Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights | Lex Fridman Podcast #231

Lex Fridman 0:00 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 l- 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's 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 Fridman 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 nonexistence, here's my conversation with Alex Gladstein.

Lex Fridman 1:34 What are some universal human rights that you believe all people should have?

Alex Gladstein 1:40 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.

Lex Fridman 1:59 What does negative rights mean?

Alex Gladstein 2:02 Negative rights are liberties, and positive rights are entitlements. So after World War II, when the UN came together, it was largely compromised between the Communist Soviet Union and the, you know, free United States, right? So, the US had, uh, on its side of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, uh, a bunch of li- 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 if 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 HRF uses as its sort of, like, lodestar, um, its 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, 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, healthcare, 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.

Lex Fridman 3:29 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 h- have the freedom t- for assembly and all those kinds of things? Can't you still manipulate the idea that, uh, citizenry still has those rights?

Alex Gladstein 3:49 The opposition l- leader of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, he once told me, uh, that, a funny joke that, you know, "In my country, we have freedom of speech. We don't have freedom after speech."

Lex Fridman 4:00 (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 4:00 So yeah. They, 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, uh, 53% of the world's population across 95 countries, um, about 4.3 billion people, those who live under those regimes are subject to, uh, massive fraud when it comes to things like literacy rates, um, life expectancy, um, any sort of socioeconomic 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 US 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.

Lex Fridman 5:05 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, uh, like to focus your attention on to defend, to protect, to make sure it's there?

Alex Gladstein 5:25 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. Um, obviously, we've seen the, the toll of violent redistributionism, you know, in over the last 100 years, uh, whether it was, uh, Lenin or Stalin or Mao, uh, or other regimes in everywhere from Ethiopia to colonia- colonialists everywhere to, to North Korea. It's not a pretty legacy.

Lex Fridman 5:56 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 m- new, like novel, mechanisms for people to communicate with each other.

Alex Gladstein 6:12 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 6:12 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, uh, removed from those social platforms. Have you thought about the freedom of speech in the United States, but in, in the world, uh, m- as it, uh, as it's implemented in the 21st century, given the internet and all those kinds of things?

Alex Gladstein 6:50 There is a Soviet dissident named Natan Sharansky who, um, survived, uh, the regime. And he wrote a book, uh, 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, um, without fear of ret- retribution? If you can do that, you have, you have free speech. I think that's a pretty good litmus test.

Lex Fridman 7:19 Hmm.

Alex Gladstein 7:20 Um, most people in this world cannot do that. If you live in Havana, if you live in Moscow, if you live in Beijing, uh, you cannot do that. And, and that's not a free society. Uh, in Austin, Texas, in Boston, Massachusetts, in London, in Santiago, Chile, in Tokyo, Japan, in many democracies, you can do that. And I think that that's a really helpful basic sort of litmus test.

Lex Fridman 7:42 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/pedophile-/ you know... I'm not saying that those are lies. Look into it. But, uh, they're very unlikely (laughs) phenomena. So, like, does that matter?

Alex Gladstein 8:10 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, I think censorship and deplatforming are two different things. Uh, private companies, um, 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.

Lex Fridman 8:39 That violence is a, is a fundamental difference. I don't know. I, I, um, I've gotten the chance to have dinner with Alex Jones.

Alex Gladstein 8:46 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 8:47 And, uh, I've, 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.

Alex Gladstein 9:29 Yeah, it's a bit of a generalization. But Alex Jones would be in prison or dead if he were in North Korea or-

Lex Fridman 9:36 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 9:36 ... in Cuba or in Russia or in China. The he- 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. Uh, large organizations, corporations, and a lot of public sentiment, uh, in different parts of our country don't like him. (laughs) And they're doing their best to drown his, out his voice. But that's very different from a, 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.

Lex Fridman 10:11 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 technologically, tech-, from a technology perspective, there is, uh, AWS-

Alex Gladstein 10:30 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 10:30 ... removing Parler from the platform. It gets a little weird.

Alex Gladstein 10:33 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 10:33 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, 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-

Alex Gladstein 10:55 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 10:56 ... uh, China, Russia. There's, uh... I don't know who, uh, runs the computer infrastructure for Russia and China, but I bet the state has complete oversight over that. And so, uh, that level of computer infrastructure, having control about which social networks can and cannot operate is very uncomfortable to me. But you're right. I think it's, 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.

Alex Gladstein 11:29 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 11:30 Human Rights Foundation. What is it? Uh, what is its mission?

Alex Gladstein 11:34 Yeah, so I've been working for HRF since 2007. Um, we are a charity, a non-profit, a 501 (c) (3) , 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 r- really aren't checks and balances. And even trying to create, like, a human rights organization, uh, or, like, an environmental group, uh, would, would be illegal. Um, and the majority of the world's population lives in that environment. That's very important

Lex Fridman 12:17 You said 53%.

Alex Gladstein 12:18 53%, 4.3 billion people.

Lex Fridman 12:20 And I saw you outlined a lot of different, um...... sources of suffering in the world-

Alex Gladstein 12:26 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 12:27 ... and then you sort of put people living under authoritarian governments-

Alex Gladstein 12:32 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 12:32 ... as, like, more than all of them. Uh, I, I forget, I forget all the examples you provided, but then... (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 12:38 Sure, I mean-

Lex Fridman 12:39 It's, uh, yeah, maybe you can mention if you remember.

