“5.7 billion people live under an authoritarian regime today around the world. If our goal is to end poverty, why would we be giving money to these insane lunatics?” Alex Gladstein
Check out this week's interview with Alex Gladstein - who is the main reason I am a hardcore Bitcoiner today. Thank you Alex!
Author of “Check Your Financial Privilege” and “Hidden Repression - How the IMF and World Bank Sell Exploitation as Development”, and co-authored “The Little Bitcoin Book”
He has also served as Vice President of Strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum since its inception in 2009.
In his work Alex has connected hundreds of dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, technologists, journalists, philanthropists, policymakers, and artists to promote free and open societies.
Alex’s writing and views on human rights and technology have appeared in media outlets across the world including The Atlantic, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, NPR, TIME, The Washington Post, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal.
He has spoken at universities ranging from MIT to Stanford, briefed the European Parliament and US State Department, and taught at Singularity University. He frequently speaks and writes about why Bitcoin matters for freedom.
https://alexgladstein.com/
https://twitter.com/gladstein
https://hrf.org
NOSTR
Hidden Repression
Check Your Financial Privilege
Stranded Article
Check out this week's interview with Alex Gladstein - who is the main reason I am a hardcore Bitcoiner today. Thank you Alex!
- What is energy poverty?
- Can we have a peaceful world without a peaceful money?
- Even if/when we get on a Bitcoin Standard - can we have a peaceful world or will human traits of greed, fear, and battle for power corrupt the process?
- Story of escaping authoritarian regime with seedwords sewed into clothing
- What are self-care practices to stay sane, healthy, and strong as a human rights activist
- OFF - Oslo Freedom Forum and Freedom Money track
Author of “Check Your Financial Privilege” and “Hidden Repression - How the IMF and World Bank Sell Exploitation as Development”, and co-authored “The Little Bitcoin Book”
He has also served as Vice President of Strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum since its inception in 2009.
In his work Alex has connected hundreds of dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, technologists, journalists, philanthropists, policymakers, and artists to promote free and open societies.
Alex’s writing and views on human rights and technology have appeared in media outlets across the world including The Atlantic, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, NPR, TIME, The Washington Post, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal.
He has spoken at universities ranging from MIT to Stanford, briefed the European Parliament and US State Department, and taught at Singularity University. He frequently speaks and writes about why Bitcoin matters for freedom.
https://alexgladstein.com/
https://twitter.com/gladstein
https://hrf.org
NOSTR
Hidden Repression
Check Your Financial Privilege
Stranded Article
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[00:00:01]
Unknown:
Have you ever wondered what it takes to be a human rights activist and how you need to take care of yourself mentally, physically, emotionally with your relationships. My guest, Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, and I dive into this, among other things, as far as Bitcoin solving for energy in rural areas of Africa. Bitcoin also being a tool to, of course, escape authoritarian regimes, domestic violence, and how Bitcoin is hopefully creating a more peaceful planet because it is an anti forever war currency.
So dive in with somebody who helped me on my journey of becoming a Bitcoiner through his wonderful work, and I'm so grateful and honored to get to interview Alex. Enjoy. Hey, Aloha. Get ready for an epic episode. And if you love it, please share it. You know why? Because you got the love. Enjoy, my friends. Hey. Aloha, love tribe. Welcome to Bitcoin for peace. I have somebody with me here who is the reason why I am a hardcore Bitcoiner. This is Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation. Welcome, Alex.
[00:01:35] Unknown:
Thank you for having me on.
[00:01:37] Unknown:
Yeah. This is I've been really looking forward to having this chat with you for quite a while. You've definitely impacted myself and obviously many people around the world with your work, your dedication, and your passion as a human rights activist, as a Bitcoin educator, and as a community builder. So thank you for everything that you're doing. You're definitely transforming the world. So so what's happening over there with you today? Are you ready for the having?
[00:02:06] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. We're we're psyched. We're we've been looking forward to the having. We have a fun announcement coming out, on the having at the having at BlockKite, you know, 80 88, 840,000. So, looking forward to that tomorrow. And, yeah, celebrating the, you know, continued way that Bitcoin distributes new currency into the world in a predetermined way that cannot be corrupted is is is pretty great. So we we're big having fans over at the Human Rights Foundation.
[00:02:43] Unknown:
Let's talk about the Human Rights Foundation a little bit for people who may not know. My audience is definitely more creators and healers. We're environmentalists. We're people who are, you know, not necessarily up to date on finance. And I think the re reality is, like, as changemakers, as activists, you know, everybody wants to go make the world a better place, but if we're not including sound money in the equation, I think we're building a 3 legged table. And so I think Bitcoin is obviously a huge solution that, you know, we have to have an understanding for whether you're an environmentalist, a human rights activist, a domestic violence, person? How is human the Human Rights Foundation addressing this with Bitcoin?
[00:03:28] Unknown:
Yeah. So, basically, 5,700,000,000 people live under an authoritarian regime today around the world, and they don't have the same protections that we even have in liberal democracies, and in many cases, they have a very weak currency. And this started to pop up in our work over the years. We started to see how people in, under different kinds of autocratic governments, had a lot of problems with money, just in general in terms of it being low quality and hard to connect to the world. That's an issue for everybody who lives in a dictatorship. But in particular, activists were having their bank accounts frozen and and getting cut off, you know, on account of their opposition to the government or their dissent or their writing or their or their free speaking freely or whatever they were doing, their art perhaps.
If it offended, it was gonna get frozen was the idea. So you started seeing all over the world governments begin to adopt financial repression as, you know, a censorship tactic. This became a lot more prevalent after 911 when, in general, financial systems became more weaponized and political, in terms of where you saw the rise of AML, KYC, like, all this stuff as the digital economy was was maturing, and it became much more centralized and controlled. And you had the WikiLeaks banking blockade in 2010, which was pretty formative moment for for Bitcoin because, obviously, in 2011, Assange posted a Bitcoin address to the WikiLeaks Twitter account, and the rest is history in terms of people understanding that this was money that couldn't be stopped by governments. That was very interesting.
And then you just started to see a variety of use cases in terms of activist movements around the world, individual activists who had been deplatformed, turned to Bitcoin. And that started as a trickle and now it's a flood. So you have many, many people around the world not doing this. And there's a kind of a global resistance forming of people who are working on different things with different perspectives, but they share a commitment to using Bitcoin and educating their colleagues about it. So it's it's really inspiring, actually. It's it's cool.
[00:06:06] Unknown:
It is. I getting to go to El Salvador, I felt like it was hope in action with the people on the ground, even though, obviously, you know, taking the politics out of things. I I think when you're around people who are excited about the future, it's contagious. You were in Malawi, and with your, the Stranded article that you did, can you talk a little bit about what's happening over there with the energy and how people are coming to a place where they can have a more flourishing life because of Bitcoin mining and getting electrified villages?
