Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights | Lex Fridman Podcast #231
the following is a conversation with alex gladstein chief strategy officer at the human rights foundation and the oslo freedom forum in recent times alex has focused on how cryptocurrency and especially bitcoin can be a tool for empowering democracy and civil liberties in the world most crucially parts of the world that are living under authoritarian regimes as a side note let me say that i have been learning a lot about the ways in which money can be used to amass power and in the same way the decentralization of money can be used to resist the corrupting nature of this power alex and i do not agree on everything but we strive for the same betterment of humanity he is sensitive to the suffering in the world and is dedicating his life to finding solutions that lessen that suffering whether bitcoin is one such solution i don't know but i think it has a chance and that means it is worth exploring deeply i'm staying in this path of learning patiently and with as little ego as possible i hope you come along with me on this journey as well this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description we recorded this conversation a while ago and i thought i lost the audio and was really disappointed with myself for messing this thing up but luckily last week i found it and so rescued from out of the abyss of non-existence here's my conversation with alex glastine what are some universal human rights that you believe all people should have so free speech freedom of assembly freedom of belief freedom to participate in your government the freedom to have privacy the freedom to own things property rights these are all basic fundamental negative rights what we call them these are the basic fundamental human freedoms what does negative rights mean negative rights are liberties and positive rights are entitlements so after world war ii when the un came together it was largely a compromise between the communist soviet union and the you know free united states right so the u.s had uh on its side of the u.n declaration of human rights a bunch of liberties essentially things like free speech freedom of association freedom of assembly the soviets wanted entitlements uh like the right to work the right to have housing the right to water the right to a vacation so you actually read the un declaration for human rights it's a negotiation between the soviets and the americans later there was another document in the 70s released called the international covenant on civil and political rights and this is what ahref uses as its sort of like lodestar it's founding document and this is like essentially an international agreement on the negative rights those are the things we choose to focus on because essentially authoritarian regimes can commit fraud and claim they're giving the positive rights the entitlements without having any of the negative liberties and they can do that because they don't have any like free speech or press freedom um when you when you take people's basic fundamental freedoms away it's quite easy to make like a potemkin village and pretend that there's the entitlements and that we have good uh health care and you know it's the same sort of thing that authoritarians have done for decades uh cuba and venezuela and and the soviet union do you think it's possible for authoritarian regimes to manipulate to kind of lie about the negative rights as well by saying that the people have free speech uh the people have the freedom to for assembly and all those kinds of things can't you still manipulate the idea that the citizenry still has those rights the opposition leader of malaysia anwar ibrahim he once told me that the funny joke that you know in my country we have freedom of speech we don't have freedom after speech so yeah they can absolutely manipulate whatever they want but i've done research into socioeconomic data and i guess what i'm telling you is that authoritarian regimes which make up 53 of the world's population across 95 countries um about 4.3 billion people those who live under those regimes are subject to massive fraud when it comes to things like literacy rates life expectancy um any sort of socio-economic data economic growth they can do this because there's no free press um so for us at the human rights foundation and for people like me we believe that the negative rights the liberties the things that are in for example uh the bill of rights in the u.s constitution these things are the table and then we can build on top of that we can build the rest of our societies on top of that the freest countries in the world have both the negative liberties and the entitlements like norway for example but there's a big difference between norway and north korea in north korea they only claim to have the entitlements and they definitely don't have the liberties do you think there's one right that's more important than others you kind of suggested the freedom of the press maybe freedom of speech that if you take that away all the other ones kind of collapse along with like from a ripple effect is there something fundamental that you like to focus your attention on to defend to protect to make sure it's there yeah i think i think free speech is probably the most fundamental it's probably why the founders chose to make it into the first amendment um a lot of things are downstream from there property rights are also very very important obviously we've seen the the toll of violent redistributionism you know in over the last hundred years uh whether it was uh lenin or stalin or mao or other regimes and everywhere from ethiopia to colonial colonialists everywhere to north korea it's not a pretty legacy is free speech clear to you as a concept there's been quite a few debates especially in the digital age what it means to violate freedom of speech there's been a lot of new like novel mechanisms for people to communicate with each other like especially on social networks and it seems that uh unclear because a lot of times those are managed by private companies it's unclear how much protection do the citizens have to have when they're communicating a lot of people are being censored on these social platforms some people even presidents get removed from those social platforms have you thought about the freedom of speech in the united states but in in the world as it as it's implemented in the 21st century given the internet and all those kinds of things there is a soviet dissident named natan sharonsky who survived the regime and he wrote a book in which his thesis was essentially the way that you can define a free society is through something called the town square test can you go to a public space where you live and criticize your ruler loudly without fear of retribution if you can do that you have you have free speech i think that's a pretty good litmus test most people in this world cannot do that if you live in havana if you live in moscow if you live in beijing you cannot do that and that's not a free society in austin texas in boston massachusetts in london in santiago chile and tokyo japan in many democracies you can do that and i think that that's a really helpful basic sort of litmus test does the content of the criticism matter can it be complete lies meaning conspiracy theories that involve claiming that the leader is let's say a lizard slash pedophile slash you know i'm not saying that those are lies look into it but uh they're very unlikely phenomena so like does that matter i i think it ends poorly when the state tries to restrict speech um i think that's kind of how i would define censorship i think censorship and de-platforming are two different things private companies you know they get to make up their own rules about what's allowed on their platforms and i think that's very different from a government with guns and an army restricting the speech of its citizens with threats of violence these things are different for me that violence is a fundamental difference i don't know i i um i've gotten a chance to have dinner with alex jones and uh i've talked to him a few times offline and it does i understand why people are so off-put by him but it does bother me that he's universally removed from every platform it feels like there's many more evil people bad people compared to alex jones who still are given a voice on these platforms and so i'm uncomfortable with the universality of the application of the censorship by uh by these platforms but on the flip side you're right there's not a violence there's not tanks there's not guns behind that censorship yeah it's a bit of a generalization but alex jones would be in prison or dead if he were in north korea or in cuba or in russia or in china the the authorities would not tolerate him to do what he did and here he can kind of do what he wants he's encountering some resistance in the marketplace of ideas large organizations corporations and a lot of public sentiment uh in different parts of our country don't like him and they're doing their best to drown out his voice but that's very different from a violent threat of censorship from the state and that's what we study that's what i study are these you know what is the state doing that's kind of paramount for for me yeah and that's true because in the marketplace of ideas there could be a company that springs up that gives alex jones a platform and the united states is not going to prevent those companies from functioning of course there's uh from a technological tech from a technology perspective there is uh aws removing parlor from the platform and gets a little weird you know as you get closer and closer to the computer infrastructure because then you get closer and closer to the state actually the the more you get to the infrastructure that's usually managed by the state the closer it gets to the control of the state i would argue aws is pretty damn close to infrastructure that's kind of controlled by the state if you especially look at other nations uh china russia there's uh i don't know who runs the compute infrastructure for russia and china but i bet the state has complete oversight over that and so that level of compute infrastructure having control about which social networks can and cannot operate is very uncomfortable to me but you're right i think it's good to focus on the obvious violations of these principles as opposed to the the gray areas of course the gray areas are fascinating you mentioned hrf human rights foundation what is it uh what is its mission yeah so i've been working for href since 2007 um we are a charity a non-profit a 501c3 based in new york and our mission is to promote and protect individual rights and freedoms in authoritarian societies around the world so again we we define about 95 countries as authoritarian meaning it's either a one-party state or opposition politicians are outlawed or persecuted there's no real free speech there's no press freedom there's no independent judiciary there really aren't checks and balances and even trying to create like a human rights organization or like an environmental group would be illegal um and the majority of the world's population lives in that environment that's very important you said 53.63 4.3 billion people and i saw you outlined a lot of different um sources of suffering in the world and then you sort of put people living under authoritarian governments as like more than all of them i i forget i forget all the examples you provided but sure i mean it's uh yeah maybe a convention if you remember the number of people who are refugees the number of people who suffer from natural disasters the number of people who live under abject poverty the number of people who don't have access to clean drinking water all of these are dwarfed by the number of people who live under authoritarianism and yet it's not something that we talk about a lot because people are mercantilist and the powers that be are happy to sacrifice freedoms and privacy for money we live in a profit-seeking world to get evidence of this take a look at the list of sponsors of the upcoming olympics in in china where the ccp is currently committing genocide against the weaker population or look at the number of people and the famous investors who went to saudi arabia a couple months ago for the davos in the desert i mean ray dalio was there all kinds of people were there and or at least they were invited and they said they were going to go and this is a government that at the time was torturing a female activist who just wanted to drive a car this is a government that had murdered jamal khashoggi uh in a brutal fashion uh just a couple years earlier so i mean at the end of the day when when it comes down to brass tacks i mean you know the powers that be the even the free countries are led by people um who are very very happy to sacrifice all these pretty words about human rights when it when it comes down to profits unfortunately so do you think capitalism that's maybe one of the flaws of capitalism as it turns a blind eye to injustices against human nature against the human rights like it turns a blind eye to authoritarian governments look i think that at the end of the day like free trade is actually really good um and you can just look at france and germany as an example of of how like a capitalist structure would develop if you have two capitalist actors they're very unlikely to fight each other there's very unlikely to be violence right these are two countries which basically murdered some large percentage of each other's male population three times in a hundred years in three different wars right and now today war is like unthinkable and a lot of that is because of increased collaboration increased trade so when you have two capitalist actors they act in a very productive way with each other um but as soon as you introduce an authoritarian actor you know all bets are off so i think what you have is a conflict between capitalist actors and authoritarian actors and at the end of the day people need to yes have more than just capitalist intentions in in the geopolitical level i'm talking about they need to actually take a stand for principles otherwise you have athletes and businesses and governments that are all too happy to to do business with the chinese communist party for example right now i think that there is a little more than just kind of the pure um the pure profit yes you mentioned what are the signs that uh the state is an authoritarian state how do you know if you're living in the authoritarian state or when you study another nation or analyze the behavior of another nation how do you know that's an authentic authoritarian state is it as simple as them having a dictator is it as simple as them as declaring that they don't have a democracy or is there something more subtle there's a couple good litmus tests one is actually can you have a gay pride parade that's a good serious it actually lines up perfectly it doesn't matter what religion the dictatorship is yeah they don't like minor they don't like minorities and they love to scapegoat whether it's gays or religious minorities etc so it lines up pretty well that's really if you cannot have a gay pride parade in your country because you're fearful that you're going to get the crap kicked out of you probably live in an authoritarian regime um i'm sure that it's not just about some kind of homophobia why is that that's really interesting because that's right i'm going through so the fascism scapegoats minorities there's an other you create another group and then you yeah i mean uganda is a great example of this but so is saudi arabia so is china um i mean so is cuba i mean these are all regimes which demonize the you know lgbt communities it's interesting because maybe you can correct me but from my very distant outsider perspective uh the sort of the way that uh certain authoritarian governments speak about uh gay people is it's almost like what is it um we don't have gay people in our country kind of idea as opposed to scapegoating scapegoating which is like well denial is the most powerful form of demonization i mean this is what the iranian dictatorship does a few years ago when ahmadinejad who was who was then sort of the de facto later he came to columbia university and he tried to give a speech which you can look up and he tried to claim that there were no gays in iran and that's the most powerful form of demonization is trying to just wipe out your utter existence there's other good litmus tests too um you know for example you you can think about comedy um can you make money making fun of your government on television if you cannot you live in a dictatorship most likely i mean it's shocking to people that i work with who live in dictatorships when i tell them that not only are comedians uh able to safely make fun of our government but they get paid very well to do so that's a hallmark of a free society so that's another good litmus test hear that tim dillon you should go to north korea check it out yeah and look there are tons of flaws with democracies these are really good tests by the way the united states is a deeply flawed country in many ways our prison system is a disaster um there's you know a horrible war on drugs we committed a grievous uh crime in my opinion by invading iraq like we did a lot of problematic things but our core architecture is still an open society um the people who criticize the us the most usually live within it and if they were to move to a different country and try to use that criticism against their new rulers they wouldn't fare so well so whether it's chomsky or whomever if they were to go to cuba and live in cuba and try to criticize cuba like they do america it wouldn't last very long so i think what's important to distinguish between open societies and closed ones or like like free societies and authoritarian regimes it doesn't mean that your government's going to be good all the time what it means is that the citizens have a way to push for reform have a way to hold the rulers accountable so even if you don't like what the u.s government does whether it was under biden or trump or obama or bush we can rotate them through voting and we have an independent supreme court that rotates over time and we have people that we can elect directly to serve our interests and then there's like a free press and there's lobbyists and all kinds of people that jostle for power so there's a separation of powers and i like to think about a free society really as like at the bottom of the foundation of the pyramid really would be free speech and then you would have civil society like for example um human rights organizations environmental groups stamp collectors athletes any groups that come together you know beyond the government's sort of strict instruction and then on top of that in the third level