Alex Gladstein 12:41 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 e- evidence of this, take a look at the list of sponsors of the upcoming Olympics in, in, in China, where the CCP is currently committing genocide against the Uighur population. Or look at the number of people and the famous investors who went to Saudi Arabia a couple of 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 gonna go. And this is a government that, uh, 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, uh, in a brutal fashion, uh, just a couple of 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 f- free countries are led by people, um, who are very, very happy to, to sacrifice all these pretty words about human rights when it, when it comes down to profits, unfortunately.

Lex Fridman 14:01 So do you think capitalism, that's maybe one of the flaws of capitalism, is it turns a blind eye to injustices against human nature? Against the human rights? Li- like, it turns a blind eye to authoritarian governments?

Alex Gladstein 14:15 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 100 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 i- in a very productive way with each other. Um, but as soon as you introduce an authoritarian actor, you know, a- 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. I- i- 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.

Lex Fridman 15:34 You mentioned one of the signs that, uh, the state is a, an authoritarian state.

Alex Gladstein 15:40 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 15:41 H- how do you know if you're living in an authoritarian state?

Alex Gladstein 15:44 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 15:44 Or when you study another nation or analyze the behavior of another nation, how do you know that's an authorit- 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?

Alex Gladstein 15:59 There's a couple good litmus tests. One is actually can you have a gay pride parade?

Lex Fridman 16:03 (laughs) That's a good-

Alex Gladstein 16:05 Serious. It actually lines up perfectly. Doesn't matter what religion the dictatorship is.

Lex Fridman 16:09 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 16:10 They don't like minor- they don't like minorities, and they love to scapegoat whether it's gays or religious minorities, et cetera. So it lines up pretty well.

Lex Fridman 16:17 That's really interesting.

Alex Gladstein 16:17 If you cannot have a gay pride parade in your country because you're fearful that you're gonna get the crap kicked out of you, probably live in an authoritarian regime. Um...

Lex Fridman 16:27 I'm sure that's not just about some kind of homophobia. Why is that? That's really interesting, 'cause that's where I go-

Alex Gladstein 16:33 Scapegoating.

Lex Fridman 16:33 ... I'm going through, so the scapego-

Alex Gladstein 16:35 Fascism scapegoats minorities.

Lex Fridman 16:37 There's an other.

Alex Gladstein 16:38 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 16:38 You create an other group, and then you, uh...

Alex Gladstein 16:40 Where there, 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, uh, the, you know, LGBT communities. Um...

Lex Fridman 16:53 It's interesting because, maybe you can correct me-

Alex Gladstein 16:56 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 16:56 ... but from my very distant outsider perspective, uh, the, uh, sort of the way that, uh, certain authoritarian governments speak about, uh, gay people is it's almost like, uh, wha- what is it, um, "We don't have gay people in our country" kind of idea, as opposed to scapegoat-

Alex Gladstein 17:18 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 17:18 ... scapegoating, which is like...

Alex Gladstein 17:21 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 leader, he came to Columbia University, and he tried to give a speech, which you can look up, and he tried to claim that there were no gays in, 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, f- 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.

Lex Fridman 18:11 Hear that Tim Dillon? You should go to North Korea. Check it out. (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 18:14 Yeah, and, and look, there are tons of flaws with democracies. Uh, the-

Lex Fridman 18:17 This is a really good test, by the way. (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 18:18 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.

Lex Fridman 18:43 Hmm.

Alex Gladstein 18:44 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, um, 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 gonna 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 US government does, whether it was under Biden or Trump or Obama or Bush, we can rotate them-

Lex Fridman 19:26 Hmm.

Alex Gladstein 19:26 ... through voting. And we have an independent Supreme Court, um, 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- 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.

Lex Fridman 20:01 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 20:01 And then on top of that, on the third level, you have separation of powers, again, what I'm describing. Um, 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- 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 that's very important for people to understand.

Lex Fridman 20:35 Although Hitler, in an interesting way, at- at a certain point just said, "I'm gonna be a ruler forever," which is interesting. The- there's an important switch that happens when you- as opposed to having a facade of elections, you even- you just put that aside in saying basically, like, "We're not even doing this."

Alex Gladstein 20:50 Yeah, there's, like, a ladder that you climb, the election, then you pull the ladder up, and then no one else can climb up.

Lex Fridman 20:56 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 20:56 This sadly, you know, happened in Egypt, and it was quite predictable. After Mubarak was ousted, after the Arab Spring, you know, Morsi came in, and it- it looked like, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood was not really gonna be very democratic. Um, but it didn't really matter because then the military came back, and now we have Sisi, who's even worse than Mubarak. So a- 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 wanna 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 gonna choose you. And that's why- one of the reasons why the US government has supported so many dictators around the world over the last few decades.

Lex Fridman 22:00 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?

Alex Gladstein 22:30 We started with authoritarianism or au- 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. Um, invented in many places across the world. Uh, Western Africa had this idea and so did the ancient Greeks, um, and they started to implement it. Although, as most know, we didn't have full democracy for a long, long time 'cause 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, uh, 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 a- a- as a civilization. So I- I think that democracy, you know, rule by the people, is definitely an upgrade from autocracy or oligarchy, you know, which would be rule by- by one or rule by a small group. And I think that the- the Democratic Revolution has been an incredible thing for our world. Uh, and- and it's- it's, you know, you could do half glass full, half glass empty.

