Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights
嘉宾：Alex Gladstein
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The following is a conversation with Alex Gladstein,
Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation
and the Oslo Freedom Forum.
In recent times, Alex has focused on how cryptocurrency
and especially Bitcoin can be a tool for empowering democracy
and civil liberties in the world.
Most crucially, parts of the world
that are living under authoritarian regimes.
As a side note, let me say that I have been learning a lot
about the ways in which money can be used to amass power.
And in the same way, the decentralization of money
can be used to resist the corrupting nature of this power.
Alex and I do not agree on everything,
but we strive for the same betterment of humanity.
He's sensitive to the suffering in the world
and is dedicating his life to finding solutions
that lessen that suffering.
Whether Bitcoin is one such solution, I don't know,
but I think it has a chance.
And that means it is worth exploring deeply.
I'm staying in this path of learning patiently
and with as little ego as possible.
I hope you come along with me on this journey as well.
This is the Alex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
We recorded this conversation a while ago
and I thought I lost the audio
and was really disappointed with myself
for messing this thing up.
But luckily last week I found it
and so rescued from out of the abyss of non-existence.
Here's my conversation with Alex Glassstein.
What are some universal human rights
that you believe all people should have?
- So free speech, freedom of assembly,
freedom of belief,
freedom to participate in your government,
the freedom to have privacy,
the freedom to own things, property rights.
These are all basic fundamental negative rights,
what we call them.
These are the basic fundamental human freedoms.
- What does negative rights mean?
- Negative rights are liberties
and positive rights are entitlements.
So after World War II, when the UN came together,
it was largely a compromise between the Communist Soviet Union
and the free United States, right?
So the US had on its side
of the UN Declaration of Human Rights,
a bunch of liberties, essentially,
things like free speech, freedom of association,
freedom of assembly.
The Soviets wanted entitlements like the right to work,
the right to have housing, the right to water,
the right to a vacation.
So you actually read the UN Declaration for Human Rights.
It's a negotiation between the Soviets and the Americans.
Later, there was another document in the '70s
released called the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights.
And this is what HRF uses as its sort of like lodestar,
its founding document.
And this is like essentially an international agreement
on the negative rights.
Those are the things we choose to focus on
because essentially, authoritarian regimes can commit fraud
and claim they're giving the positive rights,
the entitlements, without having
any of the negative liberties.
And they can do that because they don't have
any like free speech or press freedom.
When you take people's basic fundamental freedoms away,
it's quite easy to make like a Potemkin village
and pretend that there's the entitlements
and that we have good healthcare.
And it's the same sort of thing
that authoritarians have done for decades,
Cuba and Venezuela and the Soviet Union.
- Do you think it's possible for authoritarian regimes
to manipulate, to kind of lie about the negative rights
as well by saying that the people have free speech,
the people have the freedom for assembly
and all those kinds of things?
Can't you still manipulate the idea
that the citizenry still has those rights?
- The opposition leader of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim,
he once told me the funny joke that,
you know, in my country, we have freedom of speech,
we don't have freedom after speech.
So yeah, they can absolutely manipulate whatever they want.
But I've done research into socioeconomic data.
And I guess what I'm telling you
is that authoritarian regimes,
which make up 53% of the world's population
across 95 countries, about 4.3 billion people,
those who live under those regimes
are subject to massive fraud
when it comes to things like literacy rates,
life expectancy, any sort of socioeconomic data,
economic growth, they can do this
because there's no free press.
So for us at the Human Rights Foundation
and for people like me,
we believe that the negative rights, the liberties,
the things that are in, for example,
the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution,
these things are the table.
And then we can build on top of that.
We can build the rest of our societies on top of that.
The freest countries in the world
have both the negative liberties and the entitlements,
like Norway, for example.
But there's a big difference between Norway and North Korea.
In North Korea, they only claim to have the entitlements
and they definitely don't have the liberties.
- Do you think there's one right
that's more important than others?
You kind of suggested the freedom of the press,
maybe freedom of speech,
that if you take that away,
all the other ones kind of collapse
along with like from a ripple effect.
Is there something fundamental
that you like to focus your attention on
to defend, to protect, to make sure it's there?
- Yeah, I think free speech is probably the most fundamental.
It's probably why the founders chose to make it
into the First Amendment.
A lot of things are downstream from there.
Property rights are also very, very important.
Obviously, we've seen the toll of violent redistributionism
in over the last 100 years,
whether it was Lenin or Stalin or Mao or other regimes
and everywhere from Ethiopia to colonialists everywhere
to North Korea, it's not a pretty legacy.
- Is free speech clear to you as a concept?
There's been quite a few debates,
especially in the digital age,
what it means to violate freedom of speech.
There's been a lot of new, like novel mechanisms
for people to communicate with each other,
like especially on social networks.
And it seems that unclear,
because a lot of times those are managed
by private companies, it's unclear how much protection
do the citizens have to have when they're communicating.
A lot of people are being censored
on these social platforms.
Some people, even presidents,
get removed from those social platforms.
Have you thought about the freedom of speech
in the United States, but in the world,
as it's implemented in the 21st century,
given the internet and all those kinds of things?
- There is a Soviet dissident named Natan Sharansky
who survived the regime.
And he wrote a book in which his thesis
was essentially the way that you can define a free society
is through something called the Town Square Test.
Can you go to a public space where you live
and criticize your ruler loudly
without fear of retribution?
If you can do that, you have free speech.
I think that's a pretty good litmus test.
Most people in this world cannot do that.
If you live in Havana, if you live in Moscow,
if you live in Beijing, you cannot do that.
And that's not a free society.
In Austin, Texas, in Boston, Massachusetts,
in London, in Santiago, Chile, in Tokyo, Japan,
in many democracies, you can do that.
And I think that that's a really helpful
basic sort of litmus test.
- Does the content of the criticism matter?
Can it be complete lies, meaning conspiracy theories
that involve claiming that the leader is,
let's say, a lizard/pedophile/you know,
I'm not saying that those are lies, look into it,
but they're very unlikely phenomena.
So like, does that matter?
- I think it ends poorly when the state
tries to restrict speech.
I think that's kind of how I would define censorship.
I think censorship and deplatforming are two different things.
Private companies, you know,
they get to make up their own rules
about what's allowed on their platforms.
And I think that's very different from a government
with guns and an army restricting the speech
of its citizens with threats of violence.
These things are different for me.
- That violence is a fundamental difference.
I don't know, I've gotten the chance to have dinner
with Alex Jones, and I've talked to him a few times offline.
And it does, I understand why people are so off-put by him,
but it does bother me that he's universally removed
from every platform.
It feels like there's many more evil people,
§02Transcript · 09:04–17:42
bad people, compared to Alex Jones,
who still are given a voice on these platforms.
And so I'm uncomfortable with the universality
of the application of this censorship
by these platforms.
But on the flip side, you're right,
there's not a violence, there's not tanks,
there's not guns behind that censorship.
- Yeah, it's a bit of a generalization,
but Alex Jones would be in prison, or dead,
if he were in North Korea, or in Cuba,
or in Russia, or in China.
The authorities would not tolerate him to do what he did.
And here, he can kind of do what he wants.
He's encountering some resistance
in the marketplace of ideas.
Large organizations, corporations,
and a lot of public sentiment
in different parts of our country don't like him.
They're doing their best to drown out his voice.
But that's very different from a violent threat
of censorship from the state.
And that's what we study, that's what I study.
What is the state doing?
That's kind of paramount for me.
- Yeah, and that's true.
Because in the marketplace of ideas,
there could be a company that springs up
that gives Alex Jones a platform,
and the United States is not going
to prevent those companies from functioning.
Of course, there's, from a technology perspective,
there is AWS removing Parler from the platform.
It gets a little weird, you know,
as you get closer and closer to the compute infrastructure,
because then you get closer and closer to the state,
actually, the more you get to the infrastructure
that's usually managed by the state,
the closer it gets to then the control of the state.
I would argue AWS is pretty damn close
to infrastructure that's kind of controlled by the state.
If you especially look at other nations, China, Russia,
there's, I don't know who runs the compute infrastructure
for Russia and China, but I bet the state
has complete oversight over that.
And so that level of compute infrastructure,
having control about which social networks can
and cannot operate is very uncomfortable to me.
But you're right, I think it's good to focus
on the obvious violations of these principles
as opposed to the gray areas.
Of course, the gray areas are fascinating.
You mentioned HRF, Human Rights Foundation.
What is it?
What is its mission?
- Yeah, so I've been working for HRF since 2007.
We are a charity, a nonprofit, a 501(c)(3) based in New York
and our mission is to promote and protect individual rights
and freedoms in authoritarian societies around the world.
So again, we define about 95 countries as authoritarian,
meaning it's either a one party state
or opposition politicians are outlawed or persecuted.
There's no real free speech, there's no press freedom,
there's no independent judiciary,
there really aren't checks and balances
and even trying to create like a human rights organization
or like an environmental group would be illegal.
And the majority of the world's population
lives in that environment, that's very important.
- You said 53%.
- 53%, 4.3 billion people.
- And I saw you outlined a lot of different sources
of suffering in the world.
And then you sort of put people living
under authoritarian governments
as like more than all of them.
I forget all the examples you provided, but--
- Sure, I mean--
- Yeah, maybe you can mention if you remember.
- The number of people who are refugees,
the number of people who suffer from natural disasters,
the number of people who live under abject poverty,
the number of people who don't have access
to clean drinking water, all of these are dwarfed
by the number of people who live under authoritarianism.
And yet it's not something that we talk about a lot
because people are mercantilist
and the powers that be are happy to sacrifice freedoms
and privacy for money.
We live in a profit seeking world.
To get evidence of this, take a look at the list of sponsors
of the upcoming Olympics in China,
where the CCP is currently committing genocide
against the weaker population.
Or look at the number of people and the famous investors
who went to Saudi Arabia a couple months ago
for the Davos in the desert.
I mean, Ray Dalio was there, all kinds of people were there.
Or at least they were invited
and they said they were gonna go.
And this is a government that at the time
was torturing a female activist
who just wanted to drive a car.
This is a government that had murdered Jamal Khashoggi
in a brutal fashion just a couple years earlier.
So I mean, at the end of the day,
when it comes down to brass tacks,
I mean, the powers that be,
even the free countries are led by people
who are very, very happy to sacrifice
all these pretty words about human rights
when it comes down to profits, unfortunately.
- So do you think capitalism,
that's maybe one of the flaws of capitalism
is it turns a blind eye to injustices against human nature,
against the human rights?
Like it turns a blind eye to authoritarian governments?
- Look, I think that at the end of the day,
free trade is actually really good.
And you can just look at France and Germany as an example
of how a capitalist structure would develop.
If you have two capitalist actors,
they're very unlikely to fight each other.
There's very unlikely to be violence, right?
These are two countries which basically murdered
some large percentage of each other's male population,
three times in a hundred years
in three different wars, right?
And now today, war is like unthinkable.
And a lot of that is because of increased collaboration,
increased trade.
So when you have two capitalist actors,
they act in a very productive way with each other.
But as soon as you introduce an authoritarian actor,
all bets are off.
So I think what you have is a conflict
between capitalist actors and authoritarian actors.
And at the end of the day, people need to,
yes, have more than just capitalist intentions.
In the geopolitical level I'm talking about,
they need to actually take a stand for principles.
Otherwise you have athletes and businesses and governments
that are all too happy to do business
with the Chinese Communist Party, for example, right now.
I think that there is a little more
than just kind of the pure profit, yes.
- You mentioned what are the signs
that the state is an authoritarian state.
How do you know if you're living in an authoritarian state
or when you study another nation
and analyze the behavior of another nation,
how do you know that's an authoritarian state?
Is it as simple as them having a dictator?
Is it as simple as them as declaring
that they don't have a democracy
or is there something more subtle?
- There's a couple of good litmus tests.
One is actually, can you have a gay pride parade?
(laughing)
- That's a good- - I'm serious.
It actually lines up perfectly.
It doesn't matter what religion the dictatorship is.
They don't like minorities and they love to scapegoat,
whether it's gays or religious minorities, et cetera.
So it lines up pretty well.
- That's really interesting.
- If you cannot have a gay pride parade in your country
because you're fearful that you're gonna get
the crap kicked out of you,
probably live in an authoritarian regime.
- I'm sure that's not just about some kind of homophobia.
Why is that?
That's really interesting.
- It's scapegoating. - 'Cause that's right.
I'm going through, so the-
- Fascism scapegoats minorities.
- There's an other.
You create an other group and then you-
- Yeah, I mean, Uganda is a great example of this,
but so is Saudi Arabia, so is China.
I mean, so is Cuba.
I mean, these are all regimes which demonize
the LGBT communities.
- It's interesting because, maybe you can correct me,
but from my very distant outsider perspective,
sort of the way that certain authoritarian governments
speak about gay people is it's almost like,
what is it?
We don't have gay people in our country kind of idea
as opposed to scapegoating, which is like-
- Well, denial is the most powerful form of demonization.
I mean, this is what the Iranian dictatorship does.
A few years ago when Ahmadinejad,
who was then sort of the de facto leader,
he came to Columbia University and he tried to give a speech
which you can look up and he tried to claim
that there were no gays in Iran.
And that's the most powerful form of demonization
is trying to just wipe out your outer existence.
There's other good litmus tests too.
§03Transcript · 17:43–25:56
For example, you can think about comedy.
Can you make money making fun of your government
on television?
If you cannot, you live in a dictatorship most likely.
I mean, it's shocking to people that I work with
who live in dictatorships when I tell them
that not only are comedians able to safely make fun
of our government, but they get paid very well to do so.
That's a hallmark of a free society.
So that's another good litmus test.
- Hear that Tim Dillon, you should go to North Korea.
Check it out.
- Yeah, and look, there are tons of flaws with democracies.
- These are really good tests by the way.
- United States is a deeply flawed country in many ways.
Our prison system is a disaster.
There's a horrible war on drugs.
We committed a grievous crime in my opinion,
by invading Iraq.
Like we did a lot of problematic things,
but our core architecture is still an open society.
The people who criticize the US the most,
usually live within it.
And if they were to move to a different country
and try to use that criticism against their new rulers,
they wouldn't fare so well.
So whether it's Chomsky or whomever,
if they were to go to Cuba and live in Cuba
and try to criticize Cuba like they do America,
it wouldn't last very long.
So I think what's important to distinguish
between open societies and closed ones,
or like free societies and authoritarian regimes,
it doesn't mean that your government's
gonna be good all the time.
What it means is that the citizens
have a way to push for reform,
have a way to hold the rulers accountable.
So even if you don't like what the US government does,
whether it was under Biden or Trump or Obama or Bush,
we can rotate them through voting.
And we have an independent Supreme Court
that rotates over time.
And we have people that we can elect directly
to serve our interests.
And then there's like a free press and there's lobbyists
and all kinds of people that jostle for power.
So there's a separation of powers.
And I like to think about a free society really
as like at the bottom of the foundation of the pyramid
really would be free speech.
And then you would have civil society,
like for example, human rights organizations,
environmental groups, stamp collectors, athletes,
any groups that come together beyond the government's
sort of strict instruction.
And then on top of that, in the third level,
you have separation of powers.
Again, what I'm describing.
So authoritarian regimes don't really have
any of these layers to them, right?
And then at the top, then you put elections,
but the elections are meaningless
if you don't have the foundation below.
Every dictator gets elected.
Kim Jong-un gets elected.
He's the only person on the ballot.