you have separation of powers again what i'm describing so authoritarian regimes don't really have any of these layers to them right and then at the top then you put elections but the elections are meaningless if you don't have the foundation below every dictator gets elected kim jong-un gets elected he's the only person on the ballot every dictator from hitler to chavez they all got elected elections on their own mean literally nothing you have to have these other layers beneath to actually be an open and free society i think it's very important for people to understand although hitler in an interesting way at a certain point just said i'm going to be a ruler forever which is interesting the there's an important switch that happens when you as opposed to having a facade of elections you even you just put that aside and saying basically like we're not even doing this yeah there's like a ladder that you climb the election and you pull the ladder up and then no one else can climb up this sadly it happened in egypt and it was quite predictable after mubarak was ousted after the arab spring you know morsi came in and it looked like you know the muslim brotherhood was not really going to be very democratic um but it didn't really matter because then the military came back and now we have cece who's even worse than mubarak so a lot of times in these regimes unfortunately it's very difficult for people to build that democratic society afterwards um some people have told me that when you live in a totalitarian or an authoritarian regime it's kind of like a political desert what grows in the desert scorpions and cacti right so basically people with very extreme views because you as an authoritarian ruler your best method for control is to get rid of the moderates you have to crush the moderates that's very important you want to have the only opposition to you be extremists that way when you go and have negotiations with the united states you can kind of hold up the terrorists or whomever the extremists and say it's either us or them right and then the realists who run the us government are going to choose you and that's why one of the reasons why the u.s government has supported so many dictators around the world over the last few decades do you think authoritarian systems emerge naturally like that's the natural state of things if you take if you incorporate what human nature is will there go is there always going to be corrupt people that rise to the top and we almost have to um construct systems that protect us against ourselves kind of thing another way to ask that um is what kind of systems protect us from our own human nature we started with authoritarianism or autocracy right ruled by one or or a small group oligarchy and all humans lived under this structure for you know the the virtual you know bulk of all human existence only until pretty recently did we start having actual democracy uh the idea that we should be ruled by rules not by rulers very powerful invented in many places across the world western africa had this idea and so did the ancient greeks and they started to implement it although as most know we didn't have full democracy for a long long time because it was only property owners or only men only per people of a certain race but this idea that that we can like rotate our rulers and that we could be ruled by rules is extremely powerful and it really like for me the ideas behind this um i think unlocked a lot of the industrial revolution these small personal freedoms that were allowed in some countries but not others and they unlocked a lot of the scientific innovation over the last few hundred years um and to me there's like a really straight line between like scientific inquiry free speech freedoms and then more prosperity and more effectiveness as a civilization so i i think that democracy you know ruled by the people is definitely an upgrade from autocracy or oligarchy you know which would be rule by by one or a rule by a small group and i think that the the democratic revolution has been an incredible thing for our world and it's it's you know you could do half class full half class empty the half class full is that almost half the world lives under democracy like that that's an incredible achievement but just under half yeah just under half so uh but that's billions of people is billions of people and if you look at the progress of things it's getting better and better and better i mean if you know yeah we're a little bit of a um stalemate here uh democracy's really blossomed uh between world war ii and the year 2000 especially in the 80s and 90s you had an incredible wave of fault you know where many many authoritarian regimes fell and were replaced by democracies i think around 20 2015 the the acceleration kind of came to a standstill a little bit um there's some good news in some countries and there's bad news in others um like in the last 10 years you've had for example the philippines has gone backwards um thailand has come backwards bangladesh has gone backwards turkey has gone backwards that's that's like a half billion people right there so you've had some positives um like you know there was positive movement forward in armenia malaysia some other countries um but we're kind of at a stalemate right now and what most people fear them about where we are right now who i respect is what does the digital transformation of the world do to this like progress of democracy uh or of open societies and and that's what concerns me the most oh interesting so i've and we'll talk about well one of the most fascinating technologies which is bitcoin how it can help but i have a sense that technology like most technological innovations will give power to the individuals we'll give will fight fight authoritarian governments supposed to give more power to authoritarian governments but your sense is there's ways to give for technology to be utilized as a tool for the abuse of the citizenry i've seen both in my work at href i started by helping to put together backpacks with foreign information that we sent to the cuban underground library movement so in cuba you know to own a book at the time you had to have the government's permission there's very little internet penetration okay so we would send in movies you know v for vendetta dubbed into spanish and people would sit inside their homes yeah and they'd watch it and they would answer questions with each other it was very powerful and then after that i worked with people inside north korea we would send in flash drives we have this program called flash drives for freedom we've sent over a hundred thousand flash drives in our work into north korea a country of about 25 million people that's a lot it's a big big difference that's you know many many millions of hours of films books movies etc so i've seen the power that technology can have where you know in the 60s and 70s you know to get to break an information blockade you had to like send in crates of books into a communist country so now all of a sudden you can send the entire contents of what was once the library of alexandria on something the size of your thumbnail like that's remarkable so obviously i've seen the positives of technology we'll certainly get into bitcoin but i'm you know very concerned about essentially big data analysis like or what people call ai or general you know specific specific kinds of ai like very concerning i think these are very authoritarian i mean it's very hard to make a case that ai is going to be good for human rights very difficult in my opinion it may be good for health it may be good for our efforts to protect the planet it may be good for a lot of scientific things i find it very hard to believe it'll be good for civil liberties oh that's fun this is fun because i disagree uh give me your examples i'm serious what what ai applications will improve civilization i thought you meant examples of stuff that's already out there because i can give you examples that for for example the kind of things that i would like to work on but also the kind of things i'm hoping to see which is ai could be used by centralized powers by governments by big organizations like facebook and twitter and so on to collect data about people right right but i believe there's a huge hunger among people to have control over their own data so instead you can have ai that's distributed where people have complete ownership of their little ai systems so like the kind of stuff that i would like to build or like to see to be built is you could think of it as personal assistance or ai that's owned by you and you get to give it out you have complete control over all of your data you have complete control over everything that's uh learnable about your day-to-day experiences that could be useful in this in the market of um goods and ideas and all those kinds of things so it has to do with so you i know you talk about the surveillance which is very interesting it's who gets to have control of the data and i think i i believe there's a lot of hunger in among regular people to have control over their data such that if you want to create a business you have a lot of money to be made from a capitalist perspective by providing products that let people control their data where you have no control it sounds like to me you're describing encryption or at least the the ability to encrypt the ability to use uh digital keys to secure your property and i that to me is a very powerful uh individual right force for individual rights very powerful and it's what's what animates bitcoin ultimately which we'll get into but for me at least the way i look at it today in 2021 the threat from big data analysis used by governments and authoritarian regimes is terrifying i mean to actually see what the chinese communist party is doing where they have hundreds of millions of cameras overseeing society cameras that can tell who's a uyghur and who's ahan that to me is terrifying and and everything is sorted instantly there are there are super computers that are built in urumqi in xinjiang for this explicit purpose and you know it allows the government to quickly sort and basically commit genocide a lot faster and it's really scary so i do agree and i've seen personally how powerful technology can be as a force for freedom um but i'm i'm very very worried about big data analysis in the hands of governments see that's funny because i i tend to see governments as ultimately incompetent in the space of technology to where there will always be lagging behind so you look at what the chinese surveillance systems are doing i i believe when once you start getting bad enough that like technologies would be created to resist that so to mess with it from from the hacker community but also from the individual community so surveillance is actually very difficult from a centralized perspective to detect uh you know to collect data about you to detect everything you are because you can spoof a lot of that information so i believe you can put power in the hands of the citizens to sort of feed the government fake data to confuse it at a mass scale to where it will make their surveillance less effective but that okay that could be very sort of hopeful yeah i mean the practical application in xinjiang which is a territory the size of alaska where a large percentage of the population has been put into prison camps um the current issue of the new yorker has an absolutely harrowing uh essay that that tells the story of one such woman who in i believe 20 2017 got sucked into one of these camps and it took her a year or more to get out um and and she's talking about how in each home in xinjiang each home has a qr code on it that the police can scan and get like a quick instant download of who lives there each car has you know like a scannable code every every single person has their dna taken and the dna is being sifted through and analyzed by algorithms so this is like the chinese government's laboratory for how can we use technology to oppress a sort of like digital leninism and that to me is one of the biggest uh risks in our world today and it's not talked about enough that's interesting so technologies basically enables the automation of oppression absolutely so like but to define technology big data analysis and you know maybe specific ai etc does but encryption allows us to fight back it's very important people understand we have tools to fight back you know big brother can only grow if it can feed on your data if it can't get your data it can't grow so you have to willingly give up stuff to the cloud um for this monster to grow we can we can we can like make the monster hungry and shrink it if we give it less data and i think that's where i would agree with you in terms of like wanting to empower people to be able to do stuff on their own terms in a sovereign way and yeah maybe you're you're kind of thinking like the personal assistant who helps out tony stark or something like that and and that's yeah as long as there's no back doors and that's a sovereign thing that you've popped up and created and you have the keys to absolutely but practically speaking if we're talking about the world today as is we need to be concerned about the way that authoritarian regimes are using big data analysis and they're going to buy the software and this equipment from the chinese government they're already doing it street level surveillance has already been purchased by governments everywhere from latin america to sub-saharan africa to the heart of europe um there's been huge scandals in britain over their purchase of chinese surveillance technology um part of the chinese government's belt and road campaign which is basically to build the infrastructure of this century and to be in control of it is this idea part of that idea is to is to ship out and install surveillance technology both at the telecom level and at the surveillance level across dozens of countries around the world and have that back door right there's this national security law in china which states that like companies that are chinese which are abroad are mandated to send data back to beijing right so they're building this like huge global surveillance state and again not talked about enough you should go google and research the belt and road i think it's very important that we confront this yeah i'm really glad you're talking about it because it's probably important to understand i'm also hopeful that as people get educated about how much their data when collected unencrypted but in general can be used to harm them i mean it's almost like an education i feel like if you know it's a double-edged sword because i feel like people become fearful too easily and that actually has a very negative effect on the quality of life in some sense you want to have tools that allow you to live freely as opposed to living fear if you live in fear it's not a good way to live so it's a it's a balance um it's a free society versus a fear society yeah people are it's all about the trade-offs you make in your daily life like living more privately with more freedom is less convenient you trade freedom and privacy for convenience and comfort and speed absolutely it's an engineering decision in everything that you do um in the west we in advanced democracies we have not necessarily personally seen the results of that trade-off because we've we live in these free societies that have these checks and balances and freedoms but as soon as you step into an authoritarian state and you make those trade-offs your life you know immediately becomes more more restrictive and and what people are worried about is that even in advanced economies market democracies etc the people are worried that they might not survive the the great social digital transformation um you know look at what the nsa is capable of doing i mean for now it's not that big of a problem because we still have free speech um but it's deeply concerning what snowden revealed and it's a nice reminder that we need to be focused on on privacy and encryption and on helping users become more more sovereign regardless of where you live it's kind of like a crutch to live in a free society like you know it's almost like a free lunch in a way um you're not going to be sent to a prison camp because of the color of your skin or your beliefs or what you say about the government and you're very lucky again most people do live in a society where you you can be persecuted for those things and i feel like especially in america we we forget that we're we're distanced from that really strong reality you know on the topic of snowden and then nsa what should we be thinking about because that feels like a already an outdated set of conversations because of the information we've gotten from the past it feels like everything's gotten quiet now in terms of how much we actually know about the hugely important i i think the two lessons from snowden are a the the patriot act and the war on terror and mass surveillance are not necessary for our democracy and for our freedoms um this was a false choice we never had to sacrifice them to be safer um and and we've seen that government has spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on these like surveillance programs that you can read about and amounted to very little except for tremendous bureaucratic waste and you know you know erosion of our freedoms but at the same time we need to practice more privacy and the dramatic increase in the usage of signal for example has been really really great to see it's it's fantastic that tens of millions of people are downloading signal and using it um you should try to be onboarding more and more of your conversations onto signal for example where governments can't see what you're saying maybe they can see the metadata maybe they can see that you sent your phone number sent a message to someone else's phone number at this time but they can't see what's inside so using encryption in your life is very very important that's a good starting point i would say that's kind of step a the ideas of democracy the ideas of the balance of power um the all the ideas that we were talking about the constructs were inventions i wonder if there's other inventions that will allow us to sort of not engage not give governments or any centralized institutions so much power like why why do citizens have to use signal why because that's an effort you have to be because you have to like understand exactly why so that's a nice little solution for a particular set of problems but like there's a million other ways that data i'm sure is being collected constantly if we don't create a system that prevents the establishments of these centralized powers then we'll always have this problem yeah i think we can keep it simple for the purposes of this conversation you have politics information and money those are the three things i