Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
alex gladstein chief strategy officer at
the human rights foundation and the oslo
freedom forum
in recent times alex has focused on how
cryptocurrency and especially bitcoin
can be a tool for empowering democracy
and civil liberties in the world most
crucially parts of the world that are
living under authoritarian regimes
as a side note let me say that i have
been learning a lot about the ways in
which money can be used to amass power
and in the same way the decentralization
of money can be used to resist the
corrupting nature of this power
alex and i do not agree on everything
but we strive for the same betterment of
humanity he is sensitive to the
suffering in the world and is dedicating
his life to finding solutions that
lessen that suffering whether bitcoin is
one such solution i don't know
but i think it has a chance and that
means it is worth exploring deeply
i'm staying in this path of learning
patiently and with as little ego as
possible i hope you come along with me
on this journey as well
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description
we recorded this conversation a while
ago and i thought i lost the audio and
was
really disappointed with myself for
messing this thing up but luckily last
week i found it
and so
rescued from out of the abyss of
non-existence
here's my conversation with alex
glastine
what are some universal human rights
that you believe all people should have
so free speech
freedom of assembly
freedom of belief
freedom to participate in your
government the freedom to have privacy
the freedom to own things property
rights
these are all basic fundamental negative
rights what we call them
these are the basic fundamental human
freedoms
what does negative rights mean
negative rights are
liberties and positive rights are
entitlements
so after world war ii when the un came
together it was largely a compromise
between the communist soviet union and
the you know free united states right so
the u.s had
uh on its side of the u.n declaration of
human rights
a bunch of liberties essentially things
like free speech freedom of association
freedom of assembly the soviets wanted
entitlements uh like the right to work
the right to have housing the right to
water the right to a vacation
so you actually read the un declaration
for human rights it's a negotiation
between the soviets and the americans
later
there was another document in the 70s
released called the international
covenant on civil and political rights
and this is what ahref uses as its sort
of like lodestar
it's founding document and this is like
essentially an international agreement
on the negative rights those are the
things we choose to focus on because
essentially authoritarian regimes can
commit fraud and claim they're giving
the positive rights the entitlements
without having any of the negative
liberties and they can do that because
they don't have any like free speech or
press freedom um when you when you take
people's basic fundamental freedoms away
it's quite easy to make like a potemkin
village and pretend that there's the
entitlements and that we have good uh
health care and you know
it's the same sort of thing that
authoritarians have done for decades uh
cuba and venezuela and and the soviet
union do you think it's possible for
authoritarian regimes to manipulate to
kind of lie about the negative rights as
well by saying that the people have free
speech
uh the people have the freedom to for
assembly and all those kinds of things
can't you still manipulate
the idea that the citizenry still has
those rights
the opposition leader of malaysia anwar
ibrahim he once told me
that the funny joke that you know in my
country we have freedom of speech we
don't have freedom after speech so yeah
they can absolutely manipulate whatever
they want but i've done research into
socioeconomic data and i guess what i'm
telling you is that authoritarian
regimes which make up
53 of the world's population across 95
countries um about 4.3 billion people
those who live under those regimes are
subject to
massive fraud when it comes to things
like literacy rates
life expectancy um any sort of
socio-economic data economic growth
they can do this because there's no free
press
um so for us at the human rights
foundation and for people like me
we believe that the negative rights the
liberties the things that are in for
example uh the bill of rights in the u.s
constitution these things are the table
and then we can build on top of that we
can build the rest of our societies on
top of that the freest countries in the
world have both the negative liberties
and the entitlements like norway for
example
but there's a big difference between
norway and north korea in north korea
they only claim to have the entitlements
and they definitely don't have the
liberties
do you think there's one right that's
more important than others you kind of
suggested the freedom of the press
maybe freedom of speech
that if you take that away all the other
ones kind of collapse along with like
from a ripple effect is there something
fundamental that you
like to focus your attention on to
defend to protect to make sure it's
there yeah i think i think free speech
is probably the most fundamental it's
probably why the founders chose to make
it into the first amendment
um
a lot of things are downstream from
there
property rights are also very very
important
obviously we've seen the the toll of
violent redistributionism you know in
over the last hundred years
uh whether it was uh lenin or stalin or
mao
or other regimes and everywhere from
ethiopia to
colonial colonialists everywhere to
north korea it's not a pretty legacy
is free speech clear to you as a concept
there's been quite a few debates
especially in the digital age
what it means to violate freedom of
speech there's
been a lot of new like novel mechanisms
for people to communicate with each
other like especially on social networks
and it seems that uh unclear
because a lot of times those are managed
by private companies
it's unclear how much protection do the
citizens have to have
when they're communicating a lot of
people are being censored on these
social platforms some people even
