Alex Gladstein (4:00)

I'm wonderful. Thank you for having me on.

Peter McCormack (4:03)

Hey, thanks for Coming on. I've heard a couple of your interviews in the past, and I found them fascinating. And, yeah, it's great to talk to you. And one of the interesting things about doing my research is that I. I probably quite naively assumed the Human Rights foundation had been established years ago. And it was only when I did my research and preparation, it was actually tied to Venezuela. So I think it'd be really good. Alex, a good way of starting is for you to just give your background, how you came to be chief strategy officer at the Human Rights foundation, what your mandate is and your primary activities and. Yeah, that'd be a great way to start.

Alex Gladstein (4:41)

Sure. Well, in some ways, the Human Rights foundation is an organization that cares deeply about decentralization, and I'll unpack that for you. But basically, it's an organization, it's a nonprofit that looks at how governments are structured around the world and kind of senses a weakness or a problem in governments that are highly centralized. So in more than 90 countries around the world, for billions of people, power is in the hands of one man or one small group of men. Precisely about 93 countries and about 4 billion people. And in these societies, you really think about whether it's scientific achievements and patent rates and innovations, or whether you care about welfare and justice and literacy rates and life expectancies and maternal health rates, or whether you care about even things like peace and war. No two liberal democracies have ever fought each other. We just believe there's tremendous value in whether you want to call it decentralized governance or liberal democracy. It's up to you. But basically systems of governance where people are ruled by rules, not rulers. And this is a very particular, specific mission that we have. We're basically students of authoritarianism. We study how it works and how we can help people who live under these regimes, ranging from people who live under governments in Cuba to Zimbabwe to Burma to North Korea to China to Russia. Unfortunately, there are just so many of them in every part of the world. But we really take a particular tack and we figure out how can we help people who live in places that don't have freedom of the press and an independent judiciary where they can't hire a human rights lawyer or go to a local nonprofit to protect them. And whether you're trying to promote labor rights or trying to save the environment or trying to out a local politician for corruption, you can't do that in a dictatorship. There's no mechanism for that where you can do it safely. I mean, if you look at what's happening in France these past few days, you're looking at a massive people power movement that's going to result in the change of policy of the federal government. It's not really something you can do in a dictatorship. So we just have to kind of think about the architectures of our societies and realize that some of them are a lot more centralized than others. And I really do think and believe that if you stack up like the top 20 most prominent dictatorships or tyrannies or centralized societies with the top 20 most decentralized or democratic ones, that for nearly almost anything you'd want as a human, you'd rather be in a free society. So I think that kind of under lines and undergirds our work. I started my journey at the Human rights Foundation in 2007 as an intern. I was working in the British Parliament actually as sort of a research assistant to the Lib Dems at the time, doing little briefs and papers for the Lib Dems shadow foreign secretary as he traveled the world. And I applied to a job in New York City at the Human Rights Foundation. It was about a year old at the time time and I got the job. I went to New York City and my first task was to put together backpacks filled with outside information that we would send in to the Cuban underground library movement. And basically, at the time, and still to a large extent today, all information in Cuba is controlled by the Communist Party. So if you want a book or a movie, it has to be approved by them. So we decided to stir up some trouble in a good way and send in through people who are Latin American and could travel to Cuba freely. Technology and media that gave them a taste of the outside world. So, for example, it might be a dubbed version of V for Vendetta or Braveheart or something like that. And they'd actually watch these movies and films and read these books in small discussion groups and circles inside people's homes and then talk about them. And, you know, this was back in 2007, 8, 9. I mean, this later grew into what's now like paquete, the Paquette system, which is like kind of a way where some people in Cuba will install a satellite dish and download content illegally and put it onto a hard drive and distribute it around neighborhoods, and people will download what they want off of it. And that's kind of how it's evolved. But at the time, it was like people were entirely reliant on things being brought in from outside of Cuba to learn about what was happening. And that was my first experience at hrf. I found it really powerful, really moving, very innovative, and I decided to work full time for them. I got a job offer at the end of that summer and I've been working for them ever since on a variety of projects. And in 2015 I was appointed chief Strategy officer. So now I'm leading where we're going to go, how we're going to grow, how we're going to raise funds, make new partnerships, and what kind of our media and public advocacy strategy is going to be.

Peter McCormack (9:44)

Cuba's often romanticized though, as, as a, like a good form of communism.

Alex Gladstein (9:50)

Yeah, I mean, I would say that it's typically romanticized by two groups of people, the rulers in Cuba who are kleptocrats, you know, thieves in power, basically, and people who haven't been to Cuba who like to have this romantic fantasy that it's this like great place where everybody's got free health care and housing. I mean, this is a country where there were like cholera outbreaks recently, where you are arrested for speaking your mind or painting something on a wall that the government doesn't agree with. This is a country that has a really horrible hospital infrastructure, actually, if you go and read about it, look at it and research it, and really a remarkable brainwashing system where it's very difficult for people to learn about the outside world. And I think people have been really held back there. That's the sad thing. I mean, if you really think about it, how many world class companies or inventions or life saving cures have been coming out of Cuba lately? Very few. The really smart Cubans have had to leave. There's this thing called brain drain that happens to most dictatorships where people flee because they can't exercise themselves and express themselves and work on what they want to work on in a tyrannical society. So they end up going somewhere else. So countries like Spain and the United States have benefited from that, I think, in a lot of ways. And some of the smartest Cubans have gone and given their fruits to societies elsewhere.

Peter McCormack (11:16)

So Che Guevara T shirts, are they actually just a great piece of propaganda?

Alex Gladstein (11:20)

Yeah, I mean, Che Guevara was a murderer and a homophobe and someone who kept people in prison camps. I mean, it's astonishing to me, anytime I see someone with a Che shirt, like, I guess I understand what they're saying, but it's just horribly ignorant and very offensive to all the people who were killed by him and his revolution. So one of the things that Href wants to do is do a lot of public education in this area of, like, dictatorship, democracy. We do publish a lot in mainstream media outlets. We do a lot of campaigns that seek to put the issue of dictatorship and corruption and authoritarianism into places like ESPN and Good Morning America and Billboard and People and even like Pitchfork and music magazines. I mean, we try to take this issue and get it onto the radar of people who don't ordinarily think about basic human rights and freedoms. That's like a big part of our strategy.

Peter McCormack (12:19)

And how similar is the situation now in Venezuela as to what happened in Cuba?

Alex Gladstein (12:26)

Well, I mean, look, there's obviously similarities in as much as there's an authoritarian power structure, but it's very different. I mean, in Venezuela, you had a country that was famous for being the shelter destination for Latin Americans when there were dictatorships across the continent. You know, people were fleeing there. And Venezuela was a proud place where people could seek refuge in a free country. And that has turned into the complete opposite, where now more Venezuelans, according to the un, are fleeing Venezuela every day than Syrians fleeing Syria. I mean, you have millions of Venezuelans who've left Venezuela and are now living in other countries in Latin America as refugees. And it's really quite sad. And, you know, was it preventable? Probably. I mean, Hugo chavez throughout the 2000s, left some pretty obvious signs from the very beginning that he was going to create a dictatorship. I mean, by shutting down the media and confiscating the property of people he didn't like and enriching his family and engaging in grand corruption and basically seeking and forging alliances with other dictatorships like Iran and Russia, and stacking the judiciary and the parliament, rather the assembly, with his own sort of cronies. This was all happening, and the world basically did very little. I mean, even other human rights groups and kind of establishment organizations were pretty quiet on human rights violations in Venezuela till quite late in Chavez's presidency, which is one of the reasons the Human Rights foundation was created. Our founder is a Venezuelan activist named Thor Halvorson, who saw all this happening and no one was really doing anything about it in 2004. Five, six. And he decided to create an organization that would focus explicitly on closed and closing societies that were either outright dictatorships or going through some sort of democratic erosion. So, again, that kind of colors a lot of our thinking is looking at how balance of power and separation of powers and a healthy civil society are really good things for humans.

Peter McCormack (14:35)

And Chavez was able to achieve this kind of takeover of power by appealing to the working Class to the populace with his social policies?