would encourage us to focus on in politics yes someone invented democracy i mean whether it was the greeks um the west africans or many others around the world around the same time invented this idea that we should be ruled by uh rules and not by rulers right um and that has evolved dramatically right and now you and then you have information information also used to be highly centralized right you know think about how rich you had to be to gain access to a library before the printing press or you know how much money you had to have or how close to the king or the you know feudal lord you had to be to be able to have that ability but now you know the majority of the world billions of people have access to all information in their pocket and they can set up an account on social media and get their word out so not only politics but information has been dramatically decentralized and i would say that encrypted messaging is kind of a corollary to that second innovation and as much as now people are like more effortlessly like signal is a lot easier to use than pgp for example they're more easily able to practice privacy when it comes to having private messages globally um these are all good things and we need to keep pushing and i think money is like honestly maybe the most important piece and that's why i spent so much time thinking about bitcoin okay so politics information money yes let's talk about money what is money and why is it important to think about in the context of human rights i have witnessed money be peripheralized take it has taken a back seat in the human rights conversation the idea of currency who makes the money who makes the rules who issues it who sets the interest rates all these things it is not on the menu of human rights activists if you just do like a systematic study of like the human rights discourse over the last several decades money is not there it's also not really taught in schools like children don't really learn about money where does it come from it's it's kind of hidden from from our from a lot of our discourse um only really when i got into bitcoin did i start learning more about money um i spent 10 years at the human rights foundation and we we did all kinds of programs around the world we convened oslo freedom forums in different places and i got to meet hundreds of dissidents and very rarely did they ever speak about currency or bank accounts or moving money from one place to another but when i started asking them they always had amazing stories about money always i mean my friend ivan muire who started the this flag movement in zimbabwe which ended up toppling robert mugabe when i asked him to come to san francisco to give a talk about hyperinflation which he lived through he said no one's ever asked me to do that before but i'll come and he came this was about three years ago and the first thing he did when he got on the stage is he opened up a shirt and he brought out a necklace that had the 1980 zimbabwean dollar on it and he said we in the activist community wear this as a symbol of where our country used to be because the zimbabwean dollar used to be worth two british pounds and then of course over the next two and a half decades of economic mismanagement and corruption by mugabe it got inflated out of existence right you've seen those like hundred trillion dollar zimbabwean notes um so he had to live through that which was terrible and crushing but he you know is an expert on money if you actually talk to human rights activists about money they know a lot about money they're just not usually asked to talk about it so you know for me um money you know when i study money or look at money it's really about control you know who who's creating it and how much does the population know about the creation of that money and when it comes to bitcoin it's really the people's money like there is no shadowy force in charge of it we all know the rules we all know how it's going to get minted and how it's going to get printed and you know that information is out there for everybody to see and there's no like special group of rules for one group of people or another group you know a billionaire and a refugee are the same in the eyes of the protocol this is a rather revolutionary concept and in the same way that democracy allowed us to decentralize politics and have checks and balances and in the same way that the internet is this culmination of technologies that allowed us to decentralize information access to and control over it bitcoin you know decentralizes money i mean no longer again is there one group of people who can just change it arbitrarily we're all in the same playing field and i think that is a tremendous innovation you know from one perspective money and inflation hyperinflation is a kind of symptom of corruption as opposed to the core of the corruption and at this at the flip side in terms of resisting the corruption resisting the abuse of human rights it's interesting to think that fighting inflation or funny uh fighting the mismanagement of the money supply uh is a way to fight back authoritarianism or to fight authoritarianism and that's an interesting concept that i think was introduced to me by just plugging myself in intellectually into the bitcoin community but also just cryptocurrency in general it's it's to like it's not that money is a symptom you know money is a tool to fight back too absolutely so in in what way can bitcoin be used to um to fight authoritarianism not just in the united states but all of those 53 percent that you're referring to what how can bitcoin help so we talked about authoritarianism we talked about the surveillance state to me bitcoin has two kind of key mechanisms through which it can help us number one uh it's a sovereign savings account it's debasement proof meaning the government cannot print more whenever they want this is very very different from fiat currency which by its very name its very nature can be issued on sort of demand right by the rulers and while i live in a country where the rulers do a reasonable job of managing the money most people aren't so lucky so only 13 percent of humans in the world live in a country that's a liberal democracy with property rights and has what we call a reserve currency meaning a currency so stable and desirable that other countries save in it at the central bank level right you basically have the us the uk australia switzerland the euro and canada i mean those are like reserve currencies and these are liberal democracies where people have reasonable guarantees over property rights everybody else either lives under like a weaker currency or an authoritarian regime that's 87 of the world's population almost 7 billion people so for them a sovereign savings account that's permissionless meaning you don't have to have id to use it is a big big deal and a lot of people talk about zimbabwe or venezuela as some like isolated cases oh well you know hyperinflation only happens in in those two countries um i actually did some research into this and there's about one point uh over you know close to 1.3 billion people who live under double or triple digit inflation this is not an isolated instance we're talking huge countries nigeria 200 million people 15 inflation turkey 15 insulation for 100 million people argentina 40 inflation for a country 45 million people um so you can go down the list there's about 35 countries where like people's earnings their wages um are literally disappearing in front of their eyes over a matter of weeks or months against things like the dollar gold real estate right so this is a huge issue it absolutely is a human rights issue for me i mean when it comes to your time and energy having control over that or having it stolen from you i think this is pretty clear and bitcoin is like an immediate uh low-cost easily accessible solution for people and i've learned this not from my own assumptions but by talking to people by interviewing dozens of people whether it's in sudan which currently has triple digit inflation um or people who've escaped from syria who have used bitcoin to get their wealth out of the country and then also to make payments back to people inside um or venezuela or elsewhere it's very very powerful i think some very small percentage of people who have used have owned bitcoins was something like one percent right of the world whatever whatever the number is a small call it two percent for the purposes of our okay about a little under 200 million people wow yeah at most right now so if we look at zimbabwe sudan if we look at small percentages of people do you think the technology's mature enough because it's not just about the idea it's also about the implementation of it like you know bitcoin for the most part requires access to to the internet yeah and what do you think about accessibility of this technology now as a method of activism in the worst parts of the world we often think like all the conversations we've had about bitcoin is essentially middle class like wealthy people relative to the world they're kind of talking sort of investment and high concept ideas then there's also the people in the world who are suffering who are living through hyperinflation they may not have a computer or access to the internet like what how do you think bitcoin can help there yeah so again we have one clear use case which is a sovereign savings account that you can control right the other use case is an unstoppable payments network this is very important for people who live behind for example sanctions like the us like basically um weaponizes the dollar and it like sanctions different countries and instead of sanctioning like a handful of rulers for example which i would support this is like a magnitsky or smart sanctions sometimes we'll just say we're just going to shut off this whole country so the people suffer cuba or iran are good examples average people suffer right so people in those two countries i just mentioned cuba iran or even palestine which is also sort of like blockaded by the israelis so you have cuba iran palestine are three good examples where people inside all three of those countries now are using bitcoin to do commerce do their business send money back enforcement sanction resistant sanctions resistant it does not get stopped by sanctions right um and also it's again remittances are extortionate i mean the average remittance you know costs uh has a high fee takes several days if your family is in ghana or something like that or nigeria and you live in the united states it can take time to use western union um sometimes you know oh it gets paused it gets lost there's issues you have to deal with customer service screw that i mean you know if the person has a cell phone which increasingly is the case i mean by the end of next year uh more than five or six billion people depending on different estimates will have smartphones basically by the end of 2022 uh we're talking like the vast majority of humans will have access to smartphones they can all have sovereign bitcoin wallets and there's even ways to access bitcoin without the internet um but i mean we can get into that there's like hardware wallets and so on what do you mean by sovereign uh bitcoin wallet you know most users today are using bitcoin in a in a custodial manner so this is kind of like having a bank account um where you have a deposit uh account at a bank right so you have a claim right you go to the bank and they have some of your money and you take it out right with an atm so uh what i would call uh non-custodial bitcoin use would be similar to withdrawing cash from an atm you have it it's a bear instrument okay so when i it's what's called the bearer instrument i know i'm so apologize i'm outside this community just sounds funny no no yeah so like a bear instrument would be like a bar gold or yes um a banknote or bitcoin that you control meaning you have the seed phrase right which for the listeners essentially is 12 to 24 english words that you write down on a piece of paper that's your like password to get into your bitcoin account and that gives you that bearer instrument quality right but unfortunately most users uh still use bitcoin in a custodial way meaning they buy it on coinbase so coinbase where something like that you would put into into the custodial into the category like a bank yeah and look the good news is you can withdraw to your own control and in the bitcoin community we try to teach this idea that it's not your keys not your coins in the same way that if you deposit your money at the bank you might not get it back i mean it's low likelihood but it's but it's very possible same thing in bitcoin like if you want to get the full experience you want to actually custody your own bitcoin you want to you want to put it whether it's on an open source software wallet like the blue wallet is a good one for people to check out um or a hardware wallet like cold card for example there's different ways to do this um but essentially like around the world uh people are innovating like don't think so low of of your fellow man you know what i mean like people are able to figure this out you know i get a lot of flack from people saying oh bitcoin's so hard to use i've read this article in new york times saying this guy in silicon valley lost all of his bitcoin that's because he was a and didn't care about it this guy lost all this bitcoin because it wasn't worth much 10 years ago and he you know he forgot the password but if you're like receiving your remittance from a family member you're not going to lose the password right and you trust in the basic intelligence of people to figure this out and to innovate and so on and figure out we're watching it man yeah you know i'm it's kind of funny that but people in in the united states are not very savvy with money it's exactly the way you're describing it's like when you have very little money you're going to be savvy with money you're going to understand exactly the mechanisms that work that are resistant to the corruption that's around you i mean i remember instead of growing up in the soviet union the general bureaucracy and the corruption of everything around you you figure out ways around that you figure out ways how to function within that kind of system to survive under inflation under hyperinflation under all like basically being unable to trust any kind of even the police force and all those kinds of things you figure it out and that same way perhaps bitcoin could be all the different ways to store and uh gain bitcoin these mechanisms could be something that's figured out in the third world as opposed to in the oh i mean i mean the capital of bitcoin could easily be lagos and not san francisco yes in terms of users in terms of people using it and again the two use cases as a savings account and as an unstoppable payment rail these are the two ones that that you should really think about this is how people are using it today now when it comes to could it possibly be adopted by like a sufficient majority of the population i say yes and it's very similar to the way the mobile phone spread at the beginning the cell phone was only for rich people it was only for the elite it was huge it didn't work very well the interface sucked it was clunky over time it got smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper and easier to use and easier to use and today everyone benefits so you're going to watch a similar technology upgrade process with bitcoin already in the last 10 years bitcoin has gotten so much easier to use i mean there are now mobile wallets that are so slick there's one called moon m-u-n wallet from a team in argentina and these these guys created it because they saw their own currency devalued like three times in the last 20 years and they've had a hell of a time trying to get their money back and forth from different countries so they were like let's make this easy for people um again you know this is this is the people's money this is this is something that cannot be controlled by by governments or corporations and that makes it very powerful and i think it's actually quite exciting to be here in the adoption phase in the early days yeah man this is the early days and uh you also mentioned that sort of bitcoin is uh this is the mechanism of a peaceful revolution so it's a way to to resist authoritarianism in a peaceful way it's ultimately a mec you know you mentioned sort of um politics information and money it uh it seems like in the space of money this is one of the peaceful mechanisms it's a way to opt out you can opt out peacefully from the system and yeah it's it's beautiful it's beautiful so so bitcoin is currently by far the most uh popular sort of dominant cryptocurrency that said and i look forward to your letters bitcoin maximalists uh that said you know internet explorer was the most popular browser yeah for quite a long time and then other browsers came along that out competed it like chrome firefox people should check out brave it's a great browser um i think it's my favorite browser at this point anyway so why bitcoin why not another cryptocurrency if you look in the next 10 20 50 100 years do you think it's possible for another cryptocurrency like ethereum or something that it's not even here yet to overtake bitcoin as a mechanism when you say overtake um what do you mean what do you mean overtake you mean number of users do you mean a price per coin then yeah the number of users because we're talking about one percent two percent yeah and if we are serious about this being um in the space of money as a way to give individuals power yeah fight the centralized powers that you use the money system and so on how do we get from 2 to 50 right to 60 to 80 percent that that jump is it obvious to you not obvious but do you think bitcoin is the way to get from two percent to 50 or are there going to be other cryptocurrencies they may emerge that get us to 50 no i mean bitcoin is the innovation the innovation is in having the decentralized mint no one can change the monetary policy everything else is downstream from there in bitcoin the meme would be 21 million there's never going to be any more than 21 million every other cryptocurrency either has an inflationary policy i mean there's going to continue to be more and more of it over time or its monetary policy can be changed by a small group of people this is vividly on display in ethereum which is like the second largest and second most robust cryptocurrency right i've talked to senior ethereum engineers over the last couple weeks trying to figure out what is the monetary policy of ethereum no one can tell me no one knows how much eath is going to be minted in 2022 and 2023 after they shift to proof of stake it i've seen estimates that range from 100 000 to 2 million so at the end of the day you're going to be trusting a small group of people to make