Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights

Lex Fridman (02:23.600)

things like free speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly.

Alex Gladstein (02:27.340)

The Soviets wanted entitlements, like the right to work, the right to have housing,

Lex Fridman (02:31.920)

the right to water, the right to a vacation.

Lex Fridman (02:34.240)

So if you actually read the UN Declaration for Human Rights, it's a negotiation between

Lex Fridman (02:38.480)

the Soviets and the Americans.

Alex Gladstein (02:40.480)

Later, there was another document in the 70s released called the International Covenant

Lex Fridman (02:44.920)

on Civil and Political Rights.

Lex Fridman (02:46.960)

And this is what HRF uses as its sort of like lodestar, its founding document.

Lex Fridman (02:52.080)

And this is like, essentially, an international agreement on the negative rights.

Alex Gladstein (02:56.420)

Those are the things we choose to focus on, because essentially, authoritarian regimes

Alex Gladstein (03:00.320)

can commit fraud and claim they're giving the positive rights, the entitlements, without

Alex Gladstein (03:06.100)

having any of the negative liberties.

Lex Fridman (03:08.360)

And they can do that because they don't have any like free speech or press freedom.

Alex Gladstein (03:12.880)

When you take people's basic fundamental freedoms away, it's quite easy to make like a Potemkin

Alex Gladstein (03:17.120)

village and pretend that there's the entitlements and that we have good health care and, you

Alex Gladstein (03:22.920)

know, it's the same sort of thing that authoritarians have done for decades, Cuba and Venezuela

Lex Fridman (03:28.480)

and the Soviet Union.

Alex Gladstein (03:29.480)

Peter Bell.

Lex Fridman (03:30.480)

Do you think it's possible for authoritarian regimes to manipulate, to kind of lie about

Alex Gladstein (03:34.920)

the negative rights as well, by saying that the people have free speech, the people have

Alex Gladstein (03:40.200)

the freedom for assembly and all those kinds of things, can't you still manipulate the

Lex Fridman (03:45.720)

idea that citizenry still has those rights?

Alex Gladstein (03:49.240)

The opposition leader of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, he once told me the funny joke that, you know,

Alex Gladstein (03:56.320)

in my country, we have freedom of speech, we don't have freedom after speech.

Lex Fridman (04:00.560)

So yeah, they can absolutely manipulate whatever they want.

Lex Fridman (04:04.280)

But I've done research into socioeconomic data.

Lex Fridman (04:07.560)

And I guess what I'm telling you is that authoritarian regimes, which make up 53% of the world's

Alex Gladstein (04:12.920)

population across 95 countries, about 4.3 billion people, those who live under those

Alex Gladstein (04:19.440)

regimes are subject to massive fraud when it comes to things like literacy rates, life

Alex Gladstein (04:26.720)

expectancy, any sort of socioeconomic data, economic growth.

Lex Fridman (04:31.840)

They can do this because there's no free press.

Lex Fridman (04:34.760)

So for us at the Human Rights Foundation, and for people like me, we believe that the

Alex Gladstein (04:39.400)

negative rights, the liberties, the things that are in, for example, the Bill of Rights

Alex Gladstein (04:43.760)

in the US Constitution, these things are the table and then we can build on top of that.

Lex Fridman (04:48.020)

We can build the rest of our societies on top of that.

Alex Gladstein (04:50.560)

The freest countries in the world have both the negative liberties and the entitlements

Alex Gladstein (04:54.960)

like Norway, for example, but there's a big difference between Norway and North Korea.

Alex Gladstein (04:59.760)

In North Korea, they only claim to have the entitlements and they definitely don't have

Lex Fridman (05:03.400)

the liberties.

Lex Fridman (05:05.040)

Do you think there's one right that's more important than others?

Alex Gladstein (05:07.600)

You kind of suggested the freedom of the press, maybe freedom of speech, that if you take

Alex Gladstein (05:13.040)

that away, all the other ones kind of collapse along with like from a ripple effect.

Alex Gladstein (05:17.360)

Is there something fundamental that you like to focus your attention on to defend, to protect,

Lex Fridman (05:23.680)

to make sure it's there?

Lex Fridman (05:24.960)

Yeah, I think free speech is probably the most fundamental.

Alex Gladstein (05:27.680)

It's probably why the founders chose to make it into the First Amendment.

Lex Fridman (05:32.400)

A lot of things are downstream from there.

Alex Gladstein (05:34.880)

Property rights are also very, very important.

Alex Gladstein (05:38.120)

Obviously we've seen the toll of violent redistributionism, you know, in over the last hundred years,

Alex Gladstein (05:44.200)

whether it was Lenin or Stalin or Mao or other regimes and everywhere from Ethiopia to colonialists

Lex Fridman (05:52.840)

everywhere to North Korea, it's not a pretty legacy.

Lex Fridman (05:56.840)

Is free speech clear to you as a concept?

Alex Gladstein (06:00.620)

There's been quite a few debates, especially in the digital age, what it means to violate

Alex Gladstein (06:05.040)

freedom of speech.

Alex Gladstein (06:06.480)

There's been a lot of new, like novel mechanisms for people to communicate with each other,

Alex Gladstein (06:12.000)

like especially on social networks.

Lex Fridman (06:14.400)

And it seems that unclear because a lot of times those are managed by private companies.

Alex Gladstein (06:20.760)

It's unclear how much protection do the citizens have to have when they're communicating.

Lex Fridman (06:26.680)

A lot of people are being censored on these social platforms.

Alex Gladstein (06:30.320)

Some people, even presidents get removed from those social platforms.

Lex Fridman (06:35.520)

Have you thought about the freedom of speech in the United States, but in the world?

Lex Fridman (06:42.680)

As it's implemented in the 21st century, given the internet and all those kinds of things?

Alex Gladstein (06:50.520)

There is a Soviet dissident named Natan Sharansky who survived the regime and he wrote a book

Alex Gladstein (07:02.080)

in which his thesis was essentially the way that you can define a free society is through

Lex Fridman (07:06.320)

something called the town square test.

Lex Fridman (07:08.720)

Can you go to a public space where you live and criticize your ruler loudly without fear

Lex Fridman (07:14.360)

of retribution?

Alex Gladstein (07:16.020)

If you can do that, you have free speech.

Lex Fridman (07:18.240)

I think that's a pretty good litmus test.

Alex Gladstein (07:20.600)

Most people in this world cannot do that.

Alex Gladstein (07:21.940)

If you live in Havana, if you live in Moscow, if you live in Beijing, you cannot do that.

Lex Fridman (07:27.540)

And that's not a free society.

Alex Gladstein (07:29.720)

In Austin, Texas, in Boston, Massachusetts, in London, in Santiago, Chile, in Tokyo, Japan,

Alex Gladstein (07:36.920)

in many democracies, you can do that.

Lex Fridman (07:38.960)

And I think that that's a really helpful basic sort of litmus test.

Lex Fridman (07:42.760)

Does the content of the criticism matter?

Alex Gladstein (07:46.080)

Can it be complete lies, meaning conspiracy theories that involve claiming that the leader

Alex Gladstein (07:54.240)

is, let's say, a lizard slash pedophile slash, you know, I'm not saying that those are lies,

Lex Fridman (08:03.880)

look into it, but they're very unlikely phenomena.

Lex Fridman (08:08.740)

So like, does that matter?

Lex Fridman (08:10.680)

I think it ends poorly when the state tries to restrict speech.

Alex Gladstein (08:15.920)

I think that's kind of how I would define censorship.

Lex Fridman (08:18.480)

I think censorship and deplatforming are two different things.

Alex Gladstein (08:22.800)

Private companies, you know, they get to make up their own rules about what's allowed on

Lex Fridman (08:28.120)

their platforms.

Lex Fridman (08:29.120)

And I think that's very different from a government with guns and an army restricting the speech

Lex Fridman (08:34.400)

of its citizens with threats of violence.

Alex Gladstein (08:37.120)

These things are different for me.

Lex Fridman (08:39.160)

That violence is a fundamental difference.

Alex Gladstein (08:42.480)

I don't know, I've gotten the chance to have dinner with Alex Jones and I've talked to

Alex Gladstein (08:49.240)

him a few times offline and it does, I understand why people are so off put by him, but it does

Alex Gladstein (08:56.040)

bother me that he's universally removed from every platform.

Alex Gladstein (09:00.240)

It feels like there's many more evil people, bad people compared to Alex Jones who still

Alex Gladstein (09:09.560)

are given a voice on these platforms.

Lex Fridman (09:12.760)

And so I'm uncomfortable with the universality of the application of the censorship by these

Alex Gladstein (09:21.240)

platforms.

Lex Fridman (09:22.240)

But on the flip side, you're right.

Alex Gladstein (09:23.960)

There's not a violence, there's not tanks, there's not guns behind that censorship.

Lex Fridman (09:29.000)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (09:30.000)

It's a bit of a generalization, but Alex Jones would be in prison or dead if he were in North

Alex Gladstein (09:35.720)

Korea or in Cuba or in Russia or in China, that the authorities would not tolerate him

Alex Gladstein (09:40.720)

to do what he did.

Lex Fridman (09:42.640)

And here he can kind of do what he wants.

Alex Gladstein (09:45.280)

He's encountering some resistance in the marketplace of ideas, large organizations, corporations,

Lex Fridman (09:52.200)

and a lot of public sentiment in different parts of our country don't like him.

Alex Gladstein (09:58.680)

They're doing their best to drown out his voice, but that's very different from a violent

Lex Fridman (10:03.360)

threat of censorship from the state.

Lex Fridman (10:05.400)

And that's what we study.

Lex Fridman (10:06.600)

That's what I study are these, you know, what is the state doing?

Alex Gladstein (10:09.680)

That's kind of paramount for me.

Lex Fridman (10:11.200)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (10:12.200)

And that's true because in the marketplace of ideas, there could be a company that springs

Alex Gladstein (10:15.480)

up that gives Alex Jones a platform and the United States is not going to prevent those

Alex Gladstein (10:21.000)

companies from functioning.

Alex Gladstein (10:22.760)

Of course, there's from a technology perspective, there is AWS removing Parler from the platform

Lex Fridman (10:32.000)

and gets a little weird, you know, as you get closer and closer to the computer infrastructure,

Alex Gladstein (10:37.400)

because then you get closer and closer to the state, actually, the more you get to the

Alex Gladstein (10:42.400)

infrastructure that's usually managed by the state, the closer it gets to then the control

Lex Fridman (10:47.360)

of the state.

Alex Gladstein (10:48.360)

I would argue AWS is pretty damn close to infrastructure that's kind of controlled

Lex Fridman (10:53.000)

by the state.

Alex Gladstein (10:54.000)

If you especially look at other nations, China, Russia, there's, I don't know who runs the

Alex Gladstein (11:01.800)

computer infrastructure for Russia and China, but I bet the state has complete oversight

Alex Gladstein (11:06.080)

over that.

Lex Fridman (11:07.080)

And so that level of computer infrastructure, having control about which social networks

Alex Gladstein (11:14.340)

can and cannot operate is very uncomfortable to me.

Lex Fridman (11:17.480)

But you're right, I think it's good to focus on the obvious violations of these principles

Alex Gladstein (11:22.780)

as opposed to the gray areas.

Lex Fridman (11:25.360)

Of course, the gray areas are fascinating.

Alex Gladstein (11:28.440)

You mentioned HRF, Human Rights Foundation.

Lex Fridman (11:31.720)

What is it?

Lex Fridman (11:32.960)

What is its mission?

Lex Fridman (11:33.960)

Yes, I've been working for HRF since 2007.

Alex Gladstein (11:39.800)

We are a charity, a nonprofit, a 501c3 based in New York, and our mission is to promote

Lex Fridman (11:46.480)

and protect individual rights and freedoms in authoritarian societies around the world.

Lex Fridman (11:52.560)

So again, we define about 95 countries as authoritarian, meaning it's either a one party

Alex Gladstein (11:57.320)

state or opposition politicians are outlawed or persecuted, there's no real free speech,

Alex Gladstein (12:03.080)

there's no press freedom, there's no independent judiciary, there really aren't checks and

Alex Gladstein (12:06.560)

balances and even trying to create like a human rights organization or like an environmental

Alex Gladstein (12:11.280)

group would be illegal.

Lex Fridman (12:14.160)

And the majority of the world's population lives in that environment.

Alex Gladstein (12:16.560)

That's very important.

Lex Fridman (12:17.560)

You said 53%.

Alex Gladstein (12:18.560)

53%, 4.3 billion people.

Lex Fridman (12:20.720)

And I saw you outlined a lot of different sources of suffering in the world.

Lex Fridman (12:27.700)

And then you sort of put people living under authoritarian governments as like more than

Lex Fridman (12:33.440)

all of them.

Alex Gladstein (12:35.960)

I forget all the examples you provided, but then...

Lex Fridman (12:38.320)

Sure.

Alex Gladstein (12:39.320)

I mean, it's...

Lex Fridman (12:40.320)

Yeah, maybe you can mention if you remember.

Alex Gladstein (12:41.920)

The number of people who are refugees, the number of people who suffer from natural disasters,

Alex Gladstein (12:45.520)

the number of people who live under abject poverty, the number of people who don't have

Alex Gladstein (12:49.200)

access to clean drinking water, all of these are dwarfed by the number of people who live

Lex Fridman (12:52.880)

under authoritarianism.

Lex Fridman (12:54.960)

And yet it's not something that we talk about a lot because people are mercantilist and

Lex Fridman (12:59.680)

the powers that be are happy to sacrifice freedoms and privacy for money.

Alex Gladstein (13:04.920)

We live in a profit seeking world.

Alex Gladstein (13:07.520)

To get evidence of this, take a look at the list of sponsors of the upcoming Olympics

Alex Gladstein (13:11.880)

in China where the CCP is currently committing genocide against the weaker population or

Alex Gladstein (13:17.120)

look at the number of people and the famous investors who went to Saudi Arabia a couple

Alex Gladstein (13:21.540)

months ago for the Davos in the desert.

Alex Gladstein (13:23.480)

I mean, Ray Dalio was there, all kinds of people were there, or at least they were invited

Lex Fridman (13:27.880)

and they said they were gonna go.

Lex Fridman (13:29.960)

And this is a government that at the time was torturing a female activist who just wanted

Alex Gladstein (13:35.780)

to drive a car.

Alex Gladstein (13:36.780)

This is a government that had murdered Jamal Khashoggi in a brutal fashion just a couple

Alex Gladstein (13:42.620)

years earlier.

Alex Gladstein (13:43.620)

So, I mean, at the end of the day when it comes down to brass tacks, I mean, the powers

Alex Gladstein (13:49.640)

that be, even the free countries are led by people who are very, very happy to sacrifice

Alex Gladstein (13:56.840)

all these pretty words about human rights when it comes down to profits, unfortunately.

Alex Gladstein (14:00.520)

So, do you think capitalism, that's maybe one of the flaws of capitalism is it turns

Alex Gladstein (14:05.440)

a blind eye to injustices against human nature, against the human rights, like it turns a

Lex Fridman (14:12.540)

blind eye to authoritarian governments?

Alex Gladstein (14:14.480)

Look, I think that at the end of the day, like free trade is actually really good.

Lex Fridman (14:22.800)

And you can just look at France and Germany as an example of how like a capitalist structure

Lex Fridman (14:27.320)

would develop.

Alex Gladstein (14:28.320)

If you have two capitalist actors, they're very unlikely to fight each other.

Lex Fridman (14:31.400)

There's very unlikely to be violence, right?

Alex Gladstein (14:33.480)

These are two countries which basically murdered some large percentage of each other's male

Lex Fridman (14:38.600)

population three times in a hundred years in three different wars, right?

Lex Fridman (14:42.200)

And now today, war is like unthinkable and a lot of that is because of increased collaboration,

Lex Fridman (14:47.760)

increased trade.

Alex Gladstein (14:48.760)

So, when you have two capitalist actors, they act in a very productive way with each other.

Lex Fridman (14:54.680)

But as soon as you introduce an authoritarian actor, all bets are off.

Alex Gladstein (14:59.360)

So, I think what you have is a conflict between capitalist actors and authoritarian actors.

Lex Fridman (15:05.880)

And at the end of the day, people need to, yes, have more than just capitalist intentions

Alex Gladstein (15:13.480)

in the geopolitical level I'm talking about, they need to actually take a stand for principles.

Alex Gladstein (15:18.800)

Otherwise, you have athletes and businesses and governments that are all too happy to

Alex Gladstein (15:25.400)

do business with the Chinese Communist Party, for example, right now.

Lex Fridman (15:28.360)

I think that there is a little more than just kind of the pure profit, yes.

Alex Gladstein (15:34.240)

You mentioned what are the signs that the state is an authoritarian state.

Lex Fridman (15:41.880)

How do you know if you're living in an authoritarian state or when you study another nation and

Lex Fridman (15:46.120)

analyze the behavior of another nation, how do you know that's an authoritarian state?

Lex Fridman (15:51.840)

Is it as simple as them having a dictator?

Alex Gladstein (15:54.640)

Is it as simple as them as declaring that they don't have a democracy or is there something

Lex Fridman (15:58.260)

more subtle?

Alex Gladstein (15:59.260)

There's a couple of good litmus tests.

Lex Fridman (16:01.400)

One is actually, can you have a gay pride parade?

Alex Gladstein (16:04.480)

It actually lines up perfectly, it doesn't matter what religion the dictatorship is.

Alex Gladstein (16:10.040)

They don't like minorities and they love to scapegoat, whether it's gays or religious

Alex Gladstein (16:14.520)

minorities, etc.

Lex Fridman (16:16.020)

So it lines up pretty well.

Alex Gladstein (16:17.280)

That's really interesting.

Alex Gladstein (16:18.280)

If you cannot have a gay pride parade in your country, because you're fearful that you're

Alex Gladstein (16:22.140)

going to get the crap kicked out of you, probably live in an authoritarian regime.

Lex Fridman (16:27.280)

I'm sure that's not just about some kind of homophobia.

Lex Fridman (16:31.520)

Why is that?

Lex Fridman (16:32.520)

That's really interesting.

Alex Gladstein (16:33.520)

Because that's right.

Lex Fridman (16:34.520)

I'm going through...

Alex Gladstein (16:35.520)

Fascism scapegoats minorities.

Lex Fridman (16:37.400)

There's an other, you create an other group and then you...

Alex Gladstein (16:40.760)

Yeah, I mean Uganda is a great example of this, but so is Saudi Arabia, so is China.

Lex Fridman (16:46.760)

I mean, so is Cuba.

Alex Gladstein (16:48.240)

I mean, these are all regimes which demonize the LGBT communities.

Alex Gladstein (16:53.760)

It's interesting because maybe you can correct me, but from my very distant outside of perspective,

Alex Gladstein (17:00.240)

the sort of the way that certain authoritarian governments speak about gay people is it's

Lex Fridman (17:10.400)

almost like, what is it?

Alex Gladstein (17:13.840)

We don't have gay people in our country kind of idea as opposed to scapegoating, which

Lex Fridman (17:19.200)

is like...

Alex Gladstein (17:21.120)

Total denial is the most powerful form of demonization.

Lex Fridman (17:23.760)

I mean, this is what the Iranian dictatorship does.

Alex Gladstein (17:26.960)

A few years ago when Ahmadinejad, who was then sort of the de facto leader, he came

Alex Gladstein (17:31.660)

to Columbia University and he tried to give a speech, which you can look up and he tried

Alex Gladstein (17:35.440)

to claim that there were no gays in Iran.

Lex Fridman (17:37.800)

And that's the most powerful form of demonization is trying to just wipe out your utter existence.

Alex Gladstein (17:42.280)

There's other good litmus tests too.

Lex Fridman (17:46.120)

For example, you can think about comedy.

Lex Fridman (17:49.520)

Can you make money making fun of your government on television?

Lex Fridman (17:53.280)

If you cannot, you live in a dictatorship most likely.

Alex Gladstein (17:55.440)

I mean, it's shocking to people that I work with who live in dictatorships when I tell

Alex Gladstein (18:00.000)

them that not only are comedians able to safely make fun of our government, but they get paid

Alex Gladstein (18:05.760)

very well to do so.

Lex Fridman (18:07.360)

That's a hallmark of our free society.

Alex Gladstein (18:09.280)

That's another good litmus test.

Lex Fridman (18:11.800)

Hear that Tim Dylan, you should go to North Korea, check it out.

Alex Gladstein (18:14.560)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (18:15.560)

And look, there are tons of flaws with democracies.

Alex Gladstein (18:17.040)

This is a really good test by the way.

Lex Fridman (18:19.000)

The United States is a deeply flawed country in many ways.

Alex Gladstein (18:21.280)

Our prison system is a disaster.

Lex Fridman (18:24.120)

There's a horrible war on drugs.

Alex Gladstein (18:26.960)

We committed a grievous crime in my opinion by invading Iraq.

Alex Gladstein (18:31.960)

We did a lot of problematic things, but our core architecture is still an open society.

Alex Gladstein (18:38.640)

The people who criticize the US the most usually live within it.

Lex Fridman (18:44.440)

And if they were to move to a different country and try to use that criticism against their

Alex Gladstein (18:49.080)

new rulers, they wouldn't fare so well.

Lex Fridman (18:51.640)

So whether it's Chomsky or whomever, if they were to go to Cuba and live in Cuba and try

Alex Gladstein (18:57.080)

to criticize Cuba like they do America, it wouldn't last very long.

Lex Fridman (19:01.240)

So I think what's important to distinguish between open societies and closed ones or

Alex Gladstein (19:06.160)

like free societies and authoritarian regimes, it doesn't mean that your government's going

Lex Fridman (19:10.880)

to be good all the time.

Lex Fridman (19:12.760)

What it means is that the citizens have a way to push for reform, have a way to hold

Lex Fridman (19:17.440)

the rulers accountable.

Lex Fridman (19:18.440)

So even if you don't like what the US government does, whether it was under Biden or Trump

Lex Fridman (19:23.160)

or Obama or Bush, we can rotate them through voting.

Lex Fridman (19:27.080)

And we have an independent Supreme Court that rotates over time.

Lex Fridman (19:30.900)

And we have people that we can elect directly to serve our interests.

Lex Fridman (19:34.840)

And then there's like a free press and there's lobbyists and all kinds of people that jostle

Lex Fridman (19:39.280)

for power.

Lex Fridman (19:40.280)

So there's a separation of powers.

Lex Fridman (19:42.320)

And I like to think about a free society really as like at the bottom of the foundation of

Alex Gladstein (19:48.120)

the pyramid really would be free speech.

Lex Fridman (19:50.680)

And then you would have civil society, like for example, human rights organizations, environmental

Alex Gladstein (19:55.680)

groups, stamp collectors, athletes, any groups that come together beyond the government's

Lex Fridman (19:59.840)

sort of strict instruction.

Lex Fridman (1:00:03.540)

is minted outside of the control of the US Federal Reserve, right?

Lex Fridman (1:00:06.900)

It would be a Euro dollar.

Lex Fridman (1:00:08.180)

So stable coins are kind of like Euro dollars just minted by private actors in a way, right?

Lex Fridman (1:00:11.940)

But they're still tied to the dollar.

Alex Gladstein (1:00:13.300)

They're pegged to the dollar.

Lex Fridman (1:00:14.780)

They're not escaping the system.

Alex Gladstein (1:00:16.740)

Escaping the system is Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (1:00:18.580)

We aren't reliant on the dollar.

Alex Gladstein (1:00:20.780)

We have our own, you know, full store value, medium of exchange, unit of account eventually.

Lex Fridman (1:00:26.820)

And you know, the Bitcoin world will be denominated in different terms.

Lex Fridman (1:00:30.640)

And I think everyone, everything else will be tied to it.

Lex Fridman (1:00:32.660)

I really do.

Alex Gladstein (1:00:33.820)

It does feel currently like Bitcoin is like, like pirates or something like that.

Lex Fridman (1:00:38.820)

And there's still like the central banks that are like the main navies of the, of the different

Alex Gladstein (1:00:43.180)

nations.

Lex Fridman (1:00:44.180)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:00:45.180)

It's just this, if you talk about scale.

Lex Fridman (1:00:46.480)

So there's going to be a moment if Bitcoin continues to grow in its impact, when governments

Lex Fridman (1:00:51.680)

are going to seriously contend with, you know, what do we do with this?

Lex Fridman (1:00:56.760)

Do you think about those moments?

Alex Gladstein (1:00:58.520)

Is Bitcoin, is the cryptocurrency world in general going to be able to withstand the

Lex Fridman (1:01:04.800)

serious legal pushback from countries, from nations, especially authoritarian nations?

Alex Gladstein (1:01:11.260)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:01:12.260)

It's been interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:01:13.260)

It's been 12 years, okay?

Alex Gladstein (1:01:15.820)

More than 12 years since Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin and they haven't been able

Alex Gladstein (1:01:20.420)

to stop it.

Lex Fridman (1:01:21.420)

They have tried.

Alex Gladstein (1:01:22.420)

They have tried a lot.

Alex Gladstein (1:01:23.580)

I wrote a long essay for Quillette on this, like, like why haven't governments been able

Lex Fridman (1:01:27.460)

to stop Bitcoin?

Lex Fridman (1:01:28.980)

And my thesis is essentially that there's been like this mix of different kinds of technical,

Alex Gladstein (1:01:33.260)

social and economic and political incentives and disincentives that make it very difficult.

Lex Fridman (1:01:39.620)

And I think to me, the best way to think about it is that Bitcoin is like a Trojan horse.

Lex Fridman (1:01:44.380)

So just to actually tell that story just a little bit, because I think it's important

Lex Fridman (1:01:48.720)

to understand the classical mythology tale, I find this very interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:01:53.940)

Of the actual Trojan horse?

Lex Fridman (1:01:54.940)

Of the actual Trojan horse.

Alex Gladstein (1:01:55.940)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:01:56.940)

Which was told in the Aeneid actually by Virgil, right?

Lex Fridman (1:01:58.980)

And the idea was the Greeks had been like trying to take the city of Troy for like a

Lex Fridman (1:02:02.940)

decade at these like impregnable walls and they couldn't do it.

Lex Fridman (1:02:06.580)

And Ulysses and the rest of the Greek army were like, we don't know what to do.

Lex Fridman (1:02:10.140)

So Minerva, the god of strategy and war, you know, kind of like they get this idea from

Alex Gladstein (1:02:15.340)

her, I guess, to actually try to use subterfuge and trickery to take over the city.

Lex Fridman (1:02:20.340)

So the idea is to, and this was sort of hatched by Ulysses, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:02:23.420)

To put this horse together that would kind of be like a gift.