Alex Gladstein (14:46)

Yes, of course. I mean, he was wildly popular. I mean, he was absolutely a populist. It's just when you mix populism with the ability to start dismantling a country's rules and rule set, that gets immediately dangerous, right? So it's one thing to have a populist in power who's checked by a constitution or by an independent Supreme Court or by a legislature that challenges and checks and can investigate this person when they break the law. But in Chavez's case, he mixed populism with a creeping authoritarianism that became outright authoritarianism by the time he died.

Peter McCormack (15:24)

Is there any kind of research into the patterns about how and why a country will kind of change or migrate from a democratic society to authoritarian? Does it really just come down to, you know, power hungry individuals?

Alex Gladstein (15:38)

There's enormous amounts of scholarship on both sides. I mean, look, in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, you had this incredible wave of democratization, right? So everywhere from Portugal to South Korea to many places in Africa and Asia and Latin America were actually becoming democratized, and they were kind of throwing off the shackles of authoritarianism and colonialism and becoming independent. So you see the legacy of this in the fact that the world now has dozens and dozens and dozens of countries, and basically close to half of humanity lives under some sort of liberal democracy. At the same time, around the year 2000, you started to see things sort of start to turn in the other direction, start to stagnate a little bit. I mean, you saw opportunities like Erdogan in Turkey and Putin in Russia and Chavez in Venezuela, leaders that were more or less freely and fairly elected at the beginning and who were quite popular, who had the opportunity to steer their country into a free and fair direction, go the other way. And, you know, over a series of, you know, basically corrupt, you know, moves and strategies over a decade kind of consolidate power. And even more recently, you've seen kind of democracies go backwards in places like the Philippines, Bangladesh, I mean, these really, really big countries. Thailand had a military coup recently that was really depressing. So you've seen close to the countries I just mentioned, a billion people kind of going backwards in their rights in the last decade, which is of course really quite worrying. But there's quite a bit of scholarship to show why and how this happens. And the best antidote to the erosion of democracy, or even the best, I would say, tool we can use if we want to see more free societies are really checks on government power. So when you think about encouraging constitutionalism and constitutional law when you encourage civil society and free press. These things are far more important than elections. I mean, all dictators have elections of some kind. All governments do. And when you talk about a free and fair election, like, you can only really get there once you've laid the certain groundwork. So, you know, we study a lot of these other things that aren't necessarily elections, but are things like free speech, the ability to open and run a nonprofit or independent media outlet, the ability to investigate politicians and the corruption. So, like, kind of these other rights and freedoms are really important, and they underpin what makes up an open society.

Peter McCormack (18:25)

Right. Okay. So, I mean, I would say that, you know, growing up in England, I've lived a pretty privileged life. And I would say a lot of people I know, whilst they're aware and they keep an eye on the news, they're kind of aware of different things going on. But I would say they're more aware of extreme examples like North Korea. What is it that people don't really understand about living under authoritarian rules? And what kind of basic human rights do we have that people in these kind of countries don't have?

Alex Gladstein (18:57)

Well, I'll give you a couple kind of litmus test ideas, and then I want to seg into a different part of the conversation that I think will help us when it comes to money. But think about it this way. Can you have an Amnesty International organization in your country? Okay, if you can, that signals a significant, at a significant level that you have some sort of open society. Like, if you can run a human rights group that is criticizing the government and pushing for more freedoms, and you're doing it in a way where you're operating openly, raising money, working out of an office in the capital of that country. It actually is a pretty good litmus test for which countries are free and which ones are not, in terms of who has a local Amnesty office. Another one, interestingly, is where can you do a pride parade legally without worrying about getting the crap beaten out of you? Regardless of what dictatorship it is or what religion that dictatorship has, you know, whether it's Uganda or Russia or China or Cuba or Turkey, whether it's Christian or, you know, Muslim or whatever, it doesn't really matter. Authoritarian governments, for whatever reason, love to scapegoat gays. So when you look at the pride parade, you can think of it that way. Under what countries can you do a pride parade? And it kind of lines up also pretty nicely with, like, what's an open society? And what's not. But I do think what people don't really think about too much is money. And I think this is a good seg for us. We talk a lot about the separation of church and state when we talk about history. Right. But we don't really talk about the separation of money and state that often. But when you think about it, democracies like let's say Norway have a really strong separation of money and state. The people who decide how we're going to print money and print more money and what the monetary policy is going to be are not the same people sitting in the executive branch. Right. And that's really important, actually. And in all dictatorships and authoritarian systems, the dictator or the group of people in charge, the oligarchy, whatever, they get to determine the monetary policy. So this is actually quite an important thing to look at. And again, it kind of helps us break down the world into different levels of how centralized power is.

Peter McCormack (21:14)

In preparation, I've been through some of your other interviews and one of the points you talk about, which is very interesting, you've almost explained we're kind of at this pivotal time in human history, this kind of battle between centralized, authoritarian, mass surveillance path. And then there's this other path which has kind of come as a gift, which is this unknown path, kind of unknown path of decentralization, where the power is taken away from the governments, which has come kind of via Bitcoin and other technologies. And it's kind of like there's these two kind of paths battling at the moment. How do you see it?

Alex Gladstein (21:48)

Yeah, and I want to caution against, I guess, viewing the decentralized option as somehow sort of like an anarchy or some libertarian utopia type thing. I view these decentralized technologies more as a check against the surveillance state. So I believe that technologies like Bitcoin, like ipfs, like decentralized access to the Internet, like zero knowledge cryptography, I'm not looking at them as ways to get to some sort of weird, you know, anarchist, totally libertarian society. I'm looking at them as ways to prevent the mass surveillance state and to check the power of the government. And I think, like most people, regardless of their ideology, should understand at some level that it's really problematic for one group or one power or one government or one corporation to control all of our data and all of our money and all of our information. And we as citizens should fight to retain some control over that. Maybe not total control, but some control over that. Some control over our data, some control over who gets to see our location Data and our health data and things like that. And really crucially, for people living under dictatorships, some control over our money.

Peter McCormack (23:14)

But the mass surveillance operates under authoritarian governments, but also under democracy. Right. How does it differ between the two? Say what we experience with the NSA and say what you would experience in China.

Alex Gladstein (23:27)

Well, there's a friend of mine, Steve Waterhouse, from Orchid Labs, and he always talks about how his hometown of London is like the most surveilled city in the world potentially. And I think that's right. Almost every country has some sort of intricate surveillance state. It's just a matter of how advanced it is. The difference is that some countries have human rights and some don't. Really, at the root of it, like, can your government use that surveillance state to punish political opposition? Okay, in Britain, no. Pretty much no. Not in America either. However, in China, definitely. So that's how you have to start thinking about it. A lot of the same companies selling surveillance technology to China are also selling it to Western countries too. So everybody's building, like, the big red button. Right. It's just a matter of how soon can you press it. So in a dictatorship, you can press that button already. Right. There's no. We talked about separation of money and state. There's no separation of technology and state in China. So literally, the Communist Party gets to, like, control the companies, the big companies like Tencent. Right. And all the telecoms and things like that. So in America, we have both this, like, metaphorical and geographical separation where we have Silicon valley and Washington 3,000 miles apart. But really, that's been quite helpful. Right, so you've got Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and all the folks at Google and Microsoft kind of over here on the left, and then over on the right you've got all the politicians in D.C. and that's been maybe arguably a little bit healthy to have that separation. I certainly don't think it's a good idea to have like, the government, especially a centralized authoritarian government, to be in control of all the technology. That seems like a recipe for disaster.

Peter McCormack (25:17)

There is still, though, the potential with governments to surveil using blockchain technology. Right. So that's kind of one of the ironies of this, is that where bitcoin was originally seen as anonymous, you can now actually track the blockchain, so you can actually track people with it. Are there any examples of governments using crypto for. Or decentralized technologies or blockchain technologies for bad.