presidents get removed from those social
platforms
have you thought about the freedom of
speech in the united states but in in
the world
as it
as it's implemented in the 21st century
given the internet and all those kinds
of things
there is a soviet dissident
named natan sharonsky who
survived the regime
and he wrote a book
in which his thesis was essentially the
way that you can define a free society
is through something called the town
square test can you go to a public space
where you live and criticize your ruler
loudly
without fear of retribution if you can
do that you have you have free speech i
think that's a pretty good litmus test
most people in this world cannot do that
if you live in havana if you live in
moscow if you live in beijing you cannot
do that and that's not a free society
in austin texas in boston massachusetts
in london
in santiago chile and tokyo japan in
many democracies you can do that and i
think that that's a really helpful basic
sort of litmus test
does the content of the criticism matter
can it be complete
lies
meaning
conspiracy theories that involve
claiming that the leader is let's say
a lizard slash pedophile
slash
you know
i'm not saying that those are lies look
into it but uh they're very unlikely
phenomena so like does that matter i i
think it ends poorly when
the state tries to restrict speech
um i think that's kind of how i would
define censorship
i think censorship and de-platforming
are two different things
private companies
you know they get to make up their own
rules about what's allowed on their
platforms and i think that's very
different from a government with guns
and an army
restricting the speech of its citizens
with threats of violence these things
are different for me
that violence is a fundamental
difference
i don't know i i um i've gotten a chance
to have dinner with alex jones
and uh i've talked to him a few times
offline
and it does i understand why people are
so off-put by him
but it does bother me that he's
universally removed from every platform
it feels like there's many more
evil people
bad people
compared to alex jones who still
are given a voice on these platforms
and so i'm uncomfortable
with the universality of the application
of the censorship
by uh
by these platforms but on the flip side
you're right there's not a violence
there's not tanks
there's not guns behind that censorship
yeah it's a bit of a generalization but
alex jones would be in prison or dead if
he were in north korea or in cuba or in
russia or in china the the authorities
would not tolerate him to do what he did
and here he can kind of do what he wants
he's encountering some resistance in the
marketplace of ideas
large organizations corporations
and a lot of public sentiment
uh in different parts of our country
don't like him and they're doing their
best to drown out his voice but that's
very different from a violent threat of
censorship from the state and that's
what we study that's what i study are
these you know what is the state doing
that's kind of paramount for for me yeah
and that's true because in the
marketplace of ideas there could be a
company that springs up that gives alex
jones a platform and
the united states is not going to
prevent those companies from functioning
of course there's uh from a
technological tech from a technology
perspective
there is uh aws removing parlor from the
platform and gets a little weird
you know as you get closer and closer to
the computer infrastructure because then
you get closer and closer to the state
actually
the
the more you get to the infrastructure
that's usually managed by the state the
closer it gets to the control of the
state
i would argue aws is pretty damn close
to infrastructure that's kind of
controlled by the state if you
especially look at other nations
uh china russia
there's uh i don't know who runs the
compute infrastructure for russia and
china but i bet the state has complete
oversight over that
and so
that level of compute infrastructure
having control
about which social networks can and
cannot operate is very uncomfortable to
me but you're right i think
it's good to focus on the obvious
violations of these principles as
opposed to the the gray areas of course
the gray areas are fascinating
you mentioned hrf
human rights foundation what is it uh
what is its mission
yeah so i've been working for href
since 2007 um
we are a charity a non-profit a 501c3
based in new york and our mission is to
promote and protect individual rights
and freedoms in authoritarian societies
around the world so again we we define
about 95 countries as authoritarian
meaning it's either a one-party state or
opposition politicians are outlawed or
persecuted there's no real free speech
there's no press freedom there's no
independent judiciary there really
aren't checks and balances and even
trying to create like a human rights
organization or like an environmental
group would be illegal um and the
majority of the world's population lives
in that environment that's very
important you said 53.63
4.3 billion people and i saw you
outlined a lot of different um
sources of suffering in the world
and then you sort of put
people living under authoritarian
governments as like more than all of
them
i i forget i forget all the examples you
provided but
sure i mean it's uh yeah maybe a
convention if you remember the number of
people who are refugees the number of
people who suffer from natural disasters
the number of people who live under
abject poverty the number of people who
don't have access to clean drinking
water all of these are dwarfed by the
number of people who live under
authoritarianism
and yet it's not something that we talk
about a lot
because people are mercantilist and the
powers that be are happy to sacrifice
freedoms and privacy for money we live
in a profit-seeking world
to get evidence of this take a look at
the list of sponsors of the upcoming
olympics in in china where the ccp is
currently committing genocide against
the weaker population or look at the
number of people and the famous
investors who went to saudi arabia a
couple months ago for the davos in the
desert i mean ray dalio was there all
kinds of people were there
and or at least they were invited and
