[00:02:54] I think we all have our entry point. Very few people get into Bitcoin because they think it’s going to be like a future global reserve currency. So I think that hopefully this book can make an impact on people who are thinking about international economics and just show them a different point of view.

[00:03:10] Preston Pysh: Yes. It’s funny, so my wife, she has a master’s in nonprofit management. And I remember distinctly when she was going through her degree, how much this global NGO, IMF, World Bank type stuff is crammed down the throats of all of these, nonprofit management students. And I read the article that was the precursor to this book, and I shared the article with my wife.

[00:03:39] She flipped through it and like I read that thing from the start to the finish and was just so blown away at how well you properly define the way they operate and the impacts. Of what they’re doing. And so when I got the hard cover ordered, I said to my wife, I said, there’s a book coming, and as soon as it gets here, you are reading this thing cover to cover.

[00:04:02] And I really want her to see basically the other side of the story, because everybody’s living in the west. Like we hear one side of the story we really do it’s just crammed down our throats. And I think you do just an incredible job, like laying out the other side of the story. So let me lead off with this question for you, Alex.

[00:04:21] Alex Gladstein: Sure.

[00:04:21] Preston Pysh: Because in your intro you have this is what you wrote. This particular paragraph, I think is really important. In your intro, you say, as someone who has spent my career fighting for the classic Western values of freedom and human rights, this book has taught me two things.

[00:04:34] Number one, these values are more important than ever before, and essential for the future success of humanity. Number two, one cost of securing these freedoms in the west has been the deprivation of these freedoms for people elsewhere. Talk to us about the second part of that.

[00:04:50] Alex Gladstein: Yeah, it’s a kind of a grim realization, and I think it’s something that people intuitively know in a small sense, like it creeps up on you. And I think most people have this sinking feeling that they know that there’s this unequal quality to the world. What I didn’t quite realize was how directly tied together the kind of haves and the have nots were. Like, I didn’t quite realize how dependent success in one area was honestly the exploitation of people in another area.

[00:05:23] I, I really thought they were distinct and I thought that, the West really was successful just because more or less of its productivity, freedoms, entrepreneurialism, all these different examples. And I thought that, in many ways the global set governments and societies were less productive because of the lack of freedoms, lack of property rights, things like that.

[00:05:45] And that’s a really naive view in retrospect. I think that’s what I thought as a younger person, and that’s just obviously very, I think ignorant. And now looking back, we have to ask why are these other societies to so corrupt in authoritarian? Why do they lack so many institutions? And it is very linked to the West’s role there, going back to imperialism, colonialism, and then going in the modern era through how the international monetary system has been used to repress these countries on an ongoing basis.

[00:06:20] Again, replacing the weapon of the worship or the cannon or the bayone with the weapon of debt. And I think that this is not a permanent construct. I don’t think this kind of competitive rival risks dynamic is necessarily going to be permanent. Of course you’re always going to have rivalry, but what I mean by that is I don’t necessarily think you’re always going to have certain societies that prosper at the cost of impoverishing others. I think that this has quite a bit to do with the quality of the monetary system in the modern age, because before the Fiats, let’s say before Breon Woods, a lot of the exploitation was done through just straightforward violence, right? That’s how it was how imperialism was accomplished, right?

[00:07:08] So in the modern age when you can’t really be so brazen typically or quote unquote more civilized, the exploitation I argue in my book is done through debt, through creditors, borrowers, and this relationship. And that’s how the we Western nations and now even today, China, continue to benefit themselves at the expense of others.

[00:07:27] I think that if we have a new paradigm where it’s. Where the global reserve currency is neutral and is not preferential to any one nation or group of nations, and is truly apolitical, then I think a different dynamic can emerge and Jeff Booth calls this forced to cooperation.

[00:07:45] And I think this is really interesting. I don’t know, obviously it’s a little bit of a hope. We don’t know. Everything is speculation. Nobody knows what the world’s going to look like in 10, 20 years, but I do think as we shift more towards a global language for money that’s equal for everyone, that some of these really gross excesses get corrected, let’s say.

[00:08:04] I think it just makes sense that if you have everyone on one standard, there’s going to be a little bit of a regression to the mean away from some of these really hideous dynamics. So that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Like basically what we need for the world is post-colonial, post fiat.

[00:08:20] Post-colonial, post fiat economy, like we had a post-colonial economy, but it was fiat money, which enables the controllers of that fiat money to still repress. What we really need is a post-colonial, post fiat money. That’s really the only way I think the developing world can really thrive. And that can be done in corporation with the west.

[00:08:39] It doesn’t have to be this dynamic like it’s been since Breon Woods where the west has achieved energy and food sovereignty at the expense of energy and food sovereignty of the global south. I think we can, it seems a little kumbaya, but I really do think we can have a little bit more equal footing here. I really do.

[00:08:58] Preston Pysh: Do you think a lot of the key leaders, and I know this is really hard to generalize, but do you think a lot of the key leaders in the global south understand your thesis wholeheartedly, or do you think that because they’re living through the pain that’s brought about because of it?

[00:09:14] Or do you think that they view it more as just something that is different than this source that you’re basically saying is the fiat system that’s the root cause? Do you think that they see it as something else that’s providing the troubles that they face?

[00:09:30] Alex Gladstein: Look, I think anyone who’s lived in a country that’s been structurally adjusted like, 10, 15, 20 times as you might have in a place like Argentina or Ghana, Pakistan, I think that inhabitants of these countries intuitively know that the IMA is a malicious force.

[00:09:48] They feel, they’ve felt their parents and their grandparents have felt what it’s like after an adjustment that they know that austerity is painful. Doesn’t matter what profession or age or field they’re in. That’s something that is known, I think, and very obvious. And I think leaders and politicians know this too.

[00:10:06] The problem is there’s a lot of opportunism and even leaders like Lula, for example, in Brazil who’ve been very critical of the sort of debt-based international monetary system. They may say one thing, but on the other, on the next day they may go and they may take the loan. Right?

[00:10:20] Political leaders are in a difficult position because they are tasked with helping people not in 10 years, but now, right? So the kind of temporary short-term nature of politics, whether it be dictatorship or democracy, it just lends itself towards there’s no better offer opportunities for them.

[00:10:38] Yeah. Yeah. Maybe like they know that it’s bad to like further in depth the country, but what other options do they have? Is I guess what, how they reason it to themselves. I think that these leaders know that this current system is broken, that they’ve been screwed and that they’d like a different system.

