July 1, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
13:15
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I think there's a kind of a misconception that Bitcoin is completely anonymous. | ||
| It's really pseudo-anonymous. | ||
| If a state actor or even a big corporation wants to find out who transferred Bitcoin to whom, it can be done. | ||
| It's harder than just looking at someone's visa or bank account. | ||
| But I think there are new technologies built on top of Bitcoin, like the Lightning Network, | ||
| that for very small amounts will keep it almost like cash, where it'll be much harder and won't be worth the effort. | ||
|
unidentified
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[MUSIC] | |
| All right, I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| We are on location in Miami. | ||
| I am with Alex Lloyd, co-author of the little Bitcoin book, Why Bitcoin Matters for Your Freedom, Finances, and Future. | ||
| We're obviously in the right city for that, so Lloyd, why does it matter? | ||
| You know, we came at this book from a human rights perspective. | ||
| One of my co-authors, Alex Glasstein, is the Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation. | ||
| And there were a lot of books out there about the technical nature and the financial nature of why Bitcoin's important. | ||
| This one really gives more a socio-political aspect, why everyday people are going to, Bitcoin is going to be important to them. | ||
| And that's kind of the angle we took. | ||
| So we talked about this a little bit at dinner last night. | ||
| I mean, basically, you think Bitcoin will sort of free people as these systems around us kind of go down. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| I think what it is, it's a democratization of capital. | ||
| If you think of the history of how individuals got more power in the world, it started with democracy. | ||
| There's a lot of steps here, but democracy as a political system, I think, you know, another step that you might think of is freedom of speech and the Internet, which let anybody be a publisher and a creator. | ||
| And I think Bitcoin is the next step, which is people can be their own banks and have their own individual freedom. | ||
| Whereas the Internet, in a way, was a way to let any two people exchange ideas and information. | ||
| And Bitcoin is going to be a way that any two people can exchange value. | ||
| And that's a big part of this book. | ||
| So since most of my audience is pretty tech-savvy, but not everybody, for the person that's watching this right now that has no Bitcoin, they've heard the word Bitcoin, they're like, what the hell is Bitcoin, it's not backed by anything, what is this thing? | ||
| Give me the Q&A portion of this, because you guys end this, Chapter 6 is all Q&A about sort of the basics. | ||
| I think if you think of... | ||
| As Americans, a lot of people don't understand the privilege we have in terms of the amount of resources, financial resources, banks, credit card, Apple Pay, all these systems that, you know, PayPal, that let us exchange value between people. | ||
| But billions of people across the world don't have any such technology. | ||
| They probably will never have a bank account. | ||
| And Bitcoin is a way for them to, in a way, be their own bank. | ||
| And in an unstoppable way, exchange value with anybody across the whole world. | ||
| And I think that's the message that really makes Bitcoin not this crazy trading scheme or, you know, a lot of people think it's just like a Ponzi scheme. | ||
| But this is, if you think about it, it's a way for people, billions of people to exchange and store value without having any government or company involved in it. | ||
| And that's a very powerful idea. | ||
| What about the other cryptos? | ||
| Where do they fit into this, the other coins? | ||
| This book is really focused on Bitcoin. | ||
| I think there's a place for a lot of other types of technology, and Bitcoin is an evolving thing. | ||
| There's going to be other things that graft onto it, like the Lightning Network, so you'll be able to do millions or billions of transactions a day. | ||
| But Bitcoin in and of itself is really the preeminent way to store value in exchange. | ||
| It was really designed in an amazingly smart way. | ||
| And the book goes into why it's different from any previous type of money. | ||
| Can you explain the difference between why you would use Bitcoin to store | ||
| versus necessarily using it as what you're buying with, basically all the time? | ||
| Well, I think that as it stands now, Bitcoin is probably not the best way to buy things | ||
| just because there's millions of other easier ways to exchange value if you're in the United States | ||
| or Europe or a company that has a banking system. | ||
| But what we have seen is there are human rights advocates throughout the world who live in dictatorships. | ||