Lex Fridman (1:02:27.500)

So the idea was the Greeks just like pretended to leave, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:02:31.540)

They deserted.

Alex Gladstein (1:02:32.540)

They left behind one soldier and this horse and the Trojans looked at it and they were

Lex Fridman (1:02:36.060)

like, what's going on here?

Lex Fridman (1:02:37.700)

And they brought in the soldier and the soldier's like, look, they left.

Alex Gladstein (1:02:40.820)

They're so sorry for all of the desecration and blood spill.

Lex Fridman (1:02:43.660)

This is their gift to you.

Alex Gladstein (1:02:44.740)

It's, you know, honoring Minerva, you know, it's like this like, you know, trophy for

Lex Fridman (1:02:49.100)

you guys.

Lex Fridman (1:02:50.380)

And there were actually people inside Troy, Cassandra, a prophet, as well as Laocoon,

Lex Fridman (1:02:55.780)

who was like a priest who said, no, no, no, this is obviously a trick.

Alex Gladstein (1:02:58.220)

This is obviously a trick.

Lex Fridman (1:03:00.000)

But they were like dispatched and ignored because the horse was like, it was just like

Lex Fridman (1:03:03.620)

so bad ass.

Lex Fridman (1:03:04.620)

So the Trojans were like, I'm bringing it in the city.

Lex Fridman (1:03:07.540)

So they brought it in themselves.

Lex Fridman (1:03:09.000)

No blood spilled at all.

Alex Gladstein (1:03:10.000)

Right.

Alex Gladstein (1:03:11.000)

In the middle of the night, of course, what you realize is the horse was packed with Greek

Alex Gladstein (1:03:13.540)

soldiers and they come out and they let the army in, which was like hiding behind an island.

Lex Fridman (1:03:16.920)

So this idea that like something could be so attractive that you really can't say no,

Alex Gladstein (1:03:23.100)

even if you know what's inside of it, is at play in Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (1:03:26.220)

So like in Bitcoin has this number go up technology, right?

Lex Fridman (1:03:29.500)

It is what we call it in sort of shorthand NGO, NGU, right?

Lex Fridman (1:03:33.840)

But what people don't realize is that NGU is like the Trojan horse.

Alex Gladstein (1:03:38.060)

Inside the Trojan horse is FGU, Freedom Go Up technology.

Lex Fridman (1:03:41.260)

So dictators and rogue regimes and corporations are going to buy, mine, tax, accumulate this

Alex Gladstein (1:03:47.780)

thing because it's the best performing financial asset in the world.

Lex Fridman (1:03:51.620)

What they don't realize or they're going to have to ignore is that they're also aiding

Lex Fridman (1:03:56.220)

and abetting this freedom technology, which allows individuals to be sovereign and eventually

Lex Fridman (1:04:00.760)

erodes their power.

Alex Gladstein (1:04:02.140)

There's no question that rogue regimes and bad actors have already used and will continue

Lex Fridman (1:04:05.980)

to use Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (1:04:06.980)

The thing is when you think about a North Korea or a Venezuela and that government instructs

Alex Gladstein (1:04:11.500)

some of its bureaucrats and cronies and officials to start stealing Bitcoin or accumulating

Alex Gladstein (1:04:16.780)

it or whatever for short term gain to get around sanctions and use it to buy dollars

Lex Fridman (1:04:21.500)

or something like that, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:04:22.540)

Which they can't get normally.

Lex Fridman (1:04:23.700)

Well, guess what?

Alex Gladstein (1:04:24.700)

All those people who the regime has instructed to like figure this thing out and use it,

Alex Gladstein (1:04:28.420)

they're all going to realize, oh my God, this is money the government doesn't control.

Lex Fridman (1:04:31.480)

And it's going to spread like a virus.

Lex Fridman (1:04:32.860)

Okay?

Lex Fridman (1:04:33.860)

So this is like the idea of the Trojan horse allegory, why I think it's so important and

Lex Fridman (1:04:36.820)

powerful with Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (1:04:38.460)

All the people talking about Bitcoin today on TV, they don't care about freedom and privacy.

Lex Fridman (1:04:43.440)

They just care about number go up.

Lex Fridman (1:04:44.820)

But what they don't realize is what's concealed within.

Lex Fridman (1:04:47.300)

And that's very, very powerful to me.

Lex Fridman (1:04:50.120)

So the people talking about Bitcoin on TV are maybe investor types.

Lex Fridman (1:04:54.420)

Yeah, professional investors, corporations and soon governments.

Alex Gladstein (1:04:58.220)

I mean, you just had today this morning on CNBC, the leader of the Republican leader

Alex Gladstein (1:05:04.620)

of the House of Representatives, a congressman saying, like, we need to be pro Bitcoin as

Alex Gladstein (1:05:08.740)

a country.

Lex Fridman (1:05:09.740)

And the other day, Peter Thiel had a very interesting comment where he was basically

Alex Gladstein (1:05:13.020)

like, let's not fall behind China in this race.

Lex Fridman (1:05:16.020)

So you have influential people in our government, like sort of posturing for this, like, you

Alex Gladstein (1:05:22.540)

know, Bitcoin race that's going to happen in the next 10 years.

Lex Fridman (1:05:25.140)

You're going to see this.

Alex Gladstein (1:05:26.580)

You're going to compete to stack Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (1:05:28.860)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (1:05:29.860)

So you believe the the thing that's shiny and sexy, like the Trojan horse, the number

Lex Fridman (1:05:34.980)

go up.

Alex Gladstein (1:05:35.980)

It's too hard to ignore.

Lex Fridman (1:05:38.460)

And for it to do to define that a little further as meaning it does seem like the more people

Alex Gladstein (1:05:44.960)

get excited and start using Bitcoin, the more its value grows.

Lex Fridman (1:05:48.240)

So it's just a good feedback loop.

Alex Gladstein (1:05:49.820)

Yeah, it's a feedback loop.

Lex Fridman (1:05:51.300)

And then the reason you're excited about it, especially is that F.G.

Alex Gladstein (1:05:56.780)

Freedom go up.

Alex Gladstein (1:05:57.780)

Freedom go up, which is it ultimately gives power to the individuals to so decentralize

Alex Gladstein (1:06:03.740)

the entire system.

Alex Gladstein (1:06:04.740)

Yeah, I mean, like when Tesla stacks Bitcoin, they're just doing that as self interest.

Alex Gladstein (1:06:08.540)

They think it's going to be a good inflation hedge.

Lex Fridman (1:06:10.420)

Fine.

Lex Fridman (1:06:11.420)

But what they maybe don't care about, don't realize or they don't need to care.

Alex Gladstein (1:06:14.660)

I mean, Bitcoin's power is it like co ops people into promoting a freedom tool, even

Alex Gladstein (1:06:19.580)

if they don't care about or even if they hate freedom, doesn't matter.

Lex Fridman (1:06:22.820)

So when Tesla stacks Bitcoin and the price goes up and more interest goes up and more

Alex Gladstein (1:06:27.060)

people around the world are like, wow, Bitcoin, then more people get involved again.

Alex Gladstein (1:06:31.620)

More adoption, more price, more developers, better user interface, more privacy tools,

Alex Gladstein (1:06:36.500)

more mining, more network security.

Alex Gladstein (1:06:38.140)

It's just this like positive feedback loop that continues to grow and it will grow intensely

Alex Gladstein (1:06:42.620)

in the next decade as we go through the adoption cycle.

Lex Fridman (1:06:45.380)

And the reason why I'm so excited about this is the human rights world, again, to get back

Alex Gladstein (1:06:48.740)

to our previous conversation, is very hard to find people who have, you know, the empathy

Alex Gladstein (1:06:54.540)

or the altruism to actually make a difference abroad in places like China or Saudi Arabia

Alex Gladstein (1:06:58.580)

or North Korea.

Alex Gladstein (1:07:00.120)

People are very quick to just like, they'll just quickly toss off the pretty words that

Alex Gladstein (1:07:04.780)

they care about human rights as soon as profits come into play.

Lex Fridman (1:07:07.780)

So there's no alignment of incentives, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:07:09.940)

The reason why Bitcoin is so powerful is that it aligns the incentives.

Lex Fridman (1:07:13.140)

All of a sudden, they can be as greedy as they want.

Alex Gladstein (1:07:16.020)

They are being forced to promote a freedom tool.

Alex Gladstein (1:07:18.500)

This I've never seen before and it makes me, it gives me a lot of like excitement.

Alex Gladstein (1:07:21.680)

It's very refreshing because we've been laboring in the human rights space, you have to like

Alex Gladstein (1:07:25.940)

raise money and it's all like nonprofit work and you're like begging for people to make

Alex Gladstein (1:07:29.620)

a difference for you.

Alex Gladstein (1:07:31.200)

Here you have this like incredible asset which people will accumulate out of self preservation,

Alex Gladstein (1:07:36.060)

self interest and greed, and yet it will strengthen the power of the individual.

Lex Fridman (1:07:40.580)

That is what we need to fight, big brother.

Alex Gladstein (1:07:42.620)

That's what we need to fight, like what I'm scared is happening in China, like this growing

Lex Fridman (1:07:46.820)

authoritarian state which is powered by big data analysis.

Alex Gladstein (1:07:50.540)

This is our way to fight back and it runs on this like really interesting engine again

Alex Gladstein (1:07:56.580)

that like takes advantage of our base nature as humans and I know that it sounds terrible

Alex Gladstein (1:08:00.780)

for me to say this, but I mean, ultimately we are self interested and it is hard to get

Lex Fridman (1:08:07.200)

people to care about others living a thousand miles away.

Alex Gladstein (1:08:10.400)

We are kind of localized in our empathy.

Alex Gladstein (1:08:14.320)

Being as someone who works to help people who live in like a hundred different countries,

Alex Gladstein (1:08:19.300)

it's very difficult to get Americans to care about what's happening in Belarus or in Kashmir.

Lex Fridman (1:08:23.260)

It just is.

Lex Fridman (1:08:24.260)

But guess what?

Alex Gladstein (1:08:25.260)

They're going to definitely care about Bitcoin because they want to see their net worth go

Alex Gladstein (1:08:29.580)

up, they want to do better for their family, et cetera.

Alex Gladstein (1:08:31.980)

They're going to get into this thing and it's really going to like make that powerful tool

Alex Gladstein (1:08:36.060)

for everyone else who's using it.

Lex Fridman (1:08:37.940)

So this interplay dynamic is fascinating to me.

Alex Gladstein (1:08:41.820)

Yeah, I have to, I'm somebody who doesn't like the corrupting effects of greed, but

Lex Fridman (1:08:50.980)

it is also human nature.

Alex Gladstein (1:08:52.460)

Yeah, I don't like it either, but we have to be realists.

Lex Fridman (1:08:55.860)

You have to acknowledge it and then maybe use it for your advantage.

Lex Fridman (1:09:00.620)

And it's not just Bitcoin itself.

Alex Gladstein (1:09:02.160)

Like exchanges today are adopting something called lightning network, which is a way to

Alex Gladstein (1:09:06.060)

scale Bitcoin on a second layer.

Alex Gladstein (1:09:08.020)

Much like we had gold bars, which we scaled with paper money and then we had visa credit

Alex Gladstein (1:09:11.460)

cards, which were a way of scaling the paper notes, Bitcoin scales through lightning network.

Lex Fridman (1:09:16.620)

It's a private instant globally final settlement network.

Alex Gladstein (1:09:20.580)

It's something you all should check out.

Lex Fridman (1:09:22.500)

It's very, very interesting.

Alex Gladstein (1:09:24.440)

The exchanges aren't adopting lightning for its privacy benefits.

Alex Gladstein (1:09:27.860)

Like lightning operates off the chain, meaning surveillance companies can't see, they can't

Alex Gladstein (1:09:31.860)

do chain analysis on lightning because it's on an onion routed second layer kind of that

Lex Fridman (1:09:35.540)

works kind of like the Tor project.

Alex Gladstein (1:09:38.660)

The exchanges don't care about privacy.

Lex Fridman (1:09:41.020)

They're doing it because it reduces fees.

Alex Gladstein (1:09:43.300)

Lightning is cheaper and faster.

Lex Fridman (1:09:45.100)

So again, we have this really interesting alignment of incentives where like the freedom

Alex Gladstein (1:09:48.380)

tech is being promoted by people who don't, I don't, it doesn't matter what their incentives

Lex Fridman (1:09:52.260)

are.

Alex Gladstein (1:09:53.260)

I could care less if they were altruistic or not.

Lex Fridman (1:09:55.440)

And I think this is, and you're going to maybe see this even in the future.

Alex Gladstein (1:09:58.780)

There's more things coming in Bitcoin down the pike.

Lex Fridman (1:10:01.820)

Lightning was enabled by an upgrade called Segwit, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:10:04.320)

Which took place a few years ago, which was the culmination of the block size conflict.

Alex Gladstein (1:10:08.380)

There's another thing coming up called cross input signature aggregation, which may, if

Alex Gladstein (1:10:12.700)

it takes effect in the next few years, it may compel exchanges to collaboratively spend

Alex Gladstein (1:10:18.520)

all their Bitcoin together in a way that really protects our privacy and fights surveillance.

Lex Fridman (1:10:23.260)

But they're not going to do it for moral reasons.

Alex Gladstein (1:10:25.200)

They're going to do it because it's going to save them money and improve their bottom

Alex Gladstein (1:10:27.420)

line.

Lex Fridman (1:10:28.420)

Can you speak to that kind of collaborative so that you can have multiple parties in a

Lex Fridman (1:10:31.860)

single transaction kind of thing?

Lex Fridman (1:10:33.660)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:10:34.660)

Like you could do that today.

Lex Fridman (1:10:35.660)

Absolutely.

Alex Gladstein (1:10:36.660)

It's called the CoinJoin, for example.

Lex Fridman (1:10:38.220)

But right now it's more expensive to CoinJoin in Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (1:10:40.100)

You have to pay a premium for your privacy.

Alex Gladstein (1:10:42.420)

This would flip that on its head and would basically say, if you have one transaction,

Alex Gladstein (1:10:45.900)

hey, pile them all in, have as many parties as you want.

Lex Fridman (1:10:48.500)

The more parties you get in, the cheaper it's going to be per party.

Lex Fridman (1:10:52.140)

And that's not possible in Bitcoin today, but it might be in the future.

Lex Fridman (1:10:55.140)

But again, the beauty in Bitcoin are these ways that it just aligns human incentives

Lex Fridman (1:11:00.540)

and it aligns our most base desires and needs and realities with freedom and privacy.

Lex Fridman (1:11:08.420)

That I've never seen before.

Lex Fridman (1:11:09.780)

And that's why I think it's so interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:11:12.220)

So somebody like Eric Weinstein actually spoke to this, the idea of blockchain in general.

Alex Gladstein (1:11:21.460)

From a 10,000 foot view, the blockchain is a centralized place to keep the record of

Alex Gladstein (1:11:27.660)

everything that ever happened and does that concern you from a privacy perspective, from

Alex Gladstein (1:11:34.380)

a control perspective, even though it's managed, especially given the low frequency of transaction

Alex Gladstein (1:11:41.500)

for Bitcoin, you can have a lot of small computers across the globe contain the entirety set

Alex Gladstein (1:11:48.700)

of transactions, all of those kinds of features.

Alex Gladstein (1:11:52.380)

Does that concern you that there's one place where everything is made public in terms of

Lex Fridman (1:11:57.900)

everything that ever happened?

Lex Fridman (1:11:59.660)

No.

Lex Fridman (1:12:00.660)

And I'll give you two reasons.

Lex Fridman (1:12:02.380)

Number one, the Bitcoin blockchain is ultimately a settlement layer.

Alex Gladstein (1:12:07.180)

It's kind of like something like Fedwire in the United States.

Lex Fridman (1:12:10.520)

It's a way for like institutions to settle with each other.

Alex Gladstein (1:12:14.100)

That's what I think it's going to be like in 20, 30 years from now.

Lex Fridman (1:12:17.220)

The average person is never going to touch the Bitcoin blockchain probably.

Alex Gladstein (1:12:20.800)

They're going to use things like lightning or unfortunately, they may use Bitcoin banks,

Lex Fridman (1:12:24.980)

but they'll either use custodians or they'll use second layer noncustodial solutions to

Alex Gladstein (1:12:29.500)

interact.

Lex Fridman (1:12:30.500)

The main chain is going to get very expensive.

Alex Gladstein (1:12:32.280)

It's going to be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars or even more if the dollar

Lex Fridman (1:12:35.940)

starts to weaken to make a transaction on the main chain.

Lex Fridman (1:12:39.940)

And that will be reserved for like very large transactions or transactions that need final

Lex Fridman (1:12:44.580)

final settlement, et cetera, et cetera.

Lex Fridman (1:12:48.100)

And I think that that's fine and that's okay.

Lex Fridman (1:12:53.300)

And it's very important that that ledger, that settlement layer be kept by thousands

Alex Gladstein (1:12:59.940)

of people around the world.

Lex Fridman (1:13:01.380)

The Bitcoin blockchain is not centralized.

Alex Gladstein (1:13:03.220)

It is decentralized.

Lex Fridman (1:13:04.220)

It is run by people like me who run a node at home.

Alex Gladstein (1:13:06.820)

I run a personal server.

Lex Fridman (1:13:08.140)

I run the Bitcoin blockchain, no one else.

Alex Gladstein (1:13:10.740)

You run it.

Lex Fridman (1:13:11.740)

That person runs it.

Alex Gladstein (1:13:12.740)

There's no one in charge.

Lex Fridman (1:13:13.740)

Well, you have a full node?

Alex Gladstein (1:13:14.740)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:13:15.740)

I run a full node.

Alex Gladstein (1:13:16.740)

It's great.

Lex Fridman (1:13:17.740)

That's great, man.

Lex Fridman (1:13:18.740)

You run it and that way you can be sovereign over all of your usage, right?

Lex Fridman (1:13:22.260)

And you can run it on a Raspberry Pi with less than 150 bucks of equipment.

Lex Fridman (1:13:26.100)

And that's so important because again, there is no Amazon web service vulnerability here.

Lex Fridman (1:13:30.600)

That is a problem.

Lex Fridman (1:13:31.600)

And I agree with you.

Lex Fridman (1:13:32.600)

We're trending in a bad direction.

Alex Gladstein (1:13:33.600)

We're like, the government could just turn off a big important website or a news source.

Alex Gladstein (1:13:37.700)

Well, they can't turn off Bitcoin because it doesn't live on AWS, it lives with us.

Alex Gladstein (1:13:41.260)

We are Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (1:13:42.260)

And I think that that's very, very powerful.

Lex Fridman (1:13:45.300)

And then you can have something like a lightning network where you can escape some of the constraints

Alex Gladstein (1:13:51.180)

of the blockchain, depending on your needs of the privacy and all those kinds of things.

Alex Gladstein (1:13:56.340)

Everything's an engineering trade off, but yeah, you can trade off some of the assurances

Alex Gladstein (1:13:59.200)

of the base layer to go into lightning, for example, and there you can get more speed

Lex Fridman (1:14:03.760)

and more privacy.

Lex Fridman (1:14:04.760)

And the things that Bitcoin lacks, speed and privacy, for example, you can get on these

Alex Gladstein (1:14:09.740)

second layers.

Lex Fridman (1:14:10.740)

So there's all kinds of cool engineering things that people are coming up with.

Lex Fridman (1:14:14.620)

But I also want to say anyone who says the blockchain, like that's a red flag for that

Lex Fridman (1:14:19.260)

person doesn't really know what they're talking about.

Alex Gladstein (1:14:21.260)

Like Satoshi didn't use the blockchain in the white paper.

Alex Gladstein (1:14:25.440)

Blockchain was a marketing term that people came up with later to try and do this thing

Alex Gladstein (1:14:30.360)

that was kind of like it peaked in 2015 and it continues to be an issue today of it's

Lex Fridman (1:14:35.940)

blockchain not Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (1:14:37.780)

And that was like a very corporate kind of social attack on Bitcoin to say we could take

Alex Gladstein (1:14:43.100)

this ledger part of this radical thing that's for criminals and all these bad people, but

Alex Gladstein (1:14:47.500)

we could take one part of it out and we could bring it over here and we could make it safe

Lex Fridman (1:14:51.060)

for everybody.

Alex Gladstein (1:14:52.980)

The real McCoy's Bitcoin, I mean, Satoshi referred to it as the time chain.

Alex Gladstein (1:14:57.020)

I mean, really what they're talking about is just these blocks that are connected chronologically

Alex Gladstein (1:15:00.820)

of transactions.

Lex Fridman (1:15:01.820)

It's really not that exciting.

Alex Gladstein (1:15:03.620)

The exciting part of Bitcoin is the proof of work where the transaction processing is

Alex Gladstein (1:15:08.260)

done by mining and by energy and by real world expenditures instead of like, you know, some

Alex Gladstein (1:15:13.980)

central ledger.

Lex Fridman (1:15:15.860)

And you know, when you remove the blockchain from Bitcoin, it's not very, to me, it's just

Alex Gladstein (1:15:21.180)

not that interesting.

Alex Gladstein (1:15:22.180)

I don't know, to me, blockchain or time chain, whatever, as it philosophically is a pretty

Alex Gladstein (1:15:26.900)

beautiful idea.

Alex Gladstein (1:15:27.900)

I mean, it's pretty simple, but it's nevertheless as beautiful from a big database person.

Alex Gladstein (1:15:33.780)

It's an interesting way to store information that, especially that's totally publicly accessible.

Alex Gladstein (1:15:39.620)

It's I know that to Bitcoin proof of work is the fundamental idea, but to cryptocurrency

Lex Fridman (1:15:47.420)

and digital money in general and to money, the blockchain is a really interesting idea

Lex Fridman (1:15:51.100)

to me.

Alex Gladstein (1:15:52.100)

The way I think about it is it's kind of, you know, physics.

Lex Fridman (1:15:55.500)

And I like that there's a place that you can rely on that's very difficult to mess with.

Lex Fridman (1:16:00.620)

What it's not though, like it's outside of maybe Ethereum.

Lex Fridman (1:16:04.020)

Every other blockchain is easy to mess with.

Lex Fridman (1:16:06.220)

So you're saying that proof of work is what makes it hard to mess with.

Lex Fridman (1:16:10.140)

Absolutely.

Alex Gladstein (1:16:11.140)

Proof of work is the key.

Lex Fridman (1:16:12.140)

Right.

Lex Fridman (1:16:13.140)

And Ethereum is about to leave proof of work.

Lex Fridman (1:16:14.140)

So it's about to go to proof of stake, which is literally the existing system where a small

Alex Gladstein (1:16:19.180)

group of people get to decide the monetary policy.

Lex Fridman (1:16:21.140)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:16:22.140)

Reputation has a lot of value there and that you could be, it could be manipulated.

Lex Fridman (1:16:25.780)

I may sound brutal, but I'm coming at it from a political science perspective.

Alex Gladstein (1:16:29.080)

For me, it's all about freedom versus dictatorship.

Lex Fridman (1:16:31.900)

And that's why I find it so compelling that regardless of how much power or might or how

Alex Gladstein (1:16:37.140)

many armies you have, you can't change the rules of Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (1:16:41.020)

If you're wrong about Bitcoin, what would that look like?

Lex Fridman (1:16:45.620)

What kind of thing that in 10, 20 years that you, you're not wrong.

Lex Fridman (1:16:52.620)

Right.

Alex Gladstein (1:16:53.620)

It doesn't pan out.

Alex Gladstein (1:16:54.780)

It doesn't pan out, but other things that actually make you feel good about all the

Alex Gladstein (1:16:58.900)

hard work you've done do pan out, something you haven't expected.

Lex Fridman (1:17:03.160)

What might that be?

Alex Gladstein (1:17:04.340)

Well, as we've talked about, my career started in human rights and in promoting individual

Lex Fridman (1:17:08.560)

freedom and fighting authoritarianism.

Alex Gladstein (1:17:10.860)

That fight will continue on no matter what happens with Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (1:17:15.160)

I think it would be a massive failure and a tragedy if this project like didn't work.

Alex Gladstein (1:17:20.380)

The Bitcoin project.

Lex Fridman (1:17:21.380)

Yes.

Alex Gladstein (1:17:22.380)

If the Bitcoin project didn't work, we would, it would, honestly, it's one of the only

Alex Gladstein (1:17:24.760)

things that gives me hope because it is an effective way to push back against the creeping

Alex Gladstein (1:17:29.260)

centralized control.

Alex Gladstein (1:17:31.600)

If for whatever reason, and I can't really see, one of the reasons I'm so into it is

Alex Gladstein (1:17:35.180)

I can't really see how it's not going to work.

Lex Fridman (1:17:37.300)

Again, I think the Trojan horse allegory is too powerful.

Alex Gladstein (1:17:41.380)

These big centralized actors are going to be too greedy and they're going to want some

Lex Fridman (1:17:45.120)

as opposed to banning it.

Alex Gladstein (1:17:46.120)

It's way easier for them to buy it than to ban it.

Lex Fridman (1:17:47.860)

I think that's just what's going to happen.

Lex Fridman (1:17:49.380)

But if, but if whatever, for whatever reason it failed, I would have very little hope left

Alex Gladstein (1:17:52.900)

because really, I mean, the Chinese model of like centralizing all of your data and

Alex Gladstein (1:17:57.380)

controlling it, I mean, ultimately is, is a very, very powerful sort of like arch force.

Lex Fridman (1:18:03.900)

And I would be concerned that that would be all of our, of our sort of destiny.

Alex Gladstein (1:18:09.220)

I do have to sort of push back at a style of communication and you, you're not doing

Lex Fridman (1:18:12.860)

it today.

Alex Gladstein (1:18:13.860)

You're doing, you're being exceptionally eloquent and arguing these ideas.

Lex Fridman (1:18:17.500)

But me, especially just from studying history and being very skeptical from growing up in

Alex Gladstein (1:18:23.900)

the Soviet Union, I'm very skeptical and cautious when I see a community of people being very

Lex Fridman (1:18:31.860)

sure of an idea.

Alex Gladstein (1:18:34.900)

Doesn't matter what that idea is.

Lex Fridman (1:18:36.660)

And there's a huge amount of certainty around Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (1:18:40.180)

Part of it is an important feature because you, it's number go up.

Lex Fridman (1:18:43.740)

So far.

Alex Gladstein (1:18:45.740)

Number go up is a really important part of the mechanism to make sure that it, it grows

Alex Gladstein (1:18:53.580)

in impact, network effects, because I mean, it's really important to get excited about

Alex Gladstein (1:18:57.980)

idea for take hold, that's the way human nature works and so on.

