Alex Gladstein is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:34 - Universal human rights
15:34 - Authoritarianism
25:44 - AIs impact on civil liberties
37:07 - Edward Snowden and government surveillance
40:46 - Money
44:59 - Bitcoin
1:00:46 - Government response to Bitcoin
1:11:17 - The blockchain
1:16:40 - Can Bitcoin fail?
1:19:31 - Bitcoin scams
1:23:16 - Patriotism
1:25:39 - Human Rights Foundation
1:30:13 - Conflict with China
1:33:03 - Corporate accountability
1:48:25 - Garry Kasparov and the HRF
1:53:34 - Journalism, conversations, and truth
2:00:48 - Alex's book recommendations
2:08:54 - Attacks on Bitcoin
2:10:34 - The future of humanity
2:14:55 - Advice for young people
2:26:12 - Meaning of life

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a conversation with Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum.

In recent times, Alex has focused on how cryptocurrency and especially Bitcoin can be a tool for empowering democracy and civil liberties in the world.

Most crucially, parts of the world that are living under authoritarian regimes.

As a side note, let me say that I have been learning a lot about the ways in which money can be used to amass power and in the same way the decentralization of money can be used to resist the corrupting nature of this power.

Alex and I do not agree on everything, but we strive for the same betterment of humanity.

He's sensitive to the suffering in the world and is dedicating his life to finding solutions that lessen that suffering.

Whether Bitcoin is 1 such solution, I don't know.

But I think it has a chance, and that means it is worth exploring deeply.

I'm staying in this path of learning patiently and with as little ego as possible.

I hope you come along with me on this journey as well.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

We recorded this conversation a while ago, and I thought I lost the audio and was really disappointed with myself for messing this thing up.

But luckily last week I found it and so rescued from out of the abyss of non-existence.

Here's my conversation with Alex Glasstein.

What are some universal human rights that you believe all people should have?

So free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of belief, freedom to participate in your government, the freedom to have privacy, the freedom to own things, property rights.

These are all basic, fundamental, negative rights, what we call them.

These are the basic, fundamental human freedoms.

Negative rights are liberties and positive rights are entitlements.

So after World War II, when the UN came together, it was largely a compromise 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 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 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 a Potemkin village and pretend that there's the entitlements and that we have good health care and you know, it's the same sort of thing that authoritarians have done for decades, Cuba and Venezuela and the Soviet Union.

Do you think it's possible for authoritarian regimes to manipulate, to kind of lie about the negative rights as well by saying that the people have free speech, the people have the freedom for assembly and all those kinds of things?

Can't you still manipulate the idea that citizenry still has those rights?

The opposition leader of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, he once told me the funny joke that, you know, 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 socioeconomic 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 US Constitution, These things are the table.

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.

Do you think there's 1 right that's more important than others?

You kind of suggested the freedom of the press, maybe freedom of speech, that if you take that away, all the other ones kind of collapse along with like from a ripple effect, is there something fundamental that you like to focus your attention on to defend, to protect, to make sure it's there?

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

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

A lot of things are downstream from there.

Property rights are also very, very important.

Obviously, we've seen the toll of violent redistributionism, you know, in 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.

Is free speech clear to you as a concept?

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

There's been a lot of new, like novel mechanisms for people to communicate with each other, like especially on social networks.

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

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

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

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

Have you thought about the freedom of speech in the United States, but in the world, as it's implemented in the 21st century, given the internet and all those kinds of things?

There is a Soviet dissident named Natan Sharansky, who 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.

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.

Does the content of the criticism matter?

Can it be complete lies, meaning conspiracy theories that involve claiming that the leader is, let's say, a lizard slash pedophile slash, you know, I'm not saying that those are lies, look into it, but they're very unlikely phenomena.

I 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 and deplatforming are 2 different things.

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

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.

That violence is a fundamental difference.

I don't know, I've gotten the chance to have dinner with Alex Jones And I've talked to him a few times offline and it does, I understand why people are so off put by him, but it does bother me that he's universally removed from every platform.

