Alex cladd Seine, Thanks for sitting down.
It's my pleasure. Yeah, I love.
Talking to you. I think what you're doing, I mean, your your mission is the most important mission. Right at the end of the day. It's about freedom, baby, Freedom, Freedom go up, Freedom go up. That should be the goal human flourishment.
Well, it's not possible without en GU, but I do think FGU is the goal. NG is the way we get there.
Number going up is the way to get freedom to go up.
I mean, if bitcoin was a dollar forever, I don't I don't think we'd have the possibility to change the world.
Is that because we wouldn't have as much adoption.
I think that if you only had a limited value to bitcoin, it would not be able to replace the fiat system. It wouldn't be able to replace the functions of money. It wouldn't be able to replace central banking because if.
The value wasn't high enough, then the small units wouldn't be enough to transact.
That like core dynamic of bitcoin that's so unique and interesting is the fact that it turns self interest or greed basically into freedom. And I think if you had like a fixed value that was low in purchasing power,
and it didn't have potential to increase this incentive wouldn't exist. Like, basically, if it was stuck in its early days forever, it would be a niche project that a bunch of US cipherpunks and freedom fighters and human rights activists would find interesting, but the average person would have no real Yeah, it would be kind of like PGP, right, like PGP works well, has not been hacked by the government, but it's kind of a pain to use, and it didn't really attract
a massive audience even though it existed for fifteen twenty years. It wasn't until they could actually package into that to kind of technology, into things like signal that it became widespread. So I think that if you don't have NGU, your capacity for FGU would would remain like deminimous. It would be pretty minimal. I mean, it would still be cool and useful, but it would be more like manarrow. I mean, it would be a system that would probably run out
of steam. The decentralization wouldn't be as strong. There wouldn't be as an incentive for enough people to run their own nodes. There wouldn't be as big of incentive for the miners like none of it works without NGU, but it's not. But I think the NGU is the is, the means, the end is FGU. That's that's my vision of it. At least.
I write a weekly Bitcoin news email newsletter and at the top I have a quote on there and it says that bitcoin is the great bait and switch. Yeah, it pulls you in for the n GU and it switches you into the.
You know, I mean, yeah, what's that quote from Neval. It's like like a like a like it's like a freedom tool dressed up as a get rich quicks game or something something like that, right, and you know.
It's a bait and switch. We come for the n GU.
No, and after tiers in a bear market, I think it's fair to question, you know, that part of it diminishes during a bear market. But ultimately I always say price is the greatest teacher. We can do all the work we can about bitcoin education, and a lot of great work it's done in bear markets. Like trust me, there's amazing stuff happening, but there is no replacement for the massive amount of interests that flows into bitcoin when there's a bull market. Isn't And this is because of
ngu like there's self interest. The cool part is due to Bitcoin's incentive mechanism, the self interest translates to more freedom for everybody else. This is usually not the case for things like It just doesn't really work like that. So even capitalism like a whole at a global level has been totally corrupted and doesn't really work like this, Like more riches and property rights and resources for Americans directly is the result of impoverishing poor people in another
country in the current global capitalist scheme. Bitcoin doesn't work like that. It's much more kind of open and neutral, which is why I'm so excited about it.
Yeah, you know, I was thinking when we came down into this bear market from our sixty nine thousand pig to whatever you know, fifteen twenty thousand. But just like Facebook, stock also was down seventy five percent, but the Facebook, their network still worked the same way. Even though stock went down and the price of bitcoin dropped from seventy to twenty, but the bitcoin network was still resistant.
Yeah, but like, think about a country like page like like.
But for new adoption, like it would work for people in North Korea. They could still keep their money and transact it, but it wouldn't attract to your.
Point, what's the name of the company where people have like a gym in their house, a Peloton? Oh yeah, so maybe for Facebook now, but but long run, it's sort of more like Peloton. Like if Peloton stock drops ninety percent, like they're going to go under. Yeah, Like, so it presents a terminal risk to the system. Yeah. Like like if bitcoin, if the price of bitcoin dropped
ninety nine point nine percent tomorrow never recovered, it would die. Sure, Okay, so we know it's not going to do at but like that's why it can survive, That's why it can bring freedom to more people, is because of the incentives at play.
