Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Alex Gladstein,

00:00:03.300 | Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation

00:00:06.240 | and the Oslo Freedom Forum.

00:00:08.400 | In recent times, Alex has focused on how cryptocurrency

00:00:11.880 | and especially Bitcoin can be a tool for empowering democracy

00:00:15.360 | and civil liberties in the world.

00:00:17.880 | Most crucially, parts of the world

00:00:20.000 | that are living under authoritarian regimes.

00:00:23.560 | As a side note, let me say that I have been learning a lot

00:00:27.000 | about the ways in which money can be used to amass power.

00:00:30.480 | And in the same way, the decentralization of money

00:00:33.320 | can be used to resist the corrupting nature of this power.

00:00:36.920 | Alex and I do not agree on everything,

00:00:39.880 | but we strive for the same betterment of humanity.

00:00:42.600 | He's sensitive to the suffering in the world

00:00:45.200 | and is dedicating his life to finding solutions

00:00:48.120 | that lessen that suffering.

00:00:49.880 | Whether Bitcoin is one such solution, I don't know,

00:00:53.400 | but I think it has a chance.

00:00:55.160 | And that means it is worth exploring deeply.

00:00:58.560 | I'm staying in this path of learning patiently

00:01:01.240 | and with as little ego as possible.

00:01:03.680 | I hope you come along with me on this journey as well.

00:01:07.160 | This is the Alex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:09.300 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:01:11.400 | in the description.

00:01:12.960 | We recorded this conversation a while ago

00:01:15.720 | and I thought I lost the audio

00:01:17.600 | and was really disappointed with myself

00:01:20.560 | for messing this thing up.

00:01:22.300 | But luckily last week I found it

00:01:25.360 | and so rescued from out of the abyss of non-existence.

00:01:30.360 | Here's my conversation with Alex Glassstein.

00:01:33.600 | What are some universal human rights

00:01:36.900 | that you believe all people should have?

00:01:39.000 | - So free speech, freedom of assembly,

00:01:43.200 | freedom of belief,

00:01:44.640 | freedom to participate in your government,

00:01:46.800 | the freedom to have privacy,

00:01:48.400 | the freedom to own things, property rights.

00:01:51.120 | These are all basic fundamental negative rights,

00:01:54.520 | what we call them.

00:01:55.760 | These are the basic fundamental human freedoms.

00:01:59.040 | - What does negative rights mean?

00:02:00.680 | - Negative rights are liberties

00:02:04.880 | and positive rights are entitlements.

00:02:07.240 | So after World War II, when the UN came together,

00:02:10.840 | it was largely a compromise between the Communist Soviet Union

00:02:13.380 | and the free United States, right?

00:02:16.040 | So the US had on its side

00:02:18.880 | of the UN Declaration of Human Rights,

00:02:21.240 | a bunch of liberties, essentially,

00:02:23.480 | things like free speech, freedom of association,

00:02:26.000 | freedom of assembly.

00:02:27.280 | The Soviets wanted entitlements like the right to work,

00:02:30.720 | the right to have housing, the right to water,

00:02:32.680 | the right to a vacation.

00:02:34.120 | So you actually read the UN Declaration for Human Rights.

00:02:36.800 | It's a negotiation between the Soviets and the Americans.

00:02:40.440 | Later, there was another document in the '70s

00:02:43.040 | released called the International Covenant

00:02:44.960 | on Civil and Political Rights.

00:02:46.680 | And this is what HRF uses as its sort of like lodestar,

00:02:50.760 | its founding document.

00:02:51.960 | And this is like essentially an international agreement

00:02:54.440 | on the negative rights.

00:02:56.280 | Those are the things we choose to focus on

00:02:58.360 | because essentially, authoritarian regimes can commit fraud

00:03:02.040 | and claim they're giving the positive rights,

00:03:04.280 | the entitlements, without having

00:03:06.600 | any of the negative liberties.

00:03:08.120 | And they can do that because they don't have

00:03:09.880 | any like free speech or press freedom.

00:03:11.920 | When you take people's basic fundamental freedoms away,

00:03:15.560 | it's quite easy to make like a Potemkin village

00:03:17.880 | and pretend that there's the entitlements

00:03:20.000 | and that we have good healthcare.

00:03:22.360 | And it's the same sort of thing

00:03:24.760 | that authoritarians have done for decades,

00:03:26.800 | Cuba and Venezuela and the Soviet Union.

00:03:29.800 | - Do you think it's possible for authoritarian regimes

00:03:32.120 | to manipulate, to kind of lie about the negative rights

00:03:35.600 | as well by saying that the people have free speech,

00:03:39.360 | the people have the freedom for assembly

00:03:41.640 | and all those kinds of things?

00:03:42.960 | Can't you still manipulate the idea

00:03:46.160 | that the citizenry still has those rights?

00:03:49.200 | - The opposition leader of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim,

00:03:52.720 | he once told me the funny joke that,

00:03:56.200 | you know, in my country, we have freedom of speech,

00:03:58.440 | we don't have freedom after speech.

00:04:00.520 | So yeah, they can absolutely manipulate whatever they want.

00:04:04.240 | But I've done research into socioeconomic data.

00:04:07.440 | And I guess what I'm telling you

00:04:08.480 | is that authoritarian regimes,

00:04:10.280 | which make up 53% of the world's population

00:04:13.680 | across 95 countries, about 4.3 billion people,

00:04:18.440 | those who live under those regimes

00:04:20.400 | are subject to massive fraud

00:04:23.520 | when it comes to things like literacy rates,

00:04:26.600 | life expectancy, any sort of socioeconomic data,

00:04:30.360 | economic growth, they can do this

00:04:32.520 | because there's no free press.

00:04:34.720 | So for us at the Human Rights Foundation

00:04:36.760 | and for people like me,

00:04:38.520 | we believe that the negative rights, the liberties,

00:04:41.360 | the things that are in, for example,

00:04:43.280 | the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution,

00:04:45.240 | these things are the table.

00:04:46.560 | And then we can build on top of that.

00:04:48.000 | We can build the rest of our societies on top of that.

00:04:50.560 | The freest countries in the world

00:04:51.840 | have both the negative liberties and the entitlements,

00:04:55.120 | like Norway, for example.

00:04:56.640 | But there's a big difference between Norway and North Korea.

00:04:59.720 | In North Korea, they only claim to have the entitlements

00:05:02.480 | and they definitely don't have the liberties.

00:05:05.000 | - Do you think there's one right

00:05:06.240 | that's more important than others?

00:05:07.560 | You kind of suggested the freedom of the press,

00:05:09.920 | maybe freedom of speech,

00:05:11.880 | that if you take that away,

00:05:13.600 | all the other ones kind of collapse

00:05:15.080 | along with like from a ripple effect.

00:05:17.280 | Is there something fundamental

00:05:18.720 | that you like to focus your attention on

00:05:21.880 | to defend, to protect, to make sure it's there?

00:05:25.160 | - Yeah, I think free speech is probably the most fundamental.

00:05:27.640 | It's probably why the founders chose to make it

00:05:29.800 | into the First Amendment.

00:05:31.040 | A lot of things are downstream from there.

00:05:34.600 | Property rights are also very, very important.

00:05:37.720 | Obviously, we've seen the toll of violent redistributionism

00:05:41.960 | in over the last 100 years,

00:05:44.160 | whether it was Lenin or Stalin or Mao or other regimes

00:05:48.880 | and everywhere from Ethiopia to colonialists everywhere

00:05:53.400 | to North Korea, it's not a pretty legacy.

00:05:56.760 | - Is free speech clear to you as a concept?

00:06:00.480 | There's been quite a few debates,

00:06:02.000 | especially in the digital age,

00:06:04.280 | what it means to violate freedom of speech.

00:06:06.360 | There's been a lot of new, like novel mechanisms

00:06:10.200 | for people to communicate with each other,

00:06:12.280 | like especially on social networks.

00:06:14.320 | And it seems that unclear,

00:06:17.000 | because a lot of times those are managed

00:06:18.920 | by private companies, it's unclear how much protection

00:06:23.160 | do the citizens have to have when they're communicating.

00:06:26.760 | A lot of people are being censored

00:06:28.440 | on these social platforms.

00:06:30.200 | Some people, even presidents,

00:06:31.840 | get removed from those social platforms.

00:06:35.440 | Have you thought about the freedom of speech

00:06:37.880 | in the United States, but in the world,

00:06:40.600 | as it's implemented in the 21st century,

00:06:47.480 | given the internet and all those kinds of things?

00:06:50.420 | - There is a Soviet dissident named Natan Sharansky

00:06:54.960 | who survived the regime.

00:06:59.880 | And he wrote a book in which his thesis

00:07:03.080 | was essentially the way that you can define a free society

00:07:06.160 | is through something called the Town Square Test.

00:07:08.600 | Can you go to a public space where you live

00:07:11.200 | and criticize your ruler loudly

00:07:13.840 | without fear of retribution?

00:07:15.960 | If you can do that, you have free speech.

00:07:18.320 | I think that's a pretty good litmus test.

00:07:20.440 | Most people in this world cannot do that.

00:07:21.920 | If you live in Havana, if you live in Moscow,

00:07:24.600 | if you live in Beijing, you cannot do that.

00:07:27.200 | And that's not a free society.

00:07:29.680 | In Austin, Texas, in Boston, Massachusetts,

00:07:32.800 | in London, in Santiago, Chile, in Tokyo, Japan,

00:07:36.880 | in many democracies, you can do that.

00:07:38.880 | And I think that that's a really helpful

00:07:40.340 | basic sort of litmus test.

00:07:42.600 | - Does the content of the criticism matter?

00:07:45.960 | Can it be complete lies, meaning conspiracy theories

00:07:50.960 | that involve claiming that the leader is,

00:07:55.000 | let's say, a lizard/pedophile/you know,

00:08:00.000 | I'm not saying that those are lies, look into it,

00:08:04.800 | but they're very unlikely phenomena.

00:08:08.680 | So like, does that matter?

00:08:10.480 | - I think it ends poorly when the state

00:08:13.560 | tries to restrict speech.

00:08:15.080 | I think that's kind of how I would define censorship.

00:08:18.520 | I think censorship and deplatforming are two different things.

00:08:22.520 | Private companies, you know,

00:08:25.800 | they get to make up their own rules

00:08:27.000 | about what's allowed on their platforms.

00:08:29.320 | And I think that's very different from a government

00:08:30.940 | with guns and an army restricting the speech

00:08:34.480 | of its citizens with threats of violence.

00:08:37.040 | These things are different for me.

00:08:38.960 | - That violence is a fundamental difference.

00:08:41.380 | I don't know, I've gotten the chance to have dinner

00:08:45.520 | with Alex Jones, and I've talked to him a few times offline.

00:08:51.240 | And it does, I understand why people are so off-put by him,

00:08:55.760 | but it does bother me that he's universally removed

00:08:58.380 | from every platform.

00:09:00.160 | It feels like there's many more evil people,

00:09:04.680 | bad people, compared to Alex Jones,

00:09:08.360 | who still are given a voice on these platforms.

00:09:12.520 | And so I'm uncomfortable with the universality

00:09:17.040 | of the application of this censorship

00:09:19.400 | by these platforms.

00:09:22.400 | But on the flip side, you're right,

00:09:23.800 | there's not a violence, there's not tanks,

00:09:27.040 | there's not guns behind that censorship.

00:09:29.480 | - Yeah, it's a bit of a generalization,

00:09:30.980 | but Alex Jones would be in prison, or dead,

00:09:34.360 | if he were in North Korea, or in Cuba,

00:09:37.160 | or in Russia, or in China.

00:09:38.760 | The authorities would not tolerate him to do what he did.

00:09:42.240 | And here, he can kind of do what he wants.

00:09:45.120 | He's encountering some resistance

00:09:46.640 | in the marketplace of ideas.

00:09:49.160 | Large organizations, corporations,

00:09:51.800 | and a lot of public sentiment

00:09:53.920 | in different parts of our country don't like him.

00:09:58.640 | They're doing their best to drown out his voice.

00:10:01.020 | But that's very different from a violent threat

00:10:03.840 | of censorship from the state.

00:10:05.280 | And that's what we study, that's what I study.

00:10:08.220 | What is the state doing?

00:10:09.560 | That's kind of paramount for me.

00:10:11.600 | - Yeah, and that's true.

00:10:12.520 | Because in the marketplace of ideas,

00:10:14.240 | there could be a company that springs up

00:10:15.880 | that gives Alex Jones a platform,

00:10:17.920 | and the United States is not going

00:10:20.440 | to prevent those companies from functioning.

00:10:23.400 | Of course, there's, from a technology perspective,

00:10:28.400 | there is AWS removing Parler from the platform.

00:10:32.120 | It gets a little weird, you know,

00:10:34.480 | as you get closer and closer to the compute infrastructure,

00:10:37.200 | because then you get closer and closer to the state,

00:10:39.240 | actually, the more you get to the infrastructure

00:10:43.420 | that's usually managed by the state,

00:10:45.320 | the closer it gets to then the control of the state.

00:10:48.400 | I would argue AWS is pretty damn close

00:10:50.880 | to infrastructure that's kind of controlled by the state.

00:10:53.740 | If you especially look at other nations, China, Russia,

00:10:58.740 | there's, I don't know who runs the compute infrastructure

00:11:02.840 | for Russia and China, but I bet the state

00:11:04.600 | has complete oversight over that.

00:11:07.220 | And so that level of compute infrastructure,

00:11:10.600 | having control about which social networks can

00:11:14.720 | and cannot operate is very uncomfortable to me.

00:11:17.320 | But you're right, I think it's good to focus

00:11:20.520 | on the obvious violations of these principles

00:11:22.920 | as opposed to the gray areas.

00:11:25.320 | Of course, the gray areas are fascinating.

00:11:27.420 | You mentioned HRF, Human Rights Foundation.

00:11:31.600 | What is it?

00:11:32.640 | What is its mission?

00:11:34.400 | - Yeah, so I've been working for HRF since 2007.

00:11:38.220 | We are a charity, a nonprofit, a 501(c)(3) based in New York

00:11:44.440 | and our mission is to promote and protect individual rights

00:11:48.840 | and freedoms in authoritarian societies around the world.

00:11:52.480 | So again, we define about 95 countries as authoritarian,

00:11:55.800 | meaning it's either a one party state

00:11:57.920 | or opposition politicians are outlawed or persecuted.

00:12:01.920 | There's no real free speech, there's no press freedom,

00:12:04.080 | there's no independent judiciary,

00:12:05.680 | there really aren't checks and balances

00:12:07.400 | and even trying to create like a human rights organization

00:12:10.240 | or like an environmental group would be illegal.

00:12:13.920 | And the majority of the world's population

00:12:15.640 | lives in that environment, that's very important.

00:12:17.200 | - You said 53%.

00:12:18.720 | - 53%, 4.3 billion people.

00:12:20.680 | - And I saw you outlined a lot of different sources

00:12:25.240 | of suffering in the world.

00:12:27.600 | And then you sort of put people living

00:12:29.760 | under authoritarian governments

00:12:32.560 | as like more than all of them.

00:12:34.320 | I forget all the examples you provided, but--

00:12:38.560 | - Sure, I mean--

00:12:39.760 | - Yeah, maybe you can mention if you remember.

00:12:41.880 | - The number of people who are refugees,

00:12:43.280 | the number of people who suffer from natural disasters,

00:12:45.520 | the number of people who live under abject poverty,

00:12:47.760 | the number of people who don't have access

00:12:49.640 | to clean drinking water, all of these are dwarfed

00:12:51.920 | by the number of people who live under authoritarianism.

00:12:54.880 | And yet it's not something that we talk about a lot

00:12:57.840 | because people are mercantilist

00:12:59.600 | and the powers that be are happy to sacrifice freedoms

00:13:03.000 | and privacy for money.

00:13:04.880 | We live in a profit seeking world.

00:13:07.480 | To get evidence of this, take a look at the list of sponsors

00:13:10.440 | of the upcoming Olympics in China,

00:13:13.520 | where the CCP is currently committing genocide

00:13:15.440 | against the weaker population.

00:13:17.080 | Or look at the number of people and the famous investors

00:13:19.960 | who went to Saudi Arabia a couple months ago

00:13:22.080 | for the Davos in the desert.

00:13:23.920 | I mean, Ray Dalio was there, all kinds of people were there.

00:13:27.000 | Or at least they were invited

00:13:28.000 | and they said they were gonna go.

00:13:29.640 | And this is a government that at the time

00:13:32.800 | was torturing a female activist

00:13:35.360 | who just wanted to drive a car.

00:13:37.000 | This is a government that had murdered Jamal Khashoggi

00:13:40.240 | in a brutal fashion just a couple years earlier.

00:13:44.200 | So I mean, at the end of the day,

00:13:45.320 | when it comes down to brass tacks,

00:13:47.320 | I mean, the powers that be,

00:13:50.280 | even the free countries are led by people

00:13:53.760 | who are very, very happy to sacrifice

00:13:56.960 | all these pretty words about human rights

00:13:58.520 | when it comes down to profits, unfortunately.

00:14:01.160 | - So do you think capitalism,

00:14:02.840 | that's maybe one of the flaws of capitalism

00:14:04.880 | is it turns a blind eye to injustices against human nature,

00:14:09.520 | against the human rights?

00:14:11.600 | Like it turns a blind eye to authoritarian governments?

00:14:15.040 | - Look, I think that at the end of the day,

00:14:17.200 | free trade is actually really good.

00:14:22.600 | And you can just look at France and Germany as an example

00:14:25.400 | of how a capitalist structure would develop.

00:14:28.400 | If you have two capitalist actors,

00:14:30.160 | they're very unlikely to fight each other.

00:14:31.520 | There's very unlikely to be violence, right?

00:14:33.400 | These are two countries which basically murdered

00:14:36.800 | some large percentage of each other's male population,

00:14:39.360 | three times in a hundred years

00:14:40.640 | in three different wars, right?

00:14:42.120 | And now today, war is like unthinkable.

00:14:44.520 | And a lot of that is because of increased collaboration,

00:14:47.480 | increased trade.

00:14:48.720 | So when you have two capitalist actors,

00:14:51.480 | they act in a very productive way with each other.

00:14:54.600 | But as soon as you introduce an authoritarian actor,

00:14:58.280 | all bets are off.

00:14:59.680 | So I think what you have is a conflict

00:15:01.800 | between capitalist actors and authoritarian actors.

00:15:05.520 | And at the end of the day, people need to,

00:15:08.920 | yes, have more than just capitalist intentions.

00:15:12.240 | In the geopolitical level I'm talking about,

00:15:16.400 | they need to actually take a stand for principles.

00:15:19.080 | Otherwise you have athletes and businesses and governments

00:15:23.920 | that are all too happy to do business

00:15:25.920 | with the Chinese Communist Party, for example, right now.

00:15:28.480 | I think that there is a little more

00:15:29.720 | than just kind of the pure profit, yes.

00:15:34.120 | - You mentioned what are the signs

00:15:37.200 | that the state is an authoritarian state.

00:15:40.600 | How do you know if you're living in an authoritarian state

00:15:44.480 | or when you study another nation

00:15:46.120 | and analyze the behavior of another nation,

00:15:48.000 | how do you know that's an authoritarian state?

00:15:51.760 | Is it as simple as them having a dictator?

00:15:54.600 | Is it as simple as them as declaring

00:15:56.360 | that they don't have a democracy

00:15:57.560 | or is there something more subtle?

00:15:59.200 | - There's a couple of good litmus tests.

00:16:01.280 | One is actually, can you have a gay pride parade?

00:16:03.720 | (laughing)

00:16:04.840 | - That's a good- - I'm serious.

00:16:06.000 | It actually lines up perfectly.

00:16:07.160 | It doesn't matter what religion the dictatorship is.

00:16:10.000 | They don't like minorities and they love to scapegoat,

00:16:13.160 | whether it's gays or religious minorities, et cetera.

00:16:15.960 | So it lines up pretty well.

00:16:17.160 | - That's really interesting.

00:16:18.000 | - If you cannot have a gay pride parade in your country

00:16:20.460 | because you're fearful that you're gonna get

00:16:22.520 | the crap kicked out of you,

00:16:24.000 | probably live in an authoritarian regime.

00:16:26.000 | - I'm sure that's not just about some kind of homophobia.

00:16:31.480 | Why is that?

00:16:32.320 | That's really interesting.

00:16:33.160 | - It's scapegoating. - 'Cause that's right.

00:16:34.000 | I'm going through, so the-

00:16:35.440 | - Fascism scapegoats minorities.

00:16:37.280 | - There's an other.

00:16:38.240 | You create an other group and then you-

00:16:40.960 | - Yeah, I mean, Uganda is a great example of this,

00:16:43.720 | but so is Saudi Arabia, so is China.

00:16:46.720 | I mean, so is Cuba.

00:16:48.360 | I mean, these are all regimes which demonize

00:16:50.720 | the LGBT communities.

00:16:53.760 | - It's interesting because, maybe you can correct me,

00:16:56.480 | but from my very distant outsider perspective,

00:17:02.880 | sort of the way that certain authoritarian governments

00:17:07.080 | speak about gay people is it's almost like,

00:17:11.480 | what is it?

00:17:12.360 | We don't have gay people in our country kind of idea

00:17:16.920 | as opposed to scapegoating, which is like-

00:17:20.100 | - Well, denial is the most powerful form of demonization.

00:17:23.800 | I mean, this is what the Iranian dictatorship does.

00:17:27.040 | A few years ago when Ahmadinejad,

00:17:29.480 | who was then sort of the de facto leader,

00:17:31.440 | he came to Columbia University and he tried to give a speech

00:17:34.080 | which you can look up and he tried to claim

00:17:35.840 | that there were no gays in Iran.

00:17:37.720 | And that's the most powerful form of demonization

00:17:39.800 | is trying to just wipe out your outer existence.

00:17:42.160 | There's other good litmus tests too.

00:17:43.960 | For example, you can think about comedy.

00:17:49.320 | Can you make money making fun of your government

00:17:51.920 | on television?

00:17:53.240 | If you cannot, you live in a dictatorship most likely.

00:17:55.880 | I mean, it's shocking to people that I work with

00:17:58.540 | who live in dictatorships when I tell them

00:18:00.800 | that not only are comedians able to safely make fun

00:18:04.400 | of our government, but they get paid very well to do so.

00:18:07.240 | That's a hallmark of a free society.

00:18:09.160 | So that's another good litmus test.

00:18:11.680 | - Hear that Tim Dillon, you should go to North Korea.

00:18:13.920 | Check it out.

00:18:14.760 | - Yeah, and look, there are tons of flaws with democracies.

00:18:17.680 | - These are really good tests by the way.

00:18:19.000 | - United States is a deeply flawed country in many ways.

00:18:21.280 | Our prison system is a disaster.

00:18:24.040 | There's a horrible war on drugs.

00:18:26.880 | We committed a grievous crime in my opinion,

00:18:30.780 | by invading Iraq.

00:18:31.700 | Like we did a lot of problematic things,

00:18:34.860 | but our core architecture is still an open society.

00:18:38.520 | The people who criticize the US the most,

00:18:41.560 | usually live within it.

00:18:44.000 | And if they were to move to a different country

00:18:47.320 | and try to use that criticism against their new rulers,

00:18:49.800 | they wouldn't fare so well.

00:18:51.560 | So whether it's Chomsky or whomever,

00:18:55.020 | if they were to go to Cuba and live in Cuba

00:18:56.960 | and try to criticize Cuba like they do America,

00:18:59.560 | it wouldn't last very long.

00:19:01.140 | So I think what's important to distinguish

00:19:03.360 | between open societies and closed ones,

00:19:06.180 | or like free societies and authoritarian regimes,

00:19:09.080 | it doesn't mean that your government's

00:19:10.860 | gonna be good all the time.

00:19:13.240 | What it means is that the citizens

00:19:14.760 | have a way to push for reform,

00:19:16.780 | have a way to hold the rulers accountable.

00:19:18.780 | So even if you don't like what the US government does,

00:19:21.880 | whether it was under Biden or Trump or Obama or Bush,

00:19:24.900 | we can rotate them through voting.

00:19:26.960 | And we have an independent Supreme Court

00:19:29.440 | that rotates over time.

00:19:30.760 | And we have people that we can elect directly

00:19:33.440 | to serve our interests.

00:19:34.760 | And then there's like a free press and there's lobbyists

00:19:37.880 | and all kinds of people that jostle for power.

00:19:40.120 | So there's a separation of powers.

00:19:42.240 | And I like to think about a free society really

00:19:45.020 | as like at the bottom of the foundation of the pyramid

00:19:48.720 | really would be free speech.

00:19:50.580 | And then you would have civil society,

00:19:52.360 | like for example, human rights organizations,

00:19:55.040 | environmental groups, stamp collectors, athletes,

00:19:57.640 | any groups that come together beyond the government's

00:19:59.920 | sort of strict instruction.

00:20:01.600 | And then on top of that, in the third level,

00:20:03.240 | you have separation of powers.

00:20:04.800 | Again, what I'm describing.

00:20:06.760 | So authoritarian regimes don't really have

00:20:08.180 | any of these layers to them, right?

00:20:10.160 | And then at the top, then you put elections,

00:20:13.200 | but the elections are meaningless

00:20:14.280 | if you don't have the foundation below.

00:20:16.000 | Every dictator gets elected.

00:20:17.540 | Kim Jong-un gets elected.

00:20:19.200 | He's the only person on the ballot.