Lex Fridman 24:04 (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 24:04 The half glass full is that almost half the world lives under a democracy. Like, that- that's an incredible achievement.

Lex Fridman 24:09 (laughs) But just under half. (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 24:12 Yeah, just under half.

Lex Fridman 24:13 So, uh-

Alex Gladstein 24:15 But that's billions of people.

Lex Fridman 24:16 It's billions of people. And if you look at the progress of things, it's getting better and better and better. I mean, if- if, you know, you can-

Alex Gladstein 24:24 We're- we're at a little- little bit of a, um, stalemate here. Uh, democracies really blossomed, uh, between World War II and the year 2000, especially in the '80s and '90s. You had an incredible...... wave of fall, you know, wh- 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, uh, in the last 10 years you've had, for example, the Philippines has gone backwards, um, Thailand has gone 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, the- there was s- positive movement forward in Armenia, Malaysia, some other countries. Um, but we're- we're kind of at a stalemate right now. And what most people fear the m- about where we are right now, wh- who I respect, i- 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.

Lex Fridman 25:36 Oh, interesting. So I've, um ... And we'll talk about one of the most fascinating technologies, which is Bitcoin-

Alex Gladstein 25:42 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 25:42 ... how it can help, but

Lex Fridman 25:45 I have a sense that technology, like most technological innovations, will give power to the individuals, will give, uh, will fight- fight authoritarian governments as opposed to give more power to authoritarian governments. But your sense is that there's ways to give ... for technology to be utilis- utilized as a tool for the abuse of the citizenry.

Alex Gladstein 26:08 I've seen both. In my work at HRF, 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 like have the government's permission. There was very little internet penetration, okay? So we would send in movies, you know, V for Vendetta dubbed into Spanish-

Lex Fridman 26:30 (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 26:30 ... and people would sit-

Lex Fridman 26:31 That's great.

Alex Gladstein 26:31 ... inside their homes-

Lex Fridman 26:32 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 26:32 ... and they'd watch it and they would answer questions with each other, and 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 100,000 flash drives, uh, 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, et cetera. 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- your thumbnail. Like, that's remarkable. So obviously I've seen the positives of technology, and we'll certainly get into Bitcoin, but I'm, you know, very concerned about essentially big data analysis, like what people call AI or general A- you know, specif- you know, 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. The- it may be good for health, it may be good for, uh, 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.

Lex Fridman 27:45 Oh, that's fun. This is fun, because I disagree. Uh-

Alex Gladstein 27:49 Give me your examples.

Lex Fridman 27:51 I-

Alex Gladstein 27:51 I'm serious. What- what AI applications will improve civil liberties?

Lex Fridman 27:54 Oh, I thought- I thought you meant examples of stuff that's already out there, because I can give you examples that- for example, the kind of things that I would like to work on-

Alex Gladstein 28:04 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 28:04 ... but also the kind of things that I'm hoping to see.

Alex Gladstein 28:07 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 28:07 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.

Alex Gladstein 28:21 (laughs) Right.

Lex Fridman 28:22 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 would like to see to be built is, uh ... You could think of it as personal assistants 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 the s- 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 sur- surveillance, which is very interesting.

Alex Gladstein 29:14 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 29:14 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 (laughs) 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.

Alex Gladstein 29:40 It sounds like to me you're describing encryption, or- or at least the- the ability to encrypt, the ability to use, uh, digital keys to secure your property. And I- I ... That to me is a very powerful, uh, individual r- force for individual rights. Very powerful. And it's what's- what animates Bitcoin ultimately, which- 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, uh, used by governments in authoritarian regimes is terrifying. I mean, to actually see what the Chinese Communist Party's doing, where they have hundreds of millions of cameras overseeing society, cameras that can tell who's a Uighur and who's a Han. That, to me, is terrifying. And- and everything is sorted instantly. There are- there are super computers that are built in Urumqi, i- 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- 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.

Lex Fridman 30:48 See, that's funny 'cause I, I, I tend to see governments as ultimately incompetent in the space of technology, to where they will always be lagging behind. So you look at what Ch- the Chinese surveillance systems are doing.

Alex Gladstein 30:59 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 31:00 I, I believe when, once it started getting bad enough that, uh, t- the, like, technologies would be created to resist that. So to mess with it from, from the hacker community, but also from the individual communities. 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'll, it'll make their surveillance less effective. But that, that ... Okay, that could be very sort of hopeful -

Alex Gladstein 31:39 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 31:40 ... optimistic idea.

Alex Gladstein 31:40 I mean, the practical application in Xinjiang, which is a territory the size of Alaska, uh, 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, 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. Uh, each car has, you know, like a scannable code. Um, e- 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 s- 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.

Lex Fridman 32:37 That's interesting. So technologies basically enables the automation of oppression.

Alex Gladstein 32:42 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman 32:43 So like ...

Alex Gladstein 32:44 But d- define technology. Big data analysis and, you know, maybe specific AI, et cetera does, but encryption allows us to fight back. It's very important people understand we have tools to fight back. The i- you know, Big Brother can only grow if it can feed on your data.

Lex Fridman 33:02 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 33:02 If it can't get your data, it can't grow.

Lex Fridman 33:04 Gotcha.

Alex Gladstein 33:04 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-

Lex Fridman 33:20 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 33:21 ... 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.

Lex Fridman 33:28 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 33:28 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 gonna buy this 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, 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, uh, 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, um, 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 are building this like huge global surveillance state. And again, not talked about enough. You should go Google and, and research the Belt and Road. I think it's very important that we confront this.

