Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at the Human
00:00:05 Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum.
00:00:08 In recent times, Alex has focused on how cryptocurrency, and especially Bitcoin, can be a tool for
00:00:13 empowering democracy and civil liberties in the world, most crucially, parts of the world
00:00:20 that are living under authoritarian regimes.
00:00:23 As a side note, let me say that I have been learning a lot about the ways in which money
00:00:28 can be used to amass power, and in the same way, the decentralization of money can be
00:00:33 used to resist the corrupting nature of this power.
00:00:36 Alex and I do not agree on everything, but we strive for the same betterment of humanity.
00:00:42 He is sensitive to the suffering in the world, and is dedicating his life to finding solutions
00:00:48 that lessen that suffering.
00:00:50 Whether Bitcoin is one such solution, I don’t know, but I think it has a chance, and that
00:00:55 means it is worth exploring deeply.
00:00:58 I’m staying in this path of learning, patiently, and with as little ego as possible, I hope
00:01:03 you come along with me on this journey as well.
00:01:07 This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
00:01:13 We recorded this conversation a while ago, and I thought I lost the audio, and was really
00:01:18 disappointed with myself for messing this thing up, but luckily, last week, I found
00:01:24 it, and so, rescued from out of the abyss of nonexistence, here’s my conversation with
00:01:31 Alex Glastain.
00:01:34 What are some universal human rights that you believe all people should have?
00:01:40 So free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of belief, freedom to participate in your
00:01:45 government, the freedom to have privacy, the freedom to own things, property rights, these
00:01:51 are all basic, fundamental, negative rights, what we call them.
00:01:55 These are the basic, fundamental human freedoms.
00:01:59 What does negative rights mean?
00:02:02 Negative rights are liberties, and positive rights are entitlements.
00:02:07 So after World War II, when the UN came together, it was largely a compromise between the communist
00:02:12 Soviet Union and the, you know, free United States, right?
00:02:16 So the US had, on its side of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, a bunch of liberties, essentially,
00:02:23 things like free speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly.
00:02:27 The Soviets wanted entitlements, like the right to work, the right to have housing,
00:02:31 the right to water, the right to a vacation.
00:02:34 So if you actually read the UN Declaration for Human Rights, it’s a negotiation between
00:02:38 the Soviets and the Americans.
00:02:40 Later, there was another document in the 70s released called the International Covenant
00:02:44 on Civil and Political Rights.
00:02:46 And this is what HRF uses as its sort of like lodestar, its founding document.
00:02:52 And this is like, essentially, an international agreement on the negative rights.
00:02:56 Those are the things we choose to focus on, because essentially, authoritarian regimes
00:03:00 can commit fraud and claim they’re giving the positive rights, the entitlements, without
00:03:06 having any of the negative liberties.
00:03:08 And they can do that because they don’t have any like free speech or press freedom.
00:03:12 When you take people’s basic fundamental freedoms away, it’s quite easy to make like a Potemkin
00:03:17 village and pretend that there’s the entitlements and that we have good health care and, you
00:03:22 know, it’s the same sort of thing that authoritarians have done for decades, Cuba and Venezuela
00:03:28 and the Soviet Union.
00:03:29 Peter Bell.
00:03:30 Do you think it’s possible for authoritarian regimes to manipulate, to kind of lie about
00:03:34 the negative rights as well, by saying that the people have free speech, the people have
00:03:40 the freedom for assembly and all those kinds of things, can’t you still manipulate the
00:03:45 idea that citizenry still has those rights?
00:03:49 The opposition leader of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, he once told me the funny joke that, you know,
00:03:56 in my country, we have freedom of speech, we don’t have freedom after speech.
00:04:00 So yeah, they can absolutely manipulate whatever they want.
00:04:04 But I’ve done research into socioeconomic data.
00:04:07 And I guess what I’m telling you is that authoritarian regimes, which make up 53% of the world’s
00:04:12 population across 95 countries, about 4.3 billion people, those who live under those
00:04:19 regimes are subject to massive fraud when it comes to things like literacy rates, life
00:04:26 expectancy, any sort of socioeconomic data, economic growth.
00:04:31 They can do this because there’s no free press.
00:04:34 So for us at the Human Rights Foundation, and for people like me, we believe that the
00:04:39 negative rights, the liberties, the things that are in, for example, the Bill of Rights
00:04:43 in the US Constitution, these things are the table and then we can build on top of that.
00:04:48 We can build the rest of our societies on top of that.
00:04:50 The freest countries in the world have both the negative liberties and the entitlements
00:04:54 like Norway, for example, but there’s a big difference between Norway and North Korea.
00:04:59 In North Korea, they only claim to have the entitlements and they definitely don’t have
00:05:03 the liberties.
00:05:05 Do you think there’s one right that’s more important than others?
00:05:07 You kind of suggested the freedom of the press, maybe freedom of speech, that if you take
00:05:13 that away, all the other ones kind of collapse along with like from a ripple effect.
00:05:17 Is there something fundamental that you like to focus your attention on to defend, to protect,
00:05:23 to make sure it’s there?
00:05:24 Yeah, I think free speech is probably the most fundamental.
00:05:27 It’s probably why the founders chose to make it into the First Amendment.
00:05:32 A lot of things are downstream from there.
00:05:34 Property rights are also very, very important.
00:05:38 Obviously we’ve seen the toll of violent redistributionism, you know, in over the last hundred years,
00:05:44 whether it was Lenin or Stalin or Mao or other regimes and everywhere from Ethiopia to colonialists
00:05:52 everywhere to North Korea, it’s not a pretty legacy.
00:05:56 Is free speech clear to you as a concept?
00:06:00 There’s been quite a few debates, especially in the digital age, what it means to violate
00:06:05 freedom of speech.
00:06:06 There’s been a lot of new, like novel mechanisms for people to communicate with each other,
00:06:12 like especially on social networks.
00:06:14 And it seems that unclear because a lot of times those are managed by private companies.
00:06:20 It’s unclear how much protection do the citizens have to have when they’re communicating.
00:06:26 A lot of people are being censored on these social platforms.
00:06:30 Some people, even presidents get removed from those social platforms.
00:06:35 Have you thought about the freedom of speech in the United States, but in the world?
00:06:42 As it’s implemented in the 21st century, given the internet and all those kinds of things?
00:06:50 There is a Soviet dissident named Natan Sharansky who survived the regime and he wrote a book
00:07:02 in which his thesis was essentially the way that you can define a free society is through
00:07:06 something called the town square test.
00:07:08 Can you go to a public space where you live and criticize your ruler loudly without fear
00:07:14 of retribution?
00:07:16 If you can do that, you have free speech.
00:07:18 I think that’s a pretty good litmus test.
00:07:20 Most people in this world cannot do that.
00:07:21 If you live in Havana, if you live in Moscow, if you live in Beijing, you cannot do that.
00:07:27 And that’s not a free society.
00:07:29 In Austin, Texas, in Boston, Massachusetts, in London, in Santiago, Chile, in Tokyo, Japan,
00:07:36 in many democracies, you can do that.
00:07:38 And I think that that’s a really helpful basic sort of litmus test.
00:07:42 Does the content of the criticism matter?
00:07:46 Can it be complete lies, meaning conspiracy theories that involve claiming that the leader
00:07:54 is, let’s say, a lizard slash pedophile slash, you know, I’m not saying that those are lies,
00:08:03 look into it, but they’re very unlikely phenomena.
00:08:08 So like, does that matter?
00:08:10 I think it ends poorly when the state tries to restrict speech.
00:08:15 I think that’s kind of how I would define censorship.
00:08:18 I think censorship and deplatforming are two different things.
00:08:22 Private companies, you know, they get to make up their own rules about what’s allowed on
00:08:28 their platforms.
00:08:29 And I think that’s very different from a government with guns and an army restricting the speech
00:08:34 of its citizens with threats of violence.
00:08:37 These things are different for me.
00:08:39 That violence is a fundamental difference.
00:08:42 I don’t know, I’ve gotten the chance to have dinner with Alex Jones and I’ve talked to
00:08:49 him a few times offline and it does, I understand why people are so off put by him, but it does
00:08:56 bother me that he’s universally removed from every platform.
00:09:00 It feels like there’s many more evil people, bad people compared to Alex Jones who still
00:09:09 are given a voice on these platforms.
00:09:12 And so I’m uncomfortable with the universality of the application of the censorship by these
00:09:21 platforms.
00:09:22 But on the flip side, you’re right.
00:09:23 There’s not a violence, there’s not tanks, there’s not guns behind that censorship.
00:09:29 Yeah.
00:09:30 It’s a bit of a generalization, but Alex Jones would be in prison or dead if he were in North
00:09:35 Korea or in Cuba or in Russia or in China, that the authorities would not tolerate him
00:09:40 to do what he did.
00:09:42 And here he can kind of do what he wants.
00:09:45 He’s encountering some resistance in the marketplace of ideas, large organizations, corporations,
00:09:52 and a lot of public sentiment in different parts of our country don’t like him.
00:09:58 They’re doing their best to drown out his voice, but that’s very different from a violent
00:10:03 threat of censorship from the state.
00:10:05 And that’s what we study.
00:10:06 That’s what I study are these, you know, what is the state doing?
00:10:09 That’s kind of paramount for me.
00:10:11 Yeah.
00:10:12 And that’s true because in the marketplace of ideas, there could be a company that springs
00:10:15 up that gives Alex Jones a platform and the United States is not going to prevent those
00:10:21 companies from functioning.
00:10:22 Of course, there’s from a technology perspective, there is AWS removing Parler from the platform
00:10:32 and gets a little weird, you know, as you get closer and closer to the computer infrastructure,
00:10:37 because then you get closer and closer to the state, actually, the more you get to the
00:10:42 infrastructure that’s usually managed by the state, the closer it gets to then the control
00:10:47 of the state.
00:10:48 I would argue AWS is pretty damn close to infrastructure that’s kind of controlled
00:10:53 by the state.
00:10:54 If you especially look at other nations, China, Russia, there’s, I don’t know who runs the
00:11:01 computer infrastructure for Russia and China, but I bet the state has complete oversight
00:11:06 over that.
00:11:07 And so that level of computer infrastructure, having control about which social networks
00:11:14 can and cannot operate is very uncomfortable to me.
00:11:17 But you’re right, I think it’s good to focus on the obvious violations of these principles
00:11:22 as opposed to the gray areas.
00:11:25 Of course, the gray areas are fascinating.
00:11:28 You mentioned HRF, Human Rights Foundation.
00:11:31 What is it?
00:11:32 What is its mission?
00:11:33 Yes, I’ve been working for HRF since 2007.
00:11:39 We are a charity, a nonprofit, a 501c3 based in New York, and our mission is to promote
00:11:46 and protect individual rights and freedoms in authoritarian societies around the world.
00:11:52 So again, we define about 95 countries as authoritarian, meaning it’s either a one party
00:11:57 state or opposition politicians are outlawed or persecuted, there’s no real free speech,
00:12:03 there’s no press freedom, there’s no independent judiciary, there really aren’t checks and
00:12:06 balances and even trying to create like a human rights organization or like an environmental
00:12:11 group would be illegal.
00:12:14 And the majority of the world’s population lives in that environment.
00:12:16 That’s very important.
00:12:17 You said 53%.
00:12:18 53%, 4.3 billion people.
00:12:20 And I saw you outlined a lot of different sources of suffering in the world.
00:12:27 And then you sort of put people living under authoritarian governments as like more than
00:12:33 all of them.
00:12:35 I forget all the examples you provided, but then…
00:12:38 Sure.
00:12:39 I mean, it’s…
00:12:40 Yeah, maybe you can mention if you remember.
00:12:41 The number of people who are refugees, the number of people who suffer from natural disasters,
00:12:45 the number of people who live under abject poverty, the number of people who don’t have
00:12:49 access to clean drinking water, all of these are dwarfed by the number of people who live
00:12:52 under authoritarianism.
00:12:54 And yet it’s not something that we talk about a lot because people are mercantilist and
00:12:59 the powers that be are happy to sacrifice freedoms and privacy for money.
00:13:04 We live in a profit seeking world.
00:13:07 To get evidence of this, take a look at the list of sponsors of the upcoming Olympics
00:13:11 in China where the CCP is currently committing genocide against the weaker population or
00:13:17 look at the number of people and the famous investors who went to Saudi Arabia a couple
00:13:21 months ago for the Davos in the desert.
00:13:23 I mean, Ray Dalio was there, all kinds of people were there, or at least they were invited
00:13:27 and they said they were gonna go.
00:13:29 And this is a government that at the time was torturing a female activist who just wanted
00:13:35 to drive a car.
00:13:36 This is a government that had murdered Jamal Khashoggi in a brutal fashion just a couple
00:13:42 years earlier.
00:13:43 So, I mean, at the end of the day when it comes down to brass tacks, I mean, the powers
00:13:49 that be, even the free countries are led by people who are very, very happy to sacrifice
00:13:56 all these pretty words about human rights when it comes down to profits, unfortunately.
00:14:00 So, do you think capitalism, that’s maybe one of the flaws of capitalism is it turns
00:14:05 a blind eye to injustices against human nature, against the human rights, like it turns a
00:14:12 blind eye to authoritarian governments?
00:14:14 Look, I think that at the end of the day, like free trade is actually really good.
00:14:22 And you can just look at France and Germany as an example of how like a capitalist structure
00:14:27 would develop.
00:14:28 If you have two capitalist actors, they’re very unlikely to fight each other.
00:14:31 There’s very unlikely to be violence, right?
00:14:33 These are two countries which basically murdered some large percentage of each other’s male
00:14:38 population three times in a hundred years in three different wars, right?
00:14:42 And now today, war is like unthinkable and a lot of that is because of increased collaboration,
00:14:47 increased trade.
00:14:48 So, when you have two capitalist actors, they act in a very productive way with each other.
00:14:54 But as soon as you introduce an authoritarian actor, all bets are off.
00:14:59 So, I think what you have is a conflict between capitalist actors and authoritarian actors.
00:15:05 And at the end of the day, people need to, yes, have more than just capitalist intentions
00:15:13 in the geopolitical level I’m talking about, they need to actually take a stand for principles.
00:15:18 Otherwise, you have athletes and businesses and governments that are all too happy to
00:15:25 do business with the Chinese Communist Party, for example, right now.
00:15:28 I think that there is a little more than just kind of the pure profit, yes.
00:15:34 You mentioned what are the signs that the state is an authoritarian state.
00:15:41 How do you know if you’re living in an authoritarian state or when you study another nation and
00:15:46 analyze the behavior of another nation, how do you know that’s an authoritarian state?
00:15:51 Is it as simple as them having a dictator?
00:15:54 Is it as simple as them as declaring that they don’t have a democracy or is there something
00:15:58 more subtle?
00:15:59 There’s a couple of good litmus tests.
00:16:01 One is actually, can you have a gay pride parade?
00:16:04 It actually lines up perfectly, it doesn’t matter what religion the dictatorship is.
00:16:10 They don’t like minorities and they love to scapegoat, whether it’s gays or religious
00:16:14 minorities, etc.
00:16:16 So it lines up pretty well.
00:16:17 That’s really interesting.
00:16:18 If you cannot have a gay pride parade in your country, because you’re fearful that you’re
00:16:22 going to get the crap kicked out of you, probably live in an authoritarian regime.
00:16:27 I’m sure that’s not just about some kind of homophobia.
00:16:31 Why is that?
00:16:32 That’s really interesting.
00:16:33 Because that’s right.
00:16:34 I’m going through…
00:16:35 Fascism scapegoats minorities.
00:16:37 There’s an other, you create an other group and then you…
00:16:40 Yeah, I mean Uganda is a great example of this, but so is Saudi Arabia, so is China.
00:16:46 I mean, so is Cuba.
00:16:48 I mean, these are all regimes which demonize the LGBT communities.
00:16:53 It’s interesting because maybe you can correct me, but from my very distant outside of perspective,
00:17:00 the sort of the way that certain authoritarian governments speak about gay people is it’s
00:17:10 almost like, what is it?
00:17:13 We don’t have gay people in our country kind of idea as opposed to scapegoating, which
00:17:19 is like…
00:17:21 Total denial is the most powerful form of demonization.
00:17:23 I mean, this is what the Iranian dictatorship does.
00:17:26 A few years ago when Ahmadinejad, who was then sort of the de facto leader, he came
00:17:31 to Columbia University and he tried to give a speech, which you can look up and he tried
00:17:35 to claim that there were no gays in Iran.
00:17:37 And that’s the most powerful form of demonization is trying to just wipe out your utter existence.
00:17:42 There’s other good litmus tests too.
00:17:46 For example, you can think about comedy.
00:17:49 Can you make money making fun of your government on television?
00:17:53 If you cannot, you live in a dictatorship most likely.
00:17:55 I mean, it’s shocking to people that I work with who live in dictatorships when I tell
00:18:00 them that not only are comedians able to safely make fun of our government, but they get paid
00:18:05 very well to do so.
00:18:07 That’s a hallmark of our free society.
00:18:09 That’s another good litmus test.
00:18:11 Hear that Tim Dylan, you should go to North Korea, check it out.
00:18:14 Yeah.
00:18:15 And look, there are tons of flaws with democracies.
00:18:17 This is a really good test by the way.
00:18:19 The United States is a deeply flawed country in many ways.
00:18:21 Our prison system is a disaster.
00:18:24 There’s a horrible war on drugs.
00:18:26 We committed a grievous crime in my opinion by invading Iraq.
00:18:31 We did a lot of problematic things, but our core architecture is still an open society.
00:18:38 The people who criticize the US the most usually live within it.
00:18:44 And if they were to move to a different country and try to use that criticism against their
00:18:49 new rulers, they wouldn’t fare so well.
00:18:51 So whether it’s Chomsky or whomever, if they were to go to Cuba and live in Cuba and try
00:18:57 to criticize Cuba like they do America, it wouldn’t last very long.
00:19:01 So I think what’s important to distinguish between open societies and closed ones or
00:19:06 like free societies and authoritarian regimes, it doesn’t mean that your government’s going
00:19:10 to be good all the time.
00:19:12 What it means is that the citizens have a way to push for reform, have a way to hold
00:19:17 the rulers accountable.
00:19:18 So even if you don’t like what the US government does, whether it was under Biden or Trump
00:19:23 or Obama or Bush, we can rotate them through voting.
00:19:27 And we have an independent Supreme Court that rotates over time.
00:19:30 And we have people that we can elect directly to serve our interests.
00:19:34 And then there’s like a free press and there’s lobbyists and all kinds of people that jostle
00:19:39 for power.
00:19:40 So there’s a separation of powers.
00:19:42 And I like to think about a free society really as like at the bottom of the foundation of
00:19:48 the pyramid really would be free speech.
00:19:50 And then you would have civil society, like for example, human rights organizations, environmental
00:19:55 groups, stamp collectors, athletes, any groups that come together beyond the government’s
00:19:59 sort of strict instruction.
00:20:00 And then on top of that, at the third level, you have separation of powers, again, what
00:20:05 I’m describing.
00:20:06 So authoritarian regimes don’t really have any of these layers to them.
00:20:10 And then at the top, then you put elections, but the elections are meaningless if you don’t
00:20:14 have the foundation below.
00:20:16 Every dictator gets elected.
00:20:17 Kim Jong Un gets elected.
00:20:19 He’s the only person on the ballot.
00:20:21 Every dictator from Hitler to Chavez, they all got elected.
00:20:25 Elections on their own mean literally nothing.
00:20:27 You have to have these other layers beneath to actually be an open and free society.
00:20:31 I think it’s very important for people to understand.
