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Oct. 16, 2021 - Lex Fridman Podcast
02:33:23
Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights | Lex Fridman Podcast #231
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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
Thank you.
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 Lex 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 Glastein.
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, you know, 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, 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 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 you know is the same sort of thing that
authoritarians have done for decades Cuba and Venezuela and 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 here have the freedom to for assembly and all those kinds of things can't you still manipulate?
The idea that citizenry still has those rights The opposition leader of Malaysia on more Ibrahim. He once
told me That the funny joke that you know in my country that 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.
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 and 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, you know, over the last hundred 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, novel mechanisms for people to communicate with each other, 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 slash pedophile slash, you know, I'm not saying that those are lies, look into it, but they're very unlikely.
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 a 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, 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 the 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, from a technology perspective, there's AWS removing Parler from the platform.
It gets a little weird as you get closer and closer to the computer 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 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 computer infrastructure for Russia and China, but I bet the state has complete oversight over that.
And so that level of computer 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 501c3 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 percent.
53 percent. 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. 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 Uyghur 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.
Ray Dalio was there.
All kinds of people were there.
Or at least they were invited and they said they were going to 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...
You know, 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, like, Free trade is actually really good.
And you can just look at France and Germany as an example of how like 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 world.
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 declaring that they don't have a democracy or is there something more subtle?
There's a couple good litmus tests.
One is actually, can you have a gay pride parade?
That's a good... Serious.
It actually lines up perfectly.
It doesn't matter what religion the dictatorship is.
Yeah. They don't like minorities and they love to scapegoat, whether it's gays or religious minorities, etc.
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 going to get the crap kicked out of you, you probably live in an authoritarian regime.
Yeah. I'm sure that's not just about some kind of homophobia.
Why is that? That's really interesting.
It's scapegoating. I'm going through...
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, you know, LGBT communities.
It's interesting because maybe you can correct me, but from my very distant outsider perspective, the 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 Ahmed Ahmadjad, 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.
You know, 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.
The United States is a deeply flawed country in many ways.
Our prison system is a disaster.
There's, you know, 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 U.S. 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 going to 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, Trump, 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, you know, 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?
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 going to be a ruler forever, which is interesting.
There's an important switch that happens.
As opposed to having a facade of elections, you just put that aside and saying, basically, 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.
You know, Morsi came in, and it looked like, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood was not really going to 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 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 want to 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 going to choose you.
And that's why 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
If you incorporate what human nature is, 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, you know, the virtual, you know, 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.
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 because it was only property owners, only men, only people of a certain race. But
this idea that we can like rotate our rulers and that we could be ruled by rules is extremely
powerful. And it really, like for me, the ideas behind this, I think, unlocked a lot
of the industrial revolution, the small personal freedoms that were allowed in some countries
And they unlocked a lot of the scientific innovation over the last few hundred years.
And to me, there's like a really straight line between like scientific inquiry, free speech, freedoms, and then more prosperity and more effectiveness as a civilization.
So I think that Democracy, you know, ruled by the people, is definitely an upgrade from autocracy or oligarchy, you know, 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.
And it's, you know, you can do half glass full, half glass empty.
The half glass full is that almost half the world lives under democracy.
Like, that's an incredible achievement.
But just under half.
Yeah, just under half.
But that's billions of people.
It's billions of people.
And if you look at the progress of things, it's getting better and better and better.
Yeah, we're a little bit of a stalemate here.
Democracies really blossomed between World War II and the year 2000, especially in the 80s and 90s.
You had an incredible...
wave of fall, you know, where many, many authoritarian regimes fell and were replaced by democracies.
I think around 2015 the acceleration kind of It 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. 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.
We'll fight authoritarian governments as opposed to give more power to authoritarian governments.
But your sense is there's ways 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 100,000 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, etc.
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. Yeah.
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.
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 because 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 because 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.
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 or 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 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...
And 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 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 Ham.
That to me is terrifying.
And everything is sorted instantly.
There are supercomputers that are built in Urumqi, in Xinjiang, for this explicit purpose.