they said they were going to go
and this is a government that
at the time was torturing a female
activist who just wanted to drive a car
this is a government that had murdered
jamal khashoggi uh
in a brutal fashion uh just a couple
years earlier
so i mean at the end of the day when
when it comes down to brass tacks i mean
you know the powers that be the even the
free countries are led by people um who
are very very happy to sacrifice all
these pretty words about human rights
when it when it comes down to profits
unfortunately so do you think capitalism
that's maybe one of the flaws of
capitalism as it turns a blind eye to
injustices against human nature
against the human rights
like it turns a blind eye to
authoritarian governments
look i think that at the end of the day
like
free trade
is actually really good um and you can
just look at france and germany as an
example of of how like a capitalist
structure would develop if you have two
capitalist actors they're very unlikely
to fight each other there's very
unlikely to be violence right these are
two countries which
basically murdered some large percentage
of each other's male population three
times in a hundred years in three
different wars right and now today war
is like unthinkable
and a lot of that is because of
increased collaboration increased trade
so when you have two capitalist actors
they act
in a very productive way with each other
um but as soon as you introduce an
authoritarian actor you know all bets
are off so i think what you have is a
conflict between capitalist actors and
authoritarian actors
and at the end of the day people
need to
yes have more than just capitalist
intentions
in in the geopolitical
level i'm talking about they need to
actually take a stand for principles
otherwise you have athletes and
businesses and governments that are all
too happy to to do business with the
chinese communist party for example
right now i think that there is a little
more than just kind of the pure um
the pure profit yes
you mentioned what are the signs
that uh the state is an authoritarian
state
how do you know if you're living in the
authoritarian state or when you study
another nation or analyze the behavior
of another nation how do you know that's
an authentic authoritarian state
is it as simple as them
having a dictator is it as simple as
them as declaring that they don't have a
democracy or is there something more
subtle there's a couple good litmus
tests
one is actually can you have a gay pride
parade
that's a good serious it actually lines
up perfectly it doesn't matter what
religion the dictatorship is yeah they
don't like minor they don't like
minorities and they love to scapegoat
whether it's gays or religious
minorities etc so it lines up pretty
well that's really if you cannot have a
gay pride parade in your country because
you're fearful that you're going to get
the crap kicked out of you probably live
in an authoritarian regime um
i'm sure that it's not just about some
kind of homophobia why is that that's
really interesting because that's right
i'm going through so the fascism
scapegoats minorities there's an other
you create another group and then you
yeah i mean uganda is a great example of
this but so is saudi arabia so is china
um i mean
so is cuba i mean these are all regimes
which demonize
the you know lgbt communities
it's interesting because maybe you can
correct me but from my very distant
outsider perspective
uh the
sort of the way that uh certain
authoritarian governments speak about uh
gay people
is it's almost like
what is it um
we don't have gay people in our country
kind of idea as opposed to scapegoating
scapegoating which is like
well denial is the most powerful form of
demonization i mean this is what the
iranian dictatorship does
a few years ago when ahmadinejad who was
who was then sort of the de facto later
he came to columbia university and he
tried to give a speech which you can
look up and he tried to claim that there
were no gays in iran and that's the most
powerful form of demonization is trying
to just wipe out your utter existence
there's other good litmus tests too um
you know for example you you can think
about comedy um can you make money
making fun of your government on
television if you cannot you live in a
dictatorship most likely i mean it's
shocking to people that i work with
who live in dictatorships when i tell
them that not only are comedians
uh able to safely make fun of our
government but they get paid very well
to do so that's a hallmark of a free
society so that's another good litmus
test
hear that tim dillon you should go to
north korea check it out yeah and look
there are tons of flaws with democracies
these are really good tests by the way
the united states is a deeply flawed
country in many ways our prison system
is a disaster um there's you know a
horrible war on drugs we committed a
grievous uh
crime in my opinion by invading iraq
like we did a lot of
problematic things but our core
architecture is still an open society um
the people who criticize the us the most
usually live within it
and
if they were to move to a different
country and try to use that criticism
against their new rulers they wouldn't
fare so well so whether it's chomsky
or whomever if they were to go to cuba
and live in cuba and try to criticize
cuba like they do america it wouldn't
last very long
so i think what's important to
distinguish between
open societies and closed ones or like
like free societies and authoritarian
regimes it doesn't mean that your
government's going to be good all the
time
what it means is that the citizens have
a way to push for reform have a way to
hold the rulers accountable so even if
you don't like what the u.s government
does whether it was under biden or trump
or obama or bush
we can rotate them through voting and we
have an independent supreme court
that rotates over time and we have
people that we can elect directly to
serve our interests and then there's
like a free press and there's lobbyists
and all kinds of people that jostle for
power so there's a separation of powers
and i like to think about a free society
really as like at the bottom
of the foundation of the pyramid really
would be free speech