[00:06:38] Unknown:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, just on the El Salvador thing. I mean, the reason Bitcoin is cool is because Bukele can't stop it. Right? That's why it's cool. So there's a lot of organizations he's persecuting, and they're gonna they're gonna use, they're gonna use, which is, as they put it to me, poetic justice. In Africa as a continent, there are 600,000,000 people, more or less, who don't have access to electricity. There are a lot of others who are living in what we call energy poverty. Mhmm. A lot of people in Latin America in energy poverty. There's a lot of people in Asia in energy poverty. In general, you don't wanna be in energy poverty. In general, you wanna live in a country that has a high per capita usage of electricity.
There's a direct correlation between your wealth and how much electricity you use.
[00:07:24] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:07:26] Unknown:
So Malawi, only 11% people have access to electricity.
[00:07:30] Unknown:
11% of the people Yeah. Have electricity.
[00:07:34] Unknown:
Yeah. Wow. Well, that that are on a that are on have access to the national grid. Right? So, you know, without power, there's there's no freedom, basically. I mean, without power, you don't have a lot of freedom over your life. What you can do, it is especially difficult on women. It's just very profound to gain access to electricity. It changes everything. And we, of course, forget that. But if you visit a place that just recently got it, they will talk to you about all the implications. Like, it's better for the students and the kids. They can study at night instead of being in the darkness. They can, their test scores get better. They get into better schools.
People live longer because you can have refrigeration, sanitation. You can have different kinds of medicine and different kinds of medical equipment powered social interactions. You know, if you don't have electricity, then what happens is the men go, they drive to a town with electricity to, like, watch TV or football or soccer or whatever. And that brings them away from the family, so having electricity at home brings the family together. So a lot of interesting, very profound things, and clearly we want everybody in the world to have access to electricity. So, the problem is there's not really a lot of incentive for people to come in and help people in rural rural parts of places like Malawi to gain access to electricity, until Bitcoin. Because previous to Bitcoin, all this stuff was basically what we call concessional financing, so it was donations.
And, you know, there's just people are a little lazy. It takes a long time. Again, there's no urgency, and there's no there's no real money often for, like, expansion or maintenance or advancement. It's like there's a one time gift made. It takes 5 to 10 years to happen, and then there's some electricity and that's it. There's like there's not this is not thought of as in a sustainable way. So the cool part about Bitcoin is it changes that because it gives a capitalist free market incentive, to come in and create electricity. Yeah. Because immediately, 100% of what is built can be bought.
You have revenue right away. Now, from a grid management perspective, this is very important because a lot of places in rural Africa, the power source might be hydro. Right? So it's very intermittent in terms of demand, but the supply is baseload, more or less. Obviously, seasonally, the rivers shift. But generally speaking, the river's running all the time. Meanwhile, the village sleeps. Right? So you have, as anyone has ever looked at an electricity demand curve, there's obviously, it's it's lower at night, like the demand. So what happens is you normally, the river's running, and and they have to just sort of dissipate this energy at night.
So when you're the local power company, when you can you can actually get when you can get paid for 100% of uptime, that's a huge difference. Yeah. Because the Bitcoin network is just sitting there buying all of the energy the village or the variety of local industries are not gonna use. So it allows you to eliminate energy waste, and that allows that power company to have more capital, to hook up more homes, to expand, to consider creating a new operation, to make a new microgrid setup, at the river next door. I mean, it really changes the game. And, it's profound when you visit a site like that and start to realize what's gonna happen here in terms of, just the difference it makes to have a new technology that can buy power anytime, anywhere in the world, any you know, in any place, and and eliminate waste and energy. It's pretty incredible. So went saw that, wrote that up in an essay called Stranded, and folks can read that.
And and, you know, it's it's it's it's relevant everywhere, I mean, especially in Malawi, but every single power generation site in the world more or less wastes energy in some way or another. You know, maybe not, you know, it's possible that in very hyper connected advanced urban areas, there's, like, elegant balancing and there's very little waste. But even, like, in France, there's new nuclear the nuclear grid, the 70% of the nation's electricity is powered by nuclear. And there's there's waste. There's there's waste in California, a very rich place in the world. Right? California has massive curtailment of solar and wind. Right? So there's there's literally just waste. So even in rich advanced countries and places, there's a lot of waste. And then there's just enormous amounts of waste in rural areas with no with no where there's no grid. So you can't you you make an energy, you have, variable demand consumer, and there's no grid. So there's no one else to buy.
What is being wasted? Enter Bitcoin again. So Bitcoin buys 100% what you cannot sell, and it's very it could be it's this elegant thing that that's variable. Like, it turns on and off to fit a flow. So it's it's it's very powerful from that perspective. So to conclude, if if this thing can, you know, expand electricity for people, it it it can it can bring freedom, and it can bring a lot more. And, honestly, it's funny because the media says that Bitcoin is a waste of energy, but, the reality is that not Bitcoin mining is almost always wasting energy.
[00:13:10] Unknown:
Yeah. That's I remember you were saying that in, you know, talking about the in stranded. I I think that's super true. And so thinking about peace as an objective for planet Earth, do you believe that we have the ability through Bitcoin, through all of these other tools and shifting people's minds? Can we achieve a state of peace on planet Earth?
[00:13:34] Unknown:
I don't know. Probably not. But I but I think that, Bitcoin's a powerful, peaceful tool. It's a powerful, mechanism to allow people to interact and collaborate in a peaceful way. Yeah. I think it certainly steers us in that direction. I think it can dramatically reduce unnecessary conflict, basically, by bringing more constraint and accountability to governments. This is really important because governments in, like, the pre fiat standard, governments traditionally would fight war through taxes. Mhmm. So if you go back and look, the Romans or the Crusades or any of these large wars, the Mongols, there was some sort of hard currency standard, right, at some point during these eras.
And, you know, the government couldn't necessarily just create bombs Mhmm. And and sell them to the world to fight a war. Like, that that wasn't necessarily a market. And oftentimes, borrowing had limits. So, governments would tax to find fund war. So, this is important because it links the population to the war. So if you're getting taxed, you know you're paying it, you know about it, and if it takes actually too much, you're gonna fight back. So, you know, whether you look at kings in England, or India, or East Asia or Latin America, wherever, you know, war was, you know, big wave financed by taxes, and that's because of the constraints of that harder currency standard. Right?
And that's how it was until until, basically 1971. I mean, if you look at my country, United States, and the way we financed war, even as we were a sort of republic congealing into this centralized kind of empire that we are now, Taxes were how we paid, like taxes paid for a big chunk of World War 1, and half of World War 2 was financed by taxes. All of the Korean War was financed by taxes. So these were wars where even if individuals disagreed, a lot of the public agreed. Like, a lot of the public agreed, consented to the war, paid for it with their own treasure.
Okay? Knew about the war, understood it was going on, even in an age of very limited media, knew exactly what was going on, more or less. And not only with taxes but also with war bonds. So the public would give the US government, money and then they would receive a liberty bond, is what they called it, and then you would hopefully get paid back later. So that was something that was done at that huge scale. So, in World War II, more than 70,000,000 Americans bought Liberty Bells. So basically, like, there was war, there was terrible war, but it was it was done not in knowledge with and in roughly in consent with the population.