It feels like there's many more evil people, bad people, compared to Alex Jones, who still are given a voice on these platforms.

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

But on the flip side, you're right, there's not a violence, there's not tanks, there's not guns behind that censorship.

Yeah, 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.

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

Yeah, and that's true, because in the marketplace of ideas, there could be a company that springs up that gives Alex Jones a platform and the United States is not going to prevent those companies from functioning.

Of course, there's from a technology perspective, there's AWS removing parlor from the platform and gets a little weird, You know, as you get closer and closer to the compute infrastructure, because then you get closer and closer to the state, actually, the more you get to the infrastructure that's usually managed by the state, the closer it gets to then the control of the state.

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

If you especially look at other nations, China, Russia, there's, I don't know who runs the compute infrastructure for Russia and China, but I bet the state has complete oversight over that.

And so that level of compute infrastructure, having control about which social networks can and cannot operate is very uncomfortable to me, but you're right.

I think it's good to focus on the obvious violations of these principles as opposed to the gray areas.

Of course, the gray areas are fascinating.

You mentioned HRF, Human Rights Foundation.

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 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.

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

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

I forget all the examples you provided, but.

Yeah, maybe you can mention if you remember.

The 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.

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 Uyghur 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 Desert.

I mean, Ray Dalio 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.

This is a government that had murdered Jamal Khashoggi 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

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

So do you think capitalism, that's maybe 1 of the flaws of capitalism is it turns a blind eye to injustices against human nature, against the human rights?

Like it turns a blind eye to authoritarian governments?

Look, 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 2 capitalist actors, they're very unlikely to fight each other.

There's very unlikely to be violence, right?

These are 2 countries which basically murdered some large percentage of each other's male population 3 times in a hundred years in 3 different wars.

Right, and now today, war is like unthinkable.

And a lot of that is because of increased collaboration, increased trade.

So when you have 2 capitalist actors, they act in a very productive way with each other.

But as soon as you introduce an authoritarian actor, you know, 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.

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

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

How do you know if you're living in an authoritarian state or when you study another nation and analyze the behavior of another nation, how do you know that's an authoritarian state?

Is it as simple as them having a dictator?

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

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

It 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, et cetera.

If you cannot have a gay pride parade in your country because you're fearful that you're gonna get the crap kicked out of you, probably live in an authoritarian regime.

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

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

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

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

It's interesting because maybe you can correct me, but

from my very distant outsider perspective, sort of the way that certain authoritarian governments speak about gay people is it's almost like, what is it?

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

Well, denial is the most powerful form of demonization.

I mean, this is what the Iranian dictatorship does.

A few years ago, when Ahmadinejad, 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.

You know, 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.

Here that Tim Dillon, you should go to North Korea.

Yeah, and Look, there are tons of flaws with democracies.

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

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

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

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

And 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.

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.

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, you know, beyond the government's sort of strict instruction.

And then on top of that, in the third level, you have separation of powers.

So authoritarian regimes don't really have 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 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 it's very important for people to understand.

Although Hitler in an interesting way, at a certain point just said, I'm gonna be a ruler forever, which is interesting.

There's an important switch that happens when you, as opposed to having a facade of elections, you just put that aside and saying basically like, we're not even doing this.

Yeah, there's like a ladder that you climb, the election, and you pull the ladder up, and then no 1 else can climb up.

This sadly happened in Egypt, and it was quite predictable after Mubarak was ousted after the Arab Spring.

You know, Morsi came in and it looked like, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood was not really gonna 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 an authoritarian regime, it's kind of like a political desert.

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 wanna 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?

And then the realists who run the US government are gonna choose you.

And that's why, 1 of the reasons why the US government has supported so many dictators around the world over the last few decades.

Do you think authoritarian systems emerge naturally, like that's the natural state of things?

If you incorporate what human nature is, is there always going to be corrupt people the rest of the top?

And we almost have to construct systems that protect us against ourselves kind of thing.

Another way to ask that is what kind of systems protect us from our own human nature?

We started with authoritarianism or autocracy, right?

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.

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.

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