Every dictator from Hitler to Chavez, they all got elected.
Elections on their own mean literally nothing.
You have to have these other layers beneath
to actually be an open and free society.
I think it's very important for people to understand.
- Although Hitler in an interesting way,
at a certain point just said,
"I'm gonna be a ruler forever," which is interesting.
There's an important switch that happens
when you, as opposed to having a facade of elections,
you just put that aside and saying basically like,
"We're not even doing this."
- Yeah, there's like a ladder that you climb, the election,
and you pull the ladder up,
and then no one else can climb up.
This sadly happened in Egypt,
and it was quite predictable
after Mubarak was ousted after the Arab Spring.
Morsi came in, and it looked like the Muslim Brotherhood
was not really gonna be very democratic,
but it didn't really matter
because then the military came back,
and now we have Sisi, who's even worse than Mubarak.
So a lot of times in these regimes, unfortunately,
it's very difficult for people
to build that democratic society afterwards.
Some people have told me that when you live
in a totalitarian or an authoritarian regime,
it's kind of like a political desert.
What grows in the desert?
Scorpions and cacti, right?
So basically people with very extreme views
because you, as an authoritarian ruler,
your best method for control is to get rid of the moderates.
You have to crush the moderates.
That's very important.
You wanna have the only opposition to you be extremists.
That way, when you go and have negotiations
with the United States,
you can kind of hold up the terrorists or whomever,
the extremists, and say, "It's either us or them," right?
And then the realists who run the US government
are gonna choose you,
and that's one of the reasons why the US government
has supported so many dictators around the world
over the last few decades.
- Do you think authoritarian systems emerge naturally,
like that's the natural state of things?
If you incorporate what human nature is,
well, is there always going to be corrupt people
that rise to the top?
And we almost have to construct systems
that protect us against ourselves kind of thing.
Another way to ask that is,
what kind of systems protect us from our own human nature?
- We started with authoritarianism or autocracy, right?
Ruled by one or a small group oligarchy.
And all humans lived under this structure
for the virtual bulk of all human existence,
only until pretty recently
did we start having actual democracy.
The idea that we should be ruled by rules,
not by rulers, very powerful.
Invented in many places across the world.
Western Africa had this idea,
and so did the ancient Greeks.
And they started to implement it.
Although, as most know,
we didn't have full democracy for a long, long time,
'cause it was only property owners, only men,
only people of a certain race.
But this idea that we can rotate our rulers
and that we could be ruled by rules is extremely powerful.
And it really, for me, the ideas behind this,
I think, unlocked a lot of the Industrial Revolution,
these small personal freedoms that were allowed
in some countries but not others.
And they unlocked a lot of the scientific innovation
over the last few hundred years.
And to me, there's a really straight line
between scientific inquiry, free speech, freedoms,
and then more prosperity
and more effectiveness as a civilization.
So I think that democracy, ruled by the people,
is definitely an upgrade from autocracy or oligarchy,
which would be ruled by one or ruled by a small group.
And I think that the Democratic Revolution
has been an incredible thing for our world.
You could do half-class full, half-class empty.
The half-class full is that almost half the world
lives under democracy.
That's an incredible achievement.
(laughing)
- But just under half.
- Yeah, just under half.
But that's billions of people.
It is billions of people.
And if you look at the progress of things,
it's getting better and better and better.
I mean, if you, you know.
- Yeah, we're a little bit of a stalemate here.
Democracy's really blossomed between World War II
and the year 2000, especially in the '80s and '90s.
You had an incredible wave of fall,
where many, many authoritarian regimes fell
and were replaced by democracies.
I think around 2015, the acceleration kind of
came to a standstill a little bit.
There's some good news in some countries
and there's bad news in others.
Like in the last 10 years, you've had, for example,
the Philippines has gone backwards.
Thailand has gone backwards.
Bangladesh has gone backwards.
Turkey has gone backwards.
That's like a half billion people right there.
So you've had some positives.
Like, you know, there was positive movement forward
in Armenia, Malaysia, some other countries.
But we're kind of at a stalemate right now.
And what most people fear about where we are right now,
who I respect, is what is the digital transformation
of the world due to this like progress of democracy
or of open societies?
And that's what concerns me the most.
- Oh, interesting.
So I have, and we'll talk about one of the most
fascinating technologies, which is Bitcoin,
how it can help.
But I have a sense that technology,
like most technological innovations will give power
to the individuals, will fight authoritarian governments
as opposed to give more power to authoritarian governments.
§04Transcript · 26:00–34:14
But your sense is there's ways to give,
for technology to be utilized as a tool
for the abuse of the citizenry.
- I've seen both.
In my work at Ahrefs, I started by helping
to put together backpacks with foreign information
that we sent to the Cuban Underground Library Movement.
So in Cuba, you know, to own a book,
at the time you had to have the government's permission.
There was very little internet penetration, okay?
So we would send in movies, you know,
V for Vendetta dubbed into Spanish,
and people would sit inside their homes
and they'd watch it.
And they would answer questions with each other.
And it was very powerful.
And then after that, I worked with people
inside North Korea.
We would send in flash drives.
We have this program called Flash Drives for Freedom.
We've sent over a hundred thousand flash drives
in our work into North Korea,
a country of about 25 million people.
That's a lot.
It's a big, big difference.
That's, you know, many, many millions of hours
of films, books, movies, et cetera.
So I've seen the power that technology can have
where, you know, in the '60s and '70s,
you know, to get, to break an information blockade,
you had to like send in crates of books
into a communist country.
So now all of a sudden you can send the entire contents
of what was once the Library of Alexandria
on something the size of your thumbnail.
Like that's remarkable.
So obviously I've seen the positives of technology.
We'll certainly get into Bitcoin,
but I'm, you know, very concerned
about essentially big data analysis,
like what people call AI or general, you know,
specific kinds of AI, like very concerning.
I think these are very authoritarian.
I mean, it's very hard to make a case
that AI is going to be good for human rights.
Very difficult, in my opinion.
But it may be good for health.
It may be good for our efforts to protect the planet.
It may be good for a lot of scientific things.
I find it very hard to believe
it'll be good for civil liberties.
- Oh, that's fun.
This is fun 'cause I disagree.
- Give me your examples.
I'm serious.
What AI applications will improve civil liberties?
- I thought you meant examples of stuff
that's already out there.
'Cause I can give you examples that, for example,
the kind of things that I would like to work on,
but also the kind of things I'm hoping to see,
which is AI could be used by centralized powers,
by governments, by big organizations
like Facebook and Twitter and so on,
to collect data about people.
- Right. - Right.
But I believe there's a huge hunger among people
to have control over their own data.
So instead, you can have AI that's distributed
where people have complete ownership
of their little AI systems.
So like the kind of stuff that I would like to build
or like to see to be built is,
you could think of it as personal assistance
or AI that's owned by you.
And you get to give it out.
You have complete control over all of your data.
You have complete control over everything
that's learnable about your day-to-day experiences
that could be useful in the market of goods and ideas
and all those kinds of things.
So it has to do with,
so I know you talk about the surveillance,
which is very interesting.
It's who gets to have control of the data.
And I think, I believe there's a lot of hunger
among regular people to have control over their data.
Such that if you want to create a business,
you have a lot of money to be made
from a capitalist perspective
by providing products that let people control their data,
where you have no control.
- Sounds like to me, you're describing encryption
or at least the ability to encrypt,
the ability to use digital keys to secure your property.
And that to me is a very powerful individual right,
force for individual rights, very powerful.
And it's what animates Bitcoin ultimately,
which we'll get into.
But for me, at least the way I look at it today in 2021,
the threat from big data analysis
used by governments and authoritarian regimes is terrifying.
I mean, to actually see
what the Chinese Communist Party is doing,
where they have hundreds of millions of cameras
overseeing society,
cameras that can tell who's a Uyghur and who's a Han,
that to me is terrifying.
And everything is sorted instantly.
There are super computers that are built in Urumqi,
in Xinjiang for this explicit purpose.
And it allows the government to quickly sort
and basically commit genocide a lot faster.
And it's really scary.
So I do agree and I've seen personally
how powerful technology can be as a force for freedom.
But I'm very, very worried about big data analysis
in the hands of governments.
- See, that's funny 'cause I tend to see governments
as ultimately incompetent in the space of technology
to where there will always be lagging behind.
So you look at what the Chinese surveillance systems
are doing.
I believe once it started getting bad enough
that technologies would be created to resist that.
So to mess with it from the hacker community,
but also from the individual community.
So surveillance is actually very difficult
from a centralized perspective to detect,
to collect data about you, to detect everything you are,
because you can spoof a lot of that information.
So I believe you can put power in the hands of the citizens
to sort of feed the government fake data,
to confuse it at a mass scale
to where it'll make their surveillance less effective.
But that, okay, that could be very sort of hopeful.
- Yeah, I mean, the practical application in Xinjiang,
which is a territory the size of Alaska,
where a large percentage of the population
has been put into prison camps.
The current issue of the New Yorker
has an absolutely harrowing essay
that tells the story of one such woman
who in, I believe, 2017 got sucked into one of these camps
and it took her a year or more to get out.
And she's talking about how in each home in Xinjiang,
each home has a QR code on it that the police can scan
and get like a quick instant download of who lives there.
Each car has like a scannable code.
Every single person has their DNA taken
and the DNA is being sifted through
and analyzed by algorithms.
So this is like the Chinese government's laboratory
for how can we use technology to oppress.
It's like sort of like digital Leninism.
And that to me is one of the biggest risks
in our world today and it's not talked about enough.
- That's interesting.
So technology basically enables
the automation of oppression.
- Absolutely.
- So like.
- But define technology.
- Big data analysis and maybe specific AI, et cetera does.
But encryption allows us to fight back.
It's very important people understand
we have tools to fight back.
Big Brother can only grow if it can feed on your data.
If it can't get your data, it can't grow.
So you have to willingly give up stuff to the cloud
for this monster to grow.
We can make the monster hungry and shrink it
if we give it less data.
And I think that's where I would agree with you
in terms of like wanting to empower people
to be able to do stuff on their own terms
in a sovereign way.
And yeah, maybe you're kind of thinking
like the personal assistant who helps out Tony Stark
or something like that.
And that's yeah, as long as there's no back doors
and that's a sovereign thing that you've popped up
and created and you have the keys to, absolutely.
But practically speaking, if we're talking about
the world today as is, we need to be concerned
about the way that authoritarian regimes
are using big data analysis.
And they're gonna buy the software and this equipment
from the Chinese government.
They're already doing it.
Street level surveillance has already been purchased
by governments everywhere from Latin America
to Sub-Saharan Africa to the heart of Europe.
There's been huge scandals in Britain
over their purchase of Chinese surveillance technology.
Part of the Chinese government's Belt and Road campaign,
which is basically to build the infrastructure
of this century and to be in control of it,
part of that idea is to ship out
and install surveillance technology,
§05Transcript · 34:17–42:38
both at the telecom level and at the surveillance level
across dozens of countries around the world
and have that back door.
There's this national security law in China,
which states that companies that are Chinese,
which are abroad, are mandated to send data
back to Beijing.
So they are building this huge global surveillance state.
And again, not talked about enough,
you should go Google and research the Belt and Road.
I think it's very important that we confront this.
- Yeah, I'm really glad you're talking about it
because it's probably important to understand.
I'm also hopeful that as people get educated
about how much their data, when collected, unencrypted,
but in general, can be used to harm them.
I mean, it's almost like an education.
I feel like if you know,
it's a double-edged sword
because I feel like people become fearful too easily
and that actually has a very negative effect
on the quality of life.
In some sense, you want to have tools
that allow you to live freely as opposed to live in fear.
If you live in fear, it's not a good way to live.
So it's a balance.
- It's a free society versus a fear society.
- Yeah, fear society.
- And look, people are,
it's all about the trade-offs you make in your daily life.
Like living more privately with more freedom
is less convenient.
You trade freedom and privacy for convenience
and comfort and speed.
Absolutely, it's an engineering decision
in everything that you do.
In the West, in advanced democracies,
we have not necessarily personally seen
the results of that trade-off
because we live in these free societies
that have these checks and balances and freedoms.
But as soon as you step into an authoritarian state
and you make those trade-offs,
your life immediately becomes more restrictive.
And what people are worried about is that
even in advanced economies, market democracies, et cetera,
the people are worried that they might not survive
the great social digital transformation.
Look at what the NSA is capable of doing.
I mean, for now, it's not that big of a problem
because we still have free speech.
But it's deeply concerning what Snowden revealed,
and it's a nice reminder that we need to be focused
on privacy and encryption and on helping users
become more sovereign regardless of where you live.
It's kind of like a crutch to live in a free society.
Like, you know, it's almost like a free lunch in a way.
You're not gonna be sent to a prison camp
because of the color of your skin or your beliefs
or what you say about the government.
And you're very lucky.
Again, most people do live in a society
where you can be persecuted for those things.
And I feel like, especially in America, we forget that.
We're distanced from that really strong reality, you know?
- On the topic of Snowden and the NSA,
what should we be thinking about?
'Cause that feels like already an outdated
set of conversations because of the information
we've gotten from the past.
It feels like everything's gotten quiet now
in terms of how much we actually know about the--
- Hugely important.
I think the two lessons from Snowden are A,
the Patriot Act and the War on Terror and mass surveillance
are not necessary for our democracy and for our freedoms.
This was a false choice.
We never had to sacrifice them to be safer.
And we've seen that.
Government has spent hundreds and hundreds
of millions of dollars on these surveillance programs
that you can read about have amounted to very little,
except for tremendous bureaucratic waste
and the erosion of our freedoms.
But at the same time, we need to practice more privacy.
And the dramatic increase in the usage of Signal,
for example, has been really, really great to see.
It's fantastic that tens of millions of people
are downloading Signal and using it.
You should try to be onboarding more and more
of your conversations onto Signal, for example,
where governments can't see what you're saying.
Maybe they can see the metadata.
Maybe they can see that you sent your phone number,
sent a message to someone else's phone number at this time,
but they can't see what's inside.
So using encryption in your life is very, very important.
That's a good starting point.
I would say that's kind of step A.
- The ideas of democracy,
the ideas of the balance of power,
all the ideas that we were talking about,
the constructs, were inventions.
I wonder if there's other inventions
that will allow us to sort of not engage,
not give governments or any centralized institutions
so much power.
Like why do citizens have to use Signal?
Why?
Because that's an effort.
You have to be,
'cause you have to like understand exactly why.
So that's a nice little solution
for a particular set of problems.
But like there's a million other ways
that data I'm sure is being collected constantly.
If we don't create a system
that prevents the establishments of these centralized powers,
then we'll always have this problem.
- Yeah, I think we can keep it simple
for the purposes of this conversation.
You have politics, information, and money.
Those are the three things
I would encourage us to focus on.
In politics, yes, someone invented democracy.
I mean, whether it was the Greeks,
the West Africans, or many others around the world
around the same time invented this idea
that we should be ruled by rules and not by rulers, right?
And that has evolved dramatically, right?
And then you have information.
Information also used to be highly centralized, right?
Think about how rich you had to be
to gain access to a library before the printing press,
or how much money you had to have,
or how close to the king or the feudal lord you had to be
to be able to have that ability.
But now, the majority of the world,
billions of people have access to all information
in their pocket, and they can set up an account
on social media and get their word out.
So not only politics,
but information has been dramatically decentralized.
And I would say that encrypted messaging
is kind of a corollary to that second innovation.