So after the late sixties, we we go to fight this war in Vietnam. The cold war heats up. We run out of gold, and nicks and severs the link between our currency and gold in 'seventy 1. And after that, you don't see taxes anymore funding wars. So we've never we haven't had war taxes since 1967, so we haven't raised taxes to fight war. We don't have specific war taxes anymore. We don't even really have specific war bonds anymore in a meaningful way. We haven't had those since since that year either. What the government figured out was now that we were on the fiat standard, there was no limits to borrowing for war. That's really important. So it's it's something to think about. Like, basically, all the forever wars post 911 have all been paid for by by quiet borrowing. Like, the public doesn't know they're not paying taxes.
They're not there's no draft. They're not sending their kids off to the to the war, you know, without some sort of choice. And, you know, the financing part of it's basically behind behind closed doors. Nobody really knows. Now later, obviously, we feel implications of it over time, but it's it's it's, like, very quiet financing. That's really dangerous for democracy, in my opinion. And, that's an externality of the fiat system. It's it's a it it's what fiat system fiat standard makes possible. I don't think that, like, Bitcoin's gonna end all wars. I think that's probably silly. I do. I think I I I think it can like, it doesn't it like, think about Russia today.
Like, even on a Bitcoin standard, Russia may really feel like it needs to invade Ukraine, and it it has a bunch of let's say, it has a bunch of Bitcoin. It could spend the Bitcoin to fight the war. I mean, there's if it's if it's a dictatorship, like, and there's something it really wants to do, I mean, what how is that gonna stop it? What I think Bitcoin prevents is, like, quiet you know, obviously, it prevents, like, quiet financing for war. It forces governments. It's gonna force governments to to basically be more engaged with the population in war fighting, because they're gonna need tax money to pay for the war. Like, but they're not gonna be able to, like, quietly borrow to do it as easily and if yeah. In a in a in a Bitcoin standard.
So I think that wars will still happen, but there'll be more wars of necessity or regional wars or wars that are, for whatever reason, important for a particular country. But these, like, colonial, faraway, distant, forever resource wars that have nothing to do with the daily life of the average person, I just don't see these getting funded to the same extent as today. So I think that's that's really those are the kind of wars that Bitcoin
[00:19:30] Unknown:
prevents, and that's gonna be that's very positive, I think, for for for humanity. Yeah. Yeah. I think so too. And I think, you know, we talk a lot about different tools for creating, you know, a better world, a more peaceful society, and you've obviously been an, you know, an activist in human rights for almost 2 decades. I think about the mental health implications of a sound money versus fiat. And so this the fear that we all live under with, you know, inflation, with all of these wars, with not being able to pay our bills, having 2, 3 jobs, etcetera, it creates a lot of mental stress.
As a human rights activist, I I got to go to the Oslo Freedom Forum in Miami a couple years ago, and that's when I really got turned that my corner. I've I've just got got started in Bitcoin in 21. I was listening to you, and as soon as I, like, learned about, was it Roya who I don't know if it was Roya or somebody who was escaping, and they had their seed words sewn into their their clothing. And I believe it, you know, it was you doing an inter it might have been an interview you did with Peter. But, you know, once I started realizing that, I was like, wow. Okay. I've always been about peace, love, music, personal development. Let's make the world a better place. But now I realized Bitcoin was the missing one of the missing ingredients for this. And so when I was standing in line, to get in at Oslo Freedom Forum, I met a woman who was, a psychologist and a counselor, and I was like, what are you doing here? You know? This is, and she just gave me that look like, do you understand how hard it is to be a human rights activist?
And I was like, I guess I'm gonna find out, aren't I? You know? And then getting to go in, and listen to all of these stories, you know, and the work that everybody's doing, it can certainly weigh you down, I think, mentally and emotionally and energetically. How do we as individuals and how do we as a a global society get stronger even if we're gonna have Bitcoin as a tool? How do we keep our mental health? How do you keep your mental health strong as an activist? Mhmm. You know, and I That's a great question. I think most,
[00:21:40] Unknown:
many of the, activists we we deal with obviously, you know, are going through It's a tough time. They're they're losing friends, family. They have to get uprooted. They're living somewhere else. It's very difficult. So we we we design programs to to help them with that. So we have Yeah. Look. Which is very important. We've done a variety of different things ranging from counseling to, having mentorship to MDMA therapy. We've done all kinds of different interesting things for to help activists. As far as me personally, yeah, I I just get very inspired by them, and I just get fired up, and I'm ready to go, and I'm very passionate. And, every day's I'm just very grateful for every day, just practice a lot of gratitude.
That certainly helps. It's a lot of fun doing what we do. So I everybody has their issues. We work through them. But, but I'm someone who, you know, I think I believe gratitude, little bit of meditation, exercise, being with family. These are these are these are good. Make sure you're not working all the time. Carve out carve out time to not work. These are these are basic, tips. Yeah. I mean, trying to stay in shape is is a good one.
[00:23:05] Unknown:
Yeah. Being in nature. Yeah.
[00:23:07] Unknown:
View in nature. My my dog is, always keeping always keeping us more active, so that's good.
[00:23:13] Unknown:
Good.
[00:23:15] Unknown:
Yeah. These are these are these are variety of things, you know, but don't you get you gotta you gotta pull back sometimes from from from the work. But, man, it's hard for the activists, you know, if you're working on a conflict right now or there's people dying, you know, you will sit there and you will just for months, you'll just not really move. You'll you'll just walk in. That's very unhealthy. So, you know, people have to take care of themselves.
[00:23:41] Unknown:
Definitely. I think it's super important, and I know it's easy to get caught up, especially when it is life or death on the line. You know? And and you feel like, okay. I can do just a little bit more. What if there's another 20 minutes I put in? You guys are gonna be doing, a thing with Ben next week, for nonprofits, a webinar. HRF is gonna be doing the, how to help nonprofits onboard Bitcoin, which I think is super cool. Yeah. That's gonna be a lot of fun. Yeah. And so that's I'm I got I'm signed up for that. How do what do you think, do you wanna talk about your book a little bit? And I just don't wanna plug it at least. I know we don't have a bunch of time left. But Mhmm. Hidden Repression, How the IMF and World Bank are sell exploitation as development.
When I first got into Bitcoin, I I might even admit before I got into Bitcoin, I listened to, John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and I was like, oh, wow. What the heck is going on over here that I didn't know about? You know? How for the audience, just really quickly, like, do you wanna just give us a little summary of this book so we can understand? I know. But it's a great book, you guys. You gotta go. Yeah. I think, like, the great
[00:24:52] Unknown:
lie we tell ourselves is that we help weak countries, and the reality is we don't. The reality is we exploit them. I mean, that's really what the book is about. The main idea is that traditional colonialism, which was a phenomenon where large governments, empires would use force to steal and loot and get slave labor Mhmm. For their economies to make quality of life at home better. That's what colonialism is. It's about getting cheap goods from somewhere else and cheap labor from someone somewhere else so you can have lower inflation at home and and and a higher quality of life at home, that and a higher purchasing power at home. That's what it is. Period. Full stop. That's what colonialism is. So that became, like, not so acceptable, thankfully, you know, in the past over the last 100 years. Now some of it's still brazen colonialism still does exist, like what Russia's doing in Ukraine, for example. Yeah.