00:20:35 Although Hitler in an interesting way, at a certain point just said, I’m going to be
00:20:39 a ruler forever, which is interesting.
00:20:42 There’s an important switch that happens when you, as opposed to having a facade of elections,
00:20:47 you just put that aside and saying basically like, we’re not even doing this.
00:20:50 Yeah.
00:20:51 There’s like a ladder that you climb the election and you pull the ladder up and then no one
00:20:55 else can climb up.
00:20:56 This sadly happened in Egypt and it was quite predictable.
00:20:59 After Mubarak was ousted after the Arab Spring, Morsi came in and it looked like the Muslim
00:21:06 Brotherhood was not really going to be very democratic.
00:21:09 But it didn’t really matter because then the military came back and now we have Sisi who’s
00:21:12 even worse than Mubarak.
00:21:14 So a lot of times in these regimes, unfortunately, it’s very difficult for people to build that
00:21:19 democratic society afterwards.
00:21:22 Some people have told me that when you live in a totalitarian or authoritarian regime,
00:21:25 it’s kind of like a political desert.
00:21:27 What grows in the desert?
00:21:28 Scorpions and cacti, right?
00:21:30 So basically people with very extreme views because you as an authoritarian ruler, your
00:21:35 best method for control is to get rid of the moderates.
00:21:38 You have to crush the moderates.
00:21:39 That’s very important.
00:21:40 You want to have the only opposition to you be extremists.
00:21:43 That way when you go and have negotiations with the United States, you can kind of hold
00:21:47 up the terrorists or whomever, the extremists and say, it’s either us or them, right?
00:21:51 And then the realists who run the US government are going to choose you.
00:21:54 And that’s why, one of the reasons why the US government has supported so many dictators
00:21:57 around the world over the last few decades.
00:22:00 Do you think authoritarian systems emerge naturally, like that’s the natural state of
00:22:06 things.
00:22:07 If you incorporate what human nature is, is there always going to be corrupt people the
00:22:13 rise to the top?
00:22:14 And we almost have to construct systems that protect us against ourselves kind of thing.
00:22:22 Another way to ask that is what kind of systems protect us from our own human nature?
00:22:30 We started with authoritarianism or autocracy, right?
00:22:34 Ruled by one or a small group oligarchy, and all humans lived under this structure for,
00:22:41 you know, the virtual, you know, bulk of all human existence.
00:22:45 Only until pretty recently did we start having actual democracy.
00:22:49 The idea that we should be ruled by rules, not by rulers, very powerful.
00:22:54 Invented in many places across the world.
00:22:57 Western Africa had this idea and so did the ancient Greeks.
00:23:01 And they started to implement it.
00:23:02 Although as most know, we didn’t have full democracy for a long, long time because it
00:23:06 was only property owners or only men, only people of a certain race.
00:23:11 But this idea that we can like rotate our rulers and that we could be ruled by rules
00:23:17 is extremely powerful and it really like for me, the ideas behind this, I think unlocked
00:23:23 a lot of the industrial revolution, these small personal freedoms that were allowed
00:23:27 in some countries, but not others.
00:23:28 And they unlocked a lot of the scientific innovation over the last few hundred years.
00:23:33 And to me, there’s like a really straight line between like scientific inquiry, free
00:23:36 speech, freedoms, and then more prosperity and more effectiveness as a civilization.
00:23:42 So I think that democracy, you know, ruled by the people is definitely an upgrade from
00:23:48 autocracy or oligarchy, you know, which would be ruled by one or ruled by a small group.
00:23:55 And I think that the democratic revolution has been an incredible thing for our world.
00:24:01 And it’s, you know, you can do half class full, half class empty.
00:24:04 The half class full is that almost half the world lives under democracy.
00:24:07 Like that’s an incredible achievement.
00:24:10 But just under half.
00:24:11 Yeah.
00:24:12 Just under half.
00:24:13 So.
00:24:14 But that’s billions of people.
00:24:16 It’s billions of people.
00:24:18 And if you look at the progress of things, it’s getting better and better and better.
00:24:22 I mean, if you, you know.
00:24:24 Yeah.
00:24:25 We’re a little bit of a stalemate here.
00:24:28 Democracy’s really blossomed between World War II and the year 2000, especially in the
00:24:34 eighties and nineties, you had an incredible wave of fall, you know, where many, many authoritarian
00:24:41 regimes fell and were replaced by democracies.
00:24:43 I think around 2015, the acceleration kind of came to a standstill a little bit.
00:24:52 There’s some good news in some countries and there’s bad news in others.
00:24:56 Like in the last 10 years, you’ve had, for example, the Philippines has gone backwards.
00:25:02 Thailand has gone backwards.
00:25:04 Bangladesh has gone backwards.
00:25:05 Turkey has gone backwards.
00:25:07 That’s like a half billion people right there.
00:25:09 So you’ve had some positives, like, you know, there was positive movement forward in Armenia,
00:25:16 Malaysia, some other countries, but we’re kind of at a stalemate right now.
00:25:21 And what most people fear about where we are right now, who I respect, is what is the digital
00:25:28 transformation of the world due to this like progress of democracy or of open societies.
00:25:34 And that’s what concerns me the most.
00:25:36 Oh, interesting.
00:25:37 So I’ve, and we’ll talk about one of the most fascinating technologies, which is Bitcoin,
00:25:42 how it can help.
00:25:43 But I have a sense that technology, like most technological innovations will give power
00:25:51 to the individuals, will fight authoritarian governments as opposed to give more power
00:25:59 to authoritarian governments.
00:26:00 But your sense is there’s ways to give for technology to be utilized as a tool for the
00:26:07 abuse of the citizenry.
00:26:08 I’ve seen both.
00:26:10 In my work at Ahrefs, I started by helping to put together backpacks with foreign information
00:26:15 that we sent to the Cuban underground library movement.
00:26:18 So in Cuba, you know, to own a book at the time, you had to have the government’s permission.
00:26:23 There’s very little internet penetration.
00:26:25 Okay.
00:26:26 So we would send in movies, you know, V for Vendetta, dubbed into Spanish, and people
00:26:30 would sit inside their homes and they’d watch it and they would answer questions with each
00:26:35 other.
00:26:36 It was awful.
00:26:37 And then after that, I worked with people inside North Korea.
00:26:39 We would send in flash drives.
00:26:40 We have this program called Flash Drives for Freedom.
00:26:42 We’ve sent over 100,000 flash drives in our work into North Korea, a country of about
00:26:48 25 million people.
00:26:49 That’s a lot.
00:26:50 It’s a big, big difference.
00:26:51 That’s, you know, many, many millions of hours of films, books, movies, etc.
00:26:55 So I’ve seen the power that technology can have where, you know, in the 60s and 70s,
00:27:00 you know, to get to break an information blockade, you had to like send in crates of books into
00:27:03 a communist country.
00:27:05 So now all of a sudden, you can send the entire contents of what was once the Library of Alexandria
00:27:10 on something the size of your thumbnail, like that’s remarkable.
00:27:13 So obviously, I’ve seen the positives of technology and we’ll certainly get into Bitcoin.
00:27:17 But I’m, you know, very concerned about essentially big data analysis, like what people call AI
00:27:22 or general, you know, specific kinds of AI, like very concerning.
00:27:26 I think these are very authoritarian.
00:27:27 I mean, it’s very hard to make a case that AI is going to be good for human rights.
00:27:33 Very difficult, in my opinion.
00:27:35 It may be good for health.
00:27:37 It may be good for our efforts to protect the planet.
00:27:40 It may be good for a lot of scientific things.
00:27:43 I find it very hard to believe it’ll be good for civil liberties.
00:27:45 Oh, that’s fun.
00:27:46 This is fun because I disagree.
00:27:48 Give me your examples.
00:27:51 I’m serious.
00:27:52 What AI applications will improve civil liberties?
00:27:55 I thought you meant examples of stuff that’s already out there, because I can give you
00:28:00 examples that, for example, the kind of things I would like to work on, but also the kind
00:28:05 of things I’m hoping to see, which is AI could be used by centralized powers, by governments,
00:28:14 by big organizations like Facebook and Twitter and so on to collect data about people.
00:28:22 Right.
00:28:23 Right.
00:28:24 I believe there’s a huge hunger among people to have control over their own data.
00:28:31 So instead you can have AI that’s distributed or people have complete ownership of their
00:28:37 little AI systems.
00:28:39 So like the kind of stuff that I would like to build or like to see it to be built is
00:28:45 you could think of it as personal assistance or AI that’s owned by you and you get to give
00:28:52 it out.
00:28:53 You have complete control over all of your data.
00:28:55 You have complete control over everything that’s learnable about your day to day experiences
00:29:01 that could be useful in the market of goods and ideas and all those kinds of things.
00:29:08 So it has to do with, so I know you talk about the surveillance, which is very interesting.
00:29:14 It’s who gets to have control of the data.
00:29:17 And I think, I believe there’s a lot of hunger in among regular people to have control over
00:29:26 their data such that if you want to create a business, you have a lot of money to be
00:29:32 made from a capitalist perspective by providing products that let people control their data
00:29:38 where you have no control.
00:29:41 Sounds like to me you’re describing encryption or at least the ability to encrypt, the ability
00:29:45 to use digital keys to secure your property.
00:29:50 And that to me is a very powerful force for individual rights, very powerful.
00:29:56 And it’s what animates Bitcoin ultimately, which we’ll get into.
00:30:00 But for me, at least the way I look at it today in 2021, the threat from big data analysis
00:30:07 used by governments and authoritarian regimes is terrifying.
00:30:09 I mean, to actually see what the Chinese Communist Party is doing where they have hundreds of
00:30:14 millions of cameras overseeing society, cameras that can tell who’s a Uyghur and who’s a
00:30:19 Ham, that to me is terrifying and everything is sorted instantly.
00:30:24 There are supercomputers that are built in Urumqi, in Xinjiang for this explicit purpose.
00:30:30 And it allows the government to quickly sort and basically commit genocide a lot faster
00:30:35 and it’s really scary.
00:30:37 So I do agree and I’ve seen personally how powerful technology can be as a force for
00:30:42 freedom, but I’m very, very worried about big data analysis in the hands of governments.
00:30:47 See, that’s funny because I tend to see governments as ultimately incompetent in the space of
00:30:53 technology to where there will always be lagging behind.
00:30:56 So you look at what the Chinese surveillance systems are doing, I believe once it starts
00:31:01 getting bad enough that technologies would be created to resist that.
00:31:09 So to mess with it from the hacker community, but also from the individual community.
00:31:14 So surveillance is actually very difficult from a centralized perspective to collect
00:31:20 data about you, to detect everything you are because you can spoof a lot of that information.
00:31:24 So I believe you can put power in the hands of the citizens to sort of feed the government
00:31:29 fake data to confuse it at a mass scale to where it’ll make their surveillance less effective.
00:31:38 That could be very sort of hopeful.
00:31:39 Yeah.
00:31:40 I mean, the practical application in Xinjiang, which is a territory the size of Alaska, where
00:31:44 a large percentage of the population has been put into prison camps.
00:31:48 The current issue of the New Yorker has an absolutely harrowing essay that tells the
00:31:53 story of one such woman who in, I believe, 2017 got sucked into one of these camps and
00:32:00 it took her a year or more to get out.
00:32:04 And she’s talking about how in each home in Xinjiang, each home has a QR code on it that
00:32:09 the police can scan and get like a quick instant download of who lives there.
00:32:13 Each car has, you know, like a scannable code.
00:32:17 Every single person has their DNA taken and the DNA is being sifted through and analyzed
00:32:22 by algorithms.
00:32:24 So this is like the Chinese government’s laboratory for how can we use technology to oppress.
00:32:28 It’s like sort of like digital Leninism.
00:32:31 And that to me is one of the biggest risks in our world today and it’s not talked about
00:32:36 enough.
00:32:37 That’s interesting.
00:32:38 So technology is basically enables the automation of oppression.
00:32:42 Absolutely.
00:32:43 So like…
00:32:44 But to define technology, big data analysis and, you know, maybe specific AI, etc. does,
00:32:51 but encryption allows us to fight back.
00:32:53 It’s very important people understand we have tools to fight back.
00:32:56 The, you know, big brother can only grow if it can feed on your data.
00:33:02 If it can’t get your data, it can’t grow.
00:33:04 So you have to willingly give up stuff to the cloud for this monster to grow.
00:33:10 We can like make the monster hungry and shrink it if we give it less data.
00:33:15 And I think that’s where I would agree with you in terms of like wanting to empower people
00:33:18 to be able to do stuff on their own terms in a sovereign way.
00:33:22 And yeah, maybe you’re kind of thinking like the personal assistant who helps out Tony
00:33:26 Stark or something like that.
00:33:28 And that’s, yeah, as long as there’s no back doors and that’s a sovereign thing that you’ve
00:33:32 popped up and created and you have the keys to, absolutely.
00:33:36 But practically speaking, if we’re talking about the world today as is, we need to be
00:33:42 concerned about the way that authoritarian regimes are using big data analysis and they’re
00:33:46 going to buy this software and this equipment from the Chinese government, they’re already
00:33:50 doing it.
00:33:51 State level surveillance has already been purchased by governments everywhere from Latin
00:33:54 America to Sub Saharan Africa to the heart of Europe.
00:33:57 There’s been huge scandals in Britain over their purchase of Chinese surveillance technology.
00:34:03 Part of the Chinese government’s Belt and Road campaign, which is basically to build
00:34:08 the infrastructure of this century and to be in control of it, part of that idea is
00:34:13 to ship out and install surveillance technology both at the telecom level and at the surveillance
00:34:19 level across dozens of countries around the world and have that back door.
00:34:24 There’s this national security law in China, which states that companies that are Chinese,
00:34:28 which are abroad, are mandated to send data back to Beijing.
00:34:32 So they are building this huge global surveillance state.
00:34:35 And again, not talked about enough, you should go Google and research the Belt and Road.
00:34:39 I think it’s very important that we confront this.
00:34:42 Yeah, I’m really glad you’re talking about it because it’s probably important to understand.
00:34:48 I’m also hopeful that as people get educated about how much their data, when collected,
00:34:56 unencrypted, but in general, can be used to harm them.
00:35:00 I mean, it’s almost like an education.
00:35:02 I feel like if you know, it’s a double edged sword because I feel like people become fearful
00:35:10 too easily and that actually has a very negative effect on the quality of life.
00:35:14 In some sense, you want to have tools that allow you to live freely as opposed to live
00:35:18 in fear.
00:35:19 If you live in fear, it’s not a good way to live.
00:35:22 So it’s a balance.
00:35:23 It’s a free society versus a fear society.
00:35:26 Yeah, fear society.
00:35:27 And look, people are, it’s all about the trade offs you make in your daily life.
00:35:30 Like living more privately with more freedom is less convenient.
00:35:35 You trade freedom and privacy for convenience and comfort and speed.
00:35:41 Absolutely.
00:35:42 And the engineering decision and everything that you do.
00:35:45 In the West, in advanced democracies, we have not necessarily personally seen the results
00:35:53 of that trade off because we live in these free societies that have these checks and
00:35:57 balances and freedoms.
00:35:59 But as soon as you step into an authoritarian state and you make those trade offs, your
00:36:02 life immediately becomes more restrictive.
00:36:06 And what people are worried about is that even in advanced economies, market democracies,
00:36:12 etc., people are worried that they might not survive the great social digital transformation.
00:36:20 You know, look at what the NSA is capable of doing.
00:36:22 I mean, for now, it’s not that big of a problem because we still have free speech.
00:36:29 But it’s deeply concerning what Snowden revealed.
00:36:31 And it’s a nice reminder that we need to be focused on privacy and encryption and on helping
00:36:37 users become more sovereign regardless of where you live.
00:36:41 It’s kind of like a crutch to live in a free society.
00:36:43 Like, you know, it’s almost like a free lunch in a way.
00:36:47 You’re not going to be sent to a prison camp because of the color of your skin or your
00:36:50 beliefs or what you say about the government.
00:36:54 And you’re very lucky.
00:36:55 Again, most people do live in a society where you can be persecuted for those things.
00:37:00 And I feel like, especially in America, we forget that we’re distanced from that really
00:37:05 strong reality, you know.
00:37:08 On the topic of Snowden and the NSA, what should we be thinking about?
00:37:13 Because that feels like already an outdated set of conversations because of the information
00:37:17 we’ve gotten from the past.
00:37:19 It feels like everything’s gotten quiet now in terms of how much we actually know about
00:37:22 the…
00:37:23 No, it’s hugely important.
00:37:24 I think the two lessons from Snowden are, A, the Patriot Act and the War on Terror and
00:37:30 mass surveillance are not necessary for our democracy and for our freedoms.
00:37:36 This was a false choice.
00:37:37 We never had to sacrifice them to be safer.
00:37:40 And we’ve seen that.
00:37:41 The government has spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on these like surveillance
00:37:44 programs that you can read about have amounted to very little, except for tremendous bureaucratic
00:37:49 waste and, you know, erosion of our freedoms.
00:37:54 But at the same time, we need to practice more privacy.
00:37:57 And the dramatic increase in the usage of Signal, for example, has been really, really
00:38:02 great to see.
00:38:04 It’s fantastic that tens of millions of people are downloading Signal and using it.
00:38:08 You should try to be onboarding more and more of your conversations onto Signal, for example,
00:38:13 where governments can’t see what you’re saying.
00:38:16 Maybe they can see the metadata.
00:38:18 Maybe they can see that you sent your phone number, sent a message to someone else’s phone
00:38:22 number at this time, but they can’t see what’s inside.
00:38:25 So using encryption in your life is very, very important.
00:38:27 That’s a good starting point.
00:38:29 I would say that’s kind of step A.
00:38:32 The ideas of democracy, the ideas of the balance of power, all the ideas that we were talking
00:38:40 about, the constructs, were inventions.
00:38:44 I wonder if there’s other inventions that will allow us to sort of not engage, not give
00:38:50 governments or any centralized institutions so much power.
00:38:56 Why do citizens have to use Signal?
00:38:59 Because it’s an effort.
00:39:00 You have to understand exactly why.
00:39:03 So that’s a nice little solution for a particular set of problems.
00:39:06 But there’s a million other ways that data, I’m sure, is being collected constantly.
00:39:11 If we don’t create a system that prevents the establishment of these centralized powers,
00:39:18 then we’ll always have this problem.
00:39:20 Yeah, I think we can keep it simple for the purposes of this conversation.
00:39:23 You have politics, information, and money.
00:39:26 Those are the three things I would encourage us to focus on.
00:39:28 In politics, yes, someone invented democracy.
00:39:31 I mean, whether it was the Greeks, the West Africans, or many others around the world
00:39:36 around the same time invented this idea that we should be ruled by rules and not by rulers.
00:39:42 And that has evolved dramatically.
00:39:45 And then you have information.
00:39:47 Information also used to be highly centralized, right?
00:39:50 Think about how rich you had to be to gain access to a library before the printing press,
00:39:54 or how much money you had to have, or how close to the king or the feudal lord you had
00:40:00 to be to be able to have that ability.
00:40:02 But now, the majority of the world, billions of people have access to all information in
00:40:08 their pocket, and they can set up an account on social media and get their word out.
00:40:11 So not only politics, but information has been dramatically decentralized.
00:40:17 And I would say that encrypted messaging is kind of a corollary to that second innovation
00:40:22 in as much as now people are like more effortlessly, like Signal is a lot easier to use than PGP,
00:40:28 for example.
00:40:29 They’re more easily able to practice privacy when it comes to having private messages globally.
00:40:36 These are all good things and we need to keep pushing.