Alex Gladstein (25:42)

Yeah, so let's. Let's actually break that down a little Bit I think it'd be useful for our purposes and I think just for educational purposes. Be a little more specific when we come to semantics and the words that we use. So I go to a lot of events and people are like, blockchain, crypto, whatever. I don't really know what they're talking about. Like when someone says crypto, what does that mean? Are they talking about cryptography, cryptocurrency? I mean generally speaking they're talking about cryptocurrency, but it's some sort of made up cryptocurrency. Like it's not a specific one. And when they talk about blockchain, usually they're referring to some aspects of the bitcoin blockchain, perhaps immutability, transparency, but like combined with other stuff that they're dreaming about. So I really think it's healthy for us to approach this academic perspective and actually be specific. So when it comes to the bitcoin blockchain, yeah, I believe it's really helpful in its current state because it allows people to transact money in a way where mass financial surveillance is really difficult. Okay. So when I'm the US government, for example, I can just like pick up the phone and call bank of America or any of these big banking conglomerates, the three dozen or so that are involved with the Fed. Right. And you know, I can say something like, hey, I don't like Peter. Let's make sure, you know, money doesn't go into his account. Right, right. This is like censorship. So like this sort of thing happens, right? Like that's just like not possible with bitcoin. So not only is there like censorship resistance where collusion cannot lead to you not getting, not receiving transactions from someone, but also there's this level of like anti surveillance because it's expensive to track, you know, real world identities to the bitcoin blockchain is certainly doable, but it's not cheap. You have to use chain analysis and it takes time, it's expensive and it's certainly doable for like forensically looking at like a particular case where you're trying to track like where did this money go here? But when you start talking about 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 Bitcoin wallets, I mean that's going to be very, very difficult. So I like thinking about it as a protection mechanism against like basically illegal mass financial surveillance. I also like it as a protection mechanism against targeted censorship against dissidents and other people, whether it's human rights, NGOs or whatever, like Vladimir Putin in Russia can shut down the bank account of an ngo, but he can't stop them from receiving Bitcoin. Right. The Iranian government can monitor the bank accounts of certain people connected to the opposition and frees them when certain money comes in from their families, but they cannot stop them from receiving bitcoin. So I think it's quite revolutionary in this aspect. Now, how can other blockchain technologies that are not bitcoin be used against people? I think in a lot of ways when you start introducing the concept of a blockchain that has a backdoor, that's like somehow centralized, where that records can be edited post facto, you know, then you get, you get governments really excited. So you've got the Petro, the world's first national ico, arguably in Venezuela. I mean, it's not operational, but like you can sort of see what they had wanted to do. You know, their goal was sort of, hopefully they were thinking, let's get everybody using this so we can track all the money and freeze it when we want to. The Iranians, Saudis and Chinese are all going to be coming up with something similar in the next year or two. So we're talking about national cryptocurrencies that are totally surveillable, trackable, freezable. It's like the wet dream for dictators. So we really need to separate out what we're talking about when we speak about blockchains. Really, it's like it comes down to like, is there a backdoor or not? Right. So I've been speaking to folks at MakerDAO as well and I think this is a pretty exciting project. I mean, I think you can be open minded towards a lot of different technologies in this area. I think bitcoin is one that civil rights activists should be quite excited about. I think MakerDAO is something that deserves a lot of attention. Can we have relatively, pretty much decentralized, stablecoin that people can use and interact with without government interference? I mean, I've talked to several experts in the field and they basically said there's no real clear way for a government to stop and make a DAI transaction. I mean, that's cool like that. Again, that's what's interesting when we talk about blockchains and decentralization. Sure. There might be a lot of market, financial, smart, contract innovations in the future that are useful for fields like real estate. I mean, who knows? I'm interested in censorship, resistance because I'm a human rights activist. So I'm interested in helping people who live under dictatorships and Authoritarian regimes who live under broken financial systems where they can't interact and transact freely without heavy surveillance and censorship.

Peter McCormack (30:37)

Right. There's a couple of things I want to unpack first and always go back a couple of steps. But firstly, what did you therefore make of the sanctioning of the two Bitcoin addresses? Which kind of seems a bit silly because you can bounce things around, but it seems to be that was almost like the only way the US Government could kind of censor Bitcoin was to addresses under sanctions. What did you make of that?

Alex Gladstein (30:57)

Well, I think it shows you that at least right now Bitcoin is a technology that can actually be useful for governments if they're doing forensic investigation, fraud and corruption, generally speaking, I would say it's like not a hot idea. If you want to launder money through bitcoin right now, large amounts, it seems like you're probably going to get caught when you eventually move that bitcoin into some other asset class. So it kind of shows you that at least right now, actually it's kind of like a neat tool that governments can use for specific investigations. Again, I think it makes broad based financial surveillance really impractical, which is really cool. But right now in its current form where like it doesn't, it's not really a privacy technology yet. I do believe it will become a privacy technology over the next couple years both on chain and through user technology, wallets, second layer technology. But right now it's like something that governments can actually use to track down large scale criminal behavior, which may be like a good thing. Now when you talk about these two guys, right, who are tracked down, I mean obviously they just weren't really practicing good operational security. Right? I mean like you don't have to use the same, you're not supposed to use the same address every time for many, many, many, many, many transactions. Kind of obvious, right? So if you're talking about someone living in a like authoritarian or repressed society, like yeah, we're going to have to teach them good opsec. That's obvious to me. Otherwise people are going to get caught. I was talking to some Venezuelans who are in the space and like I at least don't know of or they don't know of anyone who's been arrested in Venezuela by chain analysis yet. So the Venezuelan government, from what we understand isn't doing that yet. But is the Chinese government doing it? I don't know. Is the American government doing it? Definitely. So I think it just matters about how savvy and how Much resources governments have to spend. But again, anyway, the lessons from the Iranian fiasco is that dissidents and activists and journalists are going to have to use good OPSEC when they're using technologies like Bitcoin. And b, like right now in its current form, Bitcoin seems to be something that you know, may protect against illegal mass surveillance, but may may actually benefit nation states when it comes to doing like forensic investigations on particular cases.

Peter McCormack (33:30)

So you would support then full privacy with on the bitcoin based chain because not everyone will like. There's people I've spoken to who think this might be the, the next civil war, but similar to the scaling war because not everybody wants full privacy. Some people like the fact that you can track everything on the blockchain.

Alex Gladstein (33:47)

I mean some people do, but those people don't live in dictatorships. So I view bitcoin as a liberation tool. I don't view it as a convenience for people who live in San Francisco and New York. We have a working financial system. I think it's a liberation tool for people who live under broken financial systems and repressed corrupt environments. So, so I hope that it becomes a privacy coin. But you know what, it may not be. You're right. I mean that's obviously something that's going to be achieved by consensus across the bitcoin ecosystem. So we can't really know. But I would say that it does seem that a lot of the core developers and people who hold a lot of bitcoin and people who care a lot about bitcoin do care about privacy, do care about rights and freedoms. And I wouldn't be shocked again if in the next couple years if like on chain, private transactions become possible.

Peter McCormack (34:40)

Okay, so I just want to back up a step. So when was it you joined the Human Rights Foundation?

Alex Gladstein (34:48)

2007.

Peter McCormack (34:49)

2007, right. So that's pre Bitcoin. So at what point did you discover Bitcoin and kind of when was the aha moment where it kind of changed everything and you're like, okay, this is a, a tool that could seriously help us.

