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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.
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In recent times, Alex has focused on how cryptocurrency, and especially Bitcoin, can be a tool for empowering democracy and civil liberties in the world.
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Most crucially, parts of the world that are living under authoritarian regimes.
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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.
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And in the same way, the decentralization of money can be used to resist the corrupting nature of this power.
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Alex and I do not agree on everything.
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but we strive for the same betterment of humanity.
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He s sensitive to the suffering in the world and is dedicating his life to finding solutions that lessen that suffering.
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Whether Bitcoin is one such solution, I don t know.
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But I think it has a chance, and that means it is worth exploring deeply.
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I m staying in this path of learning patiently and with as little ego as possible.
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I hope you come along with me on this journey as well.
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And now a quick few seconds summary of the sponsors.
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Check them out in the description.
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It s the best way to support this podcast.
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First is Stripe, a payment platform.
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Second is PaperSpace, a platform I use to train and deploy machine learning models.
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Third is Codecademy, a website where you can learn to code.
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Fourth is NI, a company that helps engineers solve the world s toughest problems.
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And fifth is Eight Sleep, a self-cooling mattress cover I sleep on.
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So the choices, money, AI, programming, engineering, or sleep.
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Choose wisely, my friends.
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And the choices today are kind of amazing.
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And now, onto the full ad reads.
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As always, no ads in the middle.
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I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors.
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I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too.
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This show is brought to you by Stripe, an amazing payment platform that has helped thousands of companies of all sizes make processing payments simple and borderless.
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That s stripe.com.
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Maybe I should start doing these ad reads in Russian.
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This show is also brought to you by Paperspace Gradient, which is a platform that lets you build, train, and deploy machine learning models of any size and complexity.
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I love how powerful and intuitive it is.
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I m likely going to use Paperspace for a couple of machine learning experiments I m doing as part of an upcoming video.
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Fast.ai, which is a course I highly recommend.
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It s run by Jeremy Howard, which is one of the most legit machine learning people and instructors and just humans and researchers out there.
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He uses it.
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Fast.ai uses it.
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You can host notebooks on there.
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You can swap out the compute instances any time.
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So you can start on a small scale GPU instance, or even CPU instance, and then swap out once your compute needs increase.
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You can start small and then go big.
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I m really excited about what they re calling Workflows, which provides a way to automate ML pipelines on top of gradient computer infrastructure.
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It makes it really easy to build a production app because all the orchestration is reduced to a simple configuration file, a YAML file.
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To give Gradient a try, visit gradient.run slash lex and use the signup link there.
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You get 15 bucks in free credits, which you can use to power your next machine learning application.
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That s gradient.run slash lex.
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This show is brought to you by Codecademy, the website I highly recommend you go to if you want to learn to code.
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It doesn t matter if you re totally new or somewhat experienced, there s a course there for you.
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Time flies when you re having fun.
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It gives you the most important basics, which I think is what a great course does.
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Clear, concrete basics.
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Beautifully done, beautifully presented.
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It s great.
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Codecademy, spelled C-O-D-E-C-A-D-E-M-Y.
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It s not Codeacademy, it s just Codecademy.com, promo code Lex.
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This show is also brought to you by NI, formerly known as National Instruments.
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NI is a company that has been helping engineers solve the world s toughest challenges for 40 years.
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Their motto is, my favorite motto of basically any company, is engineer ambitiously.
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They have a podcast called Testing 123, where they talk about how different
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Companies and innovators use testing to overcome failure, to improve their products.
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They also have amazing articles at ni.com slash perspectives, covering engineers and engineering innovators.
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Again, going through this whole process of testing, of challenging their systems until failure, and through failure, learning how to improve it.
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That is the journey of engineering.
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That is what I love about engineering, that failure is a feature, not a bug.
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Anyway, engineer ambitiously with NI at ni.com slash perspectives.
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That s ni.com slash perspectives.
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This episode is also brought to you by 8 Sleep and their Pod Pro mattress.
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It controls temperature with an app, is packed with sensors, and can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately.
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There are very few things I look forward to in life, as much as either taking a power nap or getting a full night s sleep.
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on a cold mattress with a warm blanket with a little bit of air conditioning in a hot Texas summer, hot Texas fall.
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I mean probably the power nap and the sleep itself is the biggest source of pleasure but I think sleep when you can get it is something that s very important so might as well use the best tools for the job to get the best sleep you can.
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They have a pod pro cover so you can just add that to your mattress without having to buy theirs but I have their mattress it s pretty nice.
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The cover can track a bunch of metrics like heart rate variability, but cooling alone is honestly worth the money.
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That s asleep.com slash lex.
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As a side note, we recorded this conversation a while ago.
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and I thought I lost the audio and was really disappointed with myself for messing this thing up.
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But luckily last week I found it and so rescued from out of the abyss of non-existence.
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Here s my conversation with Alex Glasstein.
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What are some universal human rights that you believe all people should have?
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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.
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These are all basic, fundamental, negative rights, what we call them.
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These are the basic, fundamental human freedoms.
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What does negative rights mean?
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Negative rights are liberties and positive rights are entitlements.
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So after World War II, when the UN came together, it was largely a compromise between the Communist Soviet Union and the free United States, right?
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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.
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The Soviets wanted entitlements, like the right to work, the right to have housing, the right to water, the right to a vacation.
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So you actually read the UN Declaration for Human Rights.
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It s a negotiation between the Soviets and the Americans.
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Later, there was another document in the 70s released called the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
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And this is what HRF uses as its sort of like lodestar, its founding document.
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And this is like essentially an international agreement on the negative rights.
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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.
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And they can do that because they don t have any like free speech or press freedom.
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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, it s the same sort of thing that authoritarians have done for decades.
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Cuba and Venezuela and the Soviet Union.
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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?
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the people here have the freedom for assembly and all those kinds of things.
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Can t you still manipulate the idea that citizenry still has those rights?
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The opposition leader of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, he once told me the funny joke that, you know, in my country, we have freedom of speech, we don t have freedom after speech.
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So yeah, they can absolutely manipulate whatever they want.
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But I ve done research into socioeconomic data.
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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,
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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.
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They can do this because there s no free press.
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So for us at the Human Rights Foundation and for people like me, we believe that the negative rights, the liberties, the things that are in, for example, the Bill of Rights in the U.S.
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Constitution, these things are the table.
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And then we can build on top of that.
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We can build the rest of our societies on top of that.
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The freest countries in the world have both
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the negative liberties and the entitlements, like Norway for example.
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But there s a big difference between Norway and North Korea.
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In North Korea they only claim to have the entitlements and they definitely don t have the liberties.
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Do you think there s one right that s more important than others?
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You kind of suggested the freedom of the press, maybe freedom of speech.
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that if you take that away, all the other ones kind of collapse along with like from a ripple effect.
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Is there something fundamental that you like to focus your attention on to defend, to protect, to make sure it s there?
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Yeah, I think I think free speech is probably the most fundamental.
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It s probably why the founders chose to make it into the First Amendment.
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A lot of things are downstream from there.
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Property rights are also very, very important.
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Obviously, we ve seen the toll of violent redistributionism, you know, in over the last hundred years, whether it was Lenin or Stalin or Mao or other regimes and everywhere from Ethiopia to colonial colonialists everywhere to North Korea.
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It s not a pretty legacy.
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Is free speech clear to you as a concept?
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There s been quite a few debates, especially in the digital age, what it means to violate freedom of speech.
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There s been a lot of new novel mechanisms for people to communicate with each other, especially on social networks.
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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
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when they re communicating.
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A lot of people are being censored on these social platforms.
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Some people, even presidents, get removed from those social platforms.
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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?
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There is a Soviet dissident.
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named Natan Sharansky, who survived the regime.
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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.
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Can you go to a public space where you live and criticize your ruler loudly without fear of retribution?
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If you can do that, you have free speech.
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I think that s a pretty good litmus test.
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Most people in this world cannot do that.
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If you live in Havana, if you live in Moscow, if you live in Beijing, you cannot do that.
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And that s not a free society.
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In Austin, Texas, in Boston, Massachusetts, in London, in Santiago, Chile, in Tokyo, Japan,
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in many democracies, you can do that.
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And I think that that s a really helpful basic sort of litmus test.
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Does the content of the criticism matter?
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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.
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phenomena.
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So like, does that matter?
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I think it ends poorly when the state tries to restrict speech.
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I think that s kind of how I would define censorship.
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I think censorship and de-platforming are two different things.
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Private companies, you know, they get to make up their own rules about what s allowed on their platforms.
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And I think that s very different from a government with guns and an army
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restricting the speech of its citizens with threats of violence.
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These things are different for me.
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That violence is a fundamental difference.
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I don t know, I ve gotten the chance to have dinner with Alex Jones, and I ve talked to him a few times offline, and it does, I understand why people are so off-put by him, but it does bother me that he s universally removed from every platform.
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It feels like there s many more evil people, bad people, compared to Alex Jones, who still are given a voice on these platforms.
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And so I m uncomfortable with the universality of the application of the censorship by these platforms.
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But on the flip side, you re right, there s not a violence, there s not tanks, there s not guns behind that censorship.
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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, that the authorities would not tolerate him to do what he did.
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And here he can kind of do what he wants.
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He s encountering some resistance in the marketplace of ideas.
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large organizations, corporations, and a lot of public sentiment in different parts of our country don t like him.
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They re doing their best to drown out his voice.
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But that s very different from a violent threat of censorship from the state.
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And that s what we study.
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That s what I study.
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Are these, you know, what is the state doing?
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That s kind of paramount for me.
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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.
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Of course, from a technology perspective, there is AWS removing Parler from the platform.
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It gets a little weird as you get closer and closer to the compute infrastructure, because then you get closer and closer to the state, actually.
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The more you get to the infrastructure that s usually managed by the state, the closer it gets to then the control of the state.
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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.
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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.
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And so that level of computer infrastructure having control about which social networks can and cannot operate is very uncomfortable to me.
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But you re right, I think it s good to focus on the obvious violations of these principles as opposed to the gray areas.
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Of course, the gray areas are fascinating.
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You mentioned HRF, Human Rights Foundation.
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What is it?
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What is its mission?
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Yeah, so I ve been working for HRF since 2007.
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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.
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So again, we define about 95 countries as authoritarian, meaning it s either a one-party state or opposition politicians are outlawed or persecuted.
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There s no real free speech.
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There s no press freedom.
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There s no independent judiciary.
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There really aren t checks and balances.
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And even trying to create like a human rights organization or like an environmental group would be illegal.
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And the majority of the world s population lives in that environment.
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That s very important.
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You said 53%.
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53%, 4.3 billion people.
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And I saw you outlined a lot of different sources of suffering in the world.
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And then you sort of put people living under authoritarian governments as like more than all of them.
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I forget all the examples you provided, but- Sure, I mean- Yeah, maybe you can mention if you remember.
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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.
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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.
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We live in a profit-seeking world.
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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.
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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.
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I mean, Ray Dalio was there, all kinds of people were there.
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Or at least they were invited and they said they were going to go.
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And this is a government that at the time was torturing a female activist who just wanted to drive a car.
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This is a government that had murdered Jamal Khashoggi in a brutal fashion just a couple years earlier.
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So I mean at the end of the day when it comes down to brass tacks, I mean,
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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.
1
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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?
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Look, I think that at the end of the day, like,
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free trade is actually really good.
1
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And you can just look at France and Germany as an example of how like a capitalist structure would develop.
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If you have two capitalist actors, they re very unlikely to fight each other.
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There s very unlikely to be violence, right?
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These are two countries which basically murdered some large percentage of each other s male population three times in 100 years in three different wars.
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And now today, war is like unthinkable.
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And a lot of that is because of increased collaboration, increased trade.
1
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So when you have two capitalist actors, they act in a very productive way with each other.
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But as soon as you introduce an authoritarian actor, all bets are off.
1
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So I think what you have is a conflict between capitalist actors and authoritarian actors.
1
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And at the end of the day, people need to, yes, have more than just capitalist intentions in the geopolitical
1
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level I m talking about, they need to actually take a stand for principles.
1
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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.
1
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I think that there is a little more than just kind of the pure
1
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The pure profit, yes.
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You mentioned what are the signs that the state is an authoritarian state.
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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?
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Is it as simple as them having a dictator?
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Is it as simple as them as declaring that they don t have a democracy or is there something more subtle?
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There s a couple good litmus tests.
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One is actually can you have a gay pride parade?
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Seriously, it actually lines up perfectly.
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It doesn t matter what religion the dictatorship is.
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They don t like minorities and they love to scapegoat whether it s gays or religious minorities, et cetera.
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So it lines up pretty well.
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If you cannot have a gay pride parade in your country because you re fearful that you re gonna get the crap kicked out of you, probably live in an authoritarian regime.
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I m sure that s not just about some kind of homophobia.
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Why is that?
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That s really interesting.
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Because that s right, I m going through, so the- Fascism scapegoats minorities.
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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.
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I mean, so is Cuba.
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I mean, these are all regimes which demonize the LGBT communities.
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It s interesting because, maybe you can correct me, but from my very distant outsider perspective,
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sort of the way that certain authoritarian governments speak about gay people is it s almost like, what is it?
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We don t have gay people in our country kind of idea as opposed to scapegoating, which is like,
1
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Well, denial is the most powerful form of demonization.
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I mean, this is what the Iranian dictatorship does.
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A few years ago, when Ahmadinejad, who was then sort of the de facto leader, he came to Columbia University and he tried to give a speech, which you can look up, and he tried to claim that there were no gays in Iran.
1
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And that s the most powerful form of demonization is trying to just wipe out your outer existence.
1
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There s other good litmus tests too.
1
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You know, for example, you can think about comedy.
1
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Can you make money making fun of your government on television?
1
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If you cannot, you live in a dictatorship most likely.
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I mean, it s shocking to people that I work with
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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.
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That s a hallmark of a free society.
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So that s another good litmus test.
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SPEAKER_01
Hear that, Tim Dillon?
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SPEAKER_01
You should go to North Korea.
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SPEAKER_01
Check it out.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and look, there are tons of flaws with democracies.
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SPEAKER_00
These are really good tests, by the way.