00:40:38 And I think money is like, honestly, maybe the most important piece.
00:40:42 And that’s why I spent so much time thinking about Bitcoin.
00:40:45 Okay, so politics, information, money, yes, let’s talk about money.
00:40:52 What is money?
00:40:53 Why is it important to think about in the context of human rights?
00:40:58 I have witnessed money be peripheralized, it has taken a backseat in the human rights
00:41:06 conversation.
00:41:07 The idea of currency, who makes the money, who makes the rules, who issues it, who sets
00:41:12 the interest rates, all these things, it is not on the menu of human rights activists.
00:41:17 If you just do like a systematic study of like the human rights discourse over the last
00:41:20 several decades, money is not there.
00:41:23 It’s also not really taught in schools.
00:41:25 Like children don’t really learn about money, where does it come from?
00:41:28 It’s kind of hidden from a lot of our discourse.
00:41:33 Only really when I got into Bitcoin did I started learning more about money.
00:41:37 I spent 10 years at the Human Rights Foundation and we did all kinds of programs around the
00:41:42 world.
00:41:43 We convened Oslo Freedom Forums in different places and I got to meet hundreds of dissidents.
00:41:47 And very rarely did they ever speak about currency or bank accounts or moving money
00:41:51 from one place to another.
00:41:53 But when I started asking them, they always had amazing stories about money, always.
00:41:58 I mean, my friend, Ivan Mawire, who started the This Flag movement in Zimbabwe, which
00:42:03 ended up toppling Robert Mugabe, when I asked him to come to San Francisco to give a talk
00:42:07 about hyperinflation, which he lived through.
00:42:10 He said, no one’s ever asked me to do that before, but I’ll come.
00:42:13 And he came, this was about three years ago.
00:42:15 And the first thing he did when he got on the stage is he opened up a shirt and he brought
00:42:18 out a necklace that had the 1980 Zimbabwean dollar on it.
00:42:21 And he said, we in the activist community wear this as a symbol of where our country
00:42:26 used to be because the Zimbabwean dollar used to be worth two British pounds.
00:42:30 And then of course, over the next two and a half decades of economic mismanagement and
00:42:35 corruption by Mugabe, it got inflated out of existence, right?
00:42:38 You’ve seen those like a hundred trillion dollars in Zimbabwean notes.
00:42:41 So he had to live through that, which was terrible and crushing, but he is an expert
00:42:47 on money.
00:42:48 If you actually talk to human rights activists about money, they know a lot about money.
00:42:51 They’re just not usually asked to talk about it.
00:42:54 So for me, when I study money or look at money, it’s really about control, who’s creating
00:43:02 it, and how much does the population know about the creation of that money.
00:43:06 And when it comes to Bitcoin, it’s really the people’s money.
00:43:09 Like there is no shadowy force in charge of it.
00:43:12 We all know the rules.
00:43:14 We all know how it’s going to get minted and how it’s going to get printed.
00:43:17 And you know, that information is out there for everybody to see.
00:43:20 And there’s no like special group of rules for one group of people or another group.
00:43:25 You know, a billionaire and a refugee are the same in the eyes of the protocol.
00:43:30 This is a rather revolutionary concept.
00:43:33 And in the same way that democracy allowed us to decentralize politics and have checks
00:43:38 and balances.
00:43:39 And in the same way that the internet is this culmination of technologies that allowed us
00:43:42 to decentralize information, access to and control over it, Bitcoin, you know, decentralizes
00:43:48 money.
00:43:49 I mean, no longer, again, is there one group of people who can just change it arbitrarily.
00:43:54 We’re all in the same playing field.
00:43:57 And I think that that is a tremendous innovation.
00:44:01 You know, from one perspective, money and inflation, hyperinflation is a kind of symptom
00:44:06 of corruption, as opposed to the core of the corruption.
00:44:12 And at the flip side, in terms of resisting the corruption, resisting the abuse of human
00:44:18 rights, it’s interesting to think that fighting inflation or fighting the mismanagement of
00:44:28 the money supply is a way to fight back authoritarianism or to fight authoritarianism.
00:44:38 And that’s an interesting concept that I think was introduced to me by just plugging myself
00:44:44 intellectually into the Bitcoin community, but also just cryptocurrency in general, is
00:44:49 to like, it’s not that money is a symptom.
00:44:54 You know, money is a tool to fight back, too.
00:44:58 Absolutely.
00:45:00 So in what way can Bitcoin be used to fight authoritarianism, not just in the United States,
00:45:10 but all of those 53% that you’re referring to, how can Bitcoin help?
00:45:15 So we talked about authoritarianism, and we talked about the surveillance state.
00:45:20 To me, Bitcoin has two kind of key mechanisms through which it can help us.
00:45:26 Number one, it’s a sovereign savings account.
00:45:29 It’s debasement proof, meaning the government cannot print more whenever they want.
00:45:33 This is very, very different from fiat currency, which by its very name, its very nature can
00:45:38 be issued on sort of demand, right, by the rulers.
00:45:42 And while I live in a country where the rulers do a reasonable job managing the money, most
00:45:47 people aren’t so lucky.
00:45:48 So only 13% of humans in the world live in a country that’s a liberal democracy with
00:45:53 property rights and has what we call a reserve currency, meaning a currency so stable and
00:45:58 desirable that other countries save in it at the central bank level, right?
00:46:02 You basically have the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Switzerland, the Euro, and Canada.
00:46:08 I mean, those are like reserve currencies.
00:46:10 And these are liberal democracies where people have reasonable guarantees over property rights.
00:46:14 Everybody else either lives under like a weaker currency or an authoritarian regime.
00:46:19 That’s 87% of the world’s population, almost 7 billion people.
00:46:22 So for them, a sovereign savings account that’s permissionless, meaning you don’t have to
00:46:27 have ID to use it, is a big, big deal.
00:46:30 And a lot of people talk about Zimbabwe or Venezuela as some like isolated cases.
00:46:34 Oh, well, you know, hyperinflation only happens in those two countries.
00:46:38 I actually did some research into this and there’s about one point, over, you know, close
00:46:45 to 1.3 billion people who live under double or triple digit inflation.
00:46:49 This is not an isolated instance.
00:46:51 We’re talking huge countries, Nigeria, 200 million people, 15% inflation, Turkey, 15%
00:46:57 inflation for 100 million people, Argentina, 40% inflation for a country of 45 million
00:47:02 people.
00:47:03 So you can go down the list, there’s about 35 countries where like people’s earnings,
00:47:08 their wages are literally disappearing in front of their eyes over a matter of weeks
00:47:13 or months against things like the dollar or gold or real estate, right?
00:47:17 So this is a huge issue.
00:47:19 It absolutely is a human rights issue for me.
00:47:21 I mean, when it comes to your time and energy, having control over that or having it stolen
00:47:25 from you, I think this is pretty clear.
00:47:27 And Bitcoin is like an immediate, low cost, easily accessible solution for people.
00:47:34 And I’ve learned this not from my own assumptions, but by talking to people, by interviewing
00:47:39 dozens of people, whether it’s in Sudan, which currently has triple digit inflation, or people
00:47:47 who’ve escaped from Syria, who have used Bitcoin to get their wealth out of the country, and
00:47:51 then also to make payments back to people inside, or Venezuela or elsewhere.
00:47:55 It’s very, very powerful.
00:47:58 I think some very small percentage of people who have used, have owned Bitcoin was something
00:48:03 like 1%, right?
00:48:04 Of the world, whatever that number is, it’s small.
00:48:07 Call it 2% for the purposes of our, about a little under 200 million people.
00:48:12 Wow.
00:48:13 Yeah.
00:48:14 At most, right now.
00:48:15 So if we look at Zimbabwe, Sudan, if we look at…
00:48:18 Small percentages of people.
00:48:19 Do you think the technology is mature enough?
00:48:22 Because it’s not just about the idea, it’s also about the implementation of it.
00:48:25 Like Bitcoin, for the most part, requires access to the internet.
00:48:32 Yeah.
00:48:33 And what do you think about accessibility of this technology now as a method of activism
00:48:41 in the worst parts of the world?
00:48:43 We often think like all the conversations we’ve had about Bitcoin is essentially middle
00:48:47 class, like wealthy people relative to the rest of the world.
00:48:51 They’re kind of talking sort of investment and high concept ideas.
00:48:56 Then there’s also the people in the world who are suffering, who are living through
00:48:59 hyperinflation.
00:49:00 They may not have a computer or access to the internet.
00:49:03 How do you think Bitcoin can help there?
00:49:05 Yeah.
00:49:06 So again, we have one clear use case, which is a sovereign savings account that you can
00:49:11 control, right?
00:49:12 The other use case is an unstoppable payments network.
00:49:15 This is very important for people who live behind, for example, sanctions, like the US
00:49:19 like basically weaponizes the dollar and like sanctions different countries.
00:49:24 And instead of sanctioning like a handful of rulers, for example, which I would support,
00:49:28 this is like a Magnitsky or smart sanctions.
00:49:31 Sometimes we’ll just say, we’re just going to shut off this whole country.
00:49:33 So the people suffer.
00:49:34 Cuba or Iran are good examples.
00:49:36 Average people suffer, right?
00:49:37 So people in those two countries I just mentioned, Cuba, Iran, or even Palestine, which is also
00:49:42 sort of like blockaded by the Israelis.
00:49:45 So you have Cuba, Iran, Palestine are three good examples where people inside all three
00:49:49 of those countries now are using Bitcoin to do commerce, do their business, send money
00:49:54 back and forth.
00:49:55 So sanctions resistant.
00:49:56 Sanctions resistant.
00:49:57 It does not get stopped by sanctions, right?
00:50:01 And also it’s, again, remittances are extortionate.
00:50:03 I mean, the average remittance, you know, costs has a high fee, takes several days.
00:50:09 If your family is in Ghana or something like that, or Nigeria, and you live in the United
00:50:13 States, it can take time to use Western Union.
00:50:16 Sometimes it gets paused, it gets lost, there’s issues, you have to deal with customer service.
00:50:20 Screw that.
00:50:21 I mean, you know, if the person has a cell phone, which increasingly is the case, I mean,
00:50:26 by the end of next year, more than five or six billion people depending on different
00:50:31 estimates will have smartphones basically by the end of 2022.
00:50:35 We’re talking like the vast majority of humans will have access to smartphones.
00:50:40 They can all have sovereign Bitcoin wallets.
00:50:42 And there’s even ways to access Bitcoin without the internet.
00:50:47 But I mean, we can get into that.
00:50:48 There’s like hardware wallets and so on.
00:50:50 What do you mean by sovereign Bitcoin wallet?
00:50:55 You know, most users today are using Bitcoin in a custodial manner.
00:51:00 So this is kind of like having a bank account where you have a deposit account at a bank,
00:51:06 right?
00:51:07 So you have a claim, right?
00:51:08 You go to the bank and they have some of your money and you take it out, right?
00:51:12 With an ATM.
00:51:13 So what I would call noncustodial Bitcoin use would be similar to withdrawing cash from
00:51:20 an ATM.
00:51:21 You have it.
00:51:22 It’s a bearer instrument.
00:51:23 OK, so when I…
00:51:24 Bearer instrument.
00:51:25 That’s what it’s called.
00:51:26 It’s a bearer instrument.
00:51:27 I know.
00:51:28 I apologize.
00:51:29 I’m outside this community.
00:51:30 I’m in a bar of gold or a banknote or Bitcoin that you control, meaning you have the seed
00:51:36 phrase, right?
00:51:37 Which for the listeners essentially is 12 to 24 English words that you write down on
00:51:42 a piece of paper.
00:51:43 That’s your like password to get into your Bitcoin account.
00:51:46 And that gives you that bearer instrument quality, right?
00:51:49 But unfortunately, most users still use Bitcoin in a custodial way, meaning they buy it on
00:51:55 Coinbase or Square or something like that.
00:51:58 You would put into the custodial into the custodial category like a bank.
00:52:04 And look, the good news is you can withdraw to your own control.
00:52:07 And in the Bitcoin community, we try to teach this idea that it’s not your keys, not your
00:52:11 coins in the same way that if you deposit your money at the bank, you might not get
00:52:15 it back.
00:52:16 I mean, it’s low likelihood, but it’s very possible.
00:52:19 Same thing in Bitcoin.
00:52:20 Like if you want to get the full experience, you want to actually custody your own Bitcoin.
00:52:24 You want to put it whether it’s on an open source software wallet, like the blue wallet
00:52:28 is a good one for people to check out or a hardware wallet like cold card, for example.
00:52:33 There’s different ways to do this.
00:52:35 But essentially, like around the world, people are innovating.
00:52:39 Like don’t think so low of your fellow man.
00:52:41 You know what I mean?
00:52:42 Like people are able to figure this out.
00:52:44 You know, I get a lot of flak from people saying, oh, Bitcoin is so hard to use.
00:52:47 I read this article in the New York Times saying this guy in Silicon Valley lost all
00:52:50 of his Bitcoin.
00:52:51 That’s because he was a moron and didn’t care about it.
00:52:54 This guy lost all this Bitcoin because it wasn’t worth much 10 years ago and he, you
00:52:58 know, he forgot the password.
00:52:59 But if you’re like receiving your remittance from a family member, you’re going to lose
00:53:03 the password.
00:53:04 Right.
00:53:05 And you trust in the basic intelligence of people to figure this out and to innovate
00:53:09 and so on and figure out.
00:53:10 We’re watching it, man.
00:53:12 Yeah.
00:53:13 You know, I’m, it’s kind of funny that, but people in the United States are not very savvy
00:53:18 with money.
00:53:20 It’s exactly the way you’re describing is like when you have very little money, you’re
00:53:24 going to be savvy with money.
00:53:27 You’re going to understand exactly the mechanisms that work, that are resistant to the corruption
00:53:32 that’s around you.
00:53:33 I mean, I remember sort of growing up in the Soviet Union, the general bureaucracy and
00:53:40 the corruption of everything around you, you figure out ways around that.
00:53:44 You figure out ways how to function within that kind of system to survive under inflation,
00:53:49 under hyperinflation, under all like basically being unable to trust any kind of, even the
00:53:54 police force and all those kinds of things.
00:53:56 You figure it out and that same way, perhaps Bitcoin could be all the different ways to
00:54:01 store and gain Bitcoin.
00:54:05 These mechanisms could be something that’s figured out in the third world as opposed
00:54:09 to in the United States.
00:54:10 Oh, I mean, I would say the capital of Bitcoin could easily be Lagos and not San Francisco
00:54:14 in terms of users, in terms of people using it.
00:54:17 And again, the two use cases as a savings account and as an unstoppable payment rail.
00:54:22 These are the two ones that you should really think about, this is how people are using
00:54:24 it today.
00:54:25 Now, when it comes to, could it possibly be adopted by like a sufficient majority of the
00:54:31 population?
00:54:32 I say, yes.
00:54:33 And it’s very similar to the way the mobile phone spread.
00:54:36 At the beginning, the cell phone was only for rich people, it was only for the elite,
00:54:40 it was huge, it didn’t work very well, the interface sucked, it was clunky.
00:54:44 Over time, it got smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper and easier to use and
00:54:49 easier to use.
00:54:50 And today, everyone benefits.
00:54:52 So you’re going to watch a similar technology upgrade process with Bitcoin.
00:54:55 Already in the last 10 years, Bitcoin has gotten so much easier to use.
00:54:59 I mean, there are now mobile wallets that are so slick.
00:55:02 There’s one called Moon M U U N wallet from a team in Argentina.
00:55:06 And these guys created it because they saw their own currency devalued like three times
00:55:11 in the last 20 years.
00:55:12 And they’ve had a hell of a time trying to get their money back and forth in different
00:55:15 countries.
00:55:16 So they were like, let’s make this easy for people.
00:55:18 Again, you know, this is the people’s money.
00:55:22 This is something that cannot be controlled by governments or corporations.
00:55:25 And that makes it very powerful.
00:55:27 And I think it’s actually quite exciting to be here in the adoption phase.
00:55:32 In the early days.
00:55:33 Yeah, man, this is the early days.
00:55:34 And you also mentioned that Bitcoin is the mechanism of a peaceful revolution.
00:55:40 So it’s a way to resist authoritarianism in a peaceful way.
00:55:45 It’s ultimately, you know, you mentioned sort of politics, information, and money.
00:55:54 It seems like in the space of money, this is one of the peaceful mechanisms.
00:55:57 It’s a way to opt out.
00:55:59 You can opt out peacefully from the system.
00:56:03 And yeah, it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.
00:56:06 So Bitcoin is currently by far the most popular sort of dominant cryptocurrency.
00:56:12 That said, and I look forward to your letters, Bitcoin maximalists.
00:56:17 That said, you know, Internet Explorer was the most popular browser for quite a long
00:56:23 time.
00:56:24 And then other browsers came along that out competed it like Chrome, Firefox, People’s
00:56:31 Checkout Brave.
00:56:32 It’s a great browser.
00:56:33 I think it’s my favorite browser at this point.
00:56:36 Anyway, so why Bitcoin?
00:56:38 Why not another cryptocurrency?
00:56:39 If you look in the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years, do you think it’s possible for another cryptocurrency
00:56:46 like Ethereum or something that it’s not even here yet to overtake Bitcoin as a mechanism?
00:56:53 When you say overtake, what do you mean?
00:56:57 What do you mean overtake?
00:56:58 You mean number of users?
00:56:59 Do you mean a price per coin?
00:57:01 Yeah, the number of users, because we’re talking about 1%, 2%.
00:57:05 And if we are serious about this being in the space of money as a way to give individuals
00:57:16 power, fight the centralized powers that use the money system and so on, how do we get
00:57:22 from 2% to 50%, right, to 60%, to 80%?
00:57:29 At that jump, is it obvious to you, not obvious, but do you think Bitcoin is the way to get
00:57:35 from 2% to 50% or are there going to be other cryptocurrencies that may emerge that get
00:57:42 us to 50%?
00:57:43 No.
00:57:44 I mean, Bitcoin is the innovation.
00:57:45 The innovation is in having the decentralized mint.
00:57:48 No one can change the monetary policy.
00:57:51 Everything else is downstream from there.
00:57:53 In Bitcoin, the mean would be 21 million.
00:57:55 There’s never going to be any more than 21 million.
00:57:58 Every other cryptocurrency either has an inflationary policy, meaning there’s going to continue
00:58:02 to be more and more of it over time, or its monetary policy can be changed by a small
00:58:06 group of people.
00:58:08 This is vividly on display in Ethereum, which is like the second largest and second most
00:58:12 robust cryptocurrency, right?
00:58:14 I’ve talked to senior Ethereum engineers over the last couple of weeks trying to figure
00:58:18 out what is the monetary policy of Ethereum?
00:58:22 No one can tell me.
00:58:23 No one knows how much ETH is going to be minted in 2022 and 2023 after they shift to proof
00:58:28 of stake.
00:58:29 I’ve seen estimates that range from 100,000 to 2 million.
00:58:33 So at the end of the day, you’re going to be trusting a small group of people to make
00:58:35 those decisions.
00:58:37 That is what we are escaping with Bitcoin.
00:58:39 So all these other cryptocurrencies, they might have their use cases, virtually all
00:58:43 of them are not.
00:58:44 It’s very important for people to know that if you take like the 4,500 cryptocurrencies
00:58:48 on CoinMarketCap, almost all of them are scams straight up.
00:58:52 Even the ones that have like noble intentions, I just don’t think are going to add that much
00:58:57 value ultimately.
00:58:59 I think Bitcoin to me is the innovation and you know, that’s because it has a monetary
00:59:04 policy and an issuance schedule that cannot be changed.
