YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Gladstein

lines on the record: 163
first: 2021-10-16
most recent: 2021-10-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Which is totally centralized, has blacklists. So I'm not saying there won't be new digital assets that are lumped into this category that have usage, but it's not the same innovation as Bitcoin. It's just sort of building on this idea of like a euro dollar maybe, like a dollar that is minted outside of the control of the US federal reserve, right? It would be a euro dollar. So stablecoins are kind of like euro dollars just minted by private actors, in a way, right? But they're still tied to the dollar. They're pegged to the dollar. They're not escaping the system. Escaping the system is Bitcoin. We aren't reliant on the dollar. We have our own full store value, medium of exchange, unit of account eventually. And the Bitcoin world will be denominated in different terms. And I think everyone, everything else will be tied to it. I really do.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Bitcoin. So all these other cryptocurrencies, they might have their use cases. Virtually all of them are not. It's very important for people to know that if you take like the 4,500 cryptocurrencies on Coin Market Cap, almost all of them are scams straight up. Even the ones that have noble intentions, I just don't think are going to add that much value ultimately. I think Bitcoin, to me, is the innovation. And that's because it has a monetary policy and an issuance schedule that cannot be changed. And that's what gets me so excited about. I mean, that's why it's such an important tool for human rights.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, Bitcoin is the innovation. The innovation is in having the decentralized mint. No one can change the monetary policy. Everything else is downstream from there. In Bitcoin, the meme would be 21 million. There's never going to be any more than 21 million. Every other cryptocurrency either has an inflationary policy, meaning there's going to continue to be more and more of it over time, or its monetary policy can be changed by a small group of people. This is vividly on display in Ethereum, which is like the second largest and second most robust cryptocurrency, right? I've talked to senior Ethereum engineers over the last couple weeks trying to figure out what is the monetary policy of Ethereum. No one can tell me. No one knows how much ETH is going to be minted in 2022 and 2023 after they shift to proof of stake. I've seen estimates that range from 100,000 to 2 million. So at the end of the day, you're going to be trusting a small group of people to make those decisions. That is what we are escaping.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you say overtake, what do you mean? What do you mean overtake? You mean number of users? Do you mean price per coin?”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the people's money. This is something that cannot be controlled by governments or corporations. And that makes it very powerful. And I think it's actually quite exciting to be here in the adoption phase.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it comes to could it possibly be adopted by like a sufficient majority of the population? I say yes. And it's very similar to the way the mobile phone spread. At the beginning, the cell phone was only for rich people. It was only for the elite. It was huge. It didn't work very well. The interface sucked. It was clunky. Over time, it got smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper and easier to use and easier to use than today. Everyone benefits. So you're going to watch a similar technology upgrade process with Bitcoin. Already in the last 10 years, Bitcoin has gotten so much easier to use. I mean, there are now mobile wallets that are so slick. There's one called Moon M-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-N Wallet from a team in Argentina. And these guys created it because they saw their own currency devalued like three times in the last 20 years. And they've had a hell of a time trying to get their money back and forth from different countries. So they were like, let's make this easy for people again, you know, this is.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I mean, I would say the capital of Bitcoin could easily be Lagos and not San Francisco in terms of users, in terms of people using it. And again, the two use cases as a savings account and as an unstoppable payment rail, these are the two ones that you should really think about. This is how people are using it today.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A Bitcoin And look, the good news is you can withdraw to your own control. And in the Bitcoin community, we try to teach this idea that it's not your keys, not your coins, in the same way that if you deposit your money at the bank, you might not get it back. I mean, it's low likelihood, but it's very possible. Same thing in Bitcoin. Like if you want to get the full experience, you want to actually custody your own Bitcoin. You want to put it, whether it's on an open source software wallet like the blue wallet is a good one for people to check out or a hardware wallet like cold card, for example. There's different ways to do this. But essentially, like around the world, people are innovating. Like, don't think so low of your fellow man. You know what I mean? Like people are able to figure this out. You know, I get a lot of flack from people saying, oh, Bitcoin's so hard to use. I read this article in the New York Times saying the sky in Silicon Valley lost all of his Bitcoin. That's because he was a moron and didn't care about it. This guy lost all this Bitcoin because it wasn't worth much 10 years ago. And he forgot the past.