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The United States is a deeply flawed country in many ways.
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Our prison system is a disaster.
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There s a horrible war on drugs.
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We committed a grievous crime, in my opinion, by invading Iraq.
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We did a lot of
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problematic things, but our core architecture is still an open society.
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The people who criticize the U.S.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What it means is that the citizens have a way to push for reform, have a way to hold the rulers accountable.
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So even if you don t like what the U.S.
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government does, whether it was under Biden or Trump or Obama or Bush,
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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.
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And then there s like a free press and there s lobbyists and all kinds of people that jostle for power.
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So there s a separation of powers and I like to think about a free society really as like at the bottom
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of the foundation of the pyramid really would be free speech.
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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.
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And then on top of that, in the third level, you have separation of powers, again, what I m describing.
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SPEAKER_00
So authoritarian regimes don t really have any of these layers to them, right?
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SPEAKER_00
And then at the top,
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Then you put elections, but the elections are meaningless if you don t have the foundation below.
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SPEAKER_00
Every dictator gets elected.
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Kim Jong-un gets elected.
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He s the only person on the ballot.
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Every dictator from Hitler to Chavez, they all got elected.
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Elections on their own mean literally nothing.
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You have to have these other layers beneath to actually be an open and free society.
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I think it s very important for people to understand.
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SPEAKER_01
Hitler in an interesting way at a certain point just said I m gonna be a ruler forever, which is interesting The there s an important switch that happens when you as opposed to having a facade of elections You even you just put that aside and saying basically like we re not even doing this
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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This sadly happened in Egypt and it was quite predictable after Mubarak was ousted after the Arab Spring.
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You know, Morsi came in and it looked like, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood was not really going to be very democratic.
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But it didn t really matter because then the military came back and now we have Sisi, who s even worse than Mubarak.
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So a lot of times in these regimes, unfortunately, it s very difficult for people to build that democratic society afterwards.
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Some people have told me that when you live in a totalitarian or authoritarian regime, it s kind of like a political desert.
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What grows in the desert?
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Scorpions and cacti, right?
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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.
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You have to crush the moderates.
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SPEAKER_00
That s very important.
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You want to have the only opposition to you be extremists.
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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.
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Right.
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And then the realists who run the U.S.
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government are going to choose you.
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And that s why one of the reasons why the U.S.
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government has supported so many dictators around the world over the last few decades.
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Do you think authoritarian systems emerge naturally, like that s the natural state of things?
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If you incorporate what human nature is, is there always going to be corrupt people, the rest of the top?
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SPEAKER_01
And we almost have to construct systems that protect us against ourselves kind of thing.
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Another way to ask that is what kind of systems protect us from our own human nature?
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SPEAKER_00
We started with authoritarianism or autocracy, right?
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Ruled by one or a small group oligarchy.
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And all humans lived under this structure for, you know, the virtual, you know, bulk of all human existence.
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Only until pretty recently did we start having actual democracy.
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The idea that we should be ruled by rules, not by rulers, very powerful.
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Invented in many places across the world.
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Western Africa had this idea, and so did the ancient Greeks.
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And they started to implement it.
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Although, as most know, we didn t have full democracy for a long, long time.
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because it was only property owners, only men, only people of a certain race.
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But this idea that we can like rotate our rulers and that we could be ruled by rules is extremely powerful.
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SPEAKER_00
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, but not others.
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And they unlocked a lot of the scientific innovation over the last few hundred years.
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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.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think that the democratic revolution has been an incredible thing for our world.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s, you know, you can do half-class full, half-class empty.
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SPEAKER_00
The half-class full is that almost half the world lives under democracy.
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SPEAKER_00
Like, that s an incredible achievement.
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SPEAKER_01
but just under half.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, just under half.
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But that s billions of people.
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It s billions of people.
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And if you look at the progress of things, it s getting better and better and better.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we re a little bit of a stalemate here.
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Democracy s really blossomed between World War II and the year 2000, especially in the 80s and 90s.
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You had an incredible
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wave of fall, you know, where many, many authoritarian regimes fell and were replaced by democracies.
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I think around 2015, the acceleration kind of
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came to a standstill a little bit.
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SPEAKER_00
There s some good news in some countries and there s bad news in others.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like in the last 10 years you ve had, for example, the Philippines has gone backwards.
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SPEAKER_00
Thailand has gone backwards.
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Bangladesh has gone backwards.
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Turkey has gone backwards.
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That s like a half billion people right there.
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So you ve had some positives.
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SPEAKER_00
Like, you know, there was positive movement forward in Armenia, Malaysia, some other countries.
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But we re kind of at a stalemate right now.
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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?
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And that s what concerns me the most.
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SPEAKER_01
Oh, interesting.
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SPEAKER_01
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
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technological innovations will give power to the individuals, will fight authoritarian governments as opposed to give more power to authoritarian governments.
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But your sense is there s ways to give, for technology to be utilized as a tool for the abuse of the citizenry.
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SPEAKER_00
I ve seen both.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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So in Cuba, you know, to own a book, at the time, you had to have the government s permission.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s very little internet penetration, okay?
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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And it was very powerful.
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And then after that, I worked with people inside North Korea.
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We would send in flash drives.
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We have this program called Flash Drives for Freedom.
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We ve sent over a hundred thousand flash drives in our work into North Korea, a country of about 25 million people.
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SPEAKER_00
That s a lot.
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It s a big, big difference.
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That s, you know, many, many millions of hours of films, books, movies, et cetera.
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SPEAKER_00
So I ve seen the power that technology can have where, you know, in the sixties and seventies, you know, to get to break an information blockade, you had to like send in crates of books into a communist country.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
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Like that s remarkable.
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So obviously I ve seen the positives of technology.
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and we ll certainly get into Bitcoin, but I m very concerned about essentially big data analysis, like what people call AI or general, you know, specific kinds of AI, like, very concerning.
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I think these are very authoritarian.
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I mean, it s very hard to make a case that AI is going to be good for human rights.
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SPEAKER_00
Very difficult, in my opinion.
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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,
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SPEAKER_00
I find it very hard to believe it ll be good for civil liberties.
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SPEAKER_01
Oh, that s fun.
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SPEAKER_01
This is fun, because I disagree.
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SPEAKER_01
Give me your examples.
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SPEAKER_00
I m serious, what AI applications will improve civil liberties?
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, 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,
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AI could be used by centralized powers, by governments, by big organizations like Facebook and Twitter and so on to collect data about people.
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But I believe there s a huge hunger among people
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to have control over their own data.
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So instead, you can have AI that s distributed where people have complete ownership of their little AI systems.
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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.
1
SPEAKER_01
and you get to give it out.
1
SPEAKER_01
You have complete control over all of your data.
1
SPEAKER_01
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.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it has to do with, so I know you talk about surveillance, which is very interesting.
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It s who gets to have control of the data.
1
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And I think, I believe there s a lot of hunger
1
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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.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that to me is a very powerful individual right force for individual rights.
1
SPEAKER_00
Very powerful.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it s what s what animates Bitcoin ultimately which which we ll get into.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
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I mean, to actually see what the Chinese Communist Party is doing, where they have hundreds of millions of cameras,
1
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overseeing society.
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Cameras that can tell who s a Uyghur and who s a Han.
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That to me is terrifying.
1
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And everything is sorted instantly.
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SPEAKER_00
There are supercomputers that are built in Urumqi, in Xinjiang, for this explicit purpose.
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And it allows the government to quickly sort
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and basically commit genocide a lot faster.
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And it s really scary.
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So I do agree.
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And I ve seen personally how powerful technology can be as a force for freedom.
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But I m I m very, very worried about big
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data analysis in the hands of governments.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
So you look at what the Chinese surveillance systems are doing.
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I believe once it started getting bad enough,
2
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that technologies would be created to resist that.
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SPEAKER_01
So to mess with it from the hacker community, but also from the individual community.
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SPEAKER_01
So surveillance is actually very difficult from a centralized perspective to detect, to collect data about you, to detect everything you are, because you can spoof a lot of that information.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I believe you can put power in the hands of the citizens to sort of,
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feed the government fake data to confuse it at a mass scale to where it ll make their surveillance less effective.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, that could be very sort of hopeful.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
Each car has, you know, like a scannable code.
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SPEAKER_00
Every single person has their DNA taken, and the DNA is being sifted through and analyzed by algorithms.
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SPEAKER_00
So this is like the Chinese government s laboratory for how can we use technology to oppress.
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SPEAKER_00
It s sort of like digital Leninism.
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SPEAKER_00
And that, to me, is one of the biggest risks in our world today, and it s not talked about enough.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s interesting.
2
SPEAKER_01
So technology basically enables the automation of oppression.
2
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00
But define technology, big data analysis, and maybe specific AI, et cetera, does.
2
SPEAKER_00
But encryption allows us to fight back.
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SPEAKER_00
It s very important people understand we have tools to fight back.
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SPEAKER_00
Big Brother can only grow if it can feed on your data.
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SPEAKER_00
If it can t get your data, it can t grow.
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SPEAKER_00
So you have to willingly give up stuff to the cloud for this monster to grow.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we can make the monster hungry and shrink it if we give it less data.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think that s where I would agree with you in terms of wanting to empower people to be able to do stuff.
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on their own terms in a sovereign way.
2
SPEAKER_00
And yeah, maybe you re kind of thinking like the personal assistant who helps out Tony Stark or something like that.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
But practically speaking, if we re talking about the world today as is,
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SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re already doing it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Street-level surveillance has already been purchased by governments everywhere from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa to the heart of Europe.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s been huge scandals in Britain over their purchase of Chinese surveillance technology.
2
SPEAKER_00
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,
2
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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.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s this national security law in China which states that companies that are Chinese
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SPEAKER_00
which are abroad, are mandated to send data back to Beijing, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So they are building this huge global surveillance state.
2
SPEAKER_00
And again, not talked about enough, you should go Google and research the Belt and Road.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think it s very important that we confront this.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I m really glad you re talking about it because it s probably important to understand.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s almost like an education.
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SPEAKER_01
I feel like
2
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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.
2
SPEAKER_01
In some sense, you want to have tools that allow you to live freely as opposed to live in fear.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you live in fear, that s not a good way to live.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it s a balance.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a free society versus a fierce society.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, a fierce society.
2
SPEAKER_00
And look, people are,
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SPEAKER_00
It s all about the trade-offs you make in your daily life.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, living more privately with more freedom is less convenient.
2
SPEAKER_00
You trade freedom and privacy for convenience and comfort and speed.
2
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s an engineering decision in everything that you do.
2
SPEAKER_00
In the West, we, in advanced democracies, we have not
2
SPEAKER_00
necessarily personally seen the results of that trade-off because we live in these free societies that have these checks and balances and freedoms.
2
SPEAKER_00
But as soon as you step into an authoritarian state and you make those trade-offs, your life immediately becomes more restrictive.
2
SPEAKER_00
What people are worried about is that even in advanced economies, market democracies,
2
SPEAKER_00
people are worried that they might not survive the great social digital transformation.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, look at what the NSA is capable of doing.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, for now, it s not that big of a problem because we still have free speech.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it s deeply concerning what Snowden revealed, and it s a nice reminder
2
SPEAKER_00
that we need to be focused on privacy and encryption and on helping users become more sovereign regardless of where you live.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of like a crutch to live in a free society.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, you know, it s almost like a free lunch in a way.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re not going to be sent to a prison camp because of the color of your skin or your beliefs or what you say about the government.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you re very lucky.
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SPEAKER_00
Again, most people do live in a society where you can be persecuted for those things.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I feel like, especially in America, we forget that.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re distanced from that really strong reality, you know?
2
SPEAKER_01
On the topic of Snowden and the NSA, what should we be thinking about?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because that feels like already an outdated set of conversations because of the information we ve gotten from the past.
2
SPEAKER_01
It feels like everything s gotten quiet now in terms of how much we actually know about the- No, it s hugely important.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think the two lessons from Snowden are A,
2
SPEAKER_00
The Patriot Act and the war on terror and mass surveillance are not necessary for our democracy and for our freedoms.
2
SPEAKER_00
This was a false choice.
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SPEAKER_00
We never had to sacrifice them to be safer and we ve seen that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Government has spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on these like surveillance programs that you can read about and that amounted to very little.
2
SPEAKER_00
except for tremendous bureaucratic waste and erosion of our freedoms.
2
SPEAKER_00
But at the same time, we need to practice more privacy.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the dramatic increase in the usage of Signal, for example, has been really, really great to see.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s fantastic that tens of millions of people are downloading Signal and using it.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
Maybe they can see the metadata.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
So using encryption in your life is very, very important.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s a good starting point.
2
SPEAKER_01
I would say that s kind of step A. The ideas of democracy, the ideas of the balance of power,
2
SPEAKER_01
all the ideas that we were talking about, the constructs, were inventions.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like why do citizens have to use signal?
2
SPEAKER_01
Why?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because that s an effort.
2
SPEAKER_01
You have to understand exactly why.
2
SPEAKER_01
So that s a nice little solution for a particular set of problems.
2
SPEAKER_01
But there s a million other ways that data, I m sure, is being collected constantly.
2
SPEAKER_01
If we don t create a system that prevents the establishments of these centralized powers, then we ll always have this problem.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think we can keep it simple for the purposes of this conversation.
2
SPEAKER_00
You have politics, information, and money.
2
SPEAKER_00
Those are the three things I would encourage us to focus on.
2
SPEAKER_00
In politics, yes, someone invented democracy.
2
SPEAKER_00
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?
2
SPEAKER_00
And that has evolved dramatically, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And now you and then you have information.
2
SPEAKER_00
Information also used to be highly centralized, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, think about how rich you had to be to gain access to a library before the printing press, or, you know, how much money you had to have or how close to the king or the, you know, feudal lord you had to be to be able to have that ability.
2
SPEAKER_00
But now, you know,
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
So not only politics, but information has been dramatically decentralized.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
they re more easily able to practice privacy when it comes to having private messages globally.
2
SPEAKER_00
These are all good things and we need to keep pushing.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think money is like, honestly, maybe the most important piece.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s why I spent so much time thinking about Bitcoin.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so politics, information, money.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let s talk about money.