And as much as now people are more effortlessly,
like signal is a lot easier to use than PGP, for example,
they're more easily able to practice privacy
when it comes to having private messages globally.
These are all good things, and we need to keep pushing.
And I think money is, honestly,
maybe the most important piece.
And that's why I spend so much time thinking about Bitcoin.
- Okay, so politics, information, money.
- Yes.
- Let's talk about money.
What is money and why is it important
to think about in the context of human rights?
- I have witnessed money be peripheralized.
It has taken a back seat in the human rights conversation.
The idea of currency, who makes the money,
who makes the rules, who issues it,
who sets the interest rates, all these things,
it is not on the menu of human rights activists.
If you just do like a systematic study
of like the human rights discourse
over the last several decades, money is not there.
It's also not really taught in schools.
Like children don't really learn about money.
Where does it come from?
It's kind of hidden from a lot of our discourse.
Only really when I got into Bitcoin
did I start learning more about money.
I spent 10 years at the Human Rights Foundation,
and we did all kinds of programs around the world.
We convened Oslo Freedom Forums in different places,
and I got to meet hundreds of dissidents.
And very rarely did they ever speak about currency
or bank accounts or moving money from one place to another.
But when I started asking them,
they always had amazing stories about money, always.
I mean, my friend Ivan Mawire,
who started the Disflag Movement in Zimbabwe,
which ended up toppling Robert Mugabe,
when I asked him to come to San Francisco
to give a talk about hyperinflation, which he lived through,
he said, "No one's ever asked me to do that before,
"but I'll come."
And he came, this was about three years ago.
And the first thing he did when he got on the stage
was he opened up a shirt and he brought out a necklace
that had the 1980 Zimbabwean dollar on it.
And he said, "We in the activist community wear this
"as a symbol of where our country used to be,
"because the Zimbabwean dollar
"used to be worth two British pounds."
And then, of course, over the next two and a half decades
of economic mismanagement and corruption by Mugabe,
it got inflated out of existence, right?
You've seen those like $100 trillion Zimbabwean notes.
§06Transcript · 42:41–50:50
So he had to live through that,
which was terrible and crushing.
But he is an expert on money.
If you actually talk to human rights activists about money,
they know a lot about money.
They're just not usually asked to talk about it.
So for me, money, when I study money or look at money,
it's really about control.
Who is creating it and how much does the population know
about the creation of that money?
And when it comes to Bitcoin, it's really the people's money.
Like there is no shadowy force in charge of it.
We all know the rules.
We all know how it's gonna get minted
and how it's gonna get printed.
And that information is out there for everybody to see.
And there's no like special group of rules
for one group of people or another group.
A billionaire and a refugee are the same
in the eyes of the protocol.
This is a rather revolutionary concept.
And in the same way that democracy allowed us
to decentralize politics and have checks and balances,
and in the same way that the internet
is this culmination of technologies
that allowed us to decentralize information,
access to and control over it,
Bitcoin, you know, decentralizes money.
I mean, no longer again, is there one group of people
who can just change it arbitrarily?
We're all in the same playing field.
And I think that that is a tremendous innovation.
- You know, from one perspective,
money and inflation, hyperinflation,
is a kind of symptom of corruption
as opposed to the core of the corruption.
And at the flip side, in terms of resisting the corruption,
resisting the abuse of human rights,
it's interesting to think that fighting inflation
or fighting the mismanagement of the money supply
is a way to fight back authoritarianism
or to fight authoritarianism.
And that's an interesting concept
that I think was introduced to me
by just plugging myself intellectually
into the Bitcoin community,
but also just cryptocurrency in general.
It's to like, it's not that money is a symptom.
You know, money is a tool to fight back too.
- Absolutely.
- So in what way can Bitcoin be used
to fight authoritarianism?
- Yes. - Not just in the United States,
but all of those 53% that you're referring to.
How can Bitcoin help?
- So we talked about authoritarianism
and we talked about the surveillance state.
To me, Bitcoin has two kind of key mechanisms
through which it can help us.
Number one, it's a sovereign savings account.
It's debasement proof,
meaning the government cannot print more
whenever they want.
This is very, very different from fiat currency,
which by its very name, its very nature,
can be issued on sort of demand, right, by the rulers.
And while I live in a country
where the rulers do a reasonable job
of managing the money, most people aren't so lucky.
So only 13% of humans in the world
live in a country that's a liberal democracy
with property rights
and has what we call a reserve currency,
meaning a currency so stable and desirable
that other countries save in it
at the central bank level, right?
You basically have the US, the UK, Australia,
Switzerland, the Euro, and Canada.
I mean, those are like reserve currencies
and these are liberal democracies
where people have reasonable guarantees
over property rights.
Everybody else either lives under like a weaker currency
or an authoritarian regime.
That's 87% of the world's population,
almost 7 billion people.
So for them, a sovereign savings account
that's permissionless,
meaning you don't have to have ID to use it,
is a big, big deal.
And a lot of people talk about Zimbabwe or Venezuela
as some like isolated cases.
Oh, well, you know, hyperinflation only happens
in those two countries.
I actually did some research into this
and there's about one point,
over, you know, close to 1.3 billion people
who live under double or triple digit inflation.
This is not an isolated instance.
We're talking huge countries.
Nigeria, 200 million people, 15% inflation.
Turkey, 15% inflation for 100 million people.
Argentina, 40% inflation for a country of 45 million people.
So you can go down the list.
There's about 35 countries where like people's earnings,
their wages are literally disappearing
in front of their eyes over a matter of weeks or months
against things like the dollar, gold, real estate, right?
So this is a huge issue.
It absolutely is a human rights issue for me.
I mean, when it comes to your time and energy,
having control over that or having it stolen from you,
I think this is pretty clear.
And Bitcoin is like an immediate, low cost,
easily accessible solution for people.
And I've learned this not from my own assumptions,
but by talking to people, by interviewing dozens of people,
whether it's in Sudan,
which currently has triple digit inflation,
or people who've escaped from Syria,
who have used Bitcoin to get their wealth out of the country
and then also to make payments back to people inside,
or Venezuela or elsewhere.
It's very, very powerful.
- I think some very small percentage of people
have used, have owned Bitcoin.
What's it something like 1% of the world?
Whatever the number is, it's small.
- Call it 2% for the purposes of our time.
About a little under 200 million people.
- Wow, yeah.
- At most right now.
- So if we look at Zimbabwe, Sudan, if we look at-
- Small percentages of people.
- Do you think the technology is mature enough?
'Cause it's not just about the idea,
it's also about the implementation of it.
Like, you know, Bitcoin for the most part
requires access to the internet.
- Yeah.
- And what do you think about accessibility
of this technology now as a method of activism
in the worst parts of the world?
We often think, like all the conversations we've had
about Bitcoin is essentially middle-class,
like wealthy people relative to the rest of the world.
They're kind of talking with sort of investment
and high concept ideas.
Then there's also the people in the world who are suffering,
who are living through hyperinflation.
They may not have a computer or access to the internet.
How do you think Bitcoin can help there?
- Yeah, so again, we have one clear use case,
which is a sovereign savings account
that you can control, right?
The other use case is an unstoppable payments network.
This is very important for people who live behind,
for example, sanctions.
Like the US basically weaponizes the dollar
and it like sanctions different countries.
And instead of sanctioning like a handful of rulers,
for example, which I would support,
this is like a Magnitsky or smart sanctions.
Sometimes we'll just say,
we're just gonna shut off this whole country.
- So the people suffer.
- Cuba or Iran are good examples.
Average people suffer, right?
So people in those two countries I just mentioned,
Cuba, Iran, or even Palestine,
which is also sort of like blockaded by the Israelis.
So you have Cuba, Iran, Palestine are three good examples
where people inside all three of those countries now
are using Bitcoin to do commerce, do their business,
send money back and forth.
- So it's sanction resistant.
- Sanctions resistant.
It does not get stopped by sanctions, right?
And also it's again, remittances are extortionate.
I mean, the average remittance costs has a high fee,
takes several days.
If your family is in Ghana or something like that,
or Nigeria, and you live in the United States,
it can take time to use Western Union.
Sometimes, it gets paused, it gets lost, there's issues.
You have to deal with customer service,
screw that.
I mean, the person has a cell phone,
which increasingly is the case.
I mean, by the end of next year,
more than five or six billion people,
depending on different estimates,
will have smartphones basically by the end of 2022.
We're talking like the vast majority of humans
will have access to smartphones.
They can all have sovereign Bitcoin wallets.
And there's even ways to access Bitcoin without the internet.
But I mean, we can get into that.
- There's like hardware wallets and so on.
What do you mean by sovereign Bitcoin wallet?
§07Transcript · 50:54–58:52
- You know, most users today are using Bitcoin
in a custodial manner.
So this is kind of like having a bank account,
where you have a deposit account at a bank, right?
So you have a claim, right?
You go to the bank and they have some of your money,
and you take it out, right?
With an ATM.
So what I would call non-custodial Bitcoin use
would be similar to withdrawing cash from an ATM.
You have it, it's a bearer instrument, okay?
So when I-- - Bearer instrument.
- That's what it's called, the bearer instrument.
- I know, I apologize.
I'm outside this community, it just sounds funny.
- No, no, no, yeah, so like a bearer instrument
would be like a bar of gold or a bank note,
or Bitcoin that you control,
meaning you have the seed phrase, right?
Which for the listeners essentially is 12 to 24
English words that you write down on a piece of paper.
That's your password to get into your Bitcoin account.
And that gives you that bearer instrument quality, right?
But unfortunately, most users still use Bitcoin
in a custodial way, meaning they buy it on Coinbase.
- So Coinbase-- - Or Square,
or something like that.
- You would put into the-- - Custodial.
- Into the custodial category-- - It's like a Bitcoin bank.
- Yeah.
- And look, the good news is you can withdraw
to your own control.
And in the Bitcoin community, we try to teach this idea
that it's not your keys, not your coins.
In the same way that if you deposit your money at the bank,
you might not get it back.
I mean, it's low likelihood, but it's very possible.
Same thing in Bitcoin.
If you wanna get the full experience,
you wanna actually custody your own Bitcoin.
You wanna put it, whether it's on an open source
software wallet, like the Blue Wallet is a good one
for people to check out, or a hardware wallet,
like Cold Card, for example.
There's different ways to do this.
But essentially, around the world, people are innovating.
Don't think so low of your fellow man,
you know what I mean?
People are able to figure this out.
I get a lot of flack from people saying,
"Oh, Bitcoin's so hard to use."
I read this article in the New York Times
saying this guy in Silicon Valley lost all of his Bitcoin.
That's 'cause he was a moron and didn't care about it.
This guy lost all this Bitcoin
because it wasn't worth much 10 years ago.
And he forgot the password.
But if you're receiving your remittance
from a family member, you're not gonna lose the password.
- And you trust in the basic intelligence of people
to figure this out and to innovate and so on and figure out.
- We're watching it, man.
- Yeah, you know, it's kind of funny,
but people in the United States
are not very savvy with money.
It's exactly the way you're describing it.
When you have very little money,
you're going to be savvy with money.
You're going to understand exactly the mechanisms that work,
that are resistant to the corruption that's around you.
I mean, I remember sort of growing up in the Soviet Union,
the general bureaucracy and the corruption
of everything around you.
You figure out ways around that.
You figure out ways how to function
within that kind of system to survive under inflation,
under hyperinflation, under all like basically
being unable to trust any kind of,
even the police force and all those kinds of things.
You figure it out.
And that same way, perhaps Bitcoin could be
all the different ways to store and gain Bitcoin.
These mechanisms could be something that's figured out
in the third world as opposed to in the United States.
- Oh, I mean, I would say the capital of Bitcoin
could easily be Lagos and not San Francisco
in terms of users, in terms of people using it.
And again, the two use cases as a savings account
and as an unstoppable payment rail.
These are the two ones that you should really think about.
This is how people are using it today.
Now, when it comes to, could it possibly be adopted
by like a sufficient majority of the population?
I say yes.
And it's very similar to the way the mobile phone spread.
At the beginning, the cell phone was only for rich people.
It was only for the elite.
It was huge.
It didn't work very well.
The interface sucked.
It was clunky.
Over time, it got smaller and smaller and cheaper
and cheaper and easier to use and easier to use.
And today, everyone benefits.
So you're gonna watch a similar technology
upgrade process with Bitcoin.
Already in the last 10 years,
Bitcoin has gotten so much easier to use.
I mean, there are now mobile wallets that are so slick.
There's one called Moon, M-U-U-N wallet
from a team in Argentina.
And these guys created it because they saw their own currency
devalued like three times in the last 20 years.
And they've had a hell of a time trying to get their money
back and forth in different countries.
So they were like, let's make this easy for people.
Again, this is the people's money.
This is something that cannot be controlled
by governments or corporations.
And that makes it very powerful.
And I think it's actually quite exciting
to be here in the adoption phase.
- In the early days.
- Yeah, man, this is the early days.
- And you also mentioned that sort of Bitcoin
is the mechanism of a peaceful revolution.
So it's a way to resist authoritarianism in a peaceful way.
It's ultimately a, you know,
you mentioned sort of politics, information, and money.
It seems like in the space of money,
this is one of the peaceful mechanisms.
- It's a way to opt out.
You can opt out peacefully from the system.
- And yeah, it's beautiful.
It's beautiful.
So Bitcoin is currently by far the most popular
sort of dominant cryptocurrency.
That said, and I look forward to your letters,
Bitcoin maximalists.
That said, you know, Internet Explorer
was the most popular browser for quite a long time.
And then other browsers came along that out-competed it,
like Chrome, Firefox, people should check out Brave.
It's a great browser.
I think it's my favorite browser at this point.
Anyway, so why Bitcoin?
Why not another cryptocurrency?
If you look in the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years,
do you think it's possible for another cryptocurrency
like Ethereum or something that's not even here yet
to overtake Bitcoin as a mechanism?
- When you say overtake, what do you mean?
What do you mean overtake?
You mean number of users?
Do you mean a price per coin?
- Yeah, the number of users,
'cause we're talking about 1%, 2%.
And if we are serious about this being in the space of money
as a way to give individuals power,
fight the centralized powers that abuse the money system
and so on, how do we get from 2% to 50%, right?
To 60%, to 80%.
That jump, is it obvious to you?
Not obvious, but do you think Bitcoin
is the way to get from 2% to 50%
or are there going to be other cryptocurrencies
that may emerge that get us to 50%?
- No, I mean, Bitcoin is the innovation.
The innovation is in having the decentralized mint.
No one can change the monetary policy.
Everything else is downstream from there.
In Bitcoin, the mean would be 21 million.
There's never gonna be any more than 21 million.
Every other cryptocurrency
either has an inflationary policy,
meaning there's gonna continue
to be more and more of it over time,
or its monetary policy can be changed
by a small group of people.
This is vividly on display in Ethereum,
which is like the second largest
and second most robust cryptocurrency, right?
I've talked to senior Ethereum engineers
over the last couple of weeks,
trying to figure out what is the monetary policy of Ethereum?
No one can tell me.
No one knows how much ETH is gonna be minted
in 2022 and 2023 after they shift to proof of stake.
I've seen estimates that range from 100,000 to 2 million.
So at the end of the day,
you're gonna be trusting a small group of people
to make those decisions.
That is what we are escaping with Bitcoin.
So all these other cryptocurrencies,
they might have their use cases.
Virtually all of them are not.
It's very important for people to know
that if you take like the 4,500 cryptocurrencies
on CoinMarketCap, almost all of them are scams, straight up.