Lex Fridman (1:19:01.420)

But I also get, even something that you mentioned that, you know, others may not, you know,

Alex Gladstein (1:19:10.660)

if you mentioned blockchain, you're sensitive to the attacks that have been, that have been

Lex Fridman (1:19:15.820)

mounted or the word blockchain have been used.

Alex Gladstein (1:19:18.620)

People have been fooled.

Alex Gladstein (1:19:19.620)

I mean, like people in the humanitarian sector have been fooled into thinking that some centralized

Alex Gladstein (1:19:23.940)

blockchain project is going to help some refugee all collapsed.

Lex Fridman (1:19:27.540)

There's a huge, it makes me sad that there's a huge number of scams.

Alex Gladstein (1:19:31.700)

Like you know what makes me really sad and just a tiny little tangent.

Alex Gladstein (1:19:35.580)

There's been recently, I guess with the growing platform or something, there's been a bunch

Alex Gladstein (1:19:39.220)

of fake Lex Friedman accounts.

Lex Fridman (1:19:42.060)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:19:43.060)

And have a million, but not only do they do stupid stuff, but they've been messaging people

Alex Gladstein (1:19:49.420)

like on LinkedIn and people write to me and they're saying like, I think it gets people.

Alex Gladstein (1:19:57.820)

I think they click on stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:19:59.220)

I think they were not sure.

Lex Fridman (1:20:01.100)

And it makes me think like, people are gullible or not gullible, but like, they're just like

Lex Fridman (1:20:10.340)

I am, which is they're like hopeful about the world.

Alex Gladstein (1:20:12.860)

They're optimistic about the world, naive about the evil that's out there.

Lex Fridman (1:20:16.340)

This is what goes wrong with Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (1:20:17.740)

And I've seen it.

Alex Gladstein (1:20:19.780)

People fall for these like, I mean, like in these different countries, I'm trying to like

Alex Gladstein (1:20:22.980)

talk to different people about Bitcoin and like the amount of like MLM schemes, pyramid

Lex Fridman (1:20:27.620)

schemes, Ponzi schemes, there are just so many of them.

Lex Fridman (1:20:31.300)

And there's plenty here too.

Lex Fridman (1:20:32.420)

But like in Zimbabwe, I was talking to this guy who is a reporter who studies the effects

Alex Gladstein (1:20:37.220)

like the foreign currency exchange markets.

Alex Gladstein (1:20:40.100)

He's just saying one of the main reasons people don't want to get into Bitcoin is because

Alex Gladstein (1:20:43.060)

they've been scammed so hard by all these other things.

Lex Fridman (1:20:45.700)

So I would say that that's one way it could go wrong is that like people just continue

Alex Gladstein (1:20:49.240)

to be like afraid of it because of things that are like that in the past.

Lex Fridman (1:20:54.500)

So that not, it's not just the volatility, it's just the, you know, yeah, having like

Alex Gladstein (1:20:59.700)

If you think it's a pyramid scheme, you're not going to want to get involved.

Lex Fridman (1:21:02.980)

And in some sense, if I were to speak to the Bitcoin Maximus community is to maybe ease

Alex Gladstein (1:21:09.240)

up on the certainty because that gives me the signal that it's a scam, to be honest.

Lex Fridman (1:21:14.060)

So whenever somebody, whenever there's a lot of people being cultishly excited about something,

Alex Gladstein (1:21:23.060)

I start being very skeptical.

Alex Gladstein (1:21:24.700)

It's like, you know, I used to like Green Day before they became really popular.

Lex Fridman (1:21:29.260)

And then the moment they became really popular, I'm like, I don't know, he started wearing

Lex Fridman (1:21:32.540)

mascara and I was like, I don't like him anymore.

Lex Fridman (1:21:35.220)

So I'm very skeptical about evangelists of an idea because I think Bitcoin on its own

Lex Fridman (1:21:41.940)

is just a powerful idea that stands.

Lex Fridman (1:21:44.220)

But I also understand that in a world of a lot of competing ideas where there's a lot

Alex Gladstein (1:21:49.120)

of scams and a lot of money to be made through those scams that you have to be, that you

Alex Gladstein (1:21:54.780)

have to be innovative in the kind of mechanisms you use to break through the scam, the ocean

Lex Fridman (1:21:59.500)

of scams.

Alex Gladstein (1:22:00.500)

I took this personality test and I'm a 99 skepticism.

Lex Fridman (1:22:05.380)

So I was first, sadly, cause I was first introduced to Bitcoin in 2013 and I was like, ah, whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:22:12.140)

And it took me four years to actually get into it, to go down the rabbit hole.

Alex Gladstein (1:22:16.220)

I didn't really start to grasp it and start getting excited about it until 2017.

Lex Fridman (1:22:20.900)

So I was regrettably very, very skeptical for a long time.

Lex Fridman (1:22:25.020)

And I just thought it was like, whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:22:26.740)

So I appreciate that.

Lex Fridman (1:22:28.340)

And you should be skeptical.

Lex Fridman (1:22:30.340)

But ultimately you got to believe in things like I believe in democracy, I believe it's

Lex Fridman (1:22:34.260)

good for people.

Alex Gladstein (1:22:35.260)

I believe it's better than tyranny.

Lex Fridman (1:22:36.620)

I believe in the internet.

Alex Gladstein (1:22:37.620)

I know that we've had issues with centralization of the internet, but I still believe it's

Lex Fridman (1:22:41.300)

better to be connected than to have bridges between us.

Lex Fridman (1:22:44.620)

And I believe in Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (1:22:45.860)

And to me, it's like a very similar progressive force that we're encountering.

Lex Fridman (1:22:52.020)

But yeah, be skeptical, nothing will befall you.

Lex Fridman (1:22:57.620)

That's bad if you're like cautious and skeptical.

Alex Gladstein (1:22:59.860)

That's like a good mentality to have.

Alex Gladstein (1:23:03.020)

One thing we haven't talked about all the violations of the human rights that authoritarian

Alex Gladstein (1:23:09.060)

regimes do.

Alex Gladstein (1:23:12.240)

There's a, not a positive, but there is a, you mentioned that nationalism is a drug.

Alex Gladstein (1:23:20.020)

There's something beautiful about loving your country, having pride in your country, loving

Lex Fridman (1:23:26.100)

the, there's a feeling of belonging.

Alex Gladstein (1:23:30.340)

It could be country, it could be tribe, it could be family.

Lex Fridman (1:23:33.940)

That's really powerful.

Lex Fridman (1:23:35.180)

And that speaks to human nature as well.

Lex Fridman (1:23:37.560)

And that can sometimes overpower everything else.

Alex Gladstein (1:23:40.660)

Patriotism, and you know, sometimes it can be seen when you study history, when you look

Alex Gladstein (1:23:47.500)

at Stalinist, the Soviet Union, or you can even look at Hitler and Nazi Germany, we tend

Alex Gladstein (1:23:55.380)

to paint patriotism in a negative light.

Lex Fridman (1:23:58.620)

And then maybe when we look at the United States, but even here in the United States,

Alex Gladstein (1:24:02.060)

people often paint patriotism in a bad light, you know, every time I say I love America,

Lex Fridman (1:24:08.420)

also as an immigrant, I love this country.

Alex Gladstein (1:24:12.320)

It's funny how that's taken as a political statement that, you know, people, I guess

Alex Gladstein (1:24:19.340)

on the right has been, have been more active in saying that they love the country and people

Alex Gladstein (1:24:23.140)

on the left have not sort of, it's almost become a weird slogan as opposed to a statement

Lex Fridman (1:24:30.580)

of just love.

Lex Fridman (1:24:31.980)

And I understand that patriotism can be a slippery slope into letting your government,

Alex Gladstein (1:24:36.740)

I mean, it's exactly what you're saying, the value of freedom of speech is you hold your

Alex Gladstein (1:24:41.780)

government to account for all the ways they mess up.

Lex Fridman (1:24:44.660)

I mean, look, you have patriotism and then you have jingoism, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:24:47.300)

It's very important that we stay on the patriotic side.

Alex Gladstein (1:24:49.940)

Like as an American, I'm very patriotic in terms of, I love the values that this country

Alex Gladstein (1:24:54.180)

was founded on if you read the Bill of Rights.

Lex Fridman (1:24:56.260)

And I love the fact that it was just flexible enough that we were able to change it to grant,

Alex Gladstein (1:25:00.620)

or at least to try to grant all people the same rights.

Lex Fridman (1:25:03.180)

It was not the original plan of the founders, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:25:05.180)

It had to be changed.

Lex Fridman (1:25:06.580)

But since then we've remained, those laws have remained and they're very good.

Lex Fridman (1:25:15.220)

And I'm very proud of that.

Lex Fridman (1:25:16.340)

What I'm not proud of is the jingoistic part of our country where we invade other countries

Lex Fridman (1:25:20.620)

and bomb other countries.

Lex Fridman (1:25:21.620)

I'm not proud of our prison system.

Alex Gladstein (1:25:23.340)

I think it's a huge stain on our nation.

Lex Fridman (1:25:25.260)

I'm not proud of a lot of things.

Lex Fridman (1:25:26.640)

So I think you can be patriotic, but you can be critical of your country.

Lex Fridman (1:25:31.060)

And that's important, I feel like the jingoistic thing is the thing that we need to watch out

Alex Gladstein (1:25:35.740)

for.

Lex Fridman (1:25:37.800)

That's just my own personal take.

Alex Gladstein (1:25:40.380)

Out of all the projects that the Human Rights Foundation works on, what's the most important

Lex Fridman (1:25:44.540)

one to you right now?

Lex Fridman (1:25:45.540)

Like what that's been occupying your mind?

Alex Gladstein (1:25:47.460)

Yeah, I just read again this New Yorker piece that just came out that you should read.

Alex Gladstein (1:25:51.940)

It's called Ghost Walls.

Lex Fridman (1:25:54.420)

And it's the story of how the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide right now, just

Alex Gladstein (1:25:59.260)

like other regimes did and the Turks did to the Armenians and the Nazis did to the Jews.

Lex Fridman (1:26:04.260)

And it's happening again right now.

Alex Gladstein (1:26:06.060)

We said never again, and you know, that's just not true.

Lex Fridman (1:26:08.900)

We're letting it happen.

Lex Fridman (1:26:09.900)

And again, with the business stuff, like Airbnb is like a sponsor of the Olympics, like what?

Alex Gladstein (1:26:16.140)

At the individual level, at a business level, how does somebody like me, who's just one

Lex Fridman (1:26:20.740)

little ant, how does somebody like Elon Musk, who is in charge of 10,000 ants, fight it?

Lex Fridman (1:26:29.540)

How do we push back?

Alex Gladstein (1:26:31.880)

A great blueprint is the fight against the South African apartheid.

Lex Fridman (1:26:36.100)

So we did a few events down in Johannesburg, and I've had the pleasure of being able to

Alex Gladstein (1:26:41.580)

go to the apartheid museum several times.

Lex Fridman (1:26:43.940)

And it really does a good job of chronicling how they were able to do it.

Alex Gladstein (1:26:46.160)

It took a while, there's no doubt, but the way it was done was good.

Lex Fridman (1:26:50.860)

Peaceful action from abroad was very important.

Lex Fridman (1:26:54.160)

So there was like the Sullivan principles.

Lex Fridman (1:26:55.780)

So like you can peacefully protest as a company, particular regimes, and it's very effective.

Lex Fridman (1:27:03.980)

And not just corporations, but like the Olympics is a great example.

Lex Fridman (1:27:08.280)

Like Chinese government should not be able to host the Olympics.

Alex Gladstein (1:27:10.780)

The IOC should say no, not until you close down those prison camps.

Lex Fridman (1:27:14.340)

This is a perfect, peaceful way to push back.

Alex Gladstein (1:27:16.700)

No one gets hurt.

Alex Gladstein (1:27:17.900)

Same thing when we had the Korean Olympics a few years ago, North Korea should not have

Alex Gladstein (1:27:21.300)

been allowed any sort of symbolistic kind of hosting rights there.

Lex Fridman (1:27:24.780)

They have prison camps, gulags that we can see from outer space very clearly.

Lex Fridman (1:27:29.020)

And their regime is the cruelest one on the planet probably.

Lex Fridman (1:27:32.480)

Why were they able to sit and cheer and get to sort of cohost the Olympics?

Alex Gladstein (1:27:37.560)

This is spineless.

Alex Gladstein (1:27:38.560)

Like the IOC, the Olympics, and major corporations should stand up, especially in the cultural

Alex Gladstein (1:27:44.380)

sector where you don't lose anything, or you shouldn't have to lose anything.

Lex Fridman (1:27:49.300)

So I think if we look at the way that we forced the apartheid regime out, this international

Alex Gladstein (1:27:55.260)

solidarity of musicians, athletes, performers, celebrities is very, very powerful.

Lex Fridman (1:27:59.940)

Unfortunately, today's celebrities are doing the opposite.

Alex Gladstein (1:28:02.720)

We just had this press release go out yesterday about ACON, and he's off whitewashing the

Alex Gladstein (1:28:08.060)

crimes of the dictator of Uganda and trying to build a future city there with him.

Alex Gladstein (1:28:13.820)

If this was the 1980s, ACON would be raising his fist and saying, we need to fight the

Lex Fridman (1:28:19.140)

apartheid regime.

Lex Fridman (1:28:20.260)

How do we get back to that?

Lex Fridman (1:28:21.940)

We need to think about that.

Alex Gladstein (1:28:22.940)

We have to figure out how to harness celebrities, influencers, and companies and get them to

Lex Fridman (1:28:27.860)

actually stand up for something for once.

Alex Gladstein (1:28:29.740)

I mean, that's something we've lost.

Lex Fridman (1:28:31.540)

We've really had a spine against that, and we've lost it.

Lex Fridman (1:28:37.600)

And you lose things.

Lex Fridman (1:28:38.600)

You lose them forever.

Alex Gladstein (1:28:39.600)

Look at Tibet.

Lex Fridman (1:28:40.600)

Tibet was a big cause for people in the 90s.

Alex Gladstein (1:28:42.380)

You used to go to colleges and kids would have the Tibetan flags all over the dorm rooms.

Alex Gladstein (1:28:47.620)

Go ahead, we'd have Tibet on the stage, and everybody wanted to, you know, free Tibet

Alex Gladstein (1:28:51.380)

was a big thing.

Lex Fridman (1:28:52.380)

Well, guess what?

Alex Gladstein (1:28:53.380)

Like, we lost it for some reason.

Lex Fridman (1:28:55.300)

It's not a thing anymore, and Tibet has been totally colonized, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:28:58.580)

So I think it's important that we find a way to unlock an interest in the celebrity classes

Lex Fridman (1:29:05.020)

among athletes, singers, presidents.

Alex Gladstein (1:29:08.300)

You know, we need to find a way to punish these people.

Alex Gladstein (1:29:10.620)

Yeah, it's surprising because we've become more and more connected so we can communicate

Alex Gladstein (1:29:16.100)

more effectively at a large scale, and yet we seem to be worse and worse at real activism.

Alex Gladstein (1:29:22.540)

It seems like the outrage that's overtaken the communication channels has been very US

Alex Gladstein (1:29:27.300)

focused and often more about outrage and less about productive activism.

Lex Fridman (1:29:34.220)

I'm very jaded.

Alex Gladstein (1:29:35.220)

I mean, it's very difficult to do these things at scale effectively.

Lex Fridman (1:29:38.940)

I do not believe we will be successful in boycotting the Chinese Olympics.

Alex Gladstein (1:29:43.420)

We weren't in 2008.

Alex Gladstein (1:29:44.420)

I don't think, and they're much more evil now, and I don't think we're going to be able

Alex Gladstein (1:29:47.740)

to do it this time.

Lex Fridman (1:29:49.460)

And again, to go back to the Bitcoin piece, that's why I'm like very interested in this

Alex Gladstein (1:29:53.780)

thing because it doesn't require my altruism.

Alex Gladstein (1:29:55.980)

It doesn't require some famous singer or some corporation to sacrifice anything.

Alex Gladstein (1:30:00.780)

They're literally just going to follow their own profits, seeking self interested motives,

Lex Fridman (1:30:04.920)

and they're going to end up making a stronger human rights tool for other people.

Alex Gladstein (1:30:08.860)

Freedom go up.

Lex Fridman (1:30:09.860)

FGU, man.

Lex Fridman (1:30:10.860)

Do you think we're, it's kind of a dark question, but do you think we're headed towards a war

Lex Fridman (1:30:17.060)

with China, the United States versus China?

Alex Gladstein (1:30:20.540)

I hope not.

Lex Fridman (1:30:21.980)

I hope not.

Alex Gladstein (1:30:22.980)

In the cyberspace and potentially even a hot war.

Alex Gladstein (1:30:25.420)

I think there's too many people with too much money to be lost to go to a hot war on both

Alex Gladstein (1:30:30.220)

sides, but eventually we're just going to, someone's going to have to stand up.

Alex Gladstein (1:30:34.060)

I mean, the subjugation of Hong Kong and the genocide of the Uyghurs and the colonization

Alex Gladstein (1:30:38.100)

of Tibet.

Lex Fridman (1:30:39.100)

I mean, Taiwan is the next big thing.

Alex Gladstein (1:30:40.740)

I mean, Xi Jinping has made it very clear, you know, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan.

Lex Fridman (1:30:46.180)

So we're going to have to stand up for Taiwan for different reasons, both for moral reasons,

Lex Fridman (1:30:50.980)

but also for semiconductor reasons.

Lex Fridman (1:30:52.500)

We need TSMC to be on our side, not have China take over TSMC.

Lex Fridman (1:30:57.020)

So there's different reasons why we're going to have to protect Taiwan.

Lex Fridman (1:31:01.260)

And you just hope it's not a hot war.

Alex Gladstein (1:31:02.780)

I mean, at this point, well, but also from inside the governments of China and Russia

Lex Fridman (1:31:07.900)

as well, but China I guess is the powerhouse here, is how do these governments get reformed?

Alex Gladstein (1:31:13.700)

Is there a hope for them to become democracies, like true democracies, representative democracies

Lex Fridman (1:31:18.980)

and sort of reform them to be ethical players on the world stage?

Alex Gladstein (1:31:26.980)

No empire lasts forever.

Lex Fridman (1:31:28.940)

And it's impossible to predict when these regimes fall.

Alex Gladstein (1:31:31.140)

I mean, no one thought the Soviet Union was going to fall when it fell.

Alex Gladstein (1:31:34.620)

Like that, like if you study like the news and the scholarship of the era, no one knew

Alex Gladstein (1:31:39.620)

that the Tunisian government was going to fall after Mohammed Bouazizi lit himself on

Lex Fridman (1:31:43.820)

fire.

Lex Fridman (1:31:44.820)

No one predicted that that would become what we now know as the Arab Spring, right?

Lex Fridman (1:31:49.660)

These things are impossible to predict.

Lex Fridman (1:31:52.140)

And one day the Chinese regime will fall.

Lex Fridman (1:31:54.020)

I just, we don't know when.

Alex Gladstein (1:31:56.660)

Yes.

Alex Gladstein (1:31:57.660)

You know, but, and there's quite a few folks who talk about the fall of the American empire.

Lex Fridman (1:32:02.660)

And it also concerns me that we don't know when that might fall.

Alex Gladstein (1:32:06.420)

You assume me as a very excited, naive American, I'm very excited by this project that I think

Alex Gladstein (1:32:12.940)

is the beacon of hope in the world still, but that's probably how you feel before it's

Lex Fridman (1:32:22.780)

the end.

Alex Gladstein (1:32:23.780)

Yeah, the party, you want to leave the party before it starts to deteriorate.

Alex Gladstein (1:32:28.620)

I think America could continue to have like a major, major leadership role for a long,

Alex Gladstein (1:32:33.100)

long time.

Alex Gladstein (1:32:34.460)

I think certain things we do will become maybe no longer possible in terms of the way we

Alex Gladstein (1:32:38.440)

intimidate people on the world stage and especially the way we use our currency as a weapon.

Alex Gladstein (1:32:43.580)

I think that that's going to decline over time as we become more of a multipolar world.

Lex Fridman (1:32:48.840)

But I do still believe in America and the values that were founded on despite all the

Lex Fridman (1:32:53.180)

warts.

Alex Gladstein (1:32:54.180)

I believe in us and I would prefer us absolutely to be the most prominent of the multipolar

Lex Fridman (1:32:59.300)

world vis a vis a regime like Russia or China.

Alex Gladstein (1:33:02.300)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (1:33:03.300)

There's no question.

Lex Fridman (1:33:04.300)

So we've been talking about states and nations, but can we just briefly talk about Facebook

Lex Fridman (1:33:08.420)

and Twitter and companies that have a huge impact on the world as well.

Lex Fridman (1:33:11.580)

And actually one of the things that make America a great nation is it is the place from which

Lex Fridman (1:33:16.460)

these great companies have sprung up.

Alex Gladstein (1:33:18.980)

Is there, from a human rights perspective, is there something that bothers you about

Lex Fridman (1:33:24.220)

Facebook about these large companies?

Lex Fridman (1:33:27.300)

Is there something we need to fix?

Alex Gladstein (1:33:29.360)

Something we need to be upset about, fight back on, reform, do some sort of real activism

Lex Fridman (1:33:38.220)

about?

Lex Fridman (1:33:39.420)

I'm very concerned about social media platforms and companies.

Alex Gladstein (1:33:43.740)

It almost feels like we're losing the golden age of the internet.

Alex Gladstein (1:33:46.140)

You know, we could like go online and interact with each other and share and not be worried

Alex Gladstein (1:33:51.500)

about censorship.

Alex Gladstein (1:33:52.500)

It feels like that was a golden age, like in the late nineties, the two thousands, and

Alex Gladstein (1:33:57.180)

now everything is becoming very politicized.

Lex Fridman (1:33:59.900)

And I'm not sure that there's a solution.

Alex Gladstein (1:34:02.180)

Like I don't think there's a button we can press to fix it.

Alex Gladstein (1:34:05.340)

I'm kind of afraid that this is sort of just what happens when societies digitize.

Alex Gladstein (1:34:12.780)

Like I think that certain opinions just become demonized in the room and then the social

Lex Fridman (1:34:23.100)

room that we have on the internet.

Lex Fridman (1:34:25.700)

And I don't know if there's a magical solution there.

Alex Gladstein (1:34:28.460)

I do know that there's technological solutions that will allow us to continue to communicate

Lex Fridman (1:34:35.180)

and for creators to reach their audiences without censorship.

Lex Fridman (1:34:40.060)

And that's very exciting.

Alex Gladstein (1:34:41.120)

Like right now you could be deplatformed from your, you know, from like whether it's Patreon

Lex Fridman (1:34:48.220)

or YouTube or whatever, and your bank account can be closed down, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:34:52.300)

There are emerging ways that Adam Curry, like the Podfather and a bunch of other people

Alex Gladstein (1:34:57.220)

are experimenting with, where you can essentially have your audio podcast across a whole bunch

Alex Gladstein (1:35:02.100)

of different, you know, platforms.

Lex Fridman (1:35:04.980)

So you know, it's censorship resistant, and then your audience can pay you over lightning

Alex Gladstein (1:35:10.420)

in streaming money.

Lex Fridman (1:35:11.620)

Like they can stream you money as they listen.

Lex Fridman (1:35:13.580)

So you're removing the whole advertising piece.

Lex Fridman (1:35:16.080)

You don't need to do advertising anymore.

Alex Gladstein (1:35:18.400)

You have this direct relationship with your audience.

Lex Fridman (1:35:25.020)

And this is possible with something like lightning where you can do streaming money that's censorship

Alex Gladstein (1:35:28.980)

resistant.

Lex Fridman (1:35:30.740)

And a lot of the people who are building a lightning network, for example, Elizabeth

Alex Gladstein (1:35:34.540)

Stark who, you know, started Lightning Labs and has done within her company that people

Alex Gladstein (1:35:41.220)

that work with her have built a huge part of the lightning infrastructure, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:35:45.420)

what animates her is this idea of like, again, artists and creators being able to have that

Alex Gladstein (1:35:51.020)

direct ability to reach out and have that peer to peer relationship with their audience.

Lex Fridman (1:35:57.460)

And I'm excited for that.

Lex Fridman (1:35:59.080)

And I do think that's coming, but I am very worried that the golden age of like centralized

Alex Gladstein (1:36:05.900)

social media platforms is kind of behind us.

Lex Fridman (1:36:08.780)

And I'm not sure how to fix that.

Alex Gladstein (1:36:10.100)

I don't know if that's like a fixable problem.

Lex Fridman (1:36:11.980)

Interesting.

Alex Gladstein (1:36:12.980)

I have a hope that it's a fixable problem.

Lex Fridman (1:36:15.580)

I think it's fixable because there's demand for it to be fixed.

Alex Gladstein (1:36:19.660)

That's the way I think about it.

Lex Fridman (1:36:20.860)

Well, is Twitter that bad right now?

Alex Gladstein (1:36:22.540)

Like, I mean, it's fixable in as much as you can do a verification.

Lex Fridman (1:36:25.720)

So you can give a blue check to someone and then that person is like more credible and

Alex Gladstein (1:36:30.220)

they go to the top of the comments and there's like tweaks you can do.

Alex Gladstein (1:36:33.200)

You can continue to improve it, but it's not going to fix the fact that like Twitter can

Alex Gladstein (1:36:37.180)

decide to kick off the president.

Lex Fridman (1:36:39.620)

And like a lot of people are going to be upset by that, you know, like there's ways you can

Alex Gladstein (1:36:42.700)

improve the UX over time and they continue to do so.

Lex Fridman (1:36:46.880)

Like Clubhouse is a lot of fun, great phenomenon.

Lex Fridman (1:36:50.660)

So is Twitter spaces.

Lex Fridman (1:36:52.040)

So they continue to iterate, but the censorship deplatforming piece, I'm not sure it's fixable

Alex Gladstein (1:36:57.780)

because if you, I mean, you watch the US government haul these people, haul Zuckerberg and Dorsey

Lex Fridman (1:37:03.440)

and whatever in front of Congress, they want more censorship.

Lex Fridman (1:37:07.060)

I mean, our elected leaders want more censorship, right?

Lex Fridman (1:37:11.460)

See, I just believe censorship is a really harsh word.

Alex Gladstein (1:37:16.260)

I believe it's possible to create technologies where it's not Twitter doing the censorship,

Lex Fridman (1:37:21.100)

but it's individuals doing their own selection of what they want and don't want to see.

Lex Fridman (1:37:26.900)

So for example, if you get sick and tired of Donald Trump and whatever he says, or you

Lex Fridman (1:37:31.500)

love Donald Trump, you get to select yourself.

Alex Gladstein (1:37:35.580)

Like you get to have more control over what you consume.