But, generally speaking, that's not allowed. So, okay, so what happened is, like, the world basically changed and adopted debt colonialism. So basically, what would happen is instead of, like, sending a ship with cannons and guns and enslaving people, Uh-huh. They would send, people on a business class flight to a 5 star hotel in suits, and they would dispense, a grant, you know, a loan. Loan sharks, basically. Loan shark. Yes. I'm thinking of cost of loan sharks. Yeah. Loan sharks loan sharks replaced naval warfare, right, you know, when it comes to this. And, they would be going in, and they basically offer a bunch of money at a higher interest rate with conditions.
And then this is the way they start to take advantage of a country. And this has been happening pretty consistently since, you know, since the 19 sixties across what most of what we call, you know, the developing world. And, I got interested in this because I was, like, why is the why is the IMF giving all this money to all these crazy dictators? Like, I was just looking at it over the decades. The worst of the worst dictators, you know, Marcos, Mobutu, Portillo, I mean, they all got money from the IMF, and I'm like, why? Like, what what what if if our motives are to help people and to end poverty, like, why were we giving all this money to these insane lunatics? Mhmm. And, you know, then I started looking at all the context and background, and you realize that that's not our motive. Like, sorry, the IMF and World Bank's mission is is is is not to end poverty or to help invulnerable people.
It is to exploit resources and labor in these countries so that our economic machine runs better. And it is easier to work with dictators to do this than with not than with Democratic populations because dictators can just force stuff through. There's no property rights. There's no protests. Like, you know, it's easier. It's easier. It's easier. So, at the end of the day, you realize that, you know, the policies that we imposed in concert with dictators around the world in the seventies eighties nineties and even today, you know, we're very deadly. I mean, basically, what what happened is the the quality of life and the real wages and the living standards would go down in these countries as a result of IMF policies.
And an untold millions of people were killed by them. But there's never gonna be any accountability is what you realize. There's never gonna be, like, some sort of tribunal or anything like that. You know, people moralize about, correctly moralize about how many people communism killed and Nazis killed and those that's important. That that was devastating. But they never moralized about, like, what about essentially, like, neoliberalism? How many people did that kill? So, or maybe decolonialism, we would call it. And the reality is it killed a lot of people. We don't like to talk about that though. Most people don't even know about that. So my book was about describing this. It's called Hidden Repression, and, you know, I I do think Bitcoin's really interesting. Yeah. Thank you. Because it is a way to, like, opt out of that system.
If you're in the 19 eighties and your country's being structurally and your currency's collapsing, you really have no way out. Today, if that's happening, like, that's happening right now in Egypt, Nigeria, elsewhere, you can get out. You can you can opt into Bitcoin. You can put your wages and labor into Bitcoin. And, you know, like, you're subject to market forces, but, basically, you have no counterparty risk. You can't be demonetized. You can decide what you wanna do with that money. It can't be taken from you. It can't be hyperinflated. And that's really amazing. So so at a micro level, we know that Bitcoin is a good tool for people who are dealing with this sort of thing, and it may address it in a macro sense. Like, it just may be much harder in the same way it would be to perpetuate all these, like, forever foreign wars.
It may be much harder to perpetuate this let this global bailout system for dictators on a Bitcoin standard. It may require more, accountability with the public because taxation and and voluntary involvement will be more, related to spending of governments. So, like, the public is just gonna be more clued in to what's going on, at least in a democracy. And they may say, hey. Actually, you know, maybe not on that bailout to this ruthless dictator. Maybe not. So so we'll see. I I I don't know. I'm open minded about that, but I what I know for sure is that this thing's a tool for getting people to escape repression today, which is which is cool and inspiring and, keeps going forward. You know what I mean?
[00:30:18] Unknown:
Yeah. And that's, like, super duper exciting. Every time you know, I've been going to a lot of environmental conferences lately with my partner, and anytime I start talking even if I say the b word, they're like, it's not in the oceans, and they freak out and have all the the typical FUD re rebuttal. But as soon as I start saying, well, did you know that it could be used to escape authoritarian regimes or, domestic violence? I had a woman on my episode a couple months ago who got out of a an abusive relationship. You know? All of the different things. Did you know you can electrify villages? People start to go, oh, really? Okay. Maybe I wanna learn a little bit more. So I think we have a lot of opportunities, you know, for building bridges with different sectors of the world, whether they're environmentalists, creators, you know, business people, families who don't understand Bitcoin yet. You know? And I I just it's definitely I'm still quite early, you know, and I think we we, as Bitcoiners, are quite early. So it's really it's exciting. You know? I think of Lyudmila from Open Dialogue Foundation who Mhmm. You know? They had to use Bitcoin and were getting persecuted and had to leave and all this. So I just feel like a lot of people, when they start to understand how Bitcoin can help activists, you know, I think it's gonna be just more widely accepted, you know, in different places. So, alright. So let's let's wrap it up, Alex. I know you got a rock. Ozil Freedom Forum, you wanna we'll plug it. Tell everybody what's Ozil Freedom Forum.
[00:31:48] Unknown:
Sure. It's, the Human Rights Foundation's flagship event. It takes place in Norway, June 3 to 5. It'll be the 16th year we're doing it. It brings together an eclectic group of people to focus on issues of human liberty. I have speakers from all over. No. Let's see. Just pulling it up now. I can plug it a little bit. Let's see. So, yeah, we have, speakers from Uganda, Gaza, Russia, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Iraq, Zimbabwe. We have, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Cambodia, India, Rwanda, Azerbaijan. We have speakers working on projects like trauma research. We have speakers working on open source software. Jack Dorsey will be coming.
Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, is coming. We'll have Lynn Alden coming. It'll be a great lineup. And, then separately, we'll have a financial freedom track, and that'll be, like, a full we haven't released the details of that yet, but that'll be, like, a full day on on Bitcoin stuff on Bitcoin Freedom stuff. So we're excited about that. So, yeah, go to alzdelfreedomform.com. We intentionally make the, tickets very cheap, so people it should be very accessible for people. There will also be a live stream that we attend late that that we publicize later. But, basically, you know, if you're a student, it's $15 to attend the conference, and it's $50 for anyone to attend.
There's there's obviously more expensive tickets you can get if you wanna come to the dinners and things like that. But as far as, like, experiencing, you know, 90% of the program, it's very, very, very inexpensive. So we try to really lower the bar to make sure anyone can go, and it's gonna be really fun. So June 3 to 5. Hope to see some of you there.
[00:33:51] Unknown:
Awesome. I hope one day I I'll get to get over to Oslo and could join you, for sure. I know I got lucky to get to go to the Miami one, which was not not that long for me to do it there. It was crazy. Pandemic. Pandemic exception. Pandemic. Exactly. Alright. Well, everybody, you guys can go follow Alex at alexgladstein.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at Gladstein. Any final words, Alex, for somebody who is looking to get into Bitcoin, who's an activist, who's a change maker, who Mhmm. Is a little nervous. What would you say to somebody?