those decisions that is what we are escaping with bitcoin so all these other cryptocurrencies they might have their use cases virtually all of them are not it's very important for people to know that if you take like the 4 500 cryptocurrencies on coin market cap almost all of them are scams straight up even the ones that have like noble intentions i just don't think are gonna add that much value um ultimately i think bitcoin to me is the innovation and and you know that's because it has a monetary policy and an issuance schedule that cannot be changed and that's what gets me so excited about i mean that's why it's such an important tool for human rights yeah it's it's interesting because when you grow from two percent when you grow in the number of people using it at the scale they're using it it it's going to need to be resistant to governments and institutions messing with it so it's interesting to see what kind of um what kind of cryptocurrency would be resistant to that obviously dogecoin is going to win let's be honest well i mean looking forward to the number two cryptocurrency in the world probably by like how useful it is to people is tether which is totally centralized has blacklists so i'm not saying there won't be like new digital assets that are lumped into this category that have usage but they're not they're not it's not the same innovation as bitcoin it's just sort of building on this idea of like a euro dollar maybe like a dollar that is minted outside of the control of the us federal reserve right it would be a euro dollar so stable coins are kind of like euro dollars just minted by private actors in a way right but they're still tied to the dollar they're pegged to the dollar they're not escaping the system escaping the system is bitcoin we we aren't reliant on the dollar we we have our own you know full um store value medium of exchange unit of account eventually and you know the bitcoin world will be denominated in different terms and i think everyone everything else will be tied to it i really do it does feel currently like bitcoin is like like pirates or something like that and they're still like the central banks that are like the main navies of the of the different nations yeah it's just if you talk about scale so there's going to be a moment if bitcoin continues to grow in its impact when governments are going to seriously contend with you know what do we do with this do you think about those moments is uh bitcoin is the cryptocurrency world in general going to be able to withstand the serious legal pushback from countries from nations especially authoritarian nations yeah so it's been interesting it's been 12 years okay more than 12 years since satoshi nakamoto created bitcoin and they haven't been able to stop it they have tried they've tried a lot i wrote a long essay for quillette on this like like why haven't governments been able to stop bitcoin and my thesis is essentially that there's been like this mix of different kind of technical social uh and economic and political incentives and disincentives that make it very difficult and i think to me the the the best way to think about it is that bitcoin's like a trojan horse so just just to actually tell that story just a little bit because i think it's important to understand the classical mythology tale um i find this very interesting of the actual the actual trojan horse yeah which was told in in the aeneid actually by by virgil right and the idea was the greeks had been like trying to take the city of troy for like a decade at these like impregnable walls and they couldn't do it and ulysses and the rest of the greek army were like we don't know what to do um so minerva the the the god of strategy and war you know kind of like to get this idea from her i guess to to actually try to use subterfuge and trickery to take over the city so the idea is and this was sort of hatched by ulysses right to put this horse together that would kind of be like a gift so the idea was the greeks just like pretended to leave right they they deserted they left behind one soldier and this horse and the trojans looked at it and they were like what's going on here and they brought in the soldier and the soldier's like look they left they're so sorry for all of the desecration and blood spill this is their gift to you it's you know honoring minerva you know it's like this like you know trophy for you guys and there were actually people inside troy uh cassandra a prophet as well as lao quan who was like a priest who said no no this is obviously a trick this is obviously a trick um but they were like dispatched and ignored because the horse was like it was just like so badass so that the trojans were like bringing it in the city so they brought it in themselves no blood spilled at all right in the middle of the night of course what you realize is the horses back to the greek soldiers and they come out they let the army in which was like hiding behind an island so this idea that like something could be so attractive that you really can't say no even if you know what's inside of it is it played with in bitcoin so like in bitcoin has this number go up technology right is what we call it in sort of shorthand ngo ngu right but what people don't realize is that ngu is like the trojan horse inside the trojan horse is fgu freedom go up technology so dictators and rogue regimes and corporations are gonna buy mine tax accumulate this thing because it's the best performing financial asset in the world what they don't realize or they're gonna have to ignore is that they're also aiding and abetting this freedom technology which allows individuals to be sovereign and eventually erodes their power there's no question that rogue regimes and bad actors i've already used and will continue to use bitcoin the thing is when you think about a north korea or venezuela and that government instructs some of its bureaucrats and cronies and officials to start stealing bitcoin or accumulating it or whatever for short-term gain to get around sanctions and and use it to buy dollars or something like that right which they can't get normally well guess what all those people who the regime has instructed to like figure this thing out and use it they're all going to realize oh my god this is money the government doesn't control and it's going to spread like a virus okay so this is like the idea of the trojan horse allegory i think it's so important and powerful with bitcoin all the people talking about bitcoin today on tv they don't care about freedom or privacy they just care about number go up but what they don't realize is what's concealed within and that's very very powerful to me so the people talking about bitcoin and tv are maybe investor types professional investors corporations and soon governments i mean you just had today this morning on cnbc the leader of the republican leader of the house of representatives a congressman saying like we need to be pro bitcoin as a country and the other day peter thiel had a very interesting comment where he was basically like let's not fall behind china in this race so you have influential people in our government like sort of posturing for this like you know bitcoin race that's going to happen in the next 10 years you're going to see this countries are going to compete to stack bitcoin absolutely so you believe the the thing that's shiny and sexy like the trojan horse the number go up uh too hard to ignore it and for to to uh to define that a little further meaning it's it does seem like the more people get excited and start using bitcoin the more of its value grows so it's just a good feedback loop yeah it's a feedback loop and then the reason you're excited about it especially is is that uh f g yeah freedom go up freedom go up which is it uh ultimately gives power to the individuals to just so decentralized yeah i mean like when tesla stacks bitcoin they're just doing that as self-interest they think it's going to be a good inflation hedge fund but what they maybe don't care about don't realize or they don't need to care i mean bitcoin's power is it like co-opts people into promoting a freedom tool even if they don't care about or even if they hate freedom it doesn't matter so when tesla stacks bitcoin and the price goes up and more interest goes up and more people around the world are like wow bitcoin then more people get involved again more adoption more price more developers better user interface more privacy tools more mining more network security it's just this like positive feedback loop that continues to grow and it will it will grow intensely in the next decade as we go through the adoption cycle and the reason why i'm so excited about this is the human rights world again to get back to our previous conversation is very hard to find people who who have you know the empathy or the altruism to actually make a difference abroad in places like china or saudi arabia or north korea people are very quick to just like they'll just quickly toss off the pretty words that they care about human rights as soon as profits come into play so there's no alignment of incentives right the reason why bitcoin is so powerful is that it aligns the incentives all of a sudden they can be as greedy as they want they are being forced to promote a freedom tool this i've never seen before and it makes me it gives me a lot of like excitement it's very refreshing because we've been laboring in the human rights space you have to like raise money and it's all like non-profit work and you're like begging for people to make a difference for you here you have this like incredible asset which people will accumulate out of self-preservation self-interest and greed and yet it will strengthen the power of the individual that is what we need to fight big brother that's what we need to fight like what i'm scared is happening in china like this growing authoritarian state which is powered by big data analysis this is our way to fight back and and it runs on this like really interesting engine again that like takes advantage of our base nature as humans and i know that it sounds terrible for me to say this but i mean ultimately we are self-interested and it is hard to to get people to care about others living a thousand miles away you know we are kind of localized in our empathy speaking as someone who works to help people who live in like 100 different countries it's very difficult to get americans to care about what's happening in belarus or in kashmir it just is but guess what they're going to definitely care about bitcoin because they want to see their their net worth go up they want to do better for their family etc they're going to get into this thing and it's really going to like make that powerful tool for everyone else who's using it so this interplay dynamic is fascinating to me yeah i have to um so i'm somebody who doesn't like there are corrupting effects of greed but it is also human nature yeah i don't like it either but it we have to be realistic you have to acknowledge it and then maybe use it for your advantage and it's not just bitcoin itself like exchanges today are adopting something called lightning network which is a way to scale bitcoin on a second layer much like we had gold bars which we scaled with paper money and then we had visa credit cards which were a way of scaling the paper notes bitcoin scales through lightning network it's a private instant globally final settlement network it's something you all should check out it's very very interesting the exchanges aren't adopting lightning for its privacy benefits like lightning operates off the chain meaning surveillance companies can't see they can't do chain analysis on lightning because it's on an onion routed second layer kind of that works kind of like the tour tour project the exchanges don't care about privacy they're doing it because it reduces fees lightning is cheaper and faster so again we have this really interesting alignment of incentives where like the freedom tech is being promoted by people who don't i don't it doesn't matter what their incentives are i could care less if they were altruistic or not and i think this is and you're going to maybe see this even in the future there's more things coming in bitcoin down the pike lightning was enabled by an upgrade called segwit right which had took place a few years ago which was the culmination of the block size conflict there's another thing coming up called cross input signature aggregation which may if it takes effect in the next few years it may compel exchanges to collaboratively spend all their bitcoin together in a way that really protects our privacy and fights surveillance but they're not going to do it for for moral reasons they're going to do it because it's going to save them money and improve their bottom line can you speak to that kind of collaborative so you can have multiple parties in a single transaction kind of thing yeah like you could do that today absolutely it's called the coin join for example but right now it's more expensive to coinjoin a bitcoin you have to pay a premium for your privacy this would flip that on its head and would basically say if you have one transaction hey pile them all in have as many parties as you want the more parties you get in the cheaper it's going to be per party okay and and that's not possible in bitcoin today but it might be in the future but again the beauty the beauty in bitcoin are these like these ways that it just aligns human incentives and it aligns our like most based desires and needs and realities with like freedom and privacy and that i've never seen before and that's why i think it's so interesting so something that i'm like somebody like eric weinstein actually spoke to this the you know the idea of blockchain in general from like a 10 000 foot view the blockchain is a centralized place to keep the record of everything that ever happened and does that concern you from a privacy perspective from a control perspective even though it's managed especially you know given the low frequency of transactions for bitcoin you can like you you can have a lot of you know small computers across the globe contain the entirety set of transactions you know all of those kinds of features does that concern you that there's one place where everything is made public in terms of everything that ever happened no i and i'll give you two reasons number one the bitcoin blockchain is ultimately a settlement layer it's kind of like something like fedwire in the united states it's a way for like institutions to settle with each other that's what i think it's going to be like in 20 30 years from now the average person is never going to touch the bitcoin blockchain probably they're going to use things like lightning or unfortunately they may use bitcoin banks but they'll either use custodians or they'll use second layer non-custodial solutions to interact the main chain is going to get very expensive it's going to be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars or even more if the dollar starts to weaken uh to make a transaction on the main chain and that will be reserved for like very large transactions or transactions that need final final settlement etc etc um and i think that that's that's fine and and that's okay and it's very important that that ledger that settlement layer be kept by thousands of people around the world the bitcoin blockchain is not centralized it is it is decentralized it is run by people like me who run a node at home i run a personal server i run the bitcoin blockchain no one else you run it that person runs it there's no there's no one in where you have a full node yeah i run a full node it's great i mean it's pretty easy man you run it and that way you can be sovereign over all of your usage right and you can run it on a raspberry pi with less than 150 bucks of equipment and that's so important because again there is no amazon web service vulnerability here that is a problem and i agree with you we're trending in a bad direction where like the government could just turn off you know a big important website or a news source well they can't turn off bitcoin because it doesn't live on aws it lives with us we are bitcoin and i think that that's that's very very powerful um and then you can have this the something like a lightning network where you can escape some of the constraints of the blockchain depending on your needs of the privacy and all those kinds of things everything's an engineering tradeoff but yeah you can trade off some of the assurances of the base layer to go into lightning for example and and there you can get more speed and more privacy and the things that bitcoin lacks speed and privacy for example um you can get on these second layers so there's all kinds of cool engineering things that people are coming up with um but i also would just say anyone who says the blockchain like that's a red flag for that person doesn't really know what they're talking about like satoshi didn't use the blockchain in the the white paper blockchain was a marketing term com that people came up with later to try and do this thing that was kind of like it peaked in 2015 and it continues to be an issue today of it's blockchain not bitcoin and that was like a very corporate um kind of social attack on bitcoin to say we could take this like ledger part of this radical thing that's for criminals and all these bad people but we could take one part of it out and we could bring it over here and we could make it safe for everybody the real mccoy's bitcoin i mean satoshi referred to it as the time chain i mean really what they're talking about is just these like blocks that are connected chronologically of transactions it's really not that exciting the exciting part of bitcoin is is the proof of work you know where the transaction processing is done by mining and by energy and by real world expenditures instead of like you know some central ledger and you know when you remove the blockchain from bitcoin it's not very to me it's just not it's it's just not that interesting i don't know to me blockchain or time chain whatever does it philosophically is it's pretty beautiful idea i mean it's pretty simple but nevertheless is beautiful from a i'm a big database person it's an interesting way to store information that especially that's totally publicly accessible it's um i know that to bitcoin proof of work is the fundamental idea yes but to cryptocurrency and digital money in general into money the blockchain is a really interesting idea to me the way i think about it is it's kind of you know physics and i like that there's a place that you can rely on that's very difficult to mess with but it's not though like it's outside of maybe ethereum every other blockchain is easy to mess with so i you're saying that for work is what makes it hard to absolutely proof of work is the key right