and then you would have civil society
like for example um human rights
organizations environmental groups stamp
collectors athletes any groups that come
together you know beyond the
government's sort of strict instruction
and then on top of that in the third
level you have separation of powers
again what i'm describing
so authoritarian regimes don't really
have any of these layers to them right
and then at the top
then you put elections but the elections
are meaningless if you don't have the
foundation below every dictator gets
elected kim jong-un gets elected he's
the only person on the ballot
every dictator from hitler to chavez
they all got elected elections on their
own mean literally nothing you have to
have these other layers beneath to
actually be an open and free society i
think it's very important for people to
understand
although hitler in an interesting way at
a certain point just said i'm going to
be a ruler forever which is interesting
the there's an important switch that
happens when you as opposed to having a
facade of elections you even you just
put that aside and saying basically like
we're not even doing this yeah there's
like a ladder that you climb the
election and you pull the ladder up and
then no one else can climb up this sadly
it happened in egypt and it was quite
predictable after mubarak was ousted
after the arab spring you know morsi
came in and it looked like you know the
muslim brotherhood was not really going
to be very democratic um but it didn't
really matter because then the military
came back and now we have cece who's
even worse than mubarak so
a lot of times in these regimes
unfortunately it's very difficult for
people to build that democratic society
afterwards um
some people have told me that when you
live in a totalitarian or an
authoritarian regime it's kind of like a
political desert what grows in the
desert scorpions and cacti right so
basically people with very extreme views
because you as an authoritarian ruler
your best method for control is to get
rid of the moderates you have to crush
the moderates that's very important you
want to have the only opposition to you
be extremists that way when you go and
have negotiations with the united states
you can kind of hold up the terrorists
or whomever the extremists and say it's
either us or them right and then the
realists who run the us government are
going to choose you and that's why one
of the reasons why the u.s government
has supported so many dictators around
the world over the last few decades
do you think
authoritarian systems emerge naturally
like that's the natural state of things
if you take
if you incorporate what human nature is
will there go is there always going to
be
corrupt people that rise to the top and
we almost have to um
construct systems that protect us
against ourselves
kind of thing
another way to ask that um
is
what kind of systems protect
us from our own human nature
we started with authoritarianism or
autocracy right ruled by one or or a
small group
oligarchy and all humans lived under
this structure for you know the the
virtual you know bulk of all human
existence only until pretty recently did
we start having actual democracy uh the
idea that we should be ruled by rules
not by rulers very powerful
invented in many places across the world
western africa had this idea and so did
the ancient greeks
and they started to implement it
although as most know we didn't have
full democracy for a long long time
because it was only property owners or
only men only per people of a certain
race
but this idea that that we can like
rotate our rulers and that we could be
ruled by rules is extremely powerful and
it really like for me
the ideas behind this um i think
unlocked a lot of the industrial
revolution these small personal freedoms
that were allowed in some countries but
not others and they unlocked a lot of
the scientific innovation over the last
few hundred years
um and to me there's like a really
straight line between like scientific
inquiry free speech freedoms and then
more prosperity and more effectiveness
as a civilization so i i think that
democracy you know ruled by the people
is definitely an upgrade from autocracy
or oligarchy you know which would be
rule by by one or a rule by a small
group
and i think that the the democratic
revolution
has been an incredible thing for our
world
and it's it's you know you could do half
class full half class empty the half
class full is that almost half the world
lives under democracy like that that's
an incredible achievement
but just under half
yeah just under half so
uh but that's billions of people is
billions of people and if you look at
the progress of things it's getting
better and better and better i mean if
you know yeah we're a little bit of a um
stalemate here uh democracy's really
blossomed uh between world war ii and
the year 2000 especially in the 80s and
90s you had an incredible
wave of fault you know where many many
authoritarian regimes fell and were
replaced by democracies i think around
20 2015 the
the acceleration kind of
came to a standstill a little bit um
there's some good news in some countries
and there's bad news in others um like
in the last 10 years you've had for
example the philippines has gone
backwards um thailand has come backwards
bangladesh has gone backwards turkey has
gone backwards that's that's like a half
billion people right there so you've had
some positives
um
like you know there was positive
movement forward in armenia malaysia
some other countries um but we're kind
of at a stalemate right now and
what most people fear them
about where we are right now
who i respect
is what does the digital transformation
of the world do to this like progress of
democracy uh or of open societies and
and that's what concerns me the most oh
interesting so i've and we'll talk about
well one of the most fascinating
technologies which is bitcoin how it can
help but
i have a sense that technology like most
technological innovations will give
power to the individuals
we'll give
will
fight fight authoritarian governments
supposed to give more power to
authoritarian governments but your sense
is there's ways to give
for technology to be utilized as a tool