2
SPEAKER_01
What is money?
2
SPEAKER_01
Why is it important to think about in the context of human rights?
2
SPEAKER_00
I have witnessed money be peripheralized.
2
SPEAKER_00
It has taken a back seat in the human rights conversation.
2
SPEAKER_00
The idea of currency, who makes the money, who makes the rules, who issues it, who sets the interest rates, all these things.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is not on the menu of human rights activists.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you just do like a systematic study of like the human rights discourse over the last several decades, money is not there.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s also not really taught in schools.
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SPEAKER_00
Like children don t really learn about money.
2
SPEAKER_00
Where does it come from?
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SPEAKER_00
It s kind of hidden from a lot of our discourse.
2
SPEAKER_00
Only really when I got into Bitcoin did I start learning more about money.
2
SPEAKER_00
I spent 10 years at the Human Rights Foundation
2
SPEAKER_00
And we did all kinds of programs around the world.
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SPEAKER_00
We convened Oslo Freedom Forums in different places, and I got to meet hundreds of dissidents.
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SPEAKER_00
And very rarely did they ever speak about currency or bank accounts or moving money from one place to another.
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SPEAKER_00
But when I started asking them, they always had amazing stories about money, always.
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SPEAKER_00
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,
2
SPEAKER_00
He said, no one s ever asked me to do that before, but I ll come.
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SPEAKER_00
And he came, this was about three years ago.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then of course, over the next
2
SPEAKER_00
two and a half decades of economic mismanagement and corruption by Mugabe, it got inflated out of existence, right?
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SPEAKER_00
You ve seen those like hundred trillion dollars in Babouin notes.
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SPEAKER_00
So he had to live through that, which was terrible and crushing.
2
SPEAKER_00
But he, you know, is an expert on money.
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SPEAKER_00
If you actually talk to human rights activists about money, they know a lot about money.
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SPEAKER_00
They re just not usually asked to talk about it.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, for me, money, you know, when I study money or look at money, it s really about control.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, who is creating it and how much does the population know about the creation of that money?
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SPEAKER_00
And when it comes to Bitcoin, it s really the people s money, like there is no shadowy force in charge of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
We all know the rules.
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SPEAKER_00
We all know how it s going to get minted and how it s going to get printed.
2
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, that information is out there for everybody to see.
2
SPEAKER_00
And there s no like special group of rules for one group of people or another group.
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, a billionaire and a refugee are the same in the eyes of the protocol.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is a rather revolutionary concept.
2
SPEAKER_00
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,
2
SPEAKER_00
Bitcoin, you know, decentralizes money.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, no longer, again, is there one group of people who can just change it arbitrarily?
2
SPEAKER_00
We re all in the same playing field.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think that is a tremendous innovation.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, from one perspective, money and inflation, hyperinflation, is a kind of symptom of corruption, as opposed to the core of the corruption.
2
SPEAKER_01
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
2
SPEAKER_01
is a way to fight back authoritarianism or to fight authoritarianism.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s to like, it s not that money is a symptom.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, money is a tool to fight back too.
2
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_01
So in what way can Bitcoin be used to fight authoritarianism?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Not just in the United States, but all of those 53% that you re referring to, how can Bitcoin help?
2
SPEAKER_00
So we talked about authoritarianism, and we talked about the surveillance state.
2
SPEAKER_00
To me, Bitcoin has two kind of key mechanisms through which it can help us.
2
SPEAKER_00
Number one, it s a sovereign savings account.
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SPEAKER_00
It s debasement proof, meaning the government cannot print more whenever they want.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And while I live in a country where the rulers do a reasonable job of managing the money, most people aren t so lucky.
2
SPEAKER_00
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?
2
SPEAKER_00
You basically have the US, the UK, Australia, Switzerland,
2
SPEAKER_00
the euro and Canada.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean those are like reserve currencies and these are liberal democracies where people have reasonable guarantees over property rights.
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SPEAKER_00
Everybody else either lives under like a weaker currency or an authoritarian regime.
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SPEAKER_00
That s 87% of the world s population, almost 7 billion people.
2
SPEAKER_00
So for them
2
SPEAKER_00
a sovereign savings account that s permissionless, meaning you don t have to have ID to use it, is a big, big deal.
2
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of people talk about Zimbabwe or Venezuela as some like isolated cases.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, well, you know, hyperinflation only happens in those two countries.
2
SPEAKER_00
I actually did some research into this and
2
SPEAKER_00
There s about one point – over – close to 1.3 billion people who live under double or triple digit inflation.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is not an isolated instance.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re talking huge countries, Nigeria, 200 million people, 15% inflation, Turkey.
2
SPEAKER_00
15% inflation for 100 million people.
2
SPEAKER_00
Argentina, 40% inflation for a country of 45 million people.
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SPEAKER_00
So you can go down the list.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s about 35 countries where 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?
2
SPEAKER_00
So this is a huge issue.
2
SPEAKER_00
It absolutely is a human rights issue for me.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, when it comes to your time and energy, having control over that or having it stolen from you,
2
SPEAKER_00
I think this is pretty clear.
2
SPEAKER_00
And Bitcoin is like an immediate, low cost, easily accessible solution for people.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
or Venezuela or elsewhere.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s very, very powerful.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think some very small percentage of people have used, have owned Bitcoin.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s something like 1%, right, of the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
Whatever that number is, it s small.
2
SPEAKER_00
Call it 2% for the purposes of our time.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
About a little under 200 million people.
2
SPEAKER_00
Wow, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
at most right now.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if we look at Zimbabwe, Sudan, if we look at small percentages of people, do you think the technology is mature enough?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because it s not just about the idea.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s also about the implementation of it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like, you know, Bitcoin, for the most part requires access to the internet.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
And what do you think
2
SPEAKER_01
about accessibility of this technology now as a method of activism in the worst parts of the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
We often think like all the conversations we ve had about Bitcoin is essentially middle-class, like wealthy people relative to the rest of the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re kind of talking with sort of investment and high concept ideas.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then there s also the people in the world who are suffering, who are living through hyperinflation.
2
SPEAKER_01
They may not have a computer or access to the internet.
2
SPEAKER_01
How do you think Bitcoin can help there?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so again, we have one clear use case, which is a sovereign savings account that you can control, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
The other use case is an unstoppable payments network.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is very important for people who live behind, for example, sanctions, like the US, like basically weaponizes the dollar and it like sanctions different countries.
2
SPEAKER_00
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 that people suffer.
2
SPEAKER_00
Cuba or Iran are good examples.
2
SPEAKER_00
Average people suffer, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So people in those two countries I just mentioned,
3
SPEAKER_01
Cuba, Iran, or even Palestine, which is also sort of like blockaded by the Israelis.
3
SPEAKER_01
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 from their families.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sanctions resistant.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sanctions resistant.
3
SPEAKER_01
It does not get stopped by sanctions, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And also it s, again, remittances are extortionate.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, the average remittance
3
SPEAKER_01
you know, costs, has a high fee, takes several days.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes, you know, oh, it gets paused, it gets lost, there s issues, you have to deal with customer service.
3
SPEAKER_01
Screw that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you know, the person has a cell phone, which increasingly is the case.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, by the end of next year,
3
SPEAKER_01
more than five or six billion people, depending on different estimates, will have smartphones basically by the end of 2022.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re talking like the vast majority of humans will have access to smartphones.
3
SPEAKER_01
They can all have sovereign Bitcoin wallets.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there s even ways to access Bitcoin without the internet.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I mean, we can get into that.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s like hardware wallets and so on.
3
SPEAKER_00
What do you mean by sovereign Bitcoin wallet?
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, most users today are using Bitcoin in a custodial manner.
3
SPEAKER_01
So this is kind of like having a bank account where you have a deposit account at a bank, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So you have a claim, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
You go to the bank and they have some of your money and you take it out, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
With an ATM.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what I would call non-custodial
3
SPEAKER_01
Bitcoin use would be similar to withdrawing cash from an ATM.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have it, it s a bearer instrument, okay?
3
SPEAKER_01
So when I, it s what it s called, the bearer instrument.
3
SPEAKER_00
I know, I apologize, I m outside this community, it just sounds funny.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, no, yeah, so like a bearer instrument would be like a bar of gold or a bank note, or Bitcoin that you control, meaning you have the seed phrase, right, which,
3
SPEAKER_01
for the listeners essentially is 12 to 24 English words that you write down on a piece of paper.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s your like password to get into your Bitcoin account.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that gives you that bare instrument quality, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
But unfortunately, most users still use Bitcoin in a custodial way, meaning they buy it on Coinbase or Square or something like that.
3
SPEAKER_00
You would put into the- Custodial.
3
SPEAKER_00
Into the custodial category like a bank, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
And look, the good news is you can withdraw to your own control.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s low likelihood, but it s very possible.
3
SPEAKER_01
Same thing in Bitcoin like if you want to get the full experience you want to actually custody your own Bitcoin You want to you want to put it whether it s on an open-source?
3
SPEAKER_01
Software wallet like the blue wallet is a good one for people to check out Or a hardware wallet like cold card for example.
3
SPEAKER_01
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 and
3
SPEAKER_01
I get a lot of flack from people saying, oh, Bitcoin s so hard to use.
3
SPEAKER_01
I read this article in the New York Times saying this guy in Silicon Valley lost all of his Bitcoin.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s because he was a moron and didn t care about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
This guy lost all this Bitcoin because it wasn t worth much 10 years ago, and he forgot the password.
3
SPEAKER_01
But if you re receiving your remittance from a family member, you re not gonna lose the password, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And you trust in the basic intelligence of people to figure this out and to innovate and so on and figure out.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re watching it, man.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you know, it s kind of funny, but people in the United States are not very savvy with money.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s exactly the way you re describing.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like when you have very little money, you re going to be savvy with money.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re going to understand exactly the mechanisms that work, that are resistant to the corruption that s around you.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I remember sort of growing up in the Soviet Union,
3
SPEAKER_00
the general bureaucracy and the corruption of everything around you, you figure out ways around that.
3
SPEAKER_00
You figure out ways how to function within that kind of system to survive under inflation, under hyperinflation, under all like basically being unable to trust any kind of even the police force and all those kinds of things.
3
SPEAKER_00
You figure it out.
3
SPEAKER_00
In that same way, perhaps Bitcoin could be all the different ways to store and gain Bitcoin.
3
SPEAKER_00
These mechanisms could be something that s figured out in the third world as opposed to in the United States.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
And again, the two use cases, as a savings account and as an unstoppable payment rail.
3
SPEAKER_01
These are the two ones that you should really think about.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is how people are using it today.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now,
3
SPEAKER_01
When it comes to could it possibly be adopted by like a sufficient majority of the population, I say yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s very similar to the way the mobile phone spread.
3
SPEAKER_01
At the beginning, the cell phone was only for rich people.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was only for the elite.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was huge.
3
SPEAKER_01
It didn t work very well.
3
SPEAKER_01
The interface sucked.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was clunky.
3
SPEAKER_01
Over time, it got smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper and easier to use and easier to use.
3
SPEAKER_01
And today,
3
SPEAKER_01
everyone benefits.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you re gonna watch a similar technology upgrade process with Bitcoin.
3
SPEAKER_01
Already in the last 10 years, Bitcoin has gotten so much easier to use.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there are now mobile wallets that are so slick.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s one called Moon, M-U-U-N wallet from a team in Argentina.
3
SPEAKER_01
And these guys created it because they saw their own currency devalued like three times in the last 20 years.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they ve had a hell of a time trying to get their money back and forth in different countries.
3
SPEAKER_01
So they were like, let s make this easy for people.
3
SPEAKER_01
Again, you know, this is the people s money.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is something that cannot be controlled by governments or corporations.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that makes it very powerful.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s actually quite exciting to be here in the adoption phase.
3
SPEAKER_00
In the early days.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, man, this is the early days.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you also mentioned that sort of Bitcoin is the mechanism of a peaceful revolution.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s a way to resist authoritarianism in a peaceful way.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s ultimately, you know,
3
SPEAKER_00
You mentioned sort of politics, information, and money.
3
SPEAKER_00
It seems like in the space of money, this is one of the peaceful mechanisms.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a way to opt out.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can opt out peacefully from the system.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s beautiful, it s beautiful.
3
SPEAKER_00
So Bitcoin is currently by far the most popular sort of dominant cryptocurrency.
3
SPEAKER_00
That said, and I look forward to your letters, Bitcoin maximalists.
3
SPEAKER_00
That said, you know, Internet Explorer was the most popular
3
SPEAKER_00
browser for quite a long time.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then other browsers came along that out-competed it, like Chrome, Firefox, people should check out Brave.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a great browser.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think it s my favorite browser at this point.
3
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, so why Bitcoin?
3
SPEAKER_00
Why not another cryptocurrency?
3
SPEAKER_00
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
3
SPEAKER_00
to overtake Bitcoin as a mechanism.
3
SPEAKER_01
When you say overtake,
3
SPEAKER_01
What do you mean?
3
SPEAKER_01
What do you mean overtake?
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you mean number of users?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do you mean a price per coin?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the number of users, because we re talking about 1%, 2%.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if we are serious about this being in the space of money as a way to give individuals power, fight the centralized powers that abuse the money system and so on,
3
SPEAKER_00
How do we get from 2% to 50%, right, to 60%, to 80%?
3
SPEAKER_00
That jump, is it obvious to you?
3
SPEAKER_00
Not obvious, but do you think Bitcoin is the way to get from 2% to 50%?
3
SPEAKER_00
Or are there going to be other cryptocurrencies that may emerge that get us to 50%?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, Bitcoin is the innovation.
3
SPEAKER_01
The innovation is in having the decentralized mint.
3
SPEAKER_01
No one can change the monetary policy.
3
SPEAKER_01
Everything else is downstream from there.
3
SPEAKER_01
In Bitcoin, the mean would be 21 million.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s never going to be any more than 21 million.
3
SPEAKER_01
Every other cryptocurrency either has an inflationary policy,
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, 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.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is vividly on display in Ethereum, which is like the second largest and second most robust cryptocurrency, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I ve talked to senior Ethereum engineers.