and ethereum's about to leave proof of work so it's about to go to proof of stake which is literally the existing system where a small group of people get to decide the monetary policy yeah reputation has a lot of value there and that you could be it could be manipulation it may sound brutal but i'm coming at it from a political science perspective for me it's all about freedom versus dictatorship and that's why i find it's so compelling that that regardless of how much power or might or how many armies you have you can't change the rules of bitcoin if you're wrong about bitcoin what would that look like what kind of thing that uh in 10 20 years that you you're not wrong right but it doesn't pan out it doesn't pan out but other things that actually make you feel good about all the hard work you've done do pan out something you haven't expected what what might that be well as we've talked about my career started in human rights and in promoting individual freedom and fighting authoritarianism that fight will will continue on no matter what happens with bitcoin um i think it would be a massive failure and a tragedy if this project like didn't work bitcoin yes if the bitcoin project didn't work we would it would honestly it's one of the only things that gives me hope because it is an effective way to push back against creeping centralized control if for whatever reason and i can't really see one of the reasons i'm so into it is i can't really see how it's not going to work again i think the trojan horse allegory is too powerful these big centralized actors are going to be too greedy and they're going to want some as opposed to banning it it's way easier for them to buy it than to ban it i think it's just what's going to happen but if but if whatever for whatever reason it failed i would have very little hope left because really i mean the chinese model of like centralizing all of your data and controlling it i mean ultimately is is a very very powerful um sort of like arch force and i i i would be concerned that that would be all of our of our sort of destiny i do have to sort of push back the style of communication and you you're not doing it today you're doing you're being exceptionally eloquent and arguing these ideas but me especially just from studying history and being very skeptical from growing up in the soviet union i'm very skeptical and cautious when i see a community of people being very sure of an idea doesn't matter what that idea is and there's a huge amount of certainty around bitcoin part of it is an important feature because you it's number go up so far number go up is a really important part of the mechanism to make sure that it uh it grows in impact network effects because i mean it's really important to get excited about idea for take hold that's the way human nature works and so on but i also get um even something that you mentioned that you know others may not you know if you mention blockchain you're sensitive to the attacks that have been that have been mounted where the word blockchain has been used people have been fooled i mean like yeah and people in the humanitarian sector have been fooled into thinking that some centralized blockchain project is going to help some refugee all collapsed there's a yeah there's a huge chat it makes me sad that there's a huge number of scams like you know what makes me really sad and just a tiny little tangent there's been recently i guess with the growing platform or something there's been a bunch of fake lex friedman accounts yeah and have a million but not only do they do stupid stuff but they've been messaging people oh bitcoin and stuff i looked in totally and people write to me and they're saying like tough man i think it gets people i think they click on stuff i think they they were not sure and it it makes me think like people are gullible or not gullible but like they're uh just like i am which is they're like hopeful about the world they're optimistic about the world you know almost like naive about evil that's not what goes wrong with bitcoin and i've seen it um people fall for these like i mean like in these different countries i'm trying to like talk to to different people about bitcoin and like the amount of like mlm schemes pyramid schemes ponzi schemes they're just so many of them and there's plenty here too but like in zimbabwe i was talking to this guy who is a reporter who studies the fx like the foreign currency exchange markets he's just saying one of the main reasons people don't want to get into bitcoin is because they've been scammed so hard by all these other things so i would say that that's one one way it could go wrong is that like people just continue to be like um afraid of it because of things that are like that in the past well that not it's not just the volatility it's just the the na you know uh yeah having if you think it's a pyramid scheme you're not going to want to get involved and in some sense if i were to speak to the bitcoin maximalist community is to maybe ease up on the certainty because that gives me the signal that it's a scam to be honest so whenever somebody whenever there's a lot of people being cultishly excited about something i start being very skeptical it's like uh you know i used to like green day before they became really popular and then the moment they became really popular i'm like i don't know he started wearing mascara and it's like and i don't like him anymore so like i i'm very skeptical about uh evangelists of an idea because i think bitcoin on its own is just a powerful idea that stands but i also understand that in a world of a lot of competing ideas where there's a lot of scams and a lot of money to be made through those scams that you have to be that you have to be innovative in the kind of mechanisms you use to break through the scam the ocean of scams i took this personality test and i'm a 99 skepticism so i was first sadly because i was first introduced to bitcoin in 2013. and i was like yeah whatever and it took me four years to actually get into it to go down the rabbit hole i didn't really start to grasp it and start getting excited about it until 2017. so i was regrettably very very skeptical for a long time and i just thought it was like whatever so i i appreciate that and you should be skeptical um but ultimately you got to believe in things like i believe in democracy i believe it's good for people i believe it's better than tyranny i believe in the internet i i know that we've had issues with centralization of the internet but i still believe it's better to be connected than to have bridges between us and i believe in bitcoin and to me it's like a very similar progressive force that we're encountering um but but i i yeah be skeptical nothing nothing um nothing will befall you that's bad if you're like cautious and skeptical that's like a good good good mentality to have one thing we haven't talked about all the violations of the human rights that authoritarian regimes do there's a not a positive but there is a you mentioned that nationalism is a drug yeah there's something beautiful about loving your country having pride in your country uh loving the there's a feeling of belonging it could be country it could be tribe it could be family that's really powerful and that speaks to human nature as well and that can sometimes overpower everything else patriotism patriotism yeah and you know sometimes it can be seen when you study history when you look at stalinist the soviet union or you can even look at hitler and nazi germany we tend to paint patriotism in a negative light and then maybe when we look at the united states but even here in the united states people often paint um patriotism in a bad light you know every time i say i love america so as an immigrant i love this country it's funny how that's taken as a political statement uh that you know people i guess on the right has been have been more active in saying that they love the country and people on their left uh have not sort of it's almost become a weird slogan as opposed to a statement of just love and i understand that patriotism can be a slippery slope into uh letting your government i mean it's exactly what you're saying the value of freedom of speech is you hold your government to account for all the ways they mess up i mean look you have patriotism and then you have jingoism right it's very important we stay on the patriotic side like as an american i'm very patriotic in terms of i love the values that this country was founded on if you read the bill of rights and i love the fact that it was just flexible enough that we were able to change it to grant or at least to try to grant all people the same rights it was not the original plan of the founders right it had to be changed but since you know then we've remained um you know like you know those laws have have remained and they're very good uh and i'm very proud of that what i'm not proud of is the jingoistic part of our country where we invade other countries and bomb other countries and not proud of our prison system i think it's a huge stain on our nation i'm not proud of a lot of things so i think you can be patriotic but you can be you know critical of your country um and that's important you know i feel like the jingoistic thing is is the thing that we need to watch out for um that's just my own personal take out of all the projects that the human rights foundation works on what's the most important one to you right now like that's been occupying your mind yeah i just read again this new yorker piece that just came out that you should read it's called ghost walls and it's the story of how the chinese communist party is committing genocide right now just like other regimes did in the turks did to the armenians and the nazis did to the jews and it's happening again right now he said never again and you know that's just not true we're letting it happen and again with the business stuff like people are like airbnb is like a sponsor of the olympics like what at the individual level at a business level how does somebody like me who's just one little aunt how does somebody uh like elon musk who's in charge of ten thousand ants uh fight it like what how do we yeah how do we push back a great blueprint is the the fight against the south african apartheid so i we did a few events down in johannesburg um and i've had the pleasure of being able to go to the apartheid museum several times um and it really does a good job of chronicling how they were able to do it it took a while there's no doubt but the way it was done was good um peaceful action from abroad was very important so there was like the sullivan principles so like um you can peacefully protest as a company uh particular regimes and it's very effective and not just corporations but like the olympics is a great example like chinese government should not be able to host the olympics the ioc should say no not until you close down those prison camps this is a perfect peaceful way to push back no one gets hurt same thing when we had the korean olympics a few years ago north korea should not have been allowed any sort of symbolistic kind of hosting rights there they have prison camps gulags that we can see from outer space very clearly and their regime is the cruelest one on the planet probably why were they able to sit and cheer and and you know get to sort of co-host those at the olympics this is spineless like the the ioc the olympics and major corporations should stand up um especially in the cultural sector where you don't lose anything like you know or you shouldn't have to lose anything so i think if we look at the way that we forced the apartheid regime out this international solidarity of musicians athletes performers celebrities is very very powerful unfortunately today's celebrities are doing the opposite we just you know have this press release go out yesterday about akon and he's he's off whitewashing the crimes of the dictator of uganda and trying to build a future city there with him you know if this was the 1980s akon would be raising his fist and saying we need to you know fight the apartheid regime how do we get back to that you know we need to think about that we have to figure out how to harness celebrities influencers and companies and get them to actually stand up for something for once i mean that's something we've lost we've really had a spine against that um and and you know we've lost it you know and and you lose things you lose them forever look at tibet tibet was a big cause for people in the 90s used to go to colleges and kids would have the tibetan flags all over the dorm rooms it was like radiohead would have tibet on the stage and everybody wanted to you know free tibet was a big thing guess what like we lost it for some reason it's not a thing anymore and tibet has been totally colonized you know so i think it's important that we find a way to unlock um an interest of in the celebrity classes among athletes singers presidents you know we need to find a way to punish these people yeah it's surprising because the we've become more and more connected so we can communicate more effectively at a large scale and yet we seem to be worse and worse at real activism it seems like the outrage that's overtaken the communication channels has been very us focused and often more about outrage and less about uh productive activism i'm very jaded i mean it's very difficult to to do these things at scale effectively i do not believe we will be successful in boycotting the chinese olympics we weren't in 2008 i don't think and they're much more evil now and i don't think we're going to be able to do it this time and again to go back to the the bitcoin piece that's why i'm like very interested in this thing because it doesn't require my altruism it doesn't require some famous singer or some corporation to to sacrifice anything they're literally just going to follow their own prophet seeking self-interested motives and they're going to end up making a stronger human rights tool for other people uh freedom go up fgu man do you think we're it's kind of a dark question but you think we're headed towards a war with china the united states versus china i hope not i hope not in the cyber space and potentially even a hot war i think there's too many people with too much money to be lost to go to a hot war on both sides but eventually we're just gonna someone's gonna have to stand up i mean the subjugation of hong kong and the genocide of the uyghurs and the colonization of tibet i mean taiwan is the next big thing i mean xi jinping has made it very clear you know xinjiang tibet hong kong taiwan so we're going to have to stand up for taiwan for different reasons both for moral reasons but also for semiconductor reasons we need tsmc to be on our side to not have china take over tsmc so um there's different reasons why we're going to have to protect taiwan and you just hope it's not a hot war i mean at this point well but also from inside the governments of china and russia as well but china i guess is is the powerhouse here is how do how do these governments get reformed is it is there hope for them to become democracies like true democracies of representative democracies and sort of reform them to be to be ethical players on the world stage no empire lasts forever and it's impossible to predict when these regimes fall i mean no one no one thought the soviet union was going to fall when it fell like that like if you studied like the news and the scholarship of the era no one knew that the tunisian government was going to fall after muhammad bozizi laid himself on fire no one no one really no one predicted that that would become what we now know as the arab spring right these things are impossible to predict and one day the chinese regime will fall i just we don't know when um yes you know but and there's quite a few folks who talk about the fall of the american empire and it also concerns me that we don't know when that might fall you assume me as a very excited naive american i'm very excited by this project that i think is the beacon of hope in the world still but uh that's probably how do you you know uh that's how that's probably how you feel before it's the end it's a party you want to leave the party before it starts to deteriorate um i i think america could continue to have like a major major leadership role for a long long time um i think certain things we do will become maybe no longer possible in terms of the way we intimidate people on the world stage and the term especially the way we use our currency as a weapon i think that that's going to decline over time as we become more of a multi-polar world um but i do still believe in america and the values that were founded on despite all the warts i do believe in us and i would prefer us absolutely to be the most prominent of the multi-polar world vis-a-vis a regime like russia or china absolutely there's no question so we've been talking about states and nations yeah but can we just briefly talk about facebook and twitter and companies that have a huge impact on the world as well and actually one of the things that make america a great nation is it is the place from which these great companies have sprung up is there from a human rights perspective is there something that bothers you about facebook about these large companies uh is there something we need to fix something we need to be upset about fight back on reform do some sort of real activism about i'm very concerned about social media platforms and companies it almost feels like we're losing the golden age of the internet you know we could like go online and enter and you know interact with each other and share and not be worried about censorship it feels like that that was a golden age like in the late 90s 2000s and now everything is is becoming very politicized and i'm not sure that there's a solution like i don't think there's a button we can press to fix it i'm kind of uh afraid that this is sort of just what happens when uh societies digitize like like i think that certain opinions just become demonized in in the sort of um in the room in the social room that we have on the internet and i don't know if there's a magical solution there i do know that there's technological solutions that will allow us to continue to communicate and for creators to reach their audiences without censorship um and that's very exciting like right now you could be de-platformed from your uh you know from like whether it's uh patreon or youtube or whatever um and your your bank account can be closed down right there are emerging ways that adam curry like the pod father and a bunch of other people are experimenting with where you can essentially have your audio podcast across a whole bunch of different um you know platforms so you know it's censorship resistant and then your audience can pay you over lightning in streaming money like they can stream you money as they listen so you're removing the whole advertising piece you don't need to do advertising anymore you have this direct relationship with um your uh you know your audience and this is possible with something like lightning where you can do streaming money that's censorship resistant and a lot of the people who are building a lightning network for example elizabeth stark who you know started lightning labs and has done in her within her company that people that work work with her have built a huge part of the lightning infrastructure you know what animates her is this idea of like again artists and creators being able to have that direct um ability to reach out and have that peer-to-peer relationship with their with their audience and i i'm excited for that and i do think that's coming but but i i am very worried that the golden age of like like what centralized social media platforms is kind of behind us um and i'm not sure how to fix that i don't know if that's like a fixable problem interesting i i have a hope that it's a fixable problem i think i think it's fixable because there's demand for it to be fixed that's the way i think about it well is twitter that bad right now like i mean it's fixable in as much as you can do a verification so you can give a blue check to someone and then that person is like more credible and they go to the top of the comments and there's like tweaks you can do you can continue to improve it but it's not going to fix the fact that like twitter can decide to kick off the president and like a lot of people are going to be upset by that you know like there's ways you can improve the ux over time and they continue to do so like clubhouse is a is a lot of fun great phenomenon so it's twitter spaces so they continue to iterate but the the censorship to platforming piece i'm not sure is fixable because if you i mean you watch the us government hall these people hall um zuckerberg and dorsey and whatever in front of congress they want more censorship i mean our elected leaders want more censorship right see i just believe censorship is a really harsh word i believe it's possible to create technologies where it's not twitter doing the censorship but it's individuals doing their own selection of what they want and don't want to see so for example if you get sick and tired of donald trump and whatever he says or you love donald trump you get to select yourself like you get to have more control over what you consume twitter tries to do that a little bit but they obviously fail where ideas infiltrate our view that we that like misinformation spreads really fast and conspiracy theories spread really fast to where the immune system that twitter has created to try to censor conspiracy theories and misinformation is over firing and you're now censoring too many people so that to it's exactly the same intuition as you said before if the state is doing it in this case twitter is kind of the state it's not going to work out well but if it individu if you give power to the individuals to do this sort of the not even censorship but uh incentivization and de-incentivization of great thoughtful content and terrible low effort content uh then i feel like that's going to create a system where there's going to be a much more open discourse of ideas dangerous ideas difficult ideas controversial ideas and people in a decentralized way will be able to use their own intelligence to select content to share content spread content let's keep it simple um let's look at one example uh twitter and jack dorsey and i think it's quite clear that what he believes is the solution is as you're kind of hinting at a more kind of like regionalized uh system which is not have one we call federated system right which does not just have like one company in charge of everything but there's an open protocol and then there's like different instances right so twitter make you know jack's dream for twitter is that twitter is this open protocol that the russian government can use and the chinese government can use and the iranian government can use and the american government can use and then twitter as a company is going to use two and you as the customer decide which implementation you want to join and there's going to be different censorship on each instance or each federation but uh the protocol itself would be like untouchable this is kind of like the idea behind the internet right there's like different parts of the internet that are censored but like at the very bottom of the very bottom of the backbone of it it's like this this globally connected um relatively unstoppable thing right so i think that's a pretty good vision and twitter's working towards that with the blue blue sky like initiative we'll see i'm a little skeptical that it like works out because i've used i use mastodon for example mastodon is an example of a um federated social media now it's it's ruled by a benevolent each instance is ruled by a benevolent dictator it's just like i happen to like this one so i know so rather than trust one dictator twitter you could you could you could choose which dictator you want to trust and that's kind of the federated model and maybe we head that way but you lose things when it's federated you lose the ux you lose the slickness and the feel and all the millions of dollars they spend on developers like mastodon is like not anywhere close to as nice to use as twitter so i feel like it's again it's this trade-off that we make with everything where it's convenience comfort speed versus privacy and freedom right it's very hard to have something that gives you both i don't know i think i think uh yeah it is a trade-off have you used one of these things that i have not as good as the federator they're not they're not but the federation i don't think it's it's a good i i think uh it requires genius to require skill it requires great design to come up with a way to that you know it's there's a pareto front here the trade there's a right way to hit that trade-off and i honestly think there's the ux the experience should be centralized should be designed by the company but the data yeah and like a lot of stuff that could be used to violate your basic rights should be owned by the individual and i think there's a way to decouple those that create an incredible experience to where you go there and you enjoy the market where you can share your data and have complete control over it and always have i mean there's a lot of basic ux ideas like just as an example i think there should always be in everything you design a one button that's always there that says forget i ever existed delete everything you know about me yeah and maybe it's maybe it's one button you click and it asks are you sure and you have to be able to say yes like that's a feature that's fundamental to a good social network i believe like that currently social networks first of all most of them don't allow you to do that they don't make it transparent how much data they had who they shared it with and they also make it exceptionally difficult to delete accounts so like that's a very basic starting point but that that having that button means that you have control but that's step one of the control there's a transparency of knowing exactly when what data is being shared about you how much data is already being recorded about you all that is transparency and i believe in the i believe that's a really good business model because when there's transparency and control people would be willing to give over a lot more data as long as they know what they're giving over as long as they know what they can delete yeah i guess maybe you're more optimistic about people caring about i feel like not ever so few people actually care about their their privacy and freedom i've just watched everybody give it up you know um but but we'll see i guess just to to bookend that i i think we're at this moment where obviously the centralized platforms are just so much easier and better to use and to to strike it out and and and you know venture out and use a uh like a federated instance or something even like key base which is kind of like a cool encrypted way to like have group chats um it just requires like a lot of your time and a lot of people don't have that time but i will say one thing like i do think there's this future where um we do go into more of this like uh try it's called a tribal model or like tribes um which is this social environment being built on top of lightning um by uh an app called sphinx and the idea is like kind of like it's like a decentralized slack like you have your slack instance which has like a bunch of people in the community and you have different ways to um message each other and it's all encrypted and then it has like plug-ins for like things like jitsi instead of zoom so like an open source encrypted video messenger it has ways to like plug in the content you want to get from like uh like different um platforms that you follow like podcasts things like that and again it allows you to pay those people directly in a censorship resistant private way so it's really nice to connect to the lighting network yeah so it's all sort of built on lightning but the idea you can think about it is like you're slowly starting to build up the idea of a wechat but with freedom principles right because right now wechat's like the king of convenience and comfort but of course it's feeding all that data to the big brother and the surveillance state um and then we have like our own versions over here in america that are not quite as convenient or amazing but like we give up slightly less you know privacy and freedom but this thing has a lot of promising features to it it's worth checking out it's very like early days like it feels like i mean i was pretty young but it feels like the 90s in the internet like it has that feeling yeah you know it's rough around the edges but you can feel the magic it's pretty cool i i'm very much like with steve jobs on this uh i think the founding principles are exceptionally important but at the end of the day the design of how sleek it is how well how easy it is to use and and that that's not just like pretty icing on the cake that is the icing is the cake yeah because like how easy it is to use how natural it is it's the trojan horse thing like you don't get it has to be pretty and shiny it has to have it has to fundamentally connect to the basics of human nature which is what is pleasant to use what feels good to use you have to you know to get to trick people into eating the broccoli you have to put like a delicious look at whatever ptp is the kind of a pain to use right for you you want privacy yeah so signals are upgraded way better yep i mean and it's way better than it was five years ago and it's it's not quite as good as like not quite as seamless right as like a whatsapp yet um but it's almost there and they were able to do it and and you're gonna see that with with bitcoin wallets as well i mean they're they're almost there they're like if you use like a moon wallet is like i mean it's so cool looking and it's so seamless and they've spent so many hours thinking about your experience we're getting there whereas 10 years ago it's like impossible to use one of the things that signal doesn't have and i believe these kinds of applications need to have it's like a i hate the term but killer app which is like a dumb but very viral and popular reason to switch it i didn't see exactly i mean i've been using signal but i haven't you seen a um you know uh a big reason to well you're on it man i mean the the reason but i haven't switched everything to it you know what i mean like yeah the exodus to signal was in in january they had a huge user uh surge for two main reasons one hilariously enough of course was elon tweeted like you should use signal right um which is not insignificant and then the other one was that like whatsapp changed kind of some of its terms of service and like you know announced to all of its users in this little pop-up um that it was gonna be sort of like changing the way it handled your data that spooked a lot of people so these two things really combined um and tens of millions of people in the following weeks between january and february joined signal it's like it really has had its day in the sun um and they are like frantically trying to keep up with it like and it's really nice to see that uh that this encrypted messaging service which which prioritizes your privacy um in a way that you know you know the government again may know like the metadata but doesn't know exactly what you're saying unless they can get your hands on your phone i think that's very very powerful so it can be done i i don't want to be uh too jaded here i think it can be done yeah i think um i think we can fight back and i think we can make continue to make these digital communications tools and platforms um in a way that that that really benefits us yeah i'm not i'm not sure but i'm hopeful as well i'm hopeful that if you look at the trend of technologies they ultimately are ones that respect privacy respect security and um basic human rights i mean that's at least the hope so gary kasparov i'm russian he means a lot to me on a personal level he's the chairman of uh human rights foundation what does gary have to do with anything what's your relationship like with him do you like chess what what are his specific focuses and ideas around the hrf can you just speak to it in general yeah so our chairman at the human rights foundation was vast level uh who of course was like the famous czech democracy activist uh who you know helped lead the velvet revolution and then ended up becoming the first democratically elected leader of the czech republic after the soviet union fell he passed away in 2011 and it was very difficult to find a replacement uh because who can fill hovel's shoes you know but if one could it would be gary right so we like really tried to get gary to join then thankfully he agreed and we've had an amazing relationship with gary over the years i mean he's been relentless in his pursuit of freedom i mean he could have retired and taken his career in a different direction and he could be hanging out with putin and have a pleasure yacht and all kinds of stuff but he decided to risk it and if you actually study like the times when he was running for uh president in russia masha gessen followed him around in the man without a face it's a great great book about putin um there's a fabulous chapter where she's following around gary when he's campaigning and i mean that he risked a lot i mean he can't go back to russia anymore he gave up his country um he's given up a huge amount to be able to speak his mind and to have this dream this beautiful vision of a free and democratic russia he really believes in it it's been a great experience i work very closely with gary uh we talk a lot we do different things around the world together he's he's come out to a lot of events in different cities around the world um and he's been a very active chairman this isn't some figurehead he's very involved and it's really really great i mean everything he's involved with is uh it's you know as one journalist who attends our events says when he walks in the room you know the average iq of the room goes up pretty significantly uh i'm not i'm not i'm not a big chess person unfortunately so i have not been able to connect with him on that but i think he probably would prefer it that way you know all he gets is people who want to talk to him about chess you know yeah so here we can we can talk about kind of human rights strategy and like uh how to you know improve our fight against uh against dictators but um he he really you know has that moral clarity that i that i that i really uh appreciate so yeah he's uh so he has a lot of fascinating ideas about uh artificial intelligence as well he's opened my eyes a little bit to the to the state of russia today because i've read most books on putin uh in the english language and sort of on trying to understand things and i try to look at it from a historical perspective like almost like we're living a hundred years from now and i look at putin as a important figure in the history of human civilization and study it in that way i think the way gary looks at it he probably doesn't appreciate me looking at the way i do but the way he looks at it is we can still change the direction of russia and we individual human beings and we communities and we nations can take actions have policies that can change the direction of russia to me i take a uh sort of going to the library passive view of studying fascinating aspects of russia to me russia means like most of my family suffered through the soviet union and i see beauty and suffering the the poetry the music the stories and just there's so much love that emerged from the pain that i just enjoy that the music of that but to gary and to many activists that i speak to to them they they love not just the russia of the past they have a vision and a hope for russia of the future and that and they criticize me a little bit for being a little bit too scholarly about the past and ignoring the future and there's something to that so he's he's he opens my eyes uh to look to the future of russia gary and a handful of other russian activists that we work closely with including vladimir kara murza who again i mean it's just incredibly heroic the man has survived two poisonings by putin um they like to say that you know russians will bring democracy to russia on their own terms they don't need our help this is what vladimir especially says but what he does say is that we should stop propping up putin like that that's kind of his uh stop uh kind of legitimizing him that that's kind of his argument he's like we don't need your foreign interference we don't need your ideas we don't you know we don't need your help we can do it on our own but please stop like propping up our you know illegitimate ruler that's kind of like his point of view which which i think is interesting um and fair yeah let me just say on one unrelated comment some people criticize me and others like joe rogan for giving people a platform i think in some cases that's applicable but i think in most cases knowledge is power and there's no such thing as giving a platform the conversation just shines a light as long as you shine the light well and uh as long as in shining the light and having the conversation you reveal something fundamental about the state of things about the people whether that's putin or some of the other controversial figures that have come up in possible future conversations so um i don't like this kind of platforming idea i think conversations save us don't they don't destroy us yeah i mean that's that's journalism though i mean that's very different from you know advocacy