Yeah, I want to talk about what you just said. It was kind of something I've been thinking about when I listen to your talk yesterday, which I liked. But you just said that kind of capitalism has been perverted in such a way that American kind of has built wealth while impoverishing other nations. Yes, and so that's certainly part of your work I want to talk about with IMF and kind of the new book that you're talking about with the Hidden Repression is the new book. So
your books are great I look forward to them. So anyway, for everyone listening, check out that Hidden Repression new book and the way that the financial system has been set up. It's set up in a way, and you broke it down brilliantly, and I want you to kind of break that down for us again. How these nations are forced to only provide goods that the US wants in the dollars and they can't do what's best for them, and so that's kind of a way that it impoverishes them.
But if we started just from a higher level, and if it wasn't for corrupt money, because goods and services so much cheaper those other nations, they don't have much going on there. By taking jobs, whether that be manufacturing jobs or technical jobs, even though we're paying them a very low wage, it's a good wage for that area, wouldn't that actually be taking prosperity there? But it's the financial stem that then turns that around. And actually, yeah, so.
If we had a neutral monetary language for the world that was consistent, I think there would be much more equal exchange is what you call it in international economics, unequal exchange. You have equal exchange. I think if the monetary system wasn't corrupted. Then you'd get much closer to the ideal of how people like John Locke thought of international trade, where like your country would build what you're good at, and then you could exchange that for other
things you're not good at. That is not how it works. Like the United States aggressively subsidizes things that we really shouldn't be making and crowds out the ability of other nations to do those things. It is not a free market at all. It's completely controlled. I mean, it's like the bond market, or like the stock market in Japan. The stock market in Japan can't be considered a capitalist
if the government owns fifty percent of right. The bond marketing United States cannot be considered capitalist if the government bought trillions of dollars of bonds to backstop it. I mean, it could be considered a hybrid capitalist. I love what you said, but it can't be fully capitalist.
Because because capitalism requires free.
In voluntary stut that being said, we have to then, on the other hand, empathize with I think like people around the world when over the last seventy years they saw a battle between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist the United States. Right, So even though you and I know that you know this is not capitalism, I can't fault them for calling the system capitalism. I mean,
these are just semantics, but semantics are important. So the system that people get angry with that they call capitalism is very is a very corrupted form of capitalism in my view. But it does raise the question to the point that it's not even capital right, But of course it's the not true Scotsman thing. It's like, this is our lived experience. We don't have another we don't have a counterfactual. We only have what we have. Can market
democracies thrive without exploiting other countries. We don't know the answer to that, because there is no world where that happens.
My belief is if we can adjust the monetary system, that it's possible, because then all of a sudden, people are earning I mean, you have this arbitrage thing where like all of a sudden, if people are earning bitcoin here and they're earning bitcoin here, like it kind of like tightens up a lot faster, Like if you're earning naira and then you're earning dollars, and these markets can be divided and you can squeeze one and not the other.
This allows for wage deflation, Like it's all about achieving wage deflation in some places to protect wages in other places, and to produce inflation in other places. And if you have two hundred currencies, it's very doable. Of one currency, I think it's much harder. Of course, we're speculating, but I know you and I both know that individuals are escaping the system through bitcoin, right, so we know that individuals can escape. Well, then of course the next question is, well,
can entire systems escape? We don't know, but it's certainly worth discussing.
So let's back it up and your book Hidden Repression. So there's this hidden mechanism, this hidden force that causes this repression. And I think the way that you frames up is it really starts with the IMF and the World Bank. And now I'd like for you to kind of break down how the IMF and the World Bank does this. But before we do, you know, I find to have this chart that it's kind of like an org chart of the world, and it kind of puts the BIS at the top, then like the IMF kind
of World Bank below that. But now it seems like over the last couple of years the central banks have started to kind of break out past World Bank. But we'll talk about that later, but frame up for us the picture of the IMF and how they use this hidden repression.
Look, the international monetary system is vast and complicated and has a lot of actors in it. I focus on the IMFM World Bank because they are arguably the two most important financial institutions in the world, certainly between nineteen sixty and the nineteen nineties and probably still today.