[00:34:26] Unknown:
I mean, look, just invest your time learning as much as you can, and then, look, if you have a solid foundation, try to, yeah, try to try to make a difference with an organization or group of people you care about. Start first with your your family or friends, but, there's probably a cause out there that could use this thing. And you should definitely, be reading our newsletter. So, if you go to hrf.org/, financial freedom report, you can sign up. The Financial Freedom Report is a weekly newsletter. It comes out every Thursday. I just hit this morning, and it's just a great overview of what's happening in the world with global currency issues, inflation's hyper, you know, hyperinflations, financial isolation, and and the good news, you know, what's happening on the Bitcoin front. So would definitely recommend people do that. Thanks for having me. Happy having. Watch this space. Talk to you soon. Thank you. Alright. Cool. Thanks a lot, Alex. Take good care, and, we'll chat soon.
Alright. Thank you. Okay.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to be a human rights activist and how you need to take care of yourself mentally, physically, emotionally with your relationships. My guest, Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, and I dive into this, among other things, as far as Bitcoin solving for energy in rural areas of Africa. Bitcoin also being a tool to, of course, escape authoritarian regimes, domestic violence, and how Bitcoin is hopefully creating a more peaceful planet because it is an anti forever war currency.
So dive in with somebody who helped me on my journey of becoming a Bitcoiner through his wonderful work, and I'm so grateful and honored to get to interview Alex. Enjoy. Hey, Aloha. Get ready for an epic episode. And if you love it, please share it. You know why? Because you got the love. Enjoy, my friends. Hey. Aloha, love tribe. Welcome to Bitcoin for peace. I have somebody with me here who is the reason why I am a hardcore Bitcoiner. This is Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation. Welcome, Alex.
[00:01:35] Unknown:
Thank you for having me on.
[00:01:37] Unknown:
Yeah. This is I've been really looking forward to having this chat with you for quite a while. You've definitely impacted myself and obviously many people around the world with your work, your dedication, and your passion as a human rights activist, as a Bitcoin educator, and as a community builder. So thank you for everything that you're doing. You're definitely transforming the world. So so what's happening over there with you today? Are you ready for the having?
[00:02:06] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. We're we're psyched. We're we've been looking forward to the having. We have a fun announcement coming out, on the having at the having at BlockKite, you know, 80 88, 840,000. So, looking forward to that tomorrow. And, yeah, celebrating the, you know, continued way that Bitcoin distributes new currency into the world in a predetermined way that cannot be corrupted is is is pretty great. So we we're big having fans over at the Human Rights Foundation.
[00:02:43] Unknown:
Let's talk about the Human Rights Foundation a little bit for people who may not know. My audience is definitely more creators and healers. We're environmentalists. We're people who are, you know, not necessarily up to date on finance. And I think the re reality is, like, as changemakers, as activists, you know, everybody wants to go make the world a better place, but if we're not including sound money in the equation, I think we're building a 3 legged table. And so I think Bitcoin is obviously a huge solution that, you know, we have to have an understanding for whether you're an environmentalist, a human rights activist, a domestic violence, person? How is human the Human Rights Foundation addressing this with Bitcoin?
[00:03:28] Unknown:
Yeah. So, basically, 5,700,000,000 people live under an authoritarian regime today around the world, and they don't have the same protections that we even have in liberal democracies, and in many cases, they have a very weak currency. And this started to pop up in our work over the years. We started to see how people in, under different kinds of autocratic governments, had a lot of problems with money, just in general in terms of it being low quality and hard to connect to the world. That's an issue for everybody who lives in a dictatorship. But in particular, activists were having their bank accounts frozen and and getting cut off, you know, on account of their opposition to the government or their dissent or their writing or their or their free speaking freely or whatever they were doing, their art perhaps.
If it offended, it was gonna get frozen was the idea. So you started seeing all over the world governments begin to adopt financial repression as, you know, a censorship tactic. This became a lot more prevalent after 911 when, in general, financial systems became more weaponized and political, in terms of where you saw the rise of AML, KYC, like, all this stuff as the digital economy was was maturing, and it became much more centralized and controlled. And you had the WikiLeaks banking blockade in 2010, which was pretty formative moment for for Bitcoin because, obviously, in 2011, Assange posted a Bitcoin address to the WikiLeaks Twitter account, and the rest is history in terms of people understanding that this was money that couldn't be stopped by governments. That was very interesting.
And then you just started to see a variety of use cases in terms of activist movements around the world, individual activists who had been deplatformed, turned to Bitcoin. And that started as a trickle and now it's a flood. So you have many, many people around the world not doing this. And there's a kind of a global resistance forming of people who are working on different things with different perspectives, but they share a commitment to using Bitcoin and educating their colleagues about it. So it's it's really inspiring, actually. It's it's cool.
[00:06:06] Unknown:
It is. I getting to go to El Salvador, I felt like it was hope in action with the people on the ground, even though, obviously, you know, taking the politics out of things. I I think when you're around people who are excited about the future, it's contagious. You were in Malawi, and with your, the Stranded article that you did, can you talk a little bit about what's happening over there with the energy and how people are coming to a place where they can have a more flourishing life because of Bitcoin mining and getting electrified villages?
[00:06:38] Unknown:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, just on the El Salvador thing. I mean, the reason Bitcoin is cool is because Bukele can't stop it. Right? That's why it's cool. So there's a lot of organizations he's persecuting, and they're gonna they're gonna use, they're gonna use, which is, as they put it to me, poetic justice. In Africa as a continent, there are 600,000,000 people, more or less, who don't have access to electricity. There are a lot of others who are living in what we call energy poverty. Mhmm. A lot of people in Latin America in energy poverty. There's a lot of people in Asia in energy poverty. In general, you don't wanna be in energy poverty. In general, you wanna live in a country that has a high per capita usage of electricity.
There's a direct correlation between your wealth and how much electricity you use.
[00:07:24] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:07:26] Unknown:
So Malawi, only 11% people have access to electricity.
[00:07:30] Unknown:
11% of the people Yeah. Have electricity.
[00:07:34] Unknown:
Yeah. Wow. Well, that that are on a that are on have access to the national grid. Right? So, you know, without power, there's there's no freedom, basically. I mean, without power, you don't have a lot of freedom over your life. What you can do, it is especially difficult on women. It's just very profound to gain access to electricity. It changes everything. And we, of course, forget that. But if you visit a place that just recently got it, they will talk to you about all the implications. Like, it's better for the students and the kids. They can study at night instead of being in the darkness. They can, their test scores get better. They get into better schools.
People live longer because you can have refrigeration, sanitation. You can have different kinds of medicine and different kinds of medical equipment powered social interactions. You know, if you don't have electricity, then what happens is the men go, they drive to a town with electricity to, like, watch TV or football or soccer or whatever. And that brings them away from the family, so having electricity at home brings the family together. So a lot of interesting, very profound things, and clearly we want everybody in the world to have access to electricity. So, the problem is there's not really a lot of incentive for people to come in and help people in rural rural parts of places like Malawi to gain access to electricity, until Bitcoin. Because previous to Bitcoin, all this stuff was basically what we call concessional financing, so it was donations.