Even the ones that have like noble intentions,
§08Transcript · 58:55–1:06:43
I just don't think are gonna add that much value ultimately.
I think Bitcoin to me is the innovation.
And that's because it has a monetary policy
and an issuance schedule that cannot be changed.
And that's what gets me so excited about it.
I mean, that's why it's such an important tool
for human rights.
- Yeah, it's interesting 'cause when you grow from 2%,
when you grow in the number of people using it
at the scale they're using it,
it's going to need to be resistant to governments
and institutions messing with it.
So it's interesting to see
what kind of cryptocurrency would be resistant to that.
Obviously, Dogecoin is gonna win, let's be honest.
- Well, I mean, look, the number two cryptocurrency
in the world probably by like how useful it is to people
is Tether, which is totally centralized, has blacklists.
So I'm not saying there won't be like new digital assets
that are lumped into this category that have usage,
but it's not the same innovation as Bitcoin.
It's just sort of building on this idea
of like a Euro dollar maybe,
like a dollar that is minted outside
of the control of the US Federal Reserve, right?
It would be a Euro dollar.
So stable coins are kind of like Euro dollars
just minted by private actors in a way, right?
But they're still tied to the dollar.
They're pegged to the dollar.
They're not escaping the system.
Escaping the system is Bitcoin.
We aren't reliant on the dollar.
We have our own full store value, medium of exchange,
unit of account eventually.
And the Bitcoin world will be denominated
in different terms.
And I think everyone, everything else will be tied to it.
I really do.
- It does feel currently like Bitcoin is like pirates
or something like that.
And there's still like the central banks
that are like the main navies of the different nations.
It's just like, if you talk about scale,
so there's going to be a moment
if Bitcoin continues to grow in its impact,
when governments are going to seriously contend with,
what do we do with this?
Do you think about those moments?
Is Bitcoin, is the cryptocurrency world in general
going to be able to withstand the serious legal pushback
from countries, from nations,
especially authoritarian nations?
- Yeah, so it's been interesting.
It's been 12 years, okay?
More than 12 years since Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin.
And they haven't been able to stop it.
They have tried.
They have tried a lot.
I wrote a long essay for Quillette on this.
Like, why haven't governments been able to stop Bitcoin?
And my thesis is essentially that there's been like this mix
of different kinds of technical, social,
and economic and political incentives and disincentives
that make it very difficult.
And I think to me, the best way to think about it
is that Bitcoin is like a Trojan horse.
So just to actually tell that story just a little bit,
because I think it's important to understand
the classical mythology tale,
I find this very interesting.
- Of the actual Trojan horse?
- Of the actual Trojan horse, yeah,
which was told in the Aeneid, actually, by Virgil, right?
And the idea was the Greeks had been like
trying to take the city of Troy for like a decade
at these like impregnable walls, and they couldn't do it.
And Ulysses and the rest of the Greek army were like,
we don't know what to do.
So Minerva, the god of strategy and war,
kind of like they get this idea from her, I guess,
to actually try to use subterfuge and trickery
to take over the city.
So the idea is to, and this was sort of hatched by Ulysses,
right, to put this horse together
that would kind of be like a gift.
So the idea was the Greeks just like pretended to leave,
right, they deserted, they left behind one soldier
and this horse, and the Trojans looked at it
and they were like, what's going on here?
And they brought in the soldier,
and the soldier's like, look, they left,
they're so sorry for all of the desecration and blood spill.
This is their gift to you, it's honoring Minerva.
It's like this like, you know, trophy for you guys.
And there were actually people inside Troy,
Cassandra, a prophet, as well as Laocoon,
who was like a priest who said, no, no, no,
this is obviously a trick, this is obviously a trick.
But they were like dispatched and ignored
because the horse was like, it was just like so badass.
So the Trojans were like, bring it into the city.
So they brought it in themselves.
No blood spilled at all, right?
In the middle of the night, of course,
we've, what you realize is the horse was packed
with Greek soldiers and they come out
and they let the army in,
which was like hiding behind an island.
So this idea that like, something could be so attractive
that you really can't say no,
even if you know what's inside of it,
is it played in Bitcoin.
So like, in Bitcoin has this number go up technology, right?
It is what we call it in sort of shorthand, NGO, NGU, right?
But what people don't realize is that NGU
is like the Trojan horse.
Inside the Trojan horse is FGU, freedom go up technology.
So dictators and rogue regimes and corporations
are gonna buy, mine, tax, accumulate this thing
because it's the best performing financial asset
in the world.
What they don't realize or they're gonna have to ignore
is that they're also aiding and abetting
this freedom technology,
which allows individuals to be sovereign
and eventually erodes their power.
There's no question that rogue regimes and bad actors
are already used and will continue to use Bitcoin.
The thing is, when you think about a North Korea
or a Venezuela and that government instructs
some of its bureaucrats and cronies and officials
to start stealing Bitcoin or accumulating it or whatever
for short-term gain to get around sanctions
and use it to buy dollars or something like that, right?
Which they can't get normally.
Well, guess what?
All those people who the regime has instructed
to like figure this thing out and use it,
they're all gonna realize, oh my God, this is money
the government doesn't control.
And it's gonna spread like a virus, okay?
So this is like the idea of the Trojan horse allegory.
Why I think it's so important and powerful with Bitcoin.
All the people talking about Bitcoin today on TV,
they don't care about freedom or privacy.
They just care about number go up.
But what they don't realize is what's concealed within.
And that's very, very powerful to me.
- So the people talking about Bitcoin on TV
are maybe investor types.
- Professional investors, corporations,
and soon governments.
I mean, you just had today, this morning on CNBC,
the leader of the Republican leader
of the House of Representatives, a Congressman,
saying like, we need to be pro-Bitcoin as a country.
And the other day, Peter Thiel had a very interesting
comment where he was basically like,
let's not fall behind China in this race.
So you have influential people in our government,
like sort of posturing for this like, you know,
Bitcoin race that's gonna happen in the next 10 years.
You're gonna see this.
Countries are gonna compete to stack Bitcoin.
Absolutely.
- So you believe the thing that's shiny and sexy
like the Trojan horse is the number go up.
- It's too hard to ignore.
- And to define that a little further,
meaning it does seem like the more people get excited
and start using Bitcoin, the more its value grows.
So it's just a good--
- Feedback loop.
- Yeah, it's a feedback loop.
And then the reason you're excited about it,
especially is that FG.
- Yeah, freedom go up.
- Freedom go up, which is it ultimately gives power
to the individuals to, so decentralize the entire system.
- When Tesla stacks Bitcoin,
they're just doing that as self-interest.
They think it's gonna be a good inflation hedge, fine.
But what they maybe don't care about,
don't realize or they don't need to care.
I mean, Bitcoin's power is it like co-ops people
into promoting a freedom tool,
even if they don't care about,
or even if they hate freedom, it doesn't matter.
So when Tesla stacks Bitcoin and the price goes up
and more interest goes up
and more people around the world are like, wow, Bitcoin,
then more people get involved.
Again, more adoption, more price, more developers,
better user interface, more privacy tools,
more mining, more network security.
It's just this like positive feedback loop
that continues to grow.
And it will grow intensely in the next decade
as we go through the adoption cycle.
§09Transcript · 1:06:45–1:14:02
And the reason why I'm so excited about this
is the human rights world,
again, to get back to our previous conversation,
is very hard to find people who have the empathy
or the altruism to actually make a difference abroad
in places like China or Saudi Arabia or North Korea.
People are very quick to just like,
they'll just quickly toss off the pretty words
that they care about human rights
as soon as profits come into play.
So there's no alignment of incentives, right?
The reason why Bitcoin is so powerful
is that it aligns the incentives.
All of a sudden, they can be as greedy as they want.
They are being forced to promote a freedom tool.
This I've never seen before.
And it makes me, it gives me a lot of like excitement.
It's very refreshing
because we've been laboring in the human rights space
and you have to like raise money
and it's all like nonprofit work
and you're like begging for people
to make a difference for you.
Here you have this like incredible asset
which people will accumulate out of self-preservation,
self-interest and greed,
and yet it will strengthen the power of the individual.
That is what we need to fight, big brother.
That's what we need to fight,
like what I'm scared is happening in China.
Like this growing authoritarian state,
which is powered by big data analysis.
This is our way to fight back.
And it runs on this like really interesting engine,
again, that like takes advantage
of our base nature as humans.
And I know that it sounds terrible for me to say this,
but I mean, ultimately we are self-interested
and it is hard to get people to care about others
living a thousand miles away.
You know, we are kind of localized in our empathy.
Speaking as someone who works to help people
who live in like a hundred different countries,
it's very difficult to get Americans
to care about what's happening in Belarus or in Kashmir.
It just is.
But guess what?
They're gonna definitely care about Bitcoin
because they wanna see their net worth go up.
They wanna do better for their family, et cetera.
They're gonna get into this thing
and it's really gonna like make that powerful tool
for everyone else who's using it.
So this interplay dynamic is fascinating to me.
- Yeah, I have to,
so I'm somebody who doesn't like
the corrupting effects of greed,
but it is also human nature.
- Yeah, I don't like it either,
but we have to be realists here.
You have to acknowledge it
and then maybe use it for your advantage.
- And it's not just Bitcoin itself.
Like exchanges today are adopting something
called lightning network,
which is a way to scale Bitcoin on a second layer.
Much like we had gold bars,
which we scaled with paper money.
And then we had visa credit cards,
which were a way of scaling the paper notes.
Bitcoin scales through lightning network.
It's a private instant globally final settlement network.
It's something you all should check out.
It's very, very interesting.
The exchanges aren't adopting lightning
for its privacy benefits.
Like lightning operates off the chain,
meaning surveillance companies can't see,
they can't do chain analysis on lightning
'cause it's on an onion routed second layer
kind of that works kind of like the tour project.
The exchanges don't care about privacy.
They're doing it because it reduces fees.
Lightning is cheaper and faster.
So again, we have this really interesting
alignment of incentives where like the freedom tech
is being promoted by people who don't,
I don't, it doesn't matter what their incentives are.
I could care less if they were altruistic or not.
And I think this is,
and you're gonna maybe see this even in the future.
There's more things coming in Bitcoin down the pike.
Lightning was enabled by an upgrade called SegWit, right?
Which took place a few years ago,
which was the culmination of the block size conflict.
There's another thing coming up
called cross input signature aggregation,
which may, if it takes effect in the next few years,
it may compel exchanges to collaboratively spend
all their Bitcoin together in a way
that really protects our privacy and fights surveillance.
But they're not gonna do it for moral reasons.
They're gonna do it 'cause it's gonna save them money
and improve their bottom line.
- Can you speak to that kind of collaborative
so that you can have multiple parties
in a single transaction kind of thing?
- Yeah, like you could do that today.
Absolutely.
It's called the coin join, for example.
But right now it's more expensive to coin join in Bitcoin.
You have to pay a premium for your privacy.
This would flip that on its head
and would basically say, if you have one transaction,
hey, pile them all in, have as many parties as you want.
The more parties you get in, the cheaper it's gonna be
per party, okay?
And that's not possible in Bitcoin today,
but it might be in the future.
But again, the beauty in Bitcoin are these ways
that it just aligns human incentives
and it aligns our most base desires and needs
and realities with freedom and privacy.
And that I've never seen before.
And that's why I think it's so interesting.
- So something that somebody like Eric Weisland
actually spoke to this, the idea of blockchain in general.
From like a 10,000 foot view,
the blockchain is a centralized place
to keep the record of everything that ever happened.
And does that concern you?
From a privacy perspective, from a control perspective,
even though it's managed, especially,
given the low frequency of transactions for Bitcoin,
you can have a lot of small computers across the globe
contain the entirety set of transactions,
all of those kinds of features.
Does that concern you that there's one place
where everything is made public
in terms of everything that ever happened?
- No, and I'll give you two reasons.
Number one, the Bitcoin blockchain
is ultimately a settlement layer.
It's kind of like something like Fedwire in the United States.
It's a way for like institutions to settle with each other.
That's what I think it's gonna be like
in 20, 30 years from now.
The average person's never gonna touch
the Bitcoin blockchain probably.
They're gonna use things like Lightning,
or unfortunately, they may use Bitcoin banks,
but they'll either use custodians
or they'll use second layer,
non-custodial solutions to interact.
The main chain's gonna get very expensive.
It's gonna be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars
or even more if the dollar starts to weaken
to make a transaction on the main chain.
And that will be reserved for like very large transactions
or transactions that need final, final settlement,
et cetera, et cetera.
And I think that that's fine and that's okay.
And it's very important that that ledger,
that settlement layer,
be kept by thousands of people around the world.
The Bitcoin blockchain is not centralized.
It is decentralized.
It is run by people like me who run a node at home.
I run a personal server.
I run the Bitcoin blockchain, no one else.
You run it.
That person runs it.
There's no one in charge.
- Wait, you have a full node?
- Yeah, I run a full node.
It's great.
I mean, it's pretty easy, man.
You run it and that way you can be sovereign
over all of your usage, right?
And you can run it on a Raspberry Pi
with less than 150 bucks of equipment.
And that's so important because again,
there is no Amazon web service vulnerability here.
That is a problem and I agree with you.
We're trending in a bad direction.
We're like, the government could just turn off
a big important website or a news source.
Well, they can't turn off Bitcoin
because it doesn't live on AWS.
It lives with us.
We are Bitcoin.
And I think that that's very, very powerful.
- And then you can have something like a lightning network
where you can escape some of the constraints
of the blockchain depending on your needs
of the privacy and all those kinds of things.
- Everything's an engineering trade-off,
but yeah, you can trade off some of the assurances
of the base layer to go into lightning, for example.
And there you can get more speed and more privacy.
§10Transcript · 1:14:04–1:21:56
And the things that Bitcoin lacks,
speed and privacy, for example,
you can get on these second layers.
So there's all kinds of cool engineering things
that people are coming up with.
But I also would just say,
anyone who says the blockchain,
like that's a red flag for that person
doesn't really know what they're talking about.
Like Satoshi didn't use the blockchain in the white paper.
Blockchain was a marketing term
that people came up with later to try and do this thing
that was kind of like, it peaked in 2015
and it continues to be an issue today
of it's blockchain, not Bitcoin.
And that was like a very corporate
kind of social attack on Bitcoin
to say we could take this like ledger part
of this radical thing that's for criminals
and all these bad people,
but we could take one part of it out
and we can bring it over here
and we can make it safe for everybody.
The real McCoy's Bitcoin,
I mean, Satoshi referred to it as the time chain.
I mean, really what they're talking about
is just these like blocks
that are connected chronologically of transactions.
It's really not that exciting.
The exciting part of Bitcoin is the proof of work,
where the transaction processing is done
by mining and by energy and by real world expenditures
instead of like some central ledger.
And when you remove the blockchain from Bitcoin,
it's not very, to me, it's just not that interesting.
- I don't know, to me, blockchain, time chain, whatever,
as it philosophically is a pretty beautiful idea.
I mean, it's pretty simple,
but nevertheless it's beautiful.
I'm a big database person.
It's an interesting way to store information
that especially that's totally publicly accessible.
I know that to Bitcoin, proof of work
is the fundamental idea,
but to cryptocurrency and digital money in general
and to money,
the blockchain is a really interesting idea to me.
The way I think about it is it's kind of physics.
And I like that there's a place that you can rely on
that's very difficult to mess with.
But it's not though, like it's outside of maybe Ethereum.