Yeah, but probably still.
I mean, when the United States and his allies gathered in New Hampshire in forty four, when they knew they were going to win World War two, they got together to think about what's the new monetary system going to look like, and how can we prevent the nineteen thirties from happening again. They didn't want to break down in global trade. They didn't want autarchy. They wanted the spice to flow. They wanted everything to be flowing. Okay, so with the new currency that the US set up that
the rest of the world didn't want. By the way, the rest of the world wanted a more sort of democratic system, but we had the most gold, so we got to have our say, and we said, no, it's going to be you're all going to use dollars and you're going to redeem them at thirty five dollars an ounce.
So in that system, there were pegged exchange rates, so you know, your currency was allowed to fluctuate within a band, right, and the IMF was set up as a lender of last resort to basically be like a stabilization fund for currencies. So if a currency started to like move out of that band, the IMF would would go over there and put that fire out. And you know what, that wasn't like a necessarily a bad idea. I mean, we were basically still on a sound money standard or version of it, right,
because gold was still underlying the dollar. You could redeem it for a certain rate and that rate was controlled. Now, eventually that proved to be pretty quickly, quickly untenable. Like that lasted about twenty five years, and really, I mean it really it never.
Really even worked well by fifty eight.
Between forty four and fifty eight, there were tons of exchange controls, so it wasn't even really working. But like between fifty eight and seventy one. You know, we basically had this like Bretonwood System will say, but you know, after about twelve thirteen years, it put nixcent took us off. But the point is, at the beginning it was designed
to be like an exchange rate stabilizer to keep trade going. Again, if a country had a balance of payments crisis and it was not exporting enough to sustain itself, it could borrow, okay, and then hopefully the idea would be within a few years they could fix the problem and then pay it back. That was the idea. Not necessarily against that idea. World Bank was designed to provide infrastructure funding in places where private capital just didn't have the appetite. So this is
where we were talking war torn Europe in Japan. Again, not necessarily opposed to that. I think these things can exist in a sound money standard. You could have an international lender of last resort, you could have a Global Development Bank.
They can give them the benefit of the doubt. Most of these things start out with good intention.
Yeah, and like I don't know if they were I mean, they certainly were imperial intent. I mean they were intentions to keep the United States and its allies on top. But they weren't necessarily like in any sense in moral they made sense. But what ends up happening is Nixon takes us off gold standard and we're no longer on pegged exchange rates. So a lot of economists at the time said, well, why do we need the IMF. And what happened was the IMF essentially pivot did as did
the bank. They pivoted away from stabilizing exchange rates and providing funding for infrastructure in what we now call industrial economies rich countries to providing credit to the impoverished parts of the world, to the developing world, to the third world, whatever you want to call it, the global South. That pivot took place from like the early sixties through the mid seventies, and it almost was like a total pivot, like you really had such you had a massive amount
of imfimal bank activity shift into the global South. Okay, so these institutions were now like doing something else, and like thesis of my book is essentially that what they ended up doing, whether it was conscious or not, was replicating the what's called the colonial drain. So the point of colonialism was to drain resources from other places to
sustain the quality of life at home. So for British that meant like getting tea and petrol and oil and gold and timber and whatever at very very cheap rates by going in stealing it or exploiting it somewhere else with violence bringing it back home. Okay, that Spanish conquest of Latin America, like that, it's kind of been the way they I mean, you know poor you know, the strong exploit through the strong exploit the week. I mean, it's it's a history, it's a historical thing. It's always
been that way, but like this is how it played out. Now, colonialism in this way became untenable in the twentieth century. I mean, it just became unacceptable for various reasons, and it basically died out by nineteen sixty. And that's known as like the end of colonialism is basically around nineteen sixty.
So that military colonials, Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
So now you had monetary colonialism. So like the dynamic though, like still wanted to exist, like these countries and economy still wanted to take advantage of these other countries. So what they ended up doing is replacing the sword with debt. So you placed the worship and the bayonet and the gun with debt. And now what was happening is through the IMF and World Bank, the rich creditor name could extend loans to poorer nations and in that way exploit
and repress them. And it was just sort of sort of like this machine for harvesting resources, natural resources.