Lex Fridman 34:44 Yeah. I'm, I'm really glad you're talking about it because it's probably important to understand. Uh, I'm also hopeful that as people get educated about how much their data when collected, unencrypted-

Alex Gladstein 34:57 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 34:57 ... but in general, can be used to harm them. I mean, it's almost like an education. It's like, I feel like i- if you know, and 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 live in fear. If you live in fear, that's not a good way to live. So it's a, it's a balance. Um...

Alex Gladstein 35:24 It's a free society versus a fear society.

Lex Fridman 35:26 Yeah, fear society.

Alex Gladstein 35:26 And look, people are ... It's all about the trade-offs you make in your daily life. Like, living more privately with more freedom is m- 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, 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, y- your life, you know, immediately becomes more, more restrictive. And, and what people are worried about is that even in advanced, uh, economies, market democracies, et cetera, the people are worried that they might not survive the, 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 (laughs) 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, y- you know, it's almost like a free lunch in a way. Um, y- y- you're not gonna be sent to a prison camp because of the color of your skin or your beliefs, or what you say about the government. Um, and you're very lucky. Uh, again, most people do live in a society where you, you can be persecuted for those things. Uh, and I feel like, especially in America, we, we forget that. We're, we're, we're distanced from that really strong reality, you know?

Lex Fridman 37:08 On the topic of Snowden and, and the N- NSA, what should we be thinking about? 'Cause that feels like a, already an outdated set of conversations, because of the information we've gotten from the past.

Alex Gladstein 37:19 Well-

Lex Fridman 37:19 It feels like everything's gotten quiet now in terms of how much we actually-

Alex Gladstein 37:22 No, there's-

Lex Fridman 37:22 ... know about the-

Alex Gladstein 37:23 ... it's hugely important. I, I, I think the two lessons from Snowden are, A, m- th- 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 y- you can read about, have amou- amounted to very little, except for tremendous bureaucratic waste and, you know, t- you know, erosion of our freedoms. Um, but at the same time, we, 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 kinda step A.

Lex Fridman 38:32 The ideas of democracy, the ideas of the balance of power, um, the, all the ideas that we were talking about, the constructs-

Alex Gladstein 38:41 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 38:42 ... were inventions.

Alex Gladstein 38:44 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 38:44 I wonder if there's other inventions that will allow us to sort of not engage ... n- 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 ... 'cause 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, 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.

Alex Gladstein 39:20 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.

Lex Fridman 39:28 Okay.

Alex Gladstein 39:28 In politics, yes, someone invented democracy. I mean, whether it was the Greeks, um, or 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?

Lex Fridman 39:41 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 39:41 Um, and that has evolved dramatically, right? And now you ... and then you have information. Information also used to be highly centralized, right? Uh, y- 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 f- you know, feudal lord that you had to be to be able to have that ability. But now, you know, y- uh, 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. Um, and then I would say that encrypted messaging is kind of a co- corollary to that second innovation, in as much as now people are, like, more effortlessly ... like, Signal is a lot easier to use than PGP, for example.

Lex Fridman 40:28 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 40:29 They're more easily able to practice privacy when it comes to having private messages, uh, 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 spend so much time thinking about Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman 40:45 Okay. So,

Lex Fridman 40:47 politics, information-

Alex Gladstein 40:49 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 40:49 ... money.

Alex Gladstein 40:49 Yes.

Lex Fridman 40:50 Let's talk about money. What is money and why is it important to think about in the context of human rights?

Alex Gladstein 40:58 I have witnessed money be peripheralized. Take, tak- 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, m- 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 Yvan Mawire, who, um, 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."

Lex Fridman 42:12 Hm.

Alex Gladstein 42:12 "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 his 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, $100 trillion Zimbabwean notes.

Lex Fridman 42:40 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 42:41 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, mon- you know, when I study money or look at money, it's really about control, you know, who, who is 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 gonna get minted and how it's gonna 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, 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 that is a tremendous innovation.

Lex Fridman 44:01 You know, from one perspective, money and i- inflation, hyperinflation is a kind of symptom of corruption, as opposed to the core of the corruption.

Alex Gladstein 44:10 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 44:11 And at the s- at the flip side, in terms of resisting the corruption, resisting the abuse of, uh, human rights, it's interesting to think that fighting inflation or f-

Alex Gladstein 44:25 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 44:25 ... fighting, you know, fighting the mismanagement of, uh, 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.

Alex Gladstein 44:47 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 44:48 Is, is to like ... it's not that money is the symptom. You know, money is a tool to fight back too.

Alex Gladstein 44:58 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman 45:00 So in, in what way can Bitcoin be used to, um, to fight authoritarianism?

Alex Gladstein 45:08 Yes.

Lex Fridman 45:09 Not just in the United States, but all of those 53% that you're referring to. What ... how can Bitcoin help?

Alex Gladstein 45:15 So we talked about authoritarianism, and 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 (laughs) of managing the money, most people aren't so lucky. So only 13% of humans in the world live in a country that's a liberal democracy with property rights and has what we call a reserve currency, meaning a currency so stable and desirable that other countries save in it at the central bank level, right? 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 seven 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, o- over a, 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% inflation for 100 million people. Argentina, 40% inflation for a country of 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 or gold or 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, uh, people who have 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.