Alex Gladstein (1:37:39.760)

Twitter tries to do that a little bit, but they obviously fail where ideas infiltrate

Alex Gladstein (1:37:46.500)

our view that misinformation spreads really fast and conspiracy theories spread really

Alex Gladstein (1:37:54.260)

fast to where the immune system that Twitter has created to try to censor conspiracy theories

Lex Fridman (1:38:00.720)

and misinformation is over firing and you're now censoring too many people.

Lex Fridman (1:38:08.020)

So it's exactly the same intuition as you said before.

Alex Gladstein (1:38:11.940)

If the state is doing it, in this case, Twitter is kind of the state that's not going to work

Lex Fridman (1:38:17.500)

out well.

Lex Fridman (1:38:18.660)

But if you give power to the individuals to do this sort of the, not even censorship,

Lex Fridman (1:38:24.300)

but incentivization and deaccentivization of great thoughtful content and terrible low

Alex Gladstein (1:38:33.420)

effort content, then I feel like that's going to create a system where there's going to

Alex Gladstein (1:38:39.540)

be a much more open discourse of ideas, dangerous ideas, difficult ideas, controversial ideas,

Lex Fridman (1:38:45.820)

and people in a decentralized way will be able to use their own intelligence to select

Lex Fridman (1:38:50.860)

content to share content, spread content.

Alex Gladstein (1:38:53.780)

Let's keep it simple.

Lex Fridman (1:38:55.580)

Let's look at one example, Twitter and Jack Dorsey.

Lex Fridman (1:38:58.660)

And I think it's quite clear that what he believes is the solution is as you're kind

Alex Gladstein (1:39:03.980)

of hinting at a more kind of like regionalized system, which is not have one we call federated

Lex Fridman (1:39:12.020)

system, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:39:13.020)

Which does not just have like one company in charge of everything, but there's an open

Lex Fridman (1:39:15.680)

protocol and then there's like different instances, right?

Lex Fridman (1:39:18.860)

So Twitter may, you know, Jack's dream for Twitter is that Twitter is this open protocol

Alex Gladstein (1:39:24.220)

that the Russian government can use and the Chinese government can use and the Iranian

Alex Gladstein (1:39:27.340)

government can use and the American government can use and then Twitter as a company is going

Alex Gladstein (1:39:30.540)

to use too.

Lex Fridman (1:39:31.660)

And you as the customer decide which implementation you want to join and there's going to be different

Alex Gladstein (1:39:35.860)

censorship on each instance or each federation, but the protocol itself would be like untouchable.

Lex Fridman (1:39:43.600)

This is kind of like the idea behind the internet, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:39:46.060)

There's like different parts of the internet that are censored, but like at the very bottom

Alex Gladstein (1:39:50.900)

of the very bottom of the backbone of it, it's like this globally connected relatively

Lex Fridman (1:39:56.820)

unstoppable thing, right?

Lex Fridman (1:39:58.940)

So I think that's a pretty good vision and Twitter is working towards that with the blue

Alex Gladstein (1:40:02.420)

sky initiative.

Lex Fridman (1:40:03.420)

We'll see.

Alex Gladstein (1:40:04.420)

I'm a little skeptical that it like works out because I've used Mastodon, for example.

Lex Fridman (1:40:08.980)

Mastodon is an example of a federated social media.

Alex Gladstein (1:40:13.260)

Now it's ruled by a benevolent.

Lex Fridman (1:40:15.340)

Each instance is ruled by a benevolent dictator.

Alex Gladstein (1:40:17.860)

It's just like I happen to like this one, so I know.

Lex Fridman (1:40:20.580)

So rather than trust one dictator, Twitter, you could choose which dictator you want to

Alex Gladstein (1:40:26.540)

trust and that's kind of the federated model and maybe we head that way, but you lose things.

Alex Gladstein (1:40:31.020)

When it's federated, you lose the UX, you lose the slickness and the feel and all the

Alex Gladstein (1:40:36.280)

millions of dollars they spend on developers.

Lex Fridman (1:40:38.860)

Like Mastodon is like not anywhere close to as nice to use as Twitter.

Lex Fridman (1:40:43.340)

So I feel like it's, again, it's this trade off that we make with everything where it's

Lex Fridman (1:40:46.820)

convenience, comfort, speed versus privacy and freedom, right?

Alex Gladstein (1:40:50.600)

It's very hard to have something that gives you both.

Lex Fridman (1:40:52.340)

I don't know.

Alex Gladstein (1:40:53.340)

I think, I think, uh, yeah, it is a trade off.

Lex Fridman (1:40:55.340)

Have you used one of these things that I feel like is good?

Alex Gladstein (1:40:57.500)

The federated, they're not, they're not, they're not, but the federated, I don't think it's,

Alex Gladstein (1:41:01.940)

it's a good, I think, uh, it requires genius, it requires skill, it requires great design

Alex Gladstein (1:41:06.820)

to come up with a way to, you know, there's a Pareto front here, there's a right way to

Lex Fridman (1:41:14.420)

hit that trade off.

Lex Fridman (1:41:16.000)

And I honestly think there's the UX, the experience should be centralized, should be designed

Alex Gladstein (1:41:24.540)

by the company, but the data and like a lot of stuff that could be used to violate your

Alex Gladstein (1:41:31.900)

basic rights should be owned by the individual.

Lex Fridman (1:41:34.540)

And I think there's a way to decouple those, like create an incredible experience to where

Alex Gladstein (1:41:40.760)

you go there and you enjoy the market where you can share your data and have complete

Alex Gladstein (1:41:46.740)

control over it and always have, I mean, there's a lot of basic UX ideas, like just as an example,

Alex Gladstein (1:41:53.840)

I think there should always be in everything you design, a one button that's always there

Lex Fridman (1:42:00.340)

that says, forget I ever existed, delete everything you know about me.

Lex Fridman (1:42:06.500)

And maybe it's, maybe it's one button that you click and it asks, are you sure?

Lex Fridman (1:42:11.700)

And you have to be able to say yes.

Alex Gladstein (1:42:13.500)

Like that's a feature that's fundamental to a good social network, I believe.

Alex Gladstein (1:42:17.980)

Like currently social networks, first of all, most of them don't allow you to do that.

Alex Gladstein (1:42:23.460)

They don't make it transparent how much data they had, who they shared it with.

Lex Fridman (1:42:27.320)

And they also make it exceptionally difficult to delete accounts.

Lex Fridman (1:42:30.380)

So like that's a very basic starting point, but that having that button means that you

Lex Fridman (1:42:37.060)

have control, but that's step one of the control.

Alex Gladstein (1:42:39.980)

There's a transparency of knowing exactly when, what data is being shared about you,

Lex Fridman (1:42:45.900)

how much data is already being recorded about you, all that is transparency.

Lex Fridman (1:42:50.300)

And I believe in the, I believe that's a really good business model, because when there's

Alex Gladstein (1:42:54.300)

transparency and control, people would be willing to give over a lot more data as long

Alex Gladstein (1:42:59.500)

as they know what they're given over, as long as they know what they can delete.

Lex Fridman (1:43:03.700)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:43:04.700)

I guess maybe you're more optimistic about people caring about, I feel like not so few

Lex Fridman (1:43:10.180)

people actually care about their privacy and freedom.

Alex Gladstein (1:43:12.420)

I've just watched everybody give it up, you know, but we'll see, I guess just to book

Alex Gladstein (1:43:17.600)

in that I think we're at this moment where obviously the centralized platforms are just

Lex Fridman (1:43:21.740)

so much easier and better to use and to strike it out and, you know, adventure out and use

Alex Gladstein (1:43:27.300)

a like a federated instance or something even like Keybase, which is kind of like a cool

Alex Gladstein (1:43:32.420)

encrypted way to like have group chats.

Alex Gladstein (1:43:35.420)

It just requires like a lot of your time and a lot of people don't have that time.

Lex Fridman (1:43:39.620)

But I will say one thing, like I do think there is this future where we do go into more

Alex Gladstein (1:43:44.380)

of this like, it's called a tribal model or like tribes, which is this social environment

Alex Gladstein (1:43:51.940)

being built on top of lightning by an app called Sphinx.

Lex Fridman (1:43:57.520)

And the idea is like kind of like it's like a decentralized Slack, like you have your

Alex Gladstein (1:44:00.780)

Slack instance, which has like a bunch of people in the community and you have different

Lex Fridman (1:44:04.460)

ways to message each other and it's all encrypted.

Lex Fridman (1:44:07.620)

And then it has like plugins for like things like Jitsi instead of Zoom.

Lex Fridman (1:44:11.260)

So like an open source encrypted video messenger.

Alex Gladstein (1:44:14.700)

It has ways to like plug in the content you want to get from like different platforms

Lex Fridman (1:44:20.900)

that you follow, like podcasts, things like that.

Lex Fridman (1:44:23.320)

And again, it allows you to pay those people directly in a censorship resistant private

Lex Fridman (1:44:27.300)

way.

Lex Fridman (1:44:28.300)

So it's really nice to connect to the lightning network.

Lex Fridman (1:44:29.580)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:44:30.580)

So it's all sort of built on lightning, but the idea you can think about it as like you're

Lex Fridman (1:44:33.820)

slowly starting to build up the idea of a WeChat, but with freedom principles.

Alex Gladstein (1:44:38.620)

Because right now, WeChat's like the king of convenience and comfort, but of course

Lex Fridman (1:44:41.540)

it's feeding all that data to the big brother and the surveillance state.

Lex Fridman (1:44:45.260)

And then we have like our own versions over here in America that are not quite as convenient

Lex Fridman (1:44:49.140)

or amazing, but like we give up slightly less privacy and freedom.

Lex Fridman (1:44:53.460)

But this thing has a lot of promising features to it.

Lex Fridman (1:44:55.960)

It's worth checking out.

Alex Gladstein (1:44:56.960)

It's very like early days.

Alex Gladstein (1:44:58.140)

Like it feels like, I mean, I was pretty young, but it feels like the nineties in the internet.

Alex Gladstein (1:45:03.420)

Like it has that feeling where you, yeah, you know it's rough around the edges, but

Lex Fridman (1:45:07.780)

you can feel the magic.

Alex Gladstein (1:45:09.260)

It's pretty cool.

Lex Fridman (1:45:10.260)

I'm very much like with Steve Jobs on this.

Alex Gladstein (1:45:12.940)

I think the founding principles are exceptionally important, but at the end of the day, the

Lex Fridman (1:45:17.540)

design of how sleek it is, how easy it is to use.

Lex Fridman (1:45:22.780)

And that's not just like pretty icing on the cake.

Alex Gladstein (1:45:26.980)

That is the icing is the cake because like how easy it is to use, how natural it is.

Alex Gladstein (1:45:33.060)

It's the Trojan horse thing.

Alex Gladstein (1:45:34.380)

Like you don't get, it has to be pretty and shiny and it has to have, it has to fundamentally

Alex Gladstein (1:45:39.960)

connect to the basics of human nature, which is what is pleasant to use, what feels good

Lex Fridman (1:45:44.140)

to use.

Alex Gladstein (1:45:45.680)

You have to, you know, to trick people into eating the broccoli, you have to put like

Lex Fridman (1:45:49.980)

a delicious whatever on it.

Lex Fridman (1:45:51.540)

Well, again, PGP is a kind of a pain to use, right?

Lex Fridman (1:45:53.820)

For if you want privacy.

Alex Gladstein (1:45:54.820)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:45:55.820)

So Signal is an upgrade.

Alex Gladstein (1:45:56.820)

Signal is way better.

Alex Gladstein (1:45:57.820)

I mean, and it's way better than it was five years ago and it's, it's not quite as good

Alex Gladstein (1:46:01.860)

as like not quite as seamless, right, as like a WhatsApp yet, but it's almost there.

Lex Fridman (1:46:07.740)

And they were able to do it and you're going to see that with, with Bitcoin wallets as

Alex Gladstein (1:46:12.420)

well.

Lex Fridman (1:46:13.420)

I mean, they're, they're almost there.

Alex Gladstein (1:46:14.420)

They're like, if you use like a moon wallet is like, I mean, it's so cool looking and

Alex Gladstein (1:46:18.740)

it's so seamless and they've spent so many hours thinking about your experience.

Alex Gladstein (1:46:22.860)

We are getting there.

Lex Fridman (1:46:23.940)

Whereas 10 years ago, it was like impossible to use.

Alex Gladstein (1:46:25.980)

One of the things that Signal doesn't have, and I believe these kinds of applications

Alex Gladstein (1:46:32.140)

need to have is like a, I hate the term, but killer app, which is like a dumb, but very

Alex Gladstein (1:46:39.540)

viral and popular reason to switch it.

Alex Gladstein (1:46:42.660)

I didn't see exactly, I mean, I've been using Signal, but I haven't seen a you know, a big

Alex Gladstein (1:46:50.020)

reason to, to switch.

Lex Fridman (1:46:51.020)

Well, you're on it, man.

Alex Gladstein (1:46:52.020)

To switch.

Lex Fridman (1:46:53.020)

I mean, the reason.

Lex Fridman (1:46:54.020)

But I haven't switched everything to it, you know what I mean?

Lex Fridman (1:46:56.660)

Like a.

Alex Gladstein (1:46:57.660)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:46:58.660)

The exodus to Signal was in, in January, they had a huge user surge for two main reasons.

Lex Fridman (1:47:04.580)

One hilariously enough, of course, was Elon tweeted, like you should use Signal, right?

Lex Fridman (1:47:09.460)

Which is not insignificant.

Lex Fridman (1:47:10.780)

And then the other one was that like WhatsApp changed kind of some of its terms of service

Lex Fridman (1:47:14.860)

and like, you know, announced to all of its users in this little pop up that it was going

Alex Gladstein (1:47:19.700)

to be sort of like changing the way it handled your data.

Lex Fridman (1:47:21.840)

That spooked a lot of people.

Lex Fridman (1:47:23.220)

So these two things really combined and tens of millions of people in the following weeks

Lex Fridman (1:47:28.700)

between January and February joined Signal.

Alex Gladstein (1:47:30.780)

It's like it really has had its day in the sun and they are like frantically trying to

Lex Fridman (1:47:35.880)

keep up with it.

Alex Gladstein (1:47:36.880)

Like, and it's really nice to see that, that, that this encrypted messaging service, which,

Alex Gladstein (1:47:42.460)

which prioritizes your privacy in a way that, you know, you know, the government again may

Alex Gladstein (1:47:48.580)

know like the metadata, but doesn't know exactly what you're saying unless they can get your

Lex Fridman (1:47:51.800)

hands on your phone.

Alex Gladstein (1:47:52.800)

I think that's very, very powerful.

Lex Fridman (1:47:54.260)

So it can be done.

Alex Gladstein (1:47:55.800)

I don't want to be too jaded here.

Lex Fridman (1:47:57.500)

I think it can be done.

Alex Gladstein (1:47:58.500)

Yeah, I think so.

Alex Gladstein (1:47:59.500)

I think we can fight back and I think we can make, continue to make these digital communications

Alex Gladstein (1:48:03.980)

tools and platforms in a way that, that, that really benefits us.

Lex Fridman (1:48:08.940)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:48:09.940)

I'm not, I'm not sure, but I'm hopeful as well.

Alex Gladstein (1:48:14.060)

I'm hopeful that if you look at the trend of technologies, they ultimately are ones

Alex Gladstein (1:48:17.900)

that respect privacy, respect security and basic human rights.

Lex Fridman (1:48:23.580)

I mean, that's at least the hope.

Lex Fridman (1:48:25.940)

So Gary Kasparov, I'm Russian.

Lex Fridman (1:48:28.540)

He means a lot to me on a personal level.

Alex Gladstein (1:48:31.000)

He is the chairman of a human rights foundation.

Lex Fridman (1:48:35.580)

What does Gary have to do with anything?

Lex Fridman (1:48:37.200)

What's your relationship like with him?

Lex Fridman (1:48:39.260)

Do you like chess?

Lex Fridman (1:48:41.560)

What are his specific focuses and ideas around the HRF?

Lex Fridman (1:48:45.140)

Can you just speak to it in general?

Alex Gladstein (1:48:46.900)

Yeah, so our chairman at the human rights foundation was Václav Havel, who of course

Alex Gladstein (1:48:52.740)

was like the famous Czech democracy activist who, you know, helped lead the Velvet Revolution

Lex Fridman (1:48:59.380)

and then ended up becoming the first democratically elected leader of the Czech Republic after

Lex Fridman (1:49:05.800)

the Soviet Union fell.

Alex Gladstein (1:49:08.020)

He passed away in 2011 and it was very difficult to find a replacement because who can fill

Lex Fridman (1:49:14.660)

Havel's shoes, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:49:16.580)

But if one could, it would be Gary, right?

Lex Fridman (1:49:19.160)

So we like really tried to get Gary to join and thankfully he agreed and we've had an

Alex Gladstein (1:49:23.860)

amazing relationship with Gary over the years.

Lex Fridman (1:49:26.140)

I mean, he's been relentless in his pursuit of freedom.

Alex Gladstein (1:49:28.860)

I mean, he could have retired and taken his career in a different direction and he could

Alex Gladstein (1:49:32.980)

be hanging out with Putin and have a pleasure yacht and all kinds of stuff, but he decided

Alex Gladstein (1:49:37.100)

to risk it.

Lex Fridman (1:49:39.220)

And if you actually study like the times when he was running for president in Russia, Amash

Alex Gladstein (1:49:43.860)

Gessen followed him around in The Man Without a Face, it's a great, great book about Putin.

Alex Gladstein (1:49:48.380)

There's a fabulous chapter where she's following around Gary when he's campaigning and I mean,

Alex Gladstein (1:49:53.820)

he risked a lot.

Alex Gladstein (1:49:54.820)

I mean, he can't go back to Russia anymore, he gave up his country, he's given up a huge

Alex Gladstein (1:49:58.860)

amount to be able to speak his mind and to have this dream, this beautiful vision of

Lex Fridman (1:50:03.880)

a free and democratic Russia, he really believes in it.

Alex Gladstein (1:50:06.380)

It's been a great experience, I work very closely with Gary, we talk a lot, we do different

Lex Fridman (1:50:11.460)

things around the world together.

Alex Gladstein (1:50:13.380)

He's come out to a lot of events in different cities around the world.

Lex Fridman (1:50:18.140)

And he's been a very active chairman, this isn't some figurehead, he's very involved

Lex Fridman (1:50:22.020)

and it's really, really great.

Alex Gladstein (1:50:23.420)

I mean, everything he's involved with is, as one journalist who attends our events says,

Alex Gladstein (1:50:29.000)

when he walks in the room, the average IQ of the room goes up pretty significantly.

Alex Gladstein (1:50:33.460)

I'm not a big chess person, unfortunately, so I have not been able to connect with him

Alex Gladstein (1:50:37.820)

on that, but I think he probably would prefer it that way.

Lex Fridman (1:50:40.580)

All he gets is people who want to talk to him about chess.

Lex Fridman (1:50:43.480)

So here we can talk about human rights strategy and how to improve our fight against dictators.

Lex Fridman (1:50:51.060)

But he really has that moral clarity that I really appreciate.

Alex Gladstein (1:50:57.540)

Yeah, he has a lot of fascinating ideas about artificial intelligence as well.

Alex Gladstein (1:51:02.660)

Please open my eyes a little bit to the state of Russia today, because I've read most books

Alex Gladstein (1:51:11.540)

on Putin in the English language, in sort of trying to understand things.

Lex Fridman (1:51:18.180)

And I try to look at it from a historical perspective, almost like we're living a hundred

Alex Gladstein (1:51:23.640)

years from now, and I look at Putin as an important figure in the history of human civilization

Lex Fridman (1:51:30.100)

and study it in that way.

Alex Gladstein (1:51:33.020)

I think the way Gary looks at it, he probably doesn't appreciate me looking at the way I

Alex Gladstein (1:51:36.780)

do, but the way he looks at it is we can still change the direction of Russia, and we individual

Alex Gladstein (1:51:47.300)

human beings and we communities and we nations can take actions, have policies that can change

Lex Fridman (1:51:53.700)

the direction of Russia.

Alex Gladstein (1:51:55.260)

To me, I take a sort of going to the library, passive view of studying fascinating aspects

Lex Fridman (1:52:01.460)

of Russia.

Alex Gladstein (1:52:02.460)

To me, Russia means like most of my family suffered through the Soviet Union, and I see

Alex Gladstein (1:52:08.240)

beauty in suffering, the poetry, the music, the stories, and just there's so much love

Alex Gladstein (1:52:14.720)

that emerged from the pain that I just enjoy the music of that.

Lex Fridman (1:52:18.820)

But to Gary and to many activists that I speak to, to them, they love not just the Russia

Alex Gladstein (1:52:27.380)

of the past.

Lex Fridman (1:52:28.980)

They have a vision and a hope for Russia of the future.

Lex Fridman (1:52:33.740)

And they criticize me a little bit for being a little bit too scholarly about the past

Lex Fridman (1:52:37.980)

and ignoring the future, and there's something to that.

Lex Fridman (1:52:40.920)

So he opens my eyes to look to the future of Russia.

Alex Gladstein (1:52:45.620)

Gary and a handful of other Russian activists that we work closely with, including Vladimir

Alex Gladstein (1:52:51.060)

Karamurza, who again, I mean, it's just incredibly heroic, the man has survived two poisonings

Lex Fridman (1:52:55.820)

by Putin.

Alex Gladstein (1:52:57.540)

They like to say that, you know, Russians will bring democracy to Russia on their own

Lex Fridman (1:53:02.660)

terms.

Alex Gladstein (1:53:03.660)

They don't need our help.

Lex Fridman (1:53:04.660)

This is what Vladimir especially says.

Lex Fridman (1:53:07.100)

But what he does say is that we should stop propping up Putin.

Lex Fridman (1:53:10.100)

Like that's kind of his, stop kind of legitimizing him.

Alex Gladstein (1:53:13.740)

That's kind of his argument.

Lex Fridman (1:53:15.240)

Is like, we don't need your foreign interference.

Alex Gladstein (1:53:17.540)

We don't need your ideas.

Lex Fridman (1:53:18.540)

We don't, you know, we don't need your help.

Alex Gladstein (1:53:19.780)

We can do it on our own, but please stop like propping up our, you know, illegitimate ruler.

Lex Fridman (1:53:24.480)

That's kind of like his point of view, which I think is interesting and fair.

Alex Gladstein (1:53:29.700)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:53:30.700)

Let me just say on one unrelated comment, some people criticize me and others like Joe

Alex Gladstein (1:53:38.300)

Rogan for giving people a platform.

Alex Gladstein (1:53:44.020)

I think in some cases that's applicable, but I think in most cases, knowledge is power

Lex Fridman (1:53:50.940)

and there's no such thing as giving a platform.

Lex Fridman (1:53:54.020)

The conversation just shines a light as long as you shine the light well.

Lex Fridman (1:53:58.960)

And as long as in shining the light and having the conversation, you reveal something fundamental

Alex Gladstein (1:54:05.780)

about the state of things, about the people, whether that's Putin or some of the other

Alex Gladstein (1:54:10.940)

controversial figures that have come up in a possible future conversation.

Lex Fridman (1:54:16.140)

So I don't like this kind of platforming idea.

Alex Gladstein (1:54:20.020)

I think conversations save us.

Lex Fridman (1:54:22.300)

They don't destroy us.

Alex Gladstein (1:54:23.300)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:54:24.300)

I mean, that's, that's journalism though.

Alex Gladstein (1:54:26.500)

I mean, that's very different from, you know, advocacy or strategic thinking about what

Lex Fridman (1:54:31.440)

to do with Russia.

Alex Gladstein (1:54:32.700)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (1:54:33.700)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:54:34.700)

We should interview everybody and everybody should know exactly what they're thinking.

Lex Fridman (1:54:37.460)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:54:38.460)

I think, you know, journalism to me has become a dirty word because, because it's done so

Alex Gladstein (1:54:43.180)

poorly by so many people that, you know, I listened to sometimes certain programs, like,

Alex Gladstein (1:54:51.700)

I don't know, like, uh, meet the press and the Fox Sunday program, just certain things

Lex Fridman (1:54:57.820)

just to tune in and see what different news medias are paying attention to.

Lex Fridman (1:55:02.980)

And the kind of interviews they do, you know, is like five minutes at most, but usually

Alex Gladstein (1:55:07.860)

it's like one minute it's these quick clip things and it's very gotcha and they're looking

Alex Gladstein (1:55:13.820)

for ways to sort of grab almost a misstatement.

Lex Fridman (1:55:17.660)

They want to catch you off guard.

Alex Gladstein (1:55:19.960)

They want to ask the quote, like, like the harsh question, but without any of the, like

Alex Gladstein (1:55:25.980)

the dance of conversation that reveals the truth, you know, you can't just get to the

Alex Gladstein (1:55:30.380)

truth by asking it.

Lex Fridman (1:55:33.760)

You have to sneak up on it.

Lex Fridman (1:55:36.860)

And I think that's an art form.

Lex Fridman (1:55:38.940)

And I think that art form involves long form conversation.

Alex Gladstein (1:55:42.180)

Like I'm a huge believer in just, I guess that's, what's called, I don't know, in depth

Alex Gladstein (1:55:46.860)

journal or whatever, like where you spend months or years on a story in that same way.

Alex Gladstein (1:55:52.760)

I think of long form conversation is like you spend many hours and you spend months

Lex Fridman (1:55:57.460)

and years preparing for those many hours, but like, it's not this like short form trying

Alex Gladstein (1:56:02.900)

to, trying to get the most controversial little tidbit of a story out.

Lex Fridman (1:56:07.420)

And unfortunately the funding mechanisms behind journalism are such that they are incentivized

Alex Gladstein (1:56:13.020)

clickbait journalism versus like in depth long form digging for the truth.

Alex Gladstein (1:56:18.620)

I have a conflicted relationship with journalism because to me, press freedom is so core and

Alex Gladstein (1:56:23.300)

independent journalists around the world are so brave, especially in countries like Russia

Lex Fridman (1:56:27.460)

or China, et cetera.

Lex Fridman (1:56:29.180)

And really good journalism is still something I absolutely, I love and I enjoy.

Alex Gladstein (1:56:34.980)

Like this, especially like to say again, this New Yorker piece on what's happening to the

Alex Gladstein (1:56:38.460)

Uyghurs is incredibly well reported.

Alex Gladstein (1:56:40.860)

However, on the other hand, you have this sort of clickbaity journalism that's all about

Alex Gladstein (1:56:47.220)

sensationalism and that gets used as a tool.

Alex Gladstein (1:56:49.860)

I mean, whether it be against things like privacy or Bitcoin or whatever, you have like

Alex Gladstein (1:56:55.700)

people who sensationalize and it gets used in the service of the surveillance state,

Lex Fridman (1:57:00.700)

the war on terror or whatever.

Alex Gladstein (1:57:02.340)

You know, it's difficult, but you know, I think journalism is essential to a free society.

Lex Fridman (1:57:08.380)

But it can sometimes be, it can wear my patience thin sometimes.

Alex Gladstein (1:57:13.380)

Like it's been, to be honest, it's been a huge burden on me personally, if I were to

Lex Fridman (1:57:17.260)

just turn this into a therapy session for a brief moment.

Alex Gladstein (1:57:20.300)

When I look at people, when I interact with people, I'd like to see the best in them.

Lex Fridman (1:57:25.340)

And the burden that weighs heavy on me is sometimes people I talk to may not be good

Alex Gladstein (1:57:32.940)

people.

Lex Fridman (1:57:33.940)

And I don't, I'd love to, I believe everybody has good in them and I try to focus on that.

Alex Gladstein (1:57:41.420)

The burden that weighs on me is sometimes that there may be conversations where that's

Lex Fridman (1:57:47.540)

irresponsible, where I have to also call people out.

Alex Gladstein (1:57:53.620)

I have to do enough of the hard lifting and the hard work of knowing exactly what are

Lex Fridman (1:57:58.580)

the bad things that that person has done.

Lex Fridman (1:58:02.020)

And I also have the responsibility to call them out on it.

Lex Fridman (1:58:05.380)

And that's for me personally, just an unpleasant feeling.

Alex Gladstein (1:58:08.100)

That's where speaking to journalism, like I think journalists are too much focused on

Alex Gladstein (1:58:13.220)

the bad things a person has done and not enough on the digging into the full complexity of

Alex Gladstein (1:58:21.820)

the human being behind all the things that have been done.

Lex Fridman (1:58:25.380)

But at the same time, you know, I can't have a conversation with Hitler and not ask about

Alex Gladstein (1:58:32.580)

the prison camps.

Lex Fridman (1:58:33.580)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:58:34.580)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:58:35.580)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (1:58:36.580)

No.

Lex Fridman (1:58:37.580)

So from the human rights perspective, one of our programs is we like, we try to go after

Alex Gladstein (1:58:39.900)

people who do like PR for dictators.

Lex Fridman (1:58:42.040)

So like, like then a lot of people do like PR firms in Washington get hired by all these

Alex Gladstein (1:58:47.320)

dictators and make a lot of money to make them look good.

Alex Gladstein (1:58:51.740)

It's called whitewashing or putting lipstick on a pig or whatever you want to do.

Alex Gladstein (1:58:54.780)

Astroturfing is like the fake, make like fake social media accounts to make it seem like

Lex Fridman (1:58:58.220)

you're popular.

Lex Fridman (1:58:59.980)

But whitewashing is a huge issue.

Lex Fridman (1:59:01.420)

So I think it's completely fair to interview like dictators and stuff like that.

Alex Gladstein (1:59:07.500)

Amanpour does a pretty good job.

Lex Fridman (1:59:10.100)

She's really good.

Alex Gladstein (1:59:11.100)

She makes sure that there's no messing around.

Alex Gladstein (1:59:13.940)

I mean, her interviews of Museveni recently, the Ugandan dictator was very good.

Lex Fridman (1:59:18.420)

I mean, she's basically like, well, like, well, why are you rigging another election?

Alex Gladstein (1:59:22.820)

Please tell us, you know, and she's fearless and she's good and that can be a helpful thing

Alex Gladstein (1:59:27.300)

to have on YouTube as a resource.

Lex Fridman (1:59:30.100)

But it's, it's, it's quite clear when, when it descends into a PR session and you just

Alex Gladstein (1:59:35.700)

have to be like very careful about it.

Alex Gladstein (1:59:37.540)

Like Asma al Assad, the wife of the butcher in Syria, you know, was like profiled by Vogue

Lex Fridman (1:59:43.420)

and it was this whole rose in the desert things, a bunch of nonsense, terrible, terrible, terrible,

Lex Fridman (1:59:49.100)

total propaganda.

Lex Fridman (1:59:50.500)

But a like honest interview where you, you know, you're asking about all the tough questions.

Lex Fridman (1:59:57.800)

Very important.

Alex Gladstein (1:59:58.800)

You know, so I think, I think it's just a matter of like content.

Lex Fridman (20:00.840)

And then on top of that, at the third level, you have separation of powers, again, what

Alex Gladstein (20:05.320)

I'm describing.

Lex Fridman (20:06.840)

So authoritarian regimes don't really have any of these layers to them.

Lex Fridman (20:10.360)

And then at the top, then you put elections, but the elections are meaningless if you don't

Lex Fridman (20:14.480)

have the foundation below.

Alex Gladstein (20:16.120)

Every dictator gets elected.

Lex Fridman (20:17.640)

Kim Jong Un gets elected.

Alex Gladstein (20:19.280)

He's the only person on the ballot.

Lex Fridman (20:21.400)

Every dictator from Hitler to Chavez, they all got elected.

Alex Gladstein (20:25.300)

Elections on their own mean literally nothing.

Alex Gladstein (20:27.620)

You have to have these other layers beneath to actually be an open and free society.

Alex Gladstein (20:31.320)

I think it's very important for people to understand.

Alex Gladstein (20:35.640)

Although Hitler in an interesting way, at a certain point just said, I'm going to be

Alex Gladstein (20:39.600)

a ruler forever, which is interesting.

Alex Gladstein (20:42.280)

There's an important switch that happens when you, as opposed to having a facade of elections,

Alex Gladstein (20:47.480)

you just put that aside and saying basically like, we're not even doing this.

Lex Fridman (20:50.920)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (20:51.920)

There's like a ladder that you climb the election and you pull the ladder up and then no one

Lex Fridman (20:55.160)

else can climb up.

Alex Gladstein (20:56.160)

This sadly happened in Egypt and it was quite predictable.

Alex Gladstein (20:59.760)

After Mubarak was ousted after the Arab Spring, Morsi came in and it looked like the Muslim

Alex Gladstein (21:06.200)

Brotherhood was not really going to be very democratic.

Lex Fridman (21:09.680)

But it didn't really matter because then the military came back and now we have Sisi who's

Alex Gladstein (21:12.600)

even worse than Mubarak.

Lex Fridman (21:14.280)

So a lot of times in these regimes, unfortunately, it's very difficult for people to build that

Alex Gladstein (21:19.200)

democratic society afterwards.

Alex Gladstein (21:22.220)

Some people have told me that when you live in a totalitarian or authoritarian regime,

Alex Gladstein (21:25.960)

it's kind of like a political desert.

Lex Fridman (21:27.560)

What grows in the desert?

Lex Fridman (21:28.720)

Scorpions and cacti, right?

Lex Fridman (21:30.400)

So basically people with very extreme views because you as an authoritarian ruler, your

Alex Gladstein (21:35.280)

best method for control is to get rid of the moderates.

Lex Fridman (21:38.520)

You have to crush the moderates.

Alex Gladstein (21:39.640)

That's very important.

Lex Fridman (21:40.640)

You want to have the only opposition to you be extremists.

Alex Gladstein (21:43.900)

That way when you go and have negotiations with the United States, you can kind of hold

Lex Fridman (21:47.160)

up the terrorists or whomever, the extremists and say, it's either us or them, right?

Lex Fridman (21:51.360)

And then the realists who run the US government are going to choose you.

Lex Fridman (21:54.100)

And that's why, one of the reasons why the US government has supported so many dictators

Alex Gladstein (21:57.880)

around the world over the last few decades.

Lex Fridman (22:00.720)

Do you think authoritarian systems emerge naturally, like that's the natural state of

Alex Gladstein (22:06.560)

things.

Alex Gladstein (22:07.560)

If you incorporate what human nature is, is there always going to be corrupt people the

Lex Fridman (22:13.320)

rise to the top?

Lex Fridman (22:14.320)

And we almost have to construct systems that protect us against ourselves kind of thing.

Lex Fridman (22:22.000)

Another way to ask that is what kind of systems protect us from our own human nature?

Lex Fridman (22:30.800)

We started with authoritarianism or autocracy, right?

Alex Gladstein (22:34.640)

Ruled by one or a small group oligarchy, and all humans lived under this structure for,

Lex Fridman (22:41.480)

you know, the virtual, you know, bulk of all human existence.

Alex Gladstein (22:45.120)

Only until pretty recently did we start having actual democracy.

Lex Fridman (22:49.080)

The idea that we should be ruled by rules, not by rulers, very powerful.

Alex Gladstein (22:54.440)

Invented in many places across the world.

Lex Fridman (22:57.200)

Western Africa had this idea and so did the ancient Greeks.

Lex Fridman (23:01.100)

And they started to implement it.

Alex Gladstein (23:02.840)

Although as most know, we didn't have full democracy for a long, long time because it

Alex Gladstein (23:06.600)

was only property owners or only men, only people of a certain race.

Lex Fridman (23:11.500)

But this idea that we can like rotate our rulers and that we could be ruled by rules

Alex Gladstein (23:17.200)

is extremely powerful and it really like for me, the ideas behind this, I think unlocked

Alex Gladstein (23:23.560)

a lot of the industrial revolution, these small personal freedoms that were allowed

Alex Gladstein (23:27.040)

in some countries, but not others.

Lex Fridman (23:28.920)

And they unlocked a lot of the scientific innovation over the last few hundred years.

Lex Fridman (23:33.320)

And to me, there's like a really straight line between like scientific inquiry, free

Alex Gladstein (23:36.920)

speech, freedoms, and then more prosperity and more effectiveness as a civilization.

Lex Fridman (23:42.920)

So I think that democracy, you know, ruled by the people is definitely an upgrade from

Alex Gladstein (23:48.520)

autocracy or oligarchy, you know, which would be ruled by one or ruled by a small group.

Lex Fridman (23:55.640)

And I think that the democratic revolution has been an incredible thing for our world.

Lex Fridman (24:01.280)

And it's, you know, you can do half class full, half class empty.

Alex Gladstein (24:04.280)

The half class full is that almost half the world lives under democracy.

Lex Fridman (24:07.680)

Like that's an incredible achievement.

Lex Fridman (24:10.920)

But just under half.

Lex Fridman (24:11.920)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (24:12.920)

Just under half.

Lex Fridman (24:13.920)

So.

Lex Fridman (24:14.920)

But that's billions of people.

Lex Fridman (24:16.600)

It's billions of people.

Lex Fridman (24:18.200)

And if you look at the progress of things, it's getting better and better and better.

Lex Fridman (24:22.360)

I mean, if you, you know.

Alex Gladstein (24:24.320)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (24:25.320)

We're a little bit of a stalemate here.

Alex Gladstein (24:28.800)

Democracy's really blossomed between World War II and the year 2000, especially in the

Alex Gladstein (24:34.920)

eighties and nineties, you had an incredible wave of fall, you know, where many, many authoritarian

Alex Gladstein (24:41.160)

regimes fell and were replaced by democracies.

Alex Gladstein (24:43.960)

I think around 2015, the acceleration kind of came to a standstill a little bit.

Alex Gladstein (24:52.440)

There's some good news in some countries and there's bad news in others.

Alex Gladstein (24:56.920)

Like in the last 10 years, you've had, for example, the Philippines has gone backwards.

Alex Gladstein (25:02.760)

Thailand has gone backwards.

Lex Fridman (25:04.560)

Bangladesh has gone backwards.

Alex Gladstein (25:05.960)

Turkey has gone backwards.

Lex Fridman (25:07.480)

That's like a half billion people right there.

Lex Fridman (25:09.120)

So you've had some positives, like, you know, there was positive movement forward in Armenia,

Lex Fridman (25:16.360)

Malaysia, some other countries, but we're kind of at a stalemate right now.

Lex Fridman (25:21.280)

And what most people fear about where we are right now, who I respect, is what is the digital

Alex Gladstein (25:28.460)

transformation of the world due to this like progress of democracy or of open societies.

Lex Fridman (25:34.520)

And that's what concerns me the most.

Lex Fridman (25:36.520)

Oh, interesting.

Lex Fridman (25:37.520)

So I've, and we'll talk about one of the most fascinating technologies, which is Bitcoin,

Lex Fridman (25:42.840)

how it can help.

Lex Fridman (25:43.840)

But I have a sense that technology, like most technological innovations will give power

Alex Gladstein (25:51.280)

to the individuals, will fight authoritarian governments as opposed to give more power

Alex Gladstein (25:59.160)

to authoritarian governments.

Lex Fridman (26:00.160)

But your sense is there's ways to give for technology to be utilized as a tool for the

Alex Gladstein (26:07.240)

abuse of the citizenry.

Lex Fridman (26:08.840)

I've seen both.

Alex Gladstein (26:10.480)

In my work at Ahrefs, I started by helping to put together backpacks with foreign information

Lex Fridman (26:15.880)

that we sent to the Cuban underground library movement.

Lex Fridman (26:18.620)

So in Cuba, you know, to own a book at the time, you had to have the government's permission.

Lex Fridman (26:23.240)

There's very little internet penetration.

Alex Gladstein (26:25.160)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (26:26.160)

So we would send in movies, you know, V for Vendetta, dubbed into Spanish, and people

Alex Gladstein (26:30.600)

would sit inside their homes and they'd watch it and they would answer questions with each

Lex Fridman (26:35.400)

other.

Alex Gladstein (26:36.400)

It was awful.

Lex Fridman (26:37.400)

And then after that, I worked with people inside North Korea.

Alex Gladstein (26:39.800)

We would send in flash drives.

Lex Fridman (26:40.800)

We have this program called Flash Drives for Freedom.

Alex Gladstein (26:42.800)

We've sent over 100,000 flash drives in our work into North Korea, a country of about

Lex Fridman (26:48.560)

25 million people.

Alex Gladstein (26:49.560)

That's a lot.

Lex Fridman (26:50.560)

It's a big, big difference.

Alex Gladstein (26:51.560)

That's, you know, many, many millions of hours of films, books, movies, etc.

Lex Fridman (26:55.200)

So I've seen the power that technology can have where, you know, in the 60s and 70s,

Alex Gladstein (27:00.360)

you know, to get to break an information blockade, you had to like send in crates of books into

Lex Fridman (27:03.920)

a communist country.

Lex Fridman (27:05.440)

So now all of a sudden, you can send the entire contents of what was once the Library of Alexandria

Lex Fridman (27:10.200)

on something the size of your thumbnail, like that's remarkable.

Lex Fridman (27:13.200)

So obviously, I've seen the positives of technology and we'll certainly get into Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (27:17.240)

But I'm, you know, very concerned about essentially big data analysis, like what people call AI

Alex Gladstein (27:22.520)

or general, you know, specific kinds of AI, like very concerning.

Lex Fridman (27:26.680)

I think these are very authoritarian.

Alex Gladstein (27:27.680)

I mean, it's very hard to make a case that AI is going to be good for human rights.

Lex Fridman (27:33.960)

Very difficult, in my opinion.

Alex Gladstein (27:35.960)

It may be good for health.

Lex Fridman (27:37.160)

It may be good for our efforts to protect the planet.

Alex Gladstein (27:40.460)

It may be good for a lot of scientific things.

Lex Fridman (27:43.020)

I find it very hard to believe it'll be good for civil liberties.

Alex Gladstein (27:45.360)

Oh, that's fun.

Lex Fridman (27:46.840)

This is fun because I disagree.

Alex Gladstein (27:48.840)

Give me your examples.

Lex Fridman (27:51.560)

I'm serious.

Lex Fridman (27:52.800)

What AI applications will improve civil liberties?

Alex Gladstein (27:55.440)

I thought you meant examples of stuff that's already out there, because I can give you

Alex Gladstein (28:00.760)

examples that, for example, the kind of things I would like to work on, but also the kind

Alex Gladstein (28:05.480)

of things I'm hoping to see, which is AI could be used by centralized powers, by governments,

Alex Gladstein (28:14.240)

by big organizations like Facebook and Twitter and so on to collect data about people.

Lex Fridman (28:22.040)

Right.

Alex Gladstein (28:23.040)

Right.

Alex Gladstein (28:24.040)

I believe there's a huge hunger among people to have control over their own data.

Lex Fridman (28:31.520)

So instead you can have AI that's distributed or people have complete ownership of their

Lex Fridman (28:37.260)

little AI systems.

Lex Fridman (28:39.320)

So like the kind of stuff that I would like to build or like to see it to be built is

Alex Gladstein (28:45.120)

you could think of it as personal assistance or AI that's owned by you and you get to give

Alex Gladstein (28:52.320)

it out.

Lex Fridman (28:53.440)

You have complete control over all of your data.

Alex Gladstein (28:55.680)

You have complete control over everything that's learnable about your day to day experiences

Alex Gladstein (29:01.740)

that could be useful in the market of goods and ideas and all those kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (29:08.240)

So it has to do with, so I know you talk about the surveillance, which is very interesting.

Lex Fridman (29:14.760)

It's who gets to have control of the data.

Lex Fridman (29:17.680)

And I think, I believe there's a lot of hunger in among regular people to have control over

Alex Gladstein (29:26.560)

their data such that if you want to create a business, you have a lot of money to be

Alex Gladstein (29:32.840)

made from a capitalist perspective by providing products that let people control their data

Lex Fridman (29:38.520)

where you have no control.

Alex Gladstein (29:41.040)

Sounds like to me you're describing encryption or at least the ability to encrypt, the ability

Lex Fridman (29:45.980)

to use digital keys to secure your property.

Lex Fridman (29:50.000)

And that to me is a very powerful force for individual rights, very powerful.

Lex Fridman (29:56.600)

And it's what animates Bitcoin ultimately, which we'll get into.

Lex Fridman (2:00:01.140)

Is this, is there a good resource to study whitewashing?

Lex Fridman (2:00:03.980)

Like to know what manipulative PR looks like?

Alex Gladstein (2:00:07.340)

I think you just, you should know if you've researched the topic, you should know it inside

Lex Fridman (2:00:11.740)

you because it would be, is there anything you're afraid to ask?

Alex Gladstein (2:00:15.700)

That would be it.

Lex Fridman (2:00:16.700)

Make sure you're asking all the questions.

Alex Gladstein (2:00:17.700)

As long as you're asking all the questions that you have, you're good.

Lex Fridman (2:00:21.100)

But if there's something you're afraid to ask, then, then maybe you're self censoring,

Lex Fridman (2:00:25.420)

right?

Lex Fridman (2:00:26.420)

That's a good way.

Alex Gladstein (2:00:27.420)

It's, it takes us back to that, like what is it that litmus test about is your country

Lex Fridman (2:00:32.340)

a lot to have a gay pride parade?

Lex Fridman (2:00:36.060)

So there's like obvious things that might be on your mind that you just want to ask

Lex Fridman (2:00:39.980)

and you shouldn't, you shouldn't run from them.

Alex Gladstein (2:00:41.980)

As long as you feel like you're a free person when you're interviewing, I think you're good.

Lex Fridman (2:00:46.380)

That's beautifully put.

Alex Gladstein (2:00:48.820)

Are there books, technical fiction, philosophical that had an impact on your life that you recommend

Lex Fridman (2:00:56.340)

or even resources like blogs, films?

Alex Gladstein (2:00:59.900)

I have four books I'll briefly mention.

Lex Fridman (2:01:04.200)

Number one is The Fear.

Alex Gladstein (2:01:05.780)

The Fear had a deep impact on me.

Lex Fridman (2:01:07.800)

The Fear was written by Peter Godwin.

Alex Gladstein (2:01:09.600)

It's about the systematic dismantling of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.

Lex Fridman (2:01:14.140)

Peter is Zimbabwean and it is a riveting book.

Alex Gladstein (2:01:17.420)

I think everyone should read it because it helps you understand what it's like to go

Lex Fridman (2:01:21.020)

through not just authoritarianism, but also hyperinflation.

Lex Fridman (2:01:24.980)

And I mean, really, you know, at the end of the day, what The Fear describes is how Mugabe

Alex Gladstein (2:01:28.700)

took this country in the 1980s and he actually brought it back in time to the 1920s in terms

Alex Gladstein (2:01:34.980)

of infrastructure, literacy rates, health rates, all these things.

Lex Fridman (2:01:38.580)

He stole so much from the people.

Lex Fridman (2:01:40.660)

And it's a heartbreaking book, but it's a very important book.

Lex Fridman (2:01:44.740)

And it's a way to do excellent, excellent journalism.

Lex Fridman (2:01:49.340)

So The Fear is a good one.

Lex Fridman (2:01:50.820)

And it's a personal story?

Alex Gladstein (2:01:52.660)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (2:01:53.660)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (2:01:54.660)

Because he was, it's part of his whole family story and he's in there.

Lex Fridman (2:01:57.780)

He's interviewing people personally.

Lex Fridman (2:02:00.520)

So I would say that one.

Alex Gladstein (2:02:02.340)

Is it also connected, sorry to interrupt, is it, from the inflation perspective, is

Lex Fridman (2:02:06.820)

it a good study of hyperinflation and the effects?

Lex Fridman (2:02:10.060)

Does Bitcoin at all come as a discussion of money?

Alex Gladstein (2:02:16.900)

Does that come into the, or is it purely the experience of inflation is almost a symptom

Lex Fridman (2:02:21.420)

of an authoritarian government?

Alex Gladstein (2:02:22.420)

A little bit, a little bit.

Lex Fridman (2:02:23.420)

I would say it's not deep.

Alex Gladstein (2:02:24.420)

I have another book on that, which I'll recommend in a second, but I would just say that it's

Alex Gladstein (2:02:29.200)

a very powerfully written book about how society can basically deteriorate and how you can

Alex Gladstein (2:02:37.420)

lose everything.

Alex Gladstein (2:02:39.460)

The second book is, I just mentioned it, but The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen.

Alex Gladstein (2:02:44.140)

Incredible book about modern Russia and Putin.

Lex Fridman (2:02:46.340)

Just a masterpiece.

Lex Fridman (2:02:47.780)

So that one is.

Lex Fridman (2:02:48.780)

Could be one of your favorite books about Putin and Russia.

Alex Gladstein (2:02:50.940)

That one's the best.

Lex Fridman (2:02:51.940)

I mean, she's just so fearless.

Alex Gladstein (2:02:53.460)

Incredible.

Lex Fridman (2:02:54.460)

She interviews Putin in the book at the end.

Alex Gladstein (2:02:56.820)

It's really good.

Lex Fridman (2:02:57.820)

The third one is a fiction book called The Mandibles written by Lionel Shriver.

Alex Gladstein (2:03:04.900)

This one's good.

Lex Fridman (2:03:05.900)

It's a good gift book.

Alex Gladstein (2:03:06.900)

It's funny.

Lex Fridman (2:03:07.900)

It's dark.

Alex Gladstein (2:03:08.900)

It's witty, but it's about the United States losing its status as the reserve currency

Lex Fridman (2:03:12.980)

and going into hyperinflation.

Lex Fridman (2:03:15.040)

And what's interesting is that the characters in the book map where we are today.

Lex Fridman (2:03:19.260)

The book itself is about the late, I think it's the late 2020s.

Lex Fridman (2:03:22.660)

And we have a populist president who decides to announce that the United States is like

Lex Fridman (2:03:27.460)

basically going to default on its debts.

Lex Fridman (2:03:29.020)

And the rest of the world comes up with like a new currency and everybody switches to that

Lex Fridman (2:03:33.100)

one and the dollar like overnight becomes worthless.

Lex Fridman (2:03:36.460)

And all these like economists are saying, no, it's fine.

Lex Fridman (2:03:39.480)

Like inflation won't be a problem.

Lex Fridman (2:03:41.780)

And there's this one character who's an economist who's like an economist.

Lex Fridman (2:03:45.140)

And he's basically he gets to the point where he's living as a refugee in Prospect Park

Alex Gladstein (2:03:49.300)

in Brooklyn and he's still saying everything's fine.

Alex Gladstein (2:03:51.940)

You know, so it's like it's dry, it's witty, but it's also about the surveillance state.

Alex Gladstein (2:03:57.100)

It's about centralization of power.

Lex Fridman (2:03:59.460)

It's really good.

Lex Fridman (2:04:00.460)

So The Mandibles, I would highly recommend.

Lex Fridman (2:04:03.820)

So those three books.

Lex Fridman (2:04:04.820)

And then on the topic of Bitcoin, because we talked about it a lot, I would just say

Alex Gladstein (2:04:08.340)

that my portal into Bitcoin was The Internet of Money by Andreas Antonopoulos and I did

Alex Gladstein (2:04:14.820)

it by audio book.

Lex Fridman (2:04:16.980)

And I just think this is an important one for people to start with because he goes through

Alex Gladstein (2:04:21.260)

all the main concepts, whether it be proof of work or how the network functions.

Lex Fridman (2:04:27.260)

But he does it in a way that's extremely engaging and really fascinating.

Lex Fridman (2:04:31.580)

And it really just kind of like sparked my curiosity.

Lex Fridman (2:04:34.820)

Is it discussing the technical sides or also the philosophical?

Alex Gladstein (2:04:38.300)

Because a lot of people mentioned sort of the Bitcoin standard is the philosophical

Lex Fridman (2:04:41.340)

entry into the whole Bitcoin world.

Alex Gladstein (2:04:43.700)

Very different from the Bitcoin standard.

Lex Fridman (2:04:45.300)

It's more for like the average person.

Alex Gladstein (2:04:47.720)

It's not a history book.

Lex Fridman (2:04:49.260)

It's a collection of his talks that he gave over like two or three years.

Alex Gladstein (2:04:52.620)

It's not very technical.

Lex Fridman (2:04:54.160)

It's very approachable.

Lex Fridman (2:04:55.160)

And some of it might be dated now because it's like 2015, 2016.

Lex Fridman (2:05:00.480)

But I mean, it's great to hear a shout out for Andreas because he seems to be one of

Alex Gladstein (2:05:05.500)

the seminal figures to sort of make Bitcoin ideas accessible.

Lex Fridman (2:05:09.580)

Andreas is the goat.

Alex Gladstein (2:05:10.580)

Andreas is the goat.

Alex Gladstein (2:05:11.580)

I know a lot of people will have issues with some of his like more recent work, but Andreas

Alex Gladstein (2:05:17.700)

is the goat.

Lex Fridman (2:05:18.700)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (2:05:19.700)

He's the reason I'm in Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (2:05:20.700)

I mean, he's the reason I'm in Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (2:05:21.700)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:05:22.700)

That's fascinating.

Lex Fridman (2:05:23.700)

And it's funny to watch the Bitcoin maximalist immune system also attacking him.

Lex Fridman (2:05:30.780)

And this whole feedback mechanism is working together.

Alex Gladstein (2:05:33.700)

It's fascinating.

Lex Fridman (2:05:34.700)

Well, I probably consider myself a maximalist, but I really like Andreas.

Lex Fridman (2:05:37.940)

So I think there's room for nuance.

Lex Fridman (2:05:40.420)

There's room for nuance in this world.

Alex Gladstein (2:05:42.100)

I'm glad to hear that.

Lex Fridman (2:05:43.940)

If people are fascinated by your work, what is the way to get more of Alex?

Lex Fridman (2:05:51.180)

So two years ago, I came together with seven other people from around the world and we

Lex Fridman (2:05:55.740)

wrote a book in a book sprint.

Alex Gladstein (2:05:57.540)

We lived in a house for four days.

Lex Fridman (2:05:58.540)

We wrote a book together.

Alex Gladstein (2:05:59.540)

It was really cool.

Lex Fridman (2:06:00.540)

It was like a design sprint, but we did it in book format.

Lex Fridman (2:06:03.180)

And my coauthors are from Nigeria, Venezuela, the Philippines, from former Soviet Union,

Lex Fridman (2:06:09.940)

from all over.

Lex Fridman (2:06:10.980)

And it's called The Little Bitcoin Book, and I'm still proud of it.

Lex Fridman (2:06:14.660)

It's a hundred pages.

Alex Gladstein (2:06:15.660)

It's something you give to somebody who knows nothing about the topic.

Lex Fridman (2:06:18.700)

And it's not a technical book.

Alex Gladstein (2:06:20.180)

It's about the sort of social political aspect of it.

Lex Fridman (2:06:24.060)

Like why is it important for you, for your finances, for your freedom, for your future?

Lex Fridman (2:06:29.260)

And we've translated it into like a lot of languages by now.

Alex Gladstein (2:06:32.460)

I think English, Spanish and Portuguese are for sale and littlebitcoinbook.com, you know,

Alex Gladstein (2:06:37.900)

you go buy it.

Alex Gladstein (2:06:38.900)

We've made it as a free PDF in Mandarin, Hindi, Punjab, Korean, Uyghur, which I was really

Alex Gladstein (2:06:46.660)

excited about, Arabic, Farsi.

Lex Fridman (2:06:49.540)

And I mean, it spreads, man.

Alex Gladstein (2:06:50.980)

It's been really, really cool.

Lex Fridman (2:06:51.980)

So I'm proud of that.

Alex Gladstein (2:06:54.500)

I also made a video that did very well for Reason magazine called Why is Bitcoin Protecting

Lex Fridman (2:07:00.040)

Human Rights Around the World?

Alex Gladstein (2:07:01.740)

It's five minutes.

Lex Fridman (2:07:02.740)

And it just, I feel like I tried to boil everything that I want to tell you into this five minute

Alex Gladstein (2:07:08.140)

video.

Lex Fridman (2:07:09.140)

So there's that.

Alex Gladstein (2:07:10.140)

I would recommend that.

Lex Fridman (2:07:11.540)

And then if you're interested in the why have governments not stopped it, which I think

Alex Gladstein (2:07:17.820)

is really intriguing, I wrote this long essay in Quillette in February called, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:07:24.020)

why haven't governments banned Bitcoin?

Lex Fridman (2:07:26.300)

And maybe that'll be a helpful guide to some folks.

Lex Fridman (2:07:28.540)

Is this speaking to the Trojan horse idea that there's something enticing about it?

Alex Gladstein (2:07:32.940)

Yeah, at the end, it does get into that.

Lex Fridman (2:07:34.800)

But it really also just kind of goes through technically, why is it hard to do a 51% attack?

Lex Fridman (2:07:39.100)

Like if a government wanted to, could it really get all that equipment?

Lex Fridman (2:07:43.100)

There's a semiconductor shortage, like it can't.

Alex Gladstein (2:07:45.940)

There's like certain things that stop governments from doing it.

Lex Fridman (2:07:49.380)

And same thing with like this idea of a 6102, which would be based on the idea of the executive

Alex Gladstein (2:07:55.720)

order 6102, which is from 1933 when FDR made holding gold illegal in the United States.

Alex Gladstein (2:08:01.140)

The idea is that like banks would go around now with governments and try to like steal

Alex Gladstein (2:08:04.460)

everybody's Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (2:08:05.460)

Well, in Bitcoin we have like a practice called proof of keys day every January 3rd, you know,

Alex Gladstein (2:08:11.540)

which is coinciding with the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain, where we all like withdraw

Lex Fridman (2:08:15.140)

our keys from exchanges and we'd be sovereign users.

Lex Fridman (2:08:17.820)

What we are doing is we are preparing for a 6102 attack, which will one day probably

Lex Fridman (2:08:21.380)

come, right?

Lex Fridman (2:08:22.380)

So the essay just goes through all of the like possible attacks and it runs through

Alex Gladstein (2:08:27.180)

like the ones that happened, like the Chinese and Indian governments, the two largest governments

Alex Gladstein (2:08:30.540)

in the world, both tried to attack Bitcoin by banning their citizens from exchanging

Lex Fridman (2:08:35.060)

fiat for Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (2:08:36.460)

It didn't work.

Lex Fridman (2:08:37.460)

Interest instead exploded.

Alex Gladstein (2:08:38.560)

It's like the Barbra Streisand effect where, you know, by making something public and saying

Lex Fridman (2:08:45.140)

you shouldn't do X, it actually increases attention about X a lot more, right?

Lex Fridman (2:08:51.080)

So I think there's a lot of interesting game theory there that people would enjoy.

Lex Fridman (2:08:54.720)

Do you think, are you seriously concerned about this kind of thing where the idea is

Lex Fridman (2:09:00.780)

a sovereignty and that Bitcoin espouses would actually one day be tested?

Lex Fridman (2:09:06.140)

Do you have like a legitimate concern because you said like one day very well might.

Lex Fridman (2:09:12.460)

Do you think it might go down?

Alex Gladstein (2:09:15.340)

First of all, Bitcoin has been attacked again, many times and we talk about the, you spoke

Alex Gladstein (2:09:21.260)

about this with Nick Carter on your show, the sort of protocol wars or conflict or whatever,

Lex Fridman (2:09:26.740)

right?

Lex Fridman (2:09:27.740)

And Bitcoin almost died a whole bunch of times during that and ended up surviving.

Lex Fridman (2:09:30.780)

Oh wow.

Alex Gladstein (2:09:31.780)

I didn't, I didn't know how bad the blocks at that point was.

Lex Fridman (2:09:32.940)

Oh it got really bad.

Alex Gladstein (2:09:34.660)

It was, it was a sort of a very existential threat and Bitcoin survived and that's why

Alex Gladstein (2:09:40.380)

I'm so intrigued by it is that it basically survived an attack in an environment several

Alex Gladstein (2:09:47.540)

years ago when Bitcoin was much more vulnerable than it is today.

Alex Gladstein (2:09:51.240)

It survived an attack by a conglomeration of Chinese billionaires, Silicon Valley corporations

Lex Fridman (2:09:55.860)

and a ton of people who owned the majority of the hash rate and all this infrastructure.

Alex Gladstein (2:10:00.540)

They had 83% of all the hash rate and they couldn't get what they wanted and that was

Lex Fridman (2:10:05.220)

so intriguing to me.

Lex Fridman (2:10:06.220)

Like why didn't it, why didn't it get killed?

Lex Fridman (2:10:08.500)

So as Nick said, I think you should read The Block Size War, which is a book on that you

Lex Fridman (2:10:13.140)

can get on Amazon by Jonathan Beer.

Alex Gladstein (2:10:15.380)

Really good, kind of like really important to understand the, the, the, the scaling conflict

Lex Fridman (2:10:21.620)

and the visions over the different visions of what Bitcoin should be.

Lex Fridman (2:10:24.620)

And you know, again, people like me believe it should be a freedom tool, not like a payments

Lex Fridman (2:10:27.940)

technology for retail.

Lex Fridman (2:10:30.060)

And I'm just, I'm glad it worked out the way it did because it almost didn't.

Lex Fridman (2:10:33.580)

Do you think a human's civilization will destroy itself?

Lex Fridman (2:10:38.440)

So if we think about all the threats facing human civilization, nuclear war, natural or

Lex Fridman (2:10:46.660)

engineer pandemics, you know, we talk about human rights violations.

Alex Gladstein (2:10:52.000)

We talk about authoritarian governments taking control of the money supply, but do you have

Lex Fridman (2:11:00.220)

grander concerns for the future of human civilization?

Lex Fridman (2:11:04.180)

Do you have hope for us becoming a multi planetary species?

Lex Fridman (2:11:07.100)

Yeah, I mean, I, I guess longterm we'd want to decentralize, right?

Alex Gladstein (2:11:11.640)

We don't want a single point of failure in the earth is a single point of failure.

Lex Fridman (2:11:16.620)

But no, I mean, you look at all this kind of like space fiction and I mean, who would

Lex Fridman (2:11:21.200)

want to live on Mars, man?

Lex Fridman (2:11:22.500)

It's like a fricking desert.

Alex Gladstein (2:11:23.500)

I mean, the earth is so beautiful.

Lex Fridman (2:11:24.860)

I hope we can save it.

Alex Gladstein (2:11:26.580)

You know, it's just so gorgeous when you look at the earth compared to any other like exoplanet

Alex Gladstein (2:11:31.020)

or whatever you look at it, I mean, the earth is so spectacular and wondrous and singular.

Alex Gladstein (2:11:36.140)

I think we got to do everything we can to save it here.

Lex Fridman (2:11:39.740)

That's funny.

Alex Gladstein (2:11:40.740)

I mean, I'm sure a lot of people would have said that about Europe before the explorers

Lex Fridman (2:11:46.600)

ventured out Columbus and the rest out into the unknown.

Alex Gladstein (2:11:52.020)

The thing about human nature is that we are explorers too.

Lex Fridman (2:11:54.620)

We are.

Alex Gladstein (2:11:55.620)

Some small fraction of us are insane enough to explore in the most dangerous grounds and

Alex Gladstein (2:12:02.020)

I'm pretty sure there's quite a few people that would love to take the first step on

Alex Gladstein (2:12:06.280)

Mars, the first few steps on Mars in the harshest of environments, even when the odds of survival

Lex Fridman (2:12:11.980)

extremely low.

Lex Fridman (2:12:14.180)

And I'm thankful for those people because I sit back and drink my vodka back here on

Alex Gladstein (2:12:19.420)

earth and enjoy good friendships because I think ultimately that step to Mars is going

Alex Gladstein (2:12:26.020)

to be a first step into exploring and colonizing the rest of the galaxy.

Alex Gladstein (2:12:34.220)

Mars might be a harsh environment, but maybe space is not like other planets, other exoplanets,

Lex Fridman (2:12:42.740)

but also forget planets, just creating colonies that flow about in space.

Alex Gladstein (2:12:48.380)

There's exciting technologies that are yet to be discovered, yet to be engineered and

Alex Gladstein (2:12:51.780)

built that I think require that first painful step.

Alex Gladstein (2:12:56.820)

The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step and I think Mars is that first step.

Alex Gladstein (2:13:00.620)

Yeah, no, I was born the day before the Challenger blew up and it was always so tragic for me

Alex Gladstein (2:13:06.780)

to look back on that because that really altered our arc in terms of space exploration.

Alex Gladstein (2:13:11.700)

That had not happened.

Alex Gladstein (2:13:12.700)

We'd be on a very different arc and I do respect and admire people pushing for exploration,

Lex Fridman (2:13:17.580)

but at the same time, I just want to recognize that we know how unique Earth is and I do

Lex Fridman (2:13:24.540)

think we got to do everything we can to protect it.

Lex Fridman (2:13:30.060)

But I think you've already answered the question if we're going to destroy ourselves.

Lex Fridman (2:13:33.140)

Oh, yeah, I guess.

Lex Fridman (2:13:35.860)

Are you hopeful?

Lex Fridman (2:13:36.860)

Okay, fine.

Alex Gladstein (2:13:38.140)

If we do not decentralize properly out into different physical spaces, probably, I guess,

Lex Fridman (2:13:45.340)

yeah.

Alex Gladstein (2:13:46.340)

I mean, do you have concerns that are immediately facing you, so not in terms of the injustices

Lex Fridman (2:13:53.220)

on the world, but nuclear war?

Alex Gladstein (2:13:55.020)

Yeah, look, I'm a lot more concerned about what's happening right now.

Lex Fridman (2:13:58.980)

Like, what is destroying ourselves?

Alex Gladstein (2:14:01.860)

If you were to go and see what's happening in Xinjiang or North Korea right now or Eritrea,

Lex Fridman (2:14:07.700)

that is destroying ourselves and it's already happened.

Lex Fridman (2:14:10.420)

So I guess the end, that's why I said, yes, I mean, if you don't decentralize and power

Lex Fridman (2:14:15.220)

is completely under one person, life is destroyed as we know it.

Lex Fridman (2:14:20.900)

And you don't have to go into science fiction to know what a totalitarian hellscape dystopia

Lex Fridman (2:14:27.460)

is.

Alex Gladstein (2:14:28.460)

There's several that exist already and let's try to help those people at the same time

Lex Fridman (2:14:33.660)

as we're trying to push out into space would be my counter, I guess.

Alex Gladstein (2:14:37.900)

Yeah, I agree with you.

Lex Fridman (2:14:39.520)

In my mind, destruction and suffering are next door neighbors.

Lex Fridman (2:14:43.220)

So we don't need to destroy all of human civilization.

Alex Gladstein (2:14:46.300)

If much, a large fraction of it lives in conditions that we would equate to suffering, that's

Alex Gladstein (2:14:53.060)

not a good world.

Alex Gladstein (2:14:55.980)

Is there advice that you would give to young people today about life, about career, about

Lex Fridman (2:15:01.460)

how they can help a world where 53% are living under authoritarian governments, but in general,

Lex Fridman (2:15:10.100)

a world that's full of injustice, but also full of opportunity?

Alex Gladstein (2:15:15.020)

Just thinking about my own upbringing, I went to a public school here and we never learned

Lex Fridman (2:15:19.980)

about money.

Alex Gladstein (2:15:21.540)

It was never part of our curriculum.

Lex Fridman (2:15:24.940)

Even personal finances was not part of our curriculum.

Alex Gladstein (2:15:27.780)

You could take like an optional course to learn about like business or something.

Lex Fridman (2:15:31.940)

And I think that that would be really valuable as a young person or as a teenager to start

Alex Gladstein (2:15:38.020)

incorporating into your children's lives is like a curiosity about what is money, I think

Lex Fridman (2:15:43.300)

would be very healthy, regardless of what path that takes them down.

Alex Gladstein (2:15:47.500)

Because we don't think about it enough, either from an administrative sort of personal finance

Lex Fridman (2:15:51.000)

thing about like responsibility, or more fundamentally, like, what is it and who creates it?

Lex Fridman (2:15:57.500)

Where did it come from?

Lex Fridman (2:15:58.960)

Both of those things are very important.

Lex Fridman (2:16:00.260)

So my advice to a young person would be to get to the point where you feel like you can

Lex Fridman (2:16:04.540)

answer the question, what is money?

Lex Fridman (2:16:07.620)

So you ultimately see money as a kind of power and freedom and a mechanism of suffering.

Lex Fridman (2:16:13.140)

It is so core to everything.

Alex Gladstein (2:16:15.420)

The United States, whether you want to call it the Pax Americana, the Empire, the hyperpower,

Alex Gladstein (2:16:20.940)

whatever you want to call this moment in time where the US is dominant around the world,

Alex Gladstein (2:16:24.340)

it is because of the fact that we have this petrodollar system, where we are able to force

Lex Fridman (2:16:30.580)

the Saudis and other oil producing nations to sell their oil in dollars.

Alex Gladstein (2:16:36.240)

That is really inescapable, inseparable from our power.

Lex Fridman (2:16:40.440)

And that's very rarely talked about.

Lex Fridman (2:16:42.340)

And it's very important to understand.

Lex Fridman (2:16:44.160)

So yeah, if young people could start thinking about that stuff, it'd be good.

Alex Gladstein (2:16:47.980)

I remember being, it sounds silly to say, but I remember being really uncomfortable

Lex Fridman (2:16:52.660)

that I was dependent on my parents at a young age for like financial.

Alex Gladstein (2:16:58.380)

You need to be 18 to have a bank account or whatever.

Alex Gladstein (2:17:01.580)

One of the people that we supported at Ahrefs through our, we do software development funding

Alex Gladstein (2:17:05.520)

for people in Bitcoin, open source projects.

Lex Fridman (2:17:08.060)

And one of the guys we funded is this very young, smart sort of prodigy.

Alex Gladstein (2:17:11.940)

He's like 17.

Lex Fridman (2:17:12.940)

But one of the reasons he got into Bitcoin was because he wanted to have control of his

Alex Gladstein (2:17:16.300)

money when he was like 14.

Alex Gladstein (2:17:17.300)

I mean, if you think in history, people who invented all kinds of incredible contributions

Alex Gladstein (2:17:22.960)

to science or math, I mean, a lot of them did it before they were 15.

Lex Fridman (2:17:27.540)

So think about that maturity that is capable and possible in many people.

Alex Gladstein (2:17:31.680)

Like I've participated in some of the years ago, some of the sort of selection processes

Lex Fridman (2:17:36.940)

for like the Teal fellowship, which is like really amazing.

Alex Gladstein (2:17:39.060)

Like these people who are 14, 15, 16, who don't need to go to college, they're already

Alex Gladstein (2:17:42.700)

like so smart, they can figure it out, but they wouldn't be allowed to have a bank account.

Lex Fridman (2:17:46.460)

So hey, that's kind of cool.

Alex Gladstein (2:17:48.580)

Like now you have a permissionless money, you can open up yourself without permission

Alex Gladstein (2:17:52.460)

from your parents.

Lex Fridman (2:17:53.460)

That's kind of cool.

Alex Gladstein (2:17:54.460)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:17:55.460)

That's fascinating to me.

Alex Gladstein (2:17:56.460)

I feel like I would have loved my parents more if I had freedom to fully realize myself,

Lex Fridman (2:18:06.340)

because I felt like I was a little bit trapped by, I don't know, it's not explicit, right?

Alex Gladstein (2:18:11.660)

It's a little bit, it's like a subtle push that you're somehow dependent on them.

Alex Gladstein (2:18:17.420)

I mean, part of that is like, I think it actually very much has to do not talking about money.

Lex Fridman (2:18:23.260)

Like what does it take to operate as an individual entity in this world?

Alex Gladstein (2:18:26.660)

Like knowing that when you're 10 years old, knowing that when you're very young, so that

Alex Gladstein (2:18:31.580)

you've, then you see the, how amazing it is to have the support of your parents until

Lex Fridman (2:18:39.100)

you're 18.

Alex Gladstein (2:18:40.100)

Like have that freedom, have the freedom to appreciate the value your parents bring.

Lex Fridman (2:18:47.700)

And at the same time, the freedom to leave in some capacity to carve your own path.

Alex Gladstein (2:18:55.780)

I mean, like just all of that, I think for weirdos like me, especially because I was

Alex Gladstein (2:19:00.940)

a very nontraditional path that I think it would be very empowering and certainly would

Alex Gladstein (2:19:06.620)

be empowering in the third world.

Lex Fridman (2:19:08.060)

Not just weirdos like you.

Alex Gladstein (2:19:09.060)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (2:19:10.060)

I was going to mention one of the people I got who taught me about Bitcoin, her name

Alex Gladstein (2:19:13.700)

is Roya Mapoob.

Alex Gladstein (2:19:14.700)

She's an Afghan technology CEO, and in 2013 she started paying her employees in Bitcoin

Alex Gladstein (2:19:20.700)

because they were not allowed to open bank accounts, the women that worked for her.

Lex Fridman (2:19:24.840)

She started the country's first female, like all female software company.

Lex Fridman (2:19:29.900)

And if they brought cash home, their like husbands or uncles or brothers would steal

Lex Fridman (2:19:33.260)

it from them.

Alex Gladstein (2:19:34.260)

There's like a power patriarchal dominance thing going on.

Lex Fridman (2:19:37.000)

But they had phones and she was able to pay them in Bitcoin and no one knew, and it gave

Alex Gladstein (2:19:41.680)

them that power.

Lex Fridman (2:19:42.820)

And that's always stuck in my mind as a very interesting effect of this kind of thing of

Alex Gladstein (2:19:47.340)

permissionless money, like that it can be an empowerment tool.

Lex Fridman (2:19:50.420)

So absolutely.

Lex Fridman (2:19:51.420)

So in your own personal life, where did the deep concern for the suffering in the world

Lex Fridman (2:20:00.600)

come from?

Lex Fridman (2:20:02.500)

Where was that born?

Alex Gladstein (2:20:04.740)

I was going to be an engineer actually, and then in 2003 we invaded Iraq and I got very

Alex Gladstein (2:20:09.940)

interested in why we did that as a nation and I switched my focus of study to like international

Alex Gladstein (2:20:16.320)

relations and that's how I kind of went down the kind of political science democracy rabbit

Alex Gladstein (2:20:21.700)

hole and ended up getting a job at the human rights foundation.

Lex Fridman (2:20:24.900)

So that I'm a very much a child of like 9 11 and the Iraq war.

Alex Gladstein (2:20:28.620)

Those are the two really formative events for me personally.

Lex Fridman (2:20:32.540)

Can you break that apart a little bit?

Lex Fridman (2:20:33.780)

Like what illusion about this world was broken apart by the invasion of Iraq?

Alex Gladstein (2:20:44.100)

Well I think first of all, 9 11 just shifted the world dynamics completely from a focus

Alex Gladstein (2:20:48.860)

on big power politics between the US, Russia and China to this new threat of Islamic terror.

Lex Fridman (2:20:56.620)

And a lot of it we learned later, a lot of the things we did, we were manufactured, choreographed,

Alex Gladstein (2:21:01.000)

like there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Alex Gladstein (2:21:03.380)

Like the reason our rulers said we needed to invade and destroy this country was a lie.

Lex Fridman (2:21:08.400)

And that I think has really been forgotten.

Alex Gladstein (2:21:10.860)

Like I think a lot of like the Zoomers like today don't really know a lot about that time

Alex Gladstein (2:21:15.100)

period.

Lex Fridman (2:21:16.100)

I mean it's pretty crazy.

Alex Gladstein (2:21:17.100)

Unanimously, I mean Democrat, Republican, like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, like and

Alex Gladstein (2:21:23.220)

the Republicans, everybody wanted to invade this country and it's a confusing time.

Alex Gladstein (2:21:30.100)

There's a really good book by Ian McEwen called Saturday, a fiction book that takes place

Lex Fridman (2:21:34.020)

during I think 2003 and it's one day in the life of the doctor in London.

Alex Gladstein (2:21:39.200)

It's really good though to revisit this time because he has two characters, he has characters

Lex Fridman (2:21:44.260)

in the book, one of whom is very pro war and one of them is very against war.

Alex Gladstein (2:21:47.900)

Basically he, the father himself is pro war and his son is against it and they have all

Lex Fridman (2:21:51.300)

these debates.

Lex Fridman (2:21:52.300)

And it's nice to go back to revisit but that time was, it's really crazy and it really

Alex Gladstein (2:21:56.860)

showed you that like the media could be captured into like helping promote this idea of like

Alex Gladstein (2:22:02.060)

invading another country.

Lex Fridman (2:22:03.840)

So I was very curious about why we did it and like who was pulling the strings and what

Alex Gladstein (2:22:08.100)

are the reasons that we went.

Lex Fridman (2:22:10.060)

And what's really interesting is that like I took all these courses on and interviewed

Alex Gladstein (2:22:13.660)

all these decision makers, whether they were like neocons or whatever, different people

Lex Fridman (2:22:18.420)

who were involved.

Lex Fridman (2:22:19.420)

And the whole like dollar reserve currency thing like really never came up until like

Lex Fridman (2:22:24.300)

I learned about it more recently because of Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (2:22:27.320)

And today when I look back, it seems kind of obvious that the reason we invaded Iraq

Lex Fridman (2:22:30.940)

was because Saddam Hussein wanted to sell oil in euros.

Alex Gladstein (2:22:35.060)

It seems really obvious when you go back and look at the chronology of it and we were like,

Alex Gladstein (2:22:39.300)

no, we actually don't want you to sell dollars in euros because that would threaten the dollar.

Lex Fridman (2:22:43.520)

So we're going to invade you and then you're not going to do it and then no one else is

Lex Fridman (2:22:45.820)

going to like sell dollars in euros, just oil in euros, right?

Alex Gladstein (2:22:50.060)

I guess you could say the same thing about Qaddafi, but we as a nation have very much

Lex Fridman (2:22:55.060)

protected our reserve currency, let's put it that way.

Alex Gladstein (2:22:57.660)

Yeah, actually one of the things that Bitcoin community has motivated me to do is to look

Alex Gladstein (2:23:01.700)

back to the histories that I have studied myself from just even the two world wars,

Alex Gladstein (2:23:07.460)

the history of the 20th century from a perspective of the monetary system of money.

Lex Fridman (2:23:13.220)

And it's interesting.

Alex Gladstein (2:23:14.660)

It's interesting to look at human history in the context of money.

Lex Fridman (2:23:17.580)

Can't we be patriotic and be pro America, but like not want the petrodollar?

Alex Gladstein (2:23:21.940)

Like I should be proud of my country.

Lex Fridman (2:23:24.100)

Why do we need to be propping up the Saudis?

Lex Fridman (2:23:26.180)

Why do we need to be, you know, threatening to invade other countries if they sell their

Lex Fridman (2:23:30.020)

oil for a different currency?

Alex Gladstein (2:23:31.620)

I think we can be just as powerful as we are today, if not more powerful in a Bitcoin world.

Alex Gladstein (2:23:36.100)

If you think about the infrastructure Americans are building, all the innovations we're building,

Alex Gladstein (2:23:39.340)

all the wealth we have, I think we'll be fine, better than fine.

Lex Fridman (2:23:43.140)

And we won't have these horrible negative externalities.

Alex Gladstein (2:23:46.100)

It's really an optimistic vision for the future.

Alex Gladstein (2:23:49.740)

I thought we learned the lesson of 9 11 and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (2:23:56.580)

But we're leaving and you know, Biden announced we're leaving Afghanistan this year, 20 years

Lex Fridman (2:24:01.020)

for what?

Alex Gladstein (2:24:02.020)

The Taliban are going to take over.

Lex Fridman (2:24:03.500)

Well, I mean, that's at least a good, the longest war, right?

Alex Gladstein (2:24:08.380)

The forever wars.