To borrow is serve into the lender. So they kind of.
Exactly so like you would harvest resources as much as possible without letting any trickle down to the surrounding society A or B. You would do agricultural engineering, so you would like change what these countries grow to focus on certain monoculture crops that that we want, and then that would prevent them from growing the food that they need so that they'd become dependent on us. So it was
like sort of engineering dependency. So this is why Africa, for example, imports eighty five percent of its food, which is crazy. It should be totally self sustained, it should be an exporter of food like net. It's a net importer vastly, and that's because partially US foreign policy, you know, dictated it, like we wanted to have food sovereignty and to control food so that we could use it as a weapon, and we did this several times during the
Cold War. We would basically turn off wheat or whatever to a country and starve it like to make it bend to our will. We did this in Bangladesh in the seventies. You can look it up. It's harrowing. So basically, you know, the IMF and World Bank kind of were very lucrative for the West in three main ways. I mean, a lot of libertarians especially would criticize the IMF and World Bank back in the nineties, and they would say it was wasteful, it's a waste of tax payer money.
It was not a waste of tax payer of money. It was very effective at aiding America and its allies. And it does so in three main ways. Number one is the interest. So these are high interest rate loans that created really large flow. And as anyone who borrows knows, eventually you have to pay back more than the principle. So you had all these dictators borrowing one hundred million,
five hundred million, a billion dollars. Those countries winded up paying back to US five million, a billion, a billion a half dollars over the lifetime of the loan plus interest. Right, so you have like earnings coming in and you have a flow coming in based off interest. And again these were back then pretty high interest rate loans, payday loans, the predatory lending basically. So that's that's like, and the IMF and the World Bank and all of the little
arms make billions of dollars a year doing this. That sort of sustains them. The second thing, though, is the resources and the labor. So as of twenty fifteen, there's one study that indicated that the industrial countries, the rich countries, we got about half of our resources and thirty percent or so, about a third of our labor from the global South. Now, let's just think about a world where
that ended tomorrow. So let's say tomorrow, all of a sudden, we had half the resources and we we were missing the cheapest one third of our labor. Like on the spectrum of labor, what would happen. We'd have massifulation because we'd have shortages of goods. We'd have way less goods, and like we wouldn't have enough to go around, and our labor or the wages we'd have to pay the labors be way more so you can start to realize
how this SUBSETI is our way of life. Like globalization has really in many ways been a subsidy for Western civilization. I mean it just the way it is. Number three. If interest is number one and cheap labor and resources is number two, I mean number three is political control. I mean again, we would literally shape these economies. So it's not just that we would get cheap labor and resources,
but we would make them dependent on us. And that's what I was talking about the other day in terms of like, by setting up the monetary system the way it is, we would like make sure that certain things were priced only in dollars, like obviously hydrocarbons being like the major thing. So if you could only get oil in dollars, if you're a little country, and you know, I think the mmtiers really get this wrong. They always say it's not a big deal. You can just buy dollars.
Oh you want to try doing that. Let's say you have a week currency. You want to go out and try buying dollars.
You can sell You're to sell your currency to.
Buy print your currency to buy dollars. Your currency is getting tank. It doesn't work. Plus there's often not like deep liquid pairs, like trading markets for like these random currencies, So it's not really an option to buy dollars to buy oil. That's why these countries have to do exports. You have to earn the dollars. You have to sell something to the US or its allies for a hard currency,
then use that to buy the oil. So you want to just basically to continue the point, to close the point, like if you want oil or industrial tractors or fertilizer or whatever, you can't use gunna and CDs. You have to export something like coffee and earn dollars in your foreign exchange account, and then from there you can buy the oil or the CDs. So this is a completely different paradigm than with like America, where we can just
print dollars to buy anything we want. So this is why there's like these vast inequalities in the monetary system.
There was a there was a report that China put out the Government of China, and I forget which division I use it in a video, but call off the top of my head, but they basically pointed to this exact situation, said the US is lots of things you used to do wrong. But one of them is that they
print dollars. They said in the report, it costs the United States seventeen cents to make one hundred dollars bill, but these countries have to give up one hundred dollars massive seeds ridge to get to get well.
