case that I feel Bitcoiners should understand better, that I don't understand fully at the current moment, right? Something about it, it's able to somehow seemingly operate, even as it's got these crazy inflation rates. So I don't know what's going on there, right? Or maybe it's actually going to bust or what have you, but something interesting is happening there. But other places like certainly Venezuela, certainly Lebanon, certainly Nigeria, certainly many countries.