| They have no way of safely storing anything that they create in terms of value. | ||
| And if they store cash under their mattress, that can get taken. | ||
| If they have money in their bank account, that could get taken by the government, by fiat. | ||
| But what's even worse, a lot of countries have hyperinflation. | ||
| So that's just an insidious way of stealing money from people without them really noticing it in the short term. | ||
| That's kind of where we're going right now. | ||
| It's possible, and that's maybe a bigger case for Bitcoin. | ||
| But Bitcoin is the first time that people... The Human Rights Foundation does give grants to human rights advocates throughout the world, and before it was a multi-step process that took days and was fraught with peril in terms of getting them capital and now through Bitcoin there's really a simple way | ||
| that we can send people capital and they can use it and store it in a safe | ||
| way and that's really never been possible. Right so basically Human Rights | ||
| Foundation you can find people that are doing good work in some country trying to | ||
| free people whatever whatever it is and then you can send them Bitcoin and that | ||
| way whatever work they're doing that the government is not probably thrilled | ||
| with it's theirs and the government technically doesn't even know about it. | ||
| it. Exactly. Should we be talking about that right now? | ||
| Like what, the government not knowing about it? | ||
| I think there's a kind of a misconception that Bitcoin is completely anonymous. It's really pseudo-anonymous. If a | ||
| state actor or even a big corporation wants to find out who transferred | ||
| Bitcoin to whom, it can be done. | ||
| It's harder than just looking at someone's visa or bank account. | ||
| But I think there are new technologies built on top of Bitcoin, like the Lightning Network, that for very small amounts will keep it almost like cash, where it'll be much harder and won't be worth the effort to track stuff. | ||
| How's this all connected to just decentralizing everything? | ||
| You know the world I'm in, where everybody's worried that if you put a video up that YouTube doesn't like, you're going down, or if you put a tweet up that Twitter doesn't like, they're going to get rid of you. | ||
| Just the general decentralization idea. | ||
| I think this was the first technology that really proved it could work. | ||
| The designer or inventor of Bitcoin was really smart in terms of creating an amazing incentive network where hundreds of millions of dollars has been invested in the blockchain technology and the mining around it without really any investment from government or venture capitalists. | ||
| Can you give me mining 101 for people that don't get it at all? | ||
| Bitcoin is all about proving that what's in the public ledger is accurate. | ||
| And there's two parts of that. | ||
| One is basically proving that having thousands of independent computers and people running those computers check to see that that ledger is correct. | ||
| And then the other is finding new Bitcoin. | ||
| And that's proving the work that you did enables the incentive structure to be set up so that Bitcoin can be created. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What about when Elon Musk is like, I'm into it, and it goes like this, and then he's like, I'm not into it, and it goes like this, and then that gets people all freaked out? | ||
| I feel like it's, you know, he's having fun, he's a very smart guy, he's created some really incredible technologies, but he's also someone who probably likes to troll a lot on You think? | ||
| On Twitter. | ||
| And he also runs a company that is, you know, very focused on green, which is Tesla. | ||
| And, you know, I'm sure he got pushed back saying Bitcoin isn't green, which I think it is, because a lot of the, a majority, 70% of the Bitcoin is mined from renewable sources, because people are really looking for the cheapest energy when they mine a Bitcoin, and that's typically renewable stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Can you power it by volcanoes? | ||
| Isn't that what the president of El Salvador is trying to do? | ||
| I hope it works. | ||
| Is that literally what he's trying to do? | ||
| It seemed like a joke. | ||
| Well, if you think about where Bitcoin mining takes place, it needs a power source. | ||
| And if you create a huge solar cell in the middle of the Sahara Desert, it's not really valuable energy because you have to then ship that energy to a city. | ||
| But if you created a huge green solar plant in the middle of the Sahara Desert and your output was new Bitcoin, that might be a financially viable situation because you can just email out the new Bitcoin that you create and the output is not a huge cable. | ||
| Pumping power, it's just some numbers. | ||
| Right, for the somebody watching this that's like, "All right, I didn't know much about it before. | ||
| "I got some basics here." | ||
