BTC Sessions - INTERVIEW: Ukraine, The Canadian Freedom Convoy and Bitcoin feat Jeff Booth & Lyudmyla Kozlovska ep268

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

How is Bitcoin being used as a tool for human rights and freedom? What do getting supplies into Ukraine & The Canadian Trucker Protest have in common? A discussion with Jeff Booth (author of the Price of Tomorrow) and Lyudmyla Kozlovska from the Open Dialogue Foundation. Follow Jeff, Luda and the Open Dialogue Foundation: https://twitter.com/JeffBooth https://twitter.com/LyudaKozlovska https://twitter.com/ODFoundation 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Shakepay is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada Sign up now and get $30 free after your first $100 purchase! https://shakepay.me/r/BTCSESSIONS ALSO search/subscribe to Shakepay on YouTube! LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $10 free with a savings balance of $75 or more for 15 consecutive days! https://start.ledn.io/btcsessions Keystone Wallet: secure your Bitcoin! http://bit.ly/KeyStoneSessions   BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions   Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O... Like what you see? Been watching for a while? Leave a BITCOIN TIP: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Bitcoin is an apolitical tool that can and will be used by anyone. Today I have two guests for an interesting chat. We have Jeff Booth, entrepreneur, and author of The Price of Tomorrow, and Luda from the Open Dialogue Foundation, which is busy defending human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in the post-Sovietes and the European Union. We get to talking about how Bitcoin is being used as a tool for human rights and freedoms in various different movements, many of which may seem politically opposed,

but nonetheless, Bitcoin being the apolitical tool it is, it still gets used. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. Both of these people are people that I greatly respect and that have unique thoughts on all of this. So dig in, take a listen. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Quick shout out to sponsors of this show, shakepay.com. If you're in Canada, super easy way to get your hands on Bitcoin. You can e-transfer in and out. There are no deposit or withdrawal fees, a

thin spread. And if you use the link down below, after you purchase and sign up and purchase your first $100 with a Bitcoin, they will give you $30 for free. Same deal when you refer friends and family. And on top of that, you can shake your phone every single day for free sats. Use their sats back visa card. All kinds of great stuff with Shake Pay. Be sure to check them out in the links in the show notes. Ledin.io lets you use your Bitcoin for a ton of different services. In particular, if you're in a pinch, you have a cash flow issue, you need your hands on dollars, but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin. You can deposit Bitcoin here, get a loan of dollars to your bank account within 24 hours, and when you pay back those dollars, you get back the same

amount of Bitcoin. You can also check out their savings accounts for Bitcoin and USDC. They have their B2X offering, and they're starting to roll out Bitcoin-backed loans across Canada and soon to some select U.S. states. You can click to sign up in the show notes down below, start.ledden.com slash BTC Sessions. And if you open and fund an account, you can get $10 for free. Bit refill helps a ton when trying to live on Bitcoin. It's been a godsend for me. You can pick up pretty much any gift card your little heart desires with Bitcoin, both on-chain and via the Lightning Network.

You earn SATs back as you shop. You can earn additional SATs back with their referral program. and they've begun to roll out bill payments in the U.S. so they can help you if you're down there to get on that Bitcoin standard. Check them out down below. Keystone is an awesome and easy to use Bitcoin hardware wallet that is 100% air-gapped, meaning you don't plug it into anything internet connected. It's all done offline via QR code.

I highly recommend you upgrade to the Bitcoin-only firmware. It works awesome with Blue Wallet, Sparrow, Specter, Wasabi, a ton of different options there great in a multi-sig i have a full tutorial on it that you can check out and if you want to pick one up there's a link down below to do so and finally if you're backing up any important bitcoin hardware wallet or software wallet for that manner anything with a meaningful amount of funds in it you're going to want to get that backup in something very secure and a piece of paper might not cut it that's why they have the bill foddle over at privacyprose.io you can store your seed phrase in solid steel and this thing helps you get some peace of mind when it comes to fire damage, water damage.