00:59:08 And that’s what gets me so excited about it.
00:59:09 I mean, that’s why it’s such an important tool for human rights.
00:59:12 Yeah, it’s interesting because when you grow from 2%, when you grow in the number of people
00:59:17 using it at the scale, they’re using it, it’s going to need to be resistant to governments
00:59:25 and institutions messing with it.
00:59:27 So it’s interesting to see what kind of cryptocurrency would be resistant to that.
00:59:33 Obviously Dogecoin is going to win.
00:59:35 Let’s be honest.
00:59:36 Well, I mean, look, the number two cryptocurrency in the world, probably by like how useful
00:59:43 it is to people is Tether, which is totally centralized, has blacklists.
00:59:49 So I’m not saying there won’t be like new digital assets that are lumped into this category
00:59:54 that have usage, but they’re not, they’re not, it’s not the same innovation as Bitcoin.
00:59:59 It’s just sort of building on this idea of like a Euro dollar, maybe like a dollar that
01:00:03 is minted outside of the control of the US Federal Reserve, right?
01:00:06 It would be a Euro dollar.
01:00:08 So stable coins are kind of like Euro dollars just minted by private actors in a way, right?
01:00:11 But they’re still tied to the dollar.
01:00:13 They’re pegged to the dollar.
01:00:14 They’re not escaping the system.
01:00:16 Escaping the system is Bitcoin.
01:00:18 We aren’t reliant on the dollar.
01:00:20 We have our own, you know, full store value, medium of exchange, unit of account eventually.
01:00:26 And you know, the Bitcoin world will be denominated in different terms.
01:00:30 And I think everyone, everything else will be tied to it.
01:00:32 I really do.
01:00:33 It does feel currently like Bitcoin is like, like pirates or something like that.
01:00:38 And there’s still like the central banks that are like the main navies of the, of the different
01:00:43 nations.
01:00:44 Yeah.
01:00:45 It’s just this, if you talk about scale.
01:00:46 So there’s going to be a moment if Bitcoin continues to grow in its impact, when governments
01:00:51 are going to seriously contend with, you know, what do we do with this?
01:00:56 Do you think about those moments?
01:00:58 Is Bitcoin, is the cryptocurrency world in general going to be able to withstand the
01:01:04 serious legal pushback from countries, from nations, especially authoritarian nations?
01:01:11 Yeah.
01:01:12 It’s been interesting.
01:01:13 It’s been 12 years, okay?
01:01:15 More than 12 years since Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin and they haven’t been able
01:01:20 to stop it.
01:01:21 They have tried.
01:01:22 They have tried a lot.
01:01:23 I wrote a long essay for Quillette on this, like, like why haven’t governments been able
01:01:27 to stop Bitcoin?
01:01:28 And my thesis is essentially that there’s been like this mix of different kinds of technical,
01:01:33 social and economic and political incentives and disincentives that make it very difficult.
01:01:39 And I think to me, the best way to think about it is that Bitcoin is like a Trojan horse.
01:01:44 So just to actually tell that story just a little bit, because I think it’s important
01:01:48 to understand the classical mythology tale, I find this very interesting.
01:01:53 Of the actual Trojan horse?
01:01:54 Of the actual Trojan horse.
01:01:55 Yeah.
01:01:56 Which was told in the Aeneid actually by Virgil, right?
01:01:58 And the idea was the Greeks had been like trying to take the city of Troy for like a
01:02:02 decade at these like impregnable walls and they couldn’t do it.
01:02:06 And Ulysses and the rest of the Greek army were like, we don’t know what to do.
01:02:10 So Minerva, the god of strategy and war, you know, kind of like they get this idea from
01:02:15 her, I guess, to actually try to use subterfuge and trickery to take over the city.
01:02:20 So the idea is to, and this was sort of hatched by Ulysses, right?
01:02:23 To put this horse together that would kind of be like a gift.
01:02:27 So the idea was the Greeks just like pretended to leave, right?
01:02:31 They deserted.
01:02:32 They left behind one soldier and this horse and the Trojans looked at it and they were
01:02:36 like, what’s going on here?
01:02:37 And they brought in the soldier and the soldier’s like, look, they left.
01:02:40 They’re so sorry for all of the desecration and blood spill.
01:02:43 This is their gift to you.
01:02:44 It’s, you know, honoring Minerva, you know, it’s like this like, you know, trophy for
01:02:49 you guys.
01:02:50 And there were actually people inside Troy, Cassandra, a prophet, as well as Laocoon,
01:02:55 who was like a priest who said, no, no, no, this is obviously a trick.
01:02:58 This is obviously a trick.
01:03:00 But they were like dispatched and ignored because the horse was like, it was just like
01:03:03 so bad ass.
01:03:04 So the Trojans were like, I’m bringing it in the city.
01:03:07 So they brought it in themselves.
01:03:09 No blood spilled at all.
01:03:10 Right.
01:03:11 In the middle of the night, of course, what you realize is the horse was packed with Greek
01:03:13 soldiers and they come out and they let the army in, which was like hiding behind an island.
01:03:16 So this idea that like something could be so attractive that you really can’t say no,
01:03:23 even if you know what’s inside of it, is at play in Bitcoin.
01:03:26 So like in Bitcoin has this number go up technology, right?
01:03:29 It is what we call it in sort of shorthand NGO, NGU, right?
01:03:33 But what people don’t realize is that NGU is like the Trojan horse.
01:03:38 Inside the Trojan horse is FGU, Freedom Go Up technology.
01:03:41 So dictators and rogue regimes and corporations are going to buy, mine, tax, accumulate this
01:03:47 thing because it’s the best performing financial asset in the world.
01:03:51 What they don’t realize or they’re going to have to ignore is that they’re also aiding
01:03:56 and abetting this freedom technology, which allows individuals to be sovereign and eventually
01:04:00 erodes their power.
01:04:02 There’s no question that rogue regimes and bad actors have already used and will continue
01:04:05 to use Bitcoin.
01:04:06 The thing is when you think about a North Korea or a Venezuela and that government instructs
01:04:11 some of its bureaucrats and cronies and officials to start stealing Bitcoin or accumulating
01:04:16 it or whatever for short term gain to get around sanctions and use it to buy dollars
01:04:21 or something like that, right?
01:04:22 Which they can’t get normally.
01:04:23 Well, guess what?
01:04:24 All those people who the regime has instructed to like figure this thing out and use it,
01:04:28 they’re all going to realize, oh my God, this is money the government doesn’t control.
01:04:31 And it’s going to spread like a virus.
01:04:32 Okay?
01:04:33 So this is like the idea of the Trojan horse allegory, why I think it’s so important and
01:04:36 powerful with Bitcoin.
01:04:38 All the people talking about Bitcoin today on TV, they don’t care about freedom and privacy.
01:04:43 They just care about number go up.
01:04:44 But what they don’t realize is what’s concealed within.
01:04:47 And that’s very, very powerful to me.
01:04:50 So the people talking about Bitcoin on TV are maybe investor types.
01:04:54 Yeah, professional investors, corporations and soon governments.
01:04:58 I mean, you just had today this morning on CNBC, the leader of the Republican leader
01:05:04 of the House of Representatives, a congressman saying, like, we need to be pro Bitcoin as
01:05:08 a country.
01:05:09 And the other day, Peter Thiel had a very interesting comment where he was basically
01:05:13 like, let’s not fall behind China in this race.
01:05:16 So you have influential people in our government, like sort of posturing for this, like, you
01:05:22 know, Bitcoin race that’s going to happen in the next 10 years.
01:05:25 You’re going to see this.
01:05:26 You’re going to compete to stack Bitcoin.
01:05:28 Absolutely.
01:05:29 So you believe the the thing that’s shiny and sexy, like the Trojan horse, the number
01:05:34 go up.
01:05:35 It’s too hard to ignore.
01:05:38 And for it to do to define that a little further as meaning it does seem like the more people
01:05:44 get excited and start using Bitcoin, the more its value grows.
01:05:48 So it’s just a good feedback loop.
01:05:49 Yeah, it’s a feedback loop.
01:05:51 And then the reason you’re excited about it, especially is that F.G.
01:05:56 Freedom go up.
01:05:57 Freedom go up, which is it ultimately gives power to the individuals to so decentralize
01:06:03 the entire system.
01:06:04 Yeah, I mean, like when Tesla stacks Bitcoin, they’re just doing that as self interest.
01:06:08 They think it’s going to be a good inflation hedge.
01:06:10 Fine.
01:06:11 But what they maybe don’t care about, don’t realize or they don’t need to care.
01:06:14 I mean, Bitcoin’s power is it like co ops people into promoting a freedom tool, even
01:06:19 if they don’t care about or even if they hate freedom, doesn’t matter.
01:06:22 So when Tesla stacks Bitcoin and the price goes up and more interest goes up and more
01:06:27 people around the world are like, wow, Bitcoin, then more people get involved again.
01:06:31 More adoption, more price, more developers, better user interface, more privacy tools,
01:06:36 more mining, more network security.
01:06:38 It’s just this like positive feedback loop that continues to grow and it will grow intensely
01:06:42 in the next decade as we go through the adoption cycle.
01:06:45 And the reason why I’m so excited about this is the human rights world, again, to get back
01:06:48 to our previous conversation, is very hard to find people who have, you know, the empathy
01:06:54 or the altruism to actually make a difference abroad in places like China or Saudi Arabia
01:06:58 or North Korea.
01:07:00 People are very quick to just like, they’ll just quickly toss off the pretty words that
01:07:04 they care about human rights as soon as profits come into play.
01:07:07 So there’s no alignment of incentives, right?
01:07:09 The reason why Bitcoin is so powerful is that it aligns the incentives.
01:07:13 All of a sudden, they can be as greedy as they want.
01:07:16 They are being forced to promote a freedom tool.
01:07:18 This I’ve never seen before and it makes me, it gives me a lot of like excitement.
01:07:21 It’s very refreshing because we’ve been laboring in the human rights space, you have to like
01:07:25 raise money and it’s all like nonprofit work and you’re like begging for people to make
01:07:29 a difference for you.
01:07:31 Here you have this like incredible asset which people will accumulate out of self preservation,
01:07:36 self interest and greed, and yet it will strengthen the power of the individual.
01:07:40 That is what we need to fight, big brother.
01:07:42 That’s what we need to fight, like what I’m scared is happening in China, like this growing
01:07:46 authoritarian state which is powered by big data analysis.
01:07:50 This is our way to fight back and it runs on this like really interesting engine again
01:07:56 that like takes advantage of our base nature as humans and I know that it sounds terrible
01:08:00 for me to say this, but I mean, ultimately we are self interested and it is hard to get
01:08:07 people to care about others living a thousand miles away.
01:08:10 We are kind of localized in our empathy.
01:08:14 Being as someone who works to help people who live in like a hundred different countries,
01:08:19 it’s very difficult to get Americans to care about what’s happening in Belarus or in Kashmir.
01:08:23 It just is.
01:08:24 But guess what?
01:08:25 They’re going to definitely care about Bitcoin because they want to see their net worth go
01:08:29 up, they want to do better for their family, et cetera.
01:08:31 They’re going to get into this thing and it’s really going to like make that powerful tool
01:08:36 for everyone else who’s using it.
01:08:37 So this interplay dynamic is fascinating to me.
01:08:41 Yeah, I have to, I’m somebody who doesn’t like the corrupting effects of greed, but
01:08:50 it is also human nature.
01:08:52 Yeah, I don’t like it either, but we have to be realists.
01:08:55 You have to acknowledge it and then maybe use it for your advantage.
01:09:00 And it’s not just Bitcoin itself.
01:09:02 Like exchanges today are adopting something called lightning network, which is a way to
01:09:06 scale Bitcoin on a second layer.
01:09:08 Much like we had gold bars, which we scaled with paper money and then we had visa credit
01:09:11 cards, which were a way of scaling the paper notes, Bitcoin scales through lightning network.
01:09:16 It’s a private instant globally final settlement network.
01:09:20 It’s something you all should check out.
01:09:22 It’s very, very interesting.
01:09:24 The exchanges aren’t adopting lightning for its privacy benefits.
01:09:27 Like lightning operates off the chain, meaning surveillance companies can’t see, they can’t
01:09:31 do chain analysis on lightning because it’s on an onion routed second layer kind of that
01:09:35 works kind of like the Tor project.
01:09:38 The exchanges don’t care about privacy.
01:09:41 They’re doing it because it reduces fees.
01:09:43 Lightning is cheaper and faster.
01:09:45 So again, we have this really interesting alignment of incentives where like the freedom
01:09:48 tech is being promoted by people who don’t, I don’t, it doesn’t matter what their incentives
01:09:52 are.
01:09:53 I could care less if they were altruistic or not.
01:09:55 And I think this is, and you’re going to maybe see this even in the future.
01:09:58 There’s more things coming in Bitcoin down the pike.
01:10:01 Lightning was enabled by an upgrade called Segwit, right?
01:10:04 Which took place a few years ago, which was the culmination of the block size conflict.
01:10:08 There’s another thing coming up called cross input signature aggregation, which may, if
01:10:12 it takes effect in the next few years, it may compel exchanges to collaboratively spend
01:10:18 all their Bitcoin together in a way that really protects our privacy and fights surveillance.
01:10:23 But they’re not going to do it for moral reasons.
01:10:25 They’re going to do it because it’s going to save them money and improve their bottom
01:10:27 line.
01:10:28 Can you speak to that kind of collaborative so that you can have multiple parties in a
01:10:31 single transaction kind of thing?
01:10:33 Yeah.
01:10:34 Like you could do that today.
01:10:35 Absolutely.
01:10:36 It’s called the CoinJoin, for example.
01:10:38 But right now it’s more expensive to CoinJoin in Bitcoin.
01:10:40 You have to pay a premium for your privacy.
01:10:42 This would flip that on its head and would basically say, if you have one transaction,
01:10:45 hey, pile them all in, have as many parties as you want.
01:10:48 The more parties you get in, the cheaper it’s going to be per party.
01:10:52 And that’s not possible in Bitcoin today, but it might be in the future.
01:10:55 But again, the beauty in Bitcoin are these ways that it just aligns human incentives
01:11:00 and it aligns our most base desires and needs and realities with freedom and privacy.
01:11:08 That I’ve never seen before.
01:11:09 And that’s why I think it’s so interesting.
01:11:12 So somebody like Eric Weinstein actually spoke to this, the idea of blockchain in general.
01:11:21 From a 10,000 foot view, the blockchain is a centralized place to keep the record of
01:11:27 everything that ever happened and does that concern you from a privacy perspective, from
01:11:34 a control perspective, even though it’s managed, especially given the low frequency of transaction
01:11:41 for Bitcoin, you can have a lot of small computers across the globe contain the entirety set
01:11:48 of transactions, all of those kinds of features.
01:11:52 Does that concern you that there’s one place where everything is made public in terms of
01:11:57 everything that ever happened?
01:11:59 No.
01:12:00 And I’ll give you two reasons.
01:12:02 Number one, the Bitcoin blockchain is ultimately a settlement layer.
01:12:07 It’s kind of like something like Fedwire in the United States.
01:12:10 It’s a way for like institutions to settle with each other.
01:12:14 That’s what I think it’s going to be like in 20, 30 years from now.
01:12:17 The average person is never going to touch the Bitcoin blockchain probably.
01:12:20 They’re going to use things like lightning or unfortunately, they may use Bitcoin banks,
01:12:24 but they’ll either use custodians or they’ll use second layer noncustodial solutions to
01:12:29 interact.
01:12:30 The main chain is going to get very expensive.
01:12:32 It’s going to be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars or even more if the dollar
01:12:35 starts to weaken to make a transaction on the main chain.
01:12:39 And that will be reserved for like very large transactions or transactions that need final
01:12:44 final settlement, et cetera, et cetera.
01:12:48 And I think that that’s fine and that’s okay.
01:12:53 And it’s very important that that ledger, that settlement layer be kept by thousands
01:12:59 of people around the world.
01:13:01 The Bitcoin blockchain is not centralized.
01:13:03 It is decentralized.
01:13:04 It is run by people like me who run a node at home.
01:13:06 I run a personal server.
01:13:08 I run the Bitcoin blockchain, no one else.
01:13:10 You run it.
01:13:11 That person runs it.
01:13:12 There’s no one in charge.
01:13:13 Well, you have a full node?
01:13:14 Yeah.
01:13:15 I run a full node.
01:13:16 It’s great.
01:13:17 That’s great, man.
01:13:18 You run it and that way you can be sovereign over all of your usage, right?
01:13:22 And you can run it on a Raspberry Pi with less than 150 bucks of equipment.
01:13:26 And that’s so important because again, there is no Amazon web service vulnerability here.
01:13:30 That is a problem.
01:13:31 And I agree with you.
01:13:32 We’re trending in a bad direction.
01:13:33 We’re like, the government could just turn off a big important website or a news source.
01:13:37 Well, they can’t turn off Bitcoin because it doesn’t live on AWS, it lives with us.
01:13:41 We are Bitcoin.
01:13:42 And I think that that’s very, very powerful.
01:13:45 And then you can have something like a lightning network where you can escape some of the constraints
01:13:51 of the blockchain, depending on your needs of the privacy and all those kinds of things.
01:13:56 Everything’s an engineering trade off, but yeah, you can trade off some of the assurances
01:13:59 of the base layer to go into lightning, for example, and there you can get more speed
01:14:03 and more privacy.
01:14:04 And the things that Bitcoin lacks, speed and privacy, for example, you can get on these
01:14:09 second layers.
01:14:10 So there’s all kinds of cool engineering things that people are coming up with.
01:14:14 But I also want to say anyone who says the blockchain, like that’s a red flag for that
01:14:19 person doesn’t really know what they’re talking about.
01:14:21 Like Satoshi didn’t use the blockchain in the white paper.
01:14:25 Blockchain was a marketing term that people came up with later to try and do this thing
01:14:30 that was kind of like it peaked in 2015 and it continues to be an issue today of it’s
01:14:35 blockchain not Bitcoin.
01:14:37 And that was like a very corporate kind of social attack on Bitcoin to say we could take
01:14:43 this ledger part of this radical thing that’s for criminals and all these bad people, but
01:14:47 we could take one part of it out and we could bring it over here and we could make it safe
01:14:51 for everybody.
01:14:52 The real McCoy’s Bitcoin, I mean, Satoshi referred to it as the time chain.
01:14:57 I mean, really what they’re talking about is just these blocks that are connected chronologically
01:15:00 of transactions.
01:15:01 It’s really not that exciting.
01:15:03 The exciting part of Bitcoin is the proof of work where the transaction processing is
01:15:08 done by mining and by energy and by real world expenditures instead of like, you know, some
01:15:13 central ledger.
01:15:15 And you know, when you remove the blockchain from Bitcoin, it’s not very, to me, it’s just
01:15:21 not that interesting.
01:15:22 I don’t know, to me, blockchain or time chain, whatever, as it philosophically is a pretty
01:15:26 beautiful idea.
01:15:27 I mean, it’s pretty simple, but it’s nevertheless as beautiful from a big database person.
01:15:33 It’s an interesting way to store information that, especially that’s totally publicly accessible.
01:15:39 It’s I know that to Bitcoin proof of work is the fundamental idea, but to cryptocurrency
01:15:47 and digital money in general and to money, the blockchain is a really interesting idea
01:15:51 to me.
01:15:52 The way I think about it is it’s kind of, you know, physics.
01:15:55 And I like that there’s a place that you can rely on that’s very difficult to mess with.
01:16:00 What it’s not though, like it’s outside of maybe Ethereum.
01:16:04 Every other blockchain is easy to mess with.
01:16:06 So you’re saying that proof of work is what makes it hard to mess with.
01:16:10 Absolutely.
01:16:11 Proof of work is the key.
01:16:12 Right.
01:16:13 And Ethereum is about to leave proof of work.
01:16:14 So it’s about to go to proof of stake, which is literally the existing system where a small
01:16:19 group of people get to decide the monetary policy.
01:16:21 Yeah.
01:16:22 Reputation has a lot of value there and that you could be, it could be manipulated.
01:16:25 I may sound brutal, but I’m coming at it from a political science perspective.
01:16:29 For me, it’s all about freedom versus dictatorship.
01:16:31 And that’s why I find it so compelling that regardless of how much power or might or how
01:16:37 many armies you have, you can’t change the rules of Bitcoin.
01:16:41 If you’re wrong about Bitcoin, what would that look like?
01:16:45 What kind of thing that in 10, 20 years that you, you’re not wrong.
01:16:52 Right.
01:16:53 It doesn’t pan out.
01:16:54 It doesn’t pan out, but other things that actually make you feel good about all the
01:16:58 hard work you’ve done do pan out, something you haven’t expected.
01:17:03 What might that be?
01:17:04 Well, as we’ve talked about, my career started in human rights and in promoting individual
01:17:08 freedom and fighting authoritarianism.
01:17:10 That fight will continue on no matter what happens with Bitcoin.
01:17:15 I think it would be a massive failure and a tragedy if this project like didn’t work.
01:17:20 The Bitcoin project.
01:17:21 Yes.
01:17:22 If the Bitcoin project didn’t work, we would, it would, honestly, it’s one of the only
01:17:24 things that gives me hope because it is an effective way to push back against the creeping
01:17:29 centralized control.
01:17:31 If for whatever reason, and I can’t really see, one of the reasons I’m so into it is
01:17:35 I can’t really see how it’s not going to work.
01:17:37 Again, I think the Trojan horse allegory is too powerful.
01:17:41 These big centralized actors are going to be too greedy and they’re going to want some
01:17:45 as opposed to banning it.
01:17:46 It’s way easier for them to buy it than to ban it.
01:17:47 I think that’s just what’s going to happen.
01:17:49 But if, but if whatever, for whatever reason it failed, I would have very little hope left
01:17:52 because really, I mean, the Chinese model of like centralizing all of your data and
01:17:57 controlling it, I mean, ultimately is, is a very, very powerful sort of like arch force.
01:18:03 And I would be concerned that that would be all of our, of our sort of destiny.
01:18:09 I do have to sort of push back at a style of communication and you, you’re not doing
01:18:12 it today.
01:18:13 You’re doing, you’re being exceptionally eloquent and arguing these ideas.
01:18:17 But me, especially just from studying history and being very skeptical from growing up in
01:18:23 the Soviet Union, I’m very skeptical and cautious when I see a community of people being very
01:18:31 sure of an idea.
01:18:34 Doesn’t matter what that idea is.
01:18:36 And there’s a huge amount of certainty around Bitcoin.
01:18:40 Part of it is an important feature because you, it’s number go up.
01:18:43 So far.
01:18:45 Number go up is a really important part of the mechanism to make sure that it, it grows
01:18:53 in impact, network effects, because I mean, it’s really important to get excited about
01:18:57 idea for take hold, that’s the way human nature works and so on.
01:19:01 But I also get, even something that you mentioned that, you know, others may not, you know,
01:19:10 if you mentioned blockchain, you’re sensitive to the attacks that have been, that have been
01:19:15 mounted or the word blockchain have been used.
01:19:18 People have been fooled.
01:19:19 I mean, like people in the humanitarian sector have been fooled into thinking that some centralized
01:19:23 blockchain project is going to help some refugee all collapsed.
01:19:27 There’s a huge, it makes me sad that there’s a huge number of scams.
01:19:31 Like you know what makes me really sad and just a tiny little tangent.
01:19:35 There’s been recently, I guess with the growing platform or something, there’s been a bunch
01:19:39 of fake Lex Friedman accounts.
01:19:42 Yeah.
01:19:43 And have a million, but not only do they do stupid stuff, but they’ve been messaging people
01:19:49 like on LinkedIn and people write to me and they’re saying like, I think it gets people.
01:19:57 I think they click on stuff.
01:19:59 I think they were not sure.
01:20:01 And it makes me think like, people are gullible or not gullible, but like, they’re just like
01:20:10 I am, which is they’re like hopeful about the world.
01:20:12 They’re optimistic about the world, naive about the evil that’s out there.
01:20:16 This is what goes wrong with Bitcoin.
01:20:17 And I’ve seen it.
01:20:19 People fall for these like, I mean, like in these different countries, I’m trying to like
01:20:22 talk to different people about Bitcoin and like the amount of like MLM schemes, pyramid
01:20:27 schemes, Ponzi schemes, there are just so many of them.
01:20:31 And there’s plenty here too.
01:20:32 But like in Zimbabwe, I was talking to this guy who is a reporter who studies the effects
01:20:37 like the foreign currency exchange markets.
01:20:40 He’s just saying one of the main reasons people don’t want to get into Bitcoin is because
01:20:43 they’ve been scammed so hard by all these other things.
01:20:45 So I would say that that’s one way it could go wrong is that like people just continue
01:20:49 to be like afraid of it because of things that are like that in the past.
01:20:54 So that not, it’s not just the volatility, it’s just the, you know, yeah, having like
01:20:59 If you think it’s a pyramid scheme, you’re not going to want to get involved.
01:21:02 And in some sense, if I were to speak to the Bitcoin Maximus community is to maybe ease
01:21:09 up on the certainty because that gives me the signal that it’s a scam, to be honest.
01:21:14 So whenever somebody, whenever there’s a lot of people being cultishly excited about something,
01:21:23 I start being very skeptical.
01:21:24 It’s like, you know, I used to like Green Day before they became really popular.
01:21:29 And then the moment they became really popular, I’m like, I don’t know, he started wearing
01:21:32 mascara and I was like, I don’t like him anymore.
01:21:35 So I’m very skeptical about evangelists of an idea because I think Bitcoin on its own
01:21:41 is just a powerful idea that stands.
01:21:44 But I also understand that in a world of a lot of competing ideas where there’s a lot
01:21:49 of scams and a lot of money to be made through those scams that you have to be, that you
01:21:54 have to be innovative in the kind of mechanisms you use to break through the scam, the ocean
01:21:59 of scams.
01:22:00 I took this personality test and I’m a 99 skepticism.
01:22:05 So I was first, sadly, cause I was first introduced to Bitcoin in 2013 and I was like, ah, whatever.
01:22:12 And it took me four years to actually get into it, to go down the rabbit hole.
01:22:16 I didn’t really start to grasp it and start getting excited about it until 2017.
01:22:20 So I was regrettably very, very skeptical for a long time.
01:22:25 And I just thought it was like, whatever.
01:22:26 So I appreciate that.
01:22:28 And you should be skeptical.
01:22:30 But ultimately you got to believe in things like I believe in democracy, I believe it’s
01:22:34 good for people.
01:22:35 I believe it’s better than tyranny.
01:22:36 I believe in the internet.
01:22:37 I know that we’ve had issues with centralization of the internet, but I still believe it’s
01:22:41 better to be connected than to have bridges between us.
01:22:44 And I believe in Bitcoin.
01:22:45 And to me, it’s like a very similar progressive force that we’re encountering.
01:22:52 But yeah, be skeptical, nothing will befall you.
01:22:57 That’s bad if you’re like cautious and skeptical.
01:22:59 That’s like a good mentality to have.
01:23:03 One thing we haven’t talked about all the violations of the human rights that authoritarian
01:23:09 regimes do.
01:23:12 There’s a, not a positive, but there is a, you mentioned that nationalism is a drug.
01:23:20 There’s something beautiful about loving your country, having pride in your country, loving
01:23:26 the, there’s a feeling of belonging.
01:23:30 It could be country, it could be tribe, it could be family.
01:23:33 That’s really powerful.
01:23:35 And that speaks to human nature as well.
01:23:37 And that can sometimes overpower everything else.
01:23:40 Patriotism, and you know, sometimes it can be seen when you study history, when you look
01:23:47 at Stalinist, the Soviet Union, or you can even look at Hitler and Nazi Germany, we tend
01:23:55 to paint patriotism in a negative light.
01:23:58 And then maybe when we look at the United States, but even here in the United States,
01:24:02 people often paint patriotism in a bad light, you know, every time I say I love America,
01:24:08 also as an immigrant, I love this country.
01:24:12 It’s funny how that’s taken as a political statement that, you know, people, I guess
01:24:19 on the right has been, have been more active in saying that they love the country and people
01:24:23 on the left have not sort of, it’s almost become a weird slogan as opposed to a statement
01:24:30 of just love.
01:24:31 And I understand that patriotism can be a slippery slope into letting your government,
01:24:36 I mean, it’s exactly what you’re saying, the value of freedom of speech is you hold your
01:24:41 government to account for all the ways they mess up.
01:24:44 I mean, look, you have patriotism and then you have jingoism, right?
01:24:47 It’s very important that we stay on the patriotic side.
01:24:49 Like as an American, I’m very patriotic in terms of, I love the values that this country
01:24:54 was founded on if you read the Bill of Rights.
01:24:56 And I love the fact that it was just flexible enough that we were able to change it to grant,
01:25:00 or at least to try to grant all people the same rights.
01:25:03 It was not the original plan of the founders, right?
01:25:05 It had to be changed.
01:25:06 But since then we’ve remained, those laws have remained and they’re very good.
01:25:15 And I’m very proud of that.
01:25:16 What I’m not proud of is the jingoistic part of our country where we invade other countries
01:25:20 and bomb other countries.
01:25:21 I’m not proud of our prison system.
01:25:23 I think it’s a huge stain on our nation.
01:25:25 I’m not proud of a lot of things.
01:25:26 So I think you can be patriotic, but you can be critical of your country.
01:25:31 And that’s important, I feel like the jingoistic thing is the thing that we need to watch out
01:25:35 for.
01:25:37 That’s just my own personal take.
01:25:40 Out of all the projects that the Human Rights Foundation works on, what’s the most important
01:25:44 one to you right now?
01:25:45 Like what that’s been occupying your mind?
01:25:47 Yeah, I just read again this New Yorker piece that just came out that you should read.
01:25:51 It’s called Ghost Walls.
01:25:54 And it’s the story of how the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide right now, just
01:25:59 like other regimes did and the Turks did to the Armenians and the Nazis did to the Jews.
01:26:04 And it’s happening again right now.
01:26:06 We said never again, and you know, that’s just not true.
01:26:08 We’re letting it happen.
01:26:09 And again, with the business stuff, like Airbnb is like a sponsor of the Olympics, like what?
01:26:16 At the individual level, at a business level, how does somebody like me, who’s just one
01:26:20 little ant, how does somebody like Elon Musk, who is in charge of 10,000 ants, fight it?
01:26:29 How do we push back?
01:26:31 A great blueprint is the fight against the South African apartheid.
01:26:36 So we did a few events down in Johannesburg, and I’ve had the pleasure of being able to
01:26:41 go to the apartheid museum several times.
01:26:43 And it really does a good job of chronicling how they were able to do it.
01:26:46 It took a while, there’s no doubt, but the way it was done was good.
01:26:50 Peaceful action from abroad was very important.
01:26:54 So there was like the Sullivan principles.
01:26:55 So like you can peacefully protest as a company, particular regimes, and it’s very effective.
01:27:03 And not just corporations, but like the Olympics is a great example.
01:27:08 Like Chinese government should not be able to host the Olympics.
01:27:10 The IOC should say no, not until you close down those prison camps.
01:27:14 This is a perfect, peaceful way to push back.
01:27:16 No one gets hurt.
01:27:17 Same thing when we had the Korean Olympics a few years ago, North Korea should not have
01:27:21 been allowed any sort of symbolistic kind of hosting rights there.
01:27:24 They have prison camps, gulags that we can see from outer space very clearly.
01:27:29 And their regime is the cruelest one on the planet probably.
01:27:32 Why were they able to sit and cheer and get to sort of cohost the Olympics?
01:27:37 This is spineless.
01:27:38 Like the IOC, the Olympics, and major corporations should stand up, especially in the cultural
01:27:44 sector where you don’t lose anything, or you shouldn’t have to lose anything.
01:27:49 So I think if we look at the way that we forced the apartheid regime out, this international
01:27:55 solidarity of musicians, athletes, performers, celebrities is very, very powerful.
01:27:59 Unfortunately, today’s celebrities are doing the opposite.
01:28:02 We just had this press release go out yesterday about ACON, and he’s off whitewashing the
01:28:08 crimes of the dictator of Uganda and trying to build a future city there with him.
01:28:13 If this was the 1980s, ACON would be raising his fist and saying, we need to fight the
01:28:19 apartheid regime.
01:28:20 How do we get back to that?
01:28:21 We need to think about that.
01:28:22 We have to figure out how to harness celebrities, influencers, and companies and get them to
01:28:27 actually stand up for something for once.
01:28:29 I mean, that’s something we’ve lost.
01:28:31 We’ve really had a spine against that, and we’ve lost it.
01:28:37 And you lose things.
01:28:38 You lose them forever.
01:28:39 Look at Tibet.
01:28:40 Tibet was a big cause for people in the 90s.
01:28:42 You used to go to colleges and kids would have the Tibetan flags all over the dorm rooms.
01:28:47 Go ahead, we’d have Tibet on the stage, and everybody wanted to, you know, free Tibet
01:28:51 was a big thing.
01:28:52 Well, guess what?
01:28:53 Like, we lost it for some reason.
01:28:55 It’s not a thing anymore, and Tibet has been totally colonized, you know?
01:28:58 So I think it’s important that we find a way to unlock an interest in the celebrity classes
01:29:05 among athletes, singers, presidents.
01:29:08 You know, we need to find a way to punish these people.
01:29:10 Yeah, it’s surprising because we’ve become more and more connected so we can communicate
01:29:16 more effectively at a large scale, and yet we seem to be worse and worse at real activism.
01:29:22 It seems like the outrage that’s overtaken the communication channels has been very US
01:29:27 focused and often more about outrage and less about productive activism.
01:29:34 I’m very jaded.
01:29:35 I mean, it’s very difficult to do these things at scale effectively.
01:29:38 I do not believe we will be successful in boycotting the Chinese Olympics.
01:29:43 We weren’t in 2008.
01:29:44 I don’t think, and they’re much more evil now, and I don’t think we’re going to be able
01:29:47 to do it this time.
01:29:49 And again, to go back to the Bitcoin piece, that’s why I’m like very interested in this
01:29:53 thing because it doesn’t require my altruism.
01:29:55 It doesn’t require some famous singer or some corporation to sacrifice anything.
01:30:00 They’re literally just going to follow their own profits, seeking self interested motives,
01:30:04 and they’re going to end up making a stronger human rights tool for other people.
01:30:08 Freedom go up.
01:30:09 FGU, man.
01:30:10 Do you think we’re, it’s kind of a dark question, but do you think we’re headed towards a war
01:30:17 with China, the United States versus China?
01:30:20 I hope not.
01:30:21 I hope not.
01:30:22 In the cyberspace and potentially even a hot war.
01:30:25 I think there’s too many people with too much money to be lost to go to a hot war on both
01:30:30 sides, but eventually we’re just going to, someone’s going to have to stand up.
01:30:34 I mean, the subjugation of Hong Kong and the genocide of the Uyghurs and the colonization
01:30:38 of Tibet.
01:30:39 I mean, Taiwan is the next big thing.
01:30:40 I mean, Xi Jinping has made it very clear, you know, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan.
01:30:46 So we’re going to have to stand up for Taiwan for different reasons, both for moral reasons,
01:30:50 but also for semiconductor reasons.
01:30:52 We need TSMC to be on our side, not have China take over TSMC.
01:30:57 So there’s different reasons why we’re going to have to protect Taiwan.
01:31:01 And you just hope it’s not a hot war.
01:31:02 I mean, at this point, well, but also from inside the governments of China and Russia
01:31:07 as well, but China I guess is the powerhouse here, is how do these governments get reformed?
01:31:13 Is there a hope for them to become democracies, like true democracies, representative democracies
01:31:18 and sort of reform them to be ethical players on the world stage?
01:31:26 No empire lasts forever.
01:31:28 And it’s impossible to predict when these regimes fall.
01:31:31 I mean, no one thought the Soviet Union was going to fall when it fell.
01:31:34 Like that, like if you study like the news and the scholarship of the era, no one knew
01:31:39 that the Tunisian government was going to fall after Mohammed Bouazizi lit himself on
01:31:43 fire.
01:31:44 No one predicted that that would become what we now know as the Arab Spring, right?
01:31:49 These things are impossible to predict.
01:31:52 And one day the Chinese regime will fall.
01:31:54 I just, we don’t know when.
01:31:56 Yes.
01:31:57 You know, but, and there’s quite a few folks who talk about the fall of the American empire.
01:32:02 And it also concerns me that we don’t know when that might fall.
01:32:06 You assume me as a very excited, naive American, I’m very excited by this project that I think
01:32:12 is the beacon of hope in the world still, but that’s probably how you feel before it’s
01:32:22 the end.
01:32:23 Yeah, the party, you want to leave the party before it starts to deteriorate.
01:32:28 I think America could continue to have like a major, major leadership role for a long,
01:32:33 long time.
01:32:34 I think certain things we do will become maybe no longer possible in terms of the way we
01:32:38 intimidate people on the world stage and especially the way we use our currency as a weapon.
01:32:43 I think that that’s going to decline over time as we become more of a multipolar world.
01:32:48 But I do still believe in America and the values that were founded on despite all the
01:32:53 warts.
01:32:54 I believe in us and I would prefer us absolutely to be the most prominent of the multipolar
01:32:59 world vis a vis a regime like Russia or China.
01:33:02 Absolutely.
01:33:03 There’s no question.
01:33:04 So we’ve been talking about states and nations, but can we just briefly talk about Facebook
01:33:08 and Twitter and companies that have a huge impact on the world as well.
01:33:11 And actually one of the things that make America a great nation is it is the place from which
01:33:16 these great companies have sprung up.
01:33:18 Is there, from a human rights perspective, is there something that bothers you about
01:33:24 Facebook about these large companies?
01:33:27 Is there something we need to fix?
01:33:29 Something we need to be upset about, fight back on, reform, do some sort of real activism
01:33:38 about?
01:33:39 I’m very concerned about social media platforms and companies.
01:33:43 It almost feels like we’re losing the golden age of the internet.
01:33:46 You know, we could like go online and interact with each other and share and not be worried
01:33:51 about censorship.
01:33:52 It feels like that was a golden age, like in the late nineties, the two thousands, and
01:33:57 now everything is becoming very politicized.
01:33:59 And I’m not sure that there’s a solution.
01:34:02 Like I don’t think there’s a button we can press to fix it.
01:34:05 I’m kind of afraid that this is sort of just what happens when societies digitize.
01:34:12 Like I think that certain opinions just become demonized in the room and then the social
01:34:23 room that we have on the internet.
01:34:25 And I don’t know if there’s a magical solution there.
01:34:28 I do know that there’s technological solutions that will allow us to continue to communicate
01:34:35 and for creators to reach their audiences without censorship.
01:34:40 And that’s very exciting.
01:34:41 Like right now you could be deplatformed from your, you know, from like whether it’s Patreon
01:34:48 or YouTube or whatever, and your bank account can be closed down, right?
01:34:52 There are emerging ways that Adam Curry, like the Podfather and a bunch of other people
01:34:57 are experimenting with, where you can essentially have your audio podcast across a whole bunch
01:35:02 of different, you know, platforms.
01:35:04 So you know, it’s censorship resistant, and then your audience can pay you over lightning
01:35:10 in streaming money.
01:35:11 Like they can stream you money as they listen.
01:35:13 So you’re removing the whole advertising piece.
01:35:16 You don’t need to do advertising anymore.
01:35:18 You have this direct relationship with your audience.
01:35:25 And this is possible with something like lightning where you can do streaming money that’s censorship
01:35:28 resistant.
01:35:30 And a lot of the people who are building a lightning network, for example, Elizabeth
01:35:34 Stark who, you know, started Lightning Labs and has done within her company that people
01:35:41 that work with her have built a huge part of the lightning infrastructure, you know,
01:35:45 what animates her is this idea of like, again, artists and creators being able to have that
01:35:51 direct ability to reach out and have that peer to peer relationship with their audience.
01:35:57 And I’m excited for that.
01:35:59 And I do think that’s coming, but I am very worried that the golden age of like centralized
01:36:05 social media platforms is kind of behind us.
01:36:08 And I’m not sure how to fix that.
01:36:10 I don’t know if that’s like a fixable problem.
01:36:11 Interesting.
01:36:12 I have a hope that it’s a fixable problem.
01:36:15 I think it’s fixable because there’s demand for it to be fixed.
01:36:19 That’s the way I think about it.
01:36:20 Well, is Twitter that bad right now?
01:36:22 Like, I mean, it’s fixable in as much as you can do a verification.
01:36:25 So you can give a blue check to someone and then that person is like more credible and
01:36:30 they go to the top of the comments and there’s like tweaks you can do.
01:36:33 You can continue to improve it, but it’s not going to fix the fact that like Twitter can
01:36:37 decide to kick off the president.
01:36:39 And like a lot of people are going to be upset by that, you know, like there’s ways you can
01:36:42 improve the UX over time and they continue to do so.
01:36:46 Like Clubhouse is a lot of fun, great phenomenon.
01:36:50 So is Twitter spaces.
01:36:52 So they continue to iterate, but the censorship deplatforming piece, I’m not sure it’s fixable
01:36:57 because if you, I mean, you watch the US government haul these people, haul Zuckerberg and Dorsey
01:37:03 and whatever in front of Congress, they want more censorship.
01:37:07 I mean, our elected leaders want more censorship, right?
01:37:11 See, I just believe censorship is a really harsh word.
01:37:16 I believe it’s possible to create technologies where it’s not Twitter doing the censorship,
01:37:21 but it’s individuals doing their own selection of what they want and don’t want to see.
01:37:26 So for example, if you get sick and tired of Donald Trump and whatever he says, or you
01:37:31 love Donald Trump, you get to select yourself.
01:37:35 Like you get to have more control over what you consume.
01:37:39 Twitter tries to do that a little bit, but they obviously fail where ideas infiltrate
01:37:46 our view that misinformation spreads really fast and conspiracy theories spread really
01:37:54 fast to where the immune system that Twitter has created to try to censor conspiracy theories
01:38:00 and misinformation is over firing and you’re now censoring too many people.
01:38:08 So it’s exactly the same intuition as you said before.
01:38:11 If the state is doing it, in this case, Twitter is kind of the state that’s not going to work
01:38:17 out well.
01:38:18 But if you give power to the individuals to do this sort of the, not even censorship,
01:38:24 but incentivization and deaccentivization of great thoughtful content and terrible low
01:38:33 effort content, then I feel like that’s going to create a system where there’s going to
01:38:39 be a much more open discourse of ideas, dangerous ideas, difficult ideas, controversial ideas,
01:38:45 and people in a decentralized way will be able to use their own intelligence to select
01:38:50 content to share content, spread content.
01:38:53 Let’s keep it simple.
01:38:55 Let’s look at one example, Twitter and Jack Dorsey.
01:38:58 And I think it’s quite clear that what he believes is the solution is as you’re kind
01:39:03 of hinting at a more kind of like regionalized system, which is not have one we call federated
01:39:12 system, right?
01:39:13 Which does not just have like one company in charge of everything, but there’s an open
01:39:15 protocol and then there’s like different instances, right?
01:39:18 So Twitter may, you know, Jack’s dream for Twitter is that Twitter is this open protocol
01:39:24 that the Russian government can use and the Chinese government can use and the Iranian
01:39:27 government can use and the American government can use and then Twitter as a company is going
01:39:30 to use too.
01:39:31 And you as the customer decide which implementation you want to join and there’s going to be different
01:39:35 censorship on each instance or each federation, but the protocol itself would be like untouchable.
01:39:43 This is kind of like the idea behind the internet, right?
01:39:46 There’s like different parts of the internet that are censored, but like at the very bottom
01:39:50 of the very bottom of the backbone of it, it’s like this globally connected relatively
01:39:56 unstoppable thing, right?
01:39:58 So I think that’s a pretty good vision and Twitter is working towards that with the blue
01:40:02 sky initiative.
01:40:03 We’ll see.
01:40:04 I’m a little skeptical that it like works out because I’ve used Mastodon, for example.
01:40:08 Mastodon is an example of a federated social media.
01:40:13 Now it’s ruled by a benevolent.
01:40:15 Each instance is ruled by a benevolent dictator.
01:40:17 It’s just like I happen to like this one, so I know.
01:40:20 So rather than trust one dictator, Twitter, you could choose which dictator you want to
01:40:26 trust and that’s kind of the federated model and maybe we head that way, but you lose things.
01:40:31 When it’s federated, you lose the UX, you lose the slickness and the feel and all the
01:40:36 millions of dollars they spend on developers.
01:40:38 Like Mastodon is like not anywhere close to as nice to use as Twitter.
01:40:43 So I feel like it’s, again, it’s this trade off that we make with everything where it’s
01:40:46 convenience, comfort, speed versus privacy and freedom, right?
01:40:50 It’s very hard to have something that gives you both.
01:40:52 I don’t know.
01:40:53 I think, I think, uh, yeah, it is a trade off.
01:40:55 Have you used one of these things that I feel like is good?
01:40:57 The federated, they’re not, they’re not, they’re not, but the federated, I don’t think it’s,
01:41:01 it’s a good, I think, uh, it requires genius, it requires skill, it requires great design
01:41:06 to come up with a way to, you know, there’s a Pareto front here, there’s a right way to
01:41:14 hit that trade off.
01:41:16 And I honestly think there’s the UX, the experience should be centralized, should be designed
01:41:24 by the company, but the data and like a lot of stuff that could be used to violate your
01:41:31 basic rights should be owned by the individual.
01:41:34 And I think there’s a way to decouple those, like create an incredible experience to where
01:41:40 you go there and you enjoy the market where you can share your data and have complete
01:41:46 control over it and always have, I mean, there’s a lot of basic UX ideas, like just as an example,
01:41:53 I think there should always be in everything you design, a one button that’s always there
01:42:00 that says, forget I ever existed, delete everything you know about me.
01:42:06 And maybe it’s, maybe it’s one button that you click and it asks, are you sure?
01:42:11 And you have to be able to say yes.
01:42:13 Like that’s a feature that’s fundamental to a good social network, I believe.
01:42:17 Like currently social networks, first of all, most of them don’t allow you to do that.
01:42:23 They don’t make it transparent how much data they had, who they shared it with.
01:42:27 And they also make it exceptionally difficult to delete accounts.
01:42:30 So like that’s a very basic starting point, but that having that button means that you
01:42:37 have control, but that’s step one of the control.
01:42:39 There’s a transparency of knowing exactly when, what data is being shared about you,
01:42:45 how much data is already being recorded about you, all that is transparency.
01:42:50 And I believe in the, I believe that’s a really good business model, because when there’s
01:42:54 transparency and control, people would be willing to give over a lot more data as long
01:42:59 as they know what they’re given over, as long as they know what they can delete.
01:43:03 Yeah.
01:43:04 I guess maybe you’re more optimistic about people caring about, I feel like not so few
01:43:10 people actually care about their privacy and freedom.
01:43:12 I’ve just watched everybody give it up, you know, but we’ll see, I guess just to book
01:43:17 in that I think we’re at this moment where obviously the centralized platforms are just
01:43:21 so much easier and better to use and to strike it out and, you know, adventure out and use
01:43:27 a like a federated instance or something even like Keybase, which is kind of like a cool
01:43:32 encrypted way to like have group chats.
01:43:35 It just requires like a lot of your time and a lot of people don’t have that time.
01:43:39 But I will say one thing, like I do think there is this future where we do go into more
01:43:44 of this like, it’s called a tribal model or like tribes, which is this social environment
01:43:51 being built on top of lightning by an app called Sphinx.
01:43:57 And the idea is like kind of like it’s like a decentralized Slack, like you have your
01:44:00 Slack instance, which has like a bunch of people in the community and you have different
01:44:04 ways to message each other and it’s all encrypted.
01:44:07 And then it has like plugins for like things like Jitsi instead of Zoom.
01:44:11 So like an open source encrypted video messenger.
01:44:14 It has ways to like plug in the content you want to get from like different platforms
01:44:20 that you follow, like podcasts, things like that.
01:44:23 And again, it allows you to pay those people directly in a censorship resistant private
01:44:27 way.
01:44:28 So it’s really nice to connect to the lightning network.
01:44:29 Yeah.
01:44:30 So it’s all sort of built on lightning, but the idea you can think about it as like you’re
01:44:33 slowly starting to build up the idea of a WeChat, but with freedom principles.
01:44:38 Because right now, WeChat’s like the king of convenience and comfort, but of course
01:44:41 it’s feeding all that data to the big brother and the surveillance state.
01:44:45 And then we have like our own versions over here in America that are not quite as convenient
01:44:49 or amazing, but like we give up slightly less privacy and freedom.
01:44:53 But this thing has a lot of promising features to it.
01:44:55 It’s worth checking out.
01:44:56 It’s very like early days.
01:44:58 Like it feels like, I mean, I was pretty young, but it feels like the nineties in the internet.
01:45:03 Like it has that feeling where you, yeah, you know it’s rough around the edges, but
01:45:07 you can feel the magic.
01:45:09 It’s pretty cool.
01:45:10 I’m very much like with Steve Jobs on this.
01:45:12 I think the founding principles are exceptionally important, but at the end of the day, the
01:45:17 design of how sleek it is, how easy it is to use.
01:45:22 And that’s not just like pretty icing on the cake.
01:45:26 That is the icing is the cake because like how easy it is to use, how natural it is.
01:45:33 It’s the Trojan horse thing.
01:45:34 Like you don’t get, it has to be pretty and shiny and it has to have, it has to fundamentally
01:45:39 connect to the basics of human nature, which is what is pleasant to use, what feels good
01:45:44 to use.
01:45:45 You have to, you know, to trick people into eating the broccoli, you have to put like
01:45:49 a delicious whatever on it.
01:45:51 Well, again, PGP is a kind of a pain to use, right?
01:45:53 For if you want privacy.
01:45:54 Yeah.
01:45:55 So Signal is an upgrade.
01:45:56 Signal is way better.
01:45:57 I mean, and it’s way better than it was five years ago and it’s, it’s not quite as good
01:46:01 as like not quite as seamless, right, as like a WhatsApp yet, but it’s almost there.
01:46:07 And they were able to do it and you’re going to see that with, with Bitcoin wallets as
01:46:12 well.
01:46:13 I mean, they’re, they’re almost there.
01:46:14 They’re like, if you use like a moon wallet is like, I mean, it’s so cool looking and
01:46:18 it’s so seamless and they’ve spent so many hours thinking about your experience.
01:46:22 We are getting there.
01:46:23 Whereas 10 years ago, it was like impossible to use.
01:46:25 One of the things that Signal doesn’t have, and I believe these kinds of applications
01:46:32 need to have is like a, I hate the term, but killer app, which is like a dumb, but very
01:46:39 viral and popular reason to switch it.
01:46:42 I didn’t see exactly, I mean, I’ve been using Signal, but I haven’t seen a you know, a big
01:46:50 reason to, to switch.
01:46:51 Well, you’re on it, man.
01:46:52 To switch.
01:46:53 I mean, the reason.
01:46:54 But I haven’t switched everything to it, you know what I mean?
01:46:56 Like a.
01:46:57 Yeah.
01:46:58 The exodus to Signal was in, in January, they had a huge user surge for two main reasons.
01:47:04 One hilariously enough, of course, was Elon tweeted, like you should use Signal, right?
01:47:09 Which is not insignificant.
01:47:10 And then the other one was that like WhatsApp changed kind of some of its terms of service
01:47:14 and like, you know, announced to all of its users in this little pop up that it was going
01:47:19 to be sort of like changing the way it handled your data.
01:47:21 That spooked a lot of people.
01:47:23 So these two things really combined and tens of millions of people in the following weeks
01:47:28 between January and February joined Signal.
01:47:30 It’s like it really has had its day in the sun and they are like frantically trying to
01:47:35 keep up with it.
01:47:36 Like, and it’s really nice to see that, that, that this encrypted messaging service, which,
01:47:42 which prioritizes your privacy in a way that, you know, you know, the government again may
01:47:48 know like the metadata, but doesn’t know exactly what you’re saying unless they can get your
01:47:51 hands on your phone.
01:47:52 I think that’s very, very powerful.
01:47:54 So it can be done.
01:47:55 I don’t want to be too jaded here.
01:47:57 I think it can be done.
01:47:58 Yeah, I think so.
01:47:59 I think we can fight back and I think we can make, continue to make these digital communications
01:48:03 tools and platforms in a way that, that, that really benefits us.
01:48:08 Yeah.
01:48:09 I’m not, I’m not sure, but I’m hopeful as well.
01:48:14 I’m hopeful that if you look at the trend of technologies, they ultimately are ones
01:48:17 that respect privacy, respect security and basic human rights.
01:48:23 I mean, that’s at least the hope.
01:48:25 So Gary Kasparov, I’m Russian.
01:48:28 He means a lot to me on a personal level.
01:48:31 He is the chairman of a human rights foundation.
01:48:35 What does Gary have to do with anything?
01:48:37 What’s your relationship like with him?
01:48:39 Do you like chess?
01:48:41 What are his specific focuses and ideas around the HRF?
01:48:45 Can you just speak to it in general?
01:48:46 Yeah, so our chairman at the human rights foundation was Václav Havel, who of course
01:48:52 was like the famous Czech democracy activist who, you know, helped lead the Velvet Revolution
01:48:59 and then ended up becoming the first democratically elected leader of the Czech Republic after
01:49:05 the Soviet Union fell.
01:49:08 He passed away in 2011 and it was very difficult to find a replacement because who can fill
01:49:14 Havel’s shoes, you know?
01:49:16 But if one could, it would be Gary, right?
01:49:19 So we like really tried to get Gary to join and thankfully he agreed and we’ve had an
01:49:23 amazing relationship with Gary over the years.
01:49:26 I mean, he’s been relentless in his pursuit of freedom.
01:49:28 I mean, he could have retired and taken his career in a different direction and he could
01:49:32 be hanging out with Putin and have a pleasure yacht and all kinds of stuff, but he decided
01:49:37 to risk it.
01:49:39 And if you actually study like the times when he was running for president in Russia, Amash
01:49:43 Gessen followed him around in The Man Without a Face, it’s a great, great book about Putin.
01:49:48 There’s a fabulous chapter where she’s following around Gary when he’s campaigning and I mean,
01:49:53 he risked a lot.
01:49:54 I mean, he can’t go back to Russia anymore, he gave up his country, he’s given up a huge
01:49:58 amount to be able to speak his mind and to have this dream, this beautiful vision of
01:50:03 a free and democratic Russia, he really believes in it.
01:50:06 It’s been a great experience, I work very closely with Gary, we talk a lot, we do different
01:50:11 things around the world together.
01:50:13 He’s come out to a lot of events in different cities around the world.
01:50:18 And he’s been a very active chairman, this isn’t some figurehead, he’s very involved
01:50:22 and it’s really, really great.
01:50:23 I mean, everything he’s involved with is, as one journalist who attends our events says,
01:50:29 when he walks in the room, the average IQ of the room goes up pretty significantly.
01:50:33 I’m not a big chess person, unfortunately, so I have not been able to connect with him
01:50:37 on that, but I think he probably would prefer it that way.
01:50:40 All he gets is people who want to talk to him about chess.
01:50:43 So here we can talk about human rights strategy and how to improve our fight against dictators.
01:50:51 But he really has that moral clarity that I really appreciate.
01:50:57 Yeah, he has a lot of fascinating ideas about artificial intelligence as well.
01:51:02 Please open my eyes a little bit to the state of Russia today, because I’ve read most books
01:51:11 on Putin in the English language, in sort of trying to understand things.
01:51:18 And I try to look at it from a historical perspective, almost like we’re living a hundred
01:51:23 years from now, and I look at Putin as an important figure in the history of human civilization
01:51:30 and study it in that way.
01:51:33 I think the way Gary looks at it, he probably doesn’t appreciate me looking at the way I
01:51:36 do, but the way he looks at it is we can still change the direction of Russia, and we individual
01:51:47 human beings and we communities and we nations can take actions, have policies that can change
01:51:53 the direction of Russia.
01:51:55 To me, I take a sort of going to the library, passive view of studying fascinating aspects
01:52:01 of Russia.
01:52:02 To me, Russia means like most of my family suffered through the Soviet Union, and I see
01:52:08 beauty in suffering, the poetry, the music, the stories, and just there’s so much love
01:52:14 that emerged from the pain that I just enjoy the music of that.
01:52:18 But to Gary and to many activists that I speak to, to them, they love not just the Russia
01:52:27 of the past.
01:52:28 They have a vision and a hope for Russia of the future.
01:52:33 And they criticize me a little bit for being a little bit too scholarly about the past
01:52:37 and ignoring the future, and there’s something to that.
01:52:40 So he opens my eyes to look to the future of Russia.
01:52:45 Gary and a handful of other Russian activists that we work closely with, including Vladimir
01:52:51 Karamurza, who again, I mean, it’s just incredibly heroic, the man has survived two poisonings
01:52:55 by Putin.
01:52:57 They like to say that, you know, Russians will bring democracy to Russia on their own
01:53:02 terms.
01:53:03 They don’t need our help.
01:53:04 This is what Vladimir especially says.
01:53:07 But what he does say is that we should stop propping up Putin.
01:53:10 Like that’s kind of his, stop kind of legitimizing him.
01:53:13 That’s kind of his argument.
01:53:15 Is like, we don’t need your foreign interference.
01:53:17 We don’t need your ideas.
01:53:18 We don’t, you know, we don’t need your help.
01:53:19 We can do it on our own, but please stop like propping up our, you know, illegitimate ruler.
01:53:24 That’s kind of like his point of view, which I think is interesting and fair.
01:53:29 Yeah.
01:53:30 Let me just say on one unrelated comment, some people criticize me and others like Joe
01:53:38 Rogan for giving people a platform.
01:53:44 I think in some cases that’s applicable, but I think in most cases, knowledge is power
01:53:50 and there’s no such thing as giving a platform.
01:53:54 The conversation just shines a light as long as you shine the light well.
01:53:58 And as long as in shining the light and having the conversation, you reveal something fundamental
01:54:05 about the state of things, about the people, whether that’s Putin or some of the other
01:54:10 controversial figures that have come up in a possible future conversation.
01:54:16 So I don’t like this kind of platforming idea.
01:54:20 I think conversations save us.
01:54:22 They don’t destroy us.
01:54:23 Yeah.
01:54:24 I mean, that’s, that’s journalism though.
01:54:26 I mean, that’s very different from, you know, advocacy or strategic thinking about what
01:54:31 to do with Russia.