Every other blockchain is easy to mess with.
- So you're saying that proof of work
is what makes it hard to mess with.
- Absolutely, proof of work is the key.
And Ethereum is about to leave proof of work.
So it's about to go to proof of stake,
which is literally the existing system
where a small group of people
get to decide the monetary policy.
- Yeah, reputation has a lot of value there
and that it could be manipulated.
- I may sound brutal,
but I'm coming at it from a political science perspective.
For me, it's all about freedom versus dictatorship.
And that's why I find it so compelling
that regardless of how much power or might
or how many armies you have,
you can't change the rules of Bitcoin.
- If you're wrong about Bitcoin, what would that look like?
What kind of thing that in 10, 20 years that you're not wrong.
- Right, it doesn't pan out.
- It doesn't pan out,
but other things that actually make you feel good
about all the hard work you've done do pan out.
Something you haven't expected.
What might that be?
- Well, as we've talked about,
my career started in human rights
and in promoting individual freedom
and fighting authoritarianism.
That fight will continue on
no matter what happens with Bitcoin.
I think it would be a massive failure and a tragedy
if this project didn't work.
- The Bitcoin project.
- Yes, if the Bitcoin project didn't work,
honestly, it's one of the only things that gives me hope
because it is an effective way to push back
against creeping centralized control.
If for whatever reason, and I can't really see,
one of the reasons I'm so into it
is I can't really see how it's not gonna work.
Again, I think the Trojan horse allegory is too powerful.
These big centralized actors are gonna be too greedy
and they're gonna want some as opposed to banning it.
It's way easier for them to buy it than to ban it.
I think that's just what's gonna happen.
But if for whatever reason it failed,
I would have very little hope left
because really, I mean, the Chinese model
of centralizing all of your data and controlling it,
I mean, ultimately is a very, very powerful
sort of like arch force.
And I would be concerned that that would be
all of our sort of destiny.
- I do have to sort of push back
at a style of communication.
And you're not doing it today.
You're being exceptionally eloquent in arguing these ideas.
But me, especially just from studying history
and being very skeptical from growing up
in the Soviet Union, I'm very skeptical and cautious
when I see a community of people being very sure of an idea.
Doesn't matter what that idea is.
And there's a huge amount of certainty around Bitcoin.
Part of it is an important feature
because it's number go up.
- So far.
- Number go up is a really important part of the mechanism
to make sure that it grows in impact, network effects,
because I mean, it's really important to get excited
about idea for a take hold.
That's the way human nature works and so on.
But I also get even something that you mentioned
that others may not, if you mentioned blockchain,
you're sensitive to the attacks that have been mounted
where the word blockchain has been used.
- People have been fooled.
I mean, like people in the humanitarian sector
have been fooled into thinking
that some centralized blockchain project
is gonna help some refugee, all collapsed.
- There's a, yeah, there's a huge,
it makes me sad that there's a huge number of scams.
Like, you know what makes me really sad?
And just a tiny little tangent.
There's been recently, I guess with the growing platform
or something, there's been a bunch of fake
Lex Friedman accounts.
- Yeah, must have a million.
- But not only do they do stupid stuff,
but they've been messaging people.
- Oh, to get the Bitcoin and stuff like that.
- On LinkedIn.
- Totally.
- And people write to me and they're saying like--
- Tough man.
- I think it gets people.
I think they click on stuff.
I think they were not sure.
And it makes me think like people are gullible
or not gullible, but like they're just like I am,
which is they're like hopeful about the world.
They're optimistic about the world.
They're almost like naive about the evil that's out there.
- This is what goes wrong with Bitcoin.
And I've seen it.
People fall for these, I mean,
like in these different countries,
I'm trying to like talk to different people about Bitcoin.
And like the amount of like MLM schemes,
pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes,
there are just so many of them.
And there's plenty here too.
But like in Zimbabwe, I was talking to this guy
who is a reporter who studies the FX,
like the foreign currency exchange markets.
He's just saying one of the main reasons
people don't wanna get into Bitcoin
is because they've been scammed so hard
by all these other things.
So I would say that that's one way it could go wrong
is that like people just continue to be like afraid of it
because of things that are like that in the past.
- Well, it's not just the volatility,
it's just the, you know, yeah, having--
- Yeah, if you think it's a pyramid scheme,
you're not gonna wanna get involved.
- And in some sense, if I were to speak
to the Bitcoin maximalist community
is to maybe ease up on the certainty
because that gives me the signal that it's a scam,
to be honest.
So whenever somebody, whenever there's a lot of people
being cultishly excited about something,
I start being very skeptical.
It's like, you know, I used to like Green Day
before they became really popular.
And then the moment they became really popular,
I'm like, I don't know, he started wearing mascara.
And it's like, I don't know, I don't like him anymore.
So like, I'm very skeptical about evangelists of an idea
because I think Bitcoin on its own
is just a powerful idea that stands.
But I also understand that in a world
of a lot of competing ideas where there's a lot of scams
and a lot of money to be made through those scams,
that you have to be innovative in the kind of mechanisms
you use to break through the scam, the ocean of scams.
§11Transcript · 1:22:00–1:29:51
- I took this personality test and I'm a 99 skepticism.
So I was first, sadly, 'cause I was first introduced
to Bitcoin in 2013.
And I was like, eh, whatever.
And it took me four years to actually get into it,
to go down the rat pole.
I didn't really start to grasp it
and start getting excited about it until 2017.
So I was regrettably very, very skeptical for a long time.
And I just thought it was like, whatever.
So I appreciate that and you should be skeptical.
But ultimately you gotta believe in things like,
I believe in democracy, I believe it's good for people.
I believe it's better than tyranny.
I believe in the internet.
I know that we've had issues with centralization
of the internet, but I still believe it's better
to be connected than to have bridges between us.
And I believe in Bitcoin.
And to me, it's like a very similar progressive force
that we're encountering.
But yeah, be skeptical.
Nothing will befall you that's bad
if you're cautious and skeptical.
That's a good mentality to have.
- One thing we haven't talked about,
all the violations of the human rights
that authoritarian regimes do,
there's not a positive, but there's,
you mentioned that nationalism is a drug.
- Yeah.
- There's something beautiful about loving your country,
having pride in your country, loving the,
there's a feeling of belonging.
It could be country, it could be tribe,
it could be family, that's really powerful.
And that speaks to human nature as well.
And that can sometimes overpower everything else.
- Patriotism.
- Patriotism.
- Yeah.
- And sometimes it can be seen when you study history,
when you look at Stalinist, the Soviet Union,
or you can even look at Hitler and Nazi Germany,
we tend to paint patriotism in a negative light.
And then maybe when we look at the United States,
but even here in the United States,
people often paint patriotism in a bad light.
- You know, every time I say I love America,
so as an immigrant, I love this country.
It's funny how that's taken as a political statement
that people, I guess, on the right have been more active
in saying that they love the country
and people on the left have not sort of,
it's almost become a weird slogan
as opposed to a statement of just love.
And I understand that patriotism can be a slippery slope
into letting your government,
I mean, it's exactly what you're saying,
the value of freedom of speech is you hold your government
to account for all the ways they mess up.
- I mean, look, you have patriotism
and then you have jingoism, right?
It's very important that we stay on the patriotic side.
Like as an American, I'm very patriotic in terms of,
I love the values that this country was founded on
if you read the Bill of Rights.
And I love the fact that it was just flexible enough
that we were able to change it to grant,
or at least to try to grant all people the same rights.
It was not the original plan of the founders, right?
It had to be changed.
But since then we've remained,
those laws have remained and they're very good.
And I'm very proud of that.
What I'm not proud of is the jingoistic part of our country
where we invade other countries and bomb other countries.
I'm not proud of our prison system.
I think it's a huge stain on our nation.
I'm not proud of a lot of things.
So I think you can be patriotic,
but you can be critical of your country.
And that's important.
I feel like the jingoistic thing
is the thing that we need to watch out for.
That's just my own personal take.
- Out of all the projects
that the Human Rights Foundation works on,
what's the most important one to you right now?
Like what that's been occupying your mind.
- Yeah, I just read again,
this New Yorker piece that just came out
that you should read.
It's called "Ghost Walls."
And it's the story of how the Chinese Communist Party
is committing genocide right now,
just like other regimes did
and the Turks did to the Armenians
and the Nazis did to the Jews.
And it's happening again right now.
We said never again, and that's just not true.
We're letting it happen.
And again, with the business stuff,
like people are, like Airbnb is like a sponsor
of the Olympics, like what?
- At the individual level, at a business level,
how does somebody like me, who's just one little ant,
how does somebody like Elon Musk,
who's in charge of 10,000 ants fight it?
Like how do we--
- Yeah.
- How do we push back?
- A great blueprint is the fight
against the South African apartheid.
So we did a few events down in Johannesburg
and I've had the pleasure of being able
to go to the Apartheid Museum several times.
And it really does a good job of chronicling
how they were able to do it.
It took a while, there's no doubt,
but the way it was done was good.
Peaceful action from abroad was very important.
So there was like the Sullivan Principles.
So like you can peacefully protest as a company
particular regimes and it's very effective.
And not just corporations,
but like the Olympics is a great example.
Like Chinese government should not be able
to host the Olympics.
The IOC should say no, not until you close down
those prison camps.
This is a perfect, peaceful way to push back.
No one gets hurt.
Same thing when we had the Korean Olympics a few years ago.
North Korea should not have been allowed
any sort of symbolistic kind of hosting rights there.
They have prison camps, gulags that we can see
from outer space very clearly.
And their regime is the cruelest one on the planet probably.
Why were they able to sit and cheer
and get to sort of co-host the Olympics?
This is spineless.
Like the IOC, the Olympics and major corporations
should stand up, especially in the cultural sector
where you don't lose anything.
Like, you know, or you shouldn't have to lose anything.
So I think if we look at the way
that we forced the Apartheid regime out,
this international solidarity of musicians,
athletes, performers, celebrities is very, very powerful.
Unfortunately, today's celebrities are doing the opposite.
We just, you know, had this press release go out yesterday
about Akon, and he's off whitewashing the crimes
of the dictator of Uganda
and trying to build a future city there with him.
You know, if this was the 1980s,
Akon would be raising his fist and saying,
"We need to, you know, fight the Apartheid regime."
How do we get back to that?
You know, we need to think about that.
We have to figure out how to harness celebrities,
influencers, and companies,
and get them to actually stand up for something for once.
I mean, that's something we've lost.
We really had a spine against that,
and, you know, we've lost it, you know?
And you lose things, you lose them forever.
Look at Tibet.
Tibet was a big cause for people in the '90s.
Used to go to colleges,
and kids would have the Tibetan flags
all over their dorm rooms.
It was like Radiohead would have Tibet on the stage,
and everybody wanted, you know, free Tibet was a big thing.
Guess what?
Like, we've lost it for some reason.
It's not a thing anymore,
and Tibet has been totally colonized, you know?
So I think it's important that we find a way to unlock
an interest in the celebrity classes
among athletes, singers, presidents.
You know, we need to find a way to punish these people.
- Yeah, it's surprising,
'cause we've become more and more connected,
so we can communicate more effectively at a large scale,
and yet we seem to be worse and worse at real activism.
It seems like the outrage that's overtaken
the communication channels has been very US-focused,
and often more about outrage
and less about productive activism.
- I'm very jaded.
I mean, it's very difficult
to do these things at scale effectively.
I do not believe we will be successful
in boycotting the Chinese Olympics.
We weren't in 2008.
I don't think, and they're much more evil now,
and I don't think we're gonna be able to do it this time.
And again, to go back to the Bitcoin piece,
that's why I'm very interested in this thing,
§12Transcript · 1:29:54–1:38:18
because it doesn't require my altruism.
It doesn't require some famous singer
or some corporation to sacrifice anything.
They're literally just gonna follow their own profit-seeking
self-interested motives, and they're gonna end up
making a stronger human rights tool for other people.
- Freedom go up.
- FGU, man.
(Lex laughs)
- Do you think we're, it's kind of a dark question,
but you think we're headed towards a war with China,
the United States versus China?
- I hope not.
I hope not.
- In the cyber space and potentially even a hot war?
- I think there's too many people with too much money
to be lost to go to a hot war on both sides.
But eventually, we're just gonna,
someone's gonna have to stand up.
I mean, the subjugation of Hong Kong
and the genocide of the Uyghurs
and the colonization of Tibet.
I mean, Taiwan is the next big thing.
I mean, Xi Jinping has made it very clear.
You know, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan.
So we're gonna have to stand up for Taiwan
for different reasons, both for moral reasons,
but also for semiconductor reasons.
We need TSMC to be on our side.
We cannot have China take over TSMC.
So there's different reasons why we're gonna have
to protect Taiwan.
And you just hope it's not a hot war, I mean, at this point.
- Well, but also from inside the governments of China
and Russia as well, but China, I guess,
is the powerhouse here.
How do these governments get reformed?
Is there a hope for them to become democracies,
like true democracies, representative democracies,
and sort of reform them to be ethical players
on the world stage?
- No empire lasts forever.
And it's impossible to predict when these regimes fall.
I mean, no one thought the Soviet Union
was gonna fall when it fell.
Like if you studied the news and the scholarship of the era,
no one knew that the Tunisian government was gonna fall
after Mohamed Bouazizi lit himself on fire.
No one predicted that that would become
what we now know as the Arab Spring, right?
These things are impossible to predict.
And one day, the Chinese regime will fall.
I just, we don't know when.
- Yes, you know, and there's quite a few folks
who talk about the fall of the American empire.
And it also concerns me that we don't know
when that might fall.
You assume me as a very excited, naive American,
I'm very excited by this project that I think
is the beacon of hope in the world still.
But that's probably how you feel before it's the end.
It's a--
- Yeah, the party, you wanna leave the party
before it starts to deteriorate.
I think America could continue to have
like a major, major leadership role for a long, long time.
I think certain things we do will become
maybe no longer possible in terms of the way
we intimidate people on the world stage
especially the way we use our currency as a weapon.
I think that that's going to decline over time
as we become more of a multipolar world.
But I do still believe in America
and the values that we're founded on,
despite all the warts.
I do believe in us and I would prefer us absolutely
to be the most prominent of the multipolar world
vis-a-vis a regime like Russia or China.
Absolutely, there's no question.
- So we've been talking about states and nations.
But can we just briefly talk about Facebook and Twitter
and companies that have a huge impact on the world as well.
And actually one of the things that make America
a great nation is it is the place from which
these great companies have sprung up.
Is there, from a human rights perspective,
is there something that bothers you about Facebook,
about these large companies?
Is there something we need to fix?
Something we need to be upset about,
fight back on, reform, do some sort of real activism about?
- I'm very concerned about social media platforms
and companies.
It almost feels like we're losing the golden age
of the internet.
You know, when we could like go online
and interact with each other and share
and not be worried about censorship.
It feels like that was a golden age,
like in the late 90s, 2000s.
And now everything is becoming very politicized.
And I'm not sure that there's a solution.
Like I don't think there's a button we can press to fix it.
I'm kind of afraid that this is sort of
just what happens when society's digitized.
Like I think that certain opinions just become demonized
in the sort of, in the room, in the social room
that we have on the internet.
And I don't know if there's a magical solution there.
I do know that there's technological solutions
that will allow us to continue to communicate
and for creators to reach their audiences
without censorship.
And that's very exciting.
Like right now you could be de-platformed
from your, you know, from like whether it's Patreon
or YouTube or whatever.