Alex Gladstein (2:24:09.640)

I feel like the past 20 years or whatever it is, 18 years, 19 years, we've been very

Alex Gladstein (2:24:17.300)

skeptical about invading other countries, about, we've been skeptical about military

Lex Fridman (2:24:24.900)

intervention in other nations.

Alex Gladstein (2:24:27.460)

Well, our leaders certainly haven't, we have like seven active wars right now, and neither

Lex Fridman (2:24:33.420)

the Russians and the Chinese, everybody's starting to invade everybody else.

Alex Gladstein (2:24:37.900)

I mean, so yes, but I meant to a degree that I was worried about like conflicts with, hot

Lex Fridman (2:24:42.940)

conflicts with Iran, with North Korea, those kinds of things.

Alex Gladstein (2:24:47.900)

That there was not as much war mongering as I was afraid about.

Lex Fridman (2:24:54.660)

But yes, you're absolutely right.

Alex Gladstein (2:24:56.020)

We're still, there's a big presence by the United States and other nations and across

Lex Fridman (2:25:01.200)

the world that's military.

Alex Gladstein (2:25:03.140)

The military industrial complex is a thing that has huge detrimental ripple effects throughout

Lex Fridman (2:25:11.660)

the entirety of our governments.

Alex Gladstein (2:25:13.220)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:25:14.220)

So the big question is how do we prevent the rise of this like authoritarian surveillance

Alex Gladstein (2:25:20.800)

state in China while at the same time kind of diffusing the military industrial complex

Lex Fridman (2:25:26.060)

on our side?

Alex Gladstein (2:25:27.340)

That to me is like the biggest challenge of our time.

Lex Fridman (2:25:29.820)

I don't have the answer, but we should keep digging.

Alex Gladstein (2:25:32.140)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:25:33.140)

I believe there's technological innovations.

Alex Gladstein (2:25:36.900)

You're suggesting that perhaps one of the technological innovations like is Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (2:25:40.740)

It's a big part of it.

Alex Gladstein (2:25:42.020)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (2:25:43.020)

On the money side, I think the information side, there's innovations that are open, that's

Alex Gladstein (2:25:47.300)

possible.

Lex Fridman (2:25:48.460)

And the political side, I'm the most skeptical about.

Alex Gladstein (2:25:50.900)

I just feel like there's, without hot wars that we don't seem to make any kind of progress.

Alex Gladstein (2:25:58.020)

Cities just grow, corruption and greed grow and human nature does not do well in the political

Alex Gladstein (2:26:04.980)

arena.

Lex Fridman (2:26:05.980)

So I hope technology can outpace the darker sides of human nature.

Lex Fridman (2:26:11.420)

So you're busy fighting the demons, the darkness that's out there, but looking in the mirror,

Lex Fridman (2:26:17.620)

you're a finite being.

Alex Gladstein (2:26:19.100)

Unfortunately this ride ends for you pretty soon.

Lex Fridman (2:26:24.380)

Do you ever ask yourself about the meaning at all of why the hell us descendants of apes

Lex Fridman (2:26:32.340)

are even on this thing, striving so hard to make a better world for ourselves?

Lex Fridman (2:26:39.140)

I don't often zoom out that much.

Alex Gladstein (2:26:41.700)

I feel like my day job is pretty interesting.

Lex Fridman (2:26:43.820)

It keeps me very engaged with all the stuff we've been talking about.

Alex Gladstein (2:26:49.740)

As far as the meaning of life though, it seems quite clear that we do have the possibility

Alex Gladstein (2:26:58.860)

as a species to create these beautiful communities and constructs and to share an exploration

Alex Gladstein (2:27:06.380)

of the world together that is often marred by cold realities that we've discussed.

Lex Fridman (2:27:14.260)

But I do feel like in a way that the meaning of life is that pursuit, of course biologically

Alex Gladstein (2:27:22.740)

is to spread our species, but also to pursue knowledge and science and innovation and freedom

Lex Fridman (2:27:31.780)

most importantly.

Alex Gladstein (2:27:33.380)

I think freedom has to guide us or else we end up with prison camps.

Lex Fridman (2:27:37.820)

If we don't let freedom guide us, we end up with the prison camps.

Lex Fridman (2:27:40.900)

So we need to have scientific innovation and adventurism and colonization of the stars,

Lex Fridman (2:27:45.940)

but without the slavery and without the prison camps.

Alex Gladstein (2:27:48.460)

I think that's so key.

Alex Gladstein (2:27:49.700)

There's something about the creation of beauty that seems fundamental to human nature and

Lex Fridman (2:27:55.500)

what seems beautiful is these communities that don't have suffering, they don't have

Lex Fridman (2:28:04.660)

injustice.

Lex Fridman (2:28:05.660)

And we have some kind of inner sense of what is injustice.

Alex Gladstein (2:28:09.500)

I don't know, like some of the human rights that you've mentioned earlier, they're just

Alex Gladstein (2:28:14.500)

philosophical constructs, but they're also seem to be somehow deeply in us too.

Lex Fridman (2:28:21.500)

We have a sense of what is right and what is wrong.

Alex Gladstein (2:28:24.380)

It's not just a kind of illusion that we've all agreed on.

Lex Fridman (2:28:28.140)

Yeah, arbitrary power, torture, executions.

Alex Gladstein (2:28:31.620)

We know these things are wrong.

Lex Fridman (2:28:32.620)

I mean, we know they're wrong.

Alex Gladstein (2:28:34.540)

We don't have to read a book to know that.

Lex Fridman (2:28:38.220)

But you do need to...

Alex Gladstein (2:28:40.780)

People can get brainwashed.

Alex Gladstein (2:28:41.780)

I mean, you talk to people who've grown up in North Korea, they don't know any better.

Alex Gladstein (2:28:46.060)

They don't know what's going on in the outside world.

Lex Fridman (2:28:48.740)

So they've never experienced anything differently.

Lex Fridman (2:28:51.260)

So that's why, look, technology can play a big role here in terms of the meaning of it

Lex Fridman (2:28:56.260)

all.

Alex Gladstein (2:28:57.260)

It can really help emancipate, liberate people, at least so that they can make their own choices

Lex Fridman (2:29:01.260)

about what to do, at least so that we're on a level playing field.

Lex Fridman (2:29:04.340)

So technologies like the internet and Bitcoin, they can at least give you the option to do

Lex Fridman (2:29:10.860)

things your own way on your own terms.

Lex Fridman (2:29:14.020)

And then from there, we'll see.

Alex Gladstein (2:29:17.060)

I think it's important that we have design choices where we can have a little more say

Lex Fridman (2:29:22.940)

and not everything be preprogrammed for us.

Lex Fridman (2:29:26.380)

That would be very disappointing.

Lex Fridman (2:29:28.500)

So I mean, the open web and encryption in Bitcoin, these are things that help prevent

Alex Gladstein (2:29:34.400)

social engineering and that promote more freedom and more possibilities, honestly, and more

Alex Gladstein (2:29:40.220)

entrepreneurship and more creativity and more scientific inquiry.

Alex Gladstein (2:29:43.660)

I mean, think about the people who tried to shut down scientific inquiry 500, 600 years

Alex Gladstein (2:29:47.820)

ago or whatever that were trying to say the earth was the center of everything and they

Lex Fridman (2:29:54.220)

were wrong.

Lex Fridman (2:29:55.220)

And then all these conservative religious types throughout history have always said

Alex Gladstein (2:29:59.580)

that there's no value in science and there's no value in technology and they've been wrong

Alex Gladstein (2:30:05.060)

the whole time.

Lex Fridman (2:30:06.060)

So let's continue pushing here.

Alex Gladstein (2:30:07.940)

Let's continue pushing.

Alex Gladstein (2:30:09.900)

It's kind of scary to me sometimes, humbling, beautiful, but also scary to think of.

Alex Gladstein (2:30:15.300)

You mentioned North Korea, people are kind of living in ignorance.

Alex Gladstein (2:30:20.500)

It's scary to me to think about how much ignorance there is in the world today, like how little

Alex Gladstein (2:30:24.620)

I know personally, or us as a human civilization knows there's yet to be discovered to that

Lex Fridman (2:30:30.260)

very...

Lex Fridman (2:30:31.260)

Well, there's a difference between laziness and ignorance, right?

Lex Fridman (2:30:32.780)

So I would be lazy if I didn't take advantage of the internet, right?

Alex Gladstein (2:30:38.140)

Someone in North Korea doesn't have the option.

Lex Fridman (2:30:40.140)

They don't have the option.

Alex Gladstein (2:30:41.140)

There's literally no way for them to access the internet.

Lex Fridman (2:30:43.040)

So there's kind of like social laziness that philosophers have warned about forever that

Alex Gladstein (2:30:49.220)

we basically become sheep, okay, and then there's actual like brainwashing and censorship that's

Lex Fridman (2:30:55.620)

possible like by closing off your population and keeping them off like the internet, right?

Lex Fridman (2:31:01.780)

So I think these are two very different concepts.

Lex Fridman (2:31:03.580)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (2:31:04.580)

But I also mean just like not even laziness, but cognitive limitations and just historical

Alex Gladstein (2:31:10.460)

scientific limitations like, you know, we're a very young species, like all of the exciting

Alex Gladstein (2:31:17.820)

stuff we've been talking about have happened on the scale of decades, maybe centuries.

Alex Gladstein (2:31:22.340)

We're very young and all the cool stuff we've come up with and it's just humbling to think

Alex Gladstein (2:31:26.740)

about how little we know, but you're right that, you know, ultimately having the freedom

Alex Gladstein (2:31:32.060)

to keep exploring, keep venturing out, even if we later discover that a lot of the stuff

Alex Gladstein (2:31:38.200)

we've been doing now is ethically horrible.

Alex Gladstein (2:31:44.000)

If you think about animals or I think about robots a lot, the kind of things we might

Alex Gladstein (2:31:48.300)

be doing to other consciousnesses that are here on earth might be, we might see as atrocities

Alex Gladstein (2:31:55.920)

later on, but ultimately you have to have the freedom to explore those kinds of ideas

Lex Fridman (2:32:00.300)

and without that freedom, you don't even get the chance to be lazy.

Lex Fridman (2:32:04.660)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (2:32:05.660)

I mean, look, don't be a sheep.

Lex Fridman (2:32:08.760)

It's easy to be a sheep.

Alex Gladstein (2:32:09.760)

No offense to sheep.

Lex Fridman (2:32:10.760)

And there's some practical things, man.

Alex Gladstein (2:32:12.060)

Get on signal, start encrypting your messages, take control over your privacy.

Lex Fridman (2:32:18.220)

The media doesn't want you to, but check out Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (2:32:20.740)

You can be your own bank.

Lex Fridman (2:32:22.140)

You can transact with people around the world and no one can stop you.

Alex Gladstein (2:32:25.200)

This can put a stop to a lot of arbitrary power and a lot of human rights violations.

Alex Gladstein (2:32:32.180)

Don't use WeChat, question more, research what's happening in Xinjiang, I mean, learn

Alex Gladstein (2:32:38.580)

about what's happening in the genocide in that country and let's think about how we

Alex Gladstein (2:32:43.420)

can build our societies so that we never have that kind of power concentration ever again.

Alex Gladstein (2:32:48.380)

Each of us can make a difference.

Lex Fridman (2:32:49.820)

Alex, it's a huge honor to talk to you.

Alex Gladstein (2:32:51.900)

I've been a fan of your work.

Alex Gladstein (2:32:53.140)

A lot of people spoke really highly of you as one of the beacons of hope for our human

Alex Gladstein (2:32:57.940)

civilization.

Lex Fridman (2:32:58.940)

So I'm really glad we got a chance to talk.

Alex Gladstein (2:33:01.500)

Thank you for wasting all this time with me today.

Lex Fridman (2:33:03.020)

It's been an honor.

Alex Gladstein (2:33:04.020)

Thanks man.

Lex Fridman (2:33:05.020)

A lot of fun.

Alex Gladstein (2:33:06.260)

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Alex Glastine.

Lex Fridman (2:33:09.260)

To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

Lex Fridman (2:33:13.300)

And now, let me leave you with some words from Alice Walker.

Alex Gladstein (2:33:18.380)

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

Alex Gladstein (2:33:24.900)

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Lex Fridman (30:00.260)

But for me, at least the way I look at it today in 2021, the threat from big data analysis

Alex Gladstein (30:07.320)

used by governments and authoritarian regimes is terrifying.

Alex Gladstein (30:09.800)

I mean, to actually see what the Chinese Communist Party is doing where they have hundreds of

Alex Gladstein (30:14.360)

millions of cameras overseeing society, cameras that can tell who's a Uyghur and who's a

Lex Fridman (30:19.640)

Ham, that to me is terrifying and everything is sorted instantly.

Alex Gladstein (30:24.440)

There are supercomputers that are built in Urumqi, in Xinjiang for this explicit purpose.

Lex Fridman (30:30.840)

And it allows the government to quickly sort and basically commit genocide a lot faster

Lex Fridman (30:35.720)

and it's really scary.

Lex Fridman (30:37.120)

So I do agree and I've seen personally how powerful technology can be as a force for

Alex Gladstein (30:42.680)

freedom, but I'm very, very worried about big data analysis in the hands of governments.

Alex Gladstein (30:47.960)

See, that's funny because I tend to see governments as ultimately incompetent in the space of

Alex Gladstein (30:53.200)

technology to where there will always be lagging behind.

Lex Fridman (30:56.080)

So you look at what the Chinese surveillance systems are doing, I believe once it starts

Alex Gladstein (31:01.960)

getting bad enough that technologies would be created to resist that.

Lex Fridman (31:09.200)

So to mess with it from the hacker community, but also from the individual community.

Lex Fridman (31:14.880)

So surveillance is actually very difficult from a centralized perspective to collect

Alex Gladstein (31:20.640)

data about you, to detect everything you are because you can spoof a lot of that information.

Lex Fridman (31:24.880)

So I believe you can put power in the hands of the citizens to sort of feed the government

Alex Gladstein (31:29.920)

fake data to confuse it at a mass scale to where it'll make their surveillance less effective.

Alex Gladstein (31:38.040)

That could be very sort of hopeful.

Lex Fridman (31:39.440)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (31:40.440)

I mean, the practical application in Xinjiang, which is a territory the size of Alaska, where

Lex Fridman (31:44.880)

a large percentage of the population has been put into prison camps.

Alex Gladstein (31:48.960)

The current issue of the New Yorker has an absolutely harrowing essay that tells the

Alex Gladstein (31:53.540)

story of one such woman who in, I believe, 2017 got sucked into one of these camps and

Alex Gladstein (32:00.000)

it took her a year or more to get out.

Lex Fridman (32:04.040)

And she's talking about how in each home in Xinjiang, each home has a QR code on it that

Alex Gladstein (32:09.640)

the police can scan and get like a quick instant download of who lives there.

Lex Fridman (32:13.440)

Each car has, you know, like a scannable code.

Alex Gladstein (32:17.840)

Every single person has their DNA taken and the DNA is being sifted through and analyzed

Lex Fridman (32:22.840)

by algorithms.

Lex Fridman (32:24.240)

So this is like the Chinese government's laboratory for how can we use technology to oppress.

Lex Fridman (32:28.880)

It's like sort of like digital Leninism.

Lex Fridman (32:31.400)

And that to me is one of the biggest risks in our world today and it's not talked about

Lex Fridman (32:36.600)

enough.

Alex Gladstein (32:37.600)

That's interesting.

Lex Fridman (32:38.600)

So technology is basically enables the automation of oppression.

Alex Gladstein (32:42.760)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (32:43.760)

So like...

Lex Fridman (32:44.760)

But to define technology, big data analysis and, you know, maybe specific AI, etc. does,

Lex Fridman (32:51.800)

but encryption allows us to fight back.

Alex Gladstein (32:53.880)

It's very important people understand we have tools to fight back.

Lex Fridman (32:56.240)

The, you know, big brother can only grow if it can feed on your data.

Alex Gladstein (33:02.280)

If it can't get your data, it can't grow.

Lex Fridman (33:04.720)

So you have to willingly give up stuff to the cloud for this monster to grow.

Alex Gladstein (33:10.280)

We can like make the monster hungry and shrink it if we give it less data.

Lex Fridman (33:15.220)

And I think that's where I would agree with you in terms of like wanting to empower people

Alex Gladstein (33:18.260)

to be able to do stuff on their own terms in a sovereign way.

Lex Fridman (33:22.880)

And yeah, maybe you're kind of thinking like the personal assistant who helps out Tony

Alex Gladstein (33:26.800)

Stark or something like that.

Lex Fridman (33:28.800)

And that's, yeah, as long as there's no back doors and that's a sovereign thing that you've

Alex Gladstein (33:32.160)

popped up and created and you have the keys to, absolutely.

Lex Fridman (33:36.100)

But practically speaking, if we're talking about the world today as is, we need to be

Alex Gladstein (33:42.480)

concerned about the way that authoritarian regimes are using big data analysis and they're

Alex Gladstein (33:46.840)

going to buy this software and this equipment from the Chinese government, they're already

Alex Gladstein (33:50.080)

doing it.

Alex Gladstein (33:51.240)

State level surveillance has already been purchased by governments everywhere from Latin

Alex Gladstein (33:54.520)

America to Sub Saharan Africa to the heart of Europe.

Alex Gladstein (33:57.640)

There's been huge scandals in Britain over their purchase of Chinese surveillance technology.

Alex Gladstein (34:03.640)

Part of the Chinese government's Belt and Road campaign, which is basically to build

Alex Gladstein (34:08.360)

the infrastructure of this century and to be in control of it, part of that idea is

Alex Gladstein (34:13.560)

to ship out and install surveillance technology both at the telecom level and at the surveillance

Lex Fridman (34:19.760)

level across dozens of countries around the world and have that back door.

Alex Gladstein (34:24.080)

There's this national security law in China, which states that companies that are Chinese,

Lex Fridman (34:28.480)

which are abroad, are mandated to send data back to Beijing.

Lex Fridman (34:32.120)

So they are building this huge global surveillance state.

Lex Fridman (34:35.480)

And again, not talked about enough, you should go Google and research the Belt and Road.

Alex Gladstein (34:39.680)

I think it's very important that we confront this.

Alex Gladstein (34:42.440)

Yeah, I'm really glad you're talking about it because it's probably important to understand.

Alex Gladstein (34:48.240)

I'm also hopeful that as people get educated about how much their data, when collected,

Lex Fridman (34:56.520)

unencrypted, but in general, can be used to harm them.

Alex Gladstein (35:00.520)

I mean, it's almost like an education.

Alex Gladstein (35:02.840)

I feel like if you know, it's a double edged sword because I feel like people become fearful

Alex Gladstein (35:10.360)

too easily and that actually has a very negative effect on the quality of life.

Alex Gladstein (35:14.680)

In some sense, you want to have tools that allow you to live freely as opposed to live

Alex Gladstein (35:18.560)

in fear.

Lex Fridman (35:19.560)

If you live in fear, it's not a good way to live.

Lex Fridman (35:22.560)

So it's a balance.

Lex Fridman (35:23.560)

It's a free society versus a fear society.

Alex Gladstein (35:26.000)

Yeah, fear society.

Lex Fridman (35:27.000)

And look, people are, it's all about the trade offs you make in your daily life.

Alex Gladstein (35:30.560)

Like living more privately with more freedom is less convenient.

Lex Fridman (35:35.760)

You trade freedom and privacy for convenience and comfort and speed.

Alex Gladstein (35:41.120)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (35:42.120)

And the engineering decision and everything that you do.

Alex Gladstein (35:45.700)

In the West, in advanced democracies, we have not necessarily personally seen the results

Alex Gladstein (35:53.840)

of that trade off because we live in these free societies that have these checks and

Alex Gladstein (35:57.640)

balances and freedoms.

Lex Fridman (35:59.240)

But as soon as you step into an authoritarian state and you make those trade offs, your

Alex Gladstein (36:02.840)

life immediately becomes more restrictive.

Lex Fridman (36:06.280)

And what people are worried about is that even in advanced economies, market democracies,

Alex Gladstein (36:12.560)

etc., people are worried that they might not survive the great social digital transformation.

Lex Fridman (36:20.220)

You know, look at what the NSA is capable of doing.

Alex Gladstein (36:22.640)

I mean, for now, it's not that big of a problem because we still have free speech.

Lex Fridman (36:29.060)

But it's deeply concerning what Snowden revealed.

Lex Fridman (36:31.800)

And it's a nice reminder that we need to be focused on privacy and encryption and on helping

Lex Fridman (36:37.520)

users become more sovereign regardless of where you live.

Alex Gladstein (36:41.440)

It's kind of like a crutch to live in a free society.

Lex Fridman (36:43.840)

Like, you know, it's almost like a free lunch in a way.

Alex Gladstein (36:47.680)

You're not going to be sent to a prison camp because of the color of your skin or your

Lex Fridman (36:50.960)

beliefs or what you say about the government.

Lex Fridman (36:54.140)

And you're very lucky.

Alex Gladstein (36:55.280)

Again, most people do live in a society where you can be persecuted for those things.

Lex Fridman (37:00.600)

And I feel like, especially in America, we forget that we're distanced from that really

Lex Fridman (37:05.680)

strong reality, you know.

Lex Fridman (37:08.080)

On the topic of Snowden and the NSA, what should we be thinking about?

Alex Gladstein (37:13.040)

Because that feels like already an outdated set of conversations because of the information

Alex Gladstein (37:17.420)

we've gotten from the past.

Alex Gladstein (37:19.440)

It feels like everything's gotten quiet now in terms of how much we actually know about

Alex Gladstein (37:22.880)

the...

Lex Fridman (37:23.880)

No, it's hugely important.

Alex Gladstein (37:24.880)

I think the two lessons from Snowden are, A, the Patriot Act and the War on Terror and

Lex Fridman (37:30.180)

mass surveillance are not necessary for our democracy and for our freedoms.

Alex Gladstein (37:36.000)

This was a false choice.

Lex Fridman (37:37.240)

We never had to sacrifice them to be safer.

Lex Fridman (37:40.640)

And we've seen that.

Alex Gladstein (37:41.640)

The government has spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on these like surveillance

Alex Gladstein (37:44.920)

programs that you can read about have amounted to very little, except for tremendous bureaucratic

Lex Fridman (37:49.780)

waste and, you know, erosion of our freedoms.

Lex Fridman (37:54.280)

But at the same time, we need to practice more privacy.

Lex Fridman (37:57.400)

And the dramatic increase in the usage of Signal, for example, has been really, really

Alex Gladstein (38:02.920)

great to see.

Alex Gladstein (38:04.240)

It's fantastic that tens of millions of people are downloading Signal and using it.

Alex Gladstein (38:08.400)

You should try to be onboarding more and more of your conversations onto Signal, for example,

Lex Fridman (38:13.600)

where governments can't see what you're saying.

Alex Gladstein (38:16.480)

Maybe they can see the metadata.

Alex Gladstein (38:18.000)

Maybe they can see that you sent your phone number, sent a message to someone else's phone

Alex Gladstein (38:22.200)

number at this time, but they can't see what's inside.

Lex Fridman (38:25.120)

So using encryption in your life is very, very important.

Alex Gladstein (38:27.680)

That's a good starting point.

Lex Fridman (38:29.040)

I would say that's kind of step A.

Alex Gladstein (38:32.480)

The ideas of democracy, the ideas of the balance of power, all the ideas that we were talking

Lex Fridman (38:40.280)

about, the constructs, were inventions.

Alex Gladstein (38:44.120)

I wonder if there's other inventions that will allow us to sort of not engage, not give

Lex Fridman (38:50.640)

governments or any centralized institutions so much power.

Lex Fridman (38:56.120)

Why do citizens have to use Signal?

Lex Fridman (38:59.920)

Because it's an effort.

Alex Gladstein (39:00.920)

You have to understand exactly why.

Lex Fridman (39:03.920)

So that's a nice little solution for a particular set of problems.

Lex Fridman (39:06.520)

But there's a million other ways that data, I'm sure, is being collected constantly.

Alex Gladstein (39:11.640)

If we don't create a system that prevents the establishment of these centralized powers,

Alex Gladstein (39:18.840)

then we'll always have this problem.

Lex Fridman (39:20.720)

Yeah, I think we can keep it simple for the purposes of this conversation.

Alex Gladstein (39:23.760)

You have politics, information, and money.

Lex Fridman (39:26.020)

Those are the three things I would encourage us to focus on.

Alex Gladstein (39:28.880)

In politics, yes, someone invented democracy.

Alex Gladstein (39:31.400)

I mean, whether it was the Greeks, the West Africans, or many others around the world

Alex Gladstein (39:36.560)

around the same time invented this idea that we should be ruled by rules and not by rulers.

Lex Fridman (39:42.840)

And that has evolved dramatically.

Lex Fridman (39:45.920)

And then you have information.

Lex Fridman (39:47.320)

Information also used to be highly centralized, right?

Alex Gladstein (39:50.160)

Think about how rich you had to be to gain access to a library before the printing press,

Alex Gladstein (39:54.840)

or how much money you had to have, or how close to the king or the feudal lord you had

Alex Gladstein (40:00.060)

to be to be able to have that ability.

Lex Fridman (40:02.680)

But now, the majority of the world, billions of people have access to all information in

Alex Gladstein (40:08.040)

their pocket, and they can set up an account on social media and get their word out.

Lex Fridman (40:11.600)

So not only politics, but information has been dramatically decentralized.

Lex Fridman (40:17.240)

And I would say that encrypted messaging is kind of a corollary to that second innovation

Alex Gladstein (40:22.760)

in as much as now people are like more effortlessly, like Signal is a lot easier to use than PGP,

Alex Gladstein (40:28.240)

for example.

Alex Gladstein (40:29.720)

They're more easily able to practice privacy when it comes to having private messages globally.

Alex Gladstein (40:36.100)

These are all good things and we need to keep pushing.

Lex Fridman (40:38.440)

And I think money is like, honestly, maybe the most important piece.

Lex Fridman (40:42.680)

And that's why I spent so much time thinking about Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (40:45.360)

Okay, so politics, information, money, yes, let's talk about money.

Lex Fridman (40:52.280)

What is money?

Lex Fridman (40:53.280)

Why is it important to think about in the context of human rights?

Alex Gladstein (40:58.480)

I have witnessed money be peripheralized, it has taken a backseat in the human rights

Lex Fridman (41:06.600)

conversation.

Alex Gladstein (41:07.600)

The idea of currency, who makes the money, who makes the rules, who issues it, who sets

Alex Gladstein (41:12.360)

the interest rates, all these things, it is not on the menu of human rights activists.

Alex Gladstein (41:17.200)

If you just do like a systematic study of like the human rights discourse over the last

Lex Fridman (41:20.520)

several decades, money is not there.