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, yeah. So, like a bear instrument would be like a bar gold A banknote or Bitcoin that you control, meaning you have the seed phrase, right, which for the listeners essentially is 12 to 24 English words that you write down on a piece of paper. That's your Password to get into your Bitcoin account. That gives you that bear instrument quality, right? But unfortunately, most users still use Bitcoin in a custodial way, meaning they buy it on Coinbase.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most users today are using Bitcoin in a custodial manner. So this is kind of like having a bank account where you have a deposit account at a bank, right? So you have a claim, right? You go to the bank and they have some of your money and you take it out with an ATM. So what I would call non-custodial Bitcoin use would be similar to withdrawing cash from an ATM. You have it. It's a bearer instrument, okay? So when I, it's what it's called, it's bearer instrument.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sanctions resistant. It does not get stopped by sanctions, right? And also, it's, again, remittances are extortionate. I mean, the average remittance costs has a high fee, take several days if your family is in Ghana or something like that or Nigeria and you live in the United States, it can take time to use Western Union. Sometimes, you know, oh, it gets paused, it gets lost, there's issues, you have to deal with customer service. Screw that. I mean, you know, the person has a cell phone, which increasingly is the case. I mean, by the end of next year, more than five or six billion people, depending on different estimates, will have smartphones basically by the end of 2022. We're talking like the vast majority of humans will have access to smartphones. They can all have sovereign Bitcoin wallets. And there's even ways to access Bitcoin without the internet. But, I mean, we can get into that.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cuba or Iran are good examples. Average people suffer, right? So people in those two countries I just mentioned, Cuba, Iran, or even Palestine, which is also sort of like blockaded by the Israelis. So you have Cuba, Iran, Palestine are three good examples where people inside all three of those countries now are using Bitcoin to do commerce, do their business, send money back and forth.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so again, we have one clear use case, which is a sovereign savings account that you can control, right? The other use case is an unstoppable payments network. This is very important for people who live behind, for example, sanctions, like the US basically weaponizes the dollar and it sanctions different countries. And instead of sanctioning a handful of rulers, for example, which I would support, this is like a Magnitsky or smart sanctions Sometimes we'll just say, we're just going to shut off this whole country so the”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“45 million people. So you can go down the list. There's about 35 countries where people's earnings, their wages are literally disappearing in front of their eyes over a matter of weeks or months against things like the dollar or gold or real estate. So this is a huge issue. It absolutely is a human rights issue for me. I mean, when it comes to your time and energy having control over that or having it stolen from you, I think this is pretty clear. And Bitcoin is like an immediate low cost. easily accessible solution for people. And I've learned this not from my own assumptions, but by talking to people, by interviewing dozens of people, whether it's in Sudan, which currently has triple digit inflation or people who've escaped from Syria, who have used Bitcoin to get their wealth out of the country, and then also to make payments back to people inside, or Venezuela or elsewhere. It's very, very powerful.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Euro in Canada. I mean, those are like reserve currencies. And these are liberal democracies where people have reasonable guarantees over property rights. Everybody else either lives under like a weaker currency or an authoritarian regime. That's 87% of the world's population, almost 7 billion people. So for them, a sovereign savings account that's permissionless, meaning you don't have to have ID to use it, is a big, big deal. And a lot of people talk about Zimbabwe or Venezuela as some like isolated cases. Oh, well, you know, hyperinflation only happens in those two countries. I actually did some research into this and there's about 1 over close to 1.3 billion people who live under double or triple digit inflation. This is not an isolated instance. We're talking huge countries. Nigeria, 200 million people, 15% inflation. Turkey. 