And your bank account can be closed down, right?
There are emerging ways that Adam Curry,
like the Podfather and a bunch of other people
are experimenting with, where you can essentially
have your audio podcast across a whole bunch
of different, you know, platforms.
So, you know, it's censorship resistant.
And then your audience can pay you over Lightning
in streaming money.
Like they can stream you money as they listen.
So you're removing the whole advertising piece.
You don't need to do advertising anymore.
You have this direct relationship with your,
you know, your audience.
And this is possible with something like Lightning
where you can do streaming money that's censorship resistant.
And a lot of the people who are building
a Lightning network, for example, Elizabeth Stark,
who, you know, started Lightning Labs
and has done within her company,
the people that work with her have built a huge part
of the Lightning infrastructure.
You know, what animates her is this idea of like,
again, artists and creators being able to have
that direct ability to reach out
and have that peer to peer relationship
with their audience.
And I'm excited for that.
And I do think that's coming,
but I am very worried that the golden age
of like centralized social media platforms
is kind of behind us.
And I'm not sure how to fix that.
I don't know if that's like a fixable problem.
- Interesting.
I have a hope that it's a fixable problem.
I think it's fixable because there's demand
for it to be fixed.
That's the way I think about it.
- Well, is Twitter that bad right now?
Like, I mean, it's fixable in as much
as you can do a verification.
So you can give a blue check to someone
and then that person is like more credible
and they go to the top of the comments
and there's like tweaks you can do.
You can continue to improve it,
but it's not gonna fix the fact that like Twitter
can decide to kick off the president.
And like a lot of people are gonna be upset by that.
You know, like there's ways you can improve the UX
over time and they continue to do so.
Like Clubhouse is a lot of fun, great phenomenon.
So is Twitter Spaces.
So they continue to iterate,
but the censorship, the platforming piece,
I'm not sure is fixable because if you,
I mean, you watch the US government
haul Zuckerberg and Dorsey and whatever
in front of Congress, they want more censorship.
I mean, our elected leaders want more censorship, right?
- See, I just believe censorship is a really harsh word.
I believe it's possible to create technologies
where it's not Twitter doing the censorship,
but it's individuals doing their own selection
of what they want and don't want to see.
So for example, if you get sick and tired of Donald Trump
and whatever he says, or you love Donald Trump,
you get to select yourself.
Like you get to have more control over what you consume.
Twitter tries to do that a little bit,
but they obviously fail.
Where ideas infiltrate our view that we,
that like misinformation spreads really fast
and conspiracy theories spread really fast
to where the immune system that Twitter has created
to try to censor conspiracy theories and misinformation
is over firing and you're now censoring too many people.
So that, it's exactly the same intuition as you said before.
If the state is doing it, in this case,
Twitter's kind of the state,
it's not going to work out well.
But if you give power to the individuals
§13Transcript · 1:38:20–1:46:17
to do this sort of the, not even censorship,
but incentivization and de-incentivization
of great thoughtful content
and terrible low effort content,
then I feel like that's going to create a system
where there's going to be a much more open discourse
of ideas, dangerous ideas, difficult ideas,
controversial ideas, and people in a decentralized way
will be able to use their own intelligence
to select content, to share content, spread content.
- Let's keep it simple.
Let's look at one example, Twitter and Jack Dorsey.
And I think it's quite clear
that what he believes is the solution
is as you're kind of hinting at,
a more kind of like regionalized system,
which is not have one, we call it federated system, right?
Which does not just have like one company
in charge of everything, but there's an open protocol
and then there's like different instances, right?
So Twitter make, you know, Jack's dream for Twitter
is that Twitter is this open protocol
that the Russian government can use
and the Chinese government can use
and the Iranian government can use
and the American government can use.
And then Twitter as a company is going to use too.
And you as the customer decide
which implementation you want to join.
And there's going to be different censorship
on each instance or each federation,
but the protocol itself would be like untouchable.
This is kind of like the idea behind the internet, right?
There's like different parts of the internet
that are censored, but like at the very bottom
of the very bottom of the backbone of it,
it's like this globally connected,
relatively unstoppable thing, right?
So I think that's a pretty good vision
and Twitter's working towards that
with the Blue Sky Initiative.
We'll see, I'm a little skeptical that it like works out
'cause I've used, I use Mastodon, for example.
Mastodon is an example of a federated social media.
Now it's ruled by a benevolent,
each instance is ruled by a benevolent dictator.
It's just like, I happen to like this one, so I know.
So rather than trust one dictator, Twitter,
you could choose which dictator you wanna trust.
And that's kind of the federated model.
And maybe we head that way, but you lose things.
When it's federated, you lose the UX,
you lose the slickness and the feel
and all the millions of dollars
that they spend on developers.
Like Mastodon is like not anywhere close
to as nice to use as Twitter.
So I feel like it's, again, it's this trade-off
that we make with everything where it's convenience,
comfort, speed versus privacy and freedom, right?
It's very hard to have something that gives you both.
- I don't know.
I think, yeah, it is a trade-off.
- Have you used one of these things
that you feel like is good? - I have not.
The federated-- - Dude, they're not.
- They're not, they're not. - Not as good.
- But the federated, I don't think it's a good,
I think it requires genius, it requires skill,
it requires great design to come up with a way to,
there's a Pareto front here.
There's a right way to hit that trade-off.
And I honestly think there's the UX,
the experience should be centralized,
should be designed by the company,
but the data and a lot of stuff that could be used
to violate your basic rights
should be owned by the individual.
And I think there's a way to decouple those,
like create an incredible experience
to where you go there and you enjoy the market
where you can share your data
and have complete control over it
and always have, I mean, there's a lot of basic UX ideas.
Like just as an example,
I think there should always be in everything you design
a one button that's always there that says,
forget I ever existed, delete everything you know about me.
And maybe it's one button that you click
and it asks, are you sure?
And you have to be able to say yes.
Like that's a feature that's fundamental
to a good social network, I believe.
Like currently social networks,
first of all, most of them don't allow you to do that.
They don't make it transparent how much data they had,
who they shared it with,
and they also make it exceptionally difficult
to delete accounts.
So like that's a very basic starting point,
but having that button means that you have control,
but that's step one of the control.
There's a transparency of knowing exactly
when what data is being shared about you,
how much data is already being recorded about you.
All that is transparency.
And I believe that's a really good business model
because when there's transparency and control,
people would be willing to give over a lot more data
as long as they know what they're giving over,
as long as they know what they can delete.
- Yeah, I guess maybe you're more optimistic
about people caring.
I feel like so few people actually care
about their privacy and freedom.
I've just watched everybody give it up, you know.
But we'll see.
I guess just to bookend that,
I think we're at this moment
where obviously the centralized platforms
are just so much easier and better to use,
and to strike it out and venture out
and use a federated instance or something,
even like Keybase,
which is kind of like a cool encrypted way
to have group chats.
It just requires a lot of your time,
and a lot of people don't have that time.
But I will say one thing.
I do think there is this future
where we do go into more of this,
it's called a tribal model, or tribes,
which is this social environment
being built on top of Lightning
by an app called Sphinx.
And the idea is kind of like it's a decentralized Slack.
You have your Slack instance,
which has a bunch of people in the community,
and you have different ways to message each other,
and it's all encrypted.
And then it has plugins for things like Jitsi
instead of Zoom.
So like an open source encrypted video messenger.
It has ways to plug in the content you wanna get
from different platforms that you follow,
like podcasts, things like that.
And again, it allows you to pay those people directly
in a censorship-resistant private way.
- So it's really nice to connect
to the Lightning network.
- Yeah, so it's all sort of built on Lightning,
but the idea you can think about it is like
you're slowly starting to build up the idea of a WeChat,
but with freedom principles.
'Cause right now WeChat's the king
of convenience and comfort,
but of course it's feeding all that data
to the big brother in the surveillance state.
And then we have like our own versions over here in America
that are not quite as convenient or amazing,
but like we give up slightly less privacy and freedom.
But this thing has a lot of promising features to it.
It's worth checking out.
It's very like early days.
Like it feels like, I mean, I was pretty young,
but it feels like the '90s in the internet.
Like it has that feeling.
- The Sphinx does.
- Yeah, you know it's rough around the edges,
but you can feel the magic.
It's pretty cool.
- I'm very much like with Steve Jobs on this.
I think the founding principles are exceptionally important,
but at the end of the day,
the design of how sleek it is, how easy it is to use.
And that's not just like pretty icing on the cake.
That is, the icing is the cake.
- Yeah. - Because like,
how easy it is to use, how natural it is.
It's the Trojan horse thing.
Like you don't get, it has to be pretty and shiny.
It has to fundamentally connect
to the basics of human nature,
which is what is pleasant to use, what feels good to use.
You have to, you know, to trick people
into eating a broccoli, you have to put like a delicious,
whatever on it. - Well, again,
PGP is a kind of a pain to use, right?
For, if you want privacy.
- Yeah, so signals don't upgrade.
- Signal is way better.
I mean, and it's way better than it was five years ago.
And it's not quite as good as like,
not quite as seamless, right, as like a WhatsApp yet,
but it's almost there.
And they were able to do it.
And you're gonna see that with Bitcoin wallets as well.
I mean, they're almost there.
They're like, if you use like a moon wallet is like,
I mean, it's so cool looking and it's so seamless.
§14Transcript · 1:46:19–1:54:59
And they've spent so many hours
thinking about your experience.
We are getting there.
Whereas 10 years ago, it was like impossible to use.
- One of the things that signal doesn't have,
and I believe these kinds of applications need to have,
is like a, I hate the term, but killer app,
which is like a dumb,
but very viral and popular reason to switch.
I didn't see exactly, I mean, I've been using signal,
but I haven't seen a big reason to switch.
I mean, the reason--
- No, but I haven't switched everything to it.
You know what I mean?
- Yeah, the exodus to signal was in January.
They had a huge user surge for two main reasons.
One, hilariously enough, of course,
was Elon tweeted like, you should use signal, right?
Which is not insignificant.
And then the other one was that like WhatsApp
changed kind of some of its terms of service
and like announced to all of its users
in this little pop-up that it was gonna be
sort of like changing the way it handled your data.
That spooked a lot of people.
So these two things really combined
and tens of millions of people in the following weeks
between January and February joined signal.
It's like, it really has had its day in the sun.
And they are like frantically trying to keep up with it.
Like, and it's really nice to see
that this encrypted messaging service,
which prioritizes your privacy in a way that,
you know, the government, again,
may know like the metadata,
but doesn't know exactly what you're saying
unless they can get your hands on your phone.
I think that's very, very powerful.
So it can be done.
I don't wanna be too jaded here.
I think it can be done.
I think we can fight back.
And I think we can make,
continue to make these digital communications tools
and platforms in a way that really benefits us.
- Yeah, I'm not sure, but I'm hopeful as well.
I'm hopeful that if you look at the trend of technologies,
they ultimately are ones that respect privacy,
respect security and basic human rights.
I mean, that's at least the hope.
So Garry Kasparov, I'm Russian.
He means a lot to me on a personal level.
He is the chairman of Human Rights Foundation.
What does Garry have to do with anything?
What's your relationship like with him?
Do you like chess?
What are his specific focuses and ideas around the HRF?
Can you just speak to it in general?
- Yeah, so our chairman at the Human Rights Foundation
was Václav Havel, who of course was like
the famous Czech democracy activist
who helped lead the Velvet Revolution
and then ended up becoming
the first democratically elected leader
of the Czech Republic after the Soviet Union fell.
He passed away in 2011.
And it was very difficult to find a replacement
'cause who can fill Havel's shoes?
But if one could, it would be Garry, right?
So we like really tried to get Garry to join
and thankfully he agreed.
And we've had an amazing relationship
with Garry over the years.
I mean, he's been relentless in his pursuit of freedom.
I mean, he could have retired
and taken his career in a different direction
and he could be hanging out with Putin
and have a pleasure yacht and all kinds of stuff.
But he decided to risk it.
And if you actually study like the times
when he was running for president in Russia,
Masha Gessen followed him around in "The Man Without a Face."
It's a great, great book about Putin.
There's a fabulous chapter where she's following around Garry
when he's campaigning.
And I mean, he risked a lot.
I mean, he can't go back to Russia anymore.
He gave up his country.
He's given up a huge amount to be able to speak his mind
and to have this dream, this beautiful vision
of a free and democratic Russia.
He really believes in it.
It's been a great experience.
I work very closely with Garry.
We talk a lot.
We do different things around the world together.
He's come out to a lot of events
in different cities around the world.
And he's been a very active chairman.
This isn't some figurehead.
He's very involved and it's really, really great.
I mean, everything he's involved with is,
as one journalist who attends our events says,
when he walks in the room,
the average IQ of the room goes up pretty significantly.
I'm not a big chess person, unfortunately,
so I have not been able to connect with him on that.
But I think he probably would prefer it that way.
All he gets is people who wanna talk to him about chess.
So here we can talk about kind of human rights strategy
and how to improve our fight against dictators.
But he really has that moral clarity
that I really appreciate.
- Yeah, so he has a lot of fascinating ideas
about artificial intelligence as well.
He's opened my eyes a little bit
to the state of Russia today
because I've read most books on Putin
in the English language
in sort of trying to understand things.
And I try to look at it from a historical perspective,
like almost like we're living 100 years from now.
And I look at Putin as a important figure
in the history of human civilization
and study it in that way.
I think the way Gary looks at it,
he probably doesn't appreciate me looking at the way I do.
But the way he looks at it is
we can still change the direction of Russia.
And we individual human beings,
and we communities, and we nations can take actions,
have policies that can change the direction of Russia.
To me, I take a sort of going to the library,
passive view of studying fascinating aspects of Russia.
To me, Russia means,
like most of my family suffered through the Soviet Union
and I see beauty in suffering,
the poetry, the music, the stories.
And just there's so much love that emerged from the pain
that I just enjoy the music of that.
But to Gary and to many activists that I speak to,
they love not just the Russia of the past.
They have a vision and a hope for Russia of the future.
And they criticize me a little bit
for being a little bit too scholarly about the past
and ignoring the future.
And there's something to that.
So he opens my eyes to look to the future of Russia.
Gary and a handful of other Russian activists
that we work closely with,
including Vladimir Kara-Murza,
who again, I mean, it's just incredibly heroic.
The man has survived two poisonings by Putin.
They like to say that,
Russians will bring democracy to Russia on their own terms.
They don't need our help.
This is what Vladimir especially says.
But what he does say
is that we should stop propping up Putin.
Like that's kind of his,
stop kind of legitimizing him.
That's kind of his argument.
He's like, we don't need your foreign interference.
We don't need your ideas.
We don't need your help.
We can do it on our own,
but please stop like propping up our illegitimate ruler.
That's kind of like his point of view,
which I think is interesting and fair.
- Yeah, let me just say on one unrelated comment,
some people criticize me and others,
like Joe Rogan for giving people a platform.
I think in some cases that's applicable,
but I think in most cases, knowledge is power.
And there's no such thing as giving a platform.
The conversation just shines a light,
as long as you shine the light well.
And as long as in shining the light
and having the conversation,
you reveal something fundamental about the state of things,
about the people, whether that's Putin
or some of the other controversial figures
that have come up.
In a possible future conversation.
So I don't like this kind of platforming idea.
I think conversations save us.
They don't destroy us.
- Yeah, I mean, that's journalism though.
I mean, that's very different from advocacy
or strategic thinking about what to do with Russia.
Absolutely, yeah.