for the abuse of the citizenry i've seen
both in my work at href i started by
helping to put together backpacks with
foreign information that we sent to the
cuban underground library movement so in
cuba you know to own a book at the time
you had to have the government's
permission there's very little internet
penetration okay so we would send in
movies you know v for vendetta dubbed
into spanish and people would sit inside
their homes yeah and they'd watch it and
they would answer questions with each
other it was very powerful and then
after that i worked with people inside
north korea we would send in flash
drives we have this program called flash
drives for freedom we've sent over a
hundred thousand flash drives
in our work into north korea a country
of about 25 million people that's a lot
it's a big big difference that's you
know many many millions of hours of
films books movies etc so i've seen the
power that technology can have where you
know in the 60s and 70s
you know to get to break an information
blockade you had to like send in crates
of books into a communist country so now
all of a sudden you can send the entire
contents of what was once the library of
alexandria on something the size of your
thumbnail like that's remarkable so
obviously i've seen the positives of
technology we'll certainly get into
bitcoin but i'm you know very concerned
about essentially big data analysis like
or what people call ai or general you
know specific specific kinds of ai like
very concerning i think these are very
authoritarian i mean it's very hard to
make a case that ai
is going to be good for human rights
very difficult in my opinion
it may be good for health it may be good
for
our efforts to protect the planet it may
be good for a lot of scientific things
i find it very hard to believe it'll be
good for civil liberties oh that's fun
this is fun because i disagree
uh give me your examples
i'm serious what what ai applications
will improve civilization
i thought you meant
examples of stuff that's already out
there because i can give you examples
that for for example the kind of things
that i would like to work on but also
the kind of things i'm hoping to see
which is
ai could be used by
centralized powers by governments by big
organizations like facebook and twitter
and so on
to collect data about people right right
but i believe there's a huge hunger
among people
to have control over their own data
so instead you can have
ai that's distributed where people have
complete ownership of their little ai
systems
so like the kind of stuff that i would
like to build or like to see to be built
is
you could think of it as personal
assistance
or
ai that's owned by you
and you get to give it out you have
complete control over all of your data
you have complete control over
everything that's uh
learnable about your day-to-day
experiences that could be useful in this
in the market of um
goods and ideas and all those kinds of
things so it has to do with
so you i know you talk about the
surveillance which is very interesting
it's who gets to have control of the
data and i think i i believe there's a
lot of hunger
in among regular people
to have control over their data
such that
if you want to create a business you
have a lot of money to be made from a
capitalist perspective by providing
products that let people control their
data where you have no control
it sounds like to me you're describing
encryption or at least the the ability
to encrypt the ability to use
uh digital keys to secure your property
and i that to me is a very powerful uh
individual right force for individual
rights very powerful and it's what's
what animates bitcoin ultimately which
we'll get into
but for me at least the way i look at it
today in 2021
the threat from big data analysis
used by governments and authoritarian
regimes is terrifying i mean to actually
see what the chinese communist party is
doing where they have hundreds of
millions of cameras overseeing society
cameras that can tell who's a uyghur and
who's ahan
that to me is terrifying and and
everything is sorted instantly there are
there are super computers that are built
in urumqi in xinjiang for this explicit
purpose and you know it allows the
government to quickly sort and basically
commit genocide a lot faster and it's
really scary so
i do agree and i've seen personally how
powerful technology can be as a force
for freedom um but i'm i'm very very
worried about big data analysis in the
hands of governments see that's funny
because i i tend to see governments as
ultimately incompetent in the space of
technology to where there will always be
lagging behind so you look at what the
chinese surveillance systems are doing
i i believe when once you start getting
bad
enough that
like
technologies would be created to resist
that so to mess with it from from the
hacker community but also from the
individual community so surveillance is
actually very difficult from a
centralized perspective to detect uh you
know to collect data about you to detect
everything you are because you can spoof
a lot of that information so i believe
you can put power in the hands of the
citizens to sort of
feed the government fake data to confuse
it at a mass scale to where
it will make their surveillance less
effective but that okay that could be
very sort of hopeful yeah i mean the
practical application in xinjiang which
is a territory the size of alaska
where a large percentage of the
population has been put into prison
camps
um the current issue of the new yorker
has an absolutely harrowing uh essay
that that tells the story of one such
woman
who in i believe 20 2017 got sucked into
one of these camps and it took her a
year or more to get out um and and she's
talking about how
in each home in xinjiang each home has a
qr code on it that the police can scan
and get like a quick instant download of
who lives there
each car has you know like a scannable
code
every every single person has their dna
taken and the dna is being sifted
through and analyzed by algorithms so
this is like the chinese government's
laboratory for how can we use technology
to
oppress a sort of like digital leninism
and that to me is one of the biggest uh