Lex Fridman 47:58 I think some very small percentage of people have used ... have owned Bitcoins. Was it something like one percent, right, of the world? Whatever, whatever that number is, it's small-

Alex Gladstein 48:07 Call it two percent for the purposes of our calc-

Lex Fridman 48:09 Okay.

Alex Gladstein 48:09 ... about-

Lex Fridman 48:09 Two percent.

Alex Gladstein 48:09 ... a little under 200 million people.

Lex Fridman 48:12 Uh, wow, yeah.

Alex Gladstein 48:14 At most right now.

Lex Fridman 48:15 So if we look at Zimbabwe, Sudan, if we look at uh-

Alex Gladstein 48:17 Small percentages of people.

Lex Fridman 48:19 Do you think the technology is mature enough? 'Cause 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 c- (laughs) to, to the internet.

Alex Gladstein 48:32 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 48:33 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-

Alex Gladstein 48:49 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 48:49 ... relative to the rest of 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.

Alex Gladstein 49:03 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 49:03 Like, what, how do you think Bitcoin can help them?

Alex Gladstein 49:06 Yeah, so again, we have one clear use case, which is a sovereign savings account that you can control, right? The other use, 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.

Lex Fridman 49:30 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 49:30 Sometimes we'll just say, "We're just gonna shut off this whole country." So then people go-

Lex Fridman 49:33 So the people suffer.

Alex Gladstein 49:34 Cuba or Iran are good examples.

Lex Fridman 49:35 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 49:36 Average people suffer, right? So people in those two countries I just mentioned, Cuba, Iran, or even Palestine, which is off, a- 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 and forth to their families.

Lex Fridman 49:54 So they're sanction-resistant.

Alex Gladstein 49:56 Sanctions-resistant. It does not get stopped by sanctions, right? Um, and also it's, again, remittances are extortionate. I mean, the average remittance, uh, you know, costs, uh, ha- 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. (laughs) I mean, y- you know, if the person has a cell phone, which increasingly is the case. I mean, by the end of next year-

Lex Fridman 50:28 Hmm.

Alex Gladstein 50:29 ... 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, i- and we can get into that, but-

Lex Fridman 50:48 There's, like, hardware wallets and so on. What do you mean by sovereign, uh, Bitcoin wallet?

Alex Gladstein 50:55 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 y- you have a claim, right? You go to the bank and they have some of your money and y- you take it out, right, u- with an ATM. So, uh, what I would call, uh, noncustodial Bitcoin use would be similar to withdrawing cash from an ATM. You have it, it's a bearer instrument, okay? So when I-

Lex Fridman 51:24 Bearer instrument. (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 51:24 It's what it's called. It's a bearer instrument.

Lex Fridman 51:25 Yeah, I know, I'm-

Alex Gladstein 51:25 So-

Lex Fridman 51:26 I apologize. I'm outside of this community, it just sounds funny.

Alex Gladstein 51:28 No, no, no, it's, yeah.

Lex Fridman 51:28 (laughs) It's ...

Alex Gladstein 51:28 So, like, a bearer instrument-

Lex Fridman 51:29 It's a thing.

Alex Gladstein 51:29 ... would be, like, a bar of gold, or-

Lex Fridman 51:31 Yes.

Alex Gladstein 51:31 ... um, a, a, a bank note 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.

Lex Fridman 51:42 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 51:42 That's your, like, password to get into your Bitcoin account.

Lex Fridman 51:45 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 51:46 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-

Lex Fridman 51:56 So Coinbase you would-

Alex Gladstein 51:57 ... or Square or something like that.

Lex Fridman 51:58 ... you would, you would put into, into the-

Alex Gladstein 52:00 Custodial.

Lex Fridman 52:00 ... into the custodial category like a bank-

Alex Gladstein 52:02 It's like a Bitcoin bank.

Lex Fridman 52:03 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 52:03 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. I- 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. Uh, same thing in Bitcoin. Like, if you wanna get the full experience, you wanna actually custody your own Bitcoin. You wanna, you wanna 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 ColdCard, 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 flak from people saying, "Oh, Bitcoin's so hard to use. I read this article in the New York Times saying this guy in Silicon Valley lost all of his Bitcoin." That's 'cause he was a moron and didn't care about it. This guy lost all this Bitcoin because it wasn't worth much 10 years ago.

Lex Fridman 52:57 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 52:57 And he, you know, he forgot the password. But if you're, like, receiving your remittance from a family member-

Lex Fridman 53:02 You're going to care.

Alex Gladstein 53:03 ... you're not gonna lose the password, right?

Lex Fridman 53:04 And you trust in the basic intelligence of people to figure this out and to i- innovate and so on and, and figure out-

Alex Gladstein 53:10 Well, we're watching it, man.

Lex Fridman 53:11 (laughs) Yeah, you know, I'm, it, it's kind of funny that, but people in, in, in the United States are not very savvy with money. It, it's exactly the way you're describing. It's like, when you have very little money-

Alex Gladstein 53:24 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 53:24 ... 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 sort of growing up in the Soviet Union-

Alex Gladstein 53:36 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 53:38 ... 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 in that same way, perhaps Bitcoin could be all the different ways to store and, uh, gain Bitcoin. The- these mechanisms could be something that's figured out in the third world as opposed to in the-

Alex Gladstein 54:09 Oh, I mean, I would say-

Lex Fridman 54:10 ... in the United States.