I've heard horror stories of people tossing out their seed phrase unknowingly because it's just a piece of paper. So get that piece of mind. This is how I'm backing up all my stuff over at privacyprose.com. And with that, let's dive into the interview. All right. Good to see the two of you again. It's been been a little while. I think the last time we all, I mean, obviously, also. Freedom Forum. We all got to meet. Let's do a couple quick intros here. Luda, I'll let you

go first, maybe introduce yourself and kind of what you're up to. So thank you very much for inviting me. I'm really delighted to be your guests and to share my experience. So my name is Ludmila Kozlovska. I represent Open Dialogue Foundation. It's a human rights organization based in Warsaw, Holland, Belgium, Ukraine. And normally we do with human rights in post-Soviet region, but also we defend rule of law in Poland and Hungary. And of course, once invasion to Ukraine started in February, this year, we as a organization focused attention to humanitarian, basically to support those who have to become soldiers, civilians, who has to defend their party, city, cities, and also for refugees, those who has to left their houses and try to find safe place in the world.

And yeah, my experience with basically frozen at the time collapsed financial system came to Bitcoin and how we can help with help of Bitcoin to organize in a few hours humanitarian aid, as particularly protective equipment for defenders of Ukraine. Interesting. And we're going to get pretty deep into that. So I'll toss it to Jeff really quick for a quick intro and then we'll just dive in. So Jeff, for people unfamiliar that may be watching this, can you let people know who you are? Everyone on your podcast would be familiar. But Jeff Booth, I wrote the book, Price of Tomorrow, Why Deflation is Key to an Abundant Future.

And an entrepreneur. Recently, I started Ego Death Capital, which invests in the Bitcoin ecosystem to bring on the next billion. people. Awesome. Awesome. Well, yeah, it's been an interesting year in and around this space. Before we kind of dive into the thick of what, you know, kind of how we all connect. We were all recently at an event in Oslo, Norway, for the Human Rights Foundation called the Oslo Freedom Forum. So I was wondering maybe we could start there. And I guess chat about what our experiences were there in terms of what we saw and maybe what we saw in relation to Bitcoin in particular and how it meshed with the messaging of human rights there. So, Lou, I'll start with you.

What were your impressions of the event and anything that you may have seen Bitcoin related there? And how do you feel it all kind of flowed together? What was the presentation it's like? Yeah. So for me, it was a very interesting experience because, first of all, it was an extremely useful mix of human defenders and business representatives. And at the same time, it's not like usual business representatives. It's believers.

I call this. I mean, I call you guys. You have your own religion. So mission. And it's something which in mind because my religion is actually human rights. rights. And a lot of people who are freedom, also freedom for our religion is actually human rights. And at some point, I noticed that you touch, I mean, I noticed even before because it was kind of some dream to meet you in person. If you work on something, sometimes your dreams come

true. It's not always, but at that moment it happens. Because for me, it was extremely interesting. how your technology can be not only technology, but actually can save lives. And actually, I experienced myself because my friends were literally safe, thanks to your development, because we can use Bitcoin just to easy transfer money from one point to another when you can't do it normally, and then just be able within hours to buy more than 100 with pro-West and helmets, then deliver them to Ukraine, then bring them to Ukraine, then It's again and again until the moment when bank system would somehow reply to our demands. So this is one point.

Second point is that you touch a very important topic which we usually, as human defenders, ashamed to speak about, it's freedom of money. Every authoritarian regime punish us and punish everyone who we defend with limitation of possibility to be responsible for our money, to obtain our money, to rule our money. money and to earn our money. So we cannot be basically free. We cannot speak about freedoms. We cannot speak about human rights if we don't have capacity to be able, you know, control over money. And this is something what is extremely was curious for me because you have plenty of

cryptocurrencies and all of them offer freedom. But you always want to learn particularly and personally from those people who are standing on concrete projects. and concrete technology. So I was extremely delighted to meet most of you in person to learn. And of course, I'm learning even now. So, yeah, for me, it was personal and extremely defender who was curious, who was using it and who is ready to learn and how to use it also, to scale it also. It was extremely important to meet in all. And did you, did you come away from the event with, did you feel that the way it was presented gave you additional knowledge that maybe you didn't have, or do you think that more could be injected there?