[00:10:53] I very few of them, except for obviously maybe the folks in El Salvador or Central Africa Republic, a few other places. I think very few of them are grasping the Bitcoin thing. I do think you’re going to see more of that. Right now, what we’re seeing quite obviously, is gold, right?

[00:11:06] You’re seeing central banks by gold at all time levels. This is happening not just in the global South, but all over the world. I just saw a chart yesterday from the ft. It’s a historic gold buying pace at the moment, and there’s an, it’s just interesting when you look at charts of gold purchases by central banks, You can see the tre, what was called the, like the treasury standard, right?

[00:11:28] Post 71, like people piled into treasuries as savings after the petro dollar was set up, that really was really strong until the global financial crisis, right? And then it’s, it’s, it peaked and now it’s declined. And now it’s really starting to pick up where a lot of these big governments are moving away delicately from treasuries and into gold.

[00:11:47] So I think that the gold thing is well understood, and I think that gold does obviously provide some sovereignty and a check for some of these governments. But ultimately it’s pretty limited in a 21st century economy. And for people it’s not that helpful. It’s just the fact that it can’t tell a port.

[00:12:05] And it’s clunky and difficult to divide up and to share. And you can’t really use it as money, so to speak. You can, it’s really just a savings asset, right? Like it can’t really be, it’s very impractical to use as money. I think it’s interesting to watch gold really become really popular right now, especially in the global south.

[00:12:23] And I think that as you start seeing this fiat system start to unwind a little bit, that’s going to accelerate. And then hopefully we see a little more Bitcoin adoption as well. I really do think that it’s something that will help the individual just as much as it’ll help local communities and sovereigns.

[00:12:38] Like I think that’s the thing gold, like it’s hard to imagine 10 million people benefiting from self custodys in gold. Like certainly that’s the case in some countries, but it’s just hard to imagine that having a really big impact today. But I can imagine Bitcoin doing that for obvious reasons.

[00:12:55] So it’s interesting to see these trends. The other one I was looking at is I used some data in my book about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency ownership. And the global average of adults that use the internet is around 10%. Who, people who’ve dabbled, let’s say in some sort of way with Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and the US is a little bit above average.

[00:13:13] Now, obviously that’s because of we’re all highly connected. It, we’ve been like pounded with cryptocurrency, advertisements and the Super Bowl and stuff, so it’s around 12%. But you look at some of these countries that have been structurally adjusted, a lot countries that I look at in my book, and you’re talking 20, 22%, 20%, 18%, 16% of internet using adults from 16 to 64 years old using Bitcoin or cryptocurrency.

[00:13:38] So we’re talking a really noticeable trend here of these of people finding a way out. I thought that was really interesting and I think this is happening. This innovation of Bitcoin is quite fortunate. And it’s happened now because as we were talking about earlier, before we started recording the, I mentioned to you that I’m really interested in the impact of the US government’s monetary policy abroad.

[00:14:02] What caused a lot of the suffering that I talked about, my book was the US government raising interest rates in the early eighties which it was doing were a very self-interested, but very reasonable. Let’s say domestically reasonable goal was inflation was getting out of control in the United States and they had to raise interest rates to try and fight that.

[00:14:18] Like I think people understand that’s fine. And when we talk about the feds mandates, things like keeping, healthy employment and healthy inflation, things like that, the wellbeing of other people around the world is not part of the feds mandate. So when Volker raises the rates to 20, 18, 19, 20%, wherever they go to, It absolutely crushes the global south.

[00:14:37] What was known then as the third world and, Mexico defaults and then all these other countries default, and you have the third world debt crisis and standards of living just plummet that decade. Again, we’re talking people who have to work 50% more or even twice as many hours to earn the same amount of rice or beef or something like that.

[00:14:55] That’s really what happened during that time. You had massive wage deflation in real terms. That’s happening again, right? In the last 18 months. You’re seeing the fed hike historically where like up to almost 5% are in that area from almost from zero and close to zero. And that has led to like massive price inflation in the global south in terms of like bread wheat petrol any kind of like basic stuff that people need to survive.

[00:15:20] And then also obviously a lot of currency devaluation. And the debt service that the governments have to prioritize is all in dollars, right? So mostly there’s some that are, increasingly in China and I wanted to talk to you about that, but in Chinese currency, but in general, like we’re still, it’s still a dollar world.

[00:15:37] All these poor nations have dollar debt and it, all of a sudden it gets really expensive. because they don’t, they can’t print dollars. They can only get dollars through exports really, in many cases. And the world starts to slow down. You had covid, you had the lockdowns so they’ve, there’s as we know, there’s been dollar shortages and you, this is why you see this stuff about the swap lines, things like that.

[00:15:56] Cost capital gets high and you’re seeing the same kind of disarray and tragedy. You’re seeing total economic and political collapse in dozens of countries. So if the country hasn’t completely politically collapsed, like maybe it has in Iraq or Sri Lanka for example, then you’re seeing total economic collapse like you might see in a place like Lebanon or Nigeria or so many other places.

[00:16:19] So you’re seeing like a breakdown. And one of the major factors of this, of course, is extremely, accelerated rising cost of capital due to the Fed’s decision making. So the thing is to wrap up, I note that people didn’t have a way out in the eighties. What were you going to do if you were in Peru in the eighties being structurally adjusted?

[00:16:36] Like you, there was no sort of electronic money to be even conceived of. There were no mobile phones. Like you, you had the currency that you had, which was being de deflated in terms of its value. Very devalued very quickly. And you had no way out. But today people have a way out, like their fiat is struggling, right? But we’re watching in the data them escape into Bitcoin. I just think that’s really interesting.

[00:17:00] Preston Pysh: One of the things that I’ve been talking with various Bitcoiners about on shows and whatnot is just this idea of net producers versus net consumers. And when you look at countries, people, businesses that are net consumers are not profitable or don’t have disposable income.

[00:17:15] Their ability to buy gold, their ability to buy Bitcoin, something that doesn’t have counterparty risk is near impossible. Especially when you look at it from a Bitcoin standpoint with all the volatility. Like they can’t afford to save in this technology if they don’t even have save disposable income.

[00:17:32] But let’s just say they do have a small amount of disposable income. They don’t want to put it in something that is highly volatile because if they do have to cash it in for, to pay an expense, It’s difficult or it’s challenging or it’s worth less. And then they don’t have that rainy day fund.