3
SPEAKER_01
over the last couple weeks trying to figure out what is the monetary policy of Ethereum?
3
SPEAKER_01
No one can tell me.
3
SPEAKER_01
No one knows how much ETH is going to be minted in 2022 and 2023 after they shift to proof of stake.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ve seen estimates that range from 100,000 to 2 million.
3
SPEAKER_01
So at the end of the day, you re going to be trusting a small group of people to make those decisions.
3
SPEAKER_01
That is what we are escaping with Bitcoin.
3
SPEAKER_01
So all these other cryptocurrencies, they might have their use cases.
3
SPEAKER_01
Virtually all of them are not.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
Even the ones that have like noble intentions.
3
SPEAKER_01
I just don t think you re going to add that much value.
3
SPEAKER_01
Ultimately, I think Bitcoin to me is the innovation.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, that s because it has a monetary policy and an issuance schedule that cannot be changed.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s what gets me so excited about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s why it s such an important tool for human rights.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s interesting to see what kind of cryptocurrency would be resistant to that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Obviously, Dogecoin is going to win.
3
SPEAKER_00
Let s be honest.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, look at the numbers to cryptocurrency in the world, probably by like how useful it is to people is tether, which is totally centralized, has blacklists.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I m not saying there won t be like new digital assets that are lumped into this category that have usage.
3
SPEAKER_01
But they re not – it s not the same innovation as Bitcoin.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just sort of building on this idea of like a euro dollar maybe, like a dollar that is minted outside of the control of the US Federal Reserve, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It would be a euro dollar.
3
SPEAKER_01
So stable coins are kind of like euro dollars just minted by private actors in a way, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
But they re still tied to the dollar.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re pegged to the dollar.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re not escaping the system.
3
SPEAKER_01
Escaping the system is Bitcoin.
3
SPEAKER_01
We aren t reliant on the dollar.
3
SPEAKER_01
we have our own, you know, full store value, medium of exchange, unit of account eventually.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, the Bitcoin world will be denominated in different terms.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think everyone, everything else will be tied to it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I really do.
3
SPEAKER_00
It does feel currently like Bitcoin is like, like pirates or something like that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there s still like the central banks that are like the main navies of the, of the different nations.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just, if you talk about scale.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s going to be a moment if Bitcoin continues to grow in its impact,
3
SPEAKER_00
when governments are going to seriously contend with, you know, what do we do with this?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do you think about those moments?
3
SPEAKER_00
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?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so it s been interesting.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s been 12 years, okay?
3
SPEAKER_01
More than 12 years since Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they haven t been able to stop it.
3
SPEAKER_01
They have tried.
3
SPEAKER_01
They have tried a lot.
3
SPEAKER_01
I wrote a long essay for Quillette on this.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, why haven t governments been able to stop Bitcoin?
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think to me, the best way to think about it is that Bitcoin s like a Trojan horse.
3
SPEAKER_01
So just to actually tell that story just a little bit, because I think it s important to understand the classical mythology tale.
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SPEAKER_01
I find this very interesting.
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SPEAKER_01
Of the actual Trojan horse.
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SPEAKER_01
Of the actual Trojan horse, yeah, which was told in the Aeneid actually by Virgil, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And the idea was the Greeks had been like trying to take the city of Troy for like a decade at these like impregnable walls and they couldn t do it.
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SPEAKER_01
And Ulysses and the rest of the Greek army were like, we don t know what to do.
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SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, the idea was the Greeks just like pretended to leave, right?
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SPEAKER_01
They deserted.
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SPEAKER_01
They left behind one soldier and this horse.
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SPEAKER_01
And the Trojans looked at it and they were like, what s going on here?
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SPEAKER_01
And they brought in the soldier and the soldier s like, look, they left.
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SPEAKER_01
They re so sorry for all of the desecration and blood spill.
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SPEAKER_01
This is their gift to you.
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SPEAKER_01
It s, you know, honoring Minerva.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, it s like this like
3
SPEAKER_01
you know, trophy for you guys.
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SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
This is obviously a trick.
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SPEAKER_01
But they were like dispatched and ignored because the horse was like, it was just like so badass.
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SPEAKER_01
So that the Trojans were like,
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bringing it in the city.
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SPEAKER_01
So they brought it in themselves.
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SPEAKER_01
No blood spilled at all, right?
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SPEAKER_01
In the middle of the night, of course, 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.
3
SPEAKER_01
So this idea that like
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
So like, in Bitcoin has this number go up technology, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It is what we call it in sort of shorthand NGO, NGU, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
But what people don t realize is that NGU is like the Trojan horse.
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SPEAKER_01
Inside the Trojan horse is FGU, freedom go up technology.
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SPEAKER_01
So dictators and rogue regimes and corporations are gonna buy, mine, tax, accumulate this thing because it s the best performing financial asset in the world.
3
SPEAKER_01
What they don t realize or they re gonna have to ignore is that they re also aiding and abetting this freedom technology which allows individuals to be sovereign and eventually erodes their power.
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SPEAKER_01
There s no question that rogue regimes and bad actors have already used and will continue to use Bitcoin.
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SPEAKER_01
The thing is when you think about a North Korea or a Venezuela,
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SPEAKER_01
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?
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SPEAKER_01
Which they can t get normally.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, guess what?
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SPEAKER_01
All those people who the regime has instructed to like figure this thing out and use it,
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SPEAKER_01
They re all going to realize, oh, my God, this is money the government doesn t control.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s going to spread like a virus.
3
SPEAKER_01
OK, so this is like the idea of the Trojan horse allegory.
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SPEAKER_01
I think it s so important and powerful with Bitcoin.
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SPEAKER_01
All the people talking about Bitcoin today on TV, they don t care about freedom or privacy.
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SPEAKER_01
They just care about number go up.
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SPEAKER_01
But what they don t realize is what s concealed within.
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SPEAKER_01
And that s very, very powerful to me.
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SPEAKER_00
So the people talking about Bitcoin on TV are maybe investor types.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, professional investors, corporations, and soon governments.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you just had today, this morning on CNBC, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, a congressman, saying, like, we need to be pro-Bitcoin as a country.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you have influential people in our government
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SPEAKER_01
like sort of posturing for this like, you know, Bitcoin race that s gonna happen in the next 10 years.
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SPEAKER_01
You re gonna see this.
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SPEAKER_01
Countries are gonna compete to stack Bitcoin.
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SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00
So you believe the thing that s shiny and sexy like the Trojan horse, the number go up.
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SPEAKER_00
It s too hard to ignore.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s just a good- Feedback loop.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s a feedback loop.
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SPEAKER_00
And then the reason you re excited about it, especially, is that FG- Yeah, freedom go up.
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SPEAKER_00
Freedom go up, which is it ultimately gives power to the individuals, so decentralize the entire system.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean like when Tesla stacks Bitcoin,
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SPEAKER_01
They re just doing that as self-interest.
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SPEAKER_01
They think it s going to be a good inflation hedge.
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SPEAKER_01
Fine.
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SPEAKER_01
But what they maybe don t care about, don t realize, or they don t need to care.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, Bitcoin s power is that like co-ops people into promoting a freedom tool, even if they don t care about or even if they hate freedom.
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SPEAKER_01
It doesn t matter.
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SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
then more people get involved.
3
SPEAKER_01
Again, more adoption, more price, more developers, better user interface, more privacy tools, more mining, more network security.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the reason why I m so excited about this is the human rights world, again, to get back to our previous conversation, is very hard to find people who have, you know, the empathy
3
SPEAKER_01
or the altruism to actually make a difference abroad in places like China or Saudi Arabia or North Korea.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s no alignment of incentives, right?
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SPEAKER_01
The reason why Bitcoin is so powerful is that it aligns the incentives.
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SPEAKER_01
All of a sudden,
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SPEAKER_01
They can be as greedy as they want.
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SPEAKER_01
They are being forced to promote a freedom tool.
3
SPEAKER_01
This I ve never seen before and it makes me – it gives me a lot of like excitement.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s very refreshing because we ve been laboring in the human rights space and you have to like raise money and it s all like non-profit work and you re like begging for people to make a difference for you.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
That is what we need to fight, big brother.
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SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
this is our way to fight back.
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SPEAKER_01
And it runs on this really interesting engine, again, that takes advantage of our base nature as humans.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I know that it sounds terrible for me to say this, but I mean, ultimately, we are self-interested.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it is hard to get people to care about others living 1,000 miles away.
3
SPEAKER_01
We are kind of localized in our empathy.
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SPEAKER_01
Speaking as someone who works to help people who live in,
3
SPEAKER_01
like a hundred different countries, it s very difficult to get Americans to care about what s happening in Belarus or in Kashmir.
3
SPEAKER_01
It just is.
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SPEAKER_01
But guess what?
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SPEAKER_01
They re going to definitely care about Bitcoin because they want to see their net worth go up.
3
SPEAKER_01
They want to do better for their family, etc.
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SPEAKER_01
They re going to get into this thing.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s really
4
SPEAKER_00
really gonna make that powerful tool for everyone else who s using it.
4
SPEAKER_00
So this interplay dynamic is fascinating to me.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I have to, I m somebody who doesn t like the corrupting effects of greed, but it is also human nature.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I don t like it either, but we have to be realists here.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have to acknowledge it and then maybe use it for your advantage.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s not just Bitcoin itself.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then we had Visa credit cards, which were a way of scaling the paper notes.
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SPEAKER_00
Bitcoin scales through Lightning Network.
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SPEAKER_00
It s a private, instant, globally, final settlement network.
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SPEAKER_00
It s something you all should check out.
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SPEAKER_00
It s very, very interesting.
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SPEAKER_00
The exchanges aren t adopting Lightning for its privacy benefits.
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SPEAKER_00
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 that works kind of like the Tor project.
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SPEAKER_00
The exchanges don t care about privacy.
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SPEAKER_00
They re doing it because it reduces fees.
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SPEAKER_00
Lightning is cheaper and faster.
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SPEAKER_00
So again, we have this really interesting alignment of incentives where like the freedom tech is being promoted by people who don t, I don t, it doesn t matter what their incentives are.
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SPEAKER_00
I could care less if they were altruistic or not.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think this is, and you re going to maybe see this even in the future, there s more things coming in Bitcoin down the pike.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s another thing coming up called cross-input signature aggregation, which may, if it takes effect in the next few years,
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SPEAKER_00
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 going to do it for moral reasons.
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SPEAKER_00
They re going to do it because it s going to save them money and improve their bottom line.
4
SPEAKER_01
Can you speak to that kind of collaborative so that you can have multiple parties in a single transaction kind of thing?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
You could do that today.
4
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00
It s called the coin join, for example.
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SPEAKER_00
But right now it s more expensive to coin join in Bitcoin.
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SPEAKER_00
You have to pay a premium for your privacy.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
The more parties you get in, the cheaper it s going to be per party.
4
SPEAKER_00
OK?
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SPEAKER_00
And that s not possible in Bitcoin today, but it might be in the future.
4
SPEAKER_00
But again, the beauty in Bitcoin are these like
4
SPEAKER_00
These ways that it just aligns human incentives and it aligns our most base desires and needs and realities with freedom and privacy.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that I ve never seen before.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s why I think it s so interesting.
4
SPEAKER_01
So something that somebody like Eric Weinstein actually spoke to this, the idea of blockchain in general.
4
SPEAKER_01
From a 10,000 foot view,
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SPEAKER_01
The blockchain is a centralized place to keep the record of everything that ever happened.
4
SPEAKER_01
And does that concern you?
4
SPEAKER_01
From a privacy perspective, from a control perspective, even though it s managed, especially, you know, given the low frequency of transactions for Bitcoin, you can have a lot of, you know, small computers across the globe contain the entirety set of transactions.
4
SPEAKER_01
all of those kinds of features.
4
SPEAKER_01
Does that concern you that there s one place where everything is made public in terms of everything that ever happened?
4
SPEAKER_00
No, and I ll give you two reasons.
4
SPEAKER_00
Number one, the Bitcoin blockchain is ultimately a settlement layer.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of like something like Fedwire in the United States.
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SPEAKER_00
It s a way for like,
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SPEAKER_00
institutions to settle with each other.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s what I think it s going to be like in 20, 30 years from now.
4
SPEAKER_00
The average person is never going to touch the Bitcoin blockchain, probably.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
The main chain is going to get very expensive.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s going to be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars or even more if the dollar starts to weaken.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that that s fine and that s okay and it s very important that that ledger, that settlement layer,
4
SPEAKER_00
be kept by thousands of people around the world.
4
SPEAKER_00
The Bitcoin blockchain is not centralized.
4
SPEAKER_00
It is decentralized.
4
SPEAKER_00
It is run by people like me who run a node at home.
4
SPEAKER_00
I run a personal server.
4
SPEAKER_00
I run the Bitcoin blockchain.
4
SPEAKER_00
No one else.
4
SPEAKER_00
You run it.
4
SPEAKER_00
That person runs it.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s no one in charge.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I run a full node.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s great.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s pretty easy, man.
4
SPEAKER_00
You run it, and that way you can be sovereign over all of your usage, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And you can run it on a Raspberry Pi with less than 150 bucks of equipment.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s so important because again, there is no Amazon web service vulnerability here.
4
SPEAKER_00
That is a problem.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I agree with you.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re trending in a bad direction.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re like, the government could just turn off, you know, a big important website or a news source.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, they can t turn off Bitcoin because it doesn t live on AWS.
4
SPEAKER_00
It lives with us.
4
SPEAKER_00
We are Bitcoin.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that that s very, very powerful.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
everything s an engineering tradeoff, 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 the second layers.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there s all kinds of cool engineering things that people are coming up with.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I also would say
4
SPEAKER_00
Anyone who says the blockchain like that s a red flag for that person doesn t really know what they re talking about.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like Satoshi didn t use the blockchain in the white paper.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that was like a very corporate kind of social attack on Bitcoin to say we could take this like ledger part of this radical thing that s for criminals and all these bad people, but we could take one part of it out and we could bring it over here and we could make it safe for everybody.