Alex Gladstein (35:01)

Okay, so let's zoom out a little bit to just look at like technology and human rights briefly. Through our work, you know, we encountered why technology was going to be like a game changing part of the struggle for human rights. And this, this is going to become increasingly the fact as we move forward into the future. Everybody's got a phone, right? Or nearly everybody's got a phone. Is it a liberation tool or is it a mass surveillance tracking device that's A great question. Right? And when we started working with activists, 2007, 8, 9, 10 around the world, bringing them together, we discovered that they had, like, generally speaking, like, not very much fluency with information security. So we actually started with bringing in people from organizations like the Electronic Frontier foundation to help teach them about how they could stay safe online, how they could use things like VPNs, how they could encrypt their communications, and how they could even, like, more broadly, just be a little more safe about the information they were sharing. Like, digital hygiene is not a button you press, right? It's like a lifestyle choice. I know you've talked to Jameson and other people in the OPSEC field about this, right? But it's like a series of many decisions you have to make that you, over time, change the way you behave. So we started doing that with civil society organizers and independent journalists and dissidents in closed societies, because for them, it's like, it's vitally, vitally important. I mean, I remember one year we had an Angolan dissident. This was before the Doshanto stepped aside. So maybe six years ago. And he was investigating, you know, generals in Angola who were involved in diamond oil corruption. And his computer was like, acting a little funny. And he brought it to the Oslo Freedom Forum. And we had a couple people who were working with the Tor project and EFF who sat down with him, and they were like, looking at his computer and they were like, what the heck is going on here? They basically figured out that one of the companies he was investigating connected to these generals had hired someone to spearfish him and basically were taking screenshots of his work every minute or two or something like that. That's why he was running slow. They figured this out and it was actually like, I remember PC Mag did a big special on it because he was using a Mac and it was like a big vulnerability that was exposed. And a couple other computing outlets also reported on this. It ended up being on the COVID of Newsweek In, I think, June 2013, in this sort of like looking at like white hat versus black hat hacker types, right? So, you know, the Human Rights foundation tries to recruit as many white hat types as we can and work with them. And it was about that time that we started working with Wickr, an encrypted communications platform, and also starting to attend defcon, which we do every year. So we're always trying to recruit people in this space who want to help. So not only have we been using wickr internally since 2013, but we've also created almost like a hotline for the activists in our network. When they have a particular information security question, we can pair them with someone who can help them. So these are some of the things we were doing sort of earlier on. And then personally, I started learning about Bitcoin in 2013. I didn't start really diving into it and achieving a respect and an understanding of it until maybe early to mid 2017. And that was because some of the companies that we were working with that wanted to help us were in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space. So at the Oslo Freedom Forum, every year we bring together. This is like our summit that the Human Rights foundation produces. We bring together dissidents and activists in Norway with industry leaders from all different fields. So we have a big focus on technology and folks from Google and Twitter and YouTube and all these companies would come and we actually started getting interest from like bitfury Consensus and these companies started to come on and help us do really neat things and do education. So as we started to get more involved with them, I realized, wow, I should really try to learn more about this. And I kind of fell down the rabbit hole. Yeah, I guess like a little less than two years ago and really fell in like about a year and a half ago. So I had a cursory knowledge about it and was aware, but certainly didn't realize that it was being used by people in authoritarian contexts until somewhat recently. And that's been kind of the driving force in me learning more about it, talking to people about it and trying to share this knowledge with other people.

Peter McCormack (39:53)

Next up, I talked to Alex Morgan about how bitcoin and cryptocurrencies help support freedom. But before that, I have a message from my show sponsor, BlockFi. Okay, so regular listeners will know these and I mentioned them in the intro. They're a longtime sponsor of the podcast and they had an amazing announcement this week. They've raised another $4 million in funding which is going to be used to expand their team and launch exciting new products. They've got a crypto savings account coming where you can earn interest and they're going to have crypto backed credit cards. So listen, if you don't need a loan, definitely check them out, follow them on Twitter, sign up to their newsletter. They're going to be doing so many interesting things, it's worth checking them out. If you are though interested in the crypto backline. Well, BlockFi is the leading crypto to USD lender in the US servicing over 46 states, they have interest rates as low as 7.9% and applying takes less than two minutes. They accept Bitcoin, Ether or Litecoin as collateral and customers can be funded in USD or gusd, which is Gemini's dollar back. Stablecoin, you can go from application to funding in as little as 30 minutes. So if you want to find out more about that, head over to blockfi.com what Bitcoin did. So we often hear about use cases in Venezuela and maybe Zimbabwe, but realistically you'll probably know more than anyone. How much is crypto actually being used in authoritarian regimes?

Alex Gladstein (41:07)

Yeah, so if you think about it, as far as we can understand from certain websites that do analysis on bitcoin and cryptocurrency transactions, I mean it appears that something like 30, 40 million people might be like a maximum estimate of the number of people that have kind of interacted with cryptocurrencies and bitcoin so far. Some people say less, some people say more, but clearly we're less than 1%. Right. And there are vast swaths, almost the entire planet of course, where people don't know anything about this stuff. So I think we're very, very early. But what we're seeing is like some obvious adoption in areas where the financial system is broken. So I'll give a couple examples. Obviously we talked about Venezuela. I'll share a couple details though about what's happening there now. So in the last couple months and even a few days, Venezuelan government, I guess has set up a system where they're trying to like monitor the IP addresses of people interacting and signing into their bank accounts. And they basically issued an order to banks in Venezuela to prevent people from accessing their bank accounts if they're abroad. Right. So they're going to like dramatic lengths to do this. So it's not so easy anymore. It hasn't been for a long time to send money to your family there. Right. So all these services that are set up to do this, some people literally send like a Western Union to a bank in Colombia and their family walks across the border and go gets it and brings the cash back into Venezuela, which seems like so perilous. So yes, it is actually according to some Venezuelans I work with, like quite effective to send a text or make a call, ask for a little bit of bitcoin a few minutes later, get it in your wallet and then go to a Craigslist style exchange like a local bitcoins.com type thing where you coordinate via WhatsApp or some other messenger and make an exchange of that into fiat or whatever else you want. That is actually one of the better ways to get money into Venezuela today. So that's certainly an area where people are using it. I mean, obviously you've heard others are kind of bringing crypto and bitcoin into the bitcoin, specifically into the Venezuelan ecosystem through mining, because the energy is so cheap, right? It's like nearly free. So you've got a lot of grad students or whatever who've been mining bitcoin and then using it, and some of them using it to escape. I mean, this just general concept that you could flee into a different country with all of your value intact on your phone, on a hot wallet, or on a flash drive, cold storage, or even just memorized in your head is pretty revolutionary. People didn't have that in history until now. So I think we have to look at what is cash, and cash is privacy and free speech and the world is becoming cashless. And I think bitcoin does start to give us an idea of like how we can create digital money where we start to preserve some of the things that cash once allowed us to have. So you're seeing some of this happen in Venezuela. I was talking to a company in Nigeria, they're called bitcoins, and I was asking them some questions there. And it's a massive country in central West Africa that's probably going to be larger than the United states in population 40 years. I mean, this is a huge country and they're a really big market for China, right? So this guy I was talking to was basically saying that the reason why there's so much crypto adoption in Nigeria. And he was Saying, he said 93%, roughly of the crypto is all bitcoin. And he was saying actually the value proposition, the reason why people were doing it was for commerce was to do business with Chinese companies that were reaching the limits of their capital controls. So these like import export businesses selling and buying things in Nigeria, you know, they reach a limit and then they do bitcoin on the side. And it was really interesting to hear. He said, of course, there's a lot of speculation, a lot of people who would do forex now are doing crypto trading and there's a lot of really smart software engineers, tons of them in Nigeria, and they're, they're keyed in on this as well. But he said, actually he said the number one reason why people are using crypto is actually that commerce function, which was fascinating to me. I mean, you Think about places that have strict rules about who can have money and who can't. So I have a friend, her name's Roya Mahboob and she's an Afghan technology CEO. So in Afghanistan, obviously women are treated legally and socially as less than men. So she tries to challenge this by creating a software company where she would hire women and teach them how to code and contribute and make money. And then she faced this issue of like, well, how do I pay them? Whereby like a lot of software is like sanctions, right? Because it's like Afghanistan. And if she gives them cash, they're like husbands and brothers and uncles will take it from them or prevent them from opening a bank account. They don't want them to be financially free. So she started paying them in bitcoin and they had it on their phones and it was just sort of like gave them financial freedom, which was really interesting. And she even said that one of them a couple years ago had to flee Afghanistan because of political threats. And she brought her bitcoin with her through this perilous journey through Iran, Turkey, made it to Europe, made it to Germany, and then luckily over that time her bitcoin had appreciated dramatically and she was able to use it, exchange it into fiat money and start a new life in Germany. So that was pretty impressive. And then I spoke to some folks in China. I was in Taiwan recently for an event that we did there and we got to talk to quite a few people who go back and forth regularly into China and they say they use bitcoin to basically transact and bring money in and out of the country in a way where they don't really want the government to see. These are not criminals, these are activists, these are people who are doing educational work. So I think no matter where you are, you're seeing some serious adoption for some really interesting reasons.