or strategic thinking about what to do with russia um absolutely yeah we should interview everybody and everybody should know exactly what they're thinking yeah you know but i you know journalism to me has become a dirty word because because it's done so poorly by so many people that um you know i listen to sometimes certain programs like i don't know like uh meet the press and the fox sunday program just certain things just to tune in and see what different news medias are paying attention to and the kind of interviews they do you know is like f five minutes at most but usually it's like one minute it's these quick clip things and it's very gotcha and they're looking for ways to to sort of grab almost a misstatement they want to catch you off guard they want to ask the quote like like the harsh question but without any of the like the dance of conversation that reveals the truth you know you can't just get to the truth by asking it you have to sneak up on it and i think that's an art form and i think that art form involves long-form conversation like i'm a huge believer in just i guess that's what's called i don't know in-depth journal or whatever like where you spend months or years on the story yeah and then in that same way i think of long-form conversation is like you spend many hours and you spend months and years preparing for those many hours but like it's not this like short form trying to trying to get the most controversial little tidbit of a story out and unfortunately the funding mechanisms behind journalism are such that they are incentivized clickbait journalism versus like in-depth right long-form digging for the truth i have a conflicted relationship with journalism because to me press freedom is so core right and independent journalists around the world are so brave yes um and especially in countries like russia or china et cetera and um really good journalism is still something i absolutely i love and i enjoy like this especially like to say again this new yorker piece on what's happening to the uyghurs is incredibly well reported however by the you know on the other hand you have um in this sort of clickbaity journalism that's all about sensationalism and and that gets used as a tool i mean you know whether it be against things like privacy or bitcoin or whatever you have like people who sensationalize and it gets used in the service of the surveillance state the war on terror whatever you know it's it's difficult but you know i think journalism is essential to a free society um but it can it can sometimes be it can wear my patients thin sometimes like it's been uh to be honest has been a huge burden on me personally if i were to just turn this into a therapy session for a brief moment when i look at people when i interact with people i'd like to see the best in them and the burden that weighs heavy on me is sometimes people i talk to may not be good people and i don't i'd love to i believe everybody has good in them and i try to focus on that the burden that weighs on me is sometimes that there may be conversations where that's irresponsible where i have to also call people out i have to do enough the hard lifting and the hard work of knowing exactly what are the bad things that that person has done and i also have the responsibility to call them out on it and that's for me personally just not an unpleasant feeling that's where speaking to journalism like i think journalists are too much focused on the the bad things a person has done and not enough on the digging into the the the full complexity of the human being behind all the things that have been done but at the same time you know i can't have a conversation with hitler and not ask about the prison camps yeah yeah yeah no so from the human rights perspective one of our programs is we like we try to go after people who do like pr for dictators so like like then a lot of people do like pr firms in washington get hired by all these dictators um and they make a lot of money to make them look good it's called whitewashing or putting lipstick on a pig or whatever you want to do astroturfing is like the fake make like fake social media accounts to make it seem like you're popular um but whitewashing is a huge issue so um i think it's completely fair to interview like dictators and stuff like that amanpour does a pretty good job she's she's really good she she makes sure that there's no messing around i mean her interviews of mussolini recently the ugandan dictator was very good i mean she's basically like well like why are you rigging another election please tell us you know and she's fearless and she's good and that can be a helpful thing to have on youtube as a resource um but it's it's it's quite clear when when it descends into a pr session and you just have to be like very careful about it like asma al-assad the wife of the butcher in syria you know was like profiled by by vogue and it was this whole rose in the desert things a bunch of nonsense terrible terrible terrible uh total propaganda but a like honest interview where you uh you know you're asking about all the tough questions um very important you know so i think i think it's just a matter of like content is there a good resource to study washing like to know what manipulative pr looks like i think you just you should know if you've researched the topic you should know it inside you because it would be is there anything you're afraid to ask that would be make sure you're asking all the questions as long as you're asking all the questions that you have you're good but if there's something you're afraid to ask then then maybe you're self-censoring right that's a good way it's it takes us back to that like uh what is it that litmus test about uh is your country allowed to have a gay pride parade yeah so there's like obvious things that might be on your mind that you just want to ask and uh you shouldn't you shouldn't run for that as long as you feel like you're a free person when you're interviewing i think you're good that's beautifully put are there books technical fiction philosophical that had a impact on your life that you recommend or even resources like blogs films i have four books i'll briefly mention um number one is the fear the fear had a deep impact on me the fear was written by peter godwin it's about the systematic dismantling of zimbabwe under robert mugabe peter zimbabwean and it is a riveting book i think everyone should read it because it helps you understand what it's like to go through not just authoritarianism but also hyperinflation and i mean really you know at the end of the day what the fear describes is how mugabe took this country in the 1980s and he actually brought it back in time to the 1920s in terms of infrastructure literacy rates health rates all these things he stole so much from the people and it's a heartbreaking book but it's a very important book um and it's a it's a way to do excellent excellent journalism so the fear is a good one isn't this a personal story absolutely yeah because he he was it's part of his whole family story and he's in there he's interviewing people personally um so i i would say that one is it also connected and sorry to interrupt is it is it from the inflation perspective is it is a good study of hyperinflation and the effects does uh does bitcoin at all come as a as a no you know a discussion of money does that come into this or is it purely the experience of inflation is almost a symptom of an authoritarian a little bit a little bit i would say it's not deep i have another book on on that which i'll recommend in a second but i would just say that it's it's a very powerfully written book about how society can uh basically deteriorate and how you can lose everything um the second book is i just mentioned it but the man without a face by masha gessen incredible book about modern russia and putin just a masterpiece so that would be one of your favorite books about putin in russia that one's the best i mean she's just so fearless incredible she interviews putin in the book at the end it's really good um third one is a fiction book uh called the mandibles uh written by lionel shriver this one's good it's a good gift book it's funny it's dark it's witty but it's about the united states losing its status as the reserve currency and going into hyperinflation and what's interesting is that the characters in the book map where we are today the book itself is about the late i think it's the late 2020s and we have a populist president who decides to announce that the united states is like basically going to default on its debts and the rest of the world comes up with like a new currency and everybody switches to that one and the dollar like overnight becomes worthless and all these like economists are saying no it's fine like inflation won't be a problem and there's this one character who's an icon who's like an economist and he he's basically he gets to the point where he's living as a refugee in prospect park in brooklyn and he's still saying everything's fine you know so it's like it's dry it's witty but it's also about um the surveillance state it's about centralization of power it's really good so the mandibles i would highly recommend um so those three books and then on the topic of bitcoin because we talked about it a lot i would just say that my portal into bitcoin was the internet of money by andreas antonopoulos oh wow and i did it by audiobook and i just think this is an important one for people to start with because he goes through all the main concepts whether it be proof of work or you know how the network functions but he does it in a way that's extremely engaging and really fascinating and it really just kind of like sparked my curiosity is it is it discussing the the technical sides are also the philosophical because a lot of people mention sort of the bitcoin standard is the philosophical entry into the whole bitcoin world very different from the bitcoin standard it's it's more for like the average person um it's not a history book it's a collection of his talks that he gave over like two or three years it's not very technical it's very approachable yeah um and some of it might be dated now because it's like 2015 2016. but i mean it's great it's great to hear a shout out for andres because he he seems to be one of the seminal figures to sort of uh make bitcoin ideas accessible oh andre this is the ghost he's the trace is the ghost trace is the ghost i know a lot of people have issues with some of his like more recent work but andres is the goat i mean yeah he's the reason i'm in bitcoin i mean he's the reason i'm in bitcoin so yeah that's that's fascinating it's and it's it's funny it's funny to watch the bitcoin maximalist immune system also attacking uh attacking him and and this whole feedback mechanism is working together it's fascinating well i probably consider myself a maximalist but i really like andreas so i think there's room for nuance there's room for nuance in this world i'm glad to hear that uh if people are fascinated by your work what is the way to get more of alex so two years ago i came together with seven other people from around the world and we wrote a book in a book sprint we lived in a house for four days we wrote a book together it was really cool it's like a design sprint but we did it in book format and my co-authors are from nigeria venezuela the philippines from former soviet union from all over and it's called the little bitcoin book and i'm still proud of it it's 100 pages it's something you give to somebody who knows nothing about the topic and it's not a technical book it's about the sort of social political uh aspect of it like why is it important for you for your finances for your freedom for for your future and uh we've translated it into like a lot of languages by now uh i think english spanish and portuguese are for sale and it little bitcoinbook.com you know you go buy it but we've made it as for as a free pdf in mandarin hindi punjab uh korean uyghur which i was really excited about arabic farsi and i mean it's breads man it's been really really cool so i'm proud of that um i also made a video that did very well for reason magazine called why is bitcoin protecting human rights around the world it's five minutes and it just i feel like i tried to boil everything that i that i want to tell you into this five minute video so there's that um i would recommend that and then if you're interested in the why have governments not stopped it which i think is really intriguing i wrote this long essay in quillette in february called you know um why haven't governments banned bitcoin and um maybe that'll be a helpful guide to some folks is this speaking to the trojan horse idea that there's something uh enticing about it yeah at the end it does get into that but it really also just kind of goes through technically why is it hard to do a 51 attack like why would like if a government wanted to could it really get all that equipment there's a semiconductor shortage like it can't like there's like certain things that stop governments from doing it right and same thing with like this idea of a 6102 which would be um based on the idea of the executive order 6102 which is from 1933 when fdr made holding gold illegal in the united states the idea is that like banks would go around now with governments and try to like steal everybody's bitcoin well in bitcoin we have like a practice um called proof of keys day every january 3rd you know which is coinciding with the launch of the bitcoin blockchain where we all like withdraw our keys from exchanges and we'd be sovereign users what we're doing is we're preparing for a 6102 attack which will one day probably come right so the essay just goes through all of the like possible attacks and it runs through like the ones that happened like the chinese and indian governments the two largest governments in the world both tried to attack bitcoin by banning their citizens from exchanging fiat for bitcoin it didn't work interest instead exploded it's like the barbra streisand effect where ins when you know by by making something public and saying you shouldn't do x it actually increases attention about x a lot more right um so i i think there's a lot of interesting game theory there that people would enjoy do you think uh are you do you seriously concerned about this kind of thing where the ideas of sovereignty and that bitcoin espouses would would actually one day be tested do you have a like a legitimate concern because you said like one day very well might do you think it might yeah well first of all bitcoin has been attacked again many times and we talk about the you spoke about this with nick carter on your show um the sort of protocol wars or conflict or whatever right and bitcoin almost died a whole bunch of times during that and ended up surviving oh wow i didn't i didn't know how bad the box oh it got blocked really bad it was it was a sort of a very existential threat and um bitcoin survived and that's why i'm so intrigued by it is that it it basically survived an attack in an environment several years ago when bitcoin was much more vulnerable than it is today um it survived an attack by a conglomeration of chinese billionaires silicon valley corporations and a ton of people who owned the majority of the hash rate and all this infrastructure they had 83 of all the hash rate and they couldn't get what they wanted and that was so intriguing to me like why didn't it why i didn't get killed so as nick said i think you should read the block size war which is a book on that you can get on amazon by jonathan beer really good kind of like really important to understand the the the scaling conflict and the visions over the different visions of what bitcoin should be and you know again people like me believe it should be a freedom tool not like a payments technology for retail and i'm just i'm glad it worked out the way it did because it almost didn't do you think uh humans civilization will destroy itself so if we think about all the threats facing human civilization uh nuclear war natural or engineer pandemics you know we talk about human rights violations we talk about uh authoritarian governments yeah uh taking control of the money supply yeah but do you have great grander concerns for the future of human civilization do you have hope for us becoming multi-planetary species yeah i mean i i guess long term we'd want to decentralize right we don't want a single point of failure in a physical speech because the earth is a single point of failure um but no i mean you look at all this kind of like space uh fiction and i mean who would want to live on mars man it's like a freaking desert i mean the earth is so beautiful i hope we can save it you know it's just so gorgeous when you look at the earth compared to any other like exoplanet or whatever you look at it i mean the earth is so spectacular and wondrous and singular i think we've got to do everything we can to save it here that's funny i mean i uh sure a lot of people would have said that about europe uh before the explorers ventured out uh columbus and the rest on to the unknown the the thing about human nature is that we are explorers too some small fraction of us are insane enough to explore in the most dangerous uh grounds and i'm pretty sure there's quite a few people that would love to take the first step on mars the first few steps on mars in the harshest of environments even when the odds of survival extremely low and i'm thankful for those people as i sit back and drink my vodka back here on earth and enjoy friendships because i think ultimately that step to mars is going to be a first step into a multi into uh exploring and colonizing the rest of the galaxy mars might be a harsh environment but maybe space is not uh like uh other planets other exoplanets but also forget planets just creating colonies that flow about in space there's exciting technologies that are yet to be discovered yet to be engineered and built that i think require that first painful step like uh yeah the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step i think mars is that first step yeah no i was born the day before the challenger blew up and it was always so tragic for me to look back on that because that really like altered our arc in terms of space exploration like that had not happened we'd be in a very different arc and i do respect and admire people pushing for exploration but i at the same time i just i want to recognize like the we just you know we know how unique earth is and i do think we got to do everything we can to uh to protect it i think you avoid answering the question if we're going to destroy ourselves yeah yeah i guess are you if you do not you're okay fine if we do not decentralize properly out into different physical spaces probably i guess yeah and then i mean do you do you have concerns that