4
SPEAKER_00
The real McCoy s Bitcoin, I mean, Satoshi referred to it as a time chain.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, really what they re talking about is just these like blocks that are connected chronologically of transactions.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s really not that exciting.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, when you remove the blockchain from Bitcoin, it s not very, to me, it s just not, it s just not that interesting.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_01
To me, blockchain, time chain, whatever, philosophically, it s a pretty beautiful idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s pretty simple, but nevertheless, it s beautiful.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m a big database person.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s an interesting way to store information, especially that s totally publicly accessible.
4
SPEAKER_01
I know that to Bitcoin, proof-of-work is the fundamental idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
But to cryptocurrency and digital money in general, and to money, the blockchain is a really interesting idea to me.
4
SPEAKER_01
The way I think about it is it s kind of, you know, physics.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I like that there s a place that you can rely on that s very difficult to mess with.
4
SPEAKER_00
But it s not, though.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, it s outside of maybe Ethereum.
4
SPEAKER_00
Every other blockchain is easy to mess with.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you re saying that proof of work is what makes it hard to mess with.
4
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, proof of work is the key.
4
SPEAKER_00
And Ethereum s about to leave proof of work.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, reputation has a lot of value there and that it could be manipulated.
4
SPEAKER_00
I may sound brutal, but I m coming at it from a political science perspective.
4
SPEAKER_00
For me, it s all about freedom versus dictatorship.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s why I find it so compelling that
4
SPEAKER_00
that regardless of how much power or might or how many armies you have, you can t change the rules of Bitcoin.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you re wrong about Bitcoin, what would that look like?
4
SPEAKER_01
What kind of thing that in 10, 20 years that you re not wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t pan out.
4
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t pan out.
4
SPEAKER_01
But other things that actually make you feel good about all the hard work you ve done do pan out.
4
SPEAKER_01
Something you haven t expected.
4
SPEAKER_01
What might that be?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, as we ve talked about, my career started in human rights and in promoting individual freedom and fighting authoritarianism.
4
SPEAKER_00
That fight will continue on, no matter what happens with Bitcoin.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think it would be a massive failure and a tragedy if this project, like, didn t work.
4
SPEAKER_00
The Bitcoin project?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_00
If the Bitcoin project didn t work, we would, it would, honestly, it s one of the only things that gives me hope.
4
SPEAKER_00
because it is an effective way to push back against the creeping centralized control.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
Again, I think the Trojan horse allegory is too powerful.
4
SPEAKER_00
These big centralized actors are going to be too greedy and they re going to want some.
4
SPEAKER_00
As opposed to banning it, it s way easier for them to buy it than to ban it.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think that s just what s going to happen.
4
SPEAKER_00
But if 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.
4
SPEAKER_00
I would be concerned that that would be all of our sort of destiny.
4
SPEAKER_01
I do have to sort of push back at a style of communication.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you re not doing it today.
4
SPEAKER_01
You re being exceptionally eloquent in arguing these ideas.
4
SPEAKER_01
But me, especially just from studying history and being very skeptical from growing up in the Soviet Union,
4
SPEAKER_01
I m very skeptical and cautious when I see a community of people being very sure of an idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
Doesn t matter what that idea is.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there s a huge amount of certainty around Bitcoin.
4
SPEAKER_01
Part of it is an important feature because it s number go up.
4
SPEAKER_01
So far.
4
SPEAKER_01
Number go up is a really important part of the mechanism to make sure that it grows in impact, network effects, because I mean, it s really important to get excited about an idea for it to take hold.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the way human nature works and so on.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I also get...
4
SPEAKER_01
Even something that you mentioned that, you know, others may not, you know, if you mentioned blockchain, you re sensitive to the attacks that have been, that have been mounted where the word blockchain has been used.
4
SPEAKER_00
People have been fooled.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
All collapsed.
4
SPEAKER_01
It makes me sad.
4
SPEAKER_01
It makes me sad that there s a huge number of scams.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know what makes me really sad?
4
SPEAKER_01
Just a tiny little tangent.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s been recently, I guess with the growing platform or something, there s been a bunch of fake Lex Friedman accounts.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, must have a million.
4
SPEAKER_01
But not only do they do stupid stuff,
4
SPEAKER_01
but they ve been messaging people on LinkedIn.
4
SPEAKER_01
And people write to me and they re saying like, I think it gets people.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think they click on stuff.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think they were not sure.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it makes me think like,
4
SPEAKER_01
People are gullible or not gullible, but like they re just like I am, which is they re like hopeful about the world.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re optimistic about the world.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re almost like naive about the evil that s out there.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is what goes wrong with Bitcoin and I ve seen it.
4
SPEAKER_00
People fall for these like, I mean, like in these different countries, I m trying to like talk to different people about Bitcoin and like the amount of like MLM schemes, pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes,
4
SPEAKER_00
There are just so many of them and there s plenty here too but like in Zimbabwe I was talking to this guy who is a reporter who studies the effects like the foreign currency exchange markets.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I would say that that s one way it could go wrong is that like people just continue to be like.
4
SPEAKER_00
afraid of it because of things that are like that in the past.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s not just the volatility, it s just the, you know, yeah, having- Yeah, if you think it s a pyramid scheme, you re not gonna wanna get involved.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
So whenever somebody, whenever there s a lot of people being
4
SPEAKER_01
cultishly excited about something, I start being very skeptical.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like, you know, I used to like Green Day before they became really popular.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then the moment they became really popular, I m like, I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he started wearing mascara.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, I don t know, I don t like them anymore.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I m very skeptical about evangelists of an idea because I think Bitcoin on its own is just a powerful idea that stands.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_00
I took this personality test and I m a 99 skepticism.
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SPEAKER_00
So I was first, sadly, because I was first introduced to Bitcoin in 2013.
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And I was like, whatever.
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SPEAKER_00
And it took me four years to actually get into it, to go down the rabbit hole.
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SPEAKER_00
I didn t really start to grasp it and start getting excited about it until 2017.
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So I was regrettably very, very skeptical for a long time.
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And I just thought it was like, whatever.
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SPEAKER_00
So I appreciate that and you should be skeptical.
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SPEAKER_00
But ultimately, you got to believe in things like I believe in democracy.
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I believe it s good for people.
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I believe it s better than tyranny.
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I believe in the Internet.
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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.
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SPEAKER_00
And I believe in Bitcoin.
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SPEAKER_00
And to me, it s like a very similar progressive force that we re encountering.
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SPEAKER_00
But but I yeah, be skeptical.
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SPEAKER_00
Nothing nothing.
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SPEAKER_00
Nothing will befall you that s bad if you re like cautious and skeptical.
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SPEAKER_00
That s like a good mentality to have.
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SPEAKER_01
One thing we haven t talked about, all the violations of the human rights that authoritarian regimes do.
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SPEAKER_01
There s a, not a positive, but there is, you mentioned that nationalism is a drug.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
There s something beautiful about loving your country, having pride in your country, loving the, there s a feeling of belonging.
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It could be country, it could be tribe, it could be family, that s really powerful.
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And that speaks to human nature as well.
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And that can sometimes overpower everything else.
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Patriotism.
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Patriotism.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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And, you know, sometimes it can be seen when you study history, when you look at,
4
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Stalinist, the Soviet Union, or you can even look at Hitler and Nazi Germany, we tend to paint patriotism in a negative light.
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SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, every time I say I love America, so as an immigrant, I love this country.
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SPEAKER_01
It s funny how that s taken as a political statement that,
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you know, 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.
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SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, look, you have patriotism, then you have jingoism, right?
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SPEAKER_00
It s very important that we stay on the patriotic side.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
It was not the original plan of the founders, right?
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SPEAKER_00
It had to be changed.
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SPEAKER_00
But since, you know, then we ve remained, you know, like, you know, those laws have remained and they re very good.
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And I m very proud of that.
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What I m not proud of is the jingoistic part of our country, where we invade other countries and bomb other countries.
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I m not proud of our prison system.
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I think it s a huge stain on our nation.
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I m not proud of a lot of things.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think you can be patriotic, but you can be, you know, critical of your country.
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And that s important.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, I feel like the jingoistic thing is the thing that we need to watch out for.
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That s just my own personal take.
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SPEAKER_01
Out of all the projects that the Human Rights Foundation works on, what s the most important one to you right now, like, that s been occupying your mind?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I just read, again, this New Yorker piece that just came out that you should read.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s called Ghost Walls.
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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.
4
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And it s happening again right now.
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We said never again.
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SPEAKER_00
And, you know, that s just not true.
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SPEAKER_00
We re letting it happen.
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SPEAKER_00
And again, with the business stuff, like people are like Airbnb is like a sponsor of the Olympics.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like what?
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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?
4
SPEAKER_01
How do we push back?
4
SPEAKER_00
A great blueprint is the fight against the South African apartheid.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
And it really does a good job of chronicling how they were able to do it.
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SPEAKER_00
It took a while, there s no doubt, but the way it was done was good.
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peaceful action from abroad was very important.
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SPEAKER_00
So there was like the Sullivan principles.
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SPEAKER_00
So like you can peacefully protest as a company particular regimes.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s very effective.
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SPEAKER_00
And not just corporations, but like the Olympics is a great example.
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SPEAKER_00
Like
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Chinese government should not be able to host the Olympics.
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The IOC should say no, not until you close down those prison camps.
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SPEAKER_00
This is a perfect, peaceful way to push back.
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SPEAKER_00
No one gets hurt.
4
SPEAKER_00
Same thing when we had the Korean Olympics a few years ago.
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SPEAKER_00
North Korea should not have been allowed any sort of symbolistic kind of hosting rights there.
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They have prison camps, gulags that we can see from outer space.
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Very clear
5
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clearly, and their regime is the cruelest one on the planet probably.
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Why were they able to sit and cheer and, you know, get to sort of co-host the Olympics?
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SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
Unfortunately, today s celebrities are doing the opposite.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, if this was the 1980s,
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Akon would be raising his fist and saying we need to fight the apartheid regime.
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SPEAKER_01
How do we get back to that?
5
SPEAKER_01
We need to think about that.
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SPEAKER_01
We have to figure out how to harness celebrities, influencers, and companies and get them to actually stand up for something for once.
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SPEAKER_01
That s something we ve lost.
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SPEAKER_01
We really had a spine against that.
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SPEAKER_01
And, you know, we ve lost it, you know, and you lose things, you lose them forever.
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SPEAKER_01
Look at Tibet.
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Tibet was a big cause for people in the 90s.
5
SPEAKER_01
Used to go to colleges and kids would have the Tibetan flags all over the dorm rooms.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was like Radiohead would have Tibet on the stage and everybody wanted to, you know, free Tibet was a big thing.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, guess what?
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Like, we lost it for some reason.
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It s not a thing anymore and Tibet has been totally colonized, you know?
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So I think it s important that we find a way to unlock an interest
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SPEAKER_01
of in the celebrity classes among athletes, singers, presidents, you know, we need to find a way to punish these people.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s surprising because we ve become more and more connected so we can communicate more effectively at a large scale.
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SPEAKER_00
And yet we seem to be worse and worse at real activism.
5
SPEAKER_00
It seems like the outrage that s overtaken the communication channels has been very US focused and often more about outrage and less about productive activism.
5
SPEAKER_01
I m very jaded.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s very difficult to do these things at scale effectively.
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SPEAKER_01
I do not believe we will be successful in
5
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boycotting the Chinese Olympics.
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SPEAKER_01
We weren t in 2008.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t think – they re much more evil now and I don t think we re going to be able to do it this time.
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SPEAKER_01
Again, to go back to the Bitcoin piece, that s why I m like very interested in this thing because it doesn t require my altruism.
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SPEAKER_01
It doesn t require some famous singer or some corporation to sacrifice anything.
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SPEAKER_01
They re literally just gonna follow their own profit-seeking self-interested motives, and they re gonna end up making a stronger human rights tool for other people.
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SPEAKER_00
Freedom go up.
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SPEAKER_01
FGU, man.
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SPEAKER_00
Do you think we re... It s kind of a dark question, but you think we re headed towards a war with China, the United States versus China?
5
SPEAKER_01
I hope not.
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SPEAKER_01
I hope not.
5
SPEAKER_00
In the cyberspace and potentially even a hot war.
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SPEAKER_01
I think there s too many people with too much money to be lost to go to a hot war on both sides.
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SPEAKER_01
But eventually we re just going to someone s going to have to stand up.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, the subjugation of Hong Kong and the genocide of the Uyghurs and the colonization of Tibet.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, Taiwan is the next big thing.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, Xi Jinping has made it very clear, you know, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong.
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SPEAKER_01
Taiwan so we re gonna have to stand up for Taiwan for different reasons both for moral reasons But also for semiconductor reasons we need TSMC to be on our side.
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SPEAKER_01
I cannot have China take over TSMC so There s different reasons why we re gonna have to protect Taiwan And you just hope it s not a hot war I mean at this point
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, but also from inside the governments of China and Russia as well, but China, I guess, is the powerhouse here.
5
SPEAKER_00
How do these governments get reformed?
5
SPEAKER_00
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?
5
SPEAKER_01
No empire lasts forever.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s impossible to predict when these regimes fall.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, no one, no one thought the Soviet Union was going to fall when it fell like that.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like if you study like, the news and the scholarship of the era, no one knew that the Tunisian government was going to fall after Mohammed was easy lit himself on fire.
5
SPEAKER_01
No one, no one, no one predicted that that would become what we now know as the Arab Spring, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
These things are impossible to predict.
5
SPEAKER_01
And one day the Chinese regime will fall.
5
SPEAKER_01
I just, we don t know when.
5
SPEAKER_00
And there s quite a few folks who talk about the fall of the American empire.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it also concerns me that we don t know when that might fall.
5
SPEAKER_00
You assume me as a very excited, naive American, I m very excited by this project.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think is the beacon of hope in the world still.
5
SPEAKER_00
But that s probably how you feel before it s the end.
5
SPEAKER_01
You want to leave the party before it starts to deteriorate.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think America could continue to have like a major, major leadership role for a long, long time.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think certain things we do will become maybe no longer possible in terms of the way we intimidate people on the world stage.
5
SPEAKER_01
term, especially the way we use our currency as a weapon.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think that that s going to decline over time as we become more of a multipolar world.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I do still believe in America and the values that were founded on despite all the warts.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s no question.