risks in our world today and it's not
talked about enough that's interesting
so technologies basically
enables the automation of oppression
absolutely so like
but to define technology
big data analysis and you know maybe
specific ai etc does but encryption
allows us to fight back it's very
important people understand we have
tools to fight back
you know big brother
can only grow
if it can feed on your data if it can't
get your data it can't grow so you have
to willingly give up stuff to the cloud
um for this monster to grow we can we
can we can like make the monster hungry
and shrink it if we give it less data
and i think that's where i would agree
with you in terms of like wanting to
empower people to be able to do stuff on
their own terms in a sovereign way and
yeah maybe you're you're kind of
thinking like the personal assistant who
helps out tony stark or something like
that and and that's yeah as long as
there's no back doors and that's a
sovereign thing that you've popped up
and created and you have the keys to
absolutely but practically speaking if
we're talking about the world today as
is
we need to be concerned about the way
that authoritarian regimes are using big
data analysis and they're going to buy
the software and this equipment from the
chinese government they're already doing
it street level surveillance has already
been purchased by governments everywhere
from latin america to sub-saharan africa
to the heart of europe um there's been
huge scandals in britain over their
purchase of chinese surveillance
technology
um part of the chinese government's belt
and road campaign which is basically to
build the infrastructure of this century
and to be in control of it is this idea
part of that idea is to is to ship out
and install surveillance technology
both at the telecom level and at the
surveillance level across dozens of
countries around the world and have that
back door right there's this national
security law in china which states that
like companies that are chinese which
are abroad are mandated to send data
back to beijing right so they're
building this like huge global
surveillance state and again not talked
about enough you should go google and
research the belt and road i think it's
very important that we confront this
yeah i'm really glad you're talking
about it because it's probably important
to understand i'm also hopeful that
as people get educated about
how much their data when collected
unencrypted but in general
can be used to harm them
i mean it's almost like an education i
feel like
if you know
it's a double-edged sword because i feel
like people become fearful too easily
and that actually has a very negative
effect on the quality of life
in some sense you want to have tools
that allow you to live freely as opposed
to living fear if you live in fear
it's not a good way to live so it's a
it's a balance um it's a free society
versus a fear society yeah
people are
it's all about the trade-offs you make
in your daily life like living more
privately with more freedom is
less convenient you trade freedom and
privacy for convenience and comfort and
speed absolutely it's an engineering
decision in everything that you do um
in the west
we in advanced democracies we have not
necessarily personally seen
the results of that trade-off because
we've we live in these free societies
that have these checks and balances and
freedoms but as soon as you step into an
authoritarian state and you make those
trade-offs your life you know
immediately becomes more more
restrictive and and what people are
worried about is that even in advanced
economies market democracies etc
the people are worried that they might
not survive the the great social
digital transformation um you know look
at what the nsa is capable of doing i
mean for now
it's
not that big of a problem because we
still have free speech um but it's
deeply concerning what snowden revealed
and it's a nice reminder
that we need to be focused on on privacy
and encryption and on helping users
become more more sovereign regardless of
where you live it's kind of like a
crutch to live in a free society like
you know it's almost like a free lunch
in a way um
you're not going to be sent to a prison
camp because of the color of your skin
or your beliefs or what you say about
the government
and you're very lucky again most people
do live in a society where you you can
be persecuted for those things
and i feel like especially in america we
we forget that we're we're distanced
from that really strong reality you know
on the topic of snowden and then nsa
what should we be thinking about because
that feels like a already an outdated
set of conversations because of the
information we've gotten from the past
it feels like everything's gotten quiet
now in terms of how much we actually
know about the hugely important i i
think the two lessons from snowden are a
the the patriot act and the war on
terror and mass surveillance are
not necessary for our democracy and for
our freedoms um this was a false choice
we never had to sacrifice them to be
safer
um and and we've seen that government
has spent hundreds and hundreds of
millions of dollars on these like
surveillance programs that you can read
about and amounted to very little except
for tremendous bureaucratic waste and
you know
you know erosion of our freedoms
but at the same time we need to practice
more privacy and the dramatic increase
in the usage of signal for example has
been really really great to see it's
it's fantastic that tens of millions of
people are downloading signal and using
it um you should try to be onboarding
more and more of your conversations onto
signal for example where governments
can't see what you're saying
maybe they can see the metadata maybe
they can see that you sent your phone
number sent a message to someone else's
phone number at this time but they can't
see what's inside so using encryption in
your life is very very important that's
a good starting point i would say that's
kind of step a
the ideas of democracy
the ideas of the balance of power
um
the all the ideas that we were talking
about the constructs
were inventions i wonder if there's
other inventions that will allow us to
sort of
not engage not give governments or any