00:20:21.220 | Every dictator from Hitler to Chavez, they all got elected.

00:20:24.920 | Elections on their own mean literally nothing.

00:20:27.560 | You have to have these other layers beneath

00:20:29.660 | to actually be an open and free society.

00:20:31.760 | I think it's very important for people to understand.

00:20:34.200 | - Although Hitler in an interesting way,

00:20:37.760 | at a certain point just said,

00:20:39.160 | "I'm gonna be a ruler forever," which is interesting.

00:20:42.160 | There's an important switch that happens

00:20:44.360 | when you, as opposed to having a facade of elections,

00:20:46.960 | you just put that aside and saying basically like,

00:20:49.840 | "We're not even doing this."

00:20:50.920 | - Yeah, there's like a ladder that you climb, the election,

00:20:53.680 | and you pull the ladder up,

00:20:54.800 | and then no one else can climb up.

00:20:56.280 | This sadly happened in Egypt,

00:20:58.080 | and it was quite predictable

00:20:59.560 | after Mubarak was ousted after the Arab Spring.

00:21:02.720 | Morsi came in, and it looked like the Muslim Brotherhood

00:21:06.680 | was not really gonna be very democratic,

00:21:09.640 | but it didn't really matter

00:21:10.480 | because then the military came back,

00:21:11.720 | and now we have Sisi, who's even worse than Mubarak.

00:21:14.160 | So a lot of times in these regimes, unfortunately,

00:21:17.520 | it's very difficult for people

00:21:18.680 | to build that democratic society afterwards.

00:21:20.960 | Some people have told me that when you live

00:21:24.020 | in a totalitarian or an authoritarian regime,

00:21:25.960 | it's kind of like a political desert.

00:21:27.440 | What grows in the desert?

00:21:28.640 | Scorpions and cacti, right?

00:21:30.360 | So basically people with very extreme views

00:21:32.960 | because you, as an authoritarian ruler,

00:21:35.160 | your best method for control is to get rid of the moderates.

00:21:38.480 | You have to crush the moderates.

00:21:39.600 | That's very important.

00:21:40.600 | You wanna have the only opposition to you be extremists.

00:21:43.800 | That way, when you go and have negotiations

00:21:45.440 | with the United States,

00:21:46.560 | you can kind of hold up the terrorists or whomever,

00:21:48.600 | the extremists, and say, "It's either us or them," right?

00:21:51.240 | And then the realists who run the US government

00:21:52.960 | are gonna choose you,

00:21:53.960 | and that's one of the reasons why the US government

00:21:56.320 | has supported so many dictators around the world

00:21:58.520 | over the last few decades.

00:22:00.640 | - Do you think authoritarian systems emerge naturally,

00:22:04.640 | like that's the natural state of things?

00:22:06.880 | If you incorporate what human nature is,

00:22:10.240 | well, is there always going to be corrupt people

00:22:13.320 | that rise to the top?

00:22:14.520 | And we almost have to construct systems

00:22:17.840 | that protect us against ourselves kind of thing.

00:22:21.560 | Another way to ask that is,

00:22:24.800 | what kind of systems protect us from our own human nature?

00:22:29.600 | - We started with authoritarianism or autocracy, right?

00:22:34.400 | Ruled by one or a small group oligarchy.

00:22:38.000 | And all humans lived under this structure

00:22:40.680 | for the virtual bulk of all human existence,

00:22:44.960 | only until pretty recently

00:22:46.360 | did we start having actual democracy.

00:22:49.040 | The idea that we should be ruled by rules,

00:22:51.400 | not by rulers, very powerful.

00:22:53.240 | Invented in many places across the world.

00:22:56.920 | Western Africa had this idea,

00:22:58.920 | and so did the ancient Greeks.

00:23:00.960 | And they started to implement it.

00:23:02.640 | Although, as most know,

00:23:03.800 | we didn't have full democracy for a long, long time,

00:23:06.440 | 'cause it was only property owners, only men,

00:23:09.040 | only people of a certain race.

00:23:11.440 | But this idea that we can rotate our rulers

00:23:15.080 | and that we could be ruled by rules is extremely powerful.

00:23:18.360 | And it really, for me, the ideas behind this,

00:23:22.400 | I think, unlocked a lot of the Industrial Revolution,

00:23:25.480 | these small personal freedoms that were allowed

00:23:27.160 | in some countries but not others.

00:23:28.640 | And they unlocked a lot of the scientific innovation

00:23:30.800 | over the last few hundred years.

00:23:33.200 | And to me, there's a really straight line

00:23:34.960 | between scientific inquiry, free speech, freedoms,

00:23:37.960 | and then more prosperity

00:23:39.600 | and more effectiveness as a civilization.

00:23:42.800 | So I think that democracy, ruled by the people,

00:23:47.120 | is definitely an upgrade from autocracy or oligarchy,

00:23:51.400 | which would be ruled by one or ruled by a small group.

00:23:55.360 | And I think that the Democratic Revolution

00:23:58.400 | has been an incredible thing for our world.

00:24:00.640 | You could do half-class full, half-class empty.

00:24:04.640 | The half-class full is that almost half the world

00:24:06.440 | lives under democracy.

00:24:07.960 | That's an incredible achievement.

00:24:09.600 | (laughing)

00:24:10.800 | - But just under half.

00:24:12.720 | - Yeah, just under half.

00:24:13.920 | But that's billions of people.

00:24:16.480 | It is billions of people.

00:24:17.840 | And if you look at the progress of things,

00:24:20.600 | it's getting better and better and better.

00:24:22.400 | I mean, if you, you know.

00:24:24.120 | - Yeah, we're a little bit of a stalemate here.

00:24:28.080 | Democracy's really blossomed between World War II

00:24:32.560 | and the year 2000, especially in the '80s and '90s.

00:24:35.800 | You had an incredible wave of fall,

00:24:39.960 | where many, many authoritarian regimes fell

00:24:42.120 | and were replaced by democracies.

00:24:44.040 | I think around 2015, the acceleration kind of

00:24:49.040 | came to a standstill a little bit.

00:24:51.240 | There's some good news in some countries

00:24:54.440 | and there's bad news in others.

00:24:56.840 | Like in the last 10 years, you've had, for example,

00:25:00.040 | the Philippines has gone backwards.

00:25:02.680 | Thailand has gone backwards.

00:25:04.520 | Bangladesh has gone backwards.

00:25:05.880 | Turkey has gone backwards.

00:25:07.120 | That's like a half billion people right there.

00:25:09.440 | So you've had some positives.

00:25:12.480 | Like, you know, there was positive movement forward

00:25:15.480 | in Armenia, Malaysia, some other countries.

00:25:18.800 | But we're kind of at a stalemate right now.

00:25:21.000 | And what most people fear about where we are right now,

00:25:25.880 | who I respect, is what is the digital transformation

00:25:29.200 | of the world due to this like progress of democracy

00:25:32.480 | or of open societies?

00:25:34.120 | And that's what concerns me the most.

00:25:36.800 | - Oh, interesting.

00:25:37.640 | So I have, and we'll talk about one of the most

00:25:40.600 | fascinating technologies, which is Bitcoin,

00:25:42.760 | how it can help.

00:25:43.600 | But I have a sense that technology,

00:25:47.120 | like most technological innovations will give power

00:25:51.400 | to the individuals, will fight authoritarian governments

00:25:56.400 | as opposed to give more power to authoritarian governments.

00:26:00.360 | But your sense is there's ways to give,

00:26:03.760 | for technology to be utilized as a tool

00:26:06.920 | for the abuse of the citizenry.

00:26:08.920 | - I've seen both.

00:26:10.400 | In my work at Ahrefs, I started by helping

00:26:13.120 | to put together backpacks with foreign information

00:26:15.840 | that we sent to the Cuban Underground Library Movement.

00:26:18.520 | So in Cuba, you know, to own a book,

00:26:20.800 | at the time you had to have the government's permission.

00:26:23.440 | There was very little internet penetration, okay?

00:26:25.800 | So we would send in movies, you know,

00:26:28.400 | V for Vendetta dubbed into Spanish,

00:26:30.320 | and people would sit inside their homes

00:26:32.920 | and they'd watch it.

00:26:33.960 | And they would answer questions with each other.

00:26:35.760 | And it was very powerful.

00:26:36.800 | And then after that, I worked with people

00:26:38.480 | inside North Korea.

00:26:39.740 | We would send in flash drives.

00:26:41.160 | We have this program called Flash Drives for Freedom.

00:26:42.760 | We've sent over a hundred thousand flash drives

00:26:45.840 | in our work into North Korea,

00:26:47.720 | a country of about 25 million people.

00:26:49.480 | That's a lot.

00:26:50.320 | It's a big, big difference.

00:26:51.140 | That's, you know, many, many millions of hours

00:26:52.960 | of films, books, movies, et cetera.

00:26:55.160 | So I've seen the power that technology can have

00:26:57.280 | where, you know, in the '60s and '70s,

00:27:00.320 | you know, to get, to break an information blockade,

00:27:02.280 | you had to like send in crates of books

00:27:03.840 | into a communist country.

00:27:05.320 | So now all of a sudden you can send the entire contents

00:27:07.840 | of what was once the Library of Alexandria

00:27:10.260 | on something the size of your thumbnail.

00:27:11.940 | Like that's remarkable.

00:27:13.100 | So obviously I've seen the positives of technology.

00:27:15.500 | We'll certainly get into Bitcoin,

00:27:17.120 | but I'm, you know, very concerned

00:27:18.740 | about essentially big data analysis,

00:27:20.820 | like what people call AI or general, you know,

00:27:23.460 | specific kinds of AI, like very concerning.

00:27:26.680 | I think these are very authoritarian.

00:27:28.400 | I mean, it's very hard to make a case

00:27:30.620 | that AI is going to be good for human rights.

00:27:33.640 | Very difficult, in my opinion.

00:27:35.720 | But it may be good for health.

00:27:37.100 | It may be good for our efforts to protect the planet.

00:27:40.380 | It may be good for a lot of scientific things.

00:27:43.060 | I find it very hard to believe

00:27:44.180 | it'll be good for civil liberties.

00:27:45.780 | - Oh, that's fun.

00:27:46.660 | This is fun 'cause I disagree.

00:27:48.580 | - Give me your examples.

00:27:50.700 | I'm serious.

00:27:52.420 | What AI applications will improve civil liberties?

00:27:55.500 | - I thought you meant examples of stuff

00:27:58.860 | that's already out there.

00:28:00.220 | 'Cause I can give you examples that, for example,

00:28:03.060 | the kind of things that I would like to work on,

00:28:04.920 | but also the kind of things I'm hoping to see,

00:28:07.700 | which is AI could be used by centralized powers,

00:28:12.700 | by governments, by big organizations

00:28:16.300 | like Facebook and Twitter and so on,

00:28:18.820 | to collect data about people.

00:28:21.940 | - Right. - Right.

00:28:23.540 | But I believe there's a huge hunger among people

00:28:27.820 | to have control over their own data.

00:28:31.400 | So instead, you can have AI that's distributed

00:28:35.420 | where people have complete ownership

00:28:37.020 | of their little AI systems.

00:28:39.220 | So like the kind of stuff that I would like to build

00:28:41.940 | or like to see to be built is,

00:28:45.100 | you could think of it as personal assistance

00:28:47.500 | or AI that's owned by you.

00:28:51.380 | And you get to give it out.

00:28:53.340 | You have complete control over all of your data.

00:28:55.620 | You have complete control over everything

00:28:58.140 | that's learnable about your day-to-day experiences

00:29:01.820 | that could be useful in the market of goods and ideas

00:29:06.820 | and all those kinds of things.

00:29:08.220 | So it has to do with,

00:29:10.300 | so I know you talk about the surveillance,

00:29:13.100 | which is very interesting.

00:29:14.580 | It's who gets to have control of the data.

00:29:17.580 | And I think, I believe there's a lot of hunger

00:29:21.060 | among regular people to have control over their data.

00:29:28.020 | Such that if you want to create a business,

00:29:31.420 | you have a lot of money to be made

00:29:33.300 | from a capitalist perspective

00:29:35.100 | by providing products that let people control their data,

00:29:38.660 | where you have no control.

00:29:40.740 | - Sounds like to me, you're describing encryption

00:29:43.380 | or at least the ability to encrypt,

00:29:45.620 | the ability to use digital keys to secure your property.

00:29:49.900 | And that to me is a very powerful individual right,

00:29:54.220 | force for individual rights, very powerful.

00:29:56.500 | And it's what animates Bitcoin ultimately,

00:29:58.460 | which we'll get into.

00:30:00.140 | But for me, at least the way I look at it today in 2021,

00:30:03.940 | the threat from big data analysis

00:30:07.140 | used by governments and authoritarian regimes is terrifying.

00:30:10.340 | I mean, to actually see

00:30:11.300 | what the Chinese Communist Party is doing,

00:30:13.480 | where they have hundreds of millions of cameras

00:30:15.740 | overseeing society,

00:30:17.220 | cameras that can tell who's a Uyghur and who's a Han,

00:30:20.560 | that to me is terrifying.

00:30:22.120 | And everything is sorted instantly.

00:30:24.340 | There are super computers that are built in Urumqi,

00:30:27.740 | in Xinjiang for this explicit purpose.

00:30:30.460 | And it allows the government to quickly sort

00:30:33.700 | and basically commit genocide a lot faster.

00:30:35.780 | And it's really scary.

00:30:37.020 | So I do agree and I've seen personally

00:30:39.660 | how powerful technology can be as a force for freedom.

00:30:43.820 | But I'm very, very worried about big data analysis

00:30:46.980 | in the hands of governments.

00:30:48.160 | - See, that's funny 'cause I tend to see governments

00:30:51.020 | as ultimately incompetent in the space of technology

00:30:53.880 | to where there will always be lagging behind.

00:30:56.420 | So you look at what the Chinese surveillance systems

00:30:58.900 | are doing.

00:31:00.140 | I believe once it started getting bad enough

00:31:03.060 | that technologies would be created to resist that.

00:31:08.980 | So to mess with it from the hacker community,

00:31:12.180 | but also from the individual community.

00:31:14.800 | So surveillance is actually very difficult

00:31:16.540 | from a centralized perspective to detect,

00:31:20.280 | to collect data about you, to detect everything you are,

00:31:22.400 | because you can spoof a lot of that information.

00:31:24.800 | So I believe you can put power in the hands of the citizens

00:31:27.980 | to sort of feed the government fake data,

00:31:31.060 | to confuse it at a mass scale

00:31:33.260 | to where it'll make their surveillance less effective.

00:31:36.740 | But that, okay, that could be very sort of hopeful.

00:31:39.740 | - Yeah, I mean, the practical application in Xinjiang,

00:31:42.300 | which is a territory the size of Alaska,

00:31:44.660 | where a large percentage of the population

00:31:46.620 | has been put into prison camps.

00:31:48.900 | The current issue of the New Yorker

00:31:50.100 | has an absolutely harrowing essay

00:31:52.540 | that tells the story of one such woman

00:31:55.220 | who in, I believe, 2017 got sucked into one of these camps

00:31:59.900 | and it took her a year or more to get out.

00:32:03.240 | And she's talking about how in each home in Xinjiang,

00:32:08.080 | each home has a QR code on it that the police can scan

00:32:10.620 | and get like a quick instant download of who lives there.

00:32:13.360 | Each car has like a scannable code.

00:32:17.700 | Every single person has their DNA taken

00:32:20.380 | and the DNA is being sifted through

00:32:22.140 | and analyzed by algorithms.

00:32:24.160 | So this is like the Chinese government's laboratory

00:32:26.560 | for how can we use technology to oppress.

00:32:29.740 | It's like sort of like digital Leninism.

00:32:31.300 | And that to me is one of the biggest risks

00:32:34.940 | in our world today and it's not talked about enough.

00:32:37.340 | - That's interesting.

00:32:38.180 | So technology basically enables

00:32:40.940 | the automation of oppression.

00:32:42.460 | - Absolutely.

00:32:43.300 | - So like.

00:32:44.500 | - But define technology.

00:32:46.940 | - Big data analysis and maybe specific AI, et cetera does.

00:32:51.700 | But encryption allows us to fight back.

00:32:53.860 | It's very important people understand

00:32:55.060 | we have tools to fight back.

00:32:56.500 | Big Brother can only grow if it can feed on your data.

00:33:02.220 | If it can't get your data, it can't grow.

00:33:04.580 | So you have to willingly give up stuff to the cloud

00:33:08.780 | for this monster to grow.

00:33:10.220 | We can make the monster hungry and shrink it

00:33:13.820 | if we give it less data.

00:33:15.100 | And I think that's where I would agree with you

00:33:16.420 | in terms of like wanting to empower people

00:33:18.340 | to be able to do stuff on their own terms

00:33:21.220 | in a sovereign way.

00:33:22.580 | And yeah, maybe you're kind of thinking

00:33:25.140 | like the personal assistant who helps out Tony Stark

00:33:27.260 | or something like that.

00:33:28.420 | And that's yeah, as long as there's no back doors

00:33:30.860 | and that's a sovereign thing that you've popped up

00:33:32.660 | and created and you have the keys to, absolutely.

00:33:36.000 | But practically speaking, if we're talking about

00:33:39.700 | the world today as is, we need to be concerned

00:33:43.140 | about the way that authoritarian regimes

00:33:44.740 | are using big data analysis.

00:33:46.460 | And they're gonna buy the software and this equipment

00:33:48.780 | from the Chinese government.

00:33:49.700 | They're already doing it.

00:33:50.940 | Street level surveillance has already been purchased

00:33:53.420 | by governments everywhere from Latin America

00:33:55.020 | to Sub-Saharan Africa to the heart of Europe.

00:33:58.100 | There's been huge scandals in Britain

00:33:59.820 | over their purchase of Chinese surveillance technology.

00:34:02.580 | Part of the Chinese government's Belt and Road campaign,

00:34:06.260 | which is basically to build the infrastructure

00:34:09.360 | of this century and to be in control of it,

00:34:12.340 | part of that idea is to ship out

00:34:14.900 | and install surveillance technology,

00:34:17.660 | both at the telecom level and at the surveillance level

00:34:20.380 | across dozens of countries around the world

00:34:22.420 | and have that back door.

00:34:24.020 | There's this national security law in China,

00:34:26.040 | which states that companies that are Chinese,

00:34:28.420 | which are abroad, are mandated to send data

00:34:30.660 | back to Beijing.

00:34:32.060 | So they are building this huge global surveillance state.

00:34:35.380 | And again, not talked about enough,

00:34:37.380 | you should go Google and research the Belt and Road.

00:34:40.060 | I think it's very important that we confront this.

00:34:42.560 | - Yeah, I'm really glad you're talking about it

00:34:45.740 | because it's probably important to understand.

00:34:48.300 | I'm also hopeful that as people get educated

00:34:52.720 | about how much their data, when collected, unencrypted,

00:34:57.560 | but in general, can be used to harm them.

00:35:01.100 | I mean, it's almost like an education.

00:35:02.860 | I feel like if you know,

00:35:07.620 | it's a double-edged sword

00:35:08.700 | because I feel like people become fearful too easily

00:35:11.180 | and that actually has a very negative effect

00:35:12.940 | on the quality of life.

00:35:14.620 | In some sense, you want to have tools

00:35:16.700 | that allow you to live freely as opposed to live in fear.

00:35:19.160 | If you live in fear, it's not a good way to live.

00:35:22.540 | So it's a balance.

00:35:24.420 | - It's a free society versus a fear society.

00:35:26.180 | - Yeah, fear society.

00:35:27.020 | - And look, people are,

00:35:28.300 | it's all about the trade-offs you make in your daily life.

00:35:30.460 | Like living more privately with more freedom

00:35:33.140 | is less convenient.

00:35:35.620 | You trade freedom and privacy for convenience

00:35:39.460 | and comfort and speed.

00:35:41.180 | Absolutely, it's an engineering decision

00:35:43.020 | in everything that you do.

00:35:44.320 | In the West, in advanced democracies,

00:35:49.100 | we have not necessarily personally seen

00:35:53.460 | the results of that trade-off

00:35:54.500 | because we live in these free societies

00:35:56.940 | that have these checks and balances and freedoms.

00:35:59.180 | But as soon as you step into an authoritarian state

00:36:01.260 | and you make those trade-offs,

00:36:02.620 | your life immediately becomes more restrictive.

00:36:05.860 | And what people are worried about is that

00:36:07.960 | even in advanced economies, market democracies, et cetera,

00:36:12.960 | the people are worried that they might not survive

00:36:16.080 | the great social digital transformation.

00:36:19.580 | Look at what the NSA is capable of doing.

00:36:23.020 | I mean, for now, it's not that big of a problem

00:36:26.560 | because we still have free speech.

00:36:28.980 | But it's deeply concerning what Snowden revealed,

00:36:31.720 | and it's a nice reminder that we need to be focused

00:36:34.900 | on privacy and encryption and on helping users

00:36:38.020 | become more sovereign regardless of where you live.

00:36:41.380 | It's kind of like a crutch to live in a free society.

00:36:43.780 | Like, you know, it's almost like a free lunch in a way.

00:36:47.220 | You're not gonna be sent to a prison camp

00:36:49.280 | because of the color of your skin or your beliefs

00:36:51.940 | or what you say about the government.

00:36:54.060 | And you're very lucky.

00:36:55.420 | Again, most people do live in a society

00:36:57.500 | where you can be persecuted for those things.

00:37:00.340 | And I feel like, especially in America, we forget that.

00:37:03.580 | We're distanced from that really strong reality, you know?

00:37:07.960 | - On the topic of Snowden and the NSA,

00:37:11.140 | what should we be thinking about?

00:37:12.980 | 'Cause that feels like already an outdated

00:37:15.020 | set of conversations because of the information

00:37:17.540 | we've gotten from the past.

00:37:19.460 | It feels like everything's gotten quiet now

00:37:21.440 | in terms of how much we actually know about the--

00:37:23.380 | - Hugely important.

00:37:24.980 | I think the two lessons from Snowden are A,

00:37:28.420 | the Patriot Act and the War on Terror and mass surveillance

00:37:31.100 | are not necessary for our democracy and for our freedoms.

00:37:34.960 | This was a false choice.

00:37:37.220 | We never had to sacrifice them to be safer.

00:37:39.380 | And we've seen that.

00:37:41.660 | Government has spent hundreds and hundreds

00:37:43.140 | of millions of dollars on these surveillance programs

00:37:45.620 | that you can read about have amounted to very little,

00:37:48.700 | except for tremendous bureaucratic waste

00:37:50.380 | and the erosion of our freedoms.

00:37:54.260 | But at the same time, we need to practice more privacy.

00:37:57.260 | And the dramatic increase in the usage of Signal,

00:38:00.460 | for example, has been really, really great to see.

00:38:03.940 | It's fantastic that tens of millions of people

00:38:05.980 | are downloading Signal and using it.

00:38:08.380 | You should try to be onboarding more and more

00:38:10.900 | of your conversations onto Signal, for example,

00:38:13.540 | where governments can't see what you're saying.

00:38:16.260 | Maybe they can see the metadata.

00:38:17.820 | Maybe they can see that you sent your phone number,

00:38:20.240 | sent a message to someone else's phone number at this time,

00:38:23.540 | but they can't see what's inside.

00:38:25.080 | So using encryption in your life is very, very important.

00:38:27.620 | That's a good starting point.

00:38:29.100 | I would say that's kind of step A.

00:38:30.800 | - The ideas of democracy,

00:38:34.380 | the ideas of the balance of power,

00:38:36.420 | all the ideas that we were talking about,

00:38:40.580 | the constructs, were inventions.

00:38:44.260 | I wonder if there's other inventions

00:38:46.500 | that will allow us to sort of not engage,

00:38:50.140 | not give governments or any centralized institutions

00:38:53.780 | so much power.

00:38:55.460 | Like why do citizens have to use Signal?

00:38:59.100 | Why?

00:38:59.940 | Because that's an effort.

00:39:00.760 | You have to be,

00:39:01.600 | 'cause you have to like understand exactly why.

00:39:03.860 | So that's a nice little solution

00:39:05.140 | for a particular set of problems.

00:39:06.460 | But like there's a million other ways

00:39:08.020 | that data I'm sure is being collected constantly.

00:39:11.560 | If we don't create a system

00:39:14.340 | that prevents the establishments of these centralized powers,

00:39:18.760 | then we'll always have this problem.

00:39:20.820 | - Yeah, I think we can keep it simple

00:39:22.020 | for the purposes of this conversation.

00:39:23.700 | You have politics, information, and money.

00:39:25.900 | Those are the three things

00:39:26.740 | I would encourage us to focus on.

00:39:28.820 | In politics, yes, someone invented democracy.

00:39:32.140 | I mean, whether it was the Greeks,

00:39:34.340 | the West Africans, or many others around the world

00:39:36.620 | around the same time invented this idea

00:39:38.380 | that we should be ruled by rules and not by rulers, right?

00:39:41.660 | And that has evolved dramatically, right?

00:39:45.380 | And then you have information.

00:39:46.900 | Information also used to be highly centralized, right?

00:39:50.060 | Think about how rich you had to be

00:39:52.220 | to gain access to a library before the printing press,

00:39:54.700 | or how much money you had to have,

00:39:56.940 | or how close to the king or the feudal lord you had to be

00:40:00.480 | to be able to have that ability.

00:40:02.580 | But now, the majority of the world,

00:40:05.900 | billions of people have access to all information

00:40:07.980 | in their pocket, and they can set up an account

00:40:09.580 | on social media and get their word out.