Alex Gladstein 54:10 ... the capital of Bitcoin could easily be Lagos and not San Francisco-

Lex Fridman 54:14 Yes.

Alex Gladstein 54:14 ... 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.

Lex Fridman 54:23 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 54:23 This is how people are using it today. Now, when it comes to, uh...... 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- 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 gonna 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 Muun, M-U-U-N, wallet-

Lex Fridman 55:04 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 55:05 ... from a team in Argentina. And these- 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 in 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- I think it's actually quite exciting to be here at, in the adoption phase. Like-

Lex Fridman 55:31 (laughs) In the early days.

Alex Gladstein 55:33 Yeah, man. This is the early days.

Lex Fridman 55:34 And, uh, you also mentioned that sort of Bitcoin is a, is the mechanism of a peaceful revolution.

Alex Gladstein 55:40 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 55:40 So it's a way to, to resist authoritarianism in a peaceful way. It's ultimately a mech- 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 for-

Alex Gladstein 55:57 It's a way to opt out. You can opt out peacefully from the system. And-

Lex Fridman 56:03 Yeah. It's, it's beautiful, it's beautiful. Um, so, so Bitcoin is currently by far the most popular, sort of dominant cryptocurrency.

Alex Gladstein 56:12 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 56:12 That said, and I look forward to your letters, Bitcoin maximalists, uh, that said, you know, Internet Explorer was the most popular browser-

Alex Gladstein 56:22 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 56:22 ... 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?

Alex Gladstein 56:53 When you say overtake, um, what do you mean? What do you mean overtake? Do you mean number of users? Do you mean a- a price per coin?

Lex Fridman 57:01 The- Yeah, the number of users, 'cause we're talking about 1%, 2%.

Alex Gladstein 57:04 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 57:05 And if we are serious about this being, um, in the space of money as a way to give individuals power-

Alex Gladstein 57:17 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 57:17 ... fight the centralized powers-

Alex Gladstein 57:19 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 57:19 ... that abuse the money system and so on, how do we get from 2% to 50%, right, to 60%-

Alex Gladstein 57:26 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 57:27 ... to 80%? That- that- that jump, is it obvious to you? Not obvious, but do you think Bitcoin is the way to get from 2% to 50%, or are there going to be other cryptocurrencies that may emerge that get us to 50%?

Alex Gladstein 57:43 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 mean would be 21 million. There's never gonna be any more than 21 million. Every other cryptocurrency either has an inflationary policy, meaning there's gonna 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 ETH is gonna be minted in 2022 and 2023 after they shift to proof of stake. It co- It- I've seen estimates that range from 100,000 to two million. So at the end of the day, you're gonna 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 CoinMarketCap, almost all of them are scams, straight up.

Lex Fridman 58:52 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 58:52 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 it. I mean, that's why it's such an important tool for human rights.

Lex Fridman 59:12 Yeah. It's, it's interesting, 'cause when you grow from 2%, 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-

Alex Gladstein 59:26 100%.

Lex Fridman 59:26 ... 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 gonna win. Let's be honest. (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 59:37 (laughs) Well, I mean, look, the- the-

Lex Fridman 59:38 Look forward to your letters.

Alex Gladstein 59:39 ... 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-

Lex Fridman 59:54 Gotcha.

Alex Gladstein 59:54 ... 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 eurodollar maybe, like a dollar that is minted outside of the control of the US Federal Reserve, right? It would be a eurodollar. So stablecoins are kind of like eurodollars, 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.

Lex Fridman 1:00:26 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 1:00:26 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.

Lex Fridman 1:00:33 It does feel currently like Bitcoin is, like-... like, pirates or something like that. And they're, they're still, like, the central banks that are, like, the main navies of the, (laughs) of the different nations.

Alex Gladstein 1:00:43 Y- yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:00:44 It's just this, if you talk about scale.

Lex Fridman 1:00:46 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?

Alex Gladstein 1:01:11 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 have tried a lot. Uh, 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, e- and economic and political incentives and disincentives that make it very difficult.

Lex Fridman 1:01:39 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:01:39 Um, and I think to me, the, 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, to understand the classical mythology tale. Um, I find this very interesting.

Lex Fridman 1:01:53 Oh, of the actual Trojan horse?

Alex Gladstein 1:01:54 Of the actual Trojan horse, yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:01:55 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 1:01:55 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. Had these, like, impregnable walls, and they couldn't do it. And Ulysses and the rest of their 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, they 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 to ... 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 d- 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 th- they brought in the soldier, and the soldier's like, "Look, th- they left. They're so sorry for all of the desecration and blood spill."

Lex Fridman 1:02:43 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:02:43 "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."

Lex Fridman 1:02:49 Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 1:02:50 And there were actually people inside Troy, uh, Cassandra, a prophet, as well as Laocoön, who was, like, a priest, who said, "No, 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 the, the Trojans were like, "Bring it into the city." So they brought it in themselves. No blood spilled at all, right? In the middle of the night, of course, we've, what you realize is the horse was packed with Greek soldiers, and they come out and they let the army in, which was, like, hiding behind an island. 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 at play w- in Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman 1:03:25 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:03:26 So, like, eh, Bitcoin has this number go up technology, right? Is what we call it, in, in sort of shorthand. NGU, NGU, right? But what people don't realize is that NGU is like the Trojan horse.

Lex Fridman 1:03:37 Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 1:03:37 Inside the Trojan horse is FGU, freedom go up technology. So dictators and rogue regimes and corporations-

Lex Fridman 1:03:44 Uh-huh.