[00:17:46] When we look at this and we look at the global south and we look at the impact for the last 40 years is just an explosion of their nominal debt load. They don’t have, they’re not net producers because they have such high loads of interest expense. And so it’s really ha it’s really difficult, from a nation state standpoint, for them to leverage the technology and the power that Bitcoin provides.

[00:18:12] Do you think that’s one of the main reasons that we’re seeing they like it from a country level. Like you talk to people and they’re like, this is amazing that somebody can’t come in here and change the number of units, but they’re still handicapped in, into the old, the debt loads that they have that they can’t possibly save in it because they’re still trying to pay down their fiat loans that just keep exploding and expanding.

[00:18:36] Alex Gladstein: I think that what we can observe now is that bitcoin’s a way out for individuals. It remains to be seen if it’s a way out for countries. Like we just have to watch that. But what I do think Square worth mentioning in responses is stable coins because it’s like an interesting, it’s fits into the narrative in an interesting way. Like typically what the west would do would be to protect its own economies and try to open up these like global south countries. And that was the driving force.

[00:19:04] And in defense, a lot of these global south countries would impose things like capital controls, like they would try to like protect against capital flight, things like that. So you had this struggle going back and forth because there was not like an equal playing ground. Like the powers that be had massive subsidies.

[00:19:21] Their own internal industries. Like massive tariffs on anything coming in. So there was this natural kind of little struggle that, big struggle that, that continues. Now, stablecoin are interesting because as I like to point out, the global monetary system has evolved partially because of politics and partially because of markets, right?

[00:19:38] So when we talk about things like the petro dollar or world trade policy, the agricultural, they mean the agricultural policy. These are obviously political decisions, political constructs, but something like the Euro dollar would be a totally market-based construct in terms of it emerged organically outside of the controlled US government.

[00:19:57] I think it’s interesting to watch that, and now you’re seeing the stable coins pop up as like a successor to the Euro dollar in a way, like they’re not, yes, they could probably be killed off by the US government if the US government wanted to, but as they exist today, they’re like this little free market phenomenon that’s popped up where like people really want dollars and they, it’s penetrated out in, into a lot of CI societies.

[00:20:17] So I think what’s happening is you’re seeing people balancing the Bitcoin adoption with stable coin adoption in a lot of ways. Like everywhere where you see Bitcoin adoption, you often see a lot of stable coin adoption.

[00:20:27] Preston Pysh: Alex, do you, from your sources and the people you’re talking to. I’m sorry to interrupt you. Do you think that they trust Bitcoin more, but they, but the volatility is the reason why they continue to preserve savings in dollars?

[00:20:39] Alex Gladstein: Yeah. I think that there’s again, dollar’s still the king, there’s a natural desire to have the money that everything’s priced in the world. And before stablecoin, that was pretty hard for like lower to middle income people in the global south to get they could get it in paper money, which has of course, like there’s a lot of limitations there, but it’s not like in many of these countries you could get you could have a dollar checking account.

[00:21:02] That was no. Like sometimes if sometimes if you had one, it would, they would be haircuts. Like they would, in some countries, if you’re a small business you can earn dollars from American tourists or whatever, or American clients. But in countries like Ethiopia, you have a certain number of days to get rid of the dollars.

[00:21:20] Otherwise the government comes in and takes them and gives you the local currency at a horrible exchange rate. The ability to hold, just hold the dollar digitally is a pretty revolutionary thing. I think and again, it might be ephemeral, but it’s it’s interesting to see that and that is absolutely why you see someone’s interest in stable coins.

[00:21:38] I’m not sure people trust stablecoin more. I, it’s obviously like we’re talking about tens of millions of people, so it’s hard to mimic generalizations, but I think that there’s trust in Bitcoin, but I think that people know that it’s quite volatile and they can’t like, reasonably run their business off of it.

[00:21:51] If they’re a fiat focused business for now, if you’ve got all these bills or income coming in, in fiat, like it’s difficult to be like Bitcoin native. That’s a challenge and that you see that everywhere from businesses to even like developers. Like a lot of developers, like they try to get paid entirely in Bitcoin and then the price swings and they’re in trouble.

[00:22:10] So I, I’ve seen that. I think that while we’re in this kind of transitionary phase, it’s nice to have both tools. As an American, obviously I like the fact that I can access the dollar and Bitcoin. That’s pretty handy. And I just think it’s probably morally reasonable to ask that everybody in the world have that same privilege.

[00:22:27] That’s nice. I hope everybody in the world could have as we go through this transition, access to Bitcoin, but also access for the best fiat currency. I think that’s that seems fair. And I think that the market is expressing that in the rapid adoption of stablecoin around the world in these countries. Like people like having the dollar, they also like having Bitcoin. I think that’s going to be the case for a little while here.

[00:22:48] Preston Pysh: You had mentioned the Chinese Yuan being used for debt issuance. Teach us, what are you hearing? What is the size of this? Just tell us everything.

[00:22:57] Alex Gladstein: It’s pretty significant. I have some data for you, but basically what people need to know is that the C CCP has been watching what the I N F World Bank did. Did they themselves were clients at one point and they want to replicate it. It’s pretty appealing for a natural power, a global power to, wants to do the same sort of resource exploitation like that.

[00:23:17] That makes sense. So what they’d like to do, which they are doing, is trying to make it so that like resource states that are, that have things like minerals or oil. What they’d like to do is buy that stuff with yon that they can print. And then have those countries which now have the, these, like whatever you want to call them, petro yon or just yuan on earnings.

[00:23:38] China would like to see some of that get paid back to it in the form of paying back these debt, paying back interest on these debt. That’s the machine of course, that the US built through IMAP and the petrol system, et cetera. So you’re seeing the Chinese try to build that. It is not going to work the same way because the market doesn’t want to use theon.

[00:23:58] There may be more and more trade being done in it, but like what you really should be looking at is like percentage of global, like reserves that are held than Theon and they still remain like super tiny. Like I don’t, if you look at the history of reserve currencies, and here’s where I would disagree with the Ray Dalio, it’s like whether they were the Dutch or the British or the Americans.

[00:24:15] You go back, you look at all the different reserve currencies, they were em empires, they exploited human rights abroad. But domestically, where they issued the currency, there was a rule of law. There was a court system, there was somewhat of, there was transparency you could, there was private property that was the case in these systems even going back hundreds of years.

[00:24:34] So the market likes having a rule of law at the heart of where the currency is being. Ma made that that’s really clear. People like that. That’s not going to happen with China. They don’t have rule of law there. There’s total opacity. Like no one really knows what’s going on. I don’t think you’re going to see people be like, excited to save in that currency.

[00:24:53] No. You also have the tr and dilemma stuff. Like China doesn’t want to have a really strong currency that’ll completely wreck the country if it can’t export. Like it has been doing over the last 20 years. Like the way it’s been able to grow is, as many of your guests have talked about is through having a weak currency.

[00:25:09] And they continually try to like, make that the case where they’re like, weaker than they quote unquote should be. And obviously the US accuses them of being like, you know what, it’s a by this pretty rich, but the what do they call them? A currency manipulator? This is what countries do, they try to devalue their currency so they can have higher exports.

[00:25:25] And the US never had to deal with this because we are the, we have the tr and dilemma. We are the reserve currency. So people will buy our debt no matter how indebted we are. To a point. That’s not the case with China. They have, they’re in this little dance, but they’ve tried to establish this kind of IMF type system.

[00:25:43] And I’ll just read some stats that’ll give you an idea of how big it is. And many listeners maybe have heard of like the Belton Road, which is like the overall construct, but it’s really like a bunch of Chinese funded bilateral and multilateral banks that are active in Southeast Asia, south Asia, Africa, Latin America.

[00:26:01] So about 37% of the debt that the 74 poorest countries owed last year was to Chinese controlled institutions. Wow. So you can it’s more than a third. There’s a really interesting book called Banking on Beijing by a guy named Brad Parks. And he claims that like in terms of single nation states like you, you would look at, for example, the imf, as people might know is controlled by its creditors, which typically are the US plus Japan, Germany, France, uk, et cetera.

[00:26:29] But according to him, the CCPs, the single largest lender to the developing world today. So as of last year, they had about 843 billion spread across 165 countries in almost 14,000 projects before last year when they started to have trouble, they were deploying about 85 billion per year to the global south.

[00:26:48] And 90% of that’s credit, by the way. And it’s not cheap. Like they’re more expensive than the IMG, for example. So I do this as like obviously super negative. It’s an IMF like research drain dynamic. It’s run by a genocidal dictatorship. This is not like a good thing, but they are encountering some trouble because they don’t mint the reserve currency.

[00:27:08] So the trick to the I MF system has always been that the US government can just simply print more and not suffer as a result of that. Within reason we live in this kind of m t kind of utopia type thing because of the dilemma. So we, again, we can just print more and it hasn’t necessarily impacted people’s appetite for our debt.

[00:27:27] because what’s been better than being promised to be paid back by the us? There hasn’t really been that many other better places to put your money in the last 50 years until the last few years have started to change that paradigm. China doesn’t have that set up, so I think what’s happening is that they have to eat these costs.

[00:27:43] If they lend a bunch of money to a country that goes under or that doesn’t want to pay it back. I’m sure they can use force, they can take over, they can national, they can take a huge stake in a telecom locally or something like that. But they can’t just extend another loan necessarily.

[00:27:58] That’s the IMF playbook. The IMF would go to a dictator and they would lend an totally irresponsible amount of money, let’s say Immo BTU inside here in the seventies and or Marcos in the Philippines in the seventies. And they would say, here’s a couple billion dollars. And then like obviously the dictator would not pay it back.

[00:28:13] And that’s where China’s stuck. Like they have to figure out what to do. They have to discuss restructuring and all these things. Whereas traditionally the Western systems would just say, here’s more money. And that’s why these countries have this like exponential debt increase. I don’t know if you’re going to get that exponential effect with China over time because they can’t just print more like they have to.

[00:28:34] They’re somewhat limited, so it’ll be interesting to watch. But their presence in the global south is way bigger than I thought. It’s pretty serious. Like we’re talking again, 37% of all the debt owed by poor countries is to China today. And you see those maps, right? That circulate on social where it’s like China’s the biggest trading partner of it’s like the entire global south, right?

[00:28:53] So they have this massive presence and it’s very concerning. Obviously there, for all the criticisms I have for the US and for the IMF and World Bank led system, I have even more for China. Sometimes we’ll do a window dressing about human rights, but hey, that’s better than like the Chinese coming in and saying, if you talk about human rights, we’re leaving.

[00:29:12] There’s degrees to this, right? It’s very concerning, but I don’t think it’s as sustainable as what we’ve got going on because again, they don’t want to issue the reserve currency and they’re about to have a huge economic crisis at home. So you’re seeing them pull back from a broad, a little bit.

[00:29:27] Their banking system is going to be under a lot of stress. It’s very much powered by a lot of these real estate loans, these mortgages that are Yeah, that are going to go to zero. Mean, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens there, but clearly, like some of the first things that’ll be cut back if they have a serious crisis, financially speaking are their designs across the world, right?

[00:29:46] That when any empire starts to collapse. What disintegrates first is what ha what’s farthest from the core. Looking at your book and looking at all the stuff you learned through writing this book, what’s one of the most striking findings or research that you uncovered in that process? I think that and I feel like this can’t be mentioned enough, but I was so shocked to learn that the flow of global funds that was moving from rich countries to poor countries, which is intuitive, and that’s what you’d think is happening reversed permanently in 1982.

[00:30:19] And that essentially since then was started as a trickle, is now a multi-trillion dollar annual flow of resources from the global south to the global Norths. They, another way of putting that is that the global south is subsidizing our way of life. I think that was a pretty jarring realization.

[00:30:34] I think that there’s also quite a bit of surprise that I stumbled across when I was looking at like protectionist policy. A lot of the neoliberal stuff that the IMF pushes might sound good in a vacuum to a lot of libertarians. They may say why should there be, subsidies on food and energy, things like that.

[00:30:52] I would agree in theory, right? In theory, I’m a classic liberal, but in practice what happens is that again, there’s like these double standards where the West has centralized a lot of policy and used anti-free market measures to protect their economies over here. While trying to impose this like super harsh remarket policy there, and that leads to this drain that we’re discussing.

[00:31:13] So I thought this was really shocking that just I’ll read a paragraph from the book. It’s estimated that protectionism by industrial countries reduces developing countries national income by roughly twice as much as provided by development assistance. In other words, the western nation simply opened their economies that they wouldn’t have to provide any development assistance at all.