15% inflation for 100 million people. Argentina 40% inflation for a country for”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we talked about authoritarianism and we talked about the surveillance state. Me, Bitcoin has two kind of key mechanisms through which it can help us Number one, it's a sovereign savings account. It's debasement proof, meaning the government cannot print more whenever they want. This is very, very different from fiat currency, which by its very name, its very nature, can be issued on sort of demand, right, by the rulers. And while I live in a country where the rulers do a reasonable job of managing the money, most people aren't still lucky. So only 13% of humans in the world live in a country that's a liberal democracy with property rights and has what we call a reserve currency, meaning a currency so state”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of that money. And when it comes to Bitcoin, it's really the people's money. Like there is no shadowy force in charge of it. We all know the rules. We all know how it's going to get minted and how it's going to get printed. And that information is out there for everybody to see. And there's no special group of rules for one group of people or another group. A billionaire and a refugee are the same in the eyes of the protocol. This is a rather revolutionary concept. And in the same way that Democracy allowed us to decentralize politics and have checks and balances and in the same way that the internet is this culmination of technologies that allowed us to decentralize information, access to and control over it, Bitcoin decentralizes money. I mean, no longer, again, is there one group of people who can just change it arbitrarily. We're all on the same playing field. And I think that that is a tremendous innovation.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said no one's ever asked me to do that before, but I'll come. And he came. This was about three years ago. And the first thing he did when he got on the stage is he opened up a shirt and he brought out a necklace that had the nineteen eighties Zimbabwean dollar on it. And he said, we in the activist community wear this as a symbol of where our country used to be because the Zimbabwean dollar used to be worth two British pounds. And then, of course, over the next two and a half decades of economic mismanagement and corruption by Mugabe, it got inflated out of existence, right? You've seen those like $100 trillion in Zimbabwean notes. So he had to live through that, which was terrible and crushing. But he is an expert on money. If you actually talk to human rights activists about money, they know a lot about money. They're just not usually asked to talk about it. So, you know, for me, when I study money or look at money, it's really about control. Who is creating it and how much does the population know about?”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is not on the menu of human rights activists. If you just do a systematic study of the human rights discourse over the last several decades, money is not there. It's also not really taught in schools. Like children don't really learn about money. Where does it come from? It's kind of hidden from a lot of our discourse. Only really when I got into Bitcoin did I start learning more about money. I spent 10 years at the Human Rights Foundation and we did all kinds of programs around the world. We convened Oslo Freedom Forums in different places and I got to meet hundreds of dissidents. And very rarely did they ever speak about currency or bank accounts or moving money from one place to another. But when I started asking them, they always had amazing stories about money, always. I mean, my friend Ivan Mawire, who started this flag movement in Zimbabwe, which ended up toppling Robert Mugabe, when I asked him to come to San Francisco to give a talk about hyperinflation, which he lived through.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have witnessed money be peripheralized. It has taken a back seat in the human rights conversation. The idea of currency, who makes the money, who makes the rules, who issues it, who sets the interest rates, all these things.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would say that encrypted messaging is kind of a corollary to that second innovation in as much as now people are like more effortlessly, like signal is a lot easier to use than PGP, for example, they're more easily able to practice privacy when it comes to having private messages globally. These are all good things and we need to keep pushing. And I think money is like, honestly, maybe the most important piece and that's why I spent so much time thinking about Bitcoin.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we can keep it simple for the purposes of this conversation. You have politics, information, and money. Those are the three things I would encourage us to focus on. In politics, yes, someone invented democracy. I mean, whether it was the Greeks or the West Africans or many others around the world around the same time invented this idea that we should be ruled by rules and not by rulers, right? And that has evolved dramatically, right? And then you have information. Information also used to be highly centralized, right? You know, think about how rich you had to be to gain access to a library before the printing press or how much money you had to have or how close to the king or the feudal lord you had to be to be able to have that ability. But now the majority of the world, billions of people, have access to all information in their pocket and they can set up an account on social media and get their word out. So not only politics, but information has been dramatically decentralized.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The metadata. Maybe they can see that you sent your phone number, sent a message to someone else's phone number at this time that they can't see what's inside. So using encryption in your life is very, very important. That's a good starting point. I would say that's kind of step A.