00:40:11.460 | So not only politics,

00:40:13.360 | but information has been dramatically decentralized.

00:40:17.120 | And I would say that encrypted messaging

00:40:19.820 | is kind of a corollary to that second innovation.

00:40:22.860 | And as much as now people are more effortlessly,

00:40:26.060 | like signal is a lot easier to use than PGP, for example,

00:40:29.580 | they're more easily able to practice privacy

00:40:32.020 | when it comes to having private messages globally.

00:40:35.980 | These are all good things, and we need to keep pushing.

00:40:38.280 | And I think money is, honestly,

00:40:40.940 | maybe the most important piece.

00:40:42.540 | And that's why I spend so much time thinking about Bitcoin.

00:40:45.420 | - Okay, so politics, information, money.

00:40:49.620 | - Yes.

00:40:50.460 | - Let's talk about money.

00:40:52.020 | What is money and why is it important

00:40:54.180 | to think about in the context of human rights?

00:40:57.480 | - I have witnessed money be peripheralized.

00:41:03.540 | It has taken a back seat in the human rights conversation.

00:41:07.700 | The idea of currency, who makes the money,

00:41:10.020 | who makes the rules, who issues it,

00:41:12.040 | who sets the interest rates, all these things,

00:41:14.780 | it is not on the menu of human rights activists.

00:41:17.180 | If you just do like a systematic study

00:41:18.760 | of like the human rights discourse

00:41:20.140 | over the last several decades, money is not there.

00:41:23.540 | It's also not really taught in schools.

00:41:25.100 | Like children don't really learn about money.

00:41:26.940 | Where does it come from?

00:41:28.060 | It's kind of hidden from a lot of our discourse.

00:41:31.960 | Only really when I got into Bitcoin

00:41:35.180 | did I start learning more about money.

00:41:37.940 | I spent 10 years at the Human Rights Foundation,

00:41:40.580 | and we did all kinds of programs around the world.

00:41:43.140 | We convened Oslo Freedom Forums in different places,

00:41:45.660 | and I got to meet hundreds of dissidents.

00:41:47.900 | And very rarely did they ever speak about currency

00:41:50.160 | or bank accounts or moving money from one place to another.

00:41:53.740 | But when I started asking them,

00:41:55.620 | they always had amazing stories about money, always.

00:41:58.320 | I mean, my friend Ivan Mawire,

00:41:59.780 | who started the Disflag Movement in Zimbabwe,

00:42:03.140 | which ended up toppling Robert Mugabe,

00:42:05.320 | when I asked him to come to San Francisco

00:42:07.160 | to give a talk about hyperinflation, which he lived through,

00:42:10.340 | he said, "No one's ever asked me to do that before,

00:42:12.660 | "but I'll come."

00:42:13.500 | And he came, this was about three years ago.

00:42:15.540 | And the first thing he did when he got on the stage

00:42:17.180 | was he opened up a shirt and he brought out a necklace

00:42:19.620 | that had the 1980 Zimbabwean dollar on it.

00:42:21.940 | And he said, "We in the activist community wear this

00:42:25.180 | "as a symbol of where our country used to be,

00:42:27.040 | "because the Zimbabwean dollar

00:42:28.300 | "used to be worth two British pounds."

00:42:30.220 | And then, of course, over the next two and a half decades

00:42:33.660 | of economic mismanagement and corruption by Mugabe,

00:42:37.060 | it got inflated out of existence, right?

00:42:38.580 | You've seen those like $100 trillion Zimbabwean notes.

00:42:41.880 | So he had to live through that,

00:42:43.020 | which was terrible and crushing.

00:42:45.420 | But he is an expert on money.

00:42:47.420 | If you actually talk to human rights activists about money,

00:42:49.920 | they know a lot about money.

00:42:51.780 | They're just not usually asked to talk about it.

00:42:54.200 | So for me, money, when I study money or look at money,

00:42:59.200 | it's really about control.

00:43:01.100 | Who is creating it and how much does the population know

00:43:04.260 | about the creation of that money?

00:43:06.500 | And when it comes to Bitcoin, it's really the people's money.

00:43:09.380 | Like there is no shadowy force in charge of it.

00:43:12.500 | We all know the rules.

00:43:13.980 | We all know how it's gonna get minted

00:43:15.580 | and how it's gonna get printed.

00:43:17.300 | And that information is out there for everybody to see.

00:43:20.260 | And there's no like special group of rules

00:43:22.300 | for one group of people or another group.

00:43:25.500 | A billionaire and a refugee are the same

00:43:28.180 | in the eyes of the protocol.

00:43:29.980 | This is a rather revolutionary concept.

00:43:33.140 | And in the same way that democracy allowed us

00:43:35.860 | to decentralize politics and have checks and balances,

00:43:38.900 | and in the same way that the internet

00:43:40.380 | is this culmination of technologies

00:43:41.920 | that allowed us to decentralize information,

00:43:44.700 | access to and control over it,

00:43:47.060 | Bitcoin, you know, decentralizes money.

00:43:49.820 | I mean, no longer again, is there one group of people

00:43:52.960 | who can just change it arbitrarily?

00:43:54.880 | We're all in the same playing field.

00:43:56.920 | And I think that that is a tremendous innovation.

00:43:59.360 | - You know, from one perspective,

00:44:02.360 | money and inflation, hyperinflation,

00:44:05.120 | is a kind of symptom of corruption

00:44:08.080 | as opposed to the core of the corruption.

00:44:11.620 | And at the flip side, in terms of resisting the corruption,

00:44:15.440 | resisting the abuse of human rights,

00:44:19.300 | it's interesting to think that fighting inflation

00:44:24.840 | or fighting the mismanagement of the money supply

00:44:29.840 | is a way to fight back authoritarianism

00:44:35.000 | or to fight authoritarianism.

00:44:37.060 | And that's an interesting concept

00:44:40.700 | that I think was introduced to me

00:44:42.520 | by just plugging myself intellectually

00:44:45.000 | into the Bitcoin community,

00:44:46.160 | but also just cryptocurrency in general.

00:44:48.560 | It's to like, it's not that money is a symptom.

00:44:53.560 | You know, money is a tool to fight back too.

00:44:57.920 | - Absolutely.

00:45:00.180 | - So in what way can Bitcoin be used

00:45:03.680 | to fight authoritarianism?

00:45:07.720 | - Yes. - Not just in the United States,

00:45:10.320 | but all of those 53% that you're referring to.

00:45:13.660 | How can Bitcoin help?

00:45:15.360 | - So we talked about authoritarianism

00:45:17.520 | and we talked about the surveillance state.

00:45:20.240 | To me, Bitcoin has two kind of key mechanisms

00:45:23.560 | through which it can help us.

00:45:25.000 | Number one, it's a sovereign savings account.

00:45:29.160 | It's debasement proof,

00:45:30.400 | meaning the government cannot print more

00:45:32.040 | whenever they want.

00:45:33.720 | This is very, very different from fiat currency,

00:45:35.960 | which by its very name, its very nature,

00:45:38.520 | can be issued on sort of demand, right, by the rulers.

00:45:41.840 | And while I live in a country

00:45:43.920 | where the rulers do a reasonable job

00:45:46.080 | of managing the money, most people aren't so lucky.

00:45:48.800 | So only 13% of humans in the world

00:45:51.640 | live in a country that's a liberal democracy

00:45:53.520 | with property rights

00:45:54.640 | and has what we call a reserve currency,

00:45:57.080 | meaning a currency so stable and desirable

00:45:58.960 | that other countries save in it

00:46:00.400 | at the central bank level, right?

00:46:02.120 | You basically have the US, the UK, Australia,

00:46:06.080 | Switzerland, the Euro, and Canada.

00:46:09.000 | I mean, those are like reserve currencies

00:46:10.640 | and these are liberal democracies

00:46:11.880 | where people have reasonable guarantees

00:46:13.160 | over property rights.

00:46:14.280 | Everybody else either lives under like a weaker currency

00:46:17.800 | or an authoritarian regime.

00:46:19.440 | That's 87% of the world's population,

00:46:21.300 | almost 7 billion people.

00:46:22.720 | So for them, a sovereign savings account

00:46:26.120 | that's permissionless,

00:46:26.960 | meaning you don't have to have ID to use it,

00:46:28.920 | is a big, big deal.

00:46:30.160 | And a lot of people talk about Zimbabwe or Venezuela

00:46:32.600 | as some like isolated cases.

00:46:34.440 | Oh, well, you know, hyperinflation only happens

00:46:37.420 | in those two countries.

00:46:39.240 | I actually did some research into this

00:46:40.720 | and there's about one point,

00:46:42.840 | over, you know, close to 1.3 billion people

00:46:46.920 | who live under double or triple digit inflation.

00:46:49.200 | This is not an isolated instance.

00:46:51.240 | We're talking huge countries.

00:46:52.800 | Nigeria, 200 million people, 15% inflation.

00:46:56.000 | Turkey, 15% inflation for 100 million people.

00:46:59.440 | Argentina, 40% inflation for a country of 45 million people.

00:47:04.040 | So you can go down the list.

00:47:04.920 | There's about 35 countries where like people's earnings,

00:47:08.360 | their wages are literally disappearing

00:47:11.040 | in front of their eyes over a matter of weeks or months

00:47:14.080 | against things like the dollar, gold, real estate, right?

00:47:17.280 | So this is a huge issue.

00:47:19.480 | It absolutely is a human rights issue for me.

00:47:21.240 | I mean, when it comes to your time and energy,

00:47:23.260 | having control over that or having it stolen from you,

00:47:26.320 | I think this is pretty clear.

00:47:27.880 | And Bitcoin is like an immediate, low cost,

00:47:31.480 | easily accessible solution for people.

00:47:34.040 | And I've learned this not from my own assumptions,

00:47:37.200 | but by talking to people, by interviewing dozens of people,

00:47:40.840 | whether it's in Sudan,

00:47:42.680 | which currently has triple digit inflation,

00:47:45.720 | or people who've escaped from Syria,

00:47:48.840 | who have used Bitcoin to get their wealth out of the country

00:47:51.520 | and then also to make payments back to people inside,

00:47:54.600 | or Venezuela or elsewhere.

00:47:56.240 | It's very, very powerful.

00:47:58.320 | - I think some very small percentage of people

00:48:00.440 | have used, have owned Bitcoin.

00:48:02.720 | What's it something like 1% of the world?

00:48:05.240 | Whatever the number is, it's small.

00:48:07.040 | - Call it 2% for the purposes of our time.

00:48:09.360 | About a little under 200 million people.

00:48:12.200 | - Wow, yeah.

00:48:13.160 | - At most right now.

00:48:15.040 | - So if we look at Zimbabwe, Sudan, if we look at-

00:48:17.920 | - Small percentages of people.

00:48:19.840 | - Do you think the technology is mature enough?

00:48:22.320 | 'Cause it's not just about the idea,

00:48:23.720 | it's also about the implementation of it.

00:48:25.660 | Like, you know, Bitcoin for the most part

00:48:29.580 | requires access to the internet.

00:48:32.840 | - Yeah.

00:48:33.680 | - And what do you think about accessibility

00:48:38.680 | of this technology now as a method of activism

00:48:41.880 | in the worst parts of the world?

00:48:43.340 | We often think, like all the conversations we've had

00:48:45.420 | about Bitcoin is essentially middle-class,

00:48:48.220 | like wealthy people relative to the rest of the world.

00:48:51.100 | They're kind of talking with sort of investment

00:48:53.400 | and high concept ideas.

00:48:55.880 | Then there's also the people in the world who are suffering,

00:48:58.300 | who are living through hyperinflation.

00:49:01.020 | They may not have a computer or access to the internet.

00:49:03.820 | How do you think Bitcoin can help there?

00:49:05.900 | - Yeah, so again, we have one clear use case,

00:49:08.940 | which is a sovereign savings account

00:49:10.660 | that you can control, right?

00:49:11.980 | The other use case is an unstoppable payments network.

00:49:15.140 | This is very important for people who live behind,

00:49:16.980 | for example, sanctions.

00:49:18.540 | Like the US basically weaponizes the dollar

00:49:21.740 | and it like sanctions different countries.

00:49:24.220 | And instead of sanctioning like a handful of rulers,

00:49:27.020 | for example, which I would support,

00:49:28.400 | this is like a Magnitsky or smart sanctions.

00:49:30.740 | Sometimes we'll just say,

00:49:31.740 | we're just gonna shut off this whole country.

00:49:33.100 | - So the people suffer.

00:49:34.160 | - Cuba or Iran are good examples.

00:49:36.000 | Average people suffer, right?

00:49:37.600 | So people in those two countries I just mentioned,

00:49:40.060 | Cuba, Iran, or even Palestine,

00:49:41.840 | which is also sort of like blockaded by the Israelis.

00:49:45.500 | So you have Cuba, Iran, Palestine are three good examples

00:49:48.660 | where people inside all three of those countries now

00:49:50.880 | are using Bitcoin to do commerce, do their business,

00:49:53.700 | send money back and forth.

00:49:54.860 | - So it's sanction resistant.

00:49:56.340 | - Sanctions resistant.

00:49:57.640 | It does not get stopped by sanctions, right?

00:49:59.840 | And also it's again, remittances are extortionate.

00:50:03.980 | I mean, the average remittance costs has a high fee,

00:50:08.420 | takes several days.

00:50:09.540 | If your family is in Ghana or something like that,

00:50:11.880 | or Nigeria, and you live in the United States,

00:50:13.620 | it can take time to use Western Union.

00:50:16.020 | Sometimes, it gets paused, it gets lost, there's issues.

00:50:19.100 | You have to deal with customer service,

00:50:20.780 | screw that.

00:50:21.620 | I mean, the person has a cell phone,

00:50:24.020 | which increasingly is the case.

00:50:25.980 | I mean, by the end of next year,

00:50:27.580 | more than five or six billion people,

00:50:30.900 | depending on different estimates,

00:50:31.860 | will have smartphones basically by the end of 2022.

00:50:35.700 | We're talking like the vast majority of humans

00:50:38.260 | will have access to smartphones.

00:50:40.060 | They can all have sovereign Bitcoin wallets.

00:50:42.380 | And there's even ways to access Bitcoin without the internet.

00:50:46.220 | But I mean, we can get into that.

00:50:48.780 | - There's like hardware wallets and so on.

00:50:50.500 | What do you mean by sovereign Bitcoin wallet?

00:50:54.140 | - You know, most users today are using Bitcoin

00:50:58.340 | in a custodial manner.

00:51:00.300 | So this is kind of like having a bank account,

00:51:03.340 | where you have a deposit account at a bank, right?

00:51:07.240 | So you have a claim, right?

00:51:08.660 | You go to the bank and they have some of your money,

00:51:10.820 | and you take it out, right?

00:51:12.220 | With an ATM.

00:51:13.260 | So what I would call non-custodial Bitcoin use

00:51:17.980 | would be similar to withdrawing cash from an ATM.

00:51:20.940 | You have it, it's a bearer instrument, okay?

00:51:23.060 | So when I-- - Bearer instrument.

00:51:23.900 | - That's what it's called, the bearer instrument.

00:51:25.380 | - I know, I apologize.

00:51:26.500 | I'm outside this community, it just sounds funny.

00:51:28.060 | - No, no, no, yeah, so like a bearer instrument

00:51:29.820 | would be like a bar of gold or a bank note,

00:51:33.820 | or Bitcoin that you control,

00:51:35.180 | meaning you have the seed phrase, right?

00:51:37.260 | Which for the listeners essentially is 12 to 24

00:51:40.980 | English words that you write down on a piece of paper.

00:51:42.740 | That's your password to get into your Bitcoin account.

00:51:46.180 | And that gives you that bearer instrument quality, right?

00:51:49.380 | But unfortunately, most users still use Bitcoin

00:51:53.500 | in a custodial way, meaning they buy it on Coinbase.

00:51:56.300 | - So Coinbase-- - Or Square,

00:51:57.700 | or something like that.

00:51:58.540 | - You would put into the-- - Custodial.

00:52:00.900 | - Into the custodial category-- - It's like a Bitcoin bank.

00:52:02.900 | - Yeah.

00:52:03.820 | - And look, the good news is you can withdraw

00:52:06.260 | to your own control.

00:52:07.460 | And in the Bitcoin community, we try to teach this idea

00:52:10.100 | that it's not your keys, not your coins.

00:52:12.420 | In the same way that if you deposit your money at the bank,

00:52:14.680 | you might not get it back.

00:52:15.660 | I mean, it's low likelihood, but it's very possible.

00:52:19.620 | Same thing in Bitcoin.

00:52:20.700 | If you wanna get the full experience,

00:52:22.060 | you wanna actually custody your own Bitcoin.

00:52:24.340 | You wanna put it, whether it's on an open source

00:52:26.900 | software wallet, like the Blue Wallet is a good one

00:52:29.200 | for people to check out, or a hardware wallet,

00:52:31.740 | like Cold Card, for example.

00:52:33.580 | There's different ways to do this.

00:52:35.540 | But essentially, around the world, people are innovating.

00:52:39.660 | Don't think so low of your fellow man,

00:52:41.900 | you know what I mean?

00:52:42.720 | People are able to figure this out.

00:52:44.820 | I get a lot of flack from people saying,

00:52:46.300 | "Oh, Bitcoin's so hard to use."

00:52:47.860 | I read this article in the New York Times

00:52:49.260 | saying this guy in Silicon Valley lost all of his Bitcoin.

00:52:51.880 | That's 'cause he was a moron and didn't care about it.

00:52:54.320 | This guy lost all this Bitcoin

00:52:55.700 | because it wasn't worth much 10 years ago.

00:52:57.820 | And he forgot the password.

00:52:59.500 | But if you're receiving your remittance

00:53:01.660 | from a family member, you're not gonna lose the password.

00:53:04.660 | - And you trust in the basic intelligence of people

00:53:06.740 | to figure this out and to innovate and so on and figure out.

00:53:10.860 | - We're watching it, man.

00:53:12.700 | - Yeah, you know, it's kind of funny,

00:53:15.820 | but people in the United States

00:53:17.700 | are not very savvy with money.

00:53:19.740 | It's exactly the way you're describing it.

00:53:21.940 | When you have very little money,

00:53:24.580 | you're going to be savvy with money.

00:53:26.900 | You're going to understand exactly the mechanisms that work,

00:53:30.460 | that are resistant to the corruption that's around you.

00:53:33.080 | I mean, I remember sort of growing up in the Soviet Union,

00:53:36.880 | the general bureaucracy and the corruption

00:53:41.020 | of everything around you.

00:53:42.100 | You figure out ways around that.

00:53:43.980 | You figure out ways how to function

00:53:45.740 | within that kind of system to survive under inflation,

00:53:49.180 | under hyperinflation, under all like basically

00:53:52.460 | being unable to trust any kind of,

00:53:54.160 | even the police force and all those kinds of things.

00:53:56.120 | You figure it out.

00:53:57.200 | And that same way, perhaps Bitcoin could be

00:54:00.460 | all the different ways to store and gain Bitcoin.

00:54:05.420 | These mechanisms could be something that's figured out

00:54:08.100 | in the third world as opposed to in the United States.

00:54:09.780 | - Oh, I mean, I would say the capital of Bitcoin

00:54:11.780 | could easily be Lagos and not San Francisco

00:54:14.620 | in terms of users, in terms of people using it.

00:54:16.820 | And again, the two use cases as a savings account

00:54:20.060 | and as an unstoppable payment rail.

00:54:21.980 | These are the two ones that you should really think about.

00:54:23.860 | This is how people are using it today.

00:54:25.520 | Now, when it comes to, could it possibly be adopted

00:54:29.620 | by like a sufficient majority of the population?

00:54:32.620 | I say yes.

00:54:33.460 | And it's very similar to the way the mobile phone spread.

00:54:36.260 | At the beginning, the cell phone was only for rich people.

00:54:39.820 | It was only for the elite.

00:54:40.780 | It was huge.

00:54:41.620 | It didn't work very well.

00:54:42.500 | The interface sucked.

00:54:43.380 | It was clunky.

00:54:44.580 | Over time, it got smaller and smaller and cheaper

00:54:47.700 | and cheaper and easier to use and easier to use.

00:54:49.780 | And today, everyone benefits.

00:54:51.980 | So you're gonna watch a similar technology

00:54:53.960 | upgrade process with Bitcoin.

00:54:55.620 | Already in the last 10 years,

00:54:57.380 | Bitcoin has gotten so much easier to use.

00:54:59.500 | I mean, there are now mobile wallets that are so slick.

00:55:02.500 | There's one called Moon, M-U-U-N wallet

00:55:05.180 | from a team in Argentina.

00:55:06.420 | And these guys created it because they saw their own currency

00:55:09.900 | devalued like three times in the last 20 years.

00:55:12.700 | And they've had a hell of a time trying to get their money

00:55:14.740 | back and forth in different countries.

00:55:16.340 | So they were like, let's make this easy for people.

00:55:19.060 | Again, this is the people's money.

00:55:21.980 | This is something that cannot be controlled

00:55:24.020 | by governments or corporations.

00:55:25.920 | And that makes it very powerful.

00:55:27.840 | And I think it's actually quite exciting

00:55:29.900 | to be here in the adoption phase.

00:55:31.860 | - In the early days.

00:55:32.940 | - Yeah, man, this is the early days.

00:55:34.460 | - And you also mentioned that sort of Bitcoin

00:55:36.900 | is the mechanism of a peaceful revolution.

00:55:40.060 | So it's a way to resist authoritarianism in a peaceful way.

00:55:45.060 | It's ultimately a, you know,

00:55:47.220 | you mentioned sort of politics, information, and money.

00:55:52.220 | It seems like in the space of money,

00:55:55.660 | this is one of the peaceful mechanisms.

00:55:57.780 | - It's a way to opt out.

00:55:59.780 | You can opt out peacefully from the system.

00:56:02.800 | - And yeah, it's beautiful.

00:56:05.020 | It's beautiful.

00:56:06.380 | So Bitcoin is currently by far the most popular

00:56:10.300 | sort of dominant cryptocurrency.

00:56:12.340 | That said, and I look forward to your letters,

00:56:15.260 | Bitcoin maximalists.

00:56:17.540 | That said, you know, Internet Explorer

00:56:19.860 | was the most popular browser for quite a long time.

00:56:23.980 | And then other browsers came along that out-competed it,

00:56:27.940 | like Chrome, Firefox, people should check out Brave.

00:56:32.380 | It's a great browser.

00:56:34.060 | I think it's my favorite browser at this point.

00:56:36.340 | Anyway, so why Bitcoin?

00:56:38.020 | Why not another cryptocurrency?

00:56:39.780 | If you look in the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years,

00:56:43.620 | do you think it's possible for another cryptocurrency

00:56:46.500 | like Ethereum or something that's not even here yet

00:56:49.860 | to overtake Bitcoin as a mechanism?

00:56:52.440 | - When you say overtake, what do you mean?

00:56:57.340 | What do you mean overtake?

00:56:58.420 | You mean number of users?

00:56:59.300 | Do you mean a price per coin?

00:57:02.060 | - Yeah, the number of users,

00:57:03.060 | 'cause we're talking about 1%, 2%.

00:57:05.460 | And if we are serious about this being in the space of money

00:57:10.460 | as a way to give individuals power,

00:57:16.980 | fight the centralized powers that abuse the money system

00:57:20.500 | and so on, how do we get from 2% to 50%, right?

00:57:24.860 | To 60%, to 80%.

00:57:28.500 | That jump, is it obvious to you?

00:57:31.540 | Not obvious, but do you think Bitcoin

00:57:34.900 | is the way to get from 2% to 50%

00:57:38.260 | or are there going to be other cryptocurrencies

00:57:41.020 | that may emerge that get us to 50%?

00:57:43.260 | - No, I mean, Bitcoin is the innovation.

00:57:45.420 | The innovation is in having the decentralized mint.

00:57:48.540 | No one can change the monetary policy.

00:57:51.060 | Everything else is downstream from there.

00:57:53.140 | In Bitcoin, the mean would be 21 million.

00:57:55.500 | There's never gonna be any more than 21 million.

00:57:57.740 | Every other cryptocurrency

00:57:59.220 | either has an inflationary policy,

00:58:01.620 | meaning there's gonna continue

00:58:02.460 | to be more and more of it over time,

00:58:04.420 | or its monetary policy can be changed

00:58:06.580 | by a small group of people.

00:58:08.020 | This is vividly on display in Ethereum,

00:58:09.820 | which is like the second largest

00:58:11.260 | and second most robust cryptocurrency, right?

00:58:13.980 | I've talked to senior Ethereum engineers

00:58:17.180 | over the last couple of weeks,

00:58:18.020 | trying to figure out what is the monetary policy of Ethereum?

00:58:21.860 | No one can tell me.

00:58:23.060 | No one knows how much ETH is gonna be minted

00:58:25.260 | in 2022 and 2023 after they shift to proof of stake.

00:58:29.020 | I've seen estimates that range from 100,000 to 2 million.

00:58:33.140 | So at the end of the day,

00:58:33.980 | you're gonna be trusting a small group of people

00:58:35.620 | to make those decisions.

00:58:36.860 | That is what we are escaping with Bitcoin.

00:58:39.140 | So all these other cryptocurrencies,

00:58:41.300 | they might have their use cases.

00:58:42.980 | Virtually all of them are not.

00:58:44.540 | It's very important for people to know

00:58:45.940 | that if you take like the 4,500 cryptocurrencies

00:58:48.420 | on CoinMarketCap, almost all of them are scams, straight up.