5
SPEAKER_00
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?
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
Is there, from a human rights perspective, is there something that bothers you about Facebook, about these large companies?
5
SPEAKER_00
Is there something we need to fix, something we need to
5
SPEAKER_00
be upset about, fight back on, reform, do some sort of real activism about.
5
SPEAKER_01
I m very concerned about social media platforms and companies.
5
SPEAKER_01
It almost feels like we re losing the golden age of the internet, you know, when we could like go online and interact with each other and share and not be worried about censorship.
5
SPEAKER_01
It feels like that was a golden age, like in the late 90s, 2000s.
5
SPEAKER_01
And now everything is becoming very politicized.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I m not sure that there s a solution.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like, I don t think there s a button we can press to fix it.
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SPEAKER_01
I m kind of afraid that this is sort of just what happens when societies digitize, like, like, I think that certain opinions just become demonized in in the sort of
5
SPEAKER_01
in the room, in the social room that we have on the internet.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I don t know if there s a magical solution there.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s very exciting.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like right now you could be deplatformed from your,
5
SPEAKER_01
You know from like whether it s patreon or YouTube or whatever and your bank account can be closed down right there are emerging ways That Adam Curry like the podfather and a bunch of other people are experimenting with where you can essentially have your audio podcast across a whole bunch of different
5
SPEAKER_01
platforms, so it s censorship resistant.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then your audience can pay you over Lightning in streaming money.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like they can stream you money as they listen.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you re removing the whole advertising piece.
5
SPEAKER_01
You don t need to do advertising anymore.
5
SPEAKER_01
You have this direct relationship with your audience.
5
SPEAKER_01
And this is possible with something like Lightning where you can do streaming money that s censorship resistant.
5
SPEAKER_01
And a lot of the people who are building a Lightning network
5
SPEAKER_01
For example, Elizabeth Stark, who, you know, started lightning labs and has done in her within her company, the people that work with her have built a huge part of the lightning infrastructure.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, what animates her is this idea of like, again, artists and creators being able to have that direct.
5
SPEAKER_01
ability to reach out and have that peer-to-peer relationship with their audience.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I m excited for that, and I do think that s coming, but I am very worried that the golden age of centralized social media platforms is kind of behind us.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I m not sure how to fix that.
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if that s a fixable problem.
5
SPEAKER_00
Interesting.
5
SPEAKER_00
I have a hope that it s a fixable problem.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think it s fixable because there s demand for it to be fixed.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s the way I think about it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, is Twitter that bad right now?
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s fixable in as much as you can do a verification.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you can give a blue check to someone, and then that person is more credible, and they go to the top of the comments.
5
SPEAKER_01
And there s tweaks you can do.
5
SPEAKER_01
You can continue to improve it, but it s not gonna fix the fact that Twitter can decide to
5
SPEAKER_01
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 is a lot of fun great phenomenon so is twitter spaces so they continue to iterate but the the censorship de-platforming piece i m not sure is fixable because if you i mean you watch the u.s government hall these people hall hall um
5
SPEAKER_01
Zuckerberg and Dorsey and whatever in front of Congress, they want more censorship.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, our elected leaders want more censorship, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
See, I just believe censorship is a really harsh word.
5
SPEAKER_00
I believe it s possible to create technologies where it s not Twitter doing the censorship,
5
SPEAKER_00
but it s individuals doing their own selection of what they want and don t want to see.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like you get to have more control over what you consume.
5
SPEAKER_00
Twitter tries to do that a little bit, but they obviously fail.
5
SPEAKER_00
Where ideas,
5
SPEAKER_00
infiltrate our view that misinformation spreads really fast.
5
SPEAKER_00
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
5
SPEAKER_00
too many people.
5
SPEAKER_00
So that, it s exactly the same intuition as you said before.
5
SPEAKER_00
If the state is doing it, in this case Twitter s kind of the state, it s not going to work out well.
5
SPEAKER_00
But if you give power to the individuals to do this sort of the, not even censorship, but
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s keep it simple.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s look at one example, Twitter and Jack Dorsey.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
regionalized system, which is not have one, we call federated system, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Which does not just have like one company in charge of everything, but there s an open protocol.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then there s like different instances, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then Twitter as a company is going to use too.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you as the customer decide which implementation you want to join.
5
SPEAKER_01
and there s going to be different censorship on each instance or each federation, but the protocol itself would be, like, untouchable.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is kind of like the idea behind the internet, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
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?
5
SPEAKER_01
So I think that s a pretty good vision, and Twitter s working towards that with the Blue Sky initiative.
5
SPEAKER_01
We ll see, I m a little skeptical that it works out, because I use Mastodon, for example.
5
SPEAKER_01
Mastodon is an example of a federated social media.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now, it s ruled by a benevolent, each instance is ruled by a benevolent dictator.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s just like, I happen to like this one, so I know.
5
SPEAKER_01
So rather than trust one dictator, Twitter, you could choose which dictator you want to trust.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s kind of the federated model.
5
SPEAKER_01
And maybe we head that way, but you lose things.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like Mastodon is like not anywhere close to as nice to use as Twitter.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I feel like it s, again, it s this trade-off that we make with everything where it s convenience, comfort, speed versus privacy and freedom, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
It s very hard to have something that gives you both.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think, yeah, it is a trade-off.
5
SPEAKER_01
Have you used one of these things that you feel like is good?
5
SPEAKER_00
No, I have not.
5
SPEAKER_01
Dude, they re not as good.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re not, but the Federator, I don t think it s good.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think it requires genius, it requires skill, it requires great design to come up with a way to,
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a Pareto front here.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a right way to hit that trade off.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I honestly think there s the UX.
5
SPEAKER_00
the experience should be centralized, should be designed by the company, but the data and like a lot of stuff that could be used to violate your basic rights should be owned by the individual.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I think there s a way to decouple those, like create an incredible experience to where
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
delete everything you know about me.
5
SPEAKER_00
And maybe it s one button, you click, and it asks, are you sure?
5
SPEAKER_00
And you have to be able to say yes.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s a feature that s fundamental to a good social network, I believe.
5
SPEAKER_00
Currently, social networks, first of all, most of them don t allow you to do that.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
So that s a very basic starting point.
5
SPEAKER_00
But having that button means that you have control.
5
SPEAKER_00
But that s step one of the control.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a transparency of knowing exactly when what data is being shared about you, how much data is already being recorded about you.
5
SPEAKER_00
All that is transparency.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I believe in the,
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I guess maybe you re more optimistic about people caring.
5
SPEAKER_01
I feel like so few people actually care about their privacy and freedom.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve just watched everybody give it up, you know.
5
SPEAKER_01
But we ll see.
5
SPEAKER_01
I guess just to bookend that,
5
SPEAKER_01
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 adventure out and use a federated instance or something, even like Keybase, which is kind of like a cool encrypted way to have group chats, it just requires a lot of your time, and a lot of people don t have that time.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I will say one thing, I do think there is this future where we do go into more of this
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
And the idea is like, kind of like, it s like a decentralized Slack.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then it has like plugins for like things like Jitsi instead of Zoom.
5
SPEAKER_01
So like an open source encrypted video messenger,
5
SPEAKER_01
It has ways to plug in the content you wanna get from different platforms that you follow, like podcasts, things like that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And again, it allows you to pay those people directly in a censorship-resistant private way.
5
SPEAKER_01
So it s really nicely connected to the Lightning Network.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so it s all sort of built on Lightning, but the idea you can think about it is like,
5
SPEAKER_01
you re slowly starting to build up the idea of a WeChat, but with freedom principles.
5
SPEAKER_01
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 in the surveillance state.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then we have like our own versions over here in America that are not quite as convenient or amazing, but like we give up slightly less privacy and freedom.
5
SPEAKER_01
But this thing has a lot of promising features to it.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s worth checking out.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s very like early days.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like it feels like,
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I was pretty young, but it feels like the 90s in the internet.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like it has that feeling.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you know, it s rough around the edges, but you can feel the magic.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s pretty cool.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m very much like with Steve Jobs on this.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s not just like pretty icing on the cake.
5
SPEAKER_00
That is,
5
SPEAKER_00
the icing is the cake.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because how easy it is to use, how natural it is, it s the Trojan horse thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
You don t get, it has to be pretty and shiny, it has to fundamentally connect to the basics of human nature, which is what is pleasant to use, what feels good to use.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have to, you know, to trick people into eating the broccoli, you have to put like a delicious whatever on it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, again, PGP is a kind of a pain to use, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
If you want privacy.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so signals don t upgrade.
5
SPEAKER_01
Signal is way better.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yep.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, and it s way better than it was five years ago.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s not quite as good as like, not quite as seamless, right, as like a WhatsApp yet, but it s almost there.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they were able to do it.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you re going to see that with with Bitcoin wallets as well.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, they re almost there.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
we are getting there, whereas 10 years ago, it was like impossible to use.
6
SPEAKER_01
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,
6
SPEAKER_01
but very viral and popular reason to switch.
6
SPEAKER_01
I didn t see exactly, I mean, I ve been using Signal, but I haven t seen a big reason to switch.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, but I haven t switched everything to it, you know what I mean?
6
SPEAKER_00
Like a- Yeah, the exodus to Signal was in January.
6
SPEAKER_00
They had a huge user surge for two main reasons.
6
SPEAKER_00
One, hilariously enough, of course, was Elon tweeted, like, you should use Signal, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Um, which is not insignificant.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then the other one was, uh, 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, um, that it was going to be sort of like changing the way it handled your data that spooked a lot of people.
6
SPEAKER_00
So these two things really combined, um, and tens of millions of people in the following weeks between January and February joined signal.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s like it really has had its day in the sun.
6
SPEAKER_00
and they are frantically trying to keep up with it.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it s really nice to see that this encrypted messaging service, which prioritizes your privacy in a way that you know the government, again, may know the metadata, but doesn t know exactly what you re saying unless they can get your hands on your phone.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think that s very, very powerful.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it can be done.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t wanna be too jaded here.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think it can be done.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think we can fight back and I think we can make
6
SPEAKER_00
continue to make these digital communications tools and platforms in a way that really benefits us.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I m not sure, but I m hopeful as well.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s at least the hope.
6
SPEAKER_01
So Garry Kasparov, I m Russian, he means a lot to me on a personal level.
6
SPEAKER_01
He is the chairman of Human Rights Foundation.
6
SPEAKER_01
What does Garry have to do with anything?
6
SPEAKER_01
What s your relationship like with him?
6
SPEAKER_01
Do you like chess?
6
SPEAKER_01
What are his specific focuses and ideas around the HRF?
6
SPEAKER_01
Can you just speak to it in general?
6
SPEAKER_00
So our chairman at the Human Rights Foundation was Václav Havel, who of course was the famous Czech democracy activist who helped lead the Velvet Revolution and then ended up becoming the first democratically elected leader of the Czech Republic after the Soviet Union fell.
6
SPEAKER_00
He passed away in 2011 and
6
SPEAKER_00
It was very difficult to find a replacement, because who can fill Havel s shoes, you know?
6
SPEAKER_00
But if one could, it would be Gary, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
So we like really tried to get Gary to join.
6
SPEAKER_00
And thankfully, he agreed.
6
SPEAKER_00
And we ve had an amazing relationship with Gary over the years.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean,
6
SPEAKER_00
He s been relentless in his pursuit of freedom.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if you actually study like the times when he was running for president in Russia, Amash Gessen followed him around in The Man Without a Face.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a great, great book about Putin.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a fabulous chapter where she s following around Gary when he s campaigning.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he risked a lot.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he can t go back to Russia anymore.
6
SPEAKER_00
He gave up his country.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
He really believes in it.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s been a great experience.
6
SPEAKER_00
I work very closely with Gary.
6
SPEAKER_00
We talk a lot.
6
SPEAKER_00
We do different things around the world together.
6
SPEAKER_00
He s come out to a lot of events in different cities around the world.
6
SPEAKER_00
And he s been a very active chairman.
6
SPEAKER_00
This isn t some figurehead.
6
SPEAKER_00
He s very involved, and it s really, really great.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m not a big chess person, unfortunately, so I have not been able to connect with him on that.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I think he probably would prefer it that way.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, all he gets is people who want to talk to him about chess, you know?
6
SPEAKER_00
So here we can talk about kind of human rights strategy and like how to, you know, improve our fight against dictators.
6
SPEAKER_00
But he really, you know, has that moral clarity that I really appreciate.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he has a lot of fascinating ideas about artificial intelligence as well.
6
SPEAKER_01
He s opened my eyes a little bit to the
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I try to look at it from a historical perspective, like almost like we re living a hundred years from now.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I look at Putin as a important figure in the history of human civilization and study it in that way.
6
SPEAKER_01
Think the way Gary looks at it.
6
SPEAKER_01
He probably doesn t appreciate me looking at the way I do, but the way he looks at it is
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
To me, I take a sort of going to the library passive view of studying fascinating aspects of Russia.
6
SPEAKER_01
To me, Russia means, like most of my family suffered through the Soviet Union and
6
SPEAKER_01
I see beauty in suffering, the poetry, the music, the stories.
6
SPEAKER_01
And just there s so much love that emerged from the pain that I just enjoy the music of that.
6
SPEAKER_01
But to Gary and to many activists that I speak to, to them, they love not just the Russia of the past.
6
SPEAKER_01
They have a vision and a hope for Russia of the future.
6
SPEAKER_01
And they criticized me a little bit for being a little bit too scholarly about the past and ignoring the future.
6
SPEAKER_01
And there s something to that.
6
SPEAKER_01
So he opens my eyes to look to the future of Russia.
6
SPEAKER_00
a handful of other Russian activists that we work closely with, including Vladimir Kara-Murza, who again, I mean, it s just incredibly heroic.
6
SPEAKER_00
The man has survived two poisonings by Putin.
6
SPEAKER_00
They like to say that, you know, Russians will bring democracy to Russia on their own terms.
6
SPEAKER_00
They don t need our help.
6
SPEAKER_00
This is what Vladimir especially says.