01:54:32 Absolutely.
01:54:33 Yeah.
01:54:34 We should interview everybody and everybody should know exactly what they’re thinking.
01:54:37 Yeah.
01:54:38 I think, you know, journalism to me has become a dirty word because, because it’s done so
01:54:43 poorly by so many people that, you know, I listened to sometimes certain programs, like,
01:54:51 I don’t know, like, uh, meet the press and the Fox Sunday program, just certain things
01:54:57 just to tune in and see what different news medias are paying attention to.
01:55:02 And the kind of interviews they do, you know, is like five minutes at most, but usually
01:55:07 it’s like one minute it’s these quick clip things and it’s very gotcha and they’re looking
01:55:13 for ways to sort of grab almost a misstatement.
01:55:17 They want to catch you off guard.
01:55:19 They want to ask the quote, like, like the harsh question, but without any of the, like
01:55:25 the dance of conversation that reveals the truth, you know, you can’t just get to the
01:55:30 truth by asking it.
01:55:33 You have to sneak up on it.
01:55:36 And I think that’s an art form.
01:55:38 And I think that art form involves long form conversation.
01:55:42 Like I’m a huge believer in just, I guess that’s, what’s called, I don’t know, in depth
01:55:46 journal or whatever, like where you spend months or years on a story in that same way.
01:55:52 I think of long form conversation is like you spend many hours and you spend months
01:55:57 and years preparing for those many hours, but like, it’s not this like short form trying
01:56:02 to, trying to get the most controversial little tidbit of a story out.
01:56:07 And unfortunately the funding mechanisms behind journalism are such that they are incentivized
01:56:13 clickbait journalism versus like in depth long form digging for the truth.
01:56:18 I have a conflicted relationship with journalism because to me, press freedom is so core and
01:56:23 independent journalists around the world are so brave, especially in countries like Russia
01:56:27 or China, et cetera.
01:56:29 And really good journalism is still something I absolutely, I love and I enjoy.
01:56:34 Like this, especially like to say again, this New Yorker piece on what’s happening to the
01:56:38 Uyghurs is incredibly well reported.
01:56:40 However, on the other hand, you have this sort of clickbaity journalism that’s all about
01:56:47 sensationalism and that gets used as a tool.
01:56:49 I mean, whether it be against things like privacy or Bitcoin or whatever, you have like
01:56:55 people who sensationalize and it gets used in the service of the surveillance state,
01:57:00 the war on terror or whatever.
01:57:02 You know, it’s difficult, but you know, I think journalism is essential to a free society.
01:57:08 But it can sometimes be, it can wear my patience thin sometimes.
01:57:13 Like it’s been, to be honest, it’s been a huge burden on me personally, if I were to
01:57:17 just turn this into a therapy session for a brief moment.
01:57:20 When I look at people, when I interact with people, I’d like to see the best in them.
01:57:25 And the burden that weighs heavy on me is sometimes people I talk to may not be good
01:57:32 people.
01:57:33 And I don’t, I’d love to, I believe everybody has good in them and I try to focus on that.
01:57:41 The burden that weighs on me is sometimes that there may be conversations where that’s
01:57:47 irresponsible, where I have to also call people out.
01:57:53 I have to do enough of the hard lifting and the hard work of knowing exactly what are
01:57:58 the bad things that that person has done.
01:58:02 And I also have the responsibility to call them out on it.
01:58:05 And that’s for me personally, just an unpleasant feeling.
01:58:08 That’s where speaking to journalism, like I think journalists are too much focused on
01:58:13 the bad things a person has done and not enough on the digging into the full complexity of
01:58:21 the human being behind all the things that have been done.
01:58:25 But at the same time, you know, I can’t have a conversation with Hitler and not ask about
01:58:32 the prison camps.
01:58:33 Yeah.
01:58:34 Yeah.
01:58:35 Yeah.
01:58:36 No.
01:58:37 So from the human rights perspective, one of our programs is we like, we try to go after
01:58:39 people who do like PR for dictators.
01:58:42 So like, like then a lot of people do like PR firms in Washington get hired by all these
01:58:47 dictators and make a lot of money to make them look good.
01:58:51 It’s called whitewashing or putting lipstick on a pig or whatever you want to do.
01:58:54 Astroturfing is like the fake, make like fake social media accounts to make it seem like
01:58:58 you’re popular.
01:58:59 But whitewashing is a huge issue.
01:59:01 So I think it’s completely fair to interview like dictators and stuff like that.
01:59:07 Amanpour does a pretty good job.
01:59:10 She’s really good.
01:59:11 She makes sure that there’s no messing around.
01:59:13 I mean, her interviews of Museveni recently, the Ugandan dictator was very good.
01:59:18 I mean, she’s basically like, well, like, well, why are you rigging another election?
01:59:22 Please tell us, you know, and she’s fearless and she’s good and that can be a helpful thing
01:59:27 to have on YouTube as a resource.
01:59:30 But it’s, it’s, it’s quite clear when, when it descends into a PR session and you just
01:59:35 have to be like very careful about it.
01:59:37 Like Asma al Assad, the wife of the butcher in Syria, you know, was like profiled by Vogue
01:59:43 and it was this whole rose in the desert things, a bunch of nonsense, terrible, terrible, terrible,
01:59:49 total propaganda.
01:59:50 But a like honest interview where you, you know, you’re asking about all the tough questions.
01:59:57 Very important.
01:59:58 You know, so I think, I think it’s just a matter of like content.
02:00:01 Is this, is there a good resource to study whitewashing?
02:00:03 Like to know what manipulative PR looks like?
02:00:07 I think you just, you should know if you’ve researched the topic, you should know it inside
02:00:11 you because it would be, is there anything you’re afraid to ask?
02:00:15 That would be it.
02:00:16 Make sure you’re asking all the questions.
02:00:17 As long as you’re asking all the questions that you have, you’re good.
02:00:21 But if there’s something you’re afraid to ask, then, then maybe you’re self censoring,
02:00:25 right?
02:00:26 That’s a good way.
02:00:27 It’s, it takes us back to that, like what is it that litmus test about is your country
02:00:32 a lot to have a gay pride parade?
02:00:36 So there’s like obvious things that might be on your mind that you just want to ask
02:00:39 and you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t run from them.
02:00:41 As long as you feel like you’re a free person when you’re interviewing, I think you’re good.
02:00:46 That’s beautifully put.
02:00:48 Are there books, technical fiction, philosophical that had an impact on your life that you recommend
02:00:56 or even resources like blogs, films?
02:00:59 I have four books I’ll briefly mention.
02:01:04 Number one is The Fear.
02:01:05 The Fear had a deep impact on me.
02:01:07 The Fear was written by Peter Godwin.
02:01:09 It’s about the systematic dismantling of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.
02:01:14 Peter is Zimbabwean and it is a riveting book.
02:01:17 I think everyone should read it because it helps you understand what it’s like to go
02:01:21 through not just authoritarianism, but also hyperinflation.
02:01:24 And I mean, really, you know, at the end of the day, what The Fear describes is how Mugabe
02:01:28 took this country in the 1980s and he actually brought it back in time to the 1920s in terms
02:01:34 of infrastructure, literacy rates, health rates, all these things.
02:01:38 He stole so much from the people.
02:01:40 And it’s a heartbreaking book, but it’s a very important book.
02:01:44 And it’s a way to do excellent, excellent journalism.
02:01:49 So The Fear is a good one.
02:01:50 And it’s a personal story?
02:01:52 Absolutely.
02:01:53 Yeah.
02:01:54 Because he was, it’s part of his whole family story and he’s in there.
02:01:57 He’s interviewing people personally.
02:02:00 So I would say that one.
02:02:02 Is it also connected, sorry to interrupt, is it, from the inflation perspective, is
02:02:06 it a good study of hyperinflation and the effects?
02:02:10 Does Bitcoin at all come as a discussion of money?
02:02:16 Does that come into the, or is it purely the experience of inflation is almost a symptom
02:02:21 of an authoritarian government?
02:02:22 A little bit, a little bit.
02:02:23 I would say it’s not deep.
02:02:24 I have another book on that, which I’ll recommend in a second, but I would just say that it’s
02:02:29 a very powerfully written book about how society can basically deteriorate and how you can
02:02:37 lose everything.
02:02:39 The second book is, I just mentioned it, but The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen.
02:02:44 Incredible book about modern Russia and Putin.
02:02:46 Just a masterpiece.
02:02:47 So that one is.
02:02:48 Could be one of your favorite books about Putin and Russia.
02:02:50 That one’s the best.
02:02:51 I mean, she’s just so fearless.
02:02:53 Incredible.
02:02:54 She interviews Putin in the book at the end.
02:02:56 It’s really good.
02:02:57 The third one is a fiction book called The Mandibles written by Lionel Shriver.
02:03:04 This one’s good.
02:03:05 It’s a good gift book.
02:03:06 It’s funny.
02:03:07 It’s dark.
02:03:08 It’s witty, but it’s about the United States losing its status as the reserve currency
02:03:12 and going into hyperinflation.
02:03:15 And what’s interesting is that the characters in the book map where we are today.
02:03:19 The book itself is about the late, I think it’s the late 2020s.
02:03:22 And we have a populist president who decides to announce that the United States is like
02:03:27 basically going to default on its debts.
02:03:29 And the rest of the world comes up with like a new currency and everybody switches to that
02:03:33 one and the dollar like overnight becomes worthless.
02:03:36 And all these like economists are saying, no, it’s fine.
02:03:39 Like inflation won’t be a problem.
02:03:41 And there’s this one character who’s an economist who’s like an economist.
02:03:45 And he’s basically he gets to the point where he’s living as a refugee in Prospect Park
02:03:49 in Brooklyn and he’s still saying everything’s fine.
02:03:51 You know, so it’s like it’s dry, it’s witty, but it’s also about the surveillance state.
02:03:57 It’s about centralization of power.
02:03:59 It’s really good.
02:04:00 So The Mandibles, I would highly recommend.
02:04:03 So those three books.
02:04:04 And then on the topic of Bitcoin, because we talked about it a lot, I would just say
02:04:08 that my portal into Bitcoin was The Internet of Money by Andreas Antonopoulos and I did
02:04:14 it by audio book.
02:04:16 And I just think this is an important one for people to start with because he goes through
02:04:21 all the main concepts, whether it be proof of work or how the network functions.
02:04:27 But he does it in a way that’s extremely engaging and really fascinating.
02:04:31 And it really just kind of like sparked my curiosity.
02:04:34 Is it discussing the technical sides or also the philosophical?
02:04:38 Because a lot of people mentioned sort of the Bitcoin standard is the philosophical
02:04:41 entry into the whole Bitcoin world.
02:04:43 Very different from the Bitcoin standard.
02:04:45 It’s more for like the average person.
02:04:47 It’s not a history book.
02:04:49 It’s a collection of his talks that he gave over like two or three years.
02:04:52 It’s not very technical.
02:04:54 It’s very approachable.
02:04:55 And some of it might be dated now because it’s like 2015, 2016.
02:05:00 But I mean, it’s great to hear a shout out for Andreas because he seems to be one of
02:05:05 the seminal figures to sort of make Bitcoin ideas accessible.
02:05:09 Andreas is the goat.
02:05:10 Andreas is the goat.
02:05:11 I know a lot of people will have issues with some of his like more recent work, but Andreas
02:05:17 is the goat.
02:05:18 Yeah.
02:05:19 He’s the reason I’m in Bitcoin.
02:05:20 I mean, he’s the reason I’m in Bitcoin.
02:05:21 Yeah.
02:05:22 That’s fascinating.
02:05:23 And it’s funny to watch the Bitcoin maximalist immune system also attacking him.
02:05:30 And this whole feedback mechanism is working together.
02:05:33 It’s fascinating.
02:05:34 Well, I probably consider myself a maximalist, but I really like Andreas.
02:05:37 So I think there’s room for nuance.
02:05:40 There’s room for nuance in this world.
02:05:42 I’m glad to hear that.
02:05:43 If people are fascinated by your work, what is the way to get more of Alex?
02:05:51 So two years ago, I came together with seven other people from around the world and we
02:05:55 wrote a book in a book sprint.
02:05:57 We lived in a house for four days.
02:05:58 We wrote a book together.
02:05:59 It was really cool.
02:06:00 It was like a design sprint, but we did it in book format.
02:06:03 And my coauthors are from Nigeria, Venezuela, the Philippines, from former Soviet Union,
02:06:09 from all over.
02:06:10 And it’s called The Little Bitcoin Book, and I’m still proud of it.
02:06:14 It’s a hundred pages.
02:06:15 It’s something you give to somebody who knows nothing about the topic.
02:06:18 And it’s not a technical book.
02:06:20 It’s about the sort of social political aspect of it.
02:06:24 Like why is it important for you, for your finances, for your freedom, for your future?
02:06:29 And we’ve translated it into like a lot of languages by now.
02:06:32 I think English, Spanish and Portuguese are for sale and littlebitcoinbook.com, you know,
02:06:37 you go buy it.
02:06:38 We’ve made it as a free PDF in Mandarin, Hindi, Punjab, Korean, Uyghur, which I was really
02:06:46 excited about, Arabic, Farsi.
02:06:49 And I mean, it spreads, man.
02:06:50 It’s been really, really cool.
02:06:51 So I’m proud of that.
02:06:54 I also made a video that did very well for Reason magazine called Why is Bitcoin Protecting
02:07:00 Human Rights Around the World?
02:07:01 It’s five minutes.
02:07:02 And it just, I feel like I tried to boil everything that I want to tell you into this five minute
02:07:08 video.
02:07:09 So there’s that.
02:07:10 I would recommend that.
02:07:11 And then if you’re interested in the why have governments not stopped it, which I think
02:07:17 is really intriguing, I wrote this long essay in Quillette in February called, you know,
02:07:24 why haven’t governments banned Bitcoin?
02:07:26 And maybe that’ll be a helpful guide to some folks.
02:07:28 Is this speaking to the Trojan horse idea that there’s something enticing about it?
02:07:32 Yeah, at the end, it does get into that.
02:07:34 But it really also just kind of goes through technically, why is it hard to do a 51% attack?
02:07:39 Like if a government wanted to, could it really get all that equipment?
02:07:43 There’s a semiconductor shortage, like it can’t.
02:07:45 There’s like certain things that stop governments from doing it.
02:07:49 And same thing with like this idea of a 6102, which would be based on the idea of the executive
02:07:55 order 6102, which is from 1933 when FDR made holding gold illegal in the United States.
02:08:01 The idea is that like banks would go around now with governments and try to like steal
02:08:04 everybody’s Bitcoin.
02:08:05 Well, in Bitcoin we have like a practice called proof of keys day every January 3rd, you know,
02:08:11 which is coinciding with the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain, where we all like withdraw
02:08:15 our keys from exchanges and we’d be sovereign users.
02:08:17 What we are doing is we are preparing for a 6102 attack, which will one day probably
02:08:21 come, right?
02:08:22 So the essay just goes through all of the like possible attacks and it runs through
02:08:27 like the ones that happened, like the Chinese and Indian governments, the two largest governments
02:08:30 in the world, both tried to attack Bitcoin by banning their citizens from exchanging
02:08:35 fiat for Bitcoin.
02:08:36 It didn’t work.
02:08:37 Interest instead exploded.
02:08:38 It’s like the Barbra Streisand effect where, you know, by making something public and saying
02:08:45 you shouldn’t do X, it actually increases attention about X a lot more, right?
02:08:51 So I think there’s a lot of interesting game theory there that people would enjoy.
02:08:54 Do you think, are you seriously concerned about this kind of thing where the idea is
02:09:00 a sovereignty and that Bitcoin espouses would actually one day be tested?
02:09:06 Do you have like a legitimate concern because you said like one day very well might.
02:09:12 Do you think it might go down?
02:09:15 First of all, Bitcoin has been attacked again, many times and we talk about the, you spoke
02:09:21 about this with Nick Carter on your show, the sort of protocol wars or conflict or whatever,
02:09:26 right?
02:09:27 And Bitcoin almost died a whole bunch of times during that and ended up surviving.
02:09:30 Oh wow.
02:09:31 I didn’t, I didn’t know how bad the blocks at that point was.
02:09:32 Oh it got really bad.
02:09:34 It was, it was a sort of a very existential threat and Bitcoin survived and that’s why
02:09:40 I’m so intrigued by it is that it basically survived an attack in an environment several
02:09:47 years ago when Bitcoin was much more vulnerable than it is today.
02:09:51 It survived an attack by a conglomeration of Chinese billionaires, Silicon Valley corporations
02:09:55 and a ton of people who owned the majority of the hash rate and all this infrastructure.
02:10:00 They had 83% of all the hash rate and they couldn’t get what they wanted and that was
02:10:05 so intriguing to me.
02:10:06 Like why didn’t it, why didn’t it get killed?
02:10:08 So as Nick said, I think you should read The Block Size War, which is a book on that you
02:10:13 can get on Amazon by Jonathan Beer.
02:10:15 Really good, kind of like really important to understand the, the, the, the scaling conflict
02:10:21 and the visions over the different visions of what Bitcoin should be.
02:10:24 And you know, again, people like me believe it should be a freedom tool, not like a payments
02:10:27 technology for retail.
02:10:30 And I’m just, I’m glad it worked out the way it did because it almost didn’t.
02:10:33 Do you think a human’s civilization will destroy itself?
02:10:38 So if we think about all the threats facing human civilization, nuclear war, natural or
02:10:46 engineer pandemics, you know, we talk about human rights violations.
02:10:52 We talk about authoritarian governments taking control of the money supply, but do you have
02:11:00 grander concerns for the future of human civilization?
02:11:04 Do you have hope for us becoming a multi planetary species?
02:11:07 Yeah, I mean, I, I guess longterm we’d want to decentralize, right?
02:11:11 We don’t want a single point of failure in the earth is a single point of failure.
02:11:16 But no, I mean, you look at all this kind of like space fiction and I mean, who would
02:11:21 want to live on Mars, man?
02:11:22 It’s like a fricking desert.
02:11:23 I mean, the earth is so beautiful.
02:11:24 I hope we can save it.
02:11:26 You know, it’s just so gorgeous when you look at the earth compared to any other like exoplanet
02:11:31 or whatever you look at it, I mean, the earth is so spectacular and wondrous and singular.
02:11:36 I think we got to do everything we can to save it here.
02:11:39 That’s funny.
02:11:40 I mean, I’m sure a lot of people would have said that about Europe before the explorers
02:11:46 ventured out Columbus and the rest out into the unknown.
02:11:52 The thing about human nature is that we are explorers too.
02:11:54 We are.
02:11:55 Some small fraction of us are insane enough to explore in the most dangerous grounds and
02:12:02 I’m pretty sure there’s quite a few people that would love to take the first step on
02:12:06 Mars, the first few steps on Mars in the harshest of environments, even when the odds of survival
02:12:11 extremely low.
02:12:14 And I’m thankful for those people because I sit back and drink my vodka back here on
02:12:19 earth and enjoy good friendships because I think ultimately that step to Mars is going
02:12:26 to be a first step into exploring and colonizing the rest of the galaxy.
02:12:34 Mars might be a harsh environment, but maybe space is not like other planets, other exoplanets,
02:12:42 but also forget planets, just creating colonies that flow about in space.
02:12:48 There’s exciting technologies that are yet to be discovered, yet to be engineered and
02:12:51 built that I think require that first painful step.
02:12:56 The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step and I think Mars is that first step.
02:13:00 Yeah, no, I was born the day before the Challenger blew up and it was always so tragic for me
02:13:06 to look back on that because that really altered our arc in terms of space exploration.