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We actually know about the hugely important. I think the two lessons from Snowden are A, the Patriot Act and the War on Terror and mass surveillance are not necessary for our democracy and for our freedoms. This was a false choice. We never had to sacrifice them to be safer. And we've seen that. Government has spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on these surveillance programs that you can read about have amounted to very little, except for tremendous bureaucratic waste and erosion of our freedoms. But at the same time, we need to practice more privacy. And the dramatic increase in the usage of signal, for example, has been really, really great to see. It's fantastic that tens of millions of people are downloading signal and using it. You should try to be onboarding more and more of your conversations onto Signal, for example, where governments can't see what you're saying. Maybe they can see.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are worried that they might not survive the great social digital transformation. Look at what the NSA is capable of doing. I mean, for now, it's not that big of a problem because we still have free speech. But it's deeply concerning what Snowden revealed. And it's a nice reminder that we need to be focused on privacy and encryption and on helping users become more sovereign, regardless of where you live. It's kind of like a crutch to live in a free society. Like, you know, it's almost like a free luncheon way. You're not going to be sent to a prison camp because of the color of your skin or your beliefs or what you say about the government. And you're very lucky. Again, most people do live in a society where you can be persecuted for those things. And I feel like especially in America, we forget that. We're distanced from that really strong reality, you know?”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all about the trade offs you make in your daily life like living more privately with more freedom is less convenient. You trade freedom privacy for convenience and comfort and speed. Absolutely. It's an engineering decision and everything that you do. In the West, in advanced democracies, we have not necessarily personally seen the results of that trade-off because we live in these free societies that have these checks and balances and freedoms. But as soon as you step into an authoritarian state and you make those trade-offs, your life immediately becomes more restrictive. And what people are worried about is that even in advanced economies, market democracies, et cetera,”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“State. And again, not talked about enough. You should go Google and research the Belt and Road. I think it's very important that we confront this.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world today, as is, we need to be concerned about the way that authoritarian regimes are using big data analysis and they're going to buy this software and this equipment from the Chinese government. They're already doing it. Street level surveillance has already been purchased by governments ever from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa to the heart of Europe. There's been huge scandals in Britain over their purchase of Chinese surveillance technology. Part of the Chinese government's belt and road campaign, which is basically to build the infrastructure of this century into being control of it, is this part of that idea is to ship out and install surveillance technology both at the telecom level and at the surveillance level across dozens of countries around the world and have that backdoor. There's this national security law in China which states that like companies that are Chinese which are abroad are mandated to send data back to Beijing. So they are building this like huge global surveillance.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Define technology, big data analysis and maybe specific AI, et cetera, does. But encryption allows us to fight back. It's very important people understand we have tools to fight back. Big brother can only grow if it can feed on your data. If it can't get your data, it can't grow. So you have to willingly give up stuff to the cloud for this monster to grow. And we can make the monster hungry and shrink it if we give it less data. And I think that's where I would agree with you in terms of like wanting to empower people to be able to do stuff on their own terms in a sovereign way. And yeah, maybe you're kind of thinking like the personal assistant who helps out Tony Stark or something like that. And that's, yeah, as long as there's no backdoors and that's a sovereign thing that you've popped up and created and you have the keys to, absolutely. But practically speaking, if we're talking about”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The current issue of the New Yorker has an absolutely harrowing essay that tells the story of one such woman who in, I believe, 2017 got sucked into one of these camps and took her year or more to get out. And she's talking about how in each home in Xinjiang, each home has a QR code on it that the police can scan and get like a quick instant download of who lives there. Each car has a scannable code. Every single person has their DNA taken. And the DNA is being sifted through and analyzed by algorithms. So this is like the Chinese government's laboratory for how can we use technology to oppress. It's like sort of like digital Leninism. And that to me is one of the biggest risks in our world today. And it's not talked about enough.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the practical application in Xinjiang, which is a territory the size of Alaska, where a large percentage of the population has been put into prison camps.