Peter McCormack (47:09)

And what is holding back bigger, widespread adoption, usability, education.

Alex Gladstein (47:14)

I mean, it's hard. You have to be savvy. You're a grad student mining for bitcoin in Venezuela. That is very non trivial to figure out how to do that, even to figure out how to accept bitcoin and to use some sort of craigslist style exchange to turn it into fiat money. These things are hard. I mean, I was even talking to a guy in Iran that I met on Twitter and we talked on an encrypted line and he's a young guy there and he was telling me that in Iran now there are like stores where or like places you can go to meet up with people and exchange stuff, good services for Bitcoin, I mean this is like happening. And Iran is also not as bad as Venezuela, but in this like inflationary, hyperinflationary death spiral where the currency keeps losing value against the rest of the world's currencies. So especially in places like that, as volatile as Bitcoin is, it's still a really powerful tool. And basically you're seeing challenges I think mainly in not just usability, I guess in design and ease of use, but also in education. There's just not a lot of bitcoin educational materials in different languages. There's some and it's growing and it's admirable and we should do more, but it's certainly not enough. I also think that from an education perspective, the conflation problem I mentioned earlier is a big one. Because I don't know if you're going to write a book about physics or chemistry, you're going to take an academic perspective, you're going to look at the whole thing, you're going to try and be even handed. That's not really how people are. Everybody's got an agenda with the world of cryptocurrency. To be fair, a book about it that you would give to somebody in a place like Iran or Venezuela or China should absolutely start with the technology behind Bitcoin, the history of the technology behind Bitcoin, the decades of cryptography and different advances in these different fields that led to the creation of Bitcoin. Chapter two. Why did this person create Bitcoin? Well, they left us some clues like what social problems were they trying to solve? How did it work in its early days? Chapter three Broader adoption maybe Chapter four. Then you start talking about, well, people started making the realization that maybe they could create decentralized computing and other things. Basically people right now are skipping chapters one through four and they're just coming into these places and saying let's talk about smart contracts. I just feel like it's such a massive mistake to not have everybody at least have a good understanding of why Bitcoin was created and why it works. It continues to work really well. So why that should be done in a very even handed like educational way. And that text and those resources should be spread around the world including with about how to do your own good opsec. So I think there needs to be a world class effort to do this. Very, very important.

Peter McCormack (50:11)

The reason I'm smiling is I've got a website and I'm always getting asked by people how to get into Crypto. And I'm always saying, look, you can't. It's not an easy thing. So I put a, I put a thing on my website. It was a step by step guide and it's probably not the same structure as you had, but I've got step one, watch and it's like about Bitcoin, introduction to Bitcoin. Then go on Twitter and follow Andreas and then follow his YouTube channel and watch his videos. Then watch banking on Bitcoin. Then step two is read I've got a thing, the Bullish case for Bitcoin. And I've got Nathaniel Popper's book. And then I've got an address book. And then three, I've got Listen, I've got specific podcasts. And then four, it's like content they just subscribe to. And then five, finally sign up here and go and buy some and like, I'm with you. You can't. It's not like, I don't know, it's not like when you buy a microwave, you can just read about it and turn it on and instantly start making food. It takes a long time.

Alex Gladstein (51:03)

One day, you know, it'll probably work like that, right? But right now you're right. It's like super non trivial to learn about it and implement it and certainly not trivial to use it. Super confusing. So I think that people need to just understand. Yeah, it's not something you can read Cliff Notes on. It's something that's sort of like physics or chemistry or whatever, where you have to study it for years to gain a really good understanding of it, or at least six to eight months. Right. And you have to invest your time in it. So rather than buy Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, I think it's much smarter for people to invest their time in understanding how it works. It'll be so much more valuable for you. I mean, look, the markets may go up and down, but your understanding of this technology will be so helpful for you in the future because you'll be at the edge, you'll know more about it than other folks in most industries. If you were to take the next six to eight months and really study this and understand how it works. I mean, you're going to be able to walk into almost any company, government, agency and know more than everybody about it. So it's really like a great time to do this, especially in places or in fields where you're interacting with people who really need it. And I think that's kind of what it all comes down to is a lot of the dismissals and kind of criticisms and attacks of bitcoin come from people who have the luxury of having a stable financial system where they can have easy access to capital and where they actually trust their banks and governments. I mean we can laugh, but like yeah, if you live in the United States or Britain, like you're pretty much, you pretty much trust your bank and government not to steal your money and to actually provide deposit insurance, things like that. You live in Venezuela or Iran or Zimbabwe or Somaliland or, you know, you're definitely not trusting your government with money. Right. So this is a big, this is the big difference. And I guess this is why I've just gotten so fascinated by it, is because I work with so many people in these countries and I see the clear need for them to have some sort of control over their money.

Peter McCormack (53:02)

Well, one of the things that's quite interesting, I find quite fascinating is there's so many different use cases for bitcoin. So you've explained a bunch of examples to me of people in different authoritarian regimes or under different circumstances. You know that that kind of banking, the unbanked became a bit of a saying. It's kind of. Is it really happening? But you've just given me a great example with Afghanistan. Another great example I had was a totally westernized version where I was with the guys in San Francisco called wire, whereby if you want to transfer money, say you're a forex company, you want to transfer money from the UK to Australia, bank to bank, it will take a few days and there's very high fees. What they do, they do an over the counter trade in bitcoin in both countries and just deposit in the banks so they can do it within six hours for something like less than $75. It doesn't matter how much you send. And what seems to be the common factor is that bitcoin, it makes wakes away with the rules. You can create your own set of rules. Whether it's your company in San Francisco sending money to company Australia or somebody in Afghanistan wanting to create a business to allow women to earn money. It just breaks down all the rules, right?

Alex Gladstein (54:15)

Yeah, I think in the way that it reintroduces peer to peer nature of money, which has been basically ripped out of our societies in many cases in urban areas, I mean still in rural areas, in most countries in the world, people still of course use cash. But especially in places like China and elsewhere, people are increasingly using things like wepay, Alipay for everything. You go to Rural China, you're going walking on the street and my friends who are journalists there are rural reporting back that even in very, very rural areas, I mean, you're using your phone with a QR code functionality, give a beggar money or buy a mango. So this is happening, this sort of, I guess we would call it intermediation, where they're inserting other parties between you and the person you're interacting with. Right. So instead of handing somebody a $20 bill and it being peer to peer, you're scanning it on a QR code and there's like three or four banks that it goes through before it reaches the other person, even though they're standing right in front of you. Right. So with Bitcoin it reintroduces the peer to peer nature of monetary transactions. And I think that's a pretty fundamental thing which we can build on top of. And something. A point I'd like to make, I guess is that I view Bitcoin as like one of many technologies that will help us build a decentralized future. It's very important and maybe even the fundamental one. But it needs other things to be truly helpful to people. Like it needs decentralized on ramps and off ramps. It needs censorship resistant access to the Internet, it needs privacy technology and people who are implementing that. If you have an ecosystem where you're excited about using Bitcoin, you, you probably also want an ecosystem where you're excited about having some sort of control over your location and health data. And these are things that may not necessarily be blockchain related, but they certainly will be encryption related in some way. So yeah, if I'm looking at a future in the next few years where I'm doing point of sale, just like buying and selling stuff and I'm using like lightning or something, running an app that's using that, I'm also trying to think about how can I take better control of my personal data and what technologies are going to help me do that. So I do view Bitcoin as like one of the most important, if not the most important technology in this decentralized area, or if you want to call it anti authoritarian technologies that'll actually help promote civil liberties. I think this is something people should really think about and also presents like, what's interesting to me is it presents like a very appealing perhaps investment strategy. So people talk about like clean tech and ed tech and health tech. Well, why not DemTech or Democracy Tech where you're investing in technologies that are going to make civil liberties stronger and Help things like privacy and user data and at the same time, potentially get very wealthy doing it over the next 10 years. I mean, you look at, like, Anderson Horowitz. They have a $300 million crypto fund, and their first investment was in a company that's working on encrypting user data for various applications. I mean, that's cool. I mean, will that fund do well? Probably. Should more people be doing that? Yes. Should people even be saying it's like an impact investing thing? Definitely. And, like, why aren't they doing that? I'm not sure, but it's something I'd like to see more of.

Peter McCormack (57:42)

I mean, demtech is not a term I've heard. Right. So let's popularize it.

Alex Gladstein (57:47)

I've got a bunch of speaking engagements over the next few months to where I'm. Where I'm going to, where I'm at, where I've been asked to actually talk about that. So hopefully we can start to chip in and make a difference. I mean, look, at one point, there was no such thing as clean tech or green tech. About 17 years ago, people got together and said, hey, all these companies that are reducing energy consumption or whatever, they don't really have anything to do with one another per se, but we're gonna put a lasso around them and just say, hey, this is clean tech. Let's just go to different family foundations and csr, corporate social responsibility, arms and funds, and even things like mutual funds and universities, things like that, and say, hey, you can take a certain percentage of your investment strategy and try to make the world better through here. So now what I want to do is just add another option for people to actually improve civil liberties in addition to making the world better through education, healthcare, and saving the environment. So I think how fundamental. This goes back to the beginning of our conversation. But civil liberties are so critical for all of these things. Like, you want a more fair health care system. You want to prevent pollution, you want to have a higher minimum wage. You're going to need civil liberties for your ability to write an article in the paper asking for this, for your ability to march and protest for these things. So without civil liberties, we've lost everything, our ability to make any aspect of our lives better. So they're so fundamental that it strikes me as quite an urgent thing. And I feel like in a loosely transatlantic, bipartisan way, that no matter kind of what side or the political aisle you're on, that you're probably worried about authoritarianism in some way. Whether you're worried about populist authoritarianism, or you're worried about Facebook and Google having all your data, or you're worried about the government getting really big. Like no matter what your worry is, like, we can probably all get behind the idea that civil liberties are good. So I do feel like this thing can catch on, especially as we're watching what happens when we don't do anything about it. And unfortunately we don't have to run a thought experiment. We can watch what's happening in China where there's no separation of money and state, no separation of technology and state, and people are building this horrifying Orwellian system where your behaviors are now turning into a way for the government to sort of score you. And you know, it's not this sort of national myth that sometimes you read about, but like, it's definitely something the Chinese government is trying to do at the local level through various experiments, municipal and corporate, by starting to track people and score them so that they can instead of needing to enforce their rule by violence, legitimize and prop up their rule by people self censoring each other, and by being loyal citizens and being in a competition to be who can be the most loyal citizen. It's absolutely brilliant and it's terrifying. And it's only made possible by highly centralized technology. So like, that's one future.

Peter McCormack (60:48)

So it's Black Mirror.

Alex Gladstein (60:50)

Well, I mean, maybe it's not quite Black Mirror, but it's in some cases even more horrifying than that. They've got. This is a government that's using advanced technology to put a million Muslims in prison camps, possibly even two, according to the U.S. state Department, 2 million people. So we don't really know. There's no independent journalism there. It's totally opaque, it's hard to understand. But we've got the vision. So look, we can go down that centralized road where the government has total control over everything and starts kind of owning all of your interactions, whether they be communication, financial, behavioral, et cetera, et cetera. That's not a future I want to go down now. It's not a dystopia, it's reality for like more than a billion people. So let's not assume it can't happen to us, but we've got to fight it. And I think the only way to fight it is with a healthy mix of technology. Like I think, as Wei Dai once said, all governments, no matter who they are, they'll try to take freedom from their people. And so rather than convince them not to do that, let's build technology that makes that impossible. So I would say half the strategy is building technology that can be a check or a challenge to the surveillance state. But the other half is just like old school political campaigning and old school human rights advocacy. So we need both, you know, we need both public campaigns to put pressure and to force companies and governments to adopt pro privacy policies and technologies. And we also need to encourage people to build the tech that'll make it impossible to have the Orwellian state. I mean a good example of the on the policy side would be like I'm from or I'm currently living in Oakland, I'm not from here, I moved here recently. But in Oakland, California, the local city has like a citizen oversight board over the local city authorities with regard to the surveillance equipment they can purchase. So the citizens have some sort of check mechanism over this. And there's been a lot of like obviously bad incidents in Oakland of police violence and things like that. So the citizens have come together and they've seen things like I guess a couple years ago the police were basically, you know, they have these like surveillance cameras at intersections and they were just filming every single license plate as it came through every single intersection. And they were just storing this data in a back room somewhere and they were never getting rid of it. Insane. So now there's like a bit of citizen oversight on that. I think there should be a citizen privacy board in every city, every country. Right. So maybe that's something, you know, do I trust federal regulators to regulate technology correctly? No. But there's got to be some sort of citizen powered policy check that we can have in conjunction with our, you know, our efforts to build technology that's more different, difficult to manipulate. Just to add one more thing, I think a really good example of this is that once a user base of a technology becomes interested enough in something, maybe a company will go that way. So for example, encrypted end to end Messaging, Facebook and WhatsApp, no matter your criticism of how they implemented it, didn't have to go that way. They were kind of pressured to in a certain way offer that service for their people. Right. For their clients. Right. So I think this can work well.

Peter McCormack (64:09)

So then there's a couple of important questions I have for you then. So surveillance state, what do you say to people then? For example, MI6 in the UK will say we've stopped 38 terrorist attacks in the last year. What do you say to that?

Alex Gladstein (64:24)

I'm a big fan of counterterrorism and of governments protecting people. I Don't think massive illegal surveillance is necessary to do that. I think they can do it with investigative, professional policing. I mean, you even look at books like history, like when it comes to counterterrorism in the Middle East. One of my favorite books is the Looming Tower, which is the history of a really prominent FBI agent and Osama bin Laden that kind of traces their lives. And it just shows you that what's effective is like old school police work, right. Investigation into particular cases where you have close collaboration between different intelligence agencies and you're building out a case and you're prosecuting people in specific ways. What's not helpful is broad based illegal surveillance. It's just not very helpful. I don't think the MI6 or CIA or FBI needs this to protect us.

Peter McCormack (65:22)

Okay. And then the last thing, I want to go back to demtech. I think that's really interesting and it's really spiked my interest. And I tell you, why is that as much as the technology is great, there are so many people involved in Bitcoin who just want the price to go up. And it's usually the people living in the places that don't really need bitcoin. So they want an etf, they want Wall street adoption, which are all very difficult things to happen when realistically you've got a potential customer base of 4 billion here who could be using the tech straight away and you can support that tomorrow. Anyone can. Group of people could come together and build a website that educates and teaches people how to do this now.

Alex Gladstein (65:57)

Yeah, and look, I've had conversations with a bunch of different companies that realize this and they're thinking about it very carefully and they're already starting to figure out how to do this. I mean, I truly believe that the impact of Bitcoin and perhaps other cryptocurrencies in the next decade is going to be for people who don't have, you know, working banking systems. I think the killer app is money, Bitcoin specifically. And I think that peer to peer commerce and remittances and even aid is going to be something that really changes the world. And I do think some of these big companies are realizing that. Look, I would, as part of a demtech strategy, I think you've got to look at investing in bitcoin infrastructure both on the user side, the wallet side, the app side, and then of course behind the scenes too. So whether it's a cool wallet company or like a particular on ramp or a decentralized sort of payment network like Lightning or something like that, I mean, these are all really important things for the wider adoption of Bitcoin in these places. And I would also say that when it comes to something like demtech, something that again, goes back to our original conversation, but something your listeners should think about is the fact that when we talk about impact investing, which is on the spectrum of making a pure investment, on the spectrum of making a pure gift, it's kind of like the idea that, hey, in the middle somewhere, we can invest money in a particular type of cause, that we may take a slightly lower return, but will make the world better. Now, this whole industry is steered by the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. This is like the North Star for the impact investors. The thing is, of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the word democracy is mentioned 0 times. The word privacy is mentioned 0 times. The word journalism is mentioned 0 times. The word separation of powers is mentioned 0 times. Human rights and corruption are barely mentioned. I mean, this is an authoritarian document written up by governments to sort of figure out what can we globally work on without. Without threatening our own power. And when you look at some of the governments that were involved in drafting the SDGs, Assad's government in Syria helped draft these things in 2012 while they were in the middle of massacring all their people, right? So it's pretty crazy when you actually look at it. And then you look at this document, which looks all nice and fuzzy and warm from the outside, but when you actually look at it carefully, it's a very authoritarian document that's meant to not pose a threat to any political power around the world. And you know what? Centralized political power is a huge problem. I mean, there are more people living under authoritarianism than there are combined. People who don't have access to clean drinking water, who live on less than $2 a day, who are subject to war or natural disasters, or who are refugees. There's just more people living under repression than all those things combined. And yet you never hear about it. It's always the elephant in the room. But here's our opportunity to make a difference. We can not just do gifts and donations, which are really important. And I really encourage your listeners to find a nonprofit that they like, whether it's, I'll be shameless, the Human Rights foundation or something like the Electronic Frontier foundation or Amnesty or whatever they like. Go do that and support that. That's very important. But at the same time, in your investment strategies, consider a new portfolio or fund that's only going to look at technologies that are going to support Privacy and civil liberties. I think that's going to be really important, or else we're headed down the road to the WeChat future.