02:13:11 That had not happened.
02:13:12 We’d be on a very different arc and I do respect and admire people pushing for exploration,
02:13:17 but at the same time, I just want to recognize that we know how unique Earth is and I do
02:13:24 think we got to do everything we can to protect it.
02:13:30 But I think you’ve already answered the question if we’re going to destroy ourselves.
02:13:33 Oh, yeah, I guess.
02:13:35 Are you hopeful?
02:13:36 Okay, fine.
02:13:38 If we do not decentralize properly out into different physical spaces, probably, I guess,
02:13:45 yeah.
02:13:46 I mean, do you have concerns that are immediately facing you, so not in terms of the injustices
02:13:53 on the world, but nuclear war?
02:13:55 Yeah, look, I’m a lot more concerned about what’s happening right now.
02:13:58 Like, what is destroying ourselves?
02:14:01 If you were to go and see what’s happening in Xinjiang or North Korea right now or Eritrea,
02:14:07 that is destroying ourselves and it’s already happened.
02:14:10 So I guess the end, that’s why I said, yes, I mean, if you don’t decentralize and power
02:14:15 is completely under one person, life is destroyed as we know it.
02:14:20 And you don’t have to go into science fiction to know what a totalitarian hellscape dystopia
02:14:27 is.
02:14:28 There’s several that exist already and let’s try to help those people at the same time
02:14:33 as we’re trying to push out into space would be my counter, I guess.
02:14:37 Yeah, I agree with you.
02:14:39 In my mind, destruction and suffering are next door neighbors.
02:14:43 So we don’t need to destroy all of human civilization.
02:14:46 If much, a large fraction of it lives in conditions that we would equate to suffering, that’s
02:14:53 not a good world.
02:14:55 Is there advice that you would give to young people today about life, about career, about
02:15:01 how they can help a world where 53% are living under authoritarian governments, but in general,
02:15:10 a world that’s full of injustice, but also full of opportunity?
02:15:15 Just thinking about my own upbringing, I went to a public school here and we never learned
02:15:19 about money.
02:15:21 It was never part of our curriculum.
02:15:24 Even personal finances was not part of our curriculum.
02:15:27 You could take like an optional course to learn about like business or something.
02:15:31 And I think that that would be really valuable as a young person or as a teenager to start
02:15:38 incorporating into your children’s lives is like a curiosity about what is money, I think
02:15:43 would be very healthy, regardless of what path that takes them down.
02:15:47 Because we don’t think about it enough, either from an administrative sort of personal finance
02:15:51 thing about like responsibility, or more fundamentally, like, what is it and who creates it?
02:15:57 Where did it come from?
02:15:58 Both of those things are very important.
02:16:00 So my advice to a young person would be to get to the point where you feel like you can
02:16:04 answer the question, what is money?
02:16:07 So you ultimately see money as a kind of power and freedom and a mechanism of suffering.
02:16:13 It is so core to everything.
02:16:15 The United States, whether you want to call it the Pax Americana, the Empire, the hyperpower,
02:16:20 whatever you want to call this moment in time where the US is dominant around the world,
02:16:24 it is because of the fact that we have this petrodollar system, where we are able to force
02:16:30 the Saudis and other oil producing nations to sell their oil in dollars.
02:16:36 That is really inescapable, inseparable from our power.
02:16:40 And that’s very rarely talked about.
02:16:42 And it’s very important to understand.
02:16:44 So yeah, if young people could start thinking about that stuff, it’d be good.
02:16:47 I remember being, it sounds silly to say, but I remember being really uncomfortable
02:16:52 that I was dependent on my parents at a young age for like financial.
02:16:58 You need to be 18 to have a bank account or whatever.
02:17:01 One of the people that we supported at Ahrefs through our, we do software development funding
02:17:05 for people in Bitcoin, open source projects.
02:17:08 And one of the guys we funded is this very young, smart sort of prodigy.
02:17:11 He’s like 17.
02:17:12 But one of the reasons he got into Bitcoin was because he wanted to have control of his
02:17:16 money when he was like 14.
02:17:17 I mean, if you think in history, people who invented all kinds of incredible contributions
02:17:22 to science or math, I mean, a lot of them did it before they were 15.
02:17:27 So think about that maturity that is capable and possible in many people.
02:17:31 Like I’ve participated in some of the years ago, some of the sort of selection processes
02:17:36 for like the Teal fellowship, which is like really amazing.
02:17:39 Like these people who are 14, 15, 16, who don’t need to go to college, they’re already
02:17:42 like so smart, they can figure it out, but they wouldn’t be allowed to have a bank account.
02:17:46 So hey, that’s kind of cool.
02:17:48 Like now you have a permissionless money, you can open up yourself without permission
02:17:52 from your parents.
02:17:53 That’s kind of cool.
02:17:54 Yeah.
02:17:55 That’s fascinating to me.
02:17:56 I feel like I would have loved my parents more if I had freedom to fully realize myself,
02:18:06 because I felt like I was a little bit trapped by, I don’t know, it’s not explicit, right?
02:18:11 It’s a little bit, it’s like a subtle push that you’re somehow dependent on them.
02:18:17 I mean, part of that is like, I think it actually very much has to do not talking about money.
02:18:23 Like what does it take to operate as an individual entity in this world?
02:18:26 Like knowing that when you’re 10 years old, knowing that when you’re very young, so that
02:18:31 you’ve, then you see the, how amazing it is to have the support of your parents until
02:18:39 you’re 18.
02:18:40 Like have that freedom, have the freedom to appreciate the value your parents bring.
02:18:47 And at the same time, the freedom to leave in some capacity to carve your own path.
02:18:55 I mean, like just all of that, I think for weirdos like me, especially because I was
02:19:00 a very nontraditional path that I think it would be very empowering and certainly would
02:19:06 be empowering in the third world.
02:19:08 Not just weirdos like you.
02:19:09 Yeah.
02:19:10 I was going to mention one of the people I got who taught me about Bitcoin, her name
02:19:13 is Roya Mapoob.
02:19:14 She’s an Afghan technology CEO, and in 2013 she started paying her employees in Bitcoin
02:19:20 because they were not allowed to open bank accounts, the women that worked for her.
02:19:24 She started the country’s first female, like all female software company.
02:19:29 And if they brought cash home, their like husbands or uncles or brothers would steal
02:19:33 it from them.
02:19:34 There’s like a power patriarchal dominance thing going on.
02:19:37 But they had phones and she was able to pay them in Bitcoin and no one knew, and it gave
02:19:41 them that power.
02:19:42 And that’s always stuck in my mind as a very interesting effect of this kind of thing of
02:19:47 permissionless money, like that it can be an empowerment tool.
02:19:50 So absolutely.
02:19:51 So in your own personal life, where did the deep concern for the suffering in the world
02:20:00 come from?
02:20:02 Where was that born?
02:20:04 I was going to be an engineer actually, and then in 2003 we invaded Iraq and I got very
02:20:09 interested in why we did that as a nation and I switched my focus of study to like international
02:20:16 relations and that’s how I kind of went down the kind of political science democracy rabbit
02:20:21 hole and ended up getting a job at the human rights foundation.
02:20:24 So that I’m a very much a child of like 9 11 and the Iraq war.
02:20:28 Those are the two really formative events for me personally.
02:20:32 Can you break that apart a little bit?
02:20:33 Like what illusion about this world was broken apart by the invasion of Iraq?
02:20:44 Well I think first of all, 9 11 just shifted the world dynamics completely from a focus
02:20:48 on big power politics between the US, Russia and China to this new threat of Islamic terror.
02:20:56 And a lot of it we learned later, a lot of the things we did, we were manufactured, choreographed,
02:21:01 like there were no WMDs in Iraq.
02:21:03 Like the reason our rulers said we needed to invade and destroy this country was a lie.
02:21:08 And that I think has really been forgotten.
02:21:10 Like I think a lot of like the Zoomers like today don’t really know a lot about that time
02:21:15 period.
02:21:16 I mean it’s pretty crazy.
02:21:17 Unanimously, I mean Democrat, Republican, like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, like and
02:21:23 the Republicans, everybody wanted to invade this country and it’s a confusing time.
02:21:30 There’s a really good book by Ian McEwen called Saturday, a fiction book that takes place
02:21:34 during I think 2003 and it’s one day in the life of the doctor in London.
02:21:39 It’s really good though to revisit this time because he has two characters, he has characters
02:21:44 in the book, one of whom is very pro war and one of them is very against war.
02:21:47 Basically he, the father himself is pro war and his son is against it and they have all
02:21:51 these debates.
02:21:52 And it’s nice to go back to revisit but that time was, it’s really crazy and it really
02:21:56 showed you that like the media could be captured into like helping promote this idea of like
02:22:02 invading another country.
02:22:03 So I was very curious about why we did it and like who was pulling the strings and what
02:22:08 are the reasons that we went.
02:22:10 And what’s really interesting is that like I took all these courses on and interviewed
02:22:13 all these decision makers, whether they were like neocons or whatever, different people
02:22:18 who were involved.
02:22:19 And the whole like dollar reserve currency thing like really never came up until like
02:22:24 I learned about it more recently because of Bitcoin.
02:22:27 And today when I look back, it seems kind of obvious that the reason we invaded Iraq
02:22:30 was because Saddam Hussein wanted to sell oil in euros.
02:22:35 It seems really obvious when you go back and look at the chronology of it and we were like,
02:22:39 no, we actually don’t want you to sell dollars in euros because that would threaten the dollar.
02:22:43 So we’re going to invade you and then you’re not going to do it and then no one else is
02:22:45 going to like sell dollars in euros, just oil in euros, right?
02:22:50 I guess you could say the same thing about Qaddafi, but we as a nation have very much
02:22:55 protected our reserve currency, let’s put it that way.
02:22:57 Yeah, actually one of the things that Bitcoin community has motivated me to do is to look
02:23:01 back to the histories that I have studied myself from just even the two world wars,
02:23:07 the history of the 20th century from a perspective of the monetary system of money.
02:23:13 And it’s interesting.
02:23:14 It’s interesting to look at human history in the context of money.
02:23:17 Can’t we be patriotic and be pro America, but like not want the petrodollar?
02:23:21 Like I should be proud of my country.
02:23:24 Why do we need to be propping up the Saudis?
02:23:26 Why do we need to be, you know, threatening to invade other countries if they sell their
02:23:30 oil for a different currency?
02:23:31 I think we can be just as powerful as we are today, if not more powerful in a Bitcoin world.
02:23:36 If you think about the infrastructure Americans are building, all the innovations we’re building,
02:23:39 all the wealth we have, I think we’ll be fine, better than fine.
02:23:43 And we won’t have these horrible negative externalities.
02:23:46 It’s really an optimistic vision for the future.
02:23:49 I thought we learned the lesson of 9 11 and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
02:23:56 But we’re leaving and you know, Biden announced we’re leaving Afghanistan this year, 20 years
02:24:01 for what?
02:24:02 The Taliban are going to take over.
02:24:03 Well, I mean, that’s at least a good, the longest war, right?
02:24:08 The forever wars.
02:24:09 I feel like the past 20 years or whatever it is, 18 years, 19 years, we’ve been very
02:24:17 skeptical about invading other countries, about, we’ve been skeptical about military
02:24:24 intervention in other nations.
02:24:27 Well, our leaders certainly haven’t, we have like seven active wars right now, and neither
02:24:33 the Russians and the Chinese, everybody’s starting to invade everybody else.
02:24:37 I mean, so yes, but I meant to a degree that I was worried about like conflicts with, hot
02:24:42 conflicts with Iran, with North Korea, those kinds of things.
02:24:47 That there was not as much war mongering as I was afraid about.
02:24:54 But yes, you’re absolutely right.
02:24:56 We’re still, there’s a big presence by the United States and other nations and across
02:25:01 the world that’s military.
02:25:03 The military industrial complex is a thing that has huge detrimental ripple effects throughout
02:25:11 the entirety of our governments.
02:25:13 Yeah.
02:25:14 So the big question is how do we prevent the rise of this like authoritarian surveillance
02:25:20 state in China while at the same time kind of diffusing the military industrial complex
02:25:26 on our side?
02:25:27 That to me is like the biggest challenge of our time.
02:25:29 I don’t have the answer, but we should keep digging.
02:25:32 Yeah.
02:25:33 I believe there’s technological innovations.
02:25:36 You’re suggesting that perhaps one of the technological innovations like is Bitcoin.
02:25:40 It’s a big part of it.
02:25:42 Yeah.
02:25:43 On the money side, I think the information side, there’s innovations that are open, that’s
02:25:47 possible.
02:25:48 And the political side, I’m the most skeptical about.
02:25:50 I just feel like there’s, without hot wars that we don’t seem to make any kind of progress.
02:25:58 Cities just grow, corruption and greed grow and human nature does not do well in the political
02:26:04 arena.
02:26:05 So I hope technology can outpace the darker sides of human nature.
02:26:11 So you’re busy fighting the demons, the darkness that’s out there, but looking in the mirror,
02:26:17 you’re a finite being.
02:26:19 Unfortunately this ride ends for you pretty soon.
02:26:24 Do you ever ask yourself about the meaning at all of why the hell us descendants of apes
02:26:32 are even on this thing, striving so hard to make a better world for ourselves?
02:26:39 I don’t often zoom out that much.
02:26:41 I feel like my day job is pretty interesting.
02:26:43 It keeps me very engaged with all the stuff we’ve been talking about.
02:26:49 As far as the meaning of life though, it seems quite clear that we do have the possibility
02:26:58 as a species to create these beautiful communities and constructs and to share an exploration
02:27:06 of the world together that is often marred by cold realities that we’ve discussed.
02:27:14 But I do feel like in a way that the meaning of life is that pursuit, of course biologically
02:27:22 is to spread our species, but also to pursue knowledge and science and innovation and freedom
02:27:31 most importantly.
02:27:33 I think freedom has to guide us or else we end up with prison camps.
02:27:37 If we don’t let freedom guide us, we end up with the prison camps.
02:27:40 So we need to have scientific innovation and adventurism and colonization of the stars,
02:27:45 but without the slavery and without the prison camps.
02:27:48 I think that’s so key.
02:27:49 There’s something about the creation of beauty that seems fundamental to human nature and
02:27:55 what seems beautiful is these communities that don’t have suffering, they don’t have
02:28:04 injustice.
02:28:05 And we have some kind of inner sense of what is injustice.
02:28:09 I don’t know, like some of the human rights that you’ve mentioned earlier, they’re just
02:28:14 philosophical constructs, but they’re also seem to be somehow deeply in us too.
02:28:21 We have a sense of what is right and what is wrong.
02:28:24 It’s not just a kind of illusion that we’ve all agreed on.
02:28:28 Yeah, arbitrary power, torture, executions.
02:28:31 We know these things are wrong.
02:28:32 I mean, we know they’re wrong.
02:28:34 We don’t have to read a book to know that.
02:28:38 But you do need to…
02:28:40 People can get brainwashed.
02:28:41 I mean, you talk to people who’ve grown up in North Korea, they don’t know any better.
02:28:46 They don’t know what’s going on in the outside world.
02:28:48 So they’ve never experienced anything differently.
02:28:51 So that’s why, look, technology can play a big role here in terms of the meaning of it
02:28:56 all.
02:28:57 It can really help emancipate, liberate people, at least so that they can make their own choices
02:29:01 about what to do, at least so that we’re on a level playing field.
02:29:04 So technologies like the internet and Bitcoin, they can at least give you the option to do
02:29:10 things your own way on your own terms.
02:29:14 And then from there, we’ll see.
02:29:17 I think it’s important that we have design choices where we can have a little more say
02:29:22 and not everything be preprogrammed for us.
02:29:26 That would be very disappointing.
02:29:28 So I mean, the open web and encryption in Bitcoin, these are things that help prevent
02:29:34 social engineering and that promote more freedom and more possibilities, honestly, and more
02:29:40 entrepreneurship and more creativity and more scientific inquiry.
02:29:43 I mean, think about the people who tried to shut down scientific inquiry 500, 600 years
02:29:47 ago or whatever that were trying to say the earth was the center of everything and they
02:29:54 were wrong.
02:29:55 And then all these conservative religious types throughout history have always said
02:29:59 that there’s no value in science and there’s no value in technology and they’ve been wrong
02:30:05 the whole time.
02:30:06 So let’s continue pushing here.
02:30:07 Let’s continue pushing.
02:30:09 It’s kind of scary to me sometimes, humbling, beautiful, but also scary to think of.
02:30:15 You mentioned North Korea, people are kind of living in ignorance.
02:30:20 It’s scary to me to think about how much ignorance there is in the world today, like how little
02:30:24 I know personally, or us as a human civilization knows there’s yet to be discovered to that
02:30:30 very…
02:30:31 Well, there’s a difference between laziness and ignorance, right?
02:30:32 So I would be lazy if I didn’t take advantage of the internet, right?
02:30:38 Someone in North Korea doesn’t have the option.
02:30:40 They don’t have the option.
02:30:41 There’s literally no way for them to access the internet.
02:30:43 So there’s kind of like social laziness that philosophers have warned about forever that
02:30:49 we basically become sheep, okay, and then there’s actual like brainwashing and censorship that’s
02:30:55 possible like by closing off your population and keeping them off like the internet, right?
02:31:01 So I think these are two very different concepts.
02:31:03 Absolutely.
02:31:04 But I also mean just like not even laziness, but cognitive limitations and just historical
02:31:10 scientific limitations like, you know, we’re a very young species, like all of the exciting
02:31:17 stuff we’ve been talking about have happened on the scale of decades, maybe centuries.
02:31:22 We’re very young and all the cool stuff we’ve come up with and it’s just humbling to think
02:31:26 about how little we know, but you’re right that, you know, ultimately having the freedom
02:31:32 to keep exploring, keep venturing out, even if we later discover that a lot of the stuff
02:31:38 we’ve been doing now is ethically horrible.
02:31:44 If you think about animals or I think about robots a lot, the kind of things we might
02:31:48 be doing to other consciousnesses that are here on earth might be, we might see as atrocities
02:31:55 later on, but ultimately you have to have the freedom to explore those kinds of ideas
02:32:00 and without that freedom, you don’t even get the chance to be lazy.
02:32:04 Yeah.
02:32:05 I mean, look, don’t be a sheep.
02:32:08 It’s easy to be a sheep.
02:32:09 No offense to sheep.
02:32:10 And there’s some practical things, man.
02:32:12 Get on signal, start encrypting your messages, take control over your privacy.
02:32:18 The media doesn’t want you to, but check out Bitcoin.
02:32:20 You can be your own bank.
02:32:22 You can transact with people around the world and no one can stop you.
02:32:25 This can put a stop to a lot of arbitrary power and a lot of human rights violations.
02:32:32 Don’t use WeChat, question more, research what’s happening in Xinjiang, I mean, learn
02:32:38 about what’s happening in the genocide in that country and let’s think about how we
02:32:43 can build our societies so that we never have that kind of power concentration ever again.
02:32:48 Each of us can make a difference.
02:32:49 Alex, it’s a huge honor to talk to you.
02:32:51 I’ve been a fan of your work.
02:32:53 A lot of people spoke really highly of you as one of the beacons of hope for our human
02:32:57 civilization.
02:32:58 So I’m really glad we got a chance to talk.
02:33:01 Thank you for wasting all this time with me today.
02:33:03 It’s been an honor.
02:33:04 Thanks man.
02:33:05 A lot of fun.
02:33:06 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Alex Glastine.
02:33:09 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:33:13 And now, let me leave you with some words from Alice Walker.
02:33:18 The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
02:33:24 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.