Alex Gladstein (41:23.560)

It's also not really taught in schools.

Lex Fridman (41:25.160)

Like children don't really learn about money, where does it come from?

Alex Gladstein (41:28.400)

It's kind of hidden from a lot of our discourse.

Lex Fridman (41:33.760)

Only really when I got into Bitcoin did I started learning more about money.

Alex Gladstein (41:37.840)

I spent 10 years at the Human Rights Foundation and we did all kinds of programs around the

Lex Fridman (41:42.640)

world.

Alex Gladstein (41:43.640)

We convened Oslo Freedom Forums in different places and I got to meet hundreds of dissidents.

Lex Fridman (41:47.980)

And very rarely did they ever speak about currency or bank accounts or moving money

Alex Gladstein (41:51.960)

from one place to another.

Lex Fridman (41:53.800)

But when I started asking them, they always had amazing stories about money, always.

Alex Gladstein (41:58.280)

I mean, my friend, Ivan Mawire, who started the This Flag movement in Zimbabwe, which

Alex Gladstein (42:03.220)

ended up toppling Robert Mugabe, when I asked him to come to San Francisco to give a talk

Alex Gladstein (42:07.620)

about hyperinflation, which he lived through.

Lex Fridman (42:10.400)

He said, no one's ever asked me to do that before, but I'll come.

Lex Fridman (42:13.360)

And he came, this was about three years ago.

Lex Fridman (42:15.620)

And the first thing he did when he got on the stage is he opened up a shirt and he brought

Alex Gladstein (42:18.400)

out a necklace that had the 1980 Zimbabwean dollar on it.

Lex Fridman (42:21.880)

And he said, we in the activist community wear this as a symbol of where our country

Alex Gladstein (42:26.520)

used to be because the Zimbabwean dollar used to be worth two British pounds.

Lex Fridman (42:30.540)

And then of course, over the next two and a half decades of economic mismanagement and

Lex Fridman (42:35.660)

corruption by Mugabe, it got inflated out of existence, right?

Lex Fridman (42:38.620)

You've seen those like a hundred trillion dollars in Zimbabwean notes.

Lex Fridman (42:41.920)

So he had to live through that, which was terrible and crushing, but he is an expert

Lex Fridman (42:47.000)

on money.

Alex Gladstein (42:48.000)

If you actually talk to human rights activists about money, they know a lot about money.

Lex Fridman (42:51.880)

They're just not usually asked to talk about it.

Lex Fridman (42:54.320)

So for me, when I study money or look at money, it's really about control, who's creating

Lex Fridman (43:02.320)

it, and how much does the population know about the creation of that money.

Lex Fridman (43:06.580)

And when it comes to Bitcoin, it's really the people's money.

Lex Fridman (43:09.440)

Like there is no shadowy force in charge of it.

Alex Gladstein (43:12.600)

We all know the rules.

Lex Fridman (43:14.060)

We all know how it's going to get minted and how it's going to get printed.

Lex Fridman (43:17.560)

And you know, that information is out there for everybody to see.

Lex Fridman (43:20.500)

And there's no like special group of rules for one group of people or another group.

Alex Gladstein (43:25.300)

You know, a billionaire and a refugee are the same in the eyes of the protocol.

Lex Fridman (43:30.200)

This is a rather revolutionary concept.

Lex Fridman (43:33.220)

And in the same way that democracy allowed us to decentralize politics and have checks

Lex Fridman (43:38.160)

and balances.

Lex Fridman (43:39.160)

And in the same way that the internet is this culmination of technologies that allowed us

Alex Gladstein (43:42.900)

to decentralize information, access to and control over it, Bitcoin, you know, decentralizes

Alex Gladstein (43:48.960)

money.

Alex Gladstein (43:49.960)

I mean, no longer, again, is there one group of people who can just change it arbitrarily.

Alex Gladstein (43:54.980)

We're all in the same playing field.

Lex Fridman (43:57.020)

And I think that that is a tremendous innovation.

Alex Gladstein (44:01.120)

You know, from one perspective, money and inflation, hyperinflation is a kind of symptom

Lex Fridman (44:06.220)

of corruption, as opposed to the core of the corruption.

Lex Fridman (44:12.020)

And at the flip side, in terms of resisting the corruption, resisting the abuse of human

Alex Gladstein (44:18.480)

rights, it's interesting to think that fighting inflation or fighting the mismanagement of

Alex Gladstein (44:28.940)

the money supply is a way to fight back authoritarianism or to fight authoritarianism.

Lex Fridman (44:38.380)

And that's an interesting concept that I think was introduced to me by just plugging myself

Alex Gladstein (44:44.020)

intellectually into the Bitcoin community, but also just cryptocurrency in general, is

Lex Fridman (44:49.220)

to like, it's not that money is a symptom.

Alex Gladstein (44:54.840)

You know, money is a tool to fight back, too.

Lex Fridman (44:58.780)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (45:00.260)

So in what way can Bitcoin be used to fight authoritarianism, not just in the United States,

Lex Fridman (45:10.380)

but all of those 53% that you're referring to, how can Bitcoin help?

Lex Fridman (45:15.420)

So we talked about authoritarianism, and we talked about the surveillance state.

Lex Fridman (45:20.300)

To me, Bitcoin has two kind of key mechanisms through which it can help us.

Alex Gladstein (45:26.060)

Number one, it's a sovereign savings account.

Alex Gladstein (45:29.260)

It's debasement proof, meaning the government cannot print more whenever they want.

Alex Gladstein (45:33.800)

This is very, very different from fiat currency, which by its very name, its very nature can

Lex Fridman (45:38.620)

be issued on sort of demand, right, by the rulers.

Lex Fridman (45:42.100)

And while I live in a country where the rulers do a reasonable job managing the money, most

Lex Fridman (45:47.580)

people aren't so lucky.

Lex Fridman (45:48.860)

So only 13% of humans in the world live in a country that's a liberal democracy with

Alex Gladstein (45:53.560)

property rights and has what we call a reserve currency, meaning a currency so stable and

Lex Fridman (45:58.400)

desirable that other countries save in it at the central bank level, right?

Alex Gladstein (46:02.180)

You basically have the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Switzerland, the Euro, and Canada.

Alex Gladstein (46:08.700)

I mean, those are like reserve currencies.

Lex Fridman (46:10.740)

And these are liberal democracies where people have reasonable guarantees over property rights.

Alex Gladstein (46:14.680)

Everybody else either lives under like a weaker currency or an authoritarian regime.

Lex Fridman (46:19.520)

That's 87% of the world's population, almost 7 billion people.

Lex Fridman (46:22.800)

So for them, a sovereign savings account that's permissionless, meaning you don't have to

Lex Fridman (46:27.580)

have ID to use it, is a big, big deal.

Lex Fridman (46:30.360)

And a lot of people talk about Zimbabwe or Venezuela as some like isolated cases.

Lex Fridman (46:34.300)

Oh, well, you know, hyperinflation only happens in those two countries.

Alex Gladstein (46:38.700)

I actually did some research into this and there's about one point, over, you know, close

Lex Fridman (46:45.420)

to 1.3 billion people who live under double or triple digit inflation.

Alex Gladstein (46:49.260)

This is not an isolated instance.

Alex Gladstein (46:51.340)

We're talking huge countries, Nigeria, 200 million people, 15% inflation, Turkey, 15%

Alex Gladstein (46:57.740)

inflation for 100 million people, Argentina, 40% inflation for a country of 45 million

Lex Fridman (47:02.860)

people.

Lex Fridman (47:03.860)

So you can go down the list, there's about 35 countries where like people's earnings,

Alex Gladstein (47:08.420)

their wages are literally disappearing in front of their eyes over a matter of weeks

Lex Fridman (47:13.100)

or months against things like the dollar or gold or real estate, right?

Lex Fridman (47:17.380)

So this is a huge issue.

Alex Gladstein (47:19.540)

It absolutely is a human rights issue for me.

Alex Gladstein (47:21.220)

I mean, when it comes to your time and energy, having control over that or having it stolen

Alex Gladstein (47:25.220)

from you, I think this is pretty clear.

Lex Fridman (47:27.980)

And Bitcoin is like an immediate, low cost, easily accessible solution for people.

Lex Fridman (47:34.100)

And I've learned this not from my own assumptions, but by talking to people, by interviewing

Alex Gladstein (47:39.140)

dozens of people, whether it's in Sudan, which currently has triple digit inflation, or people

Alex Gladstein (47:47.300)

who've escaped from Syria, who have used Bitcoin to get their wealth out of the country, and

Lex Fridman (47:51.620)

then also to make payments back to people inside, or Venezuela or elsewhere.

Alex Gladstein (47:55.900)

It's very, very powerful.

Alex Gladstein (47:58.260)

I think some very small percentage of people who have used, have owned Bitcoin was something

Lex Fridman (48:03.220)

like 1%, right?

Lex Fridman (48:04.220)

Of the world, whatever that number is, it's small.

Alex Gladstein (48:07.140)

Call it 2% for the purposes of our, about a little under 200 million people.

Lex Fridman (48:12.020)

Wow.

Alex Gladstein (48:13.020)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (48:14.020)

At most, right now.

Lex Fridman (48:15.140)

So if we look at Zimbabwe, Sudan, if we look at...

Lex Fridman (48:18.060)

Small percentages of people.

Lex Fridman (48:19.980)

Do you think the technology is mature enough?

Lex Fridman (48:22.060)

Because it's not just about the idea, it's also about the implementation of it.

Alex Gladstein (48:25.860)

Like Bitcoin, for the most part, requires access to the internet.

Lex Fridman (48:32.900)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (48:33.900)

And what do you think about accessibility of this technology now as a method of activism

Lex Fridman (48:41.860)

in the worst parts of the world?

Alex Gladstein (48:43.420)

We often think like all the conversations we've had about Bitcoin is essentially middle

Lex Fridman (48:47.820)

class, like wealthy people relative to the rest of the world.

Alex Gladstein (48:51.220)

They're kind of talking sort of investment and high concept ideas.

Alex Gladstein (48:56.060)

Then there's also the people in the world who are suffering, who are living through

Alex Gladstein (48:59.820)

hyperinflation.

Lex Fridman (49:00.820)

They may not have a computer or access to the internet.

Lex Fridman (49:03.940)

How do you think Bitcoin can help there?

Lex Fridman (49:05.820)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (49:06.820)

So again, we have one clear use case, which is a sovereign savings account that you can

Lex Fridman (49:11.140)

control, right?

Alex Gladstein (49:12.140)

The other use case is an unstoppable payments network.

Alex Gladstein (49:15.260)

This is very important for people who live behind, for example, sanctions, like the US

Alex Gladstein (49:19.540)

like basically weaponizes the dollar and like sanctions different countries.

Lex Fridman (49:24.400)

And instead of sanctioning like a handful of rulers, for example, which I would support,

Alex Gladstein (49:28.420)

this is like a Magnitsky or smart sanctions.

Lex Fridman (49:31.020)

Sometimes we'll just say, we're just going to shut off this whole country.

Lex Fridman (49:33.180)

So the people suffer.

Lex Fridman (49:34.180)

Cuba or Iran are good examples.

Lex Fridman (49:36.200)

Average people suffer, right?

Lex Fridman (49:37.700)

So people in those two countries I just mentioned, Cuba, Iran, or even Palestine, which is also

Alex Gladstein (49:42.900)

sort of like blockaded by the Israelis.

Lex Fridman (49:45.540)

So you have Cuba, Iran, Palestine are three good examples where people inside all three

Alex Gladstein (49:49.660)

of those countries now are using Bitcoin to do commerce, do their business, send money

Lex Fridman (49:54.060)

back and forth.

Lex Fridman (49:55.060)

So sanctions resistant.

Lex Fridman (49:56.740)

Sanctions resistant.

Lex Fridman (49:57.740)

It does not get stopped by sanctions, right?

Lex Fridman (50:01.140)

And also it's, again, remittances are extortionate.

Alex Gladstein (50:03.940)

I mean, the average remittance, you know, costs has a high fee, takes several days.

Alex Gladstein (50:09.600)

If your family is in Ghana or something like that, or Nigeria, and you live in the United

Alex Gladstein (50:13.340)

States, it can take time to use Western Union.

Alex Gladstein (50:16.380)

Sometimes it gets paused, it gets lost, there's issues, you have to deal with customer service.

Alex Gladstein (50:20.980)

Screw that.

Alex Gladstein (50:21.980)

I mean, you know, if the person has a cell phone, which increasingly is the case, I mean,

Alex Gladstein (50:26.200)

by the end of next year, more than five or six billion people depending on different

Lex Fridman (50:31.460)

estimates will have smartphones basically by the end of 2022.

Alex Gladstein (50:35.740)

We're talking like the vast majority of humans will have access to smartphones.

Lex Fridman (50:40.140)

They can all have sovereign Bitcoin wallets.

Lex Fridman (50:42.500)

And there's even ways to access Bitcoin without the internet.

Lex Fridman (50:47.300)

But I mean, we can get into that.

Alex Gladstein (50:48.860)

There's like hardware wallets and so on.

Lex Fridman (50:50.580)

What do you mean by sovereign Bitcoin wallet?

Alex Gladstein (50:55.460)

You know, most users today are using Bitcoin in a custodial manner.

Lex Fridman (51:00.360)

So this is kind of like having a bank account where you have a deposit account at a bank,

Lex Fridman (51:06.700)

right?

Lex Fridman (51:07.700)

So you have a claim, right?

Lex Fridman (51:08.700)

You go to the bank and they have some of your money and you take it out, right?

Lex Fridman (51:12.260)

With an ATM.

Lex Fridman (51:13.360)

So what I would call noncustodial Bitcoin use would be similar to withdrawing cash from

Lex Fridman (51:20.220)

an ATM.

Alex Gladstein (51:21.220)

You have it.

Lex Fridman (51:22.220)

It's a bearer instrument.

Alex Gladstein (51:23.220)

OK, so when I...

Lex Fridman (51:24.220)

Bearer instrument.

Alex Gladstein (51:25.220)

That's what it's called.

Lex Fridman (51:26.220)

It's a bearer instrument.

Alex Gladstein (51:27.220)

I know.

Lex Fridman (51:28.220)

I apologize.

Alex Gladstein (51:29.220)

I'm outside this community.

Alex Gladstein (51:30.220)

I'm in a bar of gold or a banknote or Bitcoin that you control, meaning you have the seed

Lex Fridman (51:36.380)

phrase, right?

Alex Gladstein (51:37.380)

Which for the listeners essentially is 12 to 24 English words that you write down on

Alex Gladstein (51:42.000)

a piece of paper.

Lex Fridman (51:43.000)

That's your like password to get into your Bitcoin account.

Lex Fridman (51:46.340)

And that gives you that bearer instrument quality, right?

Lex Fridman (51:49.520)

But unfortunately, most users still use Bitcoin in a custodial way, meaning they buy it on

Alex Gladstein (51:55.500)

Coinbase or Square or something like that.

Lex Fridman (51:58.460)

You would put into the custodial into the custodial category like a bank.

Lex Fridman (52:04.020)

And look, the good news is you can withdraw to your own control.

Lex Fridman (52:07.660)

And in the Bitcoin community, we try to teach this idea that it's not your keys, not your

Alex Gladstein (52:11.420)

coins in the same way that if you deposit your money at the bank, you might not get

Lex Fridman (52:15.100)

it back.

Alex Gladstein (52:16.100)

I mean, it's low likelihood, but it's very possible.

Lex Fridman (52:19.740)

Same thing in Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (52:20.740)

Like if you want to get the full experience, you want to actually custody your own Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (52:24.380)

You want to put it whether it's on an open source software wallet, like the blue wallet

Alex Gladstein (52:28.660)

is a good one for people to check out or a hardware wallet like cold card, for example.

Lex Fridman (52:33.660)

There's different ways to do this.

Lex Fridman (52:35.640)

But essentially, like around the world, people are innovating.

Lex Fridman (52:39.620)

Like don't think so low of your fellow man.

Lex Fridman (52:41.940)

You know what I mean?

Lex Fridman (52:42.940)

Like people are able to figure this out.

Alex Gladstein (52:44.700)

You know, I get a lot of flak from people saying, oh, Bitcoin is so hard to use.

Alex Gladstein (52:47.780)

I read this article in the New York Times saying this guy in Silicon Valley lost all

Alex Gladstein (52:50.860)

of his Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (52:51.960)

That's because he was a moron and didn't care about it.

Alex Gladstein (52:54.220)

This guy lost all this Bitcoin because it wasn't worth much 10 years ago and he, you

Lex Fridman (52:58.260)

know, he forgot the password.

Lex Fridman (52:59.540)

But if you're like receiving your remittance from a family member, you're going to lose

Lex Fridman (53:03.380)

the password.

Alex Gladstein (53:04.380)

Right.

Lex Fridman (53:05.380)

And you trust in the basic intelligence of people to figure this out and to innovate

Lex Fridman (53:09.100)

and so on and figure out.

Lex Fridman (53:10.740)

We're watching it, man.

Alex Gladstein (53:12.740)

Yeah.

Alex Gladstein (53:13.740)

You know, I'm, it's kind of funny that, but people in the United States are not very savvy

Alex Gladstein (53:18.540)

with money.

Alex Gladstein (53:20.020)

It's exactly the way you're describing is like when you have very little money, you're

Alex Gladstein (53:24.740)

going to be savvy with money.

Alex Gladstein (53:27.060)

You're going to understand exactly the mechanisms that work, that are resistant to the corruption

Alex Gladstein (53:32.260)

that's around you.

Alex Gladstein (53:33.260)

I mean, I remember sort of growing up in the Soviet Union, the general bureaucracy and

Alex Gladstein (53:40.100)

the corruption of everything around you, you figure out ways around that.

Alex Gladstein (53:44.060)

You figure out ways how to function within that kind of system to survive under inflation,

Alex Gladstein (53:49.340)

under hyperinflation, under all like basically being unable to trust any kind of, even the

Lex Fridman (53:54.420)

police force and all those kinds of things.

Alex Gladstein (53:56.200)

You figure it out and that same way, perhaps Bitcoin could be all the different ways to

Lex Fridman (54:01.340)

store and gain Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (54:05.540)

These mechanisms could be something that's figured out in the third world as opposed

Lex Fridman (54:09.340)

to in the United States.

Alex Gladstein (54:10.340)

Oh, I mean, I would say the capital of Bitcoin could easily be Lagos and not San Francisco

Lex Fridman (54:14.580)

in terms of users, in terms of people using it.

Lex Fridman (54:17.140)

And again, the two use cases as a savings account and as an unstoppable payment rail.

Alex Gladstein (54:22.100)

These are the two ones that you should really think about, this is how people are using

Alex Gladstein (54:24.740)

it today.

Alex Gladstein (54:25.740)

Now, when it comes to, could it possibly be adopted by like a sufficient majority of the

Lex Fridman (54:31.540)

population?

Lex Fridman (54:32.540)

I say, yes.

Lex Fridman (54:33.540)

And it's very similar to the way the mobile phone spread.

Alex Gladstein (54:36.460)

At the beginning, the cell phone was only for rich people, it was only for the elite,

Alex Gladstein (54:40.820)

it was huge, it didn't work very well, the interface sucked, it was clunky.

Alex Gladstein (54:44.740)

Over time, it got smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper and easier to use and

Alex Gladstein (54:49.060)

easier to use.

Lex Fridman (54:50.060)

And today, everyone benefits.

Lex Fridman (54:52.060)

So you're going to watch a similar technology upgrade process with Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (54:55.940)

Already in the last 10 years, Bitcoin has gotten so much easier to use.

Alex Gladstein (54:59.460)

I mean, there are now mobile wallets that are so slick.

Lex Fridman (55:02.580)

There's one called Moon M U U N wallet from a team in Argentina.

Lex Fridman (55:06.520)

And these guys created it because they saw their own currency devalued like three times

Lex Fridman (55:11.220)

in the last 20 years.

Lex Fridman (55:12.820)

And they've had a hell of a time trying to get their money back and forth in different

Lex Fridman (55:15.860)

countries.

Lex Fridman (55:16.860)

So they were like, let's make this easy for people.

Lex Fridman (55:18.540)

Again, you know, this is the people's money.

Alex Gladstein (55:22.420)

This is something that cannot be controlled by governments or corporations.

Lex Fridman (55:25.980)

And that makes it very powerful.

Lex Fridman (55:27.940)

And I think it's actually quite exciting to be here in the adoption phase.

Lex Fridman (55:32.020)

In the early days.

Alex Gladstein (55:33.020)

Yeah, man, this is the early days.

Lex Fridman (55:34.660)

And you also mentioned that Bitcoin is the mechanism of a peaceful revolution.

Lex Fridman (55:40.100)

So it's a way to resist authoritarianism in a peaceful way.

Alex Gladstein (55:45.180)

It's ultimately, you know, you mentioned sort of politics, information, and money.

Alex Gladstein (55:54.140)

It seems like in the space of money, this is one of the peaceful mechanisms.

Lex Fridman (55:57.780)

It's a way to opt out.

Alex Gladstein (55:59.780)

You can opt out peacefully from the system.

Lex Fridman (56:03.780)

And yeah, it's beautiful, it's beautiful.

Lex Fridman (56:06.420)

So Bitcoin is currently by far the most popular sort of dominant cryptocurrency.

Lex Fridman (56:12.460)

That said, and I look forward to your letters, Bitcoin maximalists.

Alex Gladstein (56:17.660)

That said, you know, Internet Explorer was the most popular browser for quite a long

Lex Fridman (56:23.340)

time.

Lex Fridman (56:24.340)

And then other browsers came along that out competed it like Chrome, Firefox, People's

Lex Fridman (56:31.100)

Checkout Brave.

Alex Gladstein (56:32.100)

It's a great browser.

Lex Fridman (56:33.980)

I think it's my favorite browser at this point.

Lex Fridman (56:36.500)

Anyway, so why Bitcoin?

Lex Fridman (56:38.060)

Why not another cryptocurrency?

Alex Gladstein (56:39.860)

If you look in the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years, do you think it's possible for another cryptocurrency

Lex Fridman (56:46.460)

like Ethereum or something that it's not even here yet to overtake Bitcoin as a mechanism?

Lex Fridman (56:53.480)

When you say overtake, what do you mean?

Lex Fridman (56:57.020)

What do you mean overtake?

Lex Fridman (56:58.020)

You mean number of users?

Lex Fridman (56:59.020)

Do you mean a price per coin?

Alex Gladstein (57:01.500)

Yeah, the number of users, because we're talking about 1%, 2%.

Lex Fridman (57:05.980)

And if we are serious about this being in the space of money as a way to give individuals

Alex Gladstein (57:16.340)

power, fight the centralized powers that use the money system and so on, how do we get

Lex Fridman (57:22.700)

from 2% to 50%, right, to 60%, to 80%?

Alex Gladstein (57:29.060)

At that jump, is it obvious to you, not obvious, but do you think Bitcoin is the way to get

Alex Gladstein (57:35.900)

from 2% to 50% or are there going to be other cryptocurrencies that may emerge that get

Lex Fridman (57:42.620)

us to 50%?

Lex Fridman (57:43.620)

No.

Alex Gladstein (57:44.620)

I mean, Bitcoin is the innovation.

Lex Fridman (57:45.620)

The innovation is in having the decentralized mint.

Alex Gladstein (57:48.700)

No one can change the monetary policy.

Lex Fridman (57:51.380)

Everything else is downstream from there.

Alex Gladstein (57:53.260)

In Bitcoin, the mean would be 21 million.

Lex Fridman (57:55.620)

There's never going to be any more than 21 million.

Alex Gladstein (57:58.020)

Every other cryptocurrency either has an inflationary policy, meaning there's going to continue

Alex Gladstein (58:02.460)

to be more and more of it over time, or its monetary policy can be changed by a small

Alex Gladstein (58:06.920)

group of people.

Alex Gladstein (58:08.160)

This is vividly on display in Ethereum, which is like the second largest and second most

Lex Fridman (58:12.020)

robust cryptocurrency, right?

Alex Gladstein (58:14.020)

I've talked to senior Ethereum engineers over the last couple of weeks trying to figure

Lex Fridman (58:18.580)

out what is the monetary policy of Ethereum?

Lex Fridman (58:22.020)

No one can tell me.

Alex Gladstein (58:23.220)

No one knows how much ETH is going to be minted in 2022 and 2023 after they shift to proof

Lex Fridman (58:28.340)

of stake.

Alex Gladstein (58:29.900)

I've seen estimates that range from 100,000 to 2 million.

Lex Fridman (58:33.300)

So at the end of the day, you're going to be trusting a small group of people to make

Alex Gladstein (58:35.940)

those decisions.

Lex Fridman (58:37.180)

That is what we are escaping with Bitcoin.

Lex Fridman (58:39.340)

So all these other cryptocurrencies, they might have their use cases, virtually all

Lex Fridman (58:43.740)

of them are not.

Alex Gladstein (58:44.740)

It's very important for people to know that if you take like the 4,500 cryptocurrencies

Lex Fridman (58:48.400)

on CoinMarketCap, almost all of them are scams straight up.

Alex Gladstein (58:52.980)

Even the ones that have like noble intentions, I just don't think are going to add that much

Lex Fridman (58:57.540)

value ultimately.

Alex Gladstein (58:59.540)

I think Bitcoin to me is the innovation and you know, that's because it has a monetary

Lex Fridman (59:04.660)

policy and an issuance schedule that cannot be changed.

Lex Fridman (59:08.460)

And that's what gets me so excited about it.

Lex Fridman (59:09.660)

I mean, that's why it's such an important tool for human rights.

Alex Gladstein (59:12.220)

Yeah, it's interesting because when you grow from 2%, when you grow in the number of people

Alex Gladstein (59:17.380)

using it at the scale, they're using it, it's going to need to be resistant to governments

Lex Fridman (59:25.300)

and institutions messing with it.

Lex Fridman (59:27.660)

So it's interesting to see what kind of cryptocurrency would be resistant to that.

Alex Gladstein (59:33.940)

Obviously Dogecoin is going to win.

Lex Fridman (59:35.980)

Let's be honest.

Alex Gladstein (59:36.980)

Well, I mean, look, the number two cryptocurrency in the world, probably by like how useful

Lex Fridman (59:43.700)

it is to people is Tether, which is totally centralized, has blacklists.

Lex Fridman (59:49.100)

So I'm not saying there won't be like new digital assets that are lumped into this category

Alex Gladstein (59:54.300)

that have usage, but they're not, they're not, it's not the same innovation as Bitcoin.

Alex Gladstein (59:59.380)

It's just sort of building on this idea of like a Euro dollar, maybe like a dollar that