Then the other thing is so you have the three benefits, right, so you have interest, cheap labor and resources and political control like that. Like if anyone says the IMF World Bank are a wasteful or that it's a waste of tax payer money, they're not. They're missing the big point. Yes, it's true they're very bureaucratic, corrupt, and they're not very efficient. That is true, But then you're missing the deeper point
that they are absolutely self interested organizations. Sure, like we have, our advancement has not been in spite of these things. It has very much been because of them. They today remain so important. I mean, the IMF is a trillion dollar organization and the World Bank is still the largest development bank in the world. I mean, we may hear about them less than news, and there are other really important institutions like the WTO and the BIS, et cetera.
But these remain so so important to the Bretton Woods economy as such, I mean until it crumbles. I mean, they are pillars of the world order, right. China has tried to copy them, and the CCP has seen what.
We did sort of like their Belt and Road.
Yeah, they're like, we want to not so much. The IMF they've done some of that, but most of it's sort of World Bank style infrastructure funding. They've done a ton of it, but it's dried up in the last year and a half or so and.
Started to backfire.
Well they do they don't mint the reserve currency, so if a country goes bankrupt, it's harder for them to just write another loan, you know, it's harder for their banking system to do that. They can't just like make reserves up like we can. So they've tried to copy it. I would expect any regional power to try and copy this thing. Sure, like you know, so long as that these like multivari fiat currency system exists. But like the point is, they can't even replicate what we've done, and
it's had such a tremendous impact on the world. I mean, it's uh, it's it's it's tough because when these when these countries take these loans that we benefit from, we ask them to do something called structural adjustment. So these loans have conditions that range from like raising taxes, shrinking the banking sector, raising interest rates, devaluing the currency, ending
all subsidies on food and energy. So basically, like we would call it austerity, or like putting your country into a recession, and that is done so that the exports become more competitive that we can buy the exports for cheaper. Like if those countries, if their wages are too high and they have too much social security and free healthcare and education, then we want then then the stuff they make will be too expensive for us to buy, right, so we need to make sure that it's cheap sta chea.
So like we don't want any social benefits for anybody in that country, and we want them to be cheap as hell.
Which is a little counterintuitive because you think you'd want them to do better so they can actually pay back the loan.
I think there's a lot of interesting, sort of paradoxical stuff here because like, yeah, a, in a classic free market, you would think that that like subsidies on food and energy, are a bad idea, and in general they are a bad idea. But you can't go from if you can, I mean they do it all the time. It's very hard to go from a society where food and energy is subsidized to the next day it being really expensive, right, Like that that's what the IMF would do, and people
would just starve. I mean, like it's not a natural course of development, right, same thing with property, Like like one would think that nationalization is a really bad idea, right, but one thing that would happen is that like these countries would develop industry and then like due to IMF policy, they would end up selling like massive dams or whatever
off for like firesale prices to foreign ownership. So one thing is like thinking about the economy in a domestic sense, I just think the global the world is a big system, and it's a little more nuanced than that. Like, like there are interesting paradoxes when it comes to like free markets in as much as there isn't a free market, so everything is like stacked against us, Like we would
never think about it this way. So Britain, Germany, France, United States, Japan, we're not doing austerity at home, like we never like, like it's not like we dictate to Germany that they devalue their currency and cut like social subsidies.
That's only done towards poor countries. So total hypocrisy. Like Britain has currently a price cap on energy in Britain right now, and they've always had all kinds of free healthcare and stuff like that, but they would go to like little countries like Sri Lanka and demand that they end their subsidies for rice. So like in theory, yes, all subsidies that distort free market stuff I think are wrong, but like what you ended up having was rich countries
being highly subsidized and poor countries having nothing. So this perpetrates and keeps this cycle going of them becoming poor and poor and needing to borrow more and more for us from us.
And keeping the cost of goods and services low so.
That we can have it for cheaper. Yeah, and this is why you see the external debt of poor countries go exponential from the beginning of the Fiat age. And I just think I don't think bitcoin entirely fixes this. I just think that if you have a neutral, open monetary language for the world, then we don't have such disparities, and wages are going to be like a little tighter than they are now, and you're going to have a
more equal exchange. And further, if bitcoin is the reserve currency, it's instead of the dollar, then like wealthy countries don't have the exorbitant privilege of just printing it, and the poor countries can just turn if they want to. It may not make sense for everybody, but if you have cheap electricity, you can just print bitcoin. I mean not print it, but you can investigate and make it without permission from the world power, which is key a current only.