6
SPEAKER_00
But what he does say is that we should stop propping up Putin.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, that s kind of his, stop kind of legitimizing him.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s kind of his argument.
6
SPEAKER_00
He s like, we don t need your foreign interference.
6
SPEAKER_00
We don t need your ideas.
6
SPEAKER_00
We don t, you know, we don t need your help.
6
SPEAKER_00
We can do it on our own.
6
SPEAKER_00
But please stop, like, propping up our, you know, illegitimate ruler.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s kind of like his point of view, which I think is interesting and fair.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, let me just say on one unrelated comment, some people criticize me and others, like Joe Rogan, for giving people a platform.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
A conversation just shines a light.
6
SPEAKER_01
as long as you shine the light well.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
in possible future conversations.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I don t like this kind of platforming idea.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think conversations save us, they don t destroy us.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, that s journalism though.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s very different from advocacy or strategic thinking about what to do with Russia.
6
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, yeah, we should interview everybody and everybody should know exactly what they re thinking.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, but I, you know, journalism to me has become a dirty word because it s done so poorly by so many people that...
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the kind of interviews they do, you know, is like five minutes at most, but usually it s like one minute.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s these quick clip things.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s very gotcha, and they re looking for ways to sort of grab almost a misstatement.
6
SPEAKER_01
They want to catch you off guard.
6
SPEAKER_01
They want to ask the quote, like the harsh question, but without any of the dance of conversation that reveals the truth.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, you can t just get to the truth by asking it.
6
SPEAKER_01
You have to sneak up on it.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s an art form.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think that art form involves long form conversation.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
And in that same way, I think of long form conversation is like,
6
SPEAKER_01
You spend many hours and you spend months and years preparing for those many hours, but like, it s not this like short form trying to, trying to get the most controversial little tidbit of a story out.
6
SPEAKER_01
And unfortunately the funding mechanisms behind journalism are such that they are incentivized clickbait journalism versus like in depth, long form digging for the truth.
6
SPEAKER_00
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, et cetera.
6
SPEAKER_00
And really good journalism is still something I absolutely, I love and I enjoy.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like this, especially like to say again, this New Yorker piece on what s happening to the Uyghurs is incredibly well-reported.
6
SPEAKER_00
However, on the other hand, you have,
6
SPEAKER_00
in this sort of clickbaity journalism that s all about sensationalism and that gets used as a tool.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
Like it s been, to be honest, it s been a huge burden on me personally, if I were to just turn this into a therapy session for a brief moment.
6
SPEAKER_01
When I look at people, when I interact with people, I d like to see the best in them.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the burden that weighs heavy on me is sometimes people I talk to may not be good people.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I don t, I d love to, I believe everybody has good in them.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I try to focus on that.
6
SPEAKER_01
The burden that weighs on me is sometimes that there may be conversations where that s irresponsible.
6
SPEAKER_01
where I have to also call people out.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I also have the responsibility to call them out on it.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that s for me personally, just an unpleasant feeling.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s where speaking to journalism, like I think journalists are too much focused on the,
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
But at the same time, you know, I can t have a conversation with Hitler and not ask about the prison camps.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
No.
6
SPEAKER_00
So from the human rights perspective, one of our programs is we like, we try to,
6
SPEAKER_00
go after people who do PR for dictators.
6
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of people do.
6
SPEAKER_00
PR firms in Washington get hired by all these dictators.
6
SPEAKER_00
And they make a lot of money to make them look good.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s called whitewashing, or putting lipstick on a pig, or whatever you want to do.
6
SPEAKER_00
Astroturfing is like the fake, you make fake social media accounts to make it seem like you re popular.
6
SPEAKER_00
But whitewashing is a huge issue, so I think it s completely fair to interview dictators and stuff like that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Amanpour does a pretty good job.
6
SPEAKER_00
She s really good.
6
SPEAKER_00
She makes sure that there s no messing around.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, her interviews of Museveni recently, the Ugandan dictator, was very good.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, she s basically like,
6
SPEAKER_00
Why are you rigging another election?
6
SPEAKER_00
Please tell us, you know?
6
SPEAKER_00
And she s fearless and she s good, and that can be a helpful thing to have on YouTube as a resource.
6
SPEAKER_00
But it s quite clear when it descends into a PR session, and you just have to be very careful about it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Asma al-Assad, the wife of the butcher in Syria, was profiled by Vogue, and it was this whole rose in the desert thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was a bunch of nonsense.
6
SPEAKER_00
Terrible, terrible, terrible total propaganda.
6
SPEAKER_00
But a honest interview where you re asking about all the tough questions, very important.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I think it s just a matter of content.
6
SPEAKER_01
Is there a good resource to study whitewashing?
6
SPEAKER_01
To know what manipulative PR looks like?
6
SPEAKER_00
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?
6
SPEAKER_00
That would be it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Make sure you re asking all the questions.
6
SPEAKER_00
As long as you re asking all the questions that you have, you re good.
6
SPEAKER_00
But if there s something you re afraid to ask, then maybe you re self-censoring, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
That s a good way, it takes us back to that like, what is it, that litmus test about is your country allowed to have a gay pride parade?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
So there s like obvious things that might be on your mind that you just want to ask and you shouldn t run from them.
6
SPEAKER_00
As long as you feel like you re a free person when you re interviewing.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think you re good.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s beautifully put.
6
SPEAKER_01
Are there books, technical fiction, philosophical, that had an impact on your life that you would recommend?
6
SPEAKER_01
Or even resources like blogs, films?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
I have
6
SPEAKER_00
four books I ll briefly mention.
6
SPEAKER_00
Number one is The Fear.
6
SPEAKER_00
The Fear had a deep impact on me.
6
SPEAKER_00
The Fear was written by Peter Godwin.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s about the systematic dismantling of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.
6
SPEAKER_00
Peter is Zimbabwean, and it is a riveting book.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think everyone should read it because it helps you understand what it s like to go through, not just authoritarianism, but also hyperinflation.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I mean, really, you know, at the end of the day, what The Fear describes is how Mugabe took this country
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the fear is a good one.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it s a personal story?
6
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because he was, it s part of his whole family story and he s in there, he s interviewing people personally.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I would say that one.
6
SPEAKER_01
Is it also connected, sorry to interrupt, is it from the inflation perspective, is it a good study of hyperinflation and the effects?
6
SPEAKER_01
Does Bitcoin at all come as a
6
SPEAKER_01
A discussion of money, does that come into the, or is it purely the experience of inflation is almost a symptom of an authoritarian government?
6
SPEAKER_00
A little bit, a little bit.
6
SPEAKER_00
I would say it s not deep.
6
SPEAKER_00
I have another book on that, which I ll recommend in a second, but.
6
SPEAKER_00
I would just say that it s a very powerfully written book about how society can basically deteriorate and how you can lose everything.
6
SPEAKER_00
The second book is, I just mentioned it, but The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen.
6
SPEAKER_00
Incredible book about modern Russia and Putin.
6
SPEAKER_00
Just a masterpiece.
6
SPEAKER_01
So that one is- That would be one of your favorite books about Putin and Russia?
6
SPEAKER_00
That one s the best.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, she s just so fearless.
6
SPEAKER_00
Incredible.
6
SPEAKER_00
She interviews Putin in the book at the end.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s really good.
6
SPEAKER_00
Third one is a fiction book called The Mandibles written by Lionel Shriver.
6
SPEAKER_00
This one s good.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a good gift book.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s funny.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s dark.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s witty.
6
SPEAKER_00
But it s about the United States losing its status as the reserve currency and going into hyperinflation.
6
SPEAKER_00
And what s interesting is that the characters in the book map
6
SPEAKER_00
where we are today.
6
SPEAKER_00
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 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.
6
SPEAKER_00
And all these like economists are saying, no, it s fine, like inflation won t be a problem.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there s this one character 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.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it s like it s dry, it s witty, but it s also about the surveillance state.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s about centralization of power.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s really good.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the mandibles I would highly recommend.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I did it by audiobook and I just think this is an important one for people to start with.
6
SPEAKER_00
because he goes through all the main concepts, whether it be proof of work or, you know, how the network functions.
6
SPEAKER_00
But he does it in a way that s extremely engaging and really fascinating.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it really just kind of like sparked my curiosity.
6
SPEAKER_01
Is it discussing the technical sides or also the philosophical?
6
SPEAKER_01
Because a lot of people mentioned sort of the Bitcoin standard as the philosophical entry into the whole Bitcoin world.
6
SPEAKER_00
Very different from the Bitcoin standard.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s more for like the average person.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not a history book.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a collection of his talks that he gave over like two or three years.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not very technical.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s very approachable.
6
SPEAKER_00
And some of it might be dated now because it s like 2015, 2016.
6
SPEAKER_01
But I mean, it s great.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
Andres is the GOAT.
6
SPEAKER_01
He s the GOAT.
6
SPEAKER_01
Andres is the GOAT.
6
SPEAKER_00
I know a lot of people will have issues with some of his like
7
SPEAKER_01
of more recent work, but Andreas is the GOAT.
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I mean, he s the reason I m in Bitcoin.
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I mean, he s the reason I m in Bitcoin, so.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s fascinating.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s funny to watch the Bitcoin maximalist immune system also attacking him and this whole feedback mechanisms working together.
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It s fascinating.
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Well, I probably consider myself a maximalist, but I really like Andreas.
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So I think there s room for nuance.
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There s room for nuance in this world, I m glad to hear that.
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If people are fascinated by your work, what is the way to get more of Alex?
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So two years ago, I came together with seven other people from around the world and we wrote a book in a book sprint.
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We lived in a house for four days, we wrote a book together.
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It was really cool, it was like a design sprint, but we did it in book format.
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And my co-authors are from Nigeria, Venezuela, the Philippines, from former Soviet Union, from all over.
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And it s called The Little Bitcoin Book, and I m still proud of it.
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It s 100 pages, it s something you give to somebody who knows nothing about the topic.
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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.
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and we ve translated it into like a lot of languages by now.
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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.
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Mandarin, Hindi, Punjab, Korean, Uyghur, which I was really excited about, Arabic, Farsi.
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And I mean, it spreads, man.
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It s been really, really cool.
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So I m proud of that.
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I also made a video that did very well for Reason Magazine called, Why is Bitcoin Protecting Human Rights Around the World?
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It s five minutes, and I feel like I tried to boil everything that I
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that I want to tell you into this five minute video.
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So there s that would recommend that.
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And then if you re interested in the.
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why have governments not stopped it, which I think is really intriguing.
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I wrote this long essay in Quillette in February called, you know, Why Haven t Governments Banned Bitcoin?
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And maybe that ll be a helpful guide to some folks.
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SPEAKER_00
Is it speaking to the Trojan horse idea that there s something enticing about it?
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SPEAKER_01
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?
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Like, if a government wanted to, could it really get all that equipment?
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SPEAKER_01
There s a semiconductor shortage, like it can t like there s like certain things that stop governments from doing it right.
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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.
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The idea is that like banks would go around now with governments and try to like steal everybody s Bitcoin.
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Well, in Bitcoin, we have like a practice called Proof of Keys Day every January 3rd, you know, which is coinciding with the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain, where we all like withdraw our keys from exchanges and we d be sovereign users.
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What we are doing is we are preparing for a 6102 attack, which will one day probably come, right?
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So the essay just goes through all of the possible attacks, and it runs through 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.
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It didn t work.
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Interest instead exploded.
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It s like the Barbra Streisand effect, where by making something public and saying you shouldn t do X, it actually increases attention about X a lot more, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So I think there s a lot of interesting game theory there that people would enjoy.
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SPEAKER_00
Do you think, are you seriously concerned about this kind of thing where the ideas of sovereignty that Bitcoin espouses would actually one day be tested?
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Do you have like a legitimate concern?
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Because you said like one day very well might.
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SPEAKER_00
Do you think it might?
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, first of all, Bitcoin has been attacked again, many times.
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And we talked about the you spoke about this with Nick Carter on your show.
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the sort of protocol wars or conflict or whatever.
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Right.
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And Bitcoin almost died a whole bunch of times during that and ended up surviving.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow.
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I didn t I didn t know how bad the block.
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Oh, it got really bad.
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It was it was a sort of a very existential threat.
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And Bitcoin survived.
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And that s why I am so intrigued by it, is that it basically survived an attack.
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in an environment several years ago when Bitcoin was much more vulnerable than it is today.
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It survived an attack by a conglomeration of Chinese billionaires, Silicon Valley corporations, and a ton of people who owned the majority of the hash rate and all this infrastructure.
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They had 83% of all the hash rate and they couldn t get what they wanted.
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And that was so intriguing to me.
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Like, why didn t it, why didn t it get killed?
7
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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.
7
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Really good, kind of like really important to understand the scaling conflict and the visions over the different visions of what Bitcoin should be.
7
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And, you know, again, people like me believe it should be a freedom tool, not like a payments technology for retail.
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And I m just I m glad it worked out the way it did, because it almost didn t.
7
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Do you think humans  civilization will destroy itself?
7
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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.
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taking control of the money supply.
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But do you have grander concerns for the future of human civilization?
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Do you have hope for us becoming a multi-planetary species?
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Yeah, I mean, I guess long term we d wanna decentralize, right?
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We don t want a single point of failure.
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The Earth is a single point of failure.
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But no, I mean, you look at all this kind of like space fiction and I mean, who would wanna live on Mars, man?
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It s like a freaking desert.
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I mean, the Earth is so beautiful.
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I hope we can save it, you know?
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It s just so gorgeous.
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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.
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I think we gotta do everything we can to save it here.
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That s funny, I mean, I m sure a lot of people would have said that about Europe before the explorers ventured out, Columbus and the rest out into the unknown.
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The thing about human nature is that we are explorers too.
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We are, I agree.
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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
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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.
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And I m thankful for those people.
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as I sit back and drink my vodka back here on Earth and enjoy good friendships, because I think ultimately that step to Mars is going to be a first step into exploring and colonizing the rest of the galaxy.
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Mars might be a harsh environment, but maybe space is not.
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like other planets, other exoplanets, but also forget planets, just creating colonies that float about in space.
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There s exciting technologies that are yet to be discovered, yet to be engineered and built that I think require that first painful step.