We should interview everybody
and everybody should know exactly what they're thinking.
- But journalism to me has become a dirty word
because it's done so poorly by so many people that...
I listen to sometimes certain programs,
like, I don't know,
like Meet the Press and the Fox Sunday program,
just certain things just to tune in
and see what different news medias are paying attention to.
§15Transcript · 1:55:02–2:03:04
And the kind of interviews they do
is like five minutes at most,
but usually it's like one minute.
It's these quick clip things and it's very gotcha.
And they're looking for ways
to sort of grab almost a misstatement.
They wanna catch you off guard.
They wanna ask the quote, like the harsh question,
but without any of the dance of conversation
that reveals the truth.
You can't just get to the truth by asking it.
You have to sneak up on it.
And I think that's an art form.
And I think that art form involves long form conversation.
Like I'm a huge believer in just,
I guess that's what's called, I don't know,
in-depth journalism or whatever,
like where you spend months or years on a story.
- Yeah, beautiful.
- In that same way, I think of long form conversation
is like you spend many hours
and you spend months and years preparing
for those many hours,
but like it's not this like short form
trying to get the most controversial
little tidbit of a story out.
And unfortunately, the funding mechanisms
behind journalism are such that they are incentivized,
clickbait journalism versus like in-depth,
long form digging for the truth.
- I have a conflicted relationship with journalism
because to me, press freedom is so core.
- Right.
- And independent journalists around the world
are so brave.
- Yes.
- Especially in countries like Russia or China, et cetera.
And really good journalism is still something
I absolutely, I love and I enjoy.
Like this, especially like to say again,
this New Yorker piece on what's happening to the Uyghurs
is incredibly well reported.
However, on the other hand,
you have this sort of clickbaity journalism
that's all about sensationalism
and that gets used as a tool.
I mean, whether it be against things like privacy
or Bitcoin or whatever,
you have like people who sensationalize
and it gets used in the service of the surveillance state,
the war on terror, whatever.
It's difficult, but I think journalism is essential
to a free society, but it can sometimes be,
it can wear my patience thin sometimes.
- Like it's been, to be honest,
it's been a huge burden on me personally,
if I were to just turn this into a therapy session
for a brief moment.
When I look at people, when I interact with people,
I'd like to see the best in them.
And the burden that weighs heavy on me
is sometimes people I talk to may not be
good people.
And I don't, I'd love to say,
I believe everybody has good in them.
And I try to focus on that.
The burden that weighs on me is sometimes that
there may be conversations where that's irresponsible,
where I have to also call people out.
I have to do enough of the hard lifting
and the hard work of knowing exactly
what are the bad things that that person has done.
And I also have the responsibility to call them out on it.
And that's for me personally, just an unpleasant feeling.
That's where speaking to journalism,
like I think journalists are too much focused
on the bad things a person has done
and not enough on the digging into the full complexity
of the human being behind all the things that have been done.
But at the same time, you know,
I can't have a conversation with Hitler
and not ask about the prison camps.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Yeah, no, so from the human rights perspective,
one of our programs is we try to go after people
who do PR for dictators.
So like, and a lot of people do.
Like PR firms in Washington get hired by all these dictators
and they make a lot of money to make them look good.
It's called whitewashing or putting lipstick on a pig
or whatever you wanna do.
Astro-turfing is like the fake,
you make fake social media accounts
to make it seem like you're popular.
But whitewashing is a huge issue.
So I think it's completely fair to interview like dictators
and stuff like that.
Amanpour does a pretty good job.
She's really good.
She makes sure that there's no messing around.
I mean, her interviews of Museveni recently,
the Ugandan dictator was very good.
I mean, she's basically like,
"Well, like, why are you rigging another election?
"Please tell us," you know?
And she's fearless and she's good.
And that can be a helpful thing to have
on YouTube as a resource.
But it's quite clear when it descends into a PR session
and you just have to be like very careful about it.
Like Asma al-Assad, the wife of the butcher in Syria,
you know, was like profiled by Vogue
and it was this whole rose in the desert thing.
It's a bunch of nonsense.
Terrible, terrible, terrible, total propaganda.
But a like honest interview where you're asking
about all the tough questions, very important.
So I think it's just a matter of like content, right?
- Is there a good resource to study whitewashing?
Like to know what manipulative PR looks like?
- I think you just, you should know,
if you've researched the topic,
you should know it inside you because it would be,
is there anything you're afraid to ask?
That would be it.
Make sure you're asking all the questions.
As long as you're asking all the questions that you have,
you're good.
But if there's something you're afraid to ask,
then maybe you're self-censoring, right?
- That's a good way.
It takes us back to that, like, what is it?
That litmus test about,
is your country allowed to have a gay pride parade?
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- So there's like obvious things that might be on your mind
that you just want to ask and you shouldn't run from them.
- As long as you feel like you're a free person
when you're interviewing, I think you're good.
- That's beautifully put.
Are there books, technical fiction, philosophical,
that had an impact on your life that you would recommend?
Or even resources like blogs, films?
- I have four books I'll briefly mention.
Number one is "The Fear."
"The Fear" had a deep impact on me.
"The Fear" was written by Peter Godwin.
It's about the systematic dismantling of Zimbabwe
under Robert Mugabe.
Peter is Zimbabwean and it is a riveting book.
I think everyone should read it
because it helps you understand what it's like
to go through not just authoritarianism
but also hyperinflation.
And I mean really, at the end of the day,
what "The Fear" describes is how Mugabe took this country
in the 1980s and he actually brought it back in time
to the 1920s in terms of infrastructure,
literacy rates, health rates, all these things.
He stole so much from the people.
And it's a heartbreaking book
but it's a very important book.
And it's a way to do excellent, excellent journalism.
So "The Fear" is a good one.
- And it's a personal story?
- Absolutely, yeah.
Because he was, it's part of his whole family story
and he's in there, he's interviewing people personally.
So I would say that one.
- Is it also connected, sorry to interrupt.
Is it, from the inflation perspective,
is it a good study of hyperinflation and the effects?
Does Bitcoin at all come as a,
- No. - You know,
a discussion of money?
Does that come into the,
or is it purely the experience of inflation
as almost a symptom of an authoritarian government?
- A little bit, a little bit.
I would say it's not deep.
I have another book on that which I'll recommend
in a second but I would just say
that it's a very powerfully written book
about how society can basically deteriorate
and how you can lose everything.
The second book is, I just mentioned it,
but "The Man Without a Face" by Masha Gessen.
Incredible book about modern Russia and Putin.
Just a masterpiece.
So that one is--
- Could be one of your favorite books
about Putin and Russia?
- That one's the best.
I mean, she's just so fearless, incredible.
She interviews Putin in the book at the end.
It's really good.
Third one is a fiction book called "The Mandibles"
written by Lionel Shriver.
This one's good.
§16Transcript · 2:03:05–2:10:45
It's a good gift book.
It's funny, it's dark, it's witty.
But it's about the United States losing its status
as the reserve currency and going into hyperinflation.
And what's interesting is that the characters
in the book map where we are today.
The book itself is about the late,
I think it's the late 2020s,
and we have a populist president who decides
to announce that the United States
is basically gonna default on its debts,
and the rest of the world comes up with a new currency,
and everybody switches to that one,
and the dollar overnight becomes worthless.
And all these economists are saying,
"No, it's fine, inflation won't be a problem."
And there's this one character who's an economist,
and he's basically, he gets to the point
where he's living as a refugee
in Prospect Park in Brooklyn,
and he's still saying everything's fine.
So it's dry, it's witty,
but it's also about the surveillance state,
it's about centralization of power.
It's really good.
So "The Mandibles" I would highly recommend.
So those three books, and then on the topic of Bitcoin,
because we talked about it a lot,
I would just say that my portal into Bitcoin
was "The Internet of Money" by Andreas Antonopoulos.
- Oh, wow.
- And I did it by audio book.
And I just think this is an important one
for people to start with,
because he goes through all the main concepts,
whether it be proof of work,
or how the network functions.
But he does it in a way that's extremely engaging,
and really fascinating,
and it really just sparked my curiosity.
- Is it discussing the technical sides,
or also the philosophical?
Because a lot of people mentioned
the Bitcoin standard as a philosophical entry
into the whole Bitcoin world.
- It's very different from the Bitcoin standard.
It's more for the average person.
It's not a history book.
It's a collection of his talks
that he gave over two or three years.
It's not very technical.
It's very approachable.
And some of it might be dated now,
'cause it's 2015, 2016.
But I mean--
- It's great to hear a shout out for Andreas,
because he seems to be one of the seminal figures
to make Bitcoin ideas accessible.
- Andreas is the GOAT.
- He's the GOAT.
- Andreas is the GOAT.
- Andreas is the GOAT.
- I know a lot of people have issues
with some of his more recent work,
but Andreas is the GOAT.
I mean, he's the reason I'm in Bitcoin.
- Yeah, that's fascinating.
And it's funny to watch the Bitcoin maximalist
immune system also attacking him,
and this whole feedback mechanism is working together.
It's fascinating.
- Well, I probably consider myself a maximalist,
but I really like Andreas.
So I think there's room for nuance.
- There's room for nuance in this world.
I'm glad to hear that.
If people are fascinated by your work,
what is the way to get more of Alex?
- So two years ago, I came together
with seven other people from around the world,
and we wrote a book in a book sprint.
We lived in a house for four days.
We wrote a book together.
It was really cool.
It was like a design sprint, but we did it in book format.
And my co-authors are from Nigeria, Venezuela,
the Philippines, from former Soviet Union, from all over.
And it's called "The Little Bitcoin Book,"
and I'm still proud of it.
It's 100 pages.
It's something you give to somebody
who knows nothing about the topic,
and it's not a technical book.
It's about the sort of social, political aspect of it,
like why is it important for you, for your finances,
for your freedom, for your future.
And we've translated it into a lot of languages by now.
I think English, Spanish, and Portuguese are for sale,
and at littlebitcoinbook.com, you go buy it.
But we've made it as a free PDF in Mandarin, Hindi, Punjab,
Korean, Uyghur, which I was really excited about,
Arabic, Farsi, and I mean, it spreads, man.
It's been really, really cool.
So I'm proud of that.
I also made a video that did very well
for Reason Magazine called
"Why is Bitcoin Protecting Human Rights Around the World?"
It's five minutes, and I feel like I tried to boil
everything that I wanna tell you
into this five-minute video.
So there's that, would recommend that.
And then if you're interested in the
why have governments not stopped it,
which I think is really intriguing,
I wrote this long essay in Quillette in February called
why haven't governments banned Bitcoin?
And maybe that'll be a helpful guide to some folks.
- Is it speaking to the Trojan horse idea
that there's something enticing about it?
- Yeah, at the end, it does get into that,
but it really also just kinda goes through technically
why is it hard to do a 51% attack?
Like, if a government wanted to,
could it really get all that equipment?
There's a semiconductor shortage, like it can't.
There's like certain things
that stop governments from doing it, right?
And same thing with like this idea of a 6102,
which would be based on the idea of the executive order 6102,
which is from 1933 when FDR
made holding gold illegal in the United States.
The idea is that like banks would go around now
with governments and try to like steal everybody's Bitcoin.
Well, in Bitcoin, we have like a practice
called Proof of Keys Day every January 3rd,
which is coinciding with the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain
where we all like withdraw our keys from exchanges
and we'd be sovereign users.
What we are doing is we are preparing for a 6102 attack,
which will one day probably come, right?
So the essay just goes through all of the like
possible attacks and it runs through like
the ones that happened,
like the Chinese and Indian governments,
the two largest governments in the world,
both tried to attack Bitcoin by banning their citizens
from exchanging fiat for Bitcoin.
It didn't work.
Interest instead exploded.
It's like the Barbra Streisand effect
where by making something public
and saying you shouldn't do X,
it actually increases attention about X a lot more, right?
So I think there's a lot of interesting game theory there
that people would enjoy.
- Do you think, are you seriously concerned
about this kind of thing where the ideas of sovereignty
that Bitcoin espouses would actually one day be tested?
Do you have like a legitimate concern?
'Cause you said like one day very well might.
Do you think it might go down?
- Yeah, well, first of all,
Bitcoin has been attacked again many times.
And we talk about the,
you spoke about this with Nick Carter on your show,
the sort of protocol wars or conflict or whatever, right?
And Bitcoin almost died a whole bunch of times during that
and ended up surviving.
- Oh, wow, I didn't know how bad the block side war was.
- Oh, it got really bad.
It was sort of a very existential threat
and Bitcoin survived.
And that's why I'm so intrigued by it
is that it basically survived an attack
in an environment several years ago
when Bitcoin was much more vulnerable than it is today.
It survived an attack by a conglomeration
of Chinese billionaires, Silicon Valley corporations,
and a ton of people who owned the majority of the hash rate
and all of this infrastructure.
They had 83% of all the hash rate
and they couldn't get what they wanted.
And that was so intriguing to me.
Like, why didn't it get killed?
So as Nick said, I think you should read
"The Block Size War," which is a book
that you can get on Amazon by Jonathan Beer.
Really good, kind of like,
really important to understand the scaling conflict
and the visions over,
the different visions of what Bitcoin should be.
And again, people like me believe
it should be a freedom tool,
not like a payments technology for retail.
And I'm just, I'm glad it worked out the way it did
'cause it almost didn't.
- Do you think a human's civilization will destroy itself?
So if we think about all the threats
facing human civilization, nuclear war,
natural or engineered pandemics,
§17Transcript · 2:10:48–2:19:02
you know, we talk about human rights violations.
We talk about authoritarian governments
taking control of the money supply.
But do you have grander concerns
for the future of human civilization?
Do you have hope for us becoming multi-planetary species?
- Yeah, I mean, I guess long-term
we'd wanna decentralize, right?
We don't want a single point of failure.
- In the physical space too.
- The Earth is a single point of failure.
But no, I mean, you look at all this
kind of like space fiction and,
I mean, who would wanna live on Mars, man?
It's like a fricking desert.
I mean, the Earth is so beautiful.
I hope we can save it, you know?
It's just so gorgeous.
When you look at the Earth compared to any other
like exoplanet or whatever, you look at it.
I mean, the Earth is so spectacular
and wondrous and singular.
I think we've gotta do everything we can to save it here.
- That's funny.
I mean, I'm sure a lot of people
would have said that about Europe
before the explorers ventured out,
Columbus and the rest out into the unknown.
The thing about human nature is that we are explorers too.
- We are, I agree.
- Some small fraction of us are insane enough
to explore in the most dangerous grounds.
And I'm pretty sure there's quite a few people
that would love to take the first step on Mars,
the first few steps on Mars,
in the harshest of environments,
even when the odds of survival are extremely low.
And I'm thankful for those people.
As I sit back and drink my vodka back here on Earth
and enjoy good friendships,
because I think ultimately that step to Mars
is going to be a first step into a multi,
into exploring and colonizing the rest of the galaxy.
Mars might be a harsh environment,
but maybe space is not.
Like other planets, other exoplanets,
but also forget planets,
just creating colonies that float about in space.
There's exciting technologies that are yet to be discovered,
yet to be engineered and built,
that I think require that first painful step.
Like, yeah, the journey of a thousand miles
starts with one step.
And I think Mars is that first step.
- Yeah, no, I was born the day before the Challenger blew up
and it was always so tragic for me to look back on that.
'Cause that really like altered our arc
in terms of space exploration.
Like if that had not happened,
we'd be in a very different arc.