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is really scary. So I do agree, and I've seen personally how powerful technology can be as a force for freedom. But I'm very, very worried about big data analysis in the hands of governments”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sounds like to me you're describing encryption or at least the ability to encrypt, the ability to use digital keys to secure your property. And that to me is a very powerful individual force for individual rights, very powerful. And it's what animates Bitcoin ultimately, which we'll get into. But for me, at least the way I look at it today in 2021, the threat from big data analysis used by governments and authoritarian regimes is terrifying. I mean, to actually see what the Chinese Communist Party is doing where they have hundreds of millions of cameras overseeing society, cameras that can tell who's a Uyghur and who's a ham. That to me is terrifying. And everything is sorted instantly. There are supercomputers that are built in Urumqi, in Xinjiang, for this explicit purpose. And, you know, it allows the government to quickly sort and basically commit genocide a lot faster.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's very hard to make a case that AI is going to be good for human rights. Very difficult, in my opinion. It may be good for health. It may be good for our efforts to protect the planet. It may be good for a lot of scientific things. I find it very hard to believe it'll be good for civil liberties.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they'd watch it and they would answer questions with each other. It was very powerful. And then after that, I worked with people inside North Korea. We would send in flash drives. We have this program called Flash Drives for Freedom. We've sent over 100,000 flash drives in our work into North Korea, a country about 25 million people. That's a lot. It's a big difference that's many, many millions of hours of films, books, movies, et cetera. So I've seen the power that technology can have where in the 60s and 70s to get, to break an information blockade, you had to send in crates of books into a communist country. So now all of a sudden you can send the entire contents of what was once the Library of Alexandria on something the size of your thumbnail. Like that's remarkable. So obviously I've seen the positives of technology. We'll certainly get into Bitcoin. But I'm very concerned about essentially big data analysis or what people call AI or general specific kinds of AI, like very concerning. I think these are very authoritarian.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seen both in my work at HRF, I started by helping to put together backpacks with foreign information that we sent to the Cuban Underground Library movement. So in Cuba, you know, to own a book at the time, you had to have the government's permission. There was very little internet penetration. So we would send in movies, V for Vendetta dubbed into Spanish, and people would sit inside their homes.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of at its stalemate right now. And what most people fear them about where we are right now, who I respect, is what is the digital transformation of the world due to this like progress of democracy or of open societies? And that's what concerns me the most.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're a little bit of a stalemate here, democracy has really blossomed between World War II and the year 2000, especially in the 80s and 90s. You had an incredible wave of fall, you know, where many, many authoritarian regimes fell and were replaced by democracies. I think around 2015, the acceleration kind of came to a standstill a little bit. There's some good news in some countries and there's bad news in others in the last 10 years you've had, for example, the Philippines has gone backwards. Thailand has gone backwards. Bangladesh has gone backwards. Turkey has gone backwards. That's like a half billion people right there. So you've had some positives. Like, you know, there was positive movement forward in Armenia, Malaysia, some other countries.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personal freedoms that were allowed in some countries, but not others. And they unlocked a lot of the scientific innovation over the last few hundred years. And to me, there's like a really straight line between like scientific inquiry, free speech, freedoms, and then more prosperity and more effectiveness as a civilization. So I think that democracy, you know, ruled by the people, is definitely an upgrade from autocracy or oligarchy, which would be ruled by one or ruled by a small group. And I think that the democratic revolution has been an incredible thing for our world. And it's, you know, you could do half class, full, half class empty. The half-class full is that almost half the world lives under democracy. That's an incredible achievement.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started with authoritarianism or autocracy, right? Ruled by one or a small group oligarchy. And all humans lived under this structure for the virtual bulk of all human existence, only until pretty recently did we start having actual democracy. The idea that we should be ruled by rules, not by rulers, very powerful. Invented in many places across the world, Western Africa had this idea. And so did the ancient Greeks. And they started to implement it. Although, as most know, we didn't have full democracy for a long, long time because it was only property owners or only men, only people of a certain race. But this idea that we can rotate our rulers and that we could be ruled by rules is extremely powerful. And it really, like, for me, the ideas behind this, I think unlocked a lot of the industrial revolution.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The realists who run the US government are going to choose you. And that's why one of the reasons why the US government has supported so many dictators around the world over the last few decades.