And, you know, 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 because 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 starts getting bad enough, That like 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, you know, to collect data by 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 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, you know, 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, 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, you know, 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.
You know, 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, like, 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 going to buy this 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, is part of that idea is to ship out and install surveillance technology, both at the telecom level and at the surveillance level, across dozens of countries around the world, and have that backdoor, right?
Which states that like companies that are Chinese, which are abroad, are mandated to send data back to Beijing, right?
So they are building this like 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.
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 I haven't necessarily personally seen the results of that tradeoff 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 tradeoffs, your life immediately becomes more restrictive.
And what people are worried about is that even in advanced economies, market democracies, etc., The people are worried that they might not survive the great social digital transformation.
You know, 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 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?
Because 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 this.
It's 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, like, surveillance programs that you can read about have amounted to very little.
Except for tremendous bureaucratic waste and 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.
Why do citizens have to use signal?
Why? Because that's an effort.
You have to understand exactly why.
So that's a nice little solution for a particular set of problems.
But 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?
Yeah. 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, you know, 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
in as much as now people are like 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 like, honestly, maybe the most important piece.
And that's why I spent 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 a systematic study of the human rights discourse over the last several decades, money is not there.
It's also not really taught in schools.
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 This Flag 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, And he came. This was about three years ago.
And the first thing he did when he got on the stage is 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.
So he had to live through that, which was terrible and crushing.
But he, you know, 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, you know, for me, money, you know, when I study money or look at money, it's really about control.
You know, who is creating it and how much does the population know about the creation of that money?
I think we're good to go.
You know, 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 on 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 not that money is a symptom.
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, something like 1%, right, of the world.
Whatever that number is, it's small.
Call it 2% for the purposes of our calculation.
Okay. 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?
Because 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 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 U.S. basically weaponizes the dollar and it 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 going to shut off this whole country.
So then 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 to their families.
So it's sanction resistant. Sanctions resistant.
It does not get stopped by sanctions, right?
And also, again, remittances are extortionate.
I mean, the average remittance...
You know, 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, you know, it gets paused, it gets lost, there's issues, you have to deal with customer service.
Screw that. I mean, you know, 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?
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?
It's what it's called, the bearer instrument.
I know. I apologize. I'm outside this community.
It just sounds funny. No, no. Yeah, so like a bearer instrument would be like a bar of gold or a banknote 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, like, password to get into your Bitcoin account.
And that gives you that bare instrument quality, right?
But unfortunately, most users still use Bitcoin in a custodial way, meaning they buy it on Coinbase or Square or something like that.
So Coinbase, you would put into the...
Custodial. Into the custodial category like a 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 like if you want to get the full
experience you want to actually custody your own Bitcoin You want to 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 Coldcard, for example.
There's different ways to do this.
But essentially, like, around the world, people are innovating.
Like, don't think so low of your fellow man, you know what I mean?
Like, people are able to figure this out.
You know, 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 because 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, you know, he forgot the password.
But if you're like receiving your remittance from a family member, you're not going to lose the password, right?
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's like 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 basically being unable to trust any kind of, even the police force and all those kinds of things.
You figure it out. In 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.
When it comes to, could it possibly be adopted by 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 than 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 from different countries.
So they were like, let's make this easy for people.
Again, you know, 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 Bitcoin is the mechanism of a peaceful revolution.
So it's a way to resist authoritarianism in a peaceful way.
It's ultimately, 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.
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 cryptocurrency.
Browser for quite a long time.
And then other browsers came along that out-competed it, like Chrome, Firefox, People's Checkout 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? Do you mean number of users?
Do you mean a price per coin?
Yeah, the number of users, because 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 use 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 meme would be 21 million.
There's never going to be any more than 21 million.
Every other cryptocurrency either has an inflationary policy, meaning there's going to 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, I just don't think are gonna add that much value.
Ultimately, I think Bitcoin to me is the innovation.
And, you know, 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 because 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 going to 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 they're not—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 U.S. Federal Reserve, right?
It would be a euro dollar. So stablecoins 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, you know, full store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account eventually.
And, you know, the Bitcoin world will be denominated in different terms.
And I think 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.
Yeah. It's just if you talk about scale.
So there's going to be a moment, Bitcoin continues to grow in its impact, When governments are going to seriously contend with, you know, 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 kind of technical, social, and economic and political incentives and disincentives that make it very difficult.
Mm-hmm. And I think to me, the best way to think about it is that Bitcoin's 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?
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, you know, 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 pretended to leave.
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, you know, honoring Minerva.
You know, 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, I'm bringing it in 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, Bitcoin has this number go up technology, right?
Is what we call it in sort of shorthand.
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 going to 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 going to 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 have 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 going to realize, oh my god, this is money the government doesn't control.
And it's going to 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 and 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.
Yeah, professional investors, corporations, and soon governments.
I mean, you just had today, this morning on CNBC, the leader, 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 going to happen in the next 10 years.
You're going to see this. Countries are going to compete to stack Bitcoin.
Absolutely. So you believe the thing that's shiny and sexy like the Trojan horse is the number go up idea?
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 the FG... Yeah, freedom go up.
Freedom go up, which is it ultimately gives power to the individuals to decentralize the entire system.
So 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-opts 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.
And the reason why I'm so excited about this is the human rights world, again,
to get back to our previous conversation, it 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 gives me a lot of excitement.
It's very refreshing because we've been laboring in the human rights space.
You have to raise money, and it's all non-profit work, and you're 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'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.
That'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 because it's on an onion routed second layer
kind of that works kind of like the Tor 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, 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 because 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 CoinJoin, for example.
But right now it's more expensive to CoinJoin 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 going to 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 like These ways that it just aligns human incentives and it aligns our, like, most base desires and needs and realities with, like, freedom and privacy.
And that I've never seen before.
And that's why I think it's so interesting.
So something that, like, somebody like Eric Weinstein actually spoke to this, you know, 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.
You know, 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 going to be like in 20, 30 years from now.
The average person is never going to touch the Bitcoin blockchain probably.
They're going to 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 is going to get very expensive.
It's going to 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, you know, 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.
Yeah. 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.
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.
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 could bring it over here and we could 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, you know, where the transaction processing is done by mining and by energy and by real world expenditures instead of like...
You know, some central ledger.
And, you know, 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, philosophically, it's 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, especially that's totally publicly accessible.
I know that to Bitcoin, proof of work is the fundamental idea.
Yes. 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, you know, 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.
Right. 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, like, didn't work.
The Bitcoin project? 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 going to work.
Again, I think the Trojan horse allegory is too powerful.
These big centralized actors are going to be too greedy and they're going to 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 going to happen.
But if for whatever reason it failed, I would have very little hope left because really, I mean, the Chinese model of like centralizing all of your data and controlling it, I mean, ultimately is a very, very powerful sort of like arch force.
Yeah. 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.
It 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 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, you know, others may not, you know, if you mention 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, and people in the humanitarian sector have been fooled into thinking that some centralized blockchain project is going to help some refugee.
All collapsed. It makes me sad that there's a huge number of scams.
You know what makes me really sad?
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. You 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...
It's 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 just like I am, which is they're hopeful about the world, they're optimistic about the world, they're almost 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, in these different countries, I'm trying to talk to different people about Bitcoin, and the amount of MLM schemes, pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, There are just so many of them.
And there's plenty here, too. But in Zimbabwe, I was talking to this guy who is a reporter who studies the FX, the foreign currency exchange markets.
He's just saying one of the main reasons people don't want to 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 people just continue to be like...
I'm afraid of it because of things that are like that in the past.
Well, it's not just the volatility, it's just the...
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 Maximus community, it's to maybe ease up on the certainty because that gives me the signal that it's a scam, to be honest.
So whenever there's a lot of people being I'm 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.
And he started wearing mascara and it's like, I don't know, I don't like them anymore.
So 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.
I took this personality test and I'm a 99 skepticism.
So I was first, sadly, because 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 rabbit hole.
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 got to 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... Nothing will befall you that's bad if you're like cautious and skeptical.