Peter McCormack (69:54)

So the last couple things I want to ask you about is, like, I'm not as exposed to as much of what goes on in the world as you have, and you obviously exposed a lot of negativity, but I guess you also exposed a lot of positive things happening. Like, where is your balance between, like, hope and despair at the moment?

Alex Gladstein (70:10)

Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, look, people often describe attending one of our Oslo Freedom Forum events as very emotional, very cathartic. It's like. It's like a roller coaster because you hear these really depressing stories and you're kind of just, like, shouting in your mind, like, why can't we help these people more? But at the end of the day, it's really healthy. And, like, after you attend one of these events and you listen to the struggles that people are going through, you get very fired up. And, you know, I think it does two things. A, it educates you. It provides you an opportunity to learn about how you can help people less fortunate than you who don't have access to the same sort of rights that you have. And B, it also, like, makes you, I think, more appreciative and vigilant about the rights that you do have. So I think, you know, being part of this community that HRF has built and learning more about things like what's happening in Cameroon and Burma and North Korea will actually probably end up making you a more active citizen wherever you live. And that. That provides me with. With great hope that we have this kind of dual impact on people. And I think the thing that keeps me going is hearing these stories from these activists and journalists that I come into contact with and just how persistent they are. I mean, you've got people who've done things that you wouldn't believe for just the hope of a tiny fraction of the rights that we take for granted every day. Okay, so you've got people who've escaped from North Korea and dragged themselves 6000 miles on crutches to freedom just for the right to have control over their own destiny and decide what they want to do with their career. I mean, you've got women that have escaped from Afghanistan just so they can have some sort of control over their finances. You've got people escaping from Venezuela just so they can feed their family. I mean, you've got people who, again, will sacrifice everything just for the tiniest little fraction of the rights and freedoms that we enjoy in places like the United Kingdom and the United States and South Korea and Japan, many other places around the world. So when you witness their hope, I think, and their persistence, it's quite inspiring, and it leads you to want to keep at it, I think.

Peter McCormack (72:30)

You mentioned North Korea. Right. We discussed previously they've got a conference coming up. What do you make of that?

Alex Gladstein (72:36)

Yeah, we should touch on this. So I actually had a meeting with the South Korean government today about this. They wanted to learn more about what I was thinking, what the Human Rights foundation thought about this effort. But essentially, in the spring, it appears maybe in April, the North Korean government is going to host a blockchain conference. So immediately, I'm thinking of a couple different things here. A, it's generally a bad idea to go to North Korea. You're going to see a Potemkin village that's very carefully curated. You're going to spend a lot of money, and it's going to go to line the pockets of a bloodthirsty, brutal regime that keeps hundreds of thousands of people in prison camps and starves and murders and rapes its population. So generally not a good idea to support them. And you're not going to actually get a chance to go and interact with like, quote, unquote, real North Koreans. You're only going to talk to a very highly choreographed group of people who the regime approves of and who are deeply loyal to the Kim Dynasty. Basically, in North Korea, there's like, more than 50 castes. So, like, in India, you've heard there's like the Untouchables and the Brahmins and whatever. Right. So in North Korea, there's actually more than 50 of these sort of social levels loosely grouped into, like, loyal, wavering and hostile. And they're actually geographically distributed. So the most loyal people live in Pyongyang and the other urban areas. And it goes from there to where the most sort of disloyal, hostile people live in the deserts, mountains, whatever. So when you go to Pyongyang, you're literally going to meet kind of like the most loyal people, the 1% of the 1%. So the idea that you're going to, like, convince them to change their lifestyle is, like, pretty unlikely. And again, you're providing. I think the government official I met with today said something like €3,000 to do this thing. I mean, that's money they need, that's hard currency that they desperately need. So you're giving them something they want. Now, what's going to happen when you get there, let's say you're like, screw it. I feel like I can make a difference. Okay, so you show up in Pyongyang, they're going to take you around and make you bow down to the statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and they're going to take you around to a bunch of, like, very important North Korean historical sites, and they're going to treat you to a bunch of feasts while everybody around you is starving. And then eventually you're going to come to a meeting where you're going to sit down and talk about blockchain. And they're basically going to stare at you and say, how can we benefit? So really, you've gone all the way around the world to Pyongyang to sit down with these mass murderers, and you're going to actually give them advice. The whole theme seems so misguided. And I would really encourage anyone who listens to this to not go to boycott this. One of the most powerful things I saw when I was in South Africa recently, we started running a conference there. And you get to go to the apartheid museum, and you go to that room which shows you how powerful it was that, like, sports stars and music stars and businesses in the Olympics boycotted the apartheid regime because it was evil. And it made such a big difference. It took a long time, but it made a huge difference. So I asked people, well, how much better is the North Korean regime? I'd argue it's a lot worse. Why should they be allowed to compete in the Olympics? Why should they get your business? Why should you go to Pyongyang and give them your advice on how they can build blockchains? Don't do it. Now, on the engineering side, what kind of blockchains do you really think they're going to try and build? Do you think that the idea of some decentralized money network that no central party can control appeals to them? Of course not. They're going to want to try to build some sort of surveillance blockchain where they can, like, more effectively track the movements of their people. Is that possible? Or does that even make sense from an engineering perspective? I don't know. Probably not, but they're certainly going to try. And all the people who go are going to be party to this. So I really hope this thing falls flat in its face. There's no reason, if you want to help the Korean people build cool blockchain stuff, go to South Korea.

Peter McCormack (76:42)

Yeah, And I've also heard there's quite a Lot of blockchain work happening out in Saudi Arabia. What's kind of going on there? Because I don't know anything about it.

Alex Gladstein (76:49)

Well, I think you have to look at the media. Smart people can read the press. They can see that this is a dictatorship that has shown no compunction about murdering journalists like Jamal Khashoggi, that participates in a brutal war in Yemen that's been massacring untold numbers of civilians, that has been torturing the female activists who are nearly fighting for their own right to drive. And you've got bigwigs from all different kinds of corporations going to Saudi Arabia to talk about financial innovation. And you've got companies like, for example, Ripple or IBM even going to Saudi Arabia to build payment infrastructure and so called smart cities. I think that the next six months are going to be really important. Are these companies going to continue working with the Saudi dictatorship or are they going to pull out and make a stand? There was a big financial summit there a few weeks ago where CEOs of Siemens and Uber kind of pulled out. And it was clear that like, oh, maybe the corporate world could actually make a stand where our governments have been miserably failing. But we'll see. I mean, there's a big blockchain summit coming up in Saudi Arabia, I think in February. Like, will all those speakers remain on the roster? Like, are they actually going to go there right now? Is that something that's actually going to happen? In the wake of the murder of Khashoggi and the torture of these female activists and the war in Yemen, These people are actually going to go to Saudi Arabia and try to help this just brutal government build blockchain surveillance systems. I think we need to take a stand and I think this is where that begins. Not just in Venezuela, not just in China. I don't think your company should be building the infrastructure for Muslim internment camps. And I don't think your company should be building the future of blockchain surveillance cities for the Saudi government so that they can basically lock up and punish or crucify or whatever they do, people who they don't agree with. So normally when a company does business with Saudi Arabia, they try to sweep it under the rug. They try not to be proud about it. It's not like you have Halliburton going around being all proud about its new Saudi contract. No, they're trying to like sweep it under the rug. So why is blockchain different? Why is IBM excited about doing business with the Saudi government? Why is Ripple really proud of this, what's the difference? I think the difference is in the industry, the difference is that there's no morals when it comes to this. The difference is that people are excited to accept invitation to go talk about crypto in Saudi Arabia. So the people in the ecosystem need to make a difference. The people in the ecosystem need to start taking a stand and start being a little more careful about what they're building. I think that's really the key point that's very important.