[00:31:33] That’s a pretty heavy thing to think about. If we just sucked it up and stopped subsidizing our agriculture, for example, then the natural reaction would be that agriculture would be much more competitive and profitable in Africa and they’d make more of it and they’d start selling some of it to us.

[00:31:53] The fact that they don’t do that. And the fact that Africa imports 85% of its food, which is another thing I learned in doing this, is a result of our policies where we stack the deck. We, again we subsidize centrally plan, we subsidize our system, and we force their system down. And then it def, it just makes it very hard for them to sell this stuff.

[00:32:13] And that’s been done intentionally, like a very, a stated mission of the US And again, this makes sense from a realist point of view was to achieve food sovereignty. And we want all these little countries to be dependent on us for food because then that gives us this huge bargaining chip in negotiations.

[00:32:28] And we’ve used it. There’ve been some countries we’ve starved like straight up because they didn’t do what we wanted. I think that if we would give up some of these economic weapons, I think there wouldn’t be any need for foreign aid. Like that’s I think the big realization, like this whole foreign aid industry is just like a bandaid covering up.

[00:32:46] A really nasty wound, and we can heal the wound simply by becoming more free market by practicing what we preach. I think that was a really interesting realization for me. You probably have some of the best stories about how Bitcoin has impacted real people’s lives in the global south. Can you just give us maybe a story that’s at the forefront of your mind or something that you’ve read recently that you think would be a great example for people to hear and hear the impact of the Lightning Network or Bitcoin as a savings technology or whatever.

[00:33:18] There’s two things that I would point out, like Pre Abu Rema, who I mentioned before and that your listeners probably know. I interviewed her for the book at Lin and she talked about how it’s pretty crazy like it and this fuels a lot of the anti-capitalist sentiment. Like I think that you and I would probably agree that capitalism is great, but that this is not capitalism.

[00:33:36] To paraphrase Alan Farin right. All we’re looking at is like the manipulation of the market system by yes. Governments and states, right? We look at the bond market, we look at the stock market, we look at all this stuff and all we’re looking at, all you’re reporting on as you do your job is how this is manipulated.

[00:33:52] It’s hard to judge the system when it’s so manipulated, I think was Alan Farrington’s point, but in this current system, whatever you want to describe it as. In general, a farmer in sub-Saharan Africa, which includes people that she knows that she works with, they only earn 1% of the price of coffee on the global market.

[00:34:11] And for her that’s like just super screwed up. Like you don’t have to be a Marxist to think that’s screwed up, right? Like the person who does the most work to give you the cup of coffee. We talk about value for value in the Bitcoin community. Okay? We talk about paying your local butcher or your local farmer in Bitcoin directly so they get all the money, right?

[00:34:29] That’s like what you see when you go to Austin. You go to Nashville, you start seeing this like beef initiative stuff. You start seeing this food intelligence that Austin, I’m telling you, this stuff resonates hardcore with people in Africa. Like they love hearing about this. This is super important to them.

[00:34:43] I think you’re going to find a lot of common ground between the Bitcoiners working on food sovereignty in America and abroad the big time. But when you think about the fact that you got these Bitcoin communities trying to establish these direct peer-to-peer ties to the people giving them their food, understanding them as humans, becoming friends with them.

[00:35:01] I think that then you think about the fact that when you drink this cup of coffee, only 1% of the value goes to the person who grows, who actually does the most work. It’s shocking. Like it’s really, it’s shocking, right? She says, if we can get to a stage where farmers can sell their coffee without so many middleman institutions and get paid in Bitcoin and directly, or more or less directly from the consumer, you could imagine she says what?

[00:35:21] How much of a difference that would make in their lives. So that’s one thing I wanted to point out along these lines. Second thing is just a story about lightning would be, you’ve got a lot of Nigerians who have family United States or friends or clients in the United States. Customers, I, when you’re sending money back to Nigeria from the United States, again, Nigeria, the biggest country in Africa is going to be bigger than the United States and population in 20, 30 years.

[00:35:45] Massive country basically could be called the United States of Africa, heard people call it that. So this enormous country, there’s a lot of flow from the US to Nigeria and from Europe to Nigeria, et cetera. In the American case, you use any sort of fiat rail, like whe whether it’s Western Union or bank wire or, some of them don’t work like transfer wise left Nigeria.

[00:36:05] You figure out a way to get fiat money from the US and Nigeria, and not only are there the normal fees that you’d have, whatever the, I think the World Bank says that the average remittance or payment to sub-Saharan Africa from the west is like 7% fee. Okay? So not only do you have that fee, which could fluctuate.

[00:36:22] But then you have the exchange rate risk thing. The government of Nigeria, as of recently, was imposing an exchange rate of 459 rep per dollar, right? So the person on the other end, whether they be someone you’re sending money to, whether you’re paying for a service, maybe you’re buying a book from a Nigerian author, maybe you’re buying some coffee from someone in Nigeria, they’re only getting 450 naira per dollar, but the street rate of the Naira is seven 50, right?

[00:36:49] In this example let’s say a month ago, not sure exactly what it’s now, but this is what it was about a month ago. So the government basically just steals like 40% of the value of that transaction. By imposing it as fake rate. So the amazing thing about Bitcoin is it gives people the real rate of exchange.

[00:37:04] Which is pretty frequent. Incredible. And that’s where you, and that goes for again, this doesn’t necessarily have to be, yes, I’m coming at this from an human rights angle. Like I’m thinking about it, like I don’t want to send a grant of $25,000 to someone in NI and we’re doing this, we’re funding a lot of people in Nigeria.

[00:37:21] Yeah. I don’t want to be sending a wire if they’re only going to get $16,000 out of the 25. I want them to get the whole thing and ideally not pay the 7% either. Now there’s Bitcoin has, doesn’t have counterparty risk, but it’s got an exchange rate risk on that zone side. Hey, maybe they take the 25 when they get it and they sell it for stable coins and keep half, that’s their complete, they have free to make their own decision.

[00:37:44] But what I hate is the fact that if you use the safe, official, system, you just get robbed. It’s crazy. And this is. The opposite of what the establishment would have You think, like when you think about the US government and the financial Times and all the whole establishment media, political like circle, they would have you think that the Bitcoin is the more dangerous and risky thing?

[00:38:05] Yeah. Yeah. But the current system is how they screw you. It’s really crazy. It’s not just that I’m cur, concerned from human rights point of view. It’s just for anyone literally doing a remittance or business or whatever, using the Bitcoin rail again, gives you the real bit of exchange. And this is where you can start seeing what Jeff was talking about in terms of forced cooperation.

[00:38:22] So I’ll just read this piece that I think I was inspired by him. So basically Bitcoin, he says, can short circuit the old system that has subsidized wealthy countries at the expense of wages and poorer countries. In the old system, the periphery had to be sacrificed to protect the core. In the new system, the periphery can work together.

[00:38:42] For example, right now, he says, the US dollar system keeps people poor through wage deflation in the periphery, but by equalizing the money and creating a neutral standard for everyone, a different dynamic is created with one monetary standard. Labor rates would necessarily be pulled closer together until kept, instead of kept apart.

[00:38:59] We don’t have words for dynamic, he says, because it’s never existed. But again, he calls this worst cooperation, and I think what I just described to you in the way that like companies using Bitcoin to do business are now serving the full value of the money to their customers. I is a really good example of this.

[00:39:17] If you think about this, you think about how the US has been able to impose its, or rather how the US has been able to subsidize its quality of life, honestly, has been to export inflation. We often talk about this, right? It’s a lot harder to export inflation if the Nigerian employees are now earning Bitcoin, right?

[00:39:37] No doubt, it’s, and we always talk about wages being sticky. What are they? What are you going to do? Tell them you’re paying less money. No, what ends up normally happening is like the exportation of what, of the inflation of wages or the devaluation of wages is hidden because they’re just not, they’re not getting a demotion.

[00:39:52] They’re just not getting a raise and they’re making whatever amount of N IRA and then IRA is scaling absolutely crushed. So this is subsidizing the way of life in the United States of people because it means that our input costs are not as much as they would be in a normal free market. All of a sudden you have Bitcoin, it’s going to equalize things and I’m very excited about that possibility. But again, we don’t know what’s going to happen at the nation state level, but we know that it’s already benefiting millions of individuals and a small businesses and families and that’s enough.

[00:40:18] That’s all I need to see. You bring up a really interesting point when you’re just comparing, we earlier talked about the volatility of Bitcoin and why that Yeah. That’s a reason why they might prefer dollars or whatever. But in this scenario that you just described, when you look at the cut that they take when you’re using traditional rails, Bitcoin starts to make a whole lot more sense, even though it has this volatility in the price to whatever underlying you’re comparing it back to, so yeah, go ahead.

[00:40:44] That’s why you see a lot of people use like Bitcoin with stable coins. Yeah. Like in the global south, like they it’s a package deal, but like they might use the Bitcoin, they may earn in Bitcoin and then, but then they might hedge the Bitcoin by buying some stable coins. This is just and like I don’t, it’d be very unfair for us to judge or blame them for that, right?

[00:41:03] Because Oh yeah. No they don’t. They don’t have dollars. Yeah. Like in fact in a lot of these countries, dollars are illegal where there’s capital controls or the government’s going to come and steal all your golden dollars or like Ethiopia again, really LA massive country, more than a hundred million people.

[00:41:18] It’s illegal to have cash out essentially on your body, like outside in the countryside, like in terms of US dollars. Just like F D R tried to take all of the good money from Americans back in the thirties to fund the new deal and stuff. That’s what all these dictators do. They try to take the good money away.

[00:41:35] So that’s what this revolution’s all about is a reaction. Is a reaction to governments doing that everywhere. Which countries are you seeing adopting Bitcoin the most? Like where do you see this really just taking off right now? Again, I think it’s tricky because people who measure this stuff often just to say cryptocurrency and then we don’t have an accurate reading bit.

[00:41:59] Refill has some interesting data. They’re a really large player in the space of like people using Bitcoin to buy stuff, which of course, as we know is like a minority of Bitcoin’s usage. Like most people use Bitcoin either to like just move money, but or to save, et cetera. But for the people actually using it to buy mobile, phone, minutes, whatever.

[00:42:19] If you look at Sergey who’s like the head of the refill, he has these great threads with all this data. Matt Al Borg also now is helping them out and he’s got this data too. You’ll see Bitcoin is 40% or something of the whole, I think something like that, stablecoin is really dominant.

[00:42:35] That’s what people are buying stuff with in this, in these economies. So you’re really seeing in a lot of places in terms of volume, transaction volume and popularity as like a currency to buy stuff. Like you’re seeing a lot of stablecoin traction in a lot of these countries. Again, I think that you often see the Bitcoin is stablecoin come to be adopted together.

[00:42:54] But again, like the, I think the rate of the people who are comfortable with familiar with, understand, use Bitcoin is demonstrably higher in, in countries that don’t have a good currency. And I think this is just such an obvious thing that would happen. I don’t know if they’re, I don’t know if it’s like a law or a theory or something, but it’s clearly an observable reality that the worse your currency is, the more, the higher likelihood you are at to use Bitcoin.

[00:43:19] It just seems obvious. Do you think that we just need more time for the global South to really understand why Bitcoin is different than Stablecoin for instance, I don’t know when it started taking so much market share, the stablecoin and Bitcoin, I would guess. It was in the last two to three years that it’s really taken off.

[00:43:37] A hundred percent. It’s like the last three years. If we warp four years into the future from right now I suspect the price of Bitcoin’s going to be drastically different than where it is right now. Sure. And these people that have been using stablecoin and Bitcoin are going to look back and say, wow, I’ve been using this stablecoin for the last four years, and if I was trying to preserve my disposable income in Bitcoin instead of stablecoin, I would be five x more wealthy or 10 x more wealthy than what I am right now.

[00:44:08] Is that what Yeah. No. What drives the adoption long term, or, yeah, but it’s so hard to say because look, we’re, we’re in like a two year bear market right now. That colors people’s understanding of it. Yes. Yeah. You got a lot of people out there who got in at 40 or 50, right?

[00:44:21] So that, they’re like I’m sure they’re excited that it bounced back a little bit from what, 16. But people are short term in terms of the way they think about this when they first get involved, right? Yeah. So I think it’s fair to expect that whatever the best non Bitcoin money is, there’s going to be a natural market demand for that globally until Bitcoin becomes big enough.

[00:44:39] Where like gold it’s a little more stable. I think that gold’s like a pretty good proxy. If Bitcoin gets to 10 trillion, 15 trillion, like it’s not going to be as volatile, huh? It’s just, it’s going to be too big. It’ll definitely still be moving around a lot, but it’s going to be more like, ooh, like a 2% declines, like a big deal, right?

[00:44:56] Whereas today, Bitcoin, we could go down 10% in a day, right? That would be like really unlikely for gold, right? On the road from a trillion from right now we’re at a half trillion, but so on the road from a half trillion to 10 trillion, I think that people, the market’s going to express demand for something else to hedge.

[00:45:12] And then at some point, it just, that market demand starts to die down as, as people are more comfortable with Bitcoin. You’ve seen it like people who’ve been around Bitcoin for five years are more comfortable living in Bitcoin because they’ve figured out how to do that. It’s not, but it’s not like an immediately understandable thing to do.

[00:45:29] It’s hard, a little, it’s hard to be pure on Bitcoin, right? It’s not so easy. I think it gets easier for a lot of reasons over the coming decade, but I think you’re just, again, you’re, again, you’re going to, whatever that is, whether it’s dollar or God knows what gold, whatever it is, like you’re going to see the market express demand for that.

[00:45:46] Hey, let’s say the dollar goes under in Fiats, get destroyed and Bitcoin skyrocket. It’s like it might still be too volatile to use in your daily life. So hey, maybe gold becomes like a thing for a while and then maybe there’s basically tether is tied to the gold price instead of the dollar price, and there’s like these, like gold tethers.

[00:46:05] It’s going to be something like that until I think you see Bitcoin get to the point where one to 2% fluctuations throughout the week are like normal maximum. Like the dollar. Like the dollar. If you look at the Dixie, I guess it’s not that often when it goes up or down more than 10%, right?

[00:46:20] Yeah. And like a really short period of time. So once Bitcoin and, but I do think people are underestimating how, like the difference between Bitcoin’s volatility and maybe like the dollar volatility like it’s going to get there. Like I think in like the next decade where when you look at bonds I mean you’ve seen, I mean you’re talking about all the time, like bonds are a type of do or a form of dollar, right?

[00:46:40] And those are already at Bitcoin’s volatility. So we talk about the what We’re wor like they’re not going to come back up. Like they’re going in a particular direction. I think that it’s going to be a while for people to be fully on board. And I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to have small communities of real diehard people who are like the educators in the evangelists, just like in our world, right?

[00:47:00] In the west. And then everyone else is just going to be like slowly adopting. But given what I’ve seen and given what I’m reporting on and given the people I’ve talked to and given the history, this is not going to be pretty for anybody, but especially for folks in the global south who have these weak via currencies.

[00:47:16] Yeah. Like they’re going to lose everything. I think it’s a moral imperative for us to help them learn about Bitcoin as much as possible. But I also think we shouldn’t judge if they find ways to hedge in something that is easily accessible for Americans like. I would expect that whatever the next best money is for daily use will remain popular until Bitcoin’s volatility chills out a little bit.

[00:47:38] I think that’s completely reasonable in terms of making a prediction and it’s rational because if Bitcoin continues to succeed, it will eventually reach a size where it will be a little less volatile. So I think it’s quite natural to just expect there’s going to be these like side markets for a while.

[00:47:53] But in general, the adoption of Bitcoin globally is just going crazy. The number of conferences and stuff coming up in these places that like, it’s crazy. Like I’m trying to go to the, I’m trying to go to the one in Indonesia, like I want, there’s so much to learn from people. There’s going to be ones in Indonesia, Argentina, India, Ghana, South Africa, Japan.

[00:48:12] I’m just rattling off ones I know of in the next 10 months. And we’re trying to do what we can here. Like I, I think that there’s no, we don’t have to I think in many ways, like the thought leaders in the global south, like we just have, we have a lot more to learn from them than they have from us in many ways.

[00:48:27] So what I’m trying to do through the Human Rights Foundation is bring them together and then learn from them. And then have them learn from each other, which is something I’ve borrowed from the work we do in the human rights field. Like the, what we do is we gather dissidents together, have them trade notes, and they get stronger, right?

[00:48:41] So we want monetary dissidents to come and do the same thing. So at the os, the Freedom Forum this year, which will be June 13 to 15 in Norway, we’re going to have a financial freedom track where we’ve got Bitcoin community leaders from everywhere from, again, Indonesia to India, to Iraq, to Cameroon, to Venezuela.

[00:48:57] And they’re going to be coming in and teaching us stuff like how to use Bitcoin in a dictatorship. What’s the best way to grow a community in a global south country. That’s the kind of content we’re going to offer. And we’re also going to strive to do more. Do what we can to help bring them together and provide them the resources they need.

[00:49:12] Whether it be sponsoring the Africa Bitcoin Conference, which I hope you can make one day it’s amazing. Or any of these other events in trickier envir, political en environments. So that’s where I think we can help. And again, that’s very tied into the writing I’m doing, but the kind of come full circle to the thing you asked me at the beginning, I do think it’s the fight for human rights and Western values is more important than ever.

[00:49:34] That’s a big takeaway I had for my book. But knowing that has always come through, this unequal exchange, through this exploitation, I think that we need to take a hard look at that and figure out can we fix it? Like the wrong answer is simp for some dictator. It frustrates me to know and to watch Bitcoiners support.

[00:49:50] Like Dubai or Saudi Arabia or China or Russia or whatever. That’s the wrong way, that’s the wrong lesson to take from the fact that our societies are exploitative. Like the right lesson would be to say what are the good things about our societies and how can we have, how can we produce the exploitation?

[00:50:06] That would be the correct lesson in my book. I think that fixing the money that helps to address this, I think that moving transcending fiat, moving more towards a world that I think you and I both think is going to have Bitcoin and is more of a significant force in the global economy, is going to give more people, individuals, lower middle class individuals away out, first of all, and better than shield to protect them against all this nonsense.

[00:50:28] But over time may start to have a huge impact on the overall way that nation states interact with each other. And I think it might end up being a more fair system. So let’s move forward towards that. However we can. And I hope folks can read the book and be prepared to be shocked and angry.

[00:50:45] But then also be prepared to get real. You’re going to be very angry when you read this book. Yeah. There’s just no way around it. And I anticipate, that’s what I went through. I just is it the, is it all the, is it all the hard facts that everything’s backed up?