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like a ladder that you climb the election and you pull the ladder up, and then no one else can climb up. This sadly happened in Egypt, and it was quite predictable after Mubarak was ousted after the Arab Spring. Morsi came in. And it looked like the Muslim Brotherhood was not really going to be very democratic. But it didn't really matter because then the military came back. And now we have Sisi, who's even worse than Mubarak. So a lot of times in these regimes, unfortunately, it's very difficult for people to build that democratic society afterwards. Some people have told me that when you live in a totalitarian or authoritarian regime, it's kind of like a political desert. What grows in the desert, scorpions at cacti, right? So basically people with very extreme views, because you as an authoritarian ruler, your best method for control is to get rid of the moderates. You have to crush the moderates. That's very important. You want to have the only opposition to you be extremists. That way when you go and have negotiations with the United States, you can kind of hold up the terrorists or whomever the extremists and say, it's either us or them, right?”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any of these layers to them, right? And then at the top, then you put elections, but the elections are meaningless if you don't have the foundation below. Every dictator gets elected. Kim Jong-un gets elected. He's the only person on the ballot. Every dictator from Hitler to Chavez, they all got elected. Elections on their own mean literally nothing. You have to have these other layers beneath to actually be an open and free society. I think that's very important for people to understand.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it means is that the citizens have a way to push for reform, have a way to hold the rulers accountable. So even if you don't like what the US government does, whether it was under Biden or Trump or Obama or Bush, we can rotate them through voting. And we have an independent Supreme Court that rotates over time. And we have people that we can elect directly to serve our interests. And then there's like a free press and there's lobbyists and all kinds of people that jostle for power. So there's a separation of powers. And I like to think about a free society really as like at the bottom of the foundation of the pyramid really would be free speech. And then you would have civil society, like, for example, human rights organizations, environmental groups, stamp collectors, athletes, any groups that come together beyond the government's sort of strict instruction. And then on top of that, and the third level, you have separation of powers. Again, what I'm describing. So authoritarian regimes don't really have...”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good test, by the way. The United States is a deeply flawed country in many ways. Our prison system is a disaster. There's a horrible war on drugs. We committed a grievous crime, in my opinion, by invading Iraq. We did a lot of problematic things, but our core architecture is still an open society. The people who criticize the U.S. the most usually live within it. If they were to move to a different country and try to use that criticism against their new rulers, they wouldn't fare so well. So whether it's Chomsky or whomever, if they were to go to Cuba and live in Cuba and try to criticize Cuba like they do America, it wouldn't last very long. So I think what's important to distinguish between open societies and closed ones, or like free societies and authoritarian regimes, it doesn't mean that your government's going to be good all the time.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Denial is the most powerful form of demonization. I mean, this is what the Iranian dictatorship does a few years ago when Ahmed Ajad, who was then sort of the de facto leader, he came to Columbia University and he tried to give a speech, which you can look up, and he tried to claim that there were no gays in Iran. And that's the most powerful form of demonization is trying to just wipe out your utter existence. There's other good litmus tests too. For example, you can think about comedy. Can you make money making fun of your government on television? If you cannot, you live in a dictatorship most likely. I mean, it's shocking to people that I work with who live in dictatorships when I tell them that not only are comedians able to safely make fun of our government, but they get paid very well to do so. That's a hallmark of a free society. So that's another good litmus test.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, Uganda is a great example of this, but so is Saudi Arabia, so is China. I mean, so is Cuba. I mean, these are all regimes which demonize the LGBT communities.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You cannot have a gay pride parade in your country because you're fearful that you're going to get the crap kicked out of you, probably live in an authoritarian regime.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Serious, it actually lines up perfectly. Doesn't matter what religion the dictatorship is They don't like minorities and they love to scapegoat whether it's gays or religious minorities, etc. So it lines up pretty well.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the geopolitical level, I'm talking about, they need to actually take a stand for principles. Otherwise, you have athletes and businesses and governments that are all too happy to do business with the Chinese Communist Party, for example, right now. I think that there is a little more than just kind of the pure profit, yes.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source