00:58:52.660 | Even the ones that have like noble intentions,

00:58:55.700 | I just don't think are gonna add that much value ultimately.

00:58:59.460 | I think Bitcoin to me is the innovation.

00:59:02.140 | And that's because it has a monetary policy

00:59:05.220 | and an issuance schedule that cannot be changed.

00:59:08.300 | And that's what gets me so excited about it.

00:59:09.580 | I mean, that's why it's such an important tool

00:59:11.340 | for human rights.

00:59:12.220 | - Yeah, it's interesting 'cause when you grow from 2%,

00:59:15.220 | when you grow in the number of people using it

00:59:18.380 | at the scale they're using it,

00:59:19.940 | it's going to need to be resistant to governments

00:59:25.380 | and institutions messing with it.

00:59:27.500 | So it's interesting to see

00:59:29.220 | what kind of cryptocurrency would be resistant to that.

00:59:33.380 | Obviously, Dogecoin is gonna win, let's be honest.

00:59:36.580 | - Well, I mean, look, the number two cryptocurrency

00:59:41.380 | in the world probably by like how useful it is to people

00:59:44.500 | is Tether, which is totally centralized, has blacklists.

00:59:49.020 | So I'm not saying there won't be like new digital assets

00:59:52.460 | that are lumped into this category that have usage,

00:59:55.700 | but it's not the same innovation as Bitcoin.

00:59:59.260 | It's just sort of building on this idea

01:00:01.300 | of like a Euro dollar maybe,

01:00:02.620 | like a dollar that is minted outside

01:00:04.660 | of the control of the US Federal Reserve, right?

01:00:07.260 | It would be a Euro dollar.

01:00:08.140 | So stable coins are kind of like Euro dollars

01:00:09.660 | just minted by private actors in a way, right?

01:00:11.900 | But they're still tied to the dollar.

01:00:13.260 | They're pegged to the dollar.

01:00:14.740 | They're not escaping the system.

01:00:16.340 | Escaping the system is Bitcoin.

01:00:18.180 | We aren't reliant on the dollar.

01:00:20.540 | We have our own full store value, medium of exchange,

01:00:24.980 | unit of account eventually.

01:00:26.540 | And the Bitcoin world will be denominated

01:00:29.520 | in different terms.

01:00:30.540 | And I think everyone, everything else will be tied to it.

01:00:32.720 | I really do.

01:00:33.740 | - It does feel currently like Bitcoin is like pirates

01:00:37.780 | or something like that.

01:00:38.700 | And there's still like the central banks

01:00:40.500 | that are like the main navies of the different nations.

01:00:44.220 | It's just like, if you talk about scale,

01:00:46.420 | so there's going to be a moment

01:00:48.020 | if Bitcoin continues to grow in its impact,

01:00:50.980 | when governments are going to seriously contend with,

01:00:54.380 | what do we do with this?

01:00:55.780 | Do you think about those moments?

01:00:58.420 | Is Bitcoin, is the cryptocurrency world in general

01:01:02.020 | going to be able to withstand the serious legal pushback

01:01:07.020 | from countries, from nations,

01:01:09.140 | especially authoritarian nations?

01:01:11.580 | - Yeah, so it's been interesting.

01:01:13.160 | It's been 12 years, okay?

01:01:15.780 | More than 12 years since Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin.

01:01:19.300 | And they haven't been able to stop it.

01:01:21.420 | They have tried.

01:01:22.660 | They have tried a lot.

01:01:23.660 | I wrote a long essay for Quillette on this.

01:01:25.620 | Like, why haven't governments been able to stop Bitcoin?

01:01:28.820 | And my thesis is essentially that there's been like this mix

01:01:31.340 | of different kinds of technical, social,

01:01:34.780 | and economic and political incentives and disincentives

01:01:37.500 | that make it very difficult.

01:01:39.260 | And I think to me, the best way to think about it

01:01:42.460 | is that Bitcoin is like a Trojan horse.

01:01:44.300 | So just to actually tell that story just a little bit,

01:01:47.860 | because I think it's important to understand

01:01:49.540 | the classical mythology tale,

01:01:52.540 | I find this very interesting.

01:01:53.640 | - Of the actual Trojan horse?

01:01:54.480 | - Of the actual Trojan horse, yeah,

01:01:55.660 | which was told in the Aeneid, actually, by Virgil, right?

01:01:59.140 | And the idea was the Greeks had been like

01:02:00.980 | trying to take the city of Troy for like a decade

01:02:03.620 | at these like impregnable walls, and they couldn't do it.

01:02:06.420 | And Ulysses and the rest of the Greek army were like,

01:02:08.620 | we don't know what to do.

01:02:10.060 | So Minerva, the god of strategy and war,

01:02:13.980 | kind of like they get this idea from her, I guess,

01:02:15.980 | to actually try to use subterfuge and trickery

01:02:18.540 | to take over the city.

01:02:20.220 | So the idea is to, and this was sort of hatched by Ulysses,

01:02:23.180 | right, to put this horse together

01:02:25.540 | that would kind of be like a gift.

01:02:27.420 | So the idea was the Greeks just like pretended to leave,

01:02:30.840 | right, they deserted, they left behind one soldier

01:02:33.840 | and this horse, and the Trojans looked at it

01:02:35.920 | and they were like, what's going on here?

01:02:37.540 | And they brought in the soldier,

01:02:39.080 | and the soldier's like, look, they left,

01:02:40.800 | they're so sorry for all of the desecration and blood spill.

01:02:43.600 | This is their gift to you, it's honoring Minerva.

01:02:47.080 | It's like this like, you know, trophy for you guys.

01:02:50.160 | And there were actually people inside Troy,

01:02:53.460 | Cassandra, a prophet, as well as Laocoon,

01:02:55.780 | who was like a priest who said, no, no, no,

01:02:57.080 | this is obviously a trick, this is obviously a trick.

01:02:59.940 | But they were like dispatched and ignored

01:03:01.880 | because the horse was like, it was just like so badass.

01:03:04.440 | So the Trojans were like, bring it into the city.

01:03:07.480 | So they brought it in themselves.

01:03:08.920 | No blood spilled at all, right?

01:03:10.360 | In the middle of the night, of course,

01:03:11.720 | we've, what you realize is the horse was packed

01:03:13.360 | with Greek soldiers and they come out

01:03:14.520 | and they let the army in,

01:03:15.360 | which was like hiding behind an island.

01:03:16.860 | So this idea that like, something could be so attractive

01:03:21.660 | that you really can't say no,

01:03:22.900 | even if you know what's inside of it,

01:03:24.340 | is it played in Bitcoin.

01:03:26.140 | So like, in Bitcoin has this number go up technology, right?

01:03:29.580 | It is what we call it in sort of shorthand, NGO, NGU, right?

01:03:33.780 | But what people don't realize is that NGU

01:03:36.220 | is like the Trojan horse.

01:03:37.660 | Inside the Trojan horse is FGU, freedom go up technology.

01:03:41.140 | So dictators and rogue regimes and corporations

01:03:44.740 | are gonna buy, mine, tax, accumulate this thing

01:03:48.500 | because it's the best performing financial asset

01:03:50.620 | in the world.

01:03:51.460 | What they don't realize or they're gonna have to ignore

01:03:55.060 | is that they're also aiding and abetting

01:03:56.740 | this freedom technology,

01:03:57.840 | which allows individuals to be sovereign

01:04:00.060 | and eventually erodes their power.

01:04:02.000 | There's no question that rogue regimes and bad actors

01:04:04.460 | are already used and will continue to use Bitcoin.

01:04:06.780 | The thing is, when you think about a North Korea

01:04:08.460 | or a Venezuela and that government instructs

01:04:11.620 | some of its bureaucrats and cronies and officials

01:04:14.300 | to start stealing Bitcoin or accumulating it or whatever

01:04:18.060 | for short-term gain to get around sanctions

01:04:20.300 | and use it to buy dollars or something like that, right?

01:04:22.500 | Which they can't get normally.

01:04:24.060 | Well, guess what?

01:04:24.880 | All those people who the regime has instructed

01:04:26.500 | to like figure this thing out and use it,

01:04:28.340 | they're all gonna realize, oh my God, this is money

01:04:30.100 | the government doesn't control.

01:04:31.340 | And it's gonna spread like a virus, okay?

01:04:33.260 | So this is like the idea of the Trojan horse allegory.

01:04:35.900 | Why I think it's so important and powerful with Bitcoin.

01:04:38.340 | All the people talking about Bitcoin today on TV,

01:04:41.460 | they don't care about freedom or privacy.

01:04:43.380 | They just care about number go up.

01:04:45.060 | But what they don't realize is what's concealed within.

01:04:47.180 | And that's very, very powerful to me.

01:04:49.220 | - So the people talking about Bitcoin on TV

01:04:52.460 | are maybe investor types.

01:04:54.540 | - Professional investors, corporations,

01:04:57.200 | and soon governments.

01:04:58.280 | I mean, you just had today, this morning on CNBC,

01:05:01.080 | the leader of the Republican leader

01:05:04.740 | of the House of Representatives, a Congressman,

01:05:06.820 | saying like, we need to be pro-Bitcoin as a country.

01:05:09.460 | And the other day, Peter Thiel had a very interesting

01:05:11.700 | comment where he was basically like,

01:05:13.260 | let's not fall behind China in this race.

01:05:15.940 | So you have influential people in our government,

01:05:19.940 | like sort of posturing for this like, you know,

01:05:22.820 | Bitcoin race that's gonna happen in the next 10 years.

01:05:25.120 | You're gonna see this.

01:05:26.300 | Countries are gonna compete to stack Bitcoin.

01:05:29.060 | Absolutely.

01:05:29.900 | - So you believe the thing that's shiny and sexy

01:05:33.380 | like the Trojan horse is the number go up.

01:05:36.420 | - It's too hard to ignore.

01:05:38.180 | - And to define that a little further,

01:05:42.380 | meaning it does seem like the more people get excited

01:05:45.660 | and start using Bitcoin, the more its value grows.

01:05:48.260 | So it's just a good--

01:05:49.220 | - Feedback loop.

01:05:50.060 | - Yeah, it's a feedback loop.

01:05:51.220 | And then the reason you're excited about it,

01:05:53.260 | especially is that FG.

01:05:56.300 | - Yeah, freedom go up.

01:05:57.500 | - Freedom go up, which is it ultimately gives power

01:06:01.220 | to the individuals to, so decentralize the entire system.

01:06:04.580 | - When Tesla stacks Bitcoin,

01:06:06.860 | they're just doing that as self-interest.

01:06:08.540 | They think it's gonna be a good inflation hedge, fine.

01:06:11.080 | But what they maybe don't care about,

01:06:13.060 | don't realize or they don't need to care.

01:06:14.720 | I mean, Bitcoin's power is it like co-ops people

01:06:17.960 | into promoting a freedom tool,

01:06:19.420 | even if they don't care about,

01:06:20.520 | or even if they hate freedom, it doesn't matter.

01:06:22.740 | So when Tesla stacks Bitcoin and the price goes up

01:06:25.580 | and more interest goes up

01:06:26.860 | and more people around the world are like, wow, Bitcoin,

01:06:29.460 | then more people get involved.

01:06:31.060 | Again, more adoption, more price, more developers,

01:06:33.780 | better user interface, more privacy tools,

01:06:36.420 | more mining, more network security.

01:06:38.060 | It's just this like positive feedback loop

01:06:39.780 | that continues to grow.

01:06:40.960 | And it will grow intensely in the next decade

01:06:43.580 | as we go through the adoption cycle.

01:06:45.140 | And the reason why I'm so excited about this

01:06:47.140 | is the human rights world,

01:06:48.140 | again, to get back to our previous conversation,

01:06:50.580 | is very hard to find people who have the empathy

01:06:54.540 | or the altruism to actually make a difference abroad

01:06:57.100 | in places like China or Saudi Arabia or North Korea.

01:06:59.940 | People are very quick to just like,

01:07:01.900 | they'll just quickly toss off the pretty words

01:07:04.620 | that they care about human rights

01:07:05.980 | as soon as profits come into play.

01:07:07.700 | So there's no alignment of incentives, right?

01:07:09.900 | The reason why Bitcoin is so powerful

01:07:11.340 | is that it aligns the incentives.

01:07:13.060 | All of a sudden, they can be as greedy as they want.

01:07:15.900 | They are being forced to promote a freedom tool.

01:07:18.380 | This I've never seen before.

01:07:19.500 | And it makes me, it gives me a lot of like excitement.

01:07:21.660 | It's very refreshing

01:07:22.900 | because we've been laboring in the human rights space

01:07:25.420 | and you have to like raise money

01:07:26.720 | and it's all like nonprofit work

01:07:28.260 | and you're like begging for people

01:07:29.460 | to make a difference for you.

01:07:30.940 | Here you have this like incredible asset

01:07:33.440 | which people will accumulate out of self-preservation,

01:07:35.860 | self-interest and greed,

01:07:37.180 | and yet it will strengthen the power of the individual.

01:07:40.380 | That is what we need to fight, big brother.

01:07:42.460 | That's what we need to fight,

01:07:43.720 | like what I'm scared is happening in China.

01:07:45.820 | Like this growing authoritarian state,

01:07:48.000 | which is powered by big data analysis.

01:07:50.300 | This is our way to fight back.

01:07:52.000 | And it runs on this like really interesting engine,

01:07:56.100 | again, that like takes advantage

01:07:57.620 | of our base nature as humans.

01:07:59.340 | And I know that it sounds terrible for me to say this,

01:08:01.620 | but I mean, ultimately we are self-interested

01:08:05.420 | and it is hard to get people to care about others

01:08:08.380 | living a thousand miles away.

01:08:10.180 | You know, we are kind of localized in our empathy.

01:08:14.020 | Speaking as someone who works to help people

01:08:16.800 | who live in like a hundred different countries,

01:08:19.200 | it's very difficult to get Americans

01:08:20.980 | to care about what's happening in Belarus or in Kashmir.

01:08:23.260 | It just is.

01:08:24.320 | But guess what?

01:08:25.740 | They're gonna definitely care about Bitcoin

01:08:27.340 | because they wanna see their net worth go up.

01:08:29.900 | They wanna do better for their family, et cetera.

01:08:31.940 | They're gonna get into this thing

01:08:33.740 | and it's really gonna like make that powerful tool

01:08:36.200 | for everyone else who's using it.

01:08:37.820 | So this interplay dynamic is fascinating to me.

01:08:42.260 | - Yeah, I have to,

01:08:44.060 | so I'm somebody who doesn't like

01:08:47.220 | the corrupting effects of greed,

01:08:49.500 | but it is also human nature.

01:08:53.220 | - Yeah, I don't like it either,

01:08:54.060 | but we have to be realists here.

01:08:55.900 | You have to acknowledge it

01:08:57.340 | and then maybe use it for your advantage.

01:09:00.580 | - And it's not just Bitcoin itself.

01:09:02.100 | Like exchanges today are adopting something

01:09:04.340 | called lightning network,

01:09:05.540 | which is a way to scale Bitcoin on a second layer.

01:09:07.940 | Much like we had gold bars,

01:09:09.140 | which we scaled with paper money.

01:09:10.620 | And then we had visa credit cards,

01:09:12.260 | which were a way of scaling the paper notes.

01:09:14.780 | Bitcoin scales through lightning network.

01:09:16.500 | It's a private instant globally final settlement network.

01:09:20.260 | It's something you all should check out.

01:09:22.500 | It's very, very interesting.

01:09:24.420 | The exchanges aren't adopting lightning

01:09:26.020 | for its privacy benefits.

01:09:27.820 | Like lightning operates off the chain,

01:09:29.860 | meaning surveillance companies can't see,

01:09:31.660 | they can't do chain analysis on lightning

01:09:33.260 | 'cause it's on an onion routed second layer

01:09:35.220 | kind of that works kind of like the tour project.

01:09:38.660 | The exchanges don't care about privacy.

01:09:40.980 | They're doing it because it reduces fees.

01:09:43.140 | Lightning is cheaper and faster.

01:09:45.060 | So again, we have this really interesting

01:09:46.660 | alignment of incentives where like the freedom tech

01:09:48.860 | is being promoted by people who don't,

01:09:50.740 | I don't, it doesn't matter what their incentives are.

01:09:52.900 | I could care less if they were altruistic or not.

01:09:55.340 | And I think this is,

01:09:56.500 | and you're gonna maybe see this even in the future.

01:09:58.660 | There's more things coming in Bitcoin down the pike.

01:10:01.540 | Lightning was enabled by an upgrade called SegWit, right?

01:10:04.220 | Which took place a few years ago,

01:10:05.460 | which was the culmination of the block size conflict.

01:10:08.220 | There's another thing coming up

01:10:09.380 | called cross input signature aggregation,

01:10:11.260 | which may, if it takes effect in the next few years,

01:10:15.420 | it may compel exchanges to collaboratively spend

01:10:18.580 | all their Bitcoin together in a way

01:10:19.980 | that really protects our privacy and fights surveillance.

01:10:23.140 | But they're not gonna do it for moral reasons.

01:10:25.140 | They're gonna do it 'cause it's gonna save them money

01:10:26.620 | and improve their bottom line.

01:10:28.220 | - Can you speak to that kind of collaborative

01:10:29.660 | so that you can have multiple parties

01:10:31.780 | in a single transaction kind of thing?

01:10:33.140 | - Yeah, like you could do that today.

01:10:35.740 | Absolutely.

01:10:36.580 | It's called the coin join, for example.

01:10:38.140 | But right now it's more expensive to coin join in Bitcoin.

01:10:40.260 | You have to pay a premium for your privacy.

01:10:42.180 | This would flip that on its head

01:10:43.580 | and would basically say, if you have one transaction,

01:10:46.140 | hey, pile them all in, have as many parties as you want.

01:10:48.500 | The more parties you get in, the cheaper it's gonna be

01:10:50.180 | per party, okay?

01:10:51.700 | And that's not possible in Bitcoin today,

01:10:53.580 | but it might be in the future.

01:10:55.020 | But again, the beauty in Bitcoin are these ways

01:10:58.980 | that it just aligns human incentives

01:11:00.580 | and it aligns our most base desires and needs

01:11:04.180 | and realities with freedom and privacy.

01:11:07.780 | And that I've never seen before.

01:11:09.500 | And that's why I think it's so interesting.

01:11:12.100 | - So something that somebody like Eric Weisland

01:11:15.380 | actually spoke to this, the idea of blockchain in general.

01:11:19.820 | From like a 10,000 foot view,

01:11:24.780 | the blockchain is a centralized place

01:11:26.900 | to keep the record of everything that ever happened.

01:11:30.060 | And does that concern you?

01:11:32.940 | From a privacy perspective, from a control perspective,

01:11:35.540 | even though it's managed, especially,

01:11:38.860 | given the low frequency of transactions for Bitcoin,

01:11:42.180 | you can have a lot of small computers across the globe

01:11:47.180 | contain the entirety set of transactions,

01:11:50.700 | all of those kinds of features.

01:11:52.260 | Does that concern you that there's one place

01:11:54.540 | where everything is made public

01:11:57.420 | in terms of everything that ever happened?

01:12:00.060 | - No, and I'll give you two reasons.

01:12:02.180 | Number one, the Bitcoin blockchain

01:12:04.940 | is ultimately a settlement layer.

01:12:07.100 | It's kind of like something like Fedwire in the United States.

01:12:10.380 | It's a way for like institutions to settle with each other.

01:12:13.780 | That's what I think it's gonna be like

01:12:15.220 | in 20, 30 years from now.

01:12:17.140 | The average person's never gonna touch

01:12:18.820 | the Bitcoin blockchain probably.

01:12:20.700 | They're gonna use things like Lightning,

01:12:22.380 | or unfortunately, they may use Bitcoin banks,

01:12:24.860 | but they'll either use custodians

01:12:26.260 | or they'll use second layer,

01:12:28.100 | non-custodial solutions to interact.

01:12:30.300 | The main chain's gonna get very expensive.

01:12:32.140 | It's gonna be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars

01:12:34.860 | or even more if the dollar starts to weaken

01:12:37.740 | to make a transaction on the main chain.

01:12:39.700 | And that will be reserved for like very large transactions

01:12:43.140 | or transactions that need final, final settlement,

01:12:45.500 | et cetera, et cetera.

01:12:46.580 | And I think that that's fine and that's okay.

01:12:52.980 | And it's very important that that ledger,

01:12:56.460 | that settlement layer,

01:12:58.300 | be kept by thousands of people around the world.

01:13:01.220 | The Bitcoin blockchain is not centralized.

01:13:03.100 | It is decentralized.

01:13:04.740 | It is run by people like me who run a node at home.

01:13:06.820 | I run a personal server.

01:13:08.140 | I run the Bitcoin blockchain, no one else.

01:13:10.580 | You run it.

01:13:11.460 | That person runs it.

01:13:12.300 | There's no one in charge.

01:13:13.420 | - Wait, you have a full node?

01:13:14.660 | - Yeah, I run a full node.

01:13:16.340 | It's great.

01:13:17.180 | I mean, it's pretty easy, man.

01:13:18.020 | You run it and that way you can be sovereign

01:13:20.140 | over all of your usage, right?

01:13:21.900 | And you can run it on a Raspberry Pi

01:13:23.700 | with less than 150 bucks of equipment.

01:13:25.940 | And that's so important because again,

01:13:27.580 | there is no Amazon web service vulnerability here.

01:13:30.420 | That is a problem and I agree with you.

01:13:32.020 | We're trending in a bad direction.

01:13:33.340 | We're like, the government could just turn off

01:13:35.900 | a big important website or a news source.

01:13:37.780 | Well, they can't turn off Bitcoin

01:13:38.900 | because it doesn't live on AWS.

01:13:40.260 | It lives with us.

01:13:41.180 | We are Bitcoin.

01:13:42.020 | And I think that that's very, very powerful.

01:13:45.180 | - And then you can have something like a lightning network

01:13:48.580 | where you can escape some of the constraints

01:13:51.220 | of the blockchain depending on your needs

01:13:53.780 | of the privacy and all those kinds of things.

01:13:56.020 | - Everything's an engineering trade-off,

01:13:57.380 | but yeah, you can trade off some of the assurances

01:13:59.300 | of the base layer to go into lightning, for example.

01:14:02.340 | And there you can get more speed and more privacy.

01:14:04.540 | And the things that Bitcoin lacks,

01:14:06.940 | speed and privacy, for example,

01:14:09.100 | you can get on these second layers.

01:14:10.620 | So there's all kinds of cool engineering things

01:14:12.580 | that people are coming up with.

01:14:14.500 | But I also would just say,

01:14:16.140 | anyone who says the blockchain,

01:14:17.900 | like that's a red flag for that person

01:14:19.740 | doesn't really know what they're talking about.

01:14:21.180 | Like Satoshi didn't use the blockchain in the white paper.

01:14:25.140 | Blockchain was a marketing term

01:14:26.980 | that people came up with later to try and do this thing

01:14:30.260 | that was kind of like, it peaked in 2015

01:14:33.020 | and it continues to be an issue today

01:14:35.260 | of it's blockchain, not Bitcoin.

01:14:37.620 | And that was like a very corporate

01:14:40.140 | kind of social attack on Bitcoin

01:14:42.300 | to say we could take this like ledger part

01:14:44.300 | of this radical thing that's for criminals

01:14:46.340 | and all these bad people,

01:14:47.420 | but we could take one part of it out

01:14:49.020 | and we can bring it over here

01:14:50.300 | and we can make it safe for everybody.

01:14:52.940 | The real McCoy's Bitcoin,

01:14:54.860 | I mean, Satoshi referred to it as the time chain.

01:14:57.060 | I mean, really what they're talking about

01:14:58.460 | is just these like blocks

01:14:59.460 | that are connected chronologically of transactions.

01:15:02.100 | It's really not that exciting.

01:15:03.580 | The exciting part of Bitcoin is the proof of work,

01:15:06.820 | where the transaction processing is done

01:15:09.020 | by mining and by energy and by real world expenditures

01:15:11.900 | instead of like some central ledger.

01:15:15.500 | And when you remove the blockchain from Bitcoin,

01:15:18.420 | it's not very, to me, it's just not that interesting.

01:15:22.660 | - I don't know, to me, blockchain, time chain, whatever,

01:15:25.500 | as it philosophically is a pretty beautiful idea.

01:15:28.020 | I mean, it's pretty simple,

01:15:29.660 | but nevertheless it's beautiful.

01:15:31.500 | I'm a big database person.

01:15:33.780 | It's an interesting way to store information

01:15:36.100 | that especially that's totally publicly accessible.

01:15:39.220 | I know that to Bitcoin, proof of work

01:15:43.480 | is the fundamental idea,

01:15:45.460 | but to cryptocurrency and digital money in general

01:15:48.620 | and to money,

01:15:49.460 | the blockchain is a really interesting idea to me.

01:15:51.820 | The way I think about it is it's kind of physics.

01:15:55.260 | And I like that there's a place that you can rely on

01:15:58.700 | that's very difficult to mess with.

01:16:00.540 | But it's not though, like it's outside of maybe Ethereum.

01:16:03.780 | Every other blockchain is easy to mess with.

01:16:06.100 | - So you're saying that proof of work

01:16:07.900 | is what makes it hard to mess with.

01:16:09.660 | - Absolutely, proof of work is the key.

01:16:11.940 | And Ethereum is about to leave proof of work.

01:16:14.020 | So it's about to go to proof of stake,

01:16:16.900 | which is literally the existing system

01:16:18.740 | where a small group of people

01:16:19.620 | get to decide the monetary policy.

01:16:21.140 | - Yeah, reputation has a lot of value there

01:16:23.860 | and that it could be manipulated.

01:16:25.860 | - I may sound brutal,

01:16:26.700 | but I'm coming at it from a political science perspective.

01:16:28.940 | For me, it's all about freedom versus dictatorship.

01:16:31.780 | And that's why I find it so compelling

01:16:33.820 | that regardless of how much power or might

01:16:36.940 | or how many armies you have,

01:16:38.700 | you can't change the rules of Bitcoin.

01:16:40.820 | - If you're wrong about Bitcoin, what would that look like?

01:16:45.420 | What kind of thing that in 10, 20 years that you're not wrong.

01:16:50.420 | - Right, it doesn't pan out.

01:16:54.660 | - It doesn't pan out,

01:16:55.940 | but other things that actually make you feel good

01:16:58.300 | about all the hard work you've done do pan out.

01:17:01.100 | Something you haven't expected.

01:17:02.460 | What might that be?

01:17:04.380 | - Well, as we've talked about,

01:17:05.860 | my career started in human rights

01:17:07.660 | and in promoting individual freedom

01:17:09.180 | and fighting authoritarianism.

01:17:10.700 | That fight will continue on

01:17:12.860 | no matter what happens with Bitcoin.

01:17:15.140 | I think it would be a massive failure and a tragedy

01:17:18.340 | if this project didn't work.

01:17:20.420 | - The Bitcoin project.

01:17:21.260 | - Yes, if the Bitcoin project didn't work,

01:17:23.900 | honestly, it's one of the only things that gives me hope

01:17:26.860 | because it is an effective way to push back

01:17:28.620 | against creeping centralized control.

01:17:30.580 | If for whatever reason, and I can't really see,

01:17:34.020 | one of the reasons I'm so into it

01:17:35.100 | is I can't really see how it's not gonna work.

01:17:37.340 | Again, I think the Trojan horse allegory is too powerful.

01:17:41.220 | These big centralized actors are gonna be too greedy

01:17:43.660 | and they're gonna want some as opposed to banning it.

01:17:45.940 | It's way easier for them to buy it than to ban it.

01:17:47.820 | I think that's just what's gonna happen.

01:17:49.260 | But if for whatever reason it failed,

01:17:51.700 | I would have very little hope left

01:17:52.940 | because really, I mean, the Chinese model

01:17:55.300 | of centralizing all of your data and controlling it,

01:17:58.700 | I mean, ultimately is a very, very powerful

01:18:02.500 | sort of like arch force.

01:18:03.860 | And I would be concerned that that would be

01:18:06.580 | all of our sort of destiny.

01:18:09.380 | - I do have to sort of push back

01:18:10.620 | at a style of communication.

01:18:11.980 | And you're not doing it today.

01:18:13.900 | You're being exceptionally eloquent in arguing these ideas.

01:18:17.340 | But me, especially just from studying history

01:18:21.420 | and being very skeptical from growing up

01:18:23.980 | in the Soviet Union, I'm very skeptical and cautious

01:18:28.980 | when I see a community of people being very sure of an idea.

01:18:34.700 | Doesn't matter what that idea is.

01:18:36.420 | And there's a huge amount of certainty around Bitcoin.

01:18:40.060 | Part of it is an important feature

01:18:41.540 | because it's number go up.

01:18:43.500 | - So far.

01:18:46.420 | - Number go up is a really important part of the mechanism

01:18:50.620 | to make sure that it grows in impact, network effects,

01:18:55.620 | because I mean, it's really important to get excited

01:18:57.860 | about idea for a take hold.

01:18:59.140 | That's the way human nature works and so on.

01:19:01.380 | But I also get even something that you mentioned

01:19:06.380 | that others may not, if you mentioned blockchain,

01:19:12.020 | you're sensitive to the attacks that have been mounted

01:19:16.900 | where the word blockchain has been used.

01:19:18.460 | - People have been fooled.

01:19:19.420 | I mean, like people in the humanitarian sector

01:19:22.180 | have been fooled into thinking

01:19:23.220 | that some centralized blockchain project

01:19:24.900 | is gonna help some refugee, all collapsed.

01:19:27.460 | - There's a, yeah, there's a huge,

01:19:29.260 | it makes me sad that there's a huge number of scams.

01:19:31.660 | Like, you know what makes me really sad?

01:19:33.300 | And just a tiny little tangent.

01:19:35.540 | There's been recently, I guess with the growing platform

01:19:38.300 | or something, there's been a bunch of fake

01:19:40.060 | Lex Friedman accounts.

01:19:41.980 | - Yeah, must have a million.

01:19:44.220 | - But not only do they do stupid stuff,

01:19:47.380 | but they've been messaging people.

01:19:49.460 | - Oh, to get the Bitcoin and stuff like that.

01:19:50.620 | - On LinkedIn.

01:19:51.460 | - Totally.

01:19:52.280 | - And people write to me and they're saying like--

01:19:54.980 | - Tough man.

01:19:56.340 | - I think it gets people.

01:19:57.880 | I think they click on stuff.

01:19:59.260 | I think they were not sure.

01:20:00.980 | And it makes me think like people are gullible

01:20:05.980 | or not gullible, but like they're just like I am,

01:20:11.060 | which is they're like hopeful about the world.

01:20:12.820 | They're optimistic about the world.

01:20:14.140 | They're almost like naive about the evil that's out there.

01:20:15.980 | - This is what goes wrong with Bitcoin.

01:20:17.700 | And I've seen it.

01:20:18.540 | People fall for these, I mean,

01:20:21.500 | like in these different countries,

01:20:22.580 | I'm trying to like talk to different people about Bitcoin.

01:20:25.020 | And like the amount of like MLM schemes,

01:20:27.340 | pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes,

01:20:29.940 | there are just so many of them.

01:20:31.220 | And there's plenty here too.

01:20:32.340 | But like in Zimbabwe, I was talking to this guy

01:20:34.940 | who is a reporter who studies the FX,

01:20:37.340 | like the foreign currency exchange markets.

01:20:39.780 | He's just saying one of the main reasons

01:20:41.260 | people don't wanna get into Bitcoin

01:20:42.820 | is because they've been scammed so hard

01:20:44.300 | by all these other things.

01:20:45.660 | So I would say that that's one way it could go wrong

01:20:47.860 | is that like people just continue to be like afraid of it

01:20:51.860 | because of things that are like that in the past.

01:20:54.460 | - Well, it's not just the volatility,

01:20:56.500 | it's just the, you know, yeah, having--

01:20:59.580 | - Yeah, if you think it's a pyramid scheme,

01:21:00.820 | you're not gonna wanna get involved.

01:21:02.660 | - And in some sense, if I were to speak

01:21:05.460 | to the Bitcoin maximalist community

01:21:08.420 | is to maybe ease up on the certainty

01:21:10.420 | because that gives me the signal that it's a scam,

01:21:13.100 | to be honest.

01:21:13.980 | So whenever somebody, whenever there's a lot of people

01:21:17.580 | being cultishly excited about something,

01:21:22.580 | I start being very skeptical.

01:21:24.620 | It's like, you know, I used to like Green Day

01:21:26.940 | before they became really popular.

01:21:29.140 | And then the moment they became really popular,

01:21:31.140 | I'm like, I don't know, he started wearing mascara.

01:21:33.180 | And it's like, I don't know, I don't like him anymore.

01:21:35.100 | So like, I'm very skeptical about evangelists of an idea

01:21:40.100 | because I think Bitcoin on its own

01:21:42.020 | is just a powerful idea that stands.

01:21:44.100 | But I also understand that in a world

01:21:46.340 | of a lot of competing ideas where there's a lot of scams

01:21:50.580 | and a lot of money to be made through those scams,

01:21:53.140 | that you have to be innovative in the kind of mechanisms

01:21:56.900 | you use to break through the scam, the ocean of scams.

01:22:00.500 | - I took this personality test and I'm a 99 skepticism.

01:22:05.260 | So I was first, sadly, 'cause I was first introduced

01:22:08.100 | to Bitcoin in 2013.

01:22:10.300 | And I was like, eh, whatever.

01:22:12.060 | And it took me four years to actually get into it,

01:22:15.300 | to go down the rat pole.

01:22:16.280 | I didn't really start to grasp it

01:22:17.980 | and start getting excited about it until 2017.

01:22:20.780 | So I was regrettably very, very skeptical for a long time.

01:22:24.940 | And I just thought it was like, whatever.

01:22:26.620 | So I appreciate that and you should be skeptical.

01:22:30.300 | But ultimately you gotta believe in things like,

01:22:32.980 | I believe in democracy, I believe it's good for people.

01:22:35.100 | I believe it's better than tyranny.

01:22:36.700 | I believe in the internet.

01:22:37.580 | I know that we've had issues with centralization

01:22:39.960 | of the internet, but I still believe it's better

01:22:41.820 | to be connected than to have bridges between us.

01:22:44.500 | And I believe in Bitcoin.

01:22:45.580 | And to me, it's like a very similar progressive force

01:22:49.500 | that we're encountering.

01:22:50.740 | But yeah, be skeptical.

01:22:54.100 | Nothing will befall you that's bad

01:22:57.980 | if you're cautious and skeptical.

01:22:59.740 | That's a good mentality to have.

01:23:02.920 | - One thing we haven't talked about,

01:23:05.340 | all the violations of the human rights

01:23:08.000 | that authoritarian regimes do,

01:23:11.820 | there's not a positive, but there's,

01:23:16.300 | you mentioned that nationalism is a drug.

01:23:18.740 | - Yeah.

01:23:19.700 | - There's something beautiful about loving your country,

01:23:22.900 | having pride in your country, loving the,

01:23:26.940 | there's a feeling of belonging.

01:23:30.260 | It could be country, it could be tribe,

01:23:32.260 | it could be family, that's really powerful.

01:23:35.100 | And that speaks to human nature as well.

01:23:37.500 | And that can sometimes overpower everything else.

01:23:40.760 | - Patriotism.

01:23:41.600 | - Patriotism.

01:23:42.440 | - Yeah.

01:23:43.260 | - And sometimes it can be seen when you study history,

01:23:47.080 | when you look at Stalinist, the Soviet Union,

01:23:51.960 | or you can even look at Hitler and Nazi Germany,

01:23:55.020 | we tend to paint patriotism in a negative light.

01:23:58.560 | And then maybe when we look at the United States,

01:24:00.680 | but even here in the United States,

01:24:01.840 | people often paint patriotism in a bad light.

01:24:06.400 | - You know, every time I say I love America,

01:24:08.300 | so as an immigrant, I love this country.

01:24:12.160 | It's funny how that's taken as a political statement

01:24:15.080 | that people, I guess, on the right have been more active

01:24:21.440 | in saying that they love the country

01:24:22.820 | and people on the left have not sort of,

01:24:27.020 | it's almost become a weird slogan

01:24:28.700 | as opposed to a statement of just love.

01:24:31.860 | And I understand that patriotism can be a slippery slope

01:24:35.020 | into letting your government,

01:24:37.340 | I mean, it's exactly what you're saying,

01:24:38.820 | the value of freedom of speech is you hold your government

01:24:42.340 | to account for all the ways they mess up.

01:24:45.300 | - I mean, look, you have patriotism

01:24:46.300 | and then you have jingoism, right?

01:24:47.540 | It's very important that we stay on the patriotic side.

01:24:49.820 | Like as an American, I'm very patriotic in terms of,

01:24:52.500 | I love the values that this country was founded on

01:24:55.060 | if you read the Bill of Rights.

01:24:56.540 | And I love the fact that it was just flexible enough

01:24:58.380 | that we were able to change it to grant,

01:25:00.580 | or at least to try to grant all people the same rights.

01:25:03.340 | It was not the original plan of the founders, right?

01:25:05.260 | It had to be changed.

01:25:06.500 | But since then we've remained,

01:25:08.860 | those laws have remained and they're very good.

01:25:14.180 | And I'm very proud of that.

01:25:16.300 | What I'm not proud of is the jingoistic part of our country

01:25:19.480 | where we invade other countries and bomb other countries.

01:25:21.660 | I'm not proud of our prison system.

01:25:23.460 | I think it's a huge stain on our nation.

01:25:25.300 | I'm not proud of a lot of things.

01:25:26.540 | So I think you can be patriotic,

01:25:27.940 | but you can be critical of your country.

01:25:30.740 | And that's important.

01:25:32.740 | I feel like the jingoistic thing

01:25:34.300 | is the thing that we need to watch out for.

01:25:36.500 | That's just my own personal take.

01:25:39.340 | - Out of all the projects

01:25:41.380 | that the Human Rights Foundation works on,

01:25:43.340 | what's the most important one to you right now?

01:25:45.540 | Like what that's been occupying your mind.

01:25:47.940 | - Yeah, I just read again,

01:25:49.220 | this New Yorker piece that just came out

01:25:50.940 | that you should read.

01:25:51.860 | It's called "Ghost Walls."

01:25:53.300 | And it's the story of how the Chinese Communist Party

01:25:57.400 | is committing genocide right now,

01:25:58.980 | just like other regimes did

01:26:00.540 | and the Turks did to the Armenians

01:26:02.580 | and the Nazis did to the Jews.

01:26:04.420 | And it's happening again right now.

01:26:06.060 | We said never again, and that's just not true.

01:26:08.900 | We're letting it happen.

01:26:09.820 | And again, with the business stuff,

01:26:12.020 | like people are, like Airbnb is like a sponsor

01:26:14.500 | of the Olympics, like what?

01:26:16.060 | - At the individual level, at a business level,

01:26:18.620 | how does somebody like me, who's just one little ant,

01:26:21.900 | how does somebody like Elon Musk,

01:26:24.460 | who's in charge of 10,000 ants fight it?

01:26:28.860 | Like how do we--

01:26:30.060 | - Yeah.

01:26:30.900 | - How do we push back?

01:26:31.940 | - A great blueprint is the fight

01:26:34.240 | against the South African apartheid.

01:26:36.020 | So we did a few events down in Johannesburg

01:26:39.180 | and I've had the pleasure of being able

01:26:41.540 | to go to the Apartheid Museum several times.

01:26:43.660 | And it really does a good job of chronicling

01:26:45.300 | how they were able to do it.

01:26:46.140 | It took a while, there's no doubt,

01:26:47.940 | but the way it was done was good.

01:26:50.380 | Peaceful action from abroad was very important.

01:26:54.100 | So there was like the Sullivan Principles.

01:26:55.660 | So like you can peacefully protest as a company

01:26:59.820 | particular regimes and it's very effective.

01:27:03.860 | And not just corporations,

01:27:05.500 | but like the Olympics is a great example.

01:27:08.140 | Like Chinese government should not be able

01:27:09.980 | to host the Olympics.

01:27:10.820 | The IOC should say no, not until you close down

01:27:13.020 | those prison camps.

01:27:14.220 | This is a perfect, peaceful way to push back.

01:27:16.580 | No one gets hurt.

01:27:17.700 | Same thing when we had the Korean Olympics a few years ago.

01:27:20.460 | North Korea should not have been allowed

01:27:21.700 | any sort of symbolistic kind of hosting rights there.

01:27:24.700 | They have prison camps, gulags that we can see

01:27:26.900 | from outer space very clearly.

01:27:28.820 | And their regime is the cruelest one on the planet probably.

01:27:32.380 | Why were they able to sit and cheer

01:27:34.100 | and get to sort of co-host the Olympics?

01:27:37.420 | This is spineless.

01:27:38.420 | Like the IOC, the Olympics and major corporations

01:27:41.780 | should stand up, especially in the cultural sector

01:27:44.780 | where you don't lose anything.

01:27:46.180 | Like, you know, or you shouldn't have to lose anything.

01:27:49.220 | So I think if we look at the way

01:27:50.380 | that we forced the Apartheid regime out,

01:27:54.540 | this international solidarity of musicians,

01:27:56.740 | athletes, performers, celebrities is very, very powerful.

01:27:59.820 | Unfortunately, today's celebrities are doing the opposite.

01:28:02.660 | We just, you know, had this press release go out yesterday

01:28:04.980 | about Akon, and he's off whitewashing the crimes

01:28:08.540 | of the dictator of Uganda

01:28:10.540 | and trying to build a future city there with him.

01:28:13.460 | You know, if this was the 1980s,

01:28:15.500 | Akon would be raising his fist and saying,

01:28:18.020 | "We need to, you know, fight the Apartheid regime."

01:28:20.180 | How do we get back to that?

01:28:21.640 | You know, we need to think about that.

01:28:22.920 | We have to figure out how to harness celebrities,

01:28:25.460 | influencers, and companies,

01:28:27.340 | and get them to actually stand up for something for once.

01:28:30.060 | I mean, that's something we've lost.

01:28:31.480 | We really had a spine against that,

01:28:33.860 | and, you know, we've lost it, you know?

01:28:37.260 | And you lose things, you lose them forever.

01:28:39.300 | Look at Tibet.

01:28:40.340 | Tibet was a big cause for people in the '90s.

01:28:42.580 | Used to go to colleges,

01:28:43.660 | and kids would have the Tibetan flags

01:28:45.140 | all over their dorm rooms.

01:28:46.060 | It was like Radiohead would have Tibet on the stage,

01:28:49.580 | and everybody wanted, you know, free Tibet was a big thing.

01:28:52.620 | Guess what?

01:28:53.460 | Like, we've lost it for some reason.

01:28:55.240 | It's not a thing anymore,

01:28:56.240 | and Tibet has been totally colonized, you know?

01:28:58.440 | So I think it's important that we find a way to unlock

01:29:02.120 | an interest in the celebrity classes

01:29:05.120 | among athletes, singers, presidents.

01:29:08.200 | You know, we need to find a way to punish these people.

01:29:11.320 | - Yeah, it's surprising,

01:29:12.160 | 'cause we've become more and more connected,

01:29:15.280 | so we can communicate more effectively at a large scale,

01:29:17.800 | and yet we seem to be worse and worse at real activism.

01:29:22.520 | It seems like the outrage that's overtaken

01:29:25.260 | the communication channels has been very US-focused,

01:29:27.980 | and often more about outrage

01:29:31.020 | and less about productive activism.

01:29:34.260 | - I'm very jaded.

01:29:35.100 | I mean, it's very difficult

01:29:36.540 | to do these things at scale effectively.

01:29:38.980 | I do not believe we will be successful

01:29:40.860 | in boycotting the Chinese Olympics.

01:29:43.420 | We weren't in 2008.

01:29:44.700 | I don't think, and they're much more evil now,

01:29:46.780 | and I don't think we're gonna be able to do it this time.

01:29:49.340 | And again, to go back to the Bitcoin piece,

01:29:51.740 | that's why I'm very interested in this thing,

01:29:54.140 | because it doesn't require my altruism.

01:29:55.940 | It doesn't require some famous singer

01:29:57.340 | or some corporation to sacrifice anything.

01:30:00.460 | They're literally just gonna follow their own profit-seeking

01:30:03.420 | self-interested motives, and they're gonna end up

01:30:06.020 | making a stronger human rights tool for other people.

01:30:08.620 | - Freedom go up.

01:30:09.820 | - FGU, man.

01:30:10.860 | (Lex laughs)

01:30:11.700 | - Do you think we're, it's kind of a dark question,

01:30:15.220 | but you think we're headed towards a war with China,

01:30:17.860 | the United States versus China?

01:30:20.580 | - I hope not.

01:30:22.060 | I hope not.

01:30:22.900 | - In the cyber space and potentially even a hot war?

01:30:25.540 | - I think there's too many people with too much money

01:30:27.780 | to be lost to go to a hot war on both sides.

01:30:31.300 | But eventually, we're just gonna,

01:30:32.980 | someone's gonna have to stand up.

01:30:34.100 | I mean, the subjugation of Hong Kong

01:30:35.760 | and the genocide of the Uyghurs

01:30:37.340 | and the colonization of Tibet.

01:30:39.020 | I mean, Taiwan is the next big thing.

01:30:40.780 | I mean, Xi Jinping has made it very clear.

01:30:42.620 | You know, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan.

01:30:46.060 | So we're gonna have to stand up for Taiwan

01:30:48.660 | for different reasons, both for moral reasons,

01:30:50.900 | but also for semiconductor reasons.

01:30:52.460 | We need TSMC to be on our side.

01:30:54.540 | We cannot have China take over TSMC.

01:30:56.900 | So there's different reasons why we're gonna have

01:30:59.260 | to protect Taiwan.

01:31:01.180 | And you just hope it's not a hot war, I mean, at this point.

01:31:04.780 | - Well, but also from inside the governments of China

01:31:07.460 | and Russia as well, but China, I guess,

01:31:09.100 | is the powerhouse here.

01:31:11.620 | How do these governments get reformed?

01:31:13.340 | Is there a hope for them to become democracies,

01:31:15.740 | like true democracies, representative democracies,

01:31:19.100 | and sort of reform them to be ethical players

01:31:24.100 | on the world stage?

01:31:26.900 | - No empire lasts forever.

01:31:28.680 | And it's impossible to predict when these regimes fall.

01:31:31.180 | I mean, no one thought the Soviet Union

01:31:33.460 | was gonna fall when it fell.

01:31:34.580 | Like if you studied the news and the scholarship of the era,

01:31:39.100 | no one knew that the Tunisian government was gonna fall

01:31:42.140 | after Mohamed Bouazizi lit himself on fire.

01:31:44.300 | No one predicted that that would become

01:31:47.020 | what we now know as the Arab Spring, right?

01:31:49.580 | These things are impossible to predict.

01:31:52.020 | And one day, the Chinese regime will fall.

01:31:54.060 | I just, we don't know when.

01:31:56.740 | - Yes, you know, and there's quite a few folks

01:31:59.420 | who talk about the fall of the American empire.

01:32:02.580 | And it also concerns me that we don't know

01:32:05.420 | when that might fall.

01:32:06.340 | You assume me as a very excited, naive American,

01:32:10.060 | I'm very excited by this project that I think

01:32:12.980 | is the beacon of hope in the world still.

01:32:15.660 | But that's probably how you feel before it's the end.

01:32:20.660 | It's a--

01:32:24.700 | - Yeah, the party, you wanna leave the party

01:32:25.980 | before it starts to deteriorate.

01:32:28.500 | I think America could continue to have

01:32:31.060 | like a major, major leadership role for a long, long time.

01:32:34.520 | I think certain things we do will become

01:32:36.580 | maybe no longer possible in terms of the way

01:32:38.420 | we intimidate people on the world stage

01:32:41.060 | especially the way we use our currency as a weapon.

01:32:43.620 | I think that that's going to decline over time

01:32:45.800 | as we become more of a multipolar world.

01:32:48.660 | But I do still believe in America

01:32:50.780 | and the values that we're founded on,

01:32:52.380 | despite all the warts.

01:32:53.500 | I do believe in us and I would prefer us absolutely

01:32:56.900 | to be the most prominent of the multipolar world

01:32:59.900 | vis-a-vis a regime like Russia or China.

01:33:02.260 | Absolutely, there's no question.

01:33:03.660 | - So we've been talking about states and nations.

01:33:05.980 | But can we just briefly talk about Facebook and Twitter

01:33:09.020 | and companies that have a huge impact on the world as well.

01:33:11.700 | And actually one of the things that make America

01:33:13.560 | a great nation is it is the place from which

01:33:16.660 | these great companies have sprung up.

01:33:18.900 | Is there, from a human rights perspective,

01:33:22.580 | is there something that bothers you about Facebook,

01:33:24.820 | about these large companies?

01:33:26.300 | Is there something we need to fix?

01:33:29.020 | Something we need to be upset about,

01:33:33.500 | fight back on, reform, do some sort of real activism about?

01:33:39.460 | - I'm very concerned about social media platforms

01:33:42.460 | and companies.

01:33:43.540 | It almost feels like we're losing the golden age

01:33:45.340 | of the internet.

01:33:46.180 | You know, when we could like go online

01:33:47.620 | and interact with each other and share

01:33:50.420 | and not be worried about censorship.

01:33:52.380 | It feels like that was a golden age,

01:33:54.180 | like in the late 90s, 2000s.

01:33:56.900 | And now everything is becoming very politicized.

01:33:59.760 | And I'm not sure that there's a solution.

01:34:02.100 | Like I don't think there's a button we can press to fix it.

01:34:05.380 | I'm kind of afraid that this is sort of

01:34:08.100 | just what happens when society's digitized.

01:34:12.660 | Like I think that certain opinions just become demonized

01:34:17.660 | in the sort of, in the room, in the social room

01:34:23.020 | that we have on the internet.

01:34:25.500 | And I don't know if there's a magical solution there.

01:34:28.680 | I do know that there's technological solutions

01:34:31.620 | that will allow us to continue to communicate

01:34:35.060 | and for creators to reach their audiences

01:34:37.440 | without censorship.

01:34:38.860 | And that's very exciting.

01:34:41.060 | Like right now you could be de-platformed

01:34:43.500 | from your, you know, from like whether it's Patreon

01:34:48.300 | or YouTube or whatever.

01:34:49.620 | And your bank account can be closed down, right?

01:34:52.140 | There are emerging ways that Adam Curry,

01:34:55.620 | like the Podfather and a bunch of other people

01:34:57.300 | are experimenting with, where you can essentially

01:34:59.540 | have your audio podcast across a whole bunch

01:35:02.220 | of different, you know, platforms.

01:35:04.940 | So, you know, it's censorship resistant.