What was your kind of take on, I'm not sure which sessions you saw, but how do you feel it was portrayed? Was the messaging right? Was it, I don't know, what was your takeaway there? I have to say that for me, it was anyway a bit difficult because it's, I mean, I think it's a problem of all of our, you know, like bubbles. So we as human defenders, we use our own language. Generally, they use their open language. It's, you know, medical workers, they use their open language. So we need to penetrate. We need to be more integrated to understand each other. You cannot do it in one session. You can do it for three days. But what we can do, we can start our dialogue. We can start learning. We can. share our knowledge. And of course, for me, was the most important thing it's about technical. So how can I improve actually what I'm doing? How can I scale it? How I actually, I can deliver

my skills, for example, my team, which is an advocacy in the EU, working with parliamentarians, so with different international institutions, how we can explain that Bitcoin is not you know, kind of tool for terrorist extremists, money laundering, it's actually saving life too. And we, use it and at some point we feel like alone, but once we met a lot of human dependers from different countries sharing the same experience, also we met with Bitcoiners who shared us the experience how we can basically, you know, make better this technology or how we can use it in a better way. It's an absolutely huge advantage for us. And I think we have to make as much as possible deeper our relations and

exploit it more and more. Yeah. It sounds like, again, that one-on-one interaction and that kind of back and forth, that practical knowledge is a large part of what's needed. Yeah, we actually now imagine after Oslo, so the next, what I'm doing, I mean, I involve Azerbaijani, human defenders, Moldovan and Ukraine, so we are preparing also different sessions. So we share our experience. So I hope we would be able to scale it and make it more practical. for our partners, I mean, from different countries. Awesome. Jeff, I'm curious about your thoughts about Oslo and what you saw,

because obviously you're coming into it from, you know, the Bitcoiner angle. And so you got to see Bitcoin juxtaposed into an event that's focused, not on Bitcoin, probably for one of the first times. So what was your impression? The irony is I actually think about it. from the other angle as well. I actually put myself in the shoes of somebody else

and what that would look like. And part of the reason why I understood Bitcoin is such a breakthrough technology and such a breakthrough base layer is that understanding that many people couldn't see. What I would say about the event, obviously Alex Gladstein and the Oswald and the Freedom Forum do such a fantastic job.

But integrating different ideas so people can talk and understand different points of use is really important. And now you can talk one-on-one and you can start to understand the problem at a deeper, at deeper level. And at a high level, I would say there's still largely a misunderstanding of how important this is, even in Oslo and some of the people on. And I think what creates that is if you're, if you listen to some of the, the people that are just horrific stories, horrific stories in nations that they are essentially shut out of a financial system. They're persecuted.

The media is turning the population against them. Most of the population hides because it's scared as well. Those people are standing up against everything with risk that we actually don't even understand. Personal risk, family risk, everything else. and they're standing there largely alone. And then what ends up happening, sometimes it breaks through and some other country is shines a light on them.

And they get seen. And this repeats over and over and over again around the world. And those people, what they don't see is, the whole thing is attached to money. So, but when you hear these stories, they're super emotional. They're super emotional.

It makes you want to scream. It makes you want to go, how does the human condition look like this? And you want to side with those people because it's so emotional. And the thing I couldn't get out of my head in as this was coming together is, imagine any of these people that are now the leader. But it couldn't change because the money's broken. So they would have to do the same thing. they would have to manipulate money, and they would have to make all the rules,

and they would have to be able to control it. And so you're just changing people and those faces on this problem over and over and over again. And I couldn't, for me, I couldn't reconcile why people couldn't see that. And then, and then Luda told her story about what Bitcoin did, which was super touch. especially considering what we dealt with in Canada and others told their story and what I could see as a breakthrough in an understanding, a really emotional understanding that maybe the understanding of this was deeper than those people thought. And I think that's where we are right now. And so some of those, some of those essentially lines are converging and people are realizing

that this is the bigger fight is about money because the other problem cