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

The following is a conversation with Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum. In recent times, Alex has focused on how cryptocurrency, and especially Bitcoin, can be a tool for empowering democracy and civil 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. What are some universal human rights that you believe all people should have?

So, free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of belief, freedom to participate in your government, the freedom to have privacy, the freedom to own things, property rights. These are all basic, fundamental, negative rights, what we call them. These are the basic, fundamental human freedoms.

What does negative rights mean?

Negative rights are liberties, and positive rights are entitlements. So after World War II, when the UN came together, it was largely 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.