01:35:06.940 | And then your audience can pay you over Lightning

01:35:10.480 | in streaming money.

01:35:11.540 | Like they can stream you money as they listen.

01:35:13.760 | So you're removing the whole advertising piece.

01:35:16.040 | You don't need to do advertising anymore.

01:35:18.340 | You have this direct relationship with your,

01:35:22.600 | you know, your audience.

01:35:24.800 | And this is possible with something like Lightning

01:35:27.240 | where you can do streaming money that's censorship resistant.

01:35:30.360 | And a lot of the people who are building

01:35:32.040 | a Lightning network, for example, Elizabeth Stark,

01:35:35.560 | who, you know, started Lightning Labs

01:35:37.660 | and has done within her company,

01:35:40.940 | the people that work with her have built a huge part

01:35:43.760 | of the Lightning infrastructure.

01:35:45.080 | You know, what animates her is this idea of like,

01:35:48.120 | again, artists and creators being able to have

01:35:50.820 | that direct ability to reach out

01:35:54.040 | and have that peer to peer relationship

01:35:55.800 | with their audience.

01:35:57.200 | And I'm excited for that.

01:35:59.000 | And I do think that's coming,

01:36:00.780 | but I am very worried that the golden age

01:36:04.060 | of like centralized social media platforms

01:36:07.160 | is kind of behind us.

01:36:08.600 | And I'm not sure how to fix that.

01:36:10.160 | I don't know if that's like a fixable problem.

01:36:12.040 | - Interesting.

01:36:12.880 | I have a hope that it's a fixable problem.

01:36:15.680 | I think it's fixable because there's demand

01:36:18.720 | for it to be fixed.

01:36:19.600 | That's the way I think about it.

01:36:21.080 | - Well, is Twitter that bad right now?

01:36:22.680 | Like, I mean, it's fixable in as much

01:36:24.040 | as you can do a verification.

01:36:25.680 | So you can give a blue check to someone

01:36:27.640 | and then that person is like more credible

01:36:29.720 | and they go to the top of the comments

01:36:31.640 | and there's like tweaks you can do.

01:36:33.040 | You can continue to improve it,

01:36:34.820 | but it's not gonna fix the fact that like Twitter

01:36:37.100 | can decide to kick off the president.

01:36:39.540 | And like a lot of people are gonna be upset by that.

01:36:41.300 | You know, like there's ways you can improve the UX

01:36:44.080 | over time and they continue to do so.

01:36:46.780 | Like Clubhouse is a lot of fun, great phenomenon.

01:36:50.540 | So is Twitter Spaces.

01:36:51.940 | So they continue to iterate,

01:36:53.580 | but the censorship, the platforming piece,

01:36:56.300 | I'm not sure is fixable because if you,

01:36:58.540 | I mean, you watch the US government

01:36:59.740 | haul Zuckerberg and Dorsey and whatever

01:37:03.960 | in front of Congress, they want more censorship.

01:37:07.120 | I mean, our elected leaders want more censorship, right?

01:37:11.600 | - See, I just believe censorship is a really harsh word.

01:37:16.300 | I believe it's possible to create technologies

01:37:18.160 | where it's not Twitter doing the censorship,

01:37:20.800 | but it's individuals doing their own selection

01:37:24.840 | of what they want and don't want to see.

01:37:26.840 | So for example, if you get sick and tired of Donald Trump

01:37:30.200 | and whatever he says, or you love Donald Trump,

01:37:33.120 | you get to select yourself.

01:37:35.420 | Like you get to have more control over what you consume.

01:37:39.540 | Twitter tries to do that a little bit,

01:37:41.600 | but they obviously fail.

01:37:43.320 | Where ideas infiltrate our view that we,

01:37:48.320 | that like misinformation spreads really fast

01:37:52.680 | and conspiracy theories spread really fast

01:37:54.840 | to where the immune system that Twitter has created

01:37:57.760 | to try to censor conspiracy theories and misinformation

01:38:02.280 | is over firing and you're now censoring too many people.

01:38:07.280 | So that, it's exactly the same intuition as you said before.

01:38:11.880 | If the state is doing it, in this case,

01:38:14.600 | Twitter's kind of the state,

01:38:16.520 | it's not going to work out well.

01:38:18.560 | But if you give power to the individuals

01:38:20.920 | to do this sort of the, not even censorship,

01:38:24.120 | but incentivization and de-incentivization

01:38:28.760 | of great thoughtful content

01:38:32.040 | and terrible low effort content,

01:38:34.720 | then I feel like that's going to create a system

01:38:38.840 | where there's going to be a much more open discourse

01:38:41.400 | of ideas, dangerous ideas, difficult ideas,

01:38:44.240 | controversial ideas, and people in a decentralized way

01:38:48.320 | will be able to use their own intelligence

01:38:50.440 | to select content, to share content, spread content.

01:38:53.440 | - Let's keep it simple.

01:38:55.480 | Let's look at one example, Twitter and Jack Dorsey.

01:38:58.600 | And I think it's quite clear

01:39:00.440 | that what he believes is the solution

01:39:02.840 | is as you're kind of hinting at,

01:39:04.680 | a more kind of like regionalized system,

01:39:09.080 | which is not have one, we call it federated system, right?

01:39:12.480 | Which does not just have like one company

01:39:13.920 | in charge of everything, but there's an open protocol

01:39:16.560 | and then there's like different instances, right?

01:39:18.760 | So Twitter make, you know, Jack's dream for Twitter

01:39:21.880 | is that Twitter is this open protocol

01:39:24.120 | that the Russian government can use

01:39:25.760 | and the Chinese government can use

01:39:26.960 | and the Iranian government can use

01:39:28.080 | and the American government can use.

01:39:29.120 | And then Twitter as a company is going to use too.

01:39:31.520 | And you as the customer decide

01:39:32.920 | which implementation you want to join.

01:39:35.040 | And there's going to be different censorship

01:39:36.520 | on each instance or each federation,

01:39:39.800 | but the protocol itself would be like untouchable.

01:39:43.520 | This is kind of like the idea behind the internet, right?

01:39:45.960 | There's like different parts of the internet

01:39:48.120 | that are censored, but like at the very bottom

01:39:51.000 | of the very bottom of the backbone of it,

01:39:53.120 | it's like this globally connected,

01:39:56.440 | relatively unstoppable thing, right?

01:39:58.840 | So I think that's a pretty good vision

01:40:00.440 | and Twitter's working towards that

01:40:01.680 | with the Blue Sky Initiative.

01:40:04.120 | We'll see, I'm a little skeptical that it like works out

01:40:06.520 | 'cause I've used, I use Mastodon, for example.

01:40:08.960 | Mastodon is an example of a federated social media.

01:40:13.200 | Now it's ruled by a benevolent,

01:40:15.240 | each instance is ruled by a benevolent dictator.

01:40:17.800 | It's just like, I happen to like this one, so I know.

01:40:20.480 | So rather than trust one dictator, Twitter,

01:40:24.240 | you could choose which dictator you wanna trust.

01:40:27.080 | And that's kind of the federated model.

01:40:28.800 | And maybe we head that way, but you lose things.

01:40:30.880 | When it's federated, you lose the UX,

01:40:33.560 | you lose the slickness and the feel

01:40:36.040 | and all the millions of dollars

01:40:37.320 | that they spend on developers.

01:40:38.760 | Like Mastodon is like not anywhere close

01:40:41.120 | to as nice to use as Twitter.

01:40:43.280 | So I feel like it's, again, it's this trade-off

01:40:45.480 | that we make with everything where it's convenience,

01:40:47.400 | comfort, speed versus privacy and freedom, right?

01:40:50.080 | It's very hard to have something that gives you both.

01:40:52.360 | - I don't know.

01:40:53.200 | I think, yeah, it is a trade-off.

01:40:55.320 | - Have you used one of these things

01:40:56.320 | that you feel like is good? - I have not.

01:40:57.440 | The federated-- - Dude, they're not.

01:40:59.080 | - They're not, they're not. - Not as good.

01:40:59.920 | - But the federated, I don't think it's a good,

01:41:03.120 | I think it requires genius, it requires skill,

01:41:05.800 | it requires great design to come up with a way to,

01:41:08.680 | there's a Pareto front here.

01:41:12.640 | There's a right way to hit that trade-off.

01:41:15.880 | And I honestly think there's the UX,

01:41:19.720 | the experience should be centralized,

01:41:23.640 | should be designed by the company,

01:41:26.200 | but the data and a lot of stuff that could be used

01:41:31.200 | to violate your basic rights

01:41:33.120 | should be owned by the individual.

01:41:34.520 | And I think there's a way to decouple those,

01:41:36.800 | like create an incredible experience

01:41:38.960 | to where you go there and you enjoy the market

01:41:43.480 | where you can share your data

01:41:46.160 | and have complete control over it

01:41:48.000 | and always have, I mean, there's a lot of basic UX ideas.

01:41:51.760 | Like just as an example,

01:41:53.840 | I think there should always be in everything you design

01:41:58.640 | a one button that's always there that says,

01:42:00.880 | forget I ever existed, delete everything you know about me.

01:42:05.880 | And maybe it's one button that you click

01:42:09.760 | and it asks, are you sure?

01:42:11.560 | And you have to be able to say yes.

01:42:13.360 | Like that's a feature that's fundamental

01:42:15.520 | to a good social network, I believe.

01:42:17.800 | Like currently social networks,

01:42:20.680 | first of all, most of them don't allow you to do that.

01:42:23.400 | They don't make it transparent how much data they had,

01:42:25.840 | who they shared it with,

01:42:27.040 | and they also make it exceptionally difficult

01:42:29.160 | to delete accounts.

01:42:30.280 | So like that's a very basic starting point,

01:42:33.280 | but having that button means that you have control,

01:42:38.120 | but that's step one of the control.

01:42:39.880 | There's a transparency of knowing exactly

01:42:42.640 | when what data is being shared about you,

01:42:45.760 | how much data is already being recorded about you.

01:42:48.440 | All that is transparency.

01:42:50.040 | And I believe that's a really good business model

01:42:53.800 | because when there's transparency and control,

01:42:56.040 | people would be willing to give over a lot more data

01:42:59.040 | as long as they know what they're giving over,

01:43:01.600 | as long as they know what they can delete.

01:43:03.800 | - Yeah, I guess maybe you're more optimistic

01:43:06.320 | about people caring.

01:43:07.640 | I feel like so few people actually care

01:43:10.960 | about their privacy and freedom.

01:43:12.400 | I've just watched everybody give it up, you know.

01:43:15.280 | But we'll see.

01:43:16.560 | I guess just to bookend that,

01:43:18.800 | I think we're at this moment

01:43:19.720 | where obviously the centralized platforms

01:43:21.440 | are just so much easier and better to use,

01:43:23.360 | and to strike it out and venture out

01:43:27.000 | and use a federated instance or something,

01:43:30.720 | even like Keybase,

01:43:31.560 | which is kind of like a cool encrypted way

01:43:33.040 | to have group chats.

01:43:35.280 | It just requires a lot of your time,

01:43:37.760 | and a lot of people don't have that time.

01:43:39.520 | But I will say one thing.

01:43:40.680 | I do think there is this future

01:43:42.000 | where we do go into more of this,

01:43:44.840 | it's called a tribal model, or tribes,

01:43:49.720 | which is this social environment

01:43:52.000 | being built on top of Lightning

01:43:53.440 | by an app called Sphinx.

01:43:57.320 | And the idea is kind of like it's a decentralized Slack.

01:44:00.280 | You have your Slack instance,

01:44:02.080 | which has a bunch of people in the community,

01:44:04.000 | and you have different ways to message each other,

01:44:06.400 | and it's all encrypted.

01:44:07.400 | And then it has plugins for things like Jitsi

01:44:10.240 | instead of Zoom.

01:44:11.120 | So like an open source encrypted video messenger.

01:44:14.600 | It has ways to plug in the content you wanna get

01:44:17.320 | from different platforms that you follow,

01:44:21.520 | like podcasts, things like that.

01:44:23.120 | And again, it allows you to pay those people directly

01:44:25.400 | in a censorship-resistant private way.

01:44:27.520 | - So it's really nice to connect

01:44:28.560 | to the Lightning network.

01:44:29.640 | - Yeah, so it's all sort of built on Lightning,

01:44:31.320 | but the idea you can think about it is like

01:44:33.640 | you're slowly starting to build up the idea of a WeChat,

01:44:36.840 | but with freedom principles.

01:44:38.520 | 'Cause right now WeChat's the king

01:44:40.120 | of convenience and comfort,

01:44:41.160 | but of course it's feeding all that data

01:44:42.600 | to the big brother in the surveillance state.

01:44:44.720 | And then we have like our own versions over here in America

01:44:47.520 | that are not quite as convenient or amazing,

01:44:50.120 | but like we give up slightly less privacy and freedom.

01:44:53.360 | But this thing has a lot of promising features to it.

01:44:55.880 | It's worth checking out.

01:44:56.800 | It's very like early days.

01:44:58.080 | Like it feels like, I mean, I was pretty young,

01:45:00.360 | but it feels like the '90s in the internet.

01:45:03.320 | Like it has that feeling.

01:45:04.520 | - The Sphinx does.

01:45:05.360 | - Yeah, you know it's rough around the edges,

01:45:07.640 | but you can feel the magic.

01:45:08.920 | It's pretty cool.

01:45:09.920 | - I'm very much like with Steve Jobs on this.

01:45:12.960 | I think the founding principles are exceptionally important,

01:45:16.120 | but at the end of the day,

01:45:17.280 | the design of how sleek it is, how easy it is to use.

01:45:22.280 | And that's not just like pretty icing on the cake.

01:45:26.740 | That is, the icing is the cake.

01:45:29.840 | - Yeah. - Because like,

01:45:30.680 | how easy it is to use, how natural it is.

01:45:33.000 | It's the Trojan horse thing.

01:45:34.240 | Like you don't get, it has to be pretty and shiny.

01:45:37.880 | It has to fundamentally connect

01:45:40.400 | to the basics of human nature,

01:45:41.720 | which is what is pleasant to use, what feels good to use.

01:45:45.540 | You have to, you know, to trick people

01:45:47.840 | into eating a broccoli, you have to put like a delicious,

01:45:51.040 | whatever on it. - Well, again,

01:45:51.880 | PGP is a kind of a pain to use, right?

01:45:53.760 | For, if you want privacy.

01:45:55.000 | - Yeah, so signals don't upgrade.

01:45:55.840 | - Signal is way better.

01:45:57.280 | I mean, and it's way better than it was five years ago.

01:45:59.740 | And it's not quite as good as like,

01:46:02.700 | not quite as seamless, right, as like a WhatsApp yet,

01:46:05.780 | but it's almost there.

01:46:07.480 | And they were able to do it.

01:46:08.840 | And you're gonna see that with Bitcoin wallets as well.

01:46:12.800 | I mean, they're almost there.

01:46:14.180 | They're like, if you use like a moon wallet is like,

01:46:17.520 | I mean, it's so cool looking and it's so seamless.

01:46:19.520 | And they've spent so many hours

01:46:20.880 | thinking about your experience.

01:46:22.760 | We are getting there.

01:46:23.820 | Whereas 10 years ago, it was like impossible to use.

01:46:25.880 | - One of the things that signal doesn't have,

01:46:27.640 | and I believe these kinds of applications need to have,

01:46:32.640 | is like a, I hate the term, but killer app,

01:46:35.520 | which is like a dumb,

01:46:38.800 | but very viral and popular reason to switch.

01:46:42.720 | I didn't see exactly, I mean, I've been using signal,

01:46:45.800 | but I haven't seen a big reason to switch.

01:46:50.800 | I mean, the reason--

01:46:54.040 | - No, but I haven't switched everything to it.

01:46:55.840 | You know what I mean?

01:46:57.080 | - Yeah, the exodus to signal was in January.

01:47:00.280 | They had a huge user surge for two main reasons.

01:47:04.360 | One, hilariously enough, of course,

01:47:05.880 | was Elon tweeted like, you should use signal, right?

01:47:09.320 | Which is not insignificant.

01:47:10.700 | And then the other one was that like WhatsApp

01:47:13.160 | changed kind of some of its terms of service

01:47:14.960 | and like announced to all of its users

01:47:17.260 | in this little pop-up that it was gonna be

01:47:19.840 | sort of like changing the way it handled your data.

01:47:21.720 | That spooked a lot of people.

01:47:23.120 | So these two things really combined

01:47:25.520 | and tens of millions of people in the following weeks

01:47:28.720 | between January and February joined signal.

01:47:30.680 | It's like, it really has had its day in the sun.

01:47:33.960 | And they are like frantically trying to keep up with it.

01:47:36.760 | Like, and it's really nice to see

01:47:38.760 | that this encrypted messaging service,

01:47:42.160 | which prioritizes your privacy in a way that,

01:47:46.520 | you know, the government, again,

01:47:48.480 | may know like the metadata,

01:47:49.760 | but doesn't know exactly what you're saying

01:47:51.180 | unless they can get your hands on your phone.

01:47:53.080 | I think that's very, very powerful.

01:47:54.220 | So it can be done.

01:47:55.620 | I don't wanna be too jaded here.

01:47:57.540 | I think it can be done.

01:47:59.520 | I think we can fight back.

01:48:01.120 | And I think we can make,

01:48:02.480 | continue to make these digital communications tools

01:48:04.560 | and platforms in a way that really benefits us.

01:48:09.120 | - Yeah, I'm not sure, but I'm hopeful as well.

01:48:12.600 | I'm hopeful that if you look at the trend of technologies,

01:48:16.840 | they ultimately are ones that respect privacy,

01:48:19.560 | respect security and basic human rights.

01:48:23.640 | I mean, that's at least the hope.

01:48:25.840 | So Garry Kasparov, I'm Russian.

01:48:28.480 | He means a lot to me on a personal level.

01:48:30.860 | He is the chairman of Human Rights Foundation.

01:48:34.320 | What does Garry have to do with anything?

01:48:37.000 | What's your relationship like with him?

01:48:39.200 | Do you like chess?

01:48:40.800 | What are his specific focuses and ideas around the HRF?

01:48:45.040 | Can you just speak to it in general?

01:48:47.400 | - Yeah, so our chairman at the Human Rights Foundation

01:48:50.040 | was Václav Havel, who of course was like

01:48:53.960 | the famous Czech democracy activist

01:48:56.200 | who helped lead the Velvet Revolution

01:48:59.760 | and then ended up becoming

01:49:01.360 | the first democratically elected leader

01:49:04.280 | of the Czech Republic after the Soviet Union fell.

01:49:07.920 | He passed away in 2011.

01:49:10.420 | And it was very difficult to find a replacement

01:49:13.280 | 'cause who can fill Havel's shoes?

01:49:16.380 | But if one could, it would be Garry, right?

01:49:19.120 | So we like really tried to get Garry to join

01:49:21.440 | and thankfully he agreed.

01:49:22.580 | And we've had an amazing relationship

01:49:24.860 | with Garry over the years.

01:49:26.180 | I mean, he's been relentless in his pursuit of freedom.

01:49:29.080 | I mean, he could have retired

01:49:30.520 | and taken his career in a different direction

01:49:32.560 | and he could be hanging out with Putin

01:49:34.040 | and have a pleasure yacht and all kinds of stuff.

01:49:36.440 | But he decided to risk it.

01:49:38.720 | And if you actually study like the times

01:49:41.320 | when he was running for president in Russia,

01:49:43.720 | Masha Gessen followed him around in "The Man Without a Face."

01:49:46.160 | It's a great, great book about Putin.

01:49:48.320 | There's a fabulous chapter where she's following around Garry

01:49:51.640 | when he's campaigning.

01:49:52.520 | And I mean, he risked a lot.

01:49:54.700 | I mean, he can't go back to Russia anymore.

01:49:56.260 | He gave up his country.

01:49:58.060 | He's given up a huge amount to be able to speak his mind

01:50:01.140 | and to have this dream, this beautiful vision

01:50:03.880 | of a free and democratic Russia.

01:50:05.240 | He really believes in it.

01:50:06.600 | It's been a great experience.

01:50:07.640 | I work very closely with Garry.

01:50:09.520 | We talk a lot.

01:50:11.080 | We do different things around the world together.

01:50:13.280 | He's come out to a lot of events

01:50:15.480 | in different cities around the world.

01:50:18.040 | And he's been a very active chairman.

01:50:19.560 | This isn't some figurehead.

01:50:20.880 | He's very involved and it's really, really great.

01:50:23.480 | I mean, everything he's involved with is,

01:50:26.440 | as one journalist who attends our events says,

01:50:28.940 | when he walks in the room,

01:50:30.320 | the average IQ of the room goes up pretty significantly.

01:50:33.620 | I'm not a big chess person, unfortunately,

01:50:36.540 | so I have not been able to connect with him on that.

01:50:38.300 | But I think he probably would prefer it that way.

01:50:40.500 | All he gets is people who wanna talk to him about chess.

01:50:43.420 | So here we can talk about kind of human rights strategy

01:50:46.060 | and how to improve our fight against dictators.

01:50:50.900 | But he really has that moral clarity

01:50:53.860 | that I really appreciate.

01:50:57.460 | - Yeah, so he has a lot of fascinating ideas

01:51:00.240 | about artificial intelligence as well.

01:51:02.540 | He's opened my eyes a little bit

01:51:05.020 | to the state of Russia today

01:51:09.300 | because I've read most books on Putin

01:51:13.140 | in the English language

01:51:14.620 | in sort of trying to understand things.

01:51:16.820 | And I try to look at it from a historical perspective,

01:51:21.460 | like almost like we're living 100 years from now.

01:51:24.700 | And I look at Putin as a important figure

01:51:28.220 | in the history of human civilization

01:51:30.180 | and study it in that way.

01:51:31.740 | I think the way Gary looks at it,

01:51:34.620 | he probably doesn't appreciate me looking at the way I do.

01:51:37.460 | But the way he looks at it is

01:51:40.260 | we can still change the direction of Russia.

01:51:46.460 | And we individual human beings,

01:51:48.180 | and we communities, and we nations can take actions,

01:51:52.020 | have policies that can change the direction of Russia.

01:51:55.220 | To me, I take a sort of going to the library,

01:51:58.660 | passive view of studying fascinating aspects of Russia.

01:52:01.940 | To me, Russia means,

01:52:03.900 | like most of my family suffered through the Soviet Union

01:52:06.900 | and I see beauty in suffering,

01:52:09.660 | the poetry, the music, the stories.

01:52:12.660 | And just there's so much love that emerged from the pain

01:52:16.140 | that I just enjoy the music of that.

01:52:18.700 | But to Gary and to many activists that I speak to,

01:52:23.700 | they love not just the Russia of the past.

01:52:28.940 | They have a vision and a hope for Russia of the future.

01:52:32.380 | And they criticize me a little bit

01:52:35.100 | for being a little bit too scholarly about the past

01:52:38.100 | and ignoring the future.

01:52:39.140 | And there's something to that.

01:52:40.900 | So he opens my eyes to look to the future of Russia.

01:52:45.660 | Gary and a handful of other Russian activists

01:52:48.980 | that we work closely with,

01:52:50.380 | including Vladimir Kara-Murza,

01:52:51.860 | who again, I mean, it's just incredibly heroic.

01:52:54.140 | The man has survived two poisonings by Putin.

01:52:56.580 | They like to say that,

01:52:59.100 | Russians will bring democracy to Russia on their own terms.

01:53:02.940 | They don't need our help.

01:53:04.140 | This is what Vladimir especially says.

01:53:07.020 | But what he does say

01:53:07.860 | is that we should stop propping up Putin.

01:53:09.980 | Like that's kind of his,

01:53:11.540 | stop kind of legitimizing him.

01:53:13.460 | That's kind of his argument.

01:53:15.140 | He's like, we don't need your foreign interference.

01:53:17.460 | We don't need your ideas.

01:53:18.420 | We don't need your help.

01:53:19.780 | We can do it on our own,

01:53:20.900 | but please stop like propping up our illegitimate ruler.

01:53:24.380 | That's kind of like his point of view,

01:53:26.260 | which I think is interesting and fair.

01:53:30.380 | - Yeah, let me just say on one unrelated comment,

01:53:35.100 | some people criticize me and others,

01:53:37.980 | like Joe Rogan for giving people a platform.

01:53:44.020 | I think in some cases that's applicable,

01:53:46.100 | but I think in most cases, knowledge is power.

01:53:51.020 | And there's no such thing as giving a platform.

01:53:54.020 | The conversation just shines a light,

01:53:56.700 | as long as you shine the light well.

01:53:58.660 | And as long as in shining the light

01:54:02.060 | and having the conversation,

01:54:03.380 | you reveal something fundamental about the state of things,

01:54:07.140 | about the people, whether that's Putin

01:54:09.820 | or some of the other controversial figures

01:54:11.940 | that have come up.

01:54:13.700 | In a possible future conversation.

01:54:16.020 | So I don't like this kind of platforming idea.

01:54:20.060 | I think conversations save us.

01:54:22.220 | They don't destroy us.

01:54:24.220 | - Yeah, I mean, that's journalism though.

01:54:26.540 | I mean, that's very different from advocacy

01:54:29.380 | or strategic thinking about what to do with Russia.

01:54:32.980 | Absolutely, yeah.

01:54:33.940 | We should interview everybody

01:54:35.220 | and everybody should know exactly what they're thinking.

01:54:38.140 | - But journalism to me has become a dirty word

01:54:41.060 | because it's done so poorly by so many people that...