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Like, yeah, the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.
7
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I think Mars is that first step.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
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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, I wanna recognize, like, we just, you know, we know how unique Earth is, and I do think we gotta do everything we can to protect it.
7
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But I think you avoid answering the question if we re gonna destroy ourselves.
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I guess that s what you did.
7
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Are you hopeful?
7
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Okay, fine.
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If we do not decentralize properly out into different...
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physical spaces, probably, I guess, yeah.
7
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And then, I mean, do you have concerns that are immediately facing you?
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SPEAKER_00
So, not in terms of the injustices on the world, but nuclear war?
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, look, I m a lot more concerned about what s happening right now.
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Like, what is destroying ourselves?
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If you were to go and see what s happening in Xinjiang or North Korea right now, or Eritrea,
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That is destroying ourselves, and it s already happened.
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So I guess that s why I said yes.
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I mean, if you don t decentralize and power is completely under one person, life is destroyed as we know it.
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And, you know, you don t have to go into science fiction to know what a totalitarian hellscape dystopia is.
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there s several that exist already, and let s try to help those people at the same time as we re trying to push out into space would be my counter, I guess.
7
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Yeah, I agree with you.
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In my mind, destruction and suffering are next door neighbors, so we don t need to destroy all of human civilization if a large fraction of it lives in conditions that we would equate to suffering.
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That s not a good world.
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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?
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But in general, a world that s full of injustice, but also full of opportunity.
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Just thinking about my own upbringing, I went to a public school here and we never learned about money.
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It was never part of our curriculum.
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Even personal finances was not part of our curriculum.
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You could take like an optional course to learn about like business or something.
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And I think that that would be really valuable as a young person or as a teenager to start
7
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incorporating into your children s lives is like a curiosity about what is money, I think would be very healthy, regardless of what path that takes them down.
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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?
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Where did it come from?
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Both of those things are very important.
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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?
7
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So you ultimately see money as a kind of power and freedom and a mechanism of sovereignty.
7
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It is so core to everything.
7
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The United States, whether you want to call it the tax Americana, the empire, the hyper power, whatever you want to call this moment in time where the US is dominant around the world, it is because of the fact that we have this petrodollar system.
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where we are able to force the Saudis and other oil producing nations to sell their oil in dollars.
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That is really inescapable, inseparable from our power.
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And that s very rarely talked about.
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And it s very important to understand.
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So yeah, if young people could start thinking about that stuff, it d be good.
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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.
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You need to be 18 to have a bank account or whatever.
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One of the people that we supported at Ahrefs through our, we do software development funding for people in Bitcoin, open source projects.
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And he s one of the guys we funded is this very young, smart sort of prodigy.
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He s like 17.
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But one of the reasons he got into Bitcoin was because he wanted to have control of his money when he was like 14.
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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.
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So think about that maturity that is capable and possible in many people.
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Like I ve participated in some of the years ago, some of the
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sort of selection processes for like the Thiel Fellowship, which is like really amazing.
7
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Like these people who are 14, 15, 16, who don t need to go to college.
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They re already like so smart, they can figure it out.
7
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But they wouldn t be allowed to have a bank account, right?
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So hey, that s kind of cool.
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Like now you have a permissionless money, you can open up yourself without permission from your parents.
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SPEAKER_01
That s kind of cool.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s fascinating to me.
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I feel like I would have loved my parents more
7
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had a little more separation.
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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?
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It s a little bit, it s like a subtle push that you re somehow dependent on them.
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I mean, part of that is like,
7
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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.
7
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to have the support of your parents until you re 18.
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Like, have that freedom.
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Have the freedom to appreciate the value your parents bring, and at the same time, the freedom to live in some capacity
7
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to carve your own path.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, just all of that, I think, for weirdos like me, especially, because that was a very nontraditional path that I think it would be very empowering.
7
SPEAKER_00
And certainly it would be empowering in the third world, too.
7
SPEAKER_01
Not just weirdos like you, I was going to mention.
7
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One of the people I got who taught me about Bitcoin, her name is Roya Mahboob.
7
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She s an Afghan technology CEO.
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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.
7
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She started the country s first all-female software company.
7
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And if they brought cash home, their husbands or uncles or brothers would steal it from them.
7
SPEAKER_01
There s a power, patriarchal dominance thing going on.
7
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But they had phones, and she was able to pay them in Bitcoin, and no one knew, and it gave them that power.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that s always stuck in my mind as a very interesting effect of this kind of thing, of permissionless money, that it can be an empowerment tool.
7
SPEAKER_01
So, absolutely.
7
SPEAKER_00
So in your own personal life, where did the deep concern for the suffering in the world come from?
7
SPEAKER_00
Where was that born?
7
SPEAKER_01
I was gonna be an engineer, actually, and then in 2003, we invaded Iraq, and I got very interested in why we did that as a nation.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I switched my focus of study to international relations, and that s how I kind of went down the political science, democracy rabbit hole, and ended up getting a job at the Human Rights Foundation.
7
SPEAKER_01
So I m very much a child of 9-11 and the Iraq War.
7
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Those are the two really formative events for me.
7
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personally.
7
SPEAKER_00
Can you break that apart a little bit?
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, what illusion about this world was broken apart by the invasion of Iraq?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think first of all, 9-11 just shifted the world dynamics completely from a focus on big power politics between the US, Russia, and China to this new threat of Islamic terror.
7
SPEAKER_01
And a lot of it we learned later, a lot of the things we did were manufactured, choreographed, like there were no WMDs in Iraq.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like the reason our rulers said we needed to invade and destroy this country was a lie.
7
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And that I think has really been forgotten.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like I think a lot of like the Zoomers like today,
7
SPEAKER_01
don t really know a lot about that time period.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it was pretty crazy.
7
SPEAKER_01
Unanimously, I mean, Democrat, Republican, like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, like, and the Republicans, everybody wanted to invade this country.
7
SPEAKER_01
And it was very, it s very, um, it s a confusing time.
7
SPEAKER_01
There s a really good book by Ian McEwen called Saturday, a fiction book that takes place during, I think, 2003.
7
SPEAKER_01
And it s one day in the life of the doctor in London.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
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 that time.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s really crazy, and it really showed you that the media could be captured into helping promote this idea of invading another country.
7
SPEAKER_01
So I was very curious about why we did it, and who was pulling the strings, and what are the reasons that we went.
7
SPEAKER_01
And what s really interesting is that I took all these courses on it, interviewed all these decision makers, whether they were neocons or whatever, different people who were involved.
7
SPEAKER_01
The whole dollar reserve currency thing really never came up until I learned about it more recently because of Bitcoin.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
This seems really obvious when you go back and look at the chronology of it.
7
SPEAKER_01
We were like, no, we actually don t want you to sell dollars and euros because that would threaten the dollar.
7
SPEAKER_01
So we re going to invade you and then you re not going to do it and then no one else is going to like sell dollars and euros, oil and euros, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
I guess you could say the same thing about Gaddafi.
7
SPEAKER_01
We as a nation have very much protected our reserve currency.
7
SPEAKER_01
Let s put it that way.
7
SPEAKER_00
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.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it s interesting.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s interesting to look at human history in the context of money.
7
SPEAKER_01
Can t we be patriotic and be pro-America, but like not want the petrodollar?
7
SPEAKER_01
Like I should be proud of my country.
7
SPEAKER_01
Why do we need to be propping up the Saudis?
7
SPEAKER_01
Why do we need to be, you know, threatening to invade other countries if they sell their oil for a different currency?
7
SPEAKER_01
I think we can be just as powerful as we are today, if not more powerful in a Bitcoin world.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
Better than fine.
7
SPEAKER_01
And we won t have these horrible negative externalities.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s really an optimistic vision for the future.
7
SPEAKER_00
I thought we learned a lesson of 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
7
SPEAKER_01
But we re leaving and Biden announced we re leaving Afghanistan this year, 20 years.
7
SPEAKER_01
For what?
7
SPEAKER_01
The Taliban are gonna take over again.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s at least the good, the longest war, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
The forever wars.
8
SPEAKER_02
the past 20 years or whatever it is, 18 years, 19 years, we ve been very skeptical about invading other countries.
8
SPEAKER_02
We ve been skeptical about military intervention in other nations.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, our leaders certainly haven t.
8
SPEAKER_00
We have like seven active wars right now, and neither the Russians and the Chinese, everybody s starting to invade everybody else.
8
SPEAKER_02
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.
8
SPEAKER_02
Sure.
8
SPEAKER_02
That there was not as much warmongering as there is now.
8
SPEAKER_02
as I was afraid about, but yes, you re absolutely right.
8
SPEAKER_02
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so the big question is how do we prevent the rise of this like authoritarian,
8
SPEAKER_00
surveillance state in China, while at the same time kind of diffusing the military industrial complex on our side.
8
SPEAKER_00
That to me is like the biggest challenge of our time.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t have the answer, but we should keep digging.
8
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I believe there s technological innovations.
8
SPEAKER_02
You re suggesting that perhaps one of the technological innovations is Bitcoin.
8
SPEAKER_02
Bitcoin s a big part of it, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_02
On the money side, I think the information side, there s innovations that are open, that s possible.
8
SPEAKER_02
And the political side, I m the most skeptical about.
8
SPEAKER_02
I just feel like there s, without hot wars, that we don t seem to make any kind of progress.
8
SPEAKER_02
Bureaucracies just grow, corruption and greed grow, and human nature does not do well in the political arena.
8
SPEAKER_02
So I hope technology can
8
SPEAKER_02
outpace the darker sides of human nature.
8
SPEAKER_02
So you re busy fighting the demons, the darkness that s out there, but looking in the mirror, you re a finite being.
8
SPEAKER_02
Unfortunately, this ride ends for you pretty soon.
8
SPEAKER_02
Do you ever ask yourself about the meaning of it all?
8
SPEAKER_02
Of why the hell us descendants of apes are even on this thing, striving so hard to make a better world for ourselves?
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t often zoom out that much.
8
SPEAKER_00
I feel like my day job is pretty interesting.
8
SPEAKER_00
It keeps me very engaged with all the stuff we ve been talking about.
8
SPEAKER_00
As far as the meaning of life, though, it seems quite clear that
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
But
8
SPEAKER_00
I do feel like, in a way, that the meaning of life is that pursuit, of course, biologically is to, you know, to spread our species, right, but also to pursue knowledge and science and innovation and freedom, most importantly.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think it freedom has to guide us or else we end up with prison camps.
8
SPEAKER_00
If we don t let freedom guide us, we end up with the prison camps.
8
SPEAKER_00
So we need to have scientific innovation and adventurism and colonization of
8
SPEAKER_00
the stars, but without the slavery and without the prison camps.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think that s so key.
8
SPEAKER_02
There s something about the creation of beauty that seems fundamental to human nature and what seems beautiful is these communities that
8
SPEAKER_02
that don t have suffering, that don t have injustice, and we have some kind of inner sense of what is injustice.
8
SPEAKER_02
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.
8
SPEAKER_02
We have a sense of what is right and what is wrong.
8
SPEAKER_02
It s not just a kind of illusion that we ve all agreed on.
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Arbitrary power, torture,
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Executions we know these things are wrong.
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I mean we know they re wrong.
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We don t have to read a book to know that But you do you do need to
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people can get brainwashed.
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I mean, you talk to people who ve grown up in North Korea, they don t know any better.
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Like they don t know what s going on in the outside world.
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So they ve never experienced anything differently.
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So that s why, look, technology can play a big role here in terms of like the meaning of it all.
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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.
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So technologies like the internet and Bitcoin,
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they can at least give you the option to do things your own way on your own terms.
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And then from there, we ll see.
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I think it s important that we have design choices where we can have a little more say and not everything be pre-programmed for us.
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That would be very disappointing.
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So, I mean, the open web and encryption and Bitcoin, these are things that help
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prevent social engineering and that promote more freedom and more possibilities honestly and more entrepreneurship and more creativity and more scientific inquiry.
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I mean think about the people who tried to shut down scientific inquiry 500, 600 years ago or whatever.
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that were trying to say, you know, the earth was the center of everything.
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And they were wrong, you know.
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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.
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And they ve been wrong the whole time.
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So let s continue pushing here.
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Let s continue pushing.
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It s kind of scary to me sometimes, humbling, beautiful, but also scary to think of.
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You mentioned North Korea, people are kind of living in ignorance.
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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.
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Well, there s a difference between laziness and ignorance, right?
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Like, so I would be lazy if I didn t, you know,
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take advantage of the internet, right?
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Someone in North Korea doesn t have the option.
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There s literally no way for them to access the internet.
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So there s kind of like social laziness that philosophers have warned about forever, that we basically become sheep, okay?
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And then there s actual brainwashing and censorship that s possible by closing off your population and keeping them off the internet, right?
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So I think these are two very different concepts.
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not even laziness, but cognitive limitations and just historical scientific limitations.
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We re a very young species.
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All of the exciting stuff we ve been talking about have happened on the scale of decades, maybe centuries.
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We re very young in all the cool stuff we ve come up with.
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And it s just humbling to think about how little we know.
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But you re right that, you know, 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,
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is ethically horrible.
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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, we might see as atrocities later on, but ultimately you have to have the freedom to explore those kinds of ideas.
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And without that freedom, you don t even get the chance to be lazy.
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Yeah, I mean, look, don t be a sheep.
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Okay, it s easy to be no offense to she and there s some practical things man get on signal start encrypting your messages Take control over your your privacy
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The media doesn t want you to, but check out Bitcoin.
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You can be your own bank.
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You can transact with people around the world and no one can stop you.
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This can put a stop to a lot of arbitrary power and a lot of human rights violations.
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Don t use WeChat.
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Question more.
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Research what s happening in Xinjiang.
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I mean, learn about what s happening in the genocide in that country.
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And let s think about how we can build our societies so that we never have that kind of power concentration ever again.
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Each of us can make a difference.
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Alex, it s a huge honor to talk to you.
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I ve been a fan of your work.
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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.
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Thank you for wasting all this time with me today.
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It s been an honor.
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Thanks, man.
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A lot of fun.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Alex Gladstein.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Alice Walker.
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The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don t have any.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.