And, you know, there's just people are a little lazy. It takes a long time. Again, there's no urgency, and there's no there's no real money often for, like, expansion or maintenance or advancement. It's like there's a one time gift made. It takes 5 to 10 years to happen, and then there's some electricity and that's it. There's like there's not this is not thought of as in a sustainable way. So the cool part about Bitcoin is it changes that because it gives a capitalist free market incentive, to come in and create electricity. Yeah. Because immediately, 100% of what is built can be bought.
You have revenue right away. Now, from a grid management perspective, this is very important because a lot of places in rural Africa, the power source might be hydro. Right? So it's very intermittent in terms of demand, but the supply is baseload, more or less. Obviously, seasonally, the rivers shift. But generally speaking, the river's running all the time. Meanwhile, the village sleeps. Right? So you have, as anyone has ever looked at an electricity demand curve, there's obviously, it's it's lower at night, like the demand. So what happens is you normally, the river's running, and and they have to just sort of dissipate this energy at night.
So when you're the local power company, when you can you can actually get when you can get paid for 100% of uptime, that's a huge difference. Yeah. Because the Bitcoin network is just sitting there buying all of the energy the village or the variety of local industries are not gonna use. So it allows you to eliminate energy waste, and that allows that power company to have more capital, to hook up more homes, to expand, to consider creating a new operation, to make a new microgrid setup, at the river next door. I mean, it really changes the game. And, it's profound when you visit a site like that and start to realize what's gonna happen here in terms of, just the difference it makes to have a new technology that can buy power anytime, anywhere in the world, any you know, in any place, and and eliminate waste and energy. It's pretty incredible. So went saw that, wrote that up in an essay called Stranded, and folks can read that.
And and, you know, it's it's it's it's relevant everywhere, I mean, especially in Malawi, but every single power generation site in the world more or less wastes energy in some way or another. You know, maybe not, you know, it's possible that in very hyper connected advanced urban areas, there's, like, elegant balancing and there's very little waste. But even, like, in France, there's new nuclear the nuclear grid, the 70% of the nation's electricity is powered by nuclear. And there's there's waste. There's there's waste in California, a very rich place in the world. Right? California has massive curtailment of solar and wind. Right? So there's there's literally just waste. So even in rich advanced countries and places, there's a lot of waste. And then there's just enormous amounts of waste in rural areas with no with no where there's no grid. So you can't you you make an energy, you have, variable demand consumer, and there's no grid. So there's no one else to buy.
What is being wasted? Enter Bitcoin again. So Bitcoin buys 100% what you cannot sell, and it's very it could be it's this elegant thing that that's variable. Like, it turns on and off to fit a flow. So it's it's it's very powerful from that perspective. So to conclude, if if this thing can, you know, expand electricity for people, it it it can it can bring freedom, and it can bring a lot more. And, honestly, it's funny because the media says that Bitcoin is a waste of energy, but, the reality is that not Bitcoin mining is almost always wasting energy.
[00:13:10] Unknown:
Yeah. That's I remember you were saying that in, you know, talking about the in stranded. I I think that's super true. And so thinking about peace as an objective for planet Earth, do you believe that we have the ability through Bitcoin, through all of these other tools and shifting people's minds? Can we achieve a state of peace on planet Earth?
[00:13:34] Unknown:
I don't know. Probably not. But I but I think that, Bitcoin's a powerful, peaceful tool. It's a powerful, mechanism to allow people to interact and collaborate in a peaceful way. Yeah. I think it certainly steers us in that direction. I think it can dramatically reduce unnecessary conflict, basically, by bringing more constraint and accountability to governments. This is really important because governments in, like, the pre fiat standard, governments traditionally would fight war through taxes. Mhmm. So if you go back and look, the Romans or the Crusades or any of these large wars, the Mongols, there was some sort of hard currency standard, right, at some point during these eras.
And, you know, the government couldn't necessarily just create bombs Mhmm. And and sell them to the world to fight a war. Like, that that wasn't necessarily a market. And oftentimes, borrowing had limits. So, governments would tax to find fund war. So, this is important because it links the population to the war. So if you're getting taxed, you know you're paying it, you know about it, and if it takes actually too much, you're gonna fight back. So, you know, whether you look at kings in England, or India, or East Asia or Latin America, wherever, you know, war was, you know, big wave financed by taxes, and that's because of the constraints of that harder currency standard. Right?
And that's how it was until until, basically 1971. I mean, if you look at my country, United States, and the way we financed war, even as we were a sort of republic congealing into this centralized kind of empire that we are now, Taxes were how we paid, like taxes paid for a big chunk of World War 1, and half of World War 2 was financed by taxes. All of the Korean War was financed by taxes. So these were wars where even if individuals disagreed, a lot of the public agreed. Like, a lot of the public agreed, consented to the war, paid for it with their own treasure.
Okay? Knew about the war, understood it was going on, even in an age of very limited media, knew exactly what was going on, more or less. And not only with taxes but also with war bonds. So the public would give the US government, money and then they would receive a liberty bond, is what they called it, and then you would hopefully get paid back later. So that was something that was done at that huge scale. So, in World War II, more than 70,000,000 Americans bought Liberty Bells. So basically, like, there was war, there was terrible war, but it was it was done not in knowledge with and in roughly in consent with the population.
So after the late sixties, we we go to fight this war in Vietnam. The cold war heats up. We run out of gold, and nicks and severs the link between our currency and gold in 'seventy 1. And after that, you don't see taxes anymore funding wars. So we've never we haven't had war taxes since 1967, so we haven't raised taxes to fight war. We don't have specific war taxes anymore. We don't even really have specific war bonds anymore in a meaningful way. We haven't had those since since that year either. What the government figured out was now that we were on the fiat standard, there was no limits to borrowing for war. That's really important. So it's it's something to think about. Like, basically, all the forever wars post 911 have all been paid for by by quiet borrowing. Like, the public doesn't know they're not paying taxes.
They're not there's no draft. They're not sending their kids off to the to the war, you know, without some sort of choice. And, you know, the financing part of it's basically behind behind closed doors. Nobody really knows. Now later, obviously, we feel implications of it over time, but it's it's it's, like, very quiet financing. That's really dangerous for democracy, in my opinion. And, that's an externality of the fiat system. It's it's a it it's what fiat system fiat standard makes possible. I don't think that, like, Bitcoin's gonna end all wars. I think that's probably silly. I do. I think I I I think it can like, it doesn't it like, think about Russia today.
Like, even on a Bitcoin standard, Russia may really feel like it needs to invade Ukraine, and it it has a bunch of let's say, it has a bunch of Bitcoin. It could spend the Bitcoin to fight the war. I mean, there's if it's if it's a dictatorship, like, and there's something it really wants to do, I mean, what how is that gonna stop it? What I think Bitcoin prevents is, like, quiet you know, obviously, it prevents, like, quiet financing for war. It forces governments. It's gonna force governments to to basically be more engaged with the population in war fighting, because they're gonna need tax money to pay for the war. Like, but they're not gonna be able to, like, quietly borrow to do it as easily and if yeah. In a in a in a Bitcoin standard.