01:54:45.780 | I listen to sometimes certain programs,

01:54:51.260 | like, I don't know,

01:54:53.060 | like Meet the Press and the Fox Sunday program,

01:54:56.900 | just certain things just to tune in

01:54:59.020 | and see what different news medias are paying attention to.

01:55:02.860 | And the kind of interviews they do

01:55:05.380 | is like five minutes at most,

01:55:07.540 | but usually it's like one minute.

01:55:08.860 | It's these quick clip things and it's very gotcha.

01:55:13.300 | And they're looking for ways

01:55:14.620 | to sort of grab almost a misstatement.

01:55:17.620 | They wanna catch you off guard.

01:55:19.900 | They wanna ask the quote, like the harsh question,

01:55:23.860 | but without any of the dance of conversation

01:55:27.420 | that reveals the truth.

01:55:29.100 | You can't just get to the truth by asking it.

01:55:33.660 | You have to sneak up on it.

01:55:36.420 | And I think that's an art form.

01:55:38.820 | And I think that art form involves long form conversation.

01:55:42.460 | Like I'm a huge believer in just,

01:55:44.820 | I guess that's what's called, I don't know,

01:55:46.380 | in-depth journalism or whatever,

01:55:48.020 | like where you spend months or years on a story.

01:55:51.140 | - Yeah, beautiful.

01:55:51.980 | - In that same way, I think of long form conversation

01:55:54.380 | is like you spend many hours

01:55:56.820 | and you spend months and years preparing

01:55:58.460 | for those many hours,

01:55:59.540 | but like it's not this like short form

01:56:02.620 | trying to get the most controversial

01:56:05.420 | little tidbit of a story out.

01:56:07.260 | And unfortunately, the funding mechanisms

01:56:09.660 | behind journalism are such that they are incentivized,

01:56:13.020 | clickbait journalism versus like in-depth,

01:56:16.340 | long form digging for the truth.

01:56:18.660 | - I have a conflicted relationship with journalism

01:56:20.340 | because to me, press freedom is so core.

01:56:22.940 | - Right.

01:56:23.780 | - And independent journalists around the world

01:56:24.620 | are so brave.

01:56:25.460 | - Yes.

01:56:26.420 | - Especially in countries like Russia or China, et cetera.

01:56:28.820 | And really good journalism is still something

01:56:32.500 | I absolutely, I love and I enjoy.

01:56:34.780 | Like this, especially like to say again,

01:56:37.020 | this New Yorker piece on what's happening to the Uyghurs

01:56:38.900 | is incredibly well reported.

01:56:40.700 | However, on the other hand,

01:56:43.020 | you have this sort of clickbaity journalism

01:56:46.780 | that's all about sensationalism

01:56:48.300 | and that gets used as a tool.

01:56:49.860 | I mean, whether it be against things like privacy

01:56:53.980 | or Bitcoin or whatever,

01:56:54.980 | you have like people who sensationalize

01:56:57.500 | and it gets used in the service of the surveillance state,

01:57:00.700 | the war on terror, whatever.

01:57:02.580 | It's difficult, but I think journalism is essential

01:57:06.020 | to a free society, but it can sometimes be,

01:57:11.020 | it can wear my patience thin sometimes.

01:57:13.300 | - Like it's been, to be honest,

01:57:14.940 | it's been a huge burden on me personally,

01:57:16.780 | if I were to just turn this into a therapy session

01:57:18.980 | for a brief moment.

01:57:20.220 | When I look at people, when I interact with people,

01:57:22.460 | I'd like to see the best in them.

01:57:24.980 | And the burden that weighs heavy on me

01:57:28.940 | is sometimes people I talk to may not be

01:57:32.380 | good people.

01:57:33.980 | And I don't, I'd love to say,

01:57:36.620 | I believe everybody has good in them.

01:57:39.020 | And I try to focus on that.

01:57:41.260 | The burden that weighs on me is sometimes that

01:57:45.420 | there may be conversations where that's irresponsible,

01:57:48.660 | where I have to also call people out.

01:57:53.660 | I have to do enough of the hard lifting

01:57:55.500 | and the hard work of knowing exactly

01:57:57.980 | what are the bad things that that person has done.

01:58:01.540 | And I also have the responsibility to call them out on it.

01:58:05.300 | And that's for me personally, just an unpleasant feeling.

01:58:07.940 | That's where speaking to journalism,

01:58:10.100 | like I think journalists are too much focused

01:58:12.900 | on the bad things a person has done

01:58:16.900 | and not enough on the digging into the full complexity

01:58:21.700 | of the human being behind all the things that have been done.

01:58:25.260 | But at the same time, you know,

01:58:28.060 | I can't have a conversation with Hitler

01:58:30.980 | and not ask about the prison camps.

01:58:33.700 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

01:58:34.620 | Yeah, no, so from the human rights perspective,

01:58:36.220 | one of our programs is we try to go after people

01:58:40.340 | who do PR for dictators.

01:58:41.940 | So like, and a lot of people do.

01:58:45.300 | Like PR firms in Washington get hired by all these dictators

01:58:48.300 | and they make a lot of money to make them look good.

01:58:51.740 | It's called whitewashing or putting lipstick on a pig

01:58:53.820 | or whatever you wanna do.

01:58:54.660 | Astro-turfing is like the fake,

01:58:56.140 | you make fake social media accounts

01:58:57.580 | to make it seem like you're popular.

01:58:59.900 | But whitewashing is a huge issue.

01:59:01.340 | So I think it's completely fair to interview like dictators

01:59:06.340 | and stuff like that.

01:59:07.580 | Amanpour does a pretty good job.

01:59:09.300 | She's really good.

01:59:10.700 | She makes sure that there's no messing around.

01:59:13.980 | I mean, her interviews of Museveni recently,

01:59:16.580 | the Ugandan dictator was very good.

01:59:18.500 | I mean, she's basically like,

01:59:19.340 | "Well, like, why are you rigging another election?

01:59:22.620 | "Please tell us," you know?

01:59:24.020 | And she's fearless and she's good.

01:59:26.020 | And that can be a helpful thing to have

01:59:27.860 | on YouTube as a resource.

01:59:30.020 | But it's quite clear when it descends into a PR session

01:59:35.020 | and you just have to be like very careful about it.

01:59:37.460 | Like Asma al-Assad, the wife of the butcher in Syria,

01:59:41.540 | you know, was like profiled by Vogue

01:59:43.540 | and it was this whole rose in the desert thing.

01:59:45.500 | It's a bunch of nonsense.

01:59:46.700 | Terrible, terrible, terrible, total propaganda.

01:59:50.340 | But a like honest interview where you're asking

01:59:54.980 | about all the tough questions, very important.

01:59:58.700 | So I think it's just a matter of like content, right?

02:00:01.060 | - Is there a good resource to study whitewashing?

02:00:03.860 | Like to know what manipulative PR looks like?

02:00:07.380 | - I think you just, you should know,

02:00:09.060 | if you've researched the topic,

02:00:10.920 | you should know it inside you because it would be,

02:00:13.580 | is there anything you're afraid to ask?

02:00:15.580 | That would be it.

02:00:16.420 | Make sure you're asking all the questions.

02:00:18.020 | As long as you're asking all the questions that you have,

02:00:20.020 | you're good.

02:00:20.980 | But if there's something you're afraid to ask,

02:00:23.260 | then maybe you're self-censoring, right?

02:00:25.900 | - That's a good way.

02:00:26.740 | It takes us back to that, like, what is it?

02:00:29.420 | That litmus test about,

02:00:31.780 | is your country allowed to have a gay pride parade?

02:00:33.780 | - Yeah.

02:00:34.620 | (laughing)

02:00:35.940 | - So there's like obvious things that might be on your mind

02:00:38.780 | that you just want to ask and you shouldn't run from them.

02:00:41.980 | - As long as you feel like you're a free person

02:00:43.540 | when you're interviewing, I think you're good.

02:00:46.100 | - That's beautifully put.

02:00:47.880 | Are there books, technical fiction, philosophical,

02:00:52.460 | that had an impact on your life that you would recommend?

02:00:56.420 | Or even resources like blogs, films?

02:00:59.980 | - I have four books I'll briefly mention.

02:01:03.180 | Number one is "The Fear."

02:01:05.660 | "The Fear" had a deep impact on me.

02:01:07.700 | "The Fear" was written by Peter Godwin.

02:01:09.540 | It's about the systematic dismantling of Zimbabwe

02:01:12.580 | under Robert Mugabe.

02:01:14.100 | Peter is Zimbabwean and it is a riveting book.

02:01:17.500 | I think everyone should read it

02:01:18.680 | because it helps you understand what it's like

02:01:20.860 | to go through not just authoritarianism

02:01:22.700 | but also hyperinflation.

02:01:24.480 | And I mean really, at the end of the day,

02:01:26.940 | what "The Fear" describes is how Mugabe took this country

02:01:30.340 | in the 1980s and he actually brought it back in time

02:01:33.740 | to the 1920s in terms of infrastructure,

02:01:36.460 | literacy rates, health rates, all these things.

02:01:38.540 | He stole so much from the people.

02:01:40.520 | And it's a heartbreaking book

02:01:41.820 | but it's a very important book.

02:01:43.320 | And it's a way to do excellent, excellent journalism.

02:01:49.260 | So "The Fear" is a good one.

02:01:51.060 | - And it's a personal story?

02:01:52.660 | - Absolutely, yeah.

02:01:53.860 | Because he was, it's part of his whole family story

02:01:57.020 | and he's in there, he's interviewing people personally.

02:02:00.380 | So I would say that one.

02:02:02.300 | - Is it also connected, sorry to interrupt.

02:02:03.940 | Is it, from the inflation perspective,

02:02:06.420 | is it a good study of hyperinflation and the effects?

02:02:09.920 | Does Bitcoin at all come as a,

02:02:12.220 | - No. - You know,

02:02:15.660 | a discussion of money?

02:02:16.820 | Does that come into the,

02:02:18.340 | or is it purely the experience of inflation

02:02:20.620 | as almost a symptom of an authoritarian government?

02:02:22.420 | - A little bit, a little bit.

02:02:23.460 | I would say it's not deep.

02:02:24.460 | I have another book on that which I'll recommend

02:02:26.300 | in a second but I would just say

02:02:28.540 | that it's a very powerfully written book

02:02:32.080 | about how society can basically deteriorate

02:02:36.940 | and how you can lose everything.

02:02:38.540 | The second book is, I just mentioned it,

02:02:41.340 | but "The Man Without a Face" by Masha Gessen.

02:02:43.660 | Incredible book about modern Russia and Putin.

02:02:46.100 | Just a masterpiece.

02:02:47.660 | So that one is--

02:02:48.500 | - Could be one of your favorite books

02:02:49.820 | about Putin and Russia?

02:02:50.820 | - That one's the best.

02:02:51.780 | I mean, she's just so fearless, incredible.

02:02:54.020 | She interviews Putin in the book at the end.

02:02:56.740 | It's really good.

02:02:57.580 | Third one is a fiction book called "The Mandibles"

02:03:02.940 | written by Lionel Shriver.

02:03:04.820 | This one's good.

02:03:05.660 | It's a good gift book.

02:03:06.480 | It's funny, it's dark, it's witty.

02:03:08.020 | But it's about the United States losing its status

02:03:12.060 | as the reserve currency and going into hyperinflation.

02:03:14.940 | And what's interesting is that the characters

02:03:16.540 | in the book map where we are today.

02:03:19.240 | The book itself is about the late,

02:03:20.620 | I think it's the late 2020s,

02:03:22.520 | and we have a populist president who decides

02:03:25.080 | to announce that the United States

02:03:26.840 | is basically gonna default on its debts,

02:03:28.960 | and the rest of the world comes up with a new currency,

02:03:31.980 | and everybody switches to that one,

02:03:33.500 | and the dollar overnight becomes worthless.

02:03:36.040 | And all these economists are saying,

02:03:38.180 | "No, it's fine, inflation won't be a problem."

02:03:41.640 | And there's this one character who's an economist,

02:03:44.780 | and he's basically, he gets to the point

02:03:47.220 | where he's living as a refugee

02:03:48.620 | in Prospect Park in Brooklyn,

02:03:50.220 | and he's still saying everything's fine.

02:03:52.360 | So it's dry, it's witty,

02:03:54.140 | but it's also about the surveillance state,

02:03:57.040 | it's about centralization of power.

02:03:59.340 | It's really good.

02:04:00.300 | So "The Mandibles" I would highly recommend.

02:04:03.740 | So those three books, and then on the topic of Bitcoin,

02:04:06.660 | because we talked about it a lot,

02:04:07.860 | I would just say that my portal into Bitcoin

02:04:10.020 | was "The Internet of Money" by Andreas Antonopoulos.

02:04:13.140 | - Oh, wow.

02:04:13.980 | - And I did it by audio book.

02:04:16.380 | And I just think this is an important one

02:04:18.860 | for people to start with,

02:04:20.340 | because he goes through all the main concepts,

02:04:23.300 | whether it be proof of work,

02:04:24.820 | or how the network functions.

02:04:27.240 | But he does it in a way that's extremely engaging,

02:04:30.060 | and really fascinating,

02:04:31.580 | and it really just sparked my curiosity.

02:04:34.500 | - Is it discussing the technical sides,

02:04:37.180 | or also the philosophical?

02:04:38.220 | Because a lot of people mentioned

02:04:39.540 | the Bitcoin standard as a philosophical entry

02:04:41.780 | into the whole Bitcoin world.

02:04:43.540 | - It's very different from the Bitcoin standard.

02:04:44.940 | It's more for the average person.

02:04:47.740 | It's not a history book.

02:04:49.220 | It's a collection of his talks

02:04:50.420 | that he gave over two or three years.

02:04:52.540 | It's not very technical.

02:04:54.180 | It's very approachable.

02:04:55.700 | And some of it might be dated now,

02:04:57.940 | 'cause it's 2015, 2016.

02:05:00.380 | But I mean--

02:05:01.220 | - It's great to hear a shout out for Andreas,

02:05:03.460 | because he seems to be one of the seminal figures

02:05:06.540 | to make Bitcoin ideas accessible.

02:05:10.380 | - Andreas is the GOAT.

02:05:11.540 | - He's the GOAT.

02:05:12.380 | - Andreas is the GOAT.

02:05:13.500 | - Andreas is the GOAT.

02:05:14.340 | - I know a lot of people have issues

02:05:15.540 | with some of his more recent work,

02:05:16.980 | but Andreas is the GOAT.

02:05:18.460 | I mean, he's the reason I'm in Bitcoin.

02:05:21.100 | - Yeah, that's fascinating.

02:05:23.020 | And it's funny to watch the Bitcoin maximalist

02:05:26.500 | immune system also attacking him,

02:05:30.300 | and this whole feedback mechanism is working together.

02:05:33.580 | It's fascinating.

02:05:34.420 | - Well, I probably consider myself a maximalist,

02:05:36.460 | but I really like Andreas.

02:05:38.540 | So I think there's room for nuance.

02:05:40.220 | - There's room for nuance in this world.

02:05:42.100 | I'm glad to hear that.

02:05:43.820 | If people are fascinated by your work,

02:05:46.580 | what is the way to get more of Alex?

02:05:51.060 | - So two years ago, I came together

02:05:53.900 | with seven other people from around the world,

02:05:55.420 | and we wrote a book in a book sprint.

02:05:57.460 | We lived in a house for four days.

02:05:58.500 | We wrote a book together.

02:05:59.820 | It was really cool.

02:06:00.660 | It was like a design sprint, but we did it in book format.

02:06:02.780 | And my co-authors are from Nigeria, Venezuela,

02:06:07.540 | the Philippines, from former Soviet Union, from all over.

02:06:10.780 | And it's called "The Little Bitcoin Book,"

02:06:12.300 | and I'm still proud of it.

02:06:14.540 | It's 100 pages.

02:06:15.460 | It's something you give to somebody

02:06:16.580 | who knows nothing about the topic,

02:06:18.460 | and it's not a technical book.

02:06:19.900 | It's about the sort of social, political aspect of it,

02:06:23.940 | like why is it important for you, for your finances,

02:06:26.220 | for your freedom, for your future.

02:06:28.900 | And we've translated it into a lot of languages by now.

02:06:32.460 | I think English, Spanish, and Portuguese are for sale,

02:06:35.460 | and at littlebitcoinbook.com, you go buy it.

02:06:38.340 | But we've made it as a free PDF in Mandarin, Hindi, Punjab,

02:06:43.340 | Korean, Uyghur, which I was really excited about,

02:06:47.780 | Arabic, Farsi, and I mean, it spreads, man.

02:06:50.860 | It's been really, really cool.

02:06:52.020 | So I'm proud of that.

02:06:53.220 | I also made a video that did very well

02:06:57.420 | for Reason Magazine called

02:06:58.900 | "Why is Bitcoin Protecting Human Rights Around the World?"

02:07:01.580 | It's five minutes, and I feel like I tried to boil

02:07:04.300 | everything that I wanna tell you

02:07:07.060 | into this five-minute video.

02:07:08.840 | So there's that, would recommend that.

02:07:11.420 | And then if you're interested in the

02:07:14.140 | why have governments not stopped it,

02:07:17.420 | which I think is really intriguing,

02:07:18.900 | I wrote this long essay in Quillette in February called

02:07:21.860 | why haven't governments banned Bitcoin?

02:07:26.020 | And maybe that'll be a helpful guide to some folks.

02:07:28.660 | - Is it speaking to the Trojan horse idea

02:07:30.420 | that there's something enticing about it?

02:07:32.860 | - Yeah, at the end, it does get into that,

02:07:34.740 | but it really also just kinda goes through technically

02:07:36.880 | why is it hard to do a 51% attack?

02:07:39.020 | Like, if a government wanted to,

02:07:41.580 | could it really get all that equipment?

02:07:43.540 | There's a semiconductor shortage, like it can't.

02:07:45.820 | There's like certain things

02:07:47.020 | that stop governments from doing it, right?

02:07:49.140 | And same thing with like this idea of a 6102,

02:07:51.780 | which would be based on the idea of the executive order 6102,

02:07:56.780 | which is from 1933 when FDR

02:07:59.100 | made holding gold illegal in the United States.

02:08:01.100 | The idea is that like banks would go around now

02:08:03.300 | with governments and try to like steal everybody's Bitcoin.

02:08:05.580 | Well, in Bitcoin, we have like a practice

02:08:08.420 | called Proof of Keys Day every January 3rd,

02:08:10.620 | which is coinciding with the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain

02:08:14.140 | where we all like withdraw our keys from exchanges

02:08:16.300 | and we'd be sovereign users.

02:08:17.720 | What we are doing is we are preparing for a 6102 attack,

02:08:20.260 | which will one day probably come, right?

02:08:22.220 | So the essay just goes through all of the like

02:08:25.220 | possible attacks and it runs through like

02:08:27.500 | the ones that happened,

02:08:28.500 | like the Chinese and Indian governments,

02:08:29.780 | the two largest governments in the world,

02:08:31.380 | both tried to attack Bitcoin by banning their citizens

02:08:34.540 | from exchanging fiat for Bitcoin.

02:08:36.340 | It didn't work.

02:08:37.180 | Interest instead exploded.

02:08:38.420 | It's like the Barbra Streisand effect

02:08:40.380 | where by making something public

02:08:44.820 | and saying you shouldn't do X,

02:08:46.300 | it actually increases attention about X a lot more, right?

02:08:49.580 | So I think there's a lot of interesting game theory there

02:08:53.780 | that people would enjoy.

02:08:54.620 | - Do you think, are you seriously concerned

02:08:58.140 | about this kind of thing where the ideas of sovereignty

02:09:01.940 | that Bitcoin espouses would actually one day be tested?

02:09:05.980 | Do you have like a legitimate concern?

02:09:09.060 | 'Cause you said like one day very well might.

02:09:12.220 | Do you think it might go down?

02:09:14.500 | - Yeah, well, first of all,

02:09:15.580 | Bitcoin has been attacked again many times.

02:09:18.380 | And we talk about the,

02:09:20.500 | you spoke about this with Nick Carter on your show,

02:09:23.100 | the sort of protocol wars or conflict or whatever, right?

02:09:26.780 | And Bitcoin almost died a whole bunch of times during that

02:09:29.620 | and ended up surviving.

02:09:30.780 | - Oh, wow, I didn't know how bad the block side war was.

02:09:33.620 | - Oh, it got really bad.

02:09:35.460 | It was sort of a very existential threat

02:09:38.060 | and Bitcoin survived.

02:09:39.660 | And that's why I'm so intrigued by it

02:09:42.500 | is that it basically survived an attack

02:09:46.420 | in an environment several years ago

02:09:48.180 | when Bitcoin was much more vulnerable than it is today.

02:09:50.900 | It survived an attack by a conglomeration

02:09:53.020 | of Chinese billionaires, Silicon Valley corporations,

02:09:55.940 | and a ton of people who owned the majority of the hash rate

02:09:59.300 | and all of this infrastructure.

02:10:00.860 | They had 83% of all the hash rate

02:10:02.900 | and they couldn't get what they wanted.

02:10:04.700 | And that was so intriguing to me.

02:10:06.020 | Like, why didn't it get killed?

02:10:08.260 | So as Nick said, I think you should read

02:10:10.580 | "The Block Size War," which is a book

02:10:12.900 | that you can get on Amazon by Jonathan Beer.

02:10:14.940 | Really good, kind of like,

02:10:16.620 | really important to understand the scaling conflict

02:10:20.660 | and the visions over,

02:10:22.060 | the different visions of what Bitcoin should be.

02:10:24.300 | And again, people like me believe

02:10:25.860 | it should be a freedom tool,

02:10:26.860 | not like a payments technology for retail.

02:10:29.740 | And I'm just, I'm glad it worked out the way it did

02:10:32.260 | 'cause it almost didn't.

02:10:34.060 | - Do you think a human's civilization will destroy itself?

02:10:38.260 | So if we think about all the threats

02:10:41.460 | facing human civilization, nuclear war,

02:10:45.900 | natural or engineered pandemics,

02:10:48.780 | you know, we talk about human rights violations.

02:10:51.900 | We talk about authoritarian governments

02:10:55.180 | taking control of the money supply.

02:10:58.540 | But do you have grander concerns

02:11:01.100 | for the future of human civilization?

02:11:02.980 | Do you have hope for us becoming multi-planetary species?

02:11:07.820 | - Yeah, I mean, I guess long-term

02:11:09.780 | we'd wanna decentralize, right?

02:11:11.540 | We don't want a single point of failure.

02:11:12.860 | - In the physical space too.

02:11:14.100 | - The Earth is a single point of failure.

02:11:16.540 | But no, I mean, you look at all this

02:11:17.820 | kind of like space fiction and,

02:11:20.660 | I mean, who would wanna live on Mars, man?

02:11:22.420 | It's like a fricking desert.

02:11:23.700 | I mean, the Earth is so beautiful.

02:11:24.900 | I hope we can save it, you know?

02:11:27.020 | It's just so gorgeous.

02:11:28.460 | When you look at the Earth compared to any other

02:11:30.140 | like exoplanet or whatever, you look at it.

02:11:32.540 | I mean, the Earth is so spectacular

02:11:34.380 | and wondrous and singular.

02:11:36.200 | I think we've gotta do everything we can to save it here.

02:11:39.540 | - That's funny.

02:11:40.380 | I mean, I'm sure a lot of people

02:11:42.780 | would have said that about Europe

02:11:45.100 | before the explorers ventured out,

02:11:48.420 | Columbus and the rest out into the unknown.

02:11:51.460 | The thing about human nature is that we are explorers too.

02:11:54.580 | - We are, I agree.

02:11:55.420 | - Some small fraction of us are insane enough

02:11:58.420 | to explore in the most dangerous grounds.

02:12:01.820 | And I'm pretty sure there's quite a few people

02:12:03.780 | that would love to take the first step on Mars,

02:12:06.780 | the first few steps on Mars,

02:12:08.620 | in the harshest of environments,

02:12:10.420 | even when the odds of survival are extremely low.

02:12:13.980 | And I'm thankful for those people.

02:12:16.780 | As I sit back and drink my vodka back here on Earth

02:12:19.780 | and enjoy good friendships,

02:12:21.580 | because I think ultimately that step to Mars

02:12:25.620 | is going to be a first step into a multi,

02:12:29.940 | into exploring and colonizing the rest of the galaxy.

02:12:33.980 | Mars might be a harsh environment,

02:12:36.000 | but maybe space is not.

02:12:37.940 | Like other planets, other exoplanets,

02:12:42.660 | but also forget planets,

02:12:44.420 | just creating colonies that float about in space.

02:12:48.260 | There's exciting technologies that are yet to be discovered,

02:12:50.740 | yet to be engineered and built,

02:12:52.740 | that I think require that first painful step.

02:12:55.500 | Like, yeah, the journey of a thousand miles

02:12:58.060 | starts with one step.

02:12:58.900 | And I think Mars is that first step.

02:13:00.700 | - Yeah, no, I was born the day before the Challenger blew up

02:13:04.340 | and it was always so tragic for me to look back on that.

02:13:07.580 | 'Cause that really like altered our arc

02:13:10.100 | in terms of space exploration.

02:13:11.380 | Like if that had not happened,

02:13:13.020 | we'd be in a very different arc.

02:13:14.020 | And I do respect and admire people pushing for exploration,

02:13:17.500 | but at the same time, I just, I want to recognize,

02:13:20.300 | like we just, you know, we know how unique Earth is.

02:13:23.100 | And I do think we got to do everything we can to protect.