centralized institutions so much power
like why why do citizens have to use
signal
why because that's an effort you have to
be because you have to like understand
exactly why so that's a nice little
solution for a particular set of
problems but like there's a million
other ways that data i'm sure
is being collected constantly if we
don't create
a system that
prevents the establishments of these
centralized powers then we'll always
have this problem yeah i think we can
keep it simple for the purposes of this
conversation you have politics
information and money those are the
three things i would encourage us to
focus on in politics yes someone
invented democracy i mean whether it was
the greeks um the west africans or many
others around the world around the same
time invented this idea that we should
be ruled by uh rules and not by rulers
right um
and that has
evolved dramatically right and now you
and then you have information
information also used to be highly
centralized right you know think about
how rich you had to be to gain access to
a library before the printing press or
you know how much money you had to have
or how close to the king or the you know
feudal lord you had to be to be able to
have that ability but now
you know
the majority of the world billions of
people have access to all information in
their pocket and they can set up an
account on social media and get their
word out so not only politics but
information has been dramatically
decentralized
and i would say that encrypted messaging
is kind of a corollary to that second
innovation and as much as now people are
like more effortlessly like signal is a
lot easier to use than pgp for example
they're more easily able to practice
privacy when it comes to having private
messages globally um these are all good
things and we need to keep pushing and i
think money is like
honestly maybe the most important piece
and that's why i spent so much time
thinking about bitcoin okay so
politics information money yes let's
talk about money what is money and why
is it important to think about
in the context of human rights
i have witnessed
money
be
peripheralized
take it has taken a back seat in the
human rights conversation the idea of
currency who makes the money who makes
the rules who issues it who sets the
interest rates all these things
it is not on the menu of human rights
activists if you just do like a
systematic study of like the human
rights discourse over the last several
decades
money is not there it's also not really
taught in schools like children don't
really learn about money where does it
come from it's it's kind of hidden from
from our from a lot of our discourse
um
only really when i got into bitcoin did
i start learning more about money
um i spent 10 years at the human rights
foundation
and we we did all kinds of programs
around the world we convened oslo
freedom forums in different places and i
got to meet hundreds of dissidents and
very rarely did they ever speak about
currency or bank accounts or moving
money from one place to another
but when i started asking them they
always had amazing stories about money
always i mean my friend ivan muire who
started the this flag movement in
zimbabwe which ended up toppling robert
mugabe when i asked him to come to san
francisco to give a talk about
hyperinflation which he lived through
he said no one's ever asked me to do
that before
but i'll come and he came this was about
three years ago
and the first thing he did when he got
on the stage is he opened up a shirt and
he brought out a necklace that had the
1980 zimbabwean dollar on it and he said
we in the activist community wear this
as a symbol of where our country used to
be because the zimbabwean dollar used to
be worth two british pounds and then of
course over the next
two and a half decades of economic
mismanagement and corruption by mugabe
it got inflated out of existence right
you've seen those like hundred trillion
dollar zimbabwean notes
um so he had to live through that which
was terrible and crushing
but he you know is an expert on money if
you actually talk to human rights
activists about money they know a lot
about money they're just not usually
asked to talk about it so you know for
me
um money you know when i study money or
look at money it's really about control
you know who who's creating it and how
much does the population know about the
creation of that money and when it comes
to bitcoin it's really the people's
money like there is no shadowy force in
charge of it we all know the rules we
all know how it's going to get minted
and how it's going to get printed and
you know that information is out there
for everybody to see and there's no like
special group of rules for one group of
people or another group
you know a billionaire and a refugee are
the same in the eyes of the protocol
this is a rather revolutionary concept
and in the same way that
democracy allowed us to decentralize
politics and have checks and balances
and in the same way that the internet is
this culmination of technologies that
allowed us to decentralize information
access to and control over it
bitcoin you know decentralizes money i
mean no longer again is there one group
of people who can just change it
arbitrarily we're all in the same
playing field and i think that is a
tremendous innovation
you know from one perspective money and
inflation hyperinflation is a kind of
symptom of
corruption as opposed to the core of the
corruption
and at this at the flip side in terms of
resisting the corruption resisting the
abuse
of human rights
it's interesting to think that
fighting inflation
or
funny uh
fighting the mismanagement of the money
supply
uh is a way to fight back
authoritarianism or to fight
authoritarianism
and
that's an interesting concept that i
think was introduced to me by just
plugging myself in intellectually into
the bitcoin community but also just
cryptocurrency in general
it's it's to like
it's not that money
is a symptom
you know money is a tool to fight back
too
absolutely
so in in what way
can bitcoin be used to um
to fight authoritarianism
not just in the united states but all of
those 53 percent that you're referring
to what how can bitcoin help so we