are immediately facing you so um not in terms of the injustices on the world but nuclear war yeah look i'm a lot more concerned about what's happening right now like like what is destroying ourselves if you were to go and see what's happening in xinjiang or north korea right now or eritrea that is destroying ourselves yeah and it's already happened so i guess the end that's why i said that is yes i mean if you don't decentralize and power is completely under one person um life is destroyed as we know it and and you know you don't have to go into science fiction to know what a totalitarian hellscape dystopia is there's several that exist already and and you know let's try to like help those people at the same time as we're trying to like push out into space would be my like counter i guess yeah i agree with you in my mind the sort of destruction and suffering are next-door neighbors so yeah we don't need to destroy all of human civilization if much a large fraction lives in conditions that we would equate to suffering that's uh that's not a good world is there advice that you would give to uh young people today about life about career about how they can help a world where 53 percent are living uh are living under authoritarian governments but in general a world that's full of injustice but also full of opportunity just thinking about my own upbringing i went to a public school here and um we never learned about money it was never part of our curriculum um even personal finances was not part of our curriculum you could take like an optional course to learn about like business or something um and i think that that would be really valuable as a young person or as a teenager to start incorporating into your children's lives is like a curiosity about what is money i think would be very health healthy regardless of what path that takes them down um because we don't think about it enough either from an administrative sort of personal finance thing about like responsibility uh or more fundamentally like what is it and who creates it where did it come from both of those things are very important so my advice to a young person would be to get to the point where you feel like you can answer the question what is money [Laughter] so you ultimately see money as a as kind of power and freedom and um a mechanism is suffering so core to everything the united states whether you want to call it the pax americana the empire the hyper power whatever you want to call this moment in time where the us is dominant around the world it is because of the fact that we have this petrodollar system where we are able to force the saudis and other oil producing nations to sell their oil in dollars that is really inescapable inseparable from our power um and that's very rarely talked about and it's very important to understand so yeah young people could start thinking about that stuff it'd be good i remember being it sounds silly to say but i remember being uh really uncomfortable that i was dependent on my parents at a young age or for like financial you need to be 18 have a bank account or whatever right one one of the people that we supported at ahref through our we do software development funding for people in bitcoin uh open source projects and he's one of the guys we funded is this uh very young smart sort of prodigy he's like 17. but one of the reasons he got into bitcoin was because he wanted to have control of his money when he was like 14. yeah i mean if you think in history people who invented uh uh all kinds of incredible contributions to science or math i mean a lot of them did it before they were 15. yeah so think about that maturity that is capable and possible in many people like i've participated in some of the years ago some of the sort of selection processes for like the teal fellowship which is like really amazing like these people who are 14 15 16 who don't need to go to college they're already like so smart they can figure it out but they wouldn't be allowed to have a bank account right so hey that's kind of cool like now you have a permissionless money you can you can open up yourself without uh permission from your parents that's kind of cool yeah that's fascinating to me i i i feel like i would have loved my parents more if you had a little more separation if i had freedom to to fully realize myself because i felt like i was a little bit trapped by i don't know it's uh uh it's not explicit right it's a little bit it's like a subtle push that you're somehow dependent on them i mean part of that is like i think it actually very much has to do not talking about money like what what does it take to operate as an individual entity in this world like knowing that when you're 10 years old knowing that when you're very young so that you've then you see the how amazing it is to uh have the support of your parents until you're 18. like have that freedom have the freedom to appreciate the value your parents bring and at the same time the freedom to leave in some capacity to uh carve your own path i mean like just just all of that i think for for weirdos like me especially because that was a very non-traditional path that uh i think it would be very empowering and certainly would be empowering in the third world too not just weirdos like you yeah i was going to mention one of the people i got who taught me about bitcoin her name is roya mapub she's an afghan technology ceo and in 2013 she started paying her employees in bitcoin because uh they were not allowed to open bank accounts the women that worked for her she started the country's first female like all-female software company and if they brought cash home their like husbands or uncles or brothers would steal it from them there's a power patriarchal dominance thing going on but they had phones and she was able to pay them in bitcoin and no one knew and it gave them that power and that that's always stuck in my mind is a very interesting uh effect of this kind of thing of permissionless money like that it could be an empowerment tool so absolutely so in your own personal life where did the deep concern for the for the suffering in the world come from where was that born i was going to be an engineer actually and then in 2003 we invaded iraq and i got very interested in why we did that as a nation and i switched to my focus of study to like international relations and that's how i kind of went down the kind of political science democracy rabbit hole and ended up getting a job at the human rights foundation so that that i'm a very much a child of like 911 and the iraq war those are the two really formative events for me personally can you break that apart a little bit like what illusion about this world was uh broken apart by the invasion of iraq well i think first of all 911 just shifted the world dynamics completely from a focus on big power politics between the us russia and china to this new threat of islamic terror and a lot of it we learned later a lot of the things we did were manufactured choreographed like there were no wmds in iraq like the reason our rulers said we needed to invade and destroy this country was a lie um and that that i think has really been forgotten like i think a lot of like the zoomers like today don't really know a lot about that time period i mean it was pretty crazy unanimously i mean democrat republican like joe biden hillary clinton like and the republicans everybody wanted to invade this country and it was very it's very um it's a confusing time there's a really good book by ian mcewen called saturday a fiction book that takes place during i think 2003 and it's one day in the life of the doctor in london it's really good though to revisit this time because he has two characters he has a character in the book one of whom is very pro-war and one of them is very against war basically he the father himself is pro-war and his son is against it and they have all these debates and it's nice to go back to revisit but that time was it's really crazy and it really showed you that like the media could be captured into like helping promote this idea of like invading another country so i was very curious about why we did it and like who who was pulling the strings and why what are the reasons that we went and what's really interesting is that like i took all these courses on and interviewed all these decision makers whether they were like neocons or whatever different people who were involved and the whole like dollar reserve currency thing like really never came up until like i i learned about it more recently because of bitcoin like and today when i look back it seems kind of obvious that the reason we invaded iraq was because saddam hussein wanted to sell oil in euros it seems really obvious when you go back and look at the chronology of it um and we were like no we actually don't want you to sell dollars in euros because that would threaten the dollar so we're going to invade you and then you're not going to do it and no one else is going to like sell dollars in europe oil and euros right um i guess you could say the same thing about gaddafi but um we we as a nation have very much protected our reserve currency let's put it that way yeah actually one of the things that bitcoin community has motivated me to do is to look back to the histories that i have studied myself from just even the two world wars the history of the 20th century from a perspective of the monetary system of of money and it's it's interesting it's interesting to look at human history in the context of money can't we be patriotic and be pro america but like not want the petro dollar like i should be proud of my country why do we need to be propping up the saudis why do we need to be you know threatening to invade other countries if they sell their oil for a different currency i think we can be just as powerful as we are today if not more powerful in a bitcoin world if you think about the infrastructure americans are building all the innovations we're building all the wealth we have i think we'll be fine better than fine and we won't have these horrible negative externalities it's it's really a an optimistic vision for the future i thought we learned the lesson of 9 11 and uh the invasion of iraq and afghanistan but we're leaving and you know biden announced we're leaving afghanistan this year 20 years for what taliban are going to take over again i mean that's like at least the good this the longest war right the uh the forever wars i feel like the past 20 years or whatever it is um 18 years 19 years we've been very skeptical about invading other countries about we've been skeptical about military intervention in other nations well our leaders certainly haven't we're we have like seven active wars right now and then neither the russians and the chinese everybody's starting to invade everybody else i mean so yes but i meant to a degree that i was worried about like conflicts with uh hot conflicts with iran with north korea those kinds of things sure that uh there was not as much warmongering as as i was afraid about but yes you're absolutely right we're still there's a there's a big presence by the united states and other nations and across the world that's military this the military-industrial complex is a thing that um has huge detrimental ripple effects throughout the entirety of our governments yeah so the big question is how do we prevent the rise of this like authoritarian um surveillance state in china while at the same time kind of diffusing the military-industrial complex on our side that to me is like the biggest challenge of our time i don't have the answer but we should keep digging yeah i i believe there's a technology technological innovations you're suggesting that perhaps one of the technological innovations like is bitcoin is a big part of it yeah on the money side i think the information side there's there's innovations that are open that's possible and the political side i'm the most skeptical about i just feel like there's uh without hot wars that we don't seem to make any kind of progress bureaucracies just grow corruption and greed grow and human nature does not does not do well in the political arena so i hope technology can outpace the darker sides of human nature so you're busy fighting the demons the darkness that's out there but looking in the mirror you're finite being unfortunately this ride ends for you soon pretty soon um do you ever ask yourself about the meaning of it all of why the hell us uh descendants of apes are even on this thing striving so hard to make a better world for ourselves i don't often zoom out that much i feel like my day job is pretty interesting it keeps me very engaged with all the stuff we've been talking about uh as far as the meaning of life though it seems quite clear that we do have the possibility as a species to create um these you know beautiful communities and constructs and to share an exploration of the world together that is often marred by cold realities that we've discussed but i do feel like in a way um that the meaning of life is that that pursuit uh um of course biologically is you know the spread our species right but also to to pursue knowledge and science and innovation and and and freedom most importantly i mean i think it freedom has to guide us or else we end up with prison camps if we don't let freedom guide us we end up with the prison camps so we need to have scientific innovation and adventurism and colonization of the stars but without the slavery and without the prison camps i think that's so key there's something about the creation of beauty that seems fundamental to human nature and what seems beautiful as these communities that um that don't have suffering they don't have injustice and we have some kind of inner sense of what is injustice i don't know like some of the human rights that you've mentioned earlier they're they're they're just philosophical constructs but there also seem to be somehow deeply in us too it there we have a sense of what is right and what is wrong it's not just a kind of illusion that we've all agreed arbitrary power torture uh executions we know these things are wrong i mean we know they're wrong we don't have to read a book to know that um but you do you do need to people can get brainwashed i mean you talk to people who've grown up in north korea that you know they don't know any better like they don't know what's going on in the outside world so they've never experienced anything differently so that's why look technology can play a big role here in terms of like the meaning of it all like it can really help emancipate liberate people at least so that they can make their own choices about what to do at least so that we're on a level playing field so technologies like the internet and bitcoin um they can at least like give you the option to do things your own way on your own terms and then and then and then from there we'll see um you know i you know i think it's important that we have design choices where we can like um have a little more say and that not everything be pre-programmed for us that that would be very disappointing so i mean yeah the open web and encryption in bitcoin these are things that help uh prevent social engineering and that promote more freedom and and more possibilities honestly and more entrepreneurship and more creativity and more scientific inquiry i mean think about the people who tried to shut down scientific inquiry 500 600 years ago or whatever that we're trying to say um you know the earth was the center of everything and they were wrong you know and then you know all these conservative religious types throughout history have always said that um you know there's no no value in science and there's no value in technology and they've been wrong the whole time so let's continue pushing here let's continue pushing it's kind of scary to me sometimes humbling beautiful but also scary to think of you mention north korea people are kind of living in ignorance it's scary to me to think about how much ignorance there is in the world today like how little i know personally or us as a human civilization knows that has yet to be discovered between laziness and and ignorance right like so i would be lazy if i didn't you know take advantage of the internet right someone in north korea doesn't have the opposite they don't have the option there's literally no way for them to access the internet so there's kind of like um social laziness that philosophers have warned about forever that we basically become sheep okay and then there's actual like brainwashing and censorship that's possible like by closing off your population and keeping them off like the internet right um so i think these are two very different concepts absolutely but i also mean just like not even laziness but cognitive limitations and just historical scientific limitations like you know we're very young species like all of the exciting stuff we've been talking about have happened on the scale of decades maybe centuries it's very we're very young and all the cool stuff we've come up with and it's just humbling to think about how little we know but you're right that you know ultimately having the freedom to keep exploring keep venturing out even if we later discover that a lot of the stuff we've been doing now is um is ethically horrible if you think about animals or i think about robots a lot the kind of things we might be doing to other consciousnesses that are here on earth might be we might see his atrocities later on but ultimately you have to have the freedom to explore those kinds of ideas and without that freedom you don't even get the chance to be lazy yeah i mean look don't be a sheep okay it's easy to beat no offense to sheep and there's some practical things man get on signals start encrypting your messages take control over your your privacy the media doesn't want you to but check out bitcoin you can be your own bank you can transact with people around the world and no one can stop you this can put it put it put a stop to a lot of arbitrary power and a lot of human rights violations um you know don't use wechat uh question more uh you know research what's happening in xinjiang i mean learn about what's happening in the genocide in that country and let's think about how we can build our society so that we never have that kind of power concentration ever again and each of us can make a difference alex it's a huge honor to talk to you i've been a fan of your work a lot of people spoke really highly of you as one of the beacons of hope for human civilization so i'm really glad we got a chance to talk thank you for wasting all this time with me today it's been an honor thanks man a lot of fun thanks for listening to this conversation with alex glasteen to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from alice walker the most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you