That's like 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 a, not a positive, but there's a, 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.
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, you know, then we've remained...
You know, like, you know, 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, you know, critical of your country.
And that's important. You know, 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 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, you know, that's just not true.
We're letting it happen. 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 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, you know, get to sort of co-host those at 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've 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 to, you know, free Tibet was a big thing.
Well, guess what? Like, we 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, we need to find a way to punish these people.
Yeah, it's surprising because 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 have been very U.S. 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.
They're much more evil now, and I don't think we're going to be able to do it this time.
And again, to go back to the Bitcoin piece, that's why I'm like, I'm very interested in this thing because it doesn't require my altruism.
It doesn't require some famous singer or some corporation to sacrifice anything.
They're literally just going to follow their own profit-seeking self-interested motives, and they're going to end up making a stronger human rights tool for other people.
Freedom go up.
FGU, man. Do you think we're...
It's kind of a dark question, but do you think we're headed towards a war with China, the United States versus China?
I hope not. I hope not.
In the cyberspace 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 going to, someone's going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 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 going to fall when it fell.
Like if you study the news and the scholarship of the era, no one knew that the Tunisian government was going to fall after Mohammed Bouazizi laid 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.
We don't know when.
Yes. 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.
You want to leave the party before it starts to deteriorate.
I think America could continue to have 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 and 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 questions.
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, 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 societies digitize.
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 deplatformed.
Uh, from your, uh, you know, from like whether it's a Patreon or YouTube or whatever, um, and your, your bank account can be closed down, right?
There are emerging ways that Adam Curry, like the pod father and a bunch of other people are experimenting with.
of your audio podcast across a whole bunch of different platforms.
So 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 audience.
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 the 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 going to fix the fact that like Twitter can decide to...
Kick off the president, and, like, a lot of people are going to 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 watch the U.S. government haul these people, 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.
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 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 overfiring and you're now censoring too many people.
So 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 that's not going to work out well.
But if you give power to the individuals 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 does 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 may, 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 gonna use too.
And you as the customer decide which implementation you wanna join.
And there's gonna 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 like initiative.
We'll see. I'm a little skeptical that it works out, because I use Mastodon, for example.
Mastodon is an example of a federated social media.
Now, 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 want to 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 they spend on developers.
Like Mastodon is like not anywhere close to as nice to use as Twitter.
So I feel like, 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. Dude, they're not. They're not.
They're not. But the federator, I don't think it's 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.
It 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.
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.
That's a feature that's fundamental to a good social network, I believe.
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 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 in the 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, you know, adventure out and use a, like, a federated instance or something, even like Keybase, which is kind of like a cool encrypted way to, like, have group chats, it just requires, like, a lot of your time.
And a lot of people don't have that time.
But I will say one thing.
Like, I do think there is this future where we do go into more of this, like, It's called a tribal model or like tribes, which is this social environment being built on top of lightning by an app called Sphinx.
And the idea is like kind of like, it's like a decentralized Slack.
Like you have your Slack instance, which has like 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 like plugins for like things like Jitsi instead of Zoom.
So like an open source encrypted video messenger.
It has ways to, like, plug in the content you want to get from, like, 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.
Right. Because right now WeChat's like the king of convenience and comfort, but of course it's feeding all that data to the big brother and 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, you know, 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 pretty icing on the cake.
The icing is the cake.
Because how easy it is to use, how natural it is.
It's the Trojan horse thing.
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 the broccoli, you have to put like a delicious whatever on it.
Well, again, PHP is a kind of a pain to use, right?
If you want privacy. Yeah, so signals don't upgrade.
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 going to 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 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, you know, a big reason to switch.
Well, you're on it, man. 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, you know, announced to all of its users in this little pop-up that it was going to 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.
And it's really nice to see that this encrypted messaging service, which prioritizes your privacy in a way that, you know, 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 want to 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 Gary Kasparov, I'm Russian.
He means a lot to me on a personal level.
He is the chairman of Human Rights Foundation.
What does Gary 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, you know, 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, because who can fill Havel's shoes, you know?