Alex Gladstein 1:03:44 ... are gonna buy, mine, tax, accumulate this thing, because it's the best performing financial asset in the world.

Lex Fridman 1:03:51 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:03:51 What they don't realize or they're gonna have to ignore is that they're also aiding and abetting this freedom technology (object thuds) which allows individuals to be sovereign (object thuds) and eventually erodes their power. There's no question that rogue regimes and bad actors have already used and will continue to use Bitcoin. The thing is, when you think about a North Korea or a 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 gonna realize, "Oh, my God. This is money the government doesn't control," and it's gonna spread like a virus. Okay? So this is like the idea of the Trojan horse allegory, why I think it's so important and powerful with Bitcoin. All the people talking about Bitcoin today o- 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.

Lex Fridman 1:04:50 So w- the people talking about Bitcoin on TV are m- maybe investor types.

Alex Gladstein 1:04:54 Yeah. Professional investors, co- corporations, and soon governments. I mean, you just had-

Lex Fridman 1:04:59 But-

Alex Gladstein 1:04:59 ... today, this morning on CNBC, the leader of, uh, uh, the r- 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, o- o- like, sort of posturing for this, like, uh, you know, Bitcoin race that's gonna happen in the next 10 years. You're gonna see this. Countries are gonna compete-

Lex Fridman 1:05:27 (laughs) Yeah.

Alex Gladstein 1:05:27 ... to stack Bitcoin. Absolutely.

Lex Fridman 1:05:29 So you, so you believe the, the thing that's shiny and sexy like the Trojan horse-

Alex Gladstein 1:05:34 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:05:34 ... is the number go up, uh, idea?

Alex Gladstein 1:05:36 It's too hard to ignore.

Lex Fridman 1:05:37 Uh, a- and for, to, to, uh, (laughs) to define that a little further-

Alex Gladstein 1:05:42 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:05:42 ... this meaning is it does seem like the more people get excited and start using Bitcoin, the more its value grows. So it's just a good-

Alex Gladstein 1:05:49 Feedback loop.

Lex Fridman 1:05:50 Yeah. It's a feedback loop. And then the reason you're excited about it especially is, is that, uh, F-G, G-

Alex Gladstein 1:05:56 Yeah. Freedom go up.

Lex Fridman 1:05:57 Freedom go up, which is it, uh, ultimately gives power to the individuals to de- so decentralize the entire system.

Alex Gladstein 1:06:03 Yeah, I mean, like, when Tesla stacks Bitcoin, they're just doing that out of self-interest. They think it's gonna be a good inflation hedge. Fine. 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. 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, um, more mining, more network security. It's just this, like, positive feedback loop that continues to grow, and it will gr- 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, it 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. Um, 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. And 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. And you have to, like, raise money, and it's all, like, nonprofit 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.

Lex Fridman 1:07:59 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:07:59 And I know that it sounds terrible for me to say this, but, I mean, ultimately, we are self-interested. Uh, 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, a hundred 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 gonna definitely care about Bitcoin because they wanna see their, their net worth go up. They wanna do better for their family, et cetera. They're gonna get into this thing, and it's really gonna, like, make that powerful tool for everyone else who's using it. So this interplay dynamic is fascinating to me.

Lex Fridman 1:08:42 Yeah, I have to, um ... so I'm somebody who doesn't like the r- corrupting effects of greed.

Alex Gladstein 1:08:49 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:08:50 But it is also human nature.

Alex Gladstein 1:08:53 Yeah, I don't like it either. But it, it, we have to-

Lex Fridman 1:08:54 But-

Alex Gladstein 1:08:55 ... we have to be realists here.

Lex Fridman 1:08:55 You have to acknowledge it and then maybe use it for your advantage.

Alex Gladstein 1:09:00 And it's not just Bitcoin itself. Like, exchanges today are adopting something called Lightning Network-

Lex Fridman 1:09:05 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:09:05 ... 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- it's something you all should check out. It's very, very interesting. The exchanges aren't adopting Lightning for its privacy bene- benefits. Like, Lightning operates off the chain, meaning surveillance companies can't see, they can't do chain analysis on Lightning 'cause it's- it's on an Onion-routed second layer, kind of, that works kind of like the Tor-

Lex Fridman 1:09:37 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:09:37 ... Tor Project. The exchanges don't care about privacy. They're doing it because it reduces fees. Lightning is cheaper and faster.

Lex Fridman 1:09:44 (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 1:09:45 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, and you're gonna maybe see this even in the future. There's more things coming in Bitcoin down the pike. Uh, Lightning was enabled by an upgrade called SegWit, right, which to- took place a few years ago, which was the culmination of the block size conflict.

Lex Fridman 1:10:08 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:10:08 There's another thing coming up called cross-input signature aggregation, which may, if it, 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 gonna do it for, for moral reasons. They're gonna do it 'cause it's gonna save them money and improve their bottom line.

Lex Fridman 1:10:27 Uh, c- can you speak to that kind of collaborative so that y- you can have multiple parties in a single transaction kind of thing?