talked about authoritarianism
we talked about the surveillance state
to me
bitcoin has two kind of key mechanisms
through which it can help us
number one uh it's a sovereign savings
account it's debasement proof meaning
the government cannot print more
whenever they want
this is very very different from fiat
currency which by its very name its very
nature can be issued on sort of demand
right by the rulers
and while i live in a country where the
rulers do a reasonable job of managing
the money most people aren't so lucky so
only 13 percent of humans in the world
live in a country that's a liberal
democracy with property rights and has
what we call a reserve currency meaning
a currency so stable and desirable that
other countries save in it at the
central bank level right you basically
have the us
the uk australia switzerland the euro
and canada i mean those are like reserve
currencies and these are liberal
democracies where people have reasonable
guarantees over property rights
everybody else either lives under like a
weaker currency or an authoritarian
regime that's 87 of the world's
population almost 7 billion people so
for them
a sovereign savings account that's
permissionless meaning you don't have to
have id to use it is a big big deal and
a lot of people talk about zimbabwe or
venezuela as some like isolated cases oh
well you know hyperinflation only
happens in in those two countries
um i actually did some research into
this and
there's about one point uh
over you know close to 1.3 billion
people who live under double or triple
digit inflation this is not an isolated
instance we're talking huge countries
nigeria 200 million people 15 inflation
turkey
15 insulation for 100 million people
argentina 40 inflation for a country 45
million people um so you can go down the
list there's about 35 countries where
like people's earnings their wages um
are literally disappearing in front of
their eyes over a matter of weeks or
months against things like the dollar
gold real estate right so this is a huge
issue it absolutely is a human rights
issue for me i mean when it comes to
your time and energy having control over
that or having it stolen from you i
think this is pretty clear
and bitcoin is like an immediate uh
low-cost easily accessible solution for
people and i've learned this not from my
own assumptions but by talking to people
by interviewing dozens of people
whether it's in sudan which currently
has triple digit inflation um or
people who've escaped from syria who
have used bitcoin to get their wealth
out of the country and then also to make
payments back to people inside um or
venezuela or elsewhere it's very very
powerful
i think some very small percentage of
people who have used have owned bitcoins
was something like one percent right of
the world
whatever whatever the number is a small
call it two percent for the purposes of
our okay about a little under 200
million people
wow yeah
at most right now so if we look at
zimbabwe sudan if we look at small
percentages of people do you think the
technology's mature enough because it's
not just about the idea it's also about
the implementation of it like you know
bitcoin
for the most part requires access to
to the internet yeah and
what do you think
about
accessibility of this technology now as
a method of activism in the worst parts
of the world we often think like all the
conversations we've had about bitcoin is
essentially
middle class like wealthy people
relative to the
world they're kind of talking sort of
investment and high concept ideas then
there's also the people in the world who
are suffering who are
living through hyperinflation they may
not have a computer or access to the
internet like what how do you think
bitcoin can help there yeah so again we
have
one clear use case which is a sovereign
savings account that you can control
right the other use case is an
unstoppable payments network this is
very important for people who live
behind for example sanctions
like the us like basically um weaponizes
the dollar and it like sanctions
different countries and instead of
sanctioning like a handful of rulers for
example which i would support this is
like a magnitsky or smart sanctions
sometimes we'll just say we're just
going to shut off this whole country so
the people suffer cuba or iran are good
examples average people suffer right so
people in those two countries i just
mentioned cuba iran or even palestine
which is
also sort of like blockaded by the
israelis so you have cuba iran palestine
are three good examples where people
inside all three of those countries now
are using bitcoin to do commerce do
their business send money back
enforcement sanction resistant sanctions
resistant it does not get stopped by
sanctions right um
and also it's again remittances are
extortionate i mean the average
remittance
you know costs uh has a high fee takes
several days if your family is in ghana
or something like that or nigeria and
you live in the united states it can
take time to use western union um
sometimes you know oh it gets paused it
gets lost there's issues you have to
deal with customer service
screw that i mean you know if the person
has a cell phone which increasingly is
the case i mean by the end of next year
uh
more than five or six billion people
depending on different estimates will
have smartphones basically by the end of
2022 uh we're talking like the vast
majority of humans will have access to
smartphones they can all have sovereign
bitcoin wallets and there's even ways to
access bitcoin without the internet um
but i mean we can get into that there's
like hardware wallets and so on what do
you mean by sovereign
uh bitcoin wallet
you know most users today are using
bitcoin in a in a custodial manner so
this is kind of like having a bank
account
um where you have a deposit uh account
at a bank right so you have a claim
right you go to the bank and they have
some of your money and you take it out
right with an atm so
uh what i would call uh non-custodial
bitcoin use would be similar to
withdrawing cash from an atm you have it
it's a bear instrument okay so when i
it's what's called the bearer instrument
i know i'm so apologize i'm outside this
community just sounds