Peter McCormack (79:32)

Right. Okay. Wow. Okay, so my last question for you is. So this is going to go out next week. And quite interestingly, I've got an interview also going out with Vijay Boyapati, who wrote a very, very good piece called the Bullish Case for Bitcoin, why it's important in the history of money, why it's good money, why it's hard money. But underneath, as I said to you with this, there is a, you know, I care about everything you said about, but I'm very spiked in interest by the demtech side of things. And I'm trying to keep away from money, trying to keep away towards the benefit of the technology. So a great way to finish would just be just here to tell the listeners of my podcast why they should care about bitcoin outside of making money themselves and why they really should care about it.

Alex Gladstein (80:17)

I think your listeners should put themselves in the shoes of someone who lives under an authoritarian regime, you know, where all their movements are being tracked and watched. What a revelation. What a lifeline would it be to be able to surreptitiously download a very soft, lightweight program onto your phone and be able to receive a file which gives you the ability to go buy things and transact or even just save it for future use or even memorize some sort of phrase that you can use later to recover this file and, you know, use that to, you know, feed your family or save for the future. I mean, this is really what bitcoin is able to do. Yes, it's money. Yes, the money thing is really important. But ultimately, I think it's like a liberation tool to give people who live under authoritarian or, you know, repression, repressive or financial surveillance systems the ability to kind of take their life into their hands a little bit and start making their own decisions. I think this is entirely unconnected in some ways from the price. It's a way for us to interact with each other again globally in a peer to peer way without intermediaries. And I just think that's really healthy. And maybe this current iteration of Bitcoin is not the one that we're going to use in 10 years. I know for a fact that it's not, but it clearly is just this fascinating innovation in how humans can network with each other. And I do think that when you look at the world and how humans have evolved over time, it's always been evolutions in the way we network with each other that have driven technological advancements. So if you think about the agricultural revolution, for better or worse, I know there's a lot of debate about that. Think about it. It was really an upgrade in how humans could network. It brought us from these like small hunter gatherer groups that really couldn't get past this Dunbar Number of like 150 people to cities and towns and villages and empires. And then you had the industrial revolution, which really brought us from couple hundred million people on the planet, several billion, in just a matter of a few hundred years because of advancements and different kinds of technology. And if you even go really far back, you have like the cognitive revolution, right, which, which made humans kind of different than animals. And you can dive into this in books like Sapiens, but every time you had like a key revolution in humanity, it was all about the way we network with each other. And I really do feel like at some basic level, bitcoin is quite fundamental. I mean, it really reintroduces the idea that we can, no matter where we are on Earth, interact with each other in a peer to peer way. And that I just see is tremendously hopeful and positive and powerful for the individual and hopefully bad news for dictatorships.

Peter McCormack (83:29)

Okay, so to finish off, it'd be great to know how people can track the Human Rights foundation, where they can find out what they're doing, where they can find out what you're doing and who you want to hear from and how people can get involved.

Alex Gladstein (83:42)

Great. Yeah. Well, you can track us quite easily on social media. So we're hrf On Twitter, I'm gladstein. Just my last name. G L A D S T E I N as far as how you can directly get involved, we actually have a program for, for just that. It's called the Oslo Freedom Forum. It's a series of conferences that take place around the globe. We have one day events in Mexico, in Mexico City on February 26, in South Africa on April 6. Our three day summit is in Norway from May 28 to 30. And then we have one day events in September in New York and in November in Taipei. And you can come to these events and you can meet these Activists and dissidents who are putting everything on the line to make a freer future, a more open society for their family and future generations. And you can trade notes with them and learn from them and figure out how you can get involved and how you can make a difference. So I would really encourage you to be interactive here and to actually attend one of our events. If you'd like an invitation, just write to me. Alexrf.org your listeners obviously are also like very deep in the bitcoin space, potentially in other technologies. So what I would recommend is to write to me also if you have a particular project that you want to support or partner with us on, if you want to learn more about bitcoin adoption in a certain country, or if you want to maybe underwrite some research or work together on a particular application or help a particular on the ground civil society group or entrepreneur, let's talk about it. Let's make it happen.

Peter McCormack (85:29)

Well, listen, I think I want to come out to the summit. Actually I've never been to Norway, so I think I might come out for that. This was great. Thank you so much for coming on. I've really enjoyed this. I think we're definitely gonna have to do a follow up. There's a lot of stuff I haven't asked.

Alex Gladstein (85:42)

I want to definitely formally extend that you should come to the Oslo Freedom Forum and do a couple episodes with some of our attendees. I think you'd have a blast.

Peter McCormack (85:51)

No, I will, I'll definitely come. But yeah, thanks for coming on, Alex. This has been great.

Alex Gladstein (85:54)

Awesome. Well, thank you so much and we'll talk soon.

Peter McCormack (86:05)

Okay. So what did you make of that? Did you find that as a interesting as I did. That was one of my favorite ever interviews. I recommend you go and check out the show notes on my website and watch some of Alex's presentations because there's so much to learn from him. They're pretty amazing and he is really great at explaining how decentralized technologies and bitcoin can help support freedom throughout the world. And listen, I know the maximalists don't like stable coins, but twice now I've heard solid arguments for their use and the maximalist sympathy side of me is struggling here. Firstly, when I met with Zach Prince and he explained to me it doesn't make sense for someone money in a place like Argentina to put all their money in bitcoin right now. And if they want to borrow a dollar and hold a stable currency, then stablecoins are a way of achieving this. Similarly, Alex talks about the opportunity would make a down. And if you're in a country like Afghanistan trying to employ and pay women who are unable to get a bank account. Yeah, well, bitcoin might be great, but we have to be fair and weigh up the volatility risk with Bitcoin and why a stablecoin might make sense. Lastly, I found Alex's points with regards to responsibilities of business. Interesting. You know, should Ripple Coin and IBM boycott Saudi Arabia? Do we accept the argument that, well, stop driving cars because your oil comes from Saudi? What is our responsibility for responding to things such as the murder of journalists? It's definitely a debate worth having. Bitcoin is meant to provide freedom and Ripple Coin openly promoting their work in Saudi Arabia appears antithetical to the ideology of bitcoin. It's something I'm kind of challenging myself on at the moment. Would be great to hear the feedback and thoughts of others on this. Anyway, listen, I hope you enjoyed the interview. If you do have any questions, you can reach out to me. And thank you to everyone who supports the show, from those who leave me a review on itunes to those who sponsor the podcast. It all helps. And if you want to support the show, there's a load of things you can do. Firstly, you can just listen to the ads and check out the sponsors such as Blockfi and Paxful. You don't have to buy anything, but supporting the advertisers definitely supports the show because if the ads are successful, other people will advertise in the future. So that's pretty cool. Also, you can think about becoming a patron. Head over to patreon.com whatbitcoin did. I think it's 54 now. There's different options in there. There's one where you can get the show early without ads, which is pretty cool. I think that's the most popular one. You can also think about becoming a show sponsor. 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Tuesday I have an interview with Bitcoin core developer Brian Bishop talking about how people develop on bitcoin, something I know nothing about. So looking forward to that. And next Friday I have an interview with Trace Mayer talking about Proof of Keys. Very, very excited about that one as well. Okay, I hope you all have a cracking week. Stay safe out there. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions. Listen, if you've lost some money in crypto and you're feeling a bit bad about it, do feel free to reach out to me. Happy to chat to anyone. Okay, have a great week. See you soon.