Alex Gladstein 1:10:33 Yeah, like, you could do that today, absolutely. It's called a CoinJoin, for example. But right now, it's more expensive to CoinJoin in Bitcoin. You have to pay a premium for your privacy. This would flip that on its head, and it would basically say, "If you have one transaction, hey, pile 'em all in. Have as many parties as you want. The more parties you get in, the cheaper it's gonna be per party, okay?" And, and that's not possible in Bitcoin today, but it might be in the future. But again, the beau- the beauty in Bitcoin are these, like, the, these ways that it just aligns human incentives, and it aligns our, like, most base desires and, and needs and realities with, like, freedom and privacy.

Lex Fridman 1:11:07 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:11:08 And that I've never seen before. And, and that's why I think it's- it's so interesting.

Lex Fridman 1:11:12 So, something that, um, like, s- somebody like Eric Weinstein actually spoke to this.

Lex Fridman 1:11:17 The, you know, the idea of blockchain in general.

Alex Gladstein 1:11:19 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:11:20 E- uh, from, uh, 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, uh, like, you, you can have a lot of, you know, small computers across the globe-

Alex Gladstein 1:11:47 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:11:47 ... to 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?

Alex Gladstein 1:12:00 No. Uh, 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 gonna be like in 20, 30 years from now. The average person is never gonna touch the Bitcoin blockchain probably.

Lex Fridman 1:12:20 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:12:20 They're gonna use things like Lightning, or un- unfortunately, they may use Bitcoin banks. But they'll either use custodians or the- or they'll use second-layer noncustodial solutions to interact.

Lex Fridman 1:12:30 Mm-hmm.

Alex Gladstein 1:12:30 The main chain's gonna get very expensive. It's gonna be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars, or- 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, et cetera, et cetera. Um, and I think that that's- that's fine, a- a- and, and that's okay. And it's very important that that ledger, that settlement layer, uh...... 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 charge.

Lex Fridman 1:13:13 Wait, you have a full node?

Alex Gladstein 1:13:14 Yeah, I run a full node.

Lex Fridman 1:13:16 (laughs) Beautiful.

Alex Gladstein 1:13:16 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?

Lex Fridman 1:13:21 Beautiful.

Alex Gladstein 1:13:22 And you can run it on a Raspberry Pi with less than 150 bucks of equipment.

Lex Fridman 1:13:25 (laughs)

Alex Gladstein 1:13:26 And that's so important because again, there is no Amazon Web Service vulnerability here. That is a problem, and I agree with you, w- 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...

Lex Fridman 1:13:45 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-

Alex Gladstein 1:13:53 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:13:53 ... your needs of the pro-

Alex Gladstein 1:13:54 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:13:54 ... privacy and all those kinds of things.

Alex Gladstein 1:13:56 Everything's an engineering trade-off, 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, there's all kinds of cool engineering things that people are coming up with. Um, but I also want to 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, the white paper. Blockchain was a marketing term come- that people came up with later to try and do this thing that was kind of like, it peaked in 2015, and it, and it continues to be an issue today of, it's blockchain, not Bitcoin. And that was like a very corporate, um, kinda social attack on Bitcoin-

Lex Fridman 1:14:42 Gotcha.

Alex Gladstein 1:14:42 ... 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 is Bitcoin. I, 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.

Lex Fridman 1:15:22 I, I don't know. To me, blockchain or time chain, whatever, as it... Philosophically, it's a, it's a pretty beautiful idea. I mean, (laughs) it's pretty simple, but nevertheless, it's beautiful from a... I'm a big database person.

Alex Gladstein 1:15:33 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:15:33 It's an interesting way to store information that, uh, especially that's totally publicly accessible. It's, um... I know that to Bitcoin, proof of work is the fundamental idea.

Alex Gladstein 1:15:44 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:15:45 But to cryptocurrency and digital money in general and to money, the blockchain is a really interesting idea. To me, the way I think about is it's kinda, you know, physics. And I like that there's a place that you can rely on that's very difficult to mess with.

Alex Gladstein 1:16:00 But it's not, though. Like, it's outside of maybe Ethereum. Every other blockchain is easy to mess with.

Lex Fridman 1:16:06 So I, uh, you're saying that proof of work-

Alex Gladstein 1:16:07 Every other one.

Lex Fridman 1:16:08 ... is what makes it hard to manage.

Alex Gladstein 1:16:09 Absolutely. Proof of work is the key.

Lex Fridman 1:16:11 Right.

Alex Gladstein 1:16:12 And Bit- and Ethereum is 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.

Lex Fridman 1:16:21 Yeah. Reputation has a lot of value there, and that you could be, it could be manipulated.

Alex Gladstein 1:16:25 I 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 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.

Lex Fridman 1:16:40 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-

Alex Gladstein 1:16:53 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:16:53 ... but-

Alex Gladstein 1:16:53 It doesn't pan out.

Lex Fridman 1:16:54 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.

Alex Gladstein 1:17:02 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:17:02 What, what might that be?

Alex Gladstein 1:17:04 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, and-

Lex Fridman 1:17:20 The Bitcoin project.

Alex Gladstein 1:17:21 Yes. If the Bitcoin project didn't work, we would, i- it would... Honestly, it's one of the only thing that g- things that gives me hope, because it is an effective way to push back against creeping centralized control. Um, 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 gonna work. Again, I think the Trojan horse allegory is too powerful. Um, these big centralized actors are gonna be too greedy, and they're gonna want some, as opposed to banning it. It's way easier for them to buy it than to ban it. I think that's just what's gonna happen. But if, but if whatev- 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, uh, I, I would be concerned that that would be all of our, of our sort of destiny.

Lex Fridman 1:18:09 I do have to sort of push back