But if one could, it would be Gary, right?
So we, like, really tried to get Gary to join, and thankfully he agreed.
And we've had an amazing relationship with Gary over the years.
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 Gary 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 Gary.
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, you know, as one journalist who attends our events says, when he walks in the room, you know, 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 want to talk to him about chess.
So here we can talk about human rights strategy and how to improve our fight against dictators.
But he really has that moral clarity that I really appreciate.
Yeah, he has a lot of fascinating ideas about artificial intelligence as well.
He's opened my eyes a little bit to the 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, almost like we're living 100 years from now, and I look at Putin as an 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, to them, 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, you know, 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, uh, Yeah. 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 possible future conversations.
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, you know, 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.
Yeah. You know, journalism to me has become a dirty word because it's done so poorly by so many people that...
You know, 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.
And the kind of interviews they do, you know, 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 want to catch you off guard.
They want to ask the, quote, like the harsh question, but without any of the, like the dance of conversation that reveals the truth.
You know, 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 journal or whatever, like where you spend months or years on a story.
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 it's not this 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 in-depth, long form digging for the truth.
I have a conflicted relationship with journalism because, to me, press freedom is so core.
And independent journalists around the world are so brave, especially in countries like Russia or China, etc.
And really good journalism is still something I absolutely love and I enjoy.
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...
You know, this sort of click-baity journalism that's all about sensationalism, and that gets used as a tool.
I mean, you know, 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.
You know, it's difficult, but, you know, I think journalism is essential to a free society, but it can sometimes be—it can wear my patience thin sometimes.
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.
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, I think journalists are too much focused on the 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, like, we try to...
Go after people who do like 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 want to do.
turfing is like the fake, you make like 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 an honest interview where you're asking about all the tough questions, very important.
So I think it's just a matter of content.
Is there a good resource to study whitewashing?
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?
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 litmus test about, is your country allowed to have a gay pride parade?
Yeah. So there's 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 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, you know, 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 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.
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. 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. The third one is a fiction book called The Mandibles, written by Lionel Shriver.
This one's good. 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 like
basically gonna default on its debts, and the rest of the world comes up with like a new currency,
basically going to default on its debts and the rest of the world comes up with like a new currency
and everybody switches to that one, and the dollar like overnight becomes worthless.
and everybody switches to that one and the dollar like overnight becomes worthless.
And all these like economists are saying, no, it's fine, like inflation won't be a problem.
And all these like economists are saying no it's fine like inflation won't be a problem.
And there's this one character who's an economist who's like 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 you know. So it's like 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.
And I did it by audiobook.
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, you know, how the network functions.
But he does it in a way that's extremely engaging and really fascinating.
And it really just kind of like sparked my curiosity.
Is it discussing the technical sides or also the philosophical?
Because a lot of people mention sort of the Bitcoin standard is the philosophical entry into the whole Bitcoin world.
Very different from the Bitcoin standard.
It's more for like the average person.
It's not a history book.
It's a collection of his talks that he gave over like two or three years.
It's not very technical.
It's very approachable.
And some of it might be dated now because it's like 2015, 2016.
But... I mean, it's great.
It's great to hear a shout out for Andres because he seems to be one of the seminal figures to sort of make Bitcoin ideas accessible.
Oh, Andres is the goat. He's the goat.
Andres is the goat. I know a lot of people have issues with some of his like more recent work, but Andres is the goat.
I mean, he's the reason I'm in Bitcoin.
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's 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, like, a lot of languages by now.
I think English, Spanish, and Portuguese are for sale.
And littlebitcoinbook.com, you know, 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 it just, I feel like I tried to boil everything that I... That I want to 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, you know, Why Haven't Governments Banned Bitcoin?
And maybe that'll be a helpful guide to some folks.
Is this 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 kind of 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, you can't. Like, 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 banks would go around now with governments and try to steal everybody's Bitcoin.
Well, in Bitcoin, we have a practice called Proof of Keys Day every January 3rd, which is coinciding with the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain, where we all 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, you know, by making something public and saying you shouldn't do X, it actually increases attention about X a lot more, right?