| Where do they start with all this? | ||
| You want them to, I mean, do you send them to a wallet to start? | ||
| Like where do you, an exchange? | ||
| Where do you send people? | ||
| There's a lot of different ways, and I think the, everybody is going to have | ||
| You can go to a centrally stored wallet like Coinbase. | ||
| You can also have an app on your phone where you store stuff. | ||
| You could have a USB stick where you store stuff. | ||
| I think the major difference, and maybe a lot of people don't wrap their head around it, is that you're your own bank. | ||
| That gives you a lot of freedom, but then it gives you some responsibilities because You have to be the person who creates the wall around your privacy and you have responsibilities when you get that freedom. | ||
| So that stick that I have in a safe of the password and all that, I can't lose that, right? | ||
| You can't lose that. | ||
| That's the key to this thing. | ||
| Don't lose the password. | ||
| And you don't want to post your password. | ||
|
unidentified
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Don't post it. | |
| Don't have it on the back of your computer written there and then you take a selfie and then everybody can see it because then the Bitcoin's gone. | ||
| I'm gonna have to scribble that down. | ||
| All right, I want to talk to you about one other thing, which is that you basically were the first big guy in Locals. | ||
| You helped us put this whole thing together and connected us with a ton of investors. | ||
| You opened up a million doors for us. | ||
| So I guess my question is, what did you see in what we were doing? | ||
| Because, you know, we talked to a lot of people at the beginning. | ||
| A lot of people said it's a good idea, but You know, it could be a little dangerous and freeing people and all that. | ||
| It made, you know, some people scared, but you were like, let's do this. | ||
| Well, I have to admit the reason I took a meeting with you is because I was a fan of your work. | ||
| So I like the way you think and I was like, well, I mean, how bad can it be? | ||
| I can meet this guy and it'll be an interesting conversation. | ||
| But then what you described it in terms of like giving power back to the creator and having a system where it's I think unfortunately a lot of times in our society there's big tech companies that have gotten a little bit too much power and I really liked your kind of David versus Google, Goliath approach to things and you know when I make a decision to invest in a company it's really about the team and your team with Asaf was really impressive and the technology | ||
| We're building was right on what I thought could work and then it's proven really to be true and I've seen so many creators thrive on your platform. | ||
| You know, they can quit their day job and just be on Locals and have an amazing life and just continue to create and that's impossible on other platforms. | ||
| So, you know, I think I've been proven right that, you know, investing in you and your team has been a really good thing. | ||
| What's the funnest part of doing this? | ||
| Like watching these companies grow and you know, you've had some nice wins. | ||
| I love entrepreneurs. | ||
| I think they're all a little bit crazy. | ||
| They take these crazy risks and it's really amazing to see it pay off. | ||
| No sane person wants to be an entrepreneur, but it's that good kind of crazy, like, you know, taking on these intractable problems and building something. | ||
| And to me, that's the most fun. | ||
| It's the human aspect. | ||
| And, you know, I'm kind of a computer geek. | ||
| I love all the technology aspects of it. | ||
| I mean, I'm a science fiction fan and I love the idea of, like, Kind of seeing how sci-fi will play out in the real world and you know, what are the trends that are gonna work on Have impact on society. | ||
| We're basically in a dystopian future right now Sometimes, you know, I think we live in the simulation because it's craziest stuff is happening. | ||
| So my last question for you We're in Miami you moved to Miami. | ||
| So yeah, you're a case of you lived in San Francisco How long did you live in San Francisco? | ||
|
unidentified
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20 years. | |
| Yeah, 23 years. | ||
| You just moved here in the last year and Beautiful wife, beautiful kids, thriving here. | ||
| You think I'm nuts for not leaving yet? | ||
| Um, you know, take your time. | ||
| Miami will still be here, but, you know, definitely move here before your IPO. | ||
| True wisdom from a great man and a great investor, Alex Lloyd. | ||
| Thanks a lot, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Nice. | |
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about tech instead of nonstop yelling, check out our tech playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're right over here. |
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