So I think that wars will still happen, but there'll be more wars of necessity or regional wars or wars that are, for whatever reason, important for a particular country. But these, like, colonial, faraway, distant, forever resource wars that have nothing to do with the daily life of the average person, I just don't see these getting funded to the same extent as today. So I think that's that's really those are the kind of wars that Bitcoin
[00:19:30] Unknown:
prevents, and that's gonna be that's very positive, I think, for for for humanity. Yeah. Yeah. I think so too. And I think, you know, we talk a lot about different tools for creating, you know, a better world, a more peaceful society, and you've obviously been an, you know, an activist in human rights for almost 2 decades. I think about the mental health implications of a sound money versus fiat. And so this the fear that we all live under with, you know, inflation, with all of these wars, with not being able to pay our bills, having 2, 3 jobs, etcetera, it creates a lot of mental stress.
As a human rights activist, I I got to go to the Oslo Freedom Forum in Miami a couple years ago, and that's when I really got turned that my corner. I've I've just got got started in Bitcoin in 21. I was listening to you, and as soon as I, like, learned about, was it Roya who I don't know if it was Roya or somebody who was escaping, and they had their seed words sewn into their their clothing. And I believe it, you know, it was you doing an inter it might have been an interview you did with Peter. But, you know, once I started realizing that, I was like, wow. Okay. I've always been about peace, love, music, personal development. Let's make the world a better place. But now I realized Bitcoin was the missing one of the missing ingredients for this. And so when I was standing in line, to get in at Oslo Freedom Forum, I met a woman who was, a psychologist and a counselor, and I was like, what are you doing here? You know? This is, and she just gave me that look like, do you understand how hard it is to be a human rights activist?
And I was like, I guess I'm gonna find out, aren't I? You know? And then getting to go in, and listen to all of these stories, you know, and the work that everybody's doing, it can certainly weigh you down, I think, mentally and emotionally and energetically. How do we as individuals and how do we as a a global society get stronger even if we're gonna have Bitcoin as a tool? How do we keep our mental health? How do you keep your mental health strong as an activist? Mhmm. You know, and I That's a great question. I think most,
[00:21:40] Unknown:
many of the, activists we we deal with obviously, you know, are going through It's a tough time. They're they're losing friends, family. They have to get uprooted. They're living somewhere else. It's very difficult. So we we we design programs to to help them with that. So we have Yeah. Look. Which is very important. We've done a variety of different things ranging from counseling to, having mentorship to MDMA therapy. We've done all kinds of different interesting things for to help activists. As far as me personally, yeah, I I just get very inspired by them, and I just get fired up, and I'm ready to go, and I'm very passionate. And, every day's I'm just very grateful for every day, just practice a lot of gratitude.
That certainly helps. It's a lot of fun doing what we do. So I everybody has their issues. We work through them. But, but I'm someone who, you know, I think I believe gratitude, little bit of meditation, exercise, being with family. These are these are these are good. Make sure you're not working all the time. Carve out carve out time to not work. These are these are basic, tips. Yeah. I mean, trying to stay in shape is is a good one.
[00:23:05] Unknown:
Yeah. Being in nature. Yeah.
[00:23:07] Unknown:
View in nature. My my dog is, always keeping always keeping us more active, so that's good.
[00:23:13] Unknown:
Good.
[00:23:15] Unknown:
Yeah. These are these are these are variety of things, you know, but don't you get you gotta you gotta pull back sometimes from from from the work. But, man, it's hard for the activists, you know, if you're working on a conflict right now or there's people dying, you know, you will sit there and you will just for months, you'll just not really move. You'll you'll just walk in. That's very unhealthy. So, you know, people have to take care of themselves.
[00:23:41] Unknown:
Definitely. I think it's super important, and I know it's easy to get caught up, especially when it is life or death on the line. You know? And and you feel like, okay. I can do just a little bit more. What if there's another 20 minutes I put in? You guys are gonna be doing, a thing with Ben next week, for nonprofits, a webinar. HRF is gonna be doing the, how to help nonprofits onboard Bitcoin, which I think is super cool. Yeah. That's gonna be a lot of fun. Yeah. And so that's I'm I got I'm signed up for that. How do what do you think, do you wanna talk about your book a little bit? And I just don't wanna plug it at least. I know we don't have a bunch of time left. But Mhmm. Hidden Repression, How the IMF and World Bank are sell exploitation as development.
When I first got into Bitcoin, I I might even admit before I got into Bitcoin, I listened to, John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and I was like, oh, wow. What the heck is going on over here that I didn't know about? You know? How for the audience, just really quickly, like, do you wanna just give us a little summary of this book so we can understand? I know. But it's a great book, you guys. You gotta go. Yeah. I think, like, the great
[00:24:52] Unknown:
lie we tell ourselves is that we help weak countries, and the reality is we don't. The reality is we exploit them. I mean, that's really what the book is about. The main idea is that traditional colonialism, which was a phenomenon where large governments, empires would use force to steal and loot and get slave labor Mhmm. For their economies to make quality of life at home better. That's what colonialism is. It's about getting cheap goods from somewhere else and cheap labor from someone somewhere else so you can have lower inflation at home and and and a higher quality of life at home, that and a higher purchasing power at home. That's what it is. Period. Full stop. That's what colonialism is. So that became, like, not so acceptable, thankfully, you know, in the past over the last 100 years. Now some of it's still brazen colonialism still does exist, like what Russia's doing in Ukraine, for example. Yeah.
But, generally speaking, that's not allowed. So, okay, so what happened is, like, the world basically changed and adopted debt colonialism. So basically, what would happen is instead of, like, sending a ship with cannons and guns and enslaving people, Uh-huh. They would send, people on a business class flight to a 5 star hotel in suits, and they would dispense, a grant, you know, a loan. Loan sharks, basically. Loan shark. Yes. I'm thinking of cost of loan sharks. Yeah. Loan sharks loan sharks replaced naval warfare, right, you know, when it comes to this. And, they would be going in, and they basically offer a bunch of money at a higher interest rate with conditions.
And then this is the way they start to take advantage of a country. And this has been happening pretty consistently since, you know, since the 19 sixties across what most of what we call, you know, the developing world. And, I got interested in this because I was, like, why is the why is the IMF giving all this money to all these crazy dictators? Like, I was just looking at it over the decades. The worst of the worst dictators, you know, Marcos, Mobutu, Portillo, I mean, they all got money from the IMF, and I'm like, why? Like, what what what if if our motives are to help people and to end poverty, like, why were we giving all this money to these insane lunatics? Mhmm. And, you know, then I started looking at all the context and background, and you realize that that's not our motive. Like, sorry, the IMF and World Bank's mission is is is is not to end poverty or to help invulnerable people.
It is to exploit resources and labor in these countries so that our economic machine runs better. And it is easier to work with dictators to do this than with not than with Democratic populations because dictators can just force stuff through. There's no property rights. There's no protests. Like, you know, it's easier. It's easier. It's easier. So, at the end of the day, you realize that, you know, the policies that we imposed in concert with dictators around the world in the seventies eighties nineties and even today, you know, we're very deadly. I mean, basically, what what happened is the the quality of life and the real wages and the living standards would go down in these countries as a result of IMF policies.