[00:51:01] Because that was the thing that I took away, at least reading the article was just like, you state, here’s how I see things actually working. And then you back it up with so much evidence and so many facts. Is that why you’re saying going to be 29? And I have 229 citations in, in, in a, 179 page book.

[00:51:20] And I, what I tried to do in the book is actually I tried to flesh out a recommended reading list, which I’m excited about. So I thought hard about the, I love that. Maybe like 25, 30 resources, which really were helpful for me. And I just put them in here so folks can go get those books and learn.

[00:51:35] And they’re like very diverse, like authors are totally all over the political map, but these are some of the books that I learned a lot from them. And I took what I could from them. So there’s a lot more to be learned from just. Reading the whole things. But I think that’s something I wanted to give, and it just, I’m just happy to have it out there.

[00:51:50] Again, it’s going to piss people off. But as I say in the intro, what I went through is that I kinda went through a journey of basically going from shock to disbelief, to shame, to optimism for a better future. So I hope that’s like the direction we could go. I love that. I would say this, if you have anybody that, friend, family, whoever that works in one of these Western NGO o nonprofit space.

[00:52:14] In general, right? Because yeah, I think so much of the messaging that’s happening in the ngo, Western NGO O space is if you go far enough upstream, the IMF in the World Bank is heavily involved in the messaging of all these programs. People forget, they, they are the two of the most important pillars of the Brentwood system.

[00:52:32] Yeah. Like when we, when the US government set up the World Monetary order in 1944, the IM World Bank were like two of the handful of yes p key pillars. Don’t forget that they are the largest international lender of last resort and largest development bank still in the world. They remain incredibly important.

[00:52:48] They remain criminally under investigated. Yes. They remain outta the conversation and let’s let’s just shine a light and see what we can learn. What was my overall take? And that’s it. I think the book can at least it would be awesome if a lot of the employees of these organizations started a book club and started to read stuff like this.

[00:53:06] I think the main thing that I also wanted to contribute was like, there’s a lot of those like kind of rhetoric out there. Confessions of an economic hitman stuff. I wanted to add something from my perspective because I just have a slightly different take. I, again, I don’t think the answer is to like, oppose the US and oppose the US system entirely and stand some like revolutionary whatever it’s Chavez or Putin or Xi Jinping.

[00:53:31] That’s a lot of this de dollarization stuff on the internet these days. It’s a little concerning because it’s are you posting about the dollarization because you want Russia and China to succeed or are you posting about it because that’s a fact and you’re observing it?

[00:53:45] This can often get muddied and I’m posting about it because I’ve been observing it for years. Yeah. And I quite obviously it’s happening. What I’m not posting. I’m not like cheer posting China though. Amen. Dude. A lot of this. Amen. A lot of this too, and I just wanted to add something to the lexicon that was a critical look at the I Bank, but that was more of a, Hey, the route is for us to fix it.

[00:54:08] Not again, ditch the system.

[00:54:10] Preston Pysh: Yes.

[00:54:10] Alex Gladstein: Like I feel very strongly about that. And as Americans, I think that’s important for us. Let’s not give up on this project. Yes, it’s have, it has accesses and things that need to end, that are shameful and highly repressive, but the way forward is to fix that, not to give up entirely. So I, I hope folks can appreciate where I’m coming from.

[00:54:29] Preston Pysh: I’m glad you said that. But anyway, I’m really glad you said that because I feel the exact same way as what you just said.

[00:54:35] Alex Gladstein: Yeah. We’re not out here cheering for the, of the dollar for the rise of our enemies or whatever. We’re here cheering for the end of the dollar because the dollar hegemony system’s been pretty bad for most Americans.

[00:54:46] And it’s actually led to American support for some of the worst dictators in the world and the repression of countless people. And it’s not been the pride of the United States. It’s not what the founders intended. Remember the current dollar system was created by Nixon and Kissinger, not by Washington and Adams and Jefferson.

[00:55:04] Let’s just remember that. So this is just something we need to fix about America. It’s not our character inherently. Anyway, I like that. You like that. So let’s keep pushing that.

[00:55:14] Preston Pysh: Absolutely. And people know who to buy this book for. Buy this book for yourself too. Oh my gosh. Yeah. This is so good. So good. Alex, I thank you brother. I cannot say that enough. So thank you so much for making time. Is there anything else that you wanted to highlight that we can have in the show notes?

[00:55:29] I wanted just say our first conversation, we got into structural adjustment. A lot of meat on what’s included in this book. Yeah, so we’ll have a link to that in the show notes with our first conversation, because we covered pretty much a completely different set of things in this conversation. What else do you want to highlight?

[00:55:46] Alex Gladstein: No, just the books out. It’s Hidden Repression. You can get out on Amazon and you can get it on Bitcoin magazine. I have reasons for you for wanting you to do both or either. The best would be to buy probably if you want to, you can buy with Bitcoin on Bitcoin magazine, which is awesome. But leaving reviews on Amazon’s very helpful for me because obviously that’s the whole system. The surveillance capitalist system wants you to do that.

[00:56:10] So the easy way to help me without helping Amazon necessarily would be to buy the book with Bitcoin on Bitcoin magazine and then leave a review on Amazon. That would be like a great thing. But I’ll be doing more on this. If you’re in Miami, I will be speaking on Friday at the Bitcoin conference on the main stage around 4:00 PM I’ll be right after Arthur Hayes and Michael Lewis, which is pretty awesome.

[00:56:30] That’s going to be very entertaining. And I’ll be right before Jack Maers, so it’s going to be a really fun afternoon. Wow. On the big stage. I’ve got a 20 minute talk on Bitcoin versus the IMF based on this book for you guys. I also have two signings, so I’ll be doing a signing in the Vale area on Saturday the 20th.

[00:56:45] I’ll also be doing a signing in the expo area. More details on that to come, but really excited to see a lot of you in Miami soon. And again, if any of the listeners are interested in getting deeper into this content, definitely come to the Oslo Freedom Forum in June. Tickets are available at oslofreedomforum.com. And again, just huge thanks Preston for having me on the show.

[00:57:04] Preston Pysh: Oh my goodness. Thank you for making time and coming on. It is always a pleasure to hear what you’re up to and to talk about this amazing book that you just published. So thanks for coming on. Alex, if you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use.

[00:57:20] Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate it. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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