02:13:27.660 | - But I think you avoid answering the question

02:13:31.620 | if we're going to destroy ourselves.

02:13:33.900 | - Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess.

02:13:35.860 | - Are you hopeful?

02:13:36.700 | - If we do not, okay, fine.

02:13:38.060 | If we do not decentralize properly

02:13:40.460 | out into different physical spaces, probably, I guess, yeah.

02:13:45.460 | - And then, I mean, do you have concerns

02:13:47.860 | that are immediately facing you?

02:13:49.180 | So not in terms of the injustices on the world,

02:13:53.860 | but nuclear war?

02:13:55.180 | - Yeah, look, I'm a lot more concerned

02:13:57.180 | about what's happening right now.

02:13:58.820 | Like what is destroying ourselves?

02:14:01.740 | If you were to go and see what's happening

02:14:03.940 | in Xinjiang or North Korea right now, or Eritrea,

02:14:07.460 | that is destroying ourselves and it's already happened.

02:14:10.340 | So I guess that's why I said, yes.

02:14:13.140 | I mean, if you don't decentralize

02:14:14.780 | and power is completely under one person,

02:14:18.380 | life is destroyed as we know it.

02:14:20.700 | And you don't have to go into science fiction

02:14:23.980 | to know what a totalitarian hellscape dystopia is.

02:14:28.180 | There's several that exist already.

02:14:29.740 | And let's try to help those people

02:14:33.060 | at the same time as we're trying to push out into space

02:14:36.180 | would be my counter, I guess.

02:14:38.060 | - Yeah, I agree with you.

02:14:39.180 | In my mind, destruction and suffering

02:14:41.900 | are next door neighbors.

02:14:43.180 | So we don't need to destroy all of human civilization

02:14:46.220 | if a large fraction of it lives in conditions

02:14:50.340 | that we would equate to suffering.

02:14:51.760 | That's not a good world.

02:14:54.140 | Is there advice that you would give to young people today

02:14:59.980 | about life, about career, about how they can help a world

02:15:03.300 | where 53% are living under authoritarian governments?

02:15:09.300 | But in general, a world that's full of injustice,

02:15:12.300 | but also full of opportunity.

02:15:13.920 | - Just thinking about my own upbringing,

02:15:16.980 | I went to a public school here

02:15:18.500 | and we never learned about money.

02:15:21.420 | It was never part of our curriculum.

02:15:23.220 | Even personal finances was not part of our curriculum.

02:15:27.700 | You could take like an optional course

02:15:28.980 | to learn about like business or something.

02:15:31.820 | And I think that that would be really valuable

02:15:33.940 | as a young person or as a teenager

02:15:37.060 | to start incorporating into your children's lives

02:15:40.660 | is like a curiosity about what is money.

02:15:43.100 | I think it'd be very healthy,

02:15:44.460 | regardless of what path that takes them down.

02:15:47.300 | Because we don't think about it enough,

02:15:48.940 | either from an administrative sort of personal finance thing

02:15:51.340 | about like responsibility,

02:15:52.940 | or more fundamentally, like what is it and who creates it?

02:15:57.420 | Where did it come from?

02:15:58.780 | Both of those things are very important.

02:16:00.180 | So my advice to a young person would be

02:16:01.780 | to get to the point where you feel like

02:16:03.540 | you can answer the question, what is money?

02:16:06.120 | (laughing)

02:16:07.520 | - So you ultimately see money as a kind of power

02:16:10.000 | and freedom and a mechanism of self-reliance.

02:16:13.520 | - It is so core to everything.

02:16:15.400 | The United States, whether you wanna call it

02:16:17.800 | the Pax Americana, the empire, the hyper power,

02:16:20.880 | whatever you wanna call this moment in time

02:16:22.840 | where the US is dominant around the world,

02:16:24.280 | it is because of the fact that we have

02:16:26.680 | this petrodollar system where we are able to force

02:16:30.640 | the Saudis and other oil producing nations

02:16:33.200 | to sell their oil in dollars.

02:16:36.120 | That is really inescapable, inseparable from our power.

02:16:39.920 | And that's very rarely talked about.

02:16:42.260 | And it's very important to understand.

02:16:44.060 | So yeah, if young people could start thinking

02:16:46.200 | about that stuff, it'd be good.

02:16:48.040 | - I remember being, it sounds silly to say,

02:16:50.320 | but I remember being really uncomfortable

02:16:52.780 | that I was dependent on my parents at a young age

02:16:56.560 | for like financial--

02:16:58.800 | - Oh, you need to be 18 to have a bank account or whatever.

02:17:00.640 | - Right.

02:17:01.480 | - And one of the people that we supported at Ahrefs

02:17:03.440 | through our, we do software development funding

02:17:05.600 | for people in Bitcoin, open source projects.

02:17:07.800 | And he's one of the guys we funded

02:17:09.360 | is this very young, smart sort of prodigy.

02:17:11.880 | He's like 17.

02:17:13.320 | But one of the reasons he got into Bitcoin

02:17:14.640 | was 'cause he wanted to have control of his money

02:17:16.640 | when he was like 14.

02:17:18.120 | I mean, if you think in history,

02:17:19.080 | people who invented all kinds of incredible contributions

02:17:23.080 | to science or math, I mean, a lot of them did it

02:17:25.600 | before they were 15.

02:17:27.500 | So think about that maturity that is capable

02:17:30.520 | and possible in many people.

02:17:31.600 | Like I've participated in some of the, years ago,

02:17:34.360 | some of the sort of selection processes

02:17:36.880 | for like the Thiel Fellowship, which is like really amazing.

02:17:39.000 | Like these people who are 14, 15, 16,

02:17:41.320 | who don't need to go to college.

02:17:42.280 | They're already like so smart, they can figure it out.

02:17:44.400 | But they wouldn't be allowed to have a bank account, right?

02:17:46.360 | So, hey, that's kind of cool.

02:17:48.480 | Like now you have a permissionless money.

02:17:50.040 | You can open up yourself

02:17:51.440 | without permission from your parents.

02:17:53.280 | That's kind of cool.

02:17:54.100 | - Yeah, that's fascinating to me.

02:17:55.240 | I feel like I would have loved my parents more

02:18:01.240 | - If you had a little more separation.

02:18:03.040 | - If I had freedom to fully realize myself,

02:18:06.200 | because I felt like I was a little bit trapped by,

02:18:08.840 | I don't know, it's not explicit, right?

02:18:11.560 | It's a little bit, it's like a subtle push

02:18:15.480 | that you're somehow dependent on them.

02:18:17.480 | I mean, part of that is like,

02:18:19.060 | I think it actually very much has to do

02:18:22.160 | not talking about money.

02:18:23.220 | Like what does it take to operate

02:18:24.880 | as an individual entity in this world?

02:18:26.600 | Like knowing that when you're 10 years old,

02:18:28.880 | knowing that when you're very young,

02:18:31.040 | so that you've, then you see how amazing it is

02:18:36.040 | to have the support of your parents until you're 18.

02:18:40.120 | Like have that freedom.

02:18:41.560 | Have the freedom to appreciate the value your parents bring,

02:18:47.340 | and at the same time, the freedom to leave

02:18:51.600 | in some capacity to carve your own path.

02:18:56.080 | I mean, just all of that, I think,

02:18:58.040 | for weirdos like me, especially,

02:19:00.120 | 'cause that was a very non-traditional path

02:19:02.960 | that I think it would be very empowering,

02:19:06.120 | and certainly would be empowering in the third world.

02:19:07.960 | - Not just weirdos like you, I was gonna mention.

02:19:10.200 | One of the people I got who taught me about Bitcoin,

02:19:13.440 | her name is Roya Mahboob.

02:19:14.600 | She's an Afghan technology CEO.

02:19:17.200 | And in 2013, she started paying her employees in Bitcoin

02:19:20.720 | because they were not allowed to open bank accounts,

02:19:23.760 | the women that worked for her.

02:19:24.740 | She started the country's first female,

02:19:27.280 | all-female software company.

02:19:29.200 | And if they brought cash home,

02:19:31.400 | their husbands or uncles or brothers

02:19:32.960 | would steal it from them.

02:19:33.800 | There's a power, patriarchal dominance thing going on.

02:19:36.840 | But they had phones, and she was able to pay them in Bitcoin

02:19:40.200 | and no one knew, and it gave them that power.

02:19:42.640 | And that's always stuck in my mind

02:19:44.280 | as a very interesting effect of this kind of thing,

02:19:47.280 | of permissionless money,

02:19:49.000 | that it can be an empowerment tool, so absolutely.

02:19:52.040 | - So in your own personal life,

02:19:53.800 | where did the deep concern

02:19:58.520 | for the suffering in the world come from?

02:20:01.400 | Where was that born?

02:20:03.720 | - I was gonna be an engineer actually,

02:20:07.040 | and then in 2003, we invaded Iraq,

02:20:09.440 | and I got very interested in why we did that as a nation.

02:20:12.640 | And I switched my focus of study

02:20:15.240 | to like international relations,

02:20:17.000 | and that's how I kind of went down

02:20:19.120 | the kind of political science, democracy rabbit hole,

02:20:22.120 | and ended up getting a job at the Human Rights Foundation.

02:20:24.880 | So I'm very much a child of like 9/11 and the Iraq War.

02:20:28.560 | Those are the two really formative events for me personally.

02:20:32.480 | - Can you break that apart a little bit?

02:20:33.760 | Like what illusion about this world

02:20:36.520 | was broken apart by the invasion of Iraq?

02:20:41.520 | - Well, I think first of all, 9/11

02:20:45.720 | just shifted the world dynamics completely

02:20:48.160 | from a focus on big power politics

02:20:50.840 | between the US, Russia, and China

02:20:52.240 | to this new threat of Islamic terror.

02:20:55.000 | And a lot of it, we learned later,

02:20:58.300 | a lot of the things we did were manufactured, choreographed.

02:21:00.920 | Like there were no WMDs in Iraq.

02:21:03.320 | Like the reason our rulers said we needed to invade

02:21:05.640 | and destroy this country was a lie.

02:21:07.400 | And that I think has really been forgotten.

02:21:10.760 | Like I think a lot of like the Zoomers like today

02:21:13.400 | don't really know a lot about that time period.

02:21:15.640 | I mean, it was pretty crazy.

02:21:16.880 | Unanimously, I mean, Democrat, Republican,

02:21:20.160 | like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, like,

02:21:23.040 | and the Republicans, everybody wanted to invade this country

02:21:25.640 | and it was very, it's very, it's a confusing time.

02:21:30.020 | There's a really good book by Ian McEwen called "Saturday,"

02:21:32.600 | a fiction book that takes place during, I think, 2003.

02:21:35.760 | And it's one day in the life of the doctor in London.

02:21:39.120 | It's really good though to revisit this time

02:21:41.200 | because he has two characters,

02:21:43.560 | he has characters in the book,

02:21:44.760 | one of whom is very pro-war

02:21:46.040 | and one of them is very against war.

02:21:47.640 | Basically, he, the father himself is pro-war

02:21:49.920 | and his son is against it and they have all these debates.

02:21:52.040 | And it's nice to go back to revisit,

02:21:53.560 | but that time was, it's really crazy.

02:21:55.880 | And it really showed you that like the media

02:21:58.480 | could be captured into like helping promote this idea

02:22:01.720 | of like invading another country.

02:22:03.720 | So I was very curious about why we did it

02:22:05.920 | and like who was pulling the strings

02:22:07.720 | and what are the reasons that we went?

02:22:09.960 | And what's really interesting is that like

02:22:12.200 | I took all these courses on it,

02:22:13.400 | interviewed all these decision makers,

02:22:15.760 | whether they were like neocons or whatever,

02:22:17.600 | different people who were involved.

02:22:19.320 | And the whole like dollar reserve currency thing

02:22:22.520 | like really never came up until like,

02:22:24.400 | I learned about it more recently because of Bitcoin.

02:22:27.200 | And today, when I look back, it seems kind of obvious

02:22:29.520 | that the reason we invaded Iraq

02:22:31.040 | was because Saddam Hussein wanted to sell oil in euros.

02:22:35.080 | It seems really obvious when you go back

02:22:36.640 | and look at the chronology of it.

02:22:38.480 | And we were like, no, we actually don't want you

02:22:40.320 | to sell dollars in euros

02:22:41.800 | because that would threaten the dollar.

02:22:43.480 | So we're gonna invade you and then you're not gonna do it

02:22:45.360 | and no one else is gonna like sell dollars in euro,

02:22:47.800 | oil in euros, right?

02:22:49.000 | I guess you could say the same thing about Gaddafi,

02:22:51.720 | but we as a nation have very much protected

02:22:55.680 | our reserve currency, let's put it that way.

02:22:57.720 | - Yeah, actually one of the things that Bitcoin community

02:22:59.800 | has motivated me to do is to look back to the histories

02:23:03.320 | that I have studied myself from just even the two world wars,

02:23:07.240 | the history of the 20th century from a perspective

02:23:09.960 | of the monetary system of money.

02:23:13.120 | And it's interesting.

02:23:14.600 | It's interesting to look at human history

02:23:16.320 | in the context of money.

02:23:17.480 | - Can't we be patriotic and be pro-America,

02:23:19.920 | but like not want the petrodollar?

02:23:21.840 | Like I should be proud of my country.

02:23:24.000 | Why do we need to be propping up the Saudis?

02:23:26.080 | Why do we need to be threatening to invade other countries

02:23:29.560 | if they sell their oil for a different currency?

02:23:31.600 | I think we can be just as powerful as we are today,

02:23:33.800 | if not more powerful in a Bitcoin world.

02:23:36.040 | If you think about the infrastructure Americans

02:23:37.880 | are building, all the innovations we're building,

02:23:39.320 | all the wealth we have, I think we'll be fine,

02:23:41.920 | better than fine.

02:23:42.840 | And we won't have these horrible negative externalities.

02:23:45.720 | It's really an optimistic vision for the future.

02:23:49.760 | - I thought we learned the lesson of 9/11

02:23:51.840 | and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

02:23:54.420 | But maybe-- - We're leaving,

02:23:57.280 | and Biden announced we're leaving Afghanistan this year.

02:24:00.160 | 20 years, for what?

02:24:02.400 | Taliban are gonna take over again.

02:24:03.720 | - I mean, that's like at least a good,

02:24:05.680 | this is the longest war, right?

02:24:08.320 | - The forever wars.

02:24:09.680 | - I feel like the past 20 years or whatever,

02:24:12.000 | it is 18 years, 19 years,

02:24:15.560 | we've been very skeptical about invading other countries.

02:24:19.840 | We've been skeptical about military intervention

02:24:25.600 | in other nations.

02:24:26.760 | - Well, our leaders certainly haven't.

02:24:30.320 | We're at, what do we have, like seven active wars right now?

02:24:32.760 | And neither the Russians and the Chinese,

02:24:34.960 | everybody's starting to invade everybody else.

02:24:37.920 | - I mean, so yes, but I meant to a degree

02:24:40.080 | that I was worried about like conflicts

02:24:42.160 | with hot conflicts with Iran, with North Korea,

02:24:46.400 | those kinds of things.

02:24:47.720 | That there was not as much warmongering

02:24:52.240 | as I was afraid about.

02:24:54.520 | But yes, you're absolutely right.

02:24:55.880 | We're still, there's a big presence by the United States

02:24:59.440 | and other nations and across the world, that's military.

02:25:03.080 | The military-industrial complex is a thing

02:25:06.880 | that has huge detrimental ripple effects

02:25:11.120 | throughout the entirety of our governments.

02:25:14.160 | - Yeah, so the big question is how do we prevent the rise

02:25:17.000 | of this like authoritarian surveillance state in China

02:25:22.000 | while at the same time kind of diffusing

02:25:24.800 | the military-industrial complex on our side?

02:25:27.000 | That to me is like the biggest challenge of our time.

02:25:29.800 | I don't have the answer, but we should keep digging.

02:25:32.440 | - Yeah, I believe there's technological innovations.

02:25:36.640 | You're suggesting that perhaps

02:25:38.080 | one of the technological innovations like is Bitcoin.

02:25:41.120 | - Bitcoin's a big part of it, yeah.

02:25:42.240 | - On the money side, I think the information side,

02:25:44.600 | there's innovations that are open, that's possible.

02:25:48.320 | And the political side, I'm the most skeptical about.

02:25:51.560 | I just feel like there's without hot wars

02:25:54.440 | that we don't seem to make any kind of progress.

02:25:57.360 | Bureaucracies just grow, corruption and greed grow,

02:26:01.200 | and human nature does not do well in the political arena.

02:26:05.760 | So I hope technology can outpace

02:26:09.520 | the darker sides of human nature.

02:26:11.200 | So you're busy fighting the demons,

02:26:14.840 | the darkness that's out there,

02:26:16.200 | but looking in the mirror, you're a finite being.

02:26:19.040 | Unfortunately, this ride ends for you pretty soon.

02:26:22.140 | Do you ever ask yourself about the meaning of it all,

02:26:28.440 | of why the hell us descendants of apes

02:26:32.480 | are even on this thing,

02:26:34.120 | striving so hard to make a better world for ourselves?

02:26:36.840 | - I don't often Zoom out that much.

02:26:41.720 | I feel like my day job is pretty interesting.

02:26:44.640 | It keeps me very engaged

02:26:46.000 | with all the stuff we've been talking about.

02:26:49.600 | As far as the meaning of life though,

02:26:53.840 | it seems quite clear that we do have the possibility

02:26:58.840 | as a species to create these beautiful communities

02:27:03.320 | and constructs and to share an exploration

02:27:06.440 | of the world together

02:27:07.720 | that is often marred by cold realities that we've discussed.

02:27:13.760 | But I do feel like in a way

02:27:17.780 | that the meaning of life is that pursuit.

02:27:20.580 | Of course, biologically is the spread, our species, right?

02:27:25.280 | But also to pursue knowledge and science and innovation

02:27:30.280 | and freedom, most importantly.

02:27:32.960 | I mean, I think it freedom has to guide us

02:27:35.280 | or else we end up with prison camps.

02:27:37.800 | If we don't let freedom guide us,

02:27:39.360 | we end up with the prison camps.

02:27:40.840 | So we need to have scientific innovation and adventurism

02:27:43.560 | and colonization of the stars,

02:27:45.920 | but without the slavery and without the prison camps.

02:27:48.520 | I think that's so key.

02:27:50.080 | - There's something about the creation of beauty

02:27:53.320 | that seems fundamental to human nature.

02:27:55.120 | And what seems beautiful is these communities

02:28:00.160 | that don't have suffering, they don't have injustice.

02:28:05.160 | And we have some kind of inner sense of what is injustice.

02:28:09.560 | I don't know, like some of the human rights

02:28:11.080 | that you've mentioned earlier,

02:28:12.640 | they're just philosophical constructs,

02:28:16.720 | but there also seem to be somehow deeply in us too.

02:28:19.880 | We have a sense of what is right and what is wrong.

02:28:24.240 | It's not just a kind of illusion we've all agreed on.

02:28:28.000 | - Arbitrary power, torture, executions.

02:28:31.600 | We know these things are wrong.

02:28:32.800 | I mean, we know they're wrong.

02:28:34.440 | We don't have to read a book to know that.

02:28:36.540 | But you do need to, people can get brainwashed.

02:28:41.860 | I mean, you talk to people who've grown up in North Korea,

02:28:43.840 | they don't know any better.

02:28:45.840 | Like they don't know what's going on in the outside world.

02:28:48.600 | So they've never experienced anything differently.

02:28:51.120 | So that's why, look, technology can play a big role here

02:28:54.960 | in terms of like the meaning of it all.

02:28:56.400 | Like it can really help emancipate, liberate people,

02:28:59.200 | at least so that they can make their own choices

02:29:01.340 | about what to do,

02:29:02.480 | at least so that we're on a level playing field.

02:29:04.280 | So technologies like the internet and Bitcoin,

02:29:07.200 | they can at least like give you the option

02:29:09.840 | to do things your own way on your own terms.

02:29:12.560 | And then from there we'll see.

02:29:15.640 | I think it's important that we have design choices

02:29:19.160 | where we can like have a little more say

02:29:22.960 | and not everything be pre-programmed for us.

02:29:26.080 | That would be very disappointing.

02:29:28.400 | So I mean, the open web and encryption and Bitcoin,

02:29:32.240 | these are things that help prevent social engineering

02:29:35.720 | and that promote more freedom and more possibilities,

02:29:39.520 | honestly, and more entrepreneurship and more creativity

02:29:42.440 | and more scientific inquiry.

02:29:44.040 | I mean, think about the people who tried to shut down

02:29:45.800 | scientific inquiry 500, 600 years ago or whatever,

02:29:49.200 | that were trying to say,

02:29:50.440 | the earth was the center of everything and they were wrong.

02:29:55.400 | And then all these conservative religious types

02:29:58.320 | throughout history have always said that

02:30:00.320 | there's no value in science

02:30:02.960 | and there's no value in technology

02:30:04.480 | and they've been wrong the whole time.

02:30:05.840 | So let's continue pushing here.

02:30:07.840 | Let's continue pushing.

02:30:09.800 | - It's kind of scary to me sometimes,

02:30:11.760 | humbling, beautiful, but also scary to think of.

02:30:15.240 | You mentioned North Korea,

02:30:17.440 | people are kind of living in ignorance.

02:30:19.480 | It's scary to me to think about how much ignorance

02:30:22.880 | there is in the world today.

02:30:23.920 | Like how little I know personally,

02:30:26.120 | or us as a human civilization knows

02:30:28.760 | there is yet to be discovered.

02:30:29.960 | - Well, there's a difference between laziness

02:30:31.280 | and ignorance, right?

02:30:32.720 | So I would be lazy if I didn't

02:30:34.760 | take advantage of the internet, right?

02:30:37.920 | Someone in North Korea doesn't have the option.

02:30:40.680 | There's literally no way for them to access the internet.

02:30:42.960 | So there's kind of like social laziness

02:30:47.360 | that philosophers have warned about forever,

02:30:49.200 | that we basically become sheep, okay?

02:30:51.720 | And then there's actual brainwashing and censorship

02:30:55.560 | that's possible by closing off your population

02:30:58.640 | and keeping them off the internet, right?

02:31:01.640 | So I think these are two very different concepts.

02:31:03.440 | - Absolutely.

02:31:04.280 | But I also mean just like, not even laziness,

02:31:07.320 | but cognitive limitations

02:31:09.240 | and just historical scientific limitations.

02:31:11.920 | We're a very young species.

02:31:17.080 | All of the exciting stuff we've been talking about

02:31:18.880 | have happened on the scale of decades, maybe centuries.

02:31:21.640 | We're very young in all the cool stuff we've come up with.

02:31:25.240 | And it's just humbling to think about how little we know.

02:31:28.480 | But you're right that ultimately having the freedom

02:31:32.200 | to keep exploring, keep venturing out.

02:31:35.640 | Even if we later discover that a lot of the stuff

02:31:38.320 | we've been doing now is ethically horrible.

02:31:43.320 | If you think about animals, or I think about robots a lot,

02:31:47.480 | the kind of things we might be doing

02:31:50.760 | to other consciousnesses that are here on earth,

02:31:53.760 | might be, we might see as atrocities later on.

02:31:56.960 | But ultimately you have to have the freedom

02:31:58.480 | to explore those kinds of ideas.

02:32:00.360 | And without that freedom,

02:32:01.700 | you don't even get the chance to be lazy.

02:32:05.440 | - Yeah, I mean, look, don't be a sheep.

02:32:07.400 | It's easy to be a sheep.

02:32:09.520 | - No offense to sheep.

02:32:10.360 | - And there's some practical things, man.

02:32:11.960 | Get on Signal, start encrypting your messages.

02:32:14.440 | Take control over your privacy.

02:32:16.940 | The media doesn't want you to, but check out Bitcoin.

02:32:20.680 | You can be your own bank.

02:32:22.080 | You can transact with people around the world

02:32:23.720 | and no one can stop you.

02:32:25.140 | This can put a stop to a lot of arbitrary power

02:32:28.760 | and a lot of human rights violations.

02:32:30.660 | Don't use WeChat, question more.

02:32:34.760 | Research what's happening in Xinjiang.

02:32:38.080 | I mean, learn about what's happening

02:32:40.520 | in the genocide in that country.

02:32:42.080 | And let's think about how we can build our societies

02:32:44.600 | so that we never have that kind of power concentration

02:32:46.820 | ever again.

02:32:48.280 | - Each of us can make a difference.

02:32:50.000 | Alex, it's a huge honor to talk to you.

02:32:51.880 | I've been a fan of your work.

02:32:53.160 | A lot of people spoke really highly of you

02:32:55.560 | as one of the beacons of hope for human civilization.

02:32:58.560 | So I'm really glad we got a chance to talk.

02:33:01.320 | Thank you for wasting all this time with me today.

02:33:03.000 | - It's been an honor.

02:33:03.840 | Thanks, man.

02:33:04.680 | A lot of fun.

02:33:06.040 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:33:07.680 | with Alex Glastine.

02:33:09.200 | To support this podcast,

02:33:10.560 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:33:13.160 | And now let me leave you with some words from Alice Walker.

02:33:18.320 | The most common way people give up their power

02:33:21.360 | is by thinking they don't have any.

02:33:23.700 | Thank you for listening.

02:33:25.880 | I hope to see you next time.

02:33:27.840 | (upbeat music)

02:33:30.420 | (upbeat music)

02:33:33.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights | Lex Fridman Podcast #231

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