And an untold millions of people were killed by them. But there's never gonna be any accountability is what you realize. There's never gonna be, like, some sort of tribunal or anything like that. You know, people moralize about, correctly moralize about how many people communism killed and Nazis killed and those that's important. That that was devastating. But they never moralized about, like, what about essentially, like, neoliberalism? How many people did that kill? So, or maybe decolonialism, we would call it. And the reality is it killed a lot of people. We don't like to talk about that though. Most people don't even know about that. So my book was about describing this. It's called Hidden Repression, and, you know, I I do think Bitcoin's really interesting. Yeah. Thank you. Because it is a way to, like, opt out of that system.
If you're in the 19 eighties and your country's being structurally and your currency's collapsing, you really have no way out. Today, if that's happening, like, that's happening right now in Egypt, Nigeria, elsewhere, you can get out. You can you can opt into Bitcoin. You can put your wages and labor into Bitcoin. And, you know, like, you're subject to market forces, but, basically, you have no counterparty risk. You can't be demonetized. You can decide what you wanna do with that money. It can't be taken from you. It can't be hyperinflated. And that's really amazing. So so at a micro level, we know that Bitcoin is a good tool for people who are dealing with this sort of thing, and it may address it in a macro sense. Like, it just may be much harder in the same way it would be to perpetuate all these, like, forever foreign wars.
It may be much harder to perpetuate this let this global bailout system for dictators on a Bitcoin standard. It may require more, accountability with the public because taxation and and voluntary involvement will be more, related to spending of governments. So, like, the public is just gonna be more clued in to what's going on, at least in a democracy. And they may say, hey. Actually, you know, maybe not on that bailout to this ruthless dictator. Maybe not. So so we'll see. I I I don't know. I'm open minded about that, but I what I know for sure is that this thing's a tool for getting people to escape repression today, which is which is cool and inspiring and, keeps going forward. You know what I mean?
[00:30:18] Unknown:
Yeah. And that's, like, super duper exciting. Every time you know, I've been going to a lot of environmental conferences lately with my partner, and anytime I start talking even if I say the b word, they're like, it's not in the oceans, and they freak out and have all the the typical FUD re rebuttal. But as soon as I start saying, well, did you know that it could be used to escape authoritarian regimes or, domestic violence? I had a woman on my episode a couple months ago who got out of a an abusive relationship. You know? All of the different things. Did you know you can electrify villages? People start to go, oh, really? Okay. Maybe I wanna learn a little bit more. So I think we have a lot of opportunities, you know, for building bridges with different sectors of the world, whether they're environmentalists, creators, you know, business people, families who don't understand Bitcoin yet. You know? And I I just it's definitely I'm still quite early, you know, and I think we we, as Bitcoiners, are quite early. So it's really it's exciting. You know? I think of Lyudmila from Open Dialogue Foundation who Mhmm. You know? They had to use Bitcoin and were getting persecuted and had to leave and all this. So I just feel like a lot of people, when they start to understand how Bitcoin can help activists, you know, I think it's gonna be just more widely accepted, you know, in different places. So, alright. So let's let's wrap it up, Alex. I know you got a rock. Ozil Freedom Forum, you wanna we'll plug it. Tell everybody what's Ozil Freedom Forum.
[00:31:48] Unknown:
Sure. It's, the Human Rights Foundation's flagship event. It takes place in Norway, June 3 to 5. It'll be the 16th year we're doing it. It brings together an eclectic group of people to focus on issues of human liberty. I have speakers from all over. No. Let's see. Just pulling it up now. I can plug it a little bit. Let's see. So, yeah, we have, speakers from Uganda, Gaza, Russia, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Iraq, Zimbabwe. We have, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Cambodia, India, Rwanda, Azerbaijan. We have speakers working on projects like trauma research. We have speakers working on open source software. Jack Dorsey will be coming.
Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, is coming. We'll have Lynn Alden coming. It'll be a great lineup. And, then separately, we'll have a financial freedom track, and that'll be, like, a full we haven't released the details of that yet, but that'll be, like, a full day on on Bitcoin stuff on Bitcoin Freedom stuff. So we're excited about that. So, yeah, go to alzdelfreedomform.com. We intentionally make the, tickets very cheap, so people it should be very accessible for people. There will also be a live stream that we attend late that that we publicize later. But, basically, you know, if you're a student, it's $15 to attend the conference, and it's $50 for anyone to attend.
There's there's obviously more expensive tickets you can get if you wanna come to the dinners and things like that. But as far as, like, experiencing, you know, 90% of the program, it's very, very, very inexpensive. So we try to really lower the bar to make sure anyone can go, and it's gonna be really fun. So June 3 to 5. Hope to see some of you there.
[00:33:51] Unknown:
Awesome. I hope one day I I'll get to get over to Oslo and could join you, for sure. I know I got lucky to get to go to the Miami one, which was not not that long for me to do it there. It was crazy. Pandemic. Pandemic exception. Pandemic. Exactly. Alright. Well, everybody, you guys can go follow Alex at alexgladstein.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at Gladstein. Any final words, Alex, for somebody who is looking to get into Bitcoin, who's an activist, who's a change maker, who Mhmm. Is a little nervous. What would you say to somebody?
[00:34:26] Unknown:
I mean, look, just invest your time learning as much as you can, and then, look, if you have a solid foundation, try to, yeah, try to try to make a difference with an organization or group of people you care about. Start first with your your family or friends, but, there's probably a cause out there that could use this thing. And you should definitely, be reading our newsletter. So, if you go to hrf.org/, financial freedom report, you can sign up. The Financial Freedom Report is a weekly newsletter. It comes out every Thursday. I just hit this morning, and it's just a great overview of what's happening in the world with global currency issues, inflation's hyper, you know, hyperinflations, financial isolation, and and the good news, you know, what's happening on the Bitcoin front. So would definitely recommend people do that. Thanks for having me. Happy having. Watch this space. Talk to you soon. Thank you. Alright. Cool. Thanks a lot, Alex. Take good care, and, we'll chat soon.
Alright. Thank you. Okay.
Introduction to the episode and the guest, Alex Gladstein, discussing the role of Bitcoin in solving energy issues in Africa and promoting peace.
Discussion on the Human Rights Foundation and the importance of including sound money like Bitcoin in activism for a better world.
Exploration of how Bitcoin is being used to electrify villages in Malawi and address energy poverty, highlighting the impact on education and quality of life.
Conversation on the role of Bitcoin in promoting peace on Earth by introducing constraints and accountability to governments, reducing unnecessary conflicts.
Discussion on the mental health implications of sound money like Bitcoin versus fiat currency, emphasizing the importance of self-care for activists and individuals.
Overview of Alex Gladstein's book 'Hidden Repression' and the exploitation by IMF and World Bank in developing countries, highlighting Bitcoin as a tool for escaping such systems.
Promotion of the Oslo Freedom Forum by the Human Rights Foundation, featuring diverse speakers and a financial freedom track focusing on Bitcoin-related topics.
Encouragement for activists and change-makers to invest time in learning about Bitcoin and making a difference, along with a recommendation to subscribe to the Financial Freedom Report newsletter.