And I do respect and admire people pushing for exploration,
but at the same time, I just, I want to recognize,
like we just, you know, we know how unique Earth is.
And I do think we got to do everything we can to protect.
- But I think you avoid answering the question
if we're going to destroy ourselves.
- Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess.
- Are you hopeful?
- If we do not, okay, fine.
If we do not decentralize properly
out into different physical spaces, probably, I guess, yeah.
- And then, I mean, do you have concerns
that are immediately facing you?
So not in terms of the injustices on the world,
but nuclear war?
- Yeah, look, I'm a lot more concerned
about what's happening right now.
Like what is destroying ourselves?
If you were to go and see what's happening
in Xinjiang or North Korea right now, or Eritrea,
that is destroying ourselves and it's already happened.
So I guess that's why I said, yes.
I mean, if you don't decentralize
and power is completely under one person,
life is destroyed as we know it.
And you don't have to go into science fiction
to know what a totalitarian hellscape dystopia is.
There's several that exist already.
And let's try to help those people
at the same time as we're trying to push out into space
would be my counter, I guess.
- Yeah, I agree with you.
In my mind, destruction and suffering
are next door neighbors.
So we don't need to destroy all of human civilization
if a large fraction of it lives in conditions
that we would equate to suffering.
That's not a good world.
Is there advice that you would give to young people today
about life, about career, about how they can help a world
where 53% are living under authoritarian governments?
But in general, a world that's full of injustice,
but also full of opportunity.
- Just thinking about my own upbringing,
I went to a public school here
and we never learned about money.
It was never part of our curriculum.
Even personal finances was not part of our curriculum.
You could take like an optional course
to learn about like business or something.
And I think that that would be really valuable
as a young person or as a teenager
to start incorporating into your children's lives
is like a curiosity about what is money.
I think it'd be very healthy,
regardless of what path that takes them down.
Because we don't think about it enough,
either from an administrative sort of personal finance thing
about like responsibility,
or more fundamentally, like what is it and who creates it?
Where did it come from?
Both of those things are very important.
So my advice to a young person would be
to get to the point where you feel like
you can answer the question, what is money?
(laughing)
- So you ultimately see money as a kind of power
and freedom and a mechanism of self-reliance.
- It is so core to everything.
The United States, whether you wanna call it
the Pax Americana, the empire, the hyper power,
whatever you wanna call this moment in time
where the US is dominant around the world,
it is because of the fact that we have
this petrodollar system where we are able to force
the Saudis and other oil producing nations
to sell their oil in dollars.
That is really inescapable, inseparable from our power.
And that's very rarely talked about.
And it's very important to understand.
So yeah, if young people could start thinking
about that stuff, it'd be good.
- I remember being, it sounds silly to say,
but I remember being really uncomfortable
that I was dependent on my parents at a young age
for like financial--
- Oh, you need to be 18 to have a bank account or whatever.
- Right.
- And one of the people that we supported at Ahrefs
through our, we do software development funding
for people in Bitcoin, open source projects.
And he's one of the guys we funded
is this very young, smart sort of prodigy.
He's like 17.
But one of the reasons he got into Bitcoin
was 'cause he wanted to have control of his money
when he was like 14.
I mean, if you think in history,
people who invented all kinds of incredible contributions
to science or math, I mean, a lot of them did it
before they were 15.
So think about that maturity that is capable
and possible in many people.
Like I've participated in some of the, years ago,
some of the sort of selection processes
for like the Thiel Fellowship, which is like really amazing.
Like these people who are 14, 15, 16,
who don't need to go to college.
They're already like so smart, they can figure it out.
But they wouldn't be allowed to have a bank account, right?
So, hey, that's kind of cool.
Like now you have a permissionless money.
You can open up yourself
without permission from your parents.
That's kind of cool.
- Yeah, that's fascinating to me.
I feel like I would have loved my parents more
- If you had a little more separation.
- If I had freedom to fully realize myself,
because I felt like I was a little bit trapped by,
I don't know, it's not explicit, right?
It's a little bit, it's like a subtle push
that you're somehow dependent on them.
I mean, part of that is like,
I think it actually very much has to do
not talking about money.
Like what does it take to operate
as an individual entity in this world?
Like knowing that when you're 10 years old,
knowing that when you're very young,
so that you've, then you see how amazing it is
to have the support of your parents until you're 18.
Like have that freedom.
Have the freedom to appreciate the value your parents bring,
and at the same time, the freedom to leave
in some capacity to carve your own path.
I mean, just all of that, I think,
for weirdos like me, especially,
'cause that was a very non-traditional path
that I think it would be very empowering,
§18Transcript · 2:19:06–2:27:55
and certainly would be empowering in the third world.
- Not just weirdos like you, I was gonna mention.
One of the people I got who taught me about Bitcoin,
her name is Roya Mahboob.
She's an Afghan technology CEO.
And in 2013, she started paying her employees in Bitcoin
because they were not allowed to open bank accounts,
the women that worked for her.
She started the country's first female,
all-female software company.
And if they brought cash home,
their husbands or uncles or brothers
would steal it from them.
There's a power, patriarchal dominance thing going on.
But they had phones, and she was able to pay them in Bitcoin
and no one knew, and it gave them that power.
And that's always stuck in my mind
as a very interesting effect of this kind of thing,
of permissionless money,
that it can be an empowerment tool, so absolutely.
- So in your own personal life,
where did the deep concern
for the suffering in the world come from?
Where was that born?
- I was gonna be an engineer actually,
and then in 2003, we invaded Iraq,
and I got very interested in why we did that as a nation.
And I switched my focus of study
to like international relations,
and that's how I kind of went down
the kind of political science, democracy rabbit hole,
and ended up getting a job at the Human Rights Foundation.
So I'm very much a child of like 9/11 and the Iraq War.
Those are the two really formative events for me personally.
- Can you break that apart a little bit?
Like what illusion about this world
was broken apart by the invasion of Iraq?
- Well, I think first of all, 9/11
just shifted the world dynamics completely
from a focus on big power politics
between the US, Russia, and China
to this new threat of Islamic terror.
And a lot of it, we learned later,
a lot of the things we did were manufactured, choreographed.
Like there were no WMDs in Iraq.
Like the reason our rulers said we needed to invade
and destroy this country was a lie.
And that I think has really been forgotten.
Like I think a lot of like the Zoomers like today
don't really know a lot about that time period.
I mean, it was pretty crazy.
Unanimously, I mean, Democrat, Republican,
like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, like,
and the Republicans, everybody wanted to invade this country
and it was very, it's very, it's a confusing time.
There's a really good book by Ian McEwen called "Saturday,"
a fiction book that takes place during, I think, 2003.
And it's one day in the life of the doctor in London.
It's really good though to revisit this time
because he has two characters,
he has characters in the book,
one of whom is very pro-war
and one of them is very against war.
Basically, he, the father himself is pro-war
and his son is against it and they have all these debates.
And it's nice to go back to revisit,
but that time was, it's really crazy.
And it really showed you that like the media
could be captured into like helping promote this idea
of like invading another country.
So I was very curious about why we did it
and like who was pulling the strings
and what are the reasons that we went?
And what's really interesting is that like
I took all these courses on it,
interviewed all these decision makers,
whether they were like neocons or whatever,
different people who were involved.
And the whole like dollar reserve currency thing
like really never came up until like,
I learned about it more recently because of Bitcoin.
And today, when I look back, it seems kind of obvious
that the reason we invaded Iraq
was because Saddam Hussein wanted to sell oil in euros.
It seems really obvious when you go back
and look at the chronology of it.
And we were like, no, we actually don't want you
to sell dollars in euros
because that would threaten the dollar.
So we're gonna invade you and then you're not gonna do it
and no one else is gonna like sell dollars in euro,
oil in euros, right?
I guess you could say the same thing about Gaddafi,
but we as a nation have very much protected
our reserve currency, let's put it that way.
- Yeah, actually one of the things that Bitcoin community
has motivated me to do is to look back to the histories
that I have studied myself from just even the two world wars,
the history of the 20th century from a perspective
of the monetary system of money.
And it's interesting.
It's interesting to look at human history
in the context of money.
- Can't we be patriotic and be pro-America,
but like not want the petrodollar?
Like I should be proud of my country.
Why do we need to be propping up the Saudis?
Why do we need to be threatening to invade other countries
if they sell their oil for a different currency?
I think we can be just as powerful as we are today,
if not more powerful in a Bitcoin world.
If you think about the infrastructure Americans
are building, all the innovations we're building,
all the wealth we have, I think we'll be fine,
better than fine.
And we won't have these horrible negative externalities.
It's really an optimistic vision for the future.
- I thought we learned the lesson of 9/11
and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
But maybe-- - We're leaving,
and Biden announced we're leaving Afghanistan this year.
20 years, for what?
Taliban are gonna take over again.
- I mean, that's like at least a good,
this is the longest war, right?
- The forever wars.
- I feel like the past 20 years or whatever,
it is 18 years, 19 years,
we've been very skeptical about invading other countries.
We've been skeptical about military intervention
in other nations.
- Well, our leaders certainly haven't.
We're at, what do we have, like seven active wars right now?
And neither the Russians and the Chinese,
everybody's starting to invade everybody else.
- I mean, so yes, but I meant to a degree
that I was worried about like conflicts
with hot conflicts with Iran, with North Korea,
those kinds of things.
That there was not as much warmongering
as I was afraid about.
But yes, you're absolutely right.
We're still, there's a big presence by the United States
and other nations and across the world, that's military.
The military-industrial complex is a thing
that has huge detrimental ripple effects
throughout the entirety of our governments.
- Yeah, so the big question is how do we prevent the rise
of this like authoritarian surveillance state in China
while at the same time kind of diffusing
the military-industrial complex on our side?
That to me is like the biggest challenge of our time.
I don't have the answer, but we should keep digging.
- Yeah, I believe there's technological innovations.
You're suggesting that perhaps
one of the technological innovations like is Bitcoin.
- Bitcoin's a big part of it, yeah.
- On the money side, I think the information side,
there's innovations that are open, that's possible.
And the political side, I'm the most skeptical about.
I just feel like there's without hot wars
that we don't seem to make any kind of progress.
Bureaucracies just grow, corruption and greed grow,
and human nature does not do well in the political arena.
So I hope technology can outpace
the darker sides of human nature.
So you're busy fighting the demons,
the darkness that's out there,
but looking in the mirror, you're a finite being.
Unfortunately, this ride ends for you pretty soon.
Do you ever ask yourself about the meaning of it all,
of why the hell us descendants of apes
are even on this thing,
striving so hard to make a better world for ourselves?
- I don't often Zoom out that much.
I feel like my day job is pretty interesting.
It keeps me very engaged
with all the stuff we've been talking about.
As far as the meaning of life though,
it seems quite clear that we do have the possibility
as a species to create these beautiful communities
and constructs and to share an exploration
of the world together
that is often marred by cold realities that we've discussed.
But I do feel like in a way
that the meaning of life is that pursuit.
Of course, biologically is the spread, our species, right?
But also to pursue knowledge and science and innovation
and freedom, most importantly.
I mean, I think it freedom has to guide us
or else we end up with prison camps.
If we don't let freedom guide us,
we end up with the prison camps.
So we need to have scientific innovation and adventurism
and colonization of the stars,
but without the slavery and without the prison camps.
I think that's so key.
- There's something about the creation of beauty
that seems fundamental to human nature.
And what seems beautiful is these communities
§19Transcript · 2:28:00–2:33:30
that don't have suffering, they don't have injustice.
And we have some kind of inner sense of what is injustice.
I don't know, like some of the human rights
that you've mentioned earlier,
they're just philosophical constructs,
but there also seem to be somehow deeply in us too.
We have a sense of what is right and what is wrong.
It's not just a kind of illusion we've all agreed on.
- Arbitrary power, torture, executions.
We know these things are wrong.
I mean, we know they're wrong.
We don't have to read a book to know that.
But you do need to, people can get brainwashed.
I mean, you talk to people who've grown up in North Korea,
they don't know any better.
Like they don't know what's going on in the outside world.
So they've never experienced anything differently.
So that's why, look, technology can play a big role here
in terms of like the meaning of it all.
Like it can really help emancipate, liberate people,
at least so that they can make their own choices
about what to do,
at least so that we're on a level playing field.
So technologies like the internet and Bitcoin,
they can at least like give you the option
to do things your own way on your own terms.
And then from there we'll see.
I think it's important that we have design choices
where we can like have a little more say
and not everything be pre-programmed for us.
That would be very disappointing.
So I mean, the open web and encryption and Bitcoin,
these are things that help prevent social engineering
and that promote more freedom and more possibilities,
honestly, and more entrepreneurship and more creativity
and more scientific inquiry.
I mean, think about the people who tried to shut down
scientific inquiry 500, 600 years ago or whatever,
that were trying to say,
the earth was the center of everything and they were wrong.
And then all these conservative religious types
throughout history have always said that
there's no value in science
and there's no value in technology
and they've been wrong the whole time.
So let's continue pushing here.
Let's continue pushing.
- It's kind of scary to me sometimes,
humbling, beautiful, but also scary to think of.
You mentioned North Korea,
people are kind of living in ignorance.
It's scary to me to think about how much ignorance
there is in the world today.
Like how little I know personally,
or us as a human civilization knows
there is yet to be discovered.
- Well, there's a difference between laziness
and ignorance, right?
So I would be lazy if I didn't
take advantage of the internet, right?
Someone in North Korea doesn't have the option.
There's literally no way for them to access the internet.
So there's kind of like social laziness
that philosophers have warned about forever,
that we basically become sheep, okay?
And then there's actual brainwashing and censorship
that's possible by closing off your population
and keeping them off the internet, right?
So I think these are two very different concepts.
- Absolutely.
But I also mean just like, not even laziness,
but cognitive limitations
and just historical scientific limitations.
We're a very young species.
All of the exciting stuff we've been talking about
have happened on the scale of decades, maybe centuries.
We're very young in all the cool stuff we've come up with.
And it's just humbling to think about how little we know.
But you're right that ultimately having the freedom
to keep exploring, keep venturing out.
Even if we later discover that a lot of the stuff
we've been doing now is ethically horrible.
If you think about animals, or I think about robots a lot,
the kind of things we might be doing
to other consciousnesses that are here on earth,
might be, we might see as atrocities later on.
But ultimately you have to have the freedom
to explore those kinds of ideas.
And without that freedom,
you don't even get the chance to be lazy.
- Yeah, I mean, look, don't be a sheep.
It's easy to be a sheep.
- No offense to sheep.
- And there's some practical things, man.
Get on Signal, start encrypting your messages.
Take control over your privacy.
The media doesn't want you to, but check out Bitcoin.
You can be your own bank.
You can transact with people around the world
and no one can stop you.
This can put a stop to a lot of arbitrary power
and a lot of human rights violations.
Don't use WeChat, question more.
Research what's happening in Xinjiang.
I mean, learn about what's happening
in the genocide in that country.
And let's think about how we can build our societies
so that we never have that kind of power concentration
ever again.
- Each of us can make a difference.
Alex, it's a huge honor to talk to you.
I've been a fan of your work.
A lot of people spoke really highly of you
as one of the beacons of hope for human civilization.
So I'm really glad we got a chance to talk.
Thank you for wasting all this time with me today.
- It's been an honor.
Thanks, man.
A lot of fun.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Alex Glastine.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Alice Walker.
The most common way people give up their power
is by thinking they don't have any.
Thank you for listening.
I hope to see you next time.
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