Like like countries that don't agree with the United States cannot get dollars or it's hard for them to get dollars.
And you would say that they could do that now, they could print bitcoin if they had the energy. They could also grow bananas, rice, wheat, But what you're saying is that the US says, no, you can't grow wheat.
Well, my general I'm just always changing, you know, involving my perspectives. But I think that at the moment what makes the most sense is like if we do end up having a bitcoin standard, like like mining won't be for every country, like mining is as you know, it's like a very expensive it's not like a hugely profitable necessarily industry all the time. It could be very unprofitable. Sometimes it's very specialized. And you think of it kind of like gold mining, like not every country, like not
every country does gold mining at scale. I mean, part of that is just because there's not gold everywhere, But in general, I think what you could expect is like countries that have cheap energy will do bitcoin mining. Countries that don't, like maybe like Japan or something, they will like provide services and they will like export stuff and
they'll by bitcoin with their reserves. So I think it's just kind of I mean, it may look a little more close to like kind of the gold standard, where like countries had a pile of gold and like when it drew down too much, like it weakened their currency. Like I do think we'll go through a time where we have essentially fiat currencies that are that are probably backed in some way by bitcoin or like a bitcoin dominant reserve.
When the IMF was founded, John Mayer Keans wanted to not be on the dollar standard. He wanted to be on a bank or yeah, he wanted to have been sort of like that reserve.
Well, the Bank Corp was just supposed to be like a basket of currencies, right, so it was supposed to have more of a globally democratic character to it. But he was vetoed so the US got its way. And yeah, I mean I again, I think that it's possible we evolve into kind of like a neo Breaton Wood system here where there are like probably fiat currencies pegged to some sort of redeemable rate of bitcoin. I think it's possible that eventually we even moved beyond that, and it's
possible we just use bitcoin as money. But I mean we're not. We're just nowhere near there technically, like technology technologically yet. Yeah, and you have to you look at like Britain. I mean, Britain started to fail as an empire a long time before the sterling failed as the world reserve currency, so it's very sticky. So I also think you can see a world where like bitcoin moons, but like people still use the dollar for stuff.
Sure, well, in the pounds sterling, it was a thirty to forty year process. Here we are eighty nine years later, and it's still the top three currents.
A world bitcoin could like explode in price and interest could go way up and you could have much more global adoption. But like the technology of daily payments could could lag. I mean, you could still end up using dollars for a long time. I think eventually they like it would they go obsolete. I mean this is like tears law, like, and I think people should really study dollarizing countries if they want to know what this is going to look like. It's not going to be Gresham's
law forever. It's not going to be. I mean, it's it's it's it's it's not going to be, even though the government's going to try and force it. Like merchants are just gonna they're not gonna want your fiat eventually and then that's gonna spur circular economy. But until that day, I mean, yeah, most people will save bitcoin because if they can, because like why wouldn't you You try at least you might ideologically want to spend something, which I
think is wonderful and important. But like, ultimately, I don't think that the needle's going to move for the majority of people on what you do with your bitcoin until merchants start basically saying providing a premium or like basically a discount for bitcoin and a premium on fiat. It's kind of like if you like, some people will say today they prefer cash to bank money. They want the cash, right. Yeah.
I think in the future they'll even offer a discount sometimes, right if you pay me like like a like a like a contractor at your house, if you're doing your house, they may offer to do it for a little less if you're paying cash. So that's when I think you start to see in the future, Oh, I'll do it. I'll do it for a little less if you pay me a bitcoin, right, And then eventually it just becomes like, oh, sorry, I don't take fiat, I don't take dollars, I take bitcoin.
I just think that that process may take decades, Like it just might be sticky.
It's certainly accelerating with the rise of the authoritarian nations, and it's seems seemingly rapidly by.
What I want money that's deplatformable, Like, I think the only way this revolution fails is if governments stop deplatforming people and stop devaluing currents.