Yeah. 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 and that Bitcoin espouses would actually one day be tested?
Do you have like a legitimate concern?
Because you said like one day very well might.
Do you think it might?
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 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 in all 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, you know, 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 because it almost didn't.
Do you think human civilization will destroy itself?
So if we think about all the threats facing human civilization, nuclear war, natural or engineered pandemics, 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 a multi-planetary species?
Yeah, I mean, I guess long term we'd want to decentralize, right?
We don't want a single point of failure.
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 want to live on Mars, man?
It's like a freaking 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 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 onto 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, because 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 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 flow 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.
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, because that really, like, altered our arc in terms of space exploration.
Like, if that had not happened, we'd be on a very different arc.
And I do respect and admire people pushing for exploration, but at the same time, I just want to recognize, like, we just, you know, we know how unique Earth is, and I do think we've got to do everything we can to protect it.
But I think you avoid answering the question if we're gonna destroy ourselves.
Oh, yeah, I guess.
Are you hopeful? Okay, fine.
If we do not decentralize properly out into different physical spaces, probably, I guess, yeah.
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 know, you don't have to go into science fiction to know what a totalitarian hellscape dystopia is.
There's several that exist already.
And, you know, let's try to, like, help those people at the same time as we're trying to, like, push out into space would be my, like, counter, I guess.
Yeah, I agree with you.
In my mind, the sort of destruction and suffering are next door neighbors.
So we don't need to destroy all of human civilization.
If much, a large fraction 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 like a curiosity about what is money.
I think it would 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?
So you ultimately see money as kind of power and freedom and a mechanism of sovereignty.
It's so core to everything. The United States, whether you want to call it the Pax Americana, the empire, the hyperpower, whatever you want to call this moment in time where the U.S. 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. 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...
You need to be 18 to have a bank account or whatever.
Right. One of the people that we supported at Ahrefs through our, we do software development funding for people in Bitcoin, open source projects.
And 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 because he wanted to have control of his money when he was like 14.
Yeah. 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 Teal 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 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, because that was a very non-traditional path that I think it would be very empowering.
And certainly it would be empowering in the third world.
Not just weirdos like you.
Yeah, I was going to mention one of the people I got who taught me about Bitcoin Her name is Roya Mapoob.
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, like all-female software company.
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, like 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 going to 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 9-11 and the Iraq War.
Those are the two really formative events for me, personally.
Can you break that apart a little bit?
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 U.S., 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.
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 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 the media could be captured into helping promote this idea of invading another country.
So I was very curious about why we did it and who was pulling the strings and what are the reasons that we went.
And what's really interesting is that I took all these courses on and interviewed all these decision makers, whether they were neocons or whatever, different people who were involved.
And The whole dollar reserve currency thing really never came up until 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.
We were like, no, we actually don't want you to sell dollars in euros because that would threaten the dollar.
So we're going to invade you, and then you're not going to do it, and then no one else is going to sell oil in euros, right?
And I guess you could say the same thing about Qaddafi, 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, you know, 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.
We're leaving and, you know, Biden announced we're leaving Afghanistan this year.
20 years. For what?
The Taliban are going to take over again.
I mean, that's at least a good, 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 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.
Sure. That there was not as much warmongering as...
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 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 at 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.
I do feel like, in a way, that the meaning of life is that pursuit.
Of course, biologically, it's the spread, our species, right?
But also to pursue knowledge and science and innovation and freedom, most importantly.
I mean, I think 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 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 that That don't have suffering, that 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 they 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 that we've all agreed on.
Yeah, 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 that 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.
You know, 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 we're trying to say, you know, the earth was the center of everything and they were wrong, you know, and then, you know, all these conservative religious types throughout history have always said that, you know, 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?
Like, so I would be lazy if I didn't, you know, 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 like brainwashing and censorship that's possible,
like by closing off your population and keeping them off like 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.
Like, you know...
We're a very young species.
All of the exciting stuff we've been talking about happened on a 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...
It's 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.
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 our 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.
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