YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Gladstein

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163
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2021-10-16
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2021-10-16
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1
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podcast

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  1. “I think that at the end of the day, Free trade is actually really good. And you can just look at France and Germany as an example of how a capitalist structure would develop. If you have two capitalist actors, they're very unlikely to fight each other. There's very unlikely to be violence, right? These are two countries which basically murdered some large percentage of each other's male population three times in 100 years in three different wars. And now today, war is like unthinkable. And a lot of that is because of increased collaboration, increased trade. So when you have two capitalist actors, they act in a very productive way with each other. But as soon as you introduce an authoritarian actor, all bets are off. So I think what you have is a conflict between capitalist actors and authoritarian actors. And at the end of the day, people need to, yes, have more than just capitalist intentions.”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “This is a government that had murdered Jamakoshogi in a brutal fashion just a couple years earlier. So, I mean, at the end of the day, when it comes down to brass tacks, I mean, You know, the powers that be even the free countries are led by people who are very, very happy to sacrifice all these pretty words about human rights when it comes down to profits, unfortunately.”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Number of people who are refugees, the number of people who suffer from natural disasters, the number of people who live under abject poverty, the number of people who don't have access to clean drinking water, all of these are dwarfed by the number of people who live under authoritarianism. And yet, it's not something that we talk about a lot because people are mercantilist and the powers that be are happy to sacrifice freedoms and privacy for money. We live in a profit-seeking world. To get evidence of this, take a look at the list of sponsors of the upcoming Olympics in China, where the CCP is currently committing genocide against the weaker population, or look at the number of people and the famous investors who went to Saudi Arabia a couple months ago for the Davos in the desertia was there all kinds of people were there, or at least they were invited and they said they were going to go. And this is a government that at the time was torturing a female activist who just wanted to drive a car.”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So, I've been working for HRF. Since 2007, we are a charity, a nonprofit, a 501c3 based in New York, and our mission is to promote and protect individual rights and freedoms in authoritarian societies around the world. So again, we define about 95 countries as authoritarian, meaning it's either a one-party state or opposition politicians are outlawed or persecuted. There's no real free speech. There's no press freedom. There's no independent judiciary. There really aren't checks and balances. And even trying to create like a human rights organization or like an environmental group would be illegal. And the majority of the world's population lives in that environment. That's very important. 53%, 4.3 billion people.”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It's a bit of a generalization, but Alex Jones would be in prison or dead if he were in North Korea or in Cuba or in Russia or in China. The authorities would not tolerate him to do what he did. And here he can kind of do what he wants. He's encountering some resistance in the marketplace of ideas. Large organizations, corporations, and a lot of public sentiment in different parts of our country don't like him. They're doing their best to drown out his voice, but that's very different from a violent threat of censorship from the state. And that's what we study. That's what I study. What is the state doing that? That's kind of paramount for me.”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Think it ends poorly when the state tries to restrict speech. I think that's kind of how I would define censorship. I think censorship in deplatforming are two different things. Private companies They get to make up their own rules about what's allowed. And I think that's very different from a government with guns and an army restricting the speech of its citizens with threats of violence. These things are different for me”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “There is a Soviet dissident Named Natan Shiransky Survived the regime, and he wrote a book in which his thesis was essentially the way that you can define a free society is through something called the town square test. Can you go to a public space where you live and criticize your ruler loudly without fear of retribution? If you can do that, you have free speech. I think that's a pretty good litmus test. Most people in this world cannot do that. If you live in Havana, if you live in Moscow, if you live in Beijing, you cannot do that. And that's not a free society. In Austin, Texas, in Boston, Massachusetts, in London, in Santiago, Chile, in Tokyo, Japan, in many democracies, you can do that. And I think that that's a really helpful basic sort of litmus test.”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think free speech is probably the most fundamental. It's probably why the founders chose to make it into the First Amendment Lot of things are downstream from there. Property rights are also very, very important. Obviously, we've seen the toll of violent redistributionism over the last hundred years, whether it was Lenin or Stalin or Mao or other regimes and everywhere from Ethiopia to colonialists everywhere to North Korea. It's not a pretty legacy.”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “These things are the table. And then we can build on top of that. We can build the rest of our societies on top of that. The freest countries in the world have both the negative liberties and the entitlements, like Norway, for example. But there's a big difference between Norway and North Korea. In North Korea, they only claim to have the entitlements, and they definitely don't have the liberties.”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The opposition leader of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, he once told me the funny joke, that in my country we have freedom of speech, we don't have freedom after speech. So yeah, they can absolutely manipulate whatever they want. But I've done research into socioeconomic data. And I guess what I'm telling you is that authoritarian regimes, which make up 53% of the world's population across 95 countries, about 4.3 billion people, those who live under those regimes are subject to massive fraud when it comes to things like literacy rates, life expectancy, any sort of association data, economic growth. They can do this because there's no free press. So for us at the Human Rights Foundation and for people like me, we believe that the negative rights, the liberties, the things that are in, for example, the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Congress.”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Focus on because essentially authoritarian regimes can commit fraud and claim they're giving the positive rights, the entitlements, without having any of the negative liberties. And they can do that because they don't have any free speech or press freedom. When you take people's basic fundamental freedoms away, it's quite easy to make like a Potemkin village and pretend that there's the entitlement sin that we have good healthcare and it's the same sort of thing that authoritarians have done for decades. Cuba and Venezuela and the Soviet Union.”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Negative rights are liberties and positive rights are entitlements. So after World War II, when the UN came together, it was largely compromised between the Communist Soviet Union and the free United States, right? So the US had on its side of the UN Declaration of Human Rights a bunch of liberties, essentially, things like free speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly. The Soviets wanted entitlements like the right to work, the right to have housing, the right to water, the right to a vacation. So if you actually read the UN Declaration for Human Rights, it's a negotiation between the Soviets and the Americans. Later, there was another document in the 70s released called The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and this is what HRF uses as its sort of like lodestar, its founding document. And this is like essentially an international agreement on the negative rights. Those are the things we choose to”

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source