They take away the need, they take away the need for it.
Yeah, there's no need for bitcoin, It'll die. Why would you feed it any energy if it was useless. I'm sorry, though, I just don't believe in a world where we're going to see less deplatforming and less devaluation of currency. I think we're going to see a lot more to platforming and a lot more devaluation because that's what governments do. So I see a world where bitcoin gets much more valuable and widely used. I just think it's just going
to be. And as for the impact on these institutions, I think over time, I mean, they essentially start to go bankrupt, like the loans they start to lend out get defaulted on, and they are not able to refill the basket as much, and I think they shrink, and I think they might still survive, like in more of an original capacity. Like that, a handful of powerful countries may choose to like retain a fund to help put out fires so that the trade keeps going. That could
totally happen on a sound money standard. And again you might have like again like a fund where it's like okay, like in the in our common collective self interest, we may want to like help this country develop a little bit, but like those loans are going to be much more like prudent and like like examined carefully, as opposed to like, yeah, you can just keep all this money and like don't worry about it.
And the goal would be to give them the loan and help hopefully help them grow so they can grow their way out of it.
Like Jeff Booth calls this forced cooperation. I really like that. I mean both at the nation state level, like as you're describing, but also at the labor level, at the individual level, like you're just there's more forced cooperation and less again unequal exchange.
So cooperation as opposed to coersion, yeah, or exploitation.
Like again, like the classic example of like it comes to the Ghana, it has a lot of gold. I mean, I don't think you need to subscribe to any ideology to object to the fact that ninety five plus percent of the gold profits over the last thirty forty years have gone to people outside of Ghana. And that's in large part due to this Fiat credit system. I mean, it's not entirely because of it, but it certainly is exacerbated by it.
Right, So if I'm tracking this, the problem is that through the financial system that we have set up in the IMF, etc. Through these exploitive type loans. It extracts the wealth and it forces people to remain in poverty.
It deflates their wages and.
Deflates their wages. So it's not the fact that the West or whatever is going to these countries and paying low, low wages for labor or things like that, because they're providing jobs and they're bringing them out of poverty. It's the fact that they're forcing them to stay down, not allowing them.
We also, like our corporations get like favorable rules in these countries. So for example, like say you're a giant American Coca Cola or something like remember you're like a dollar native firm, so when you move into one of these countries, you are much more. You have such an advantage over local soft drink makers who are priced in the local currency that's being devalued. All of a sudden, the imports they need to make everything gets so expensive
and they go out of business. I mean, this is why people don't like multinational corporations in poor countries because of the monitor. It has partly to do with the monetary element of it, like again, these are firms that are dollar native or your own native or yen native or whatever. They're not the Peso native or lira a native or whatever. So it's like an outgrowth of our current system whatever you want to call it. Is like the dominance of multinational firms in countries that have in
poorer countries. And this is this is absolutely exacerbated by the World Bank and the IMF. I mean, there's this whole I mean, the whole double loan phenomena is where like we we you know, let's say France gives one hundred million dollars to Ivory Coast. The of Orians immediately give one hundred million right back because they hire French companies to build all the stuff. So France has been
paid back. The French economy is now whole from the loan, but the Avorians still have to pay back principal plus interest. So France will make one hundred and fifty million euros over the duration of this project, just as an example. They'll make principal plus interest plus I mean, I mean plus that be paid back. So this is how you can start to see that like the West is like earning a lot of value you from from from deploying credit to poor countries as any I mean, who benefits
qui bono in a loan? I mean yes, the point like, yes, if I take out a loan and I do it carefully and I pay it back, I can benefit, right, you can. The problem is this isn't to This isn't a healthy like one off, Okay, we solved it. This is an infinite debt trap where the loan gets paid back by another loan and then all of a sudden it's a ponzi like. It's a ponzi like. The only way the new loans can get paid back is with
more loans. And this this was just became like the people who run the system became ware this in the seventies. They realized this there was no way these countries could pay back as debt. The only way to pay it back with more debt.
And so what I'm just trying to differentiate for everybody listening and maybe even for myself, is it's not the problem of extending loans to people that needed and helping them come up. It's the it's the finance, it's the it's the dollar scene riage that forces you to take loans and forces them to do things that are holding them back, like you said, only producing goods that we want, not goods that would help you, and never allowing them
to grow out of that. So if I said, hey, Alex, you need a loan, we give you some money, and then you're able to turn your business around, make a bunch of money, pay me back, and now your life is much better. Like, that's a good thing. That's a free market, that's cooperation.
Sure, I think there'll be a credit in the bitclin standards.
Well, because of the scene riage, that's the problem.
Well, right, it's like think about it this way. Like if you are lending dollars to a country and they owe you one hundred dollars and then like their currency gets devalued, they're going to have a hall of a time paying back that hundred dollars. So when you think about the way I am structural adjustment, which is the condition that the loans come with, is that usually it ends up devaluing the currency and raising price inflation inside
the country for the majority of the people. Yeah, that's not just like taking out a loan and paying it back. There are other structural things happening here that really impovers people, and this should just be more widely discussed.
Yeah, and are you you said you know, you kind of talked about like the dollar taking them for the pound Starli And that's a long process, and so we're in a long process.
Well, we've also never had anything like bitcoin before though, right, I mean we don't know. I mean it could be gradually even suddenly.
And we've never had the We've kind of never had this full coret press from authoritarians, both both in devaluation the rise of censorship.
I mean, to give an example, look at the bank run. I mean, social media and electronic money made a bankrun much faster, right if you looked at SVB. Sure, well, social media and electronic money might make like the switch to a new reserve currency way faster. It might take years or months or days instead of decades. It's I mean, I'm just throwing it out sure like, like we're definitely living in a world where these transitions can happen.
Faster and information travels fast. People find out about these solutions, Like.
When the sterling was being phased out, like there were people who didn't even learn about it for like years. That's not going to I mean, if bitcoin starts to Moon, everybody's gonna find within like a week like on Earth, like that information will travel and even people who don't know what bitcoin is are going to be like, what the hell's going on there? So I just think it's a it could happen really really fast, which is why
it's so so important. And I guess we'll just conclude with this that, like we work to help communities understand bitcoin, Like what we want to do with the Human Rights Foundation is just work on ux and education. We want to make bitcoin easier to use, safer to use, more private to use. We also want to make sure that people understand the value of self custodying bitcoin. It's just all about right now. I understand that on chain bitcoin will get expensive in the future, that's the way it's
going to be. That's how the fee market's going to work. But right now you can get on board, you can open the channel, you can get into lightning, you can self custody bitcoin. We had that couple days there where fees got out of hand. I mean we can expect more of that. That's a glimit of the future, but they're back down to like a dollar, so a couple of dollars. So let's do as much as we can now, and we won't regret it. I mean, the only thing we'll regret in ten years is not doing more of it.
So let's educate and spread the word as much as we can. And really that's what you're seeing as like a resistance to the IMF and World Bank. As you're seeing in the countries that got structurally adjusted the hardest you saw them, you saw them flock to bitcoin and different kinds of like basically stable coins and bitcoin like the highest, Like if you look at the percentage of people in those countries who use these things, it's like
way higher than in America. It's like Nigeria or talking like twenty percent of Internet users using bitcoin and cryptocurrency in some way. Where's in America it's like around ten percent. Yeah, So it's like it's just it's it's people are seeking a way out, and it makes total sense, and I think you can expect to see more of that.
So higher the pain, the more people are going to move to the solution.
I'm just glad that there is a way out. I don't know, again, I don't think it saves entire countries and I don't think we're speculating, but what's not a matter of speculation is that it can save individuals and that's something we're celebrating and we will continue to focus on that.
Yeah cool, well, well we can wrap it up with that. Thank you, Human Rights Foundation.
Yeah h r F or h r h h r F Yeah, h r F, Yeah h R h r F dot org.
Yeah, so everyone check that out? Anything else?
Oh?
Your books?
Got check out the Bookhidden Depression. The book on Amazon. It's on the Bitcoin mag site if you want to buy it with bitcoin, So uh, you do what you wish.
Yeah, I would.
Appreciate if you checked it out, left a review on Amazon. That'd be great. And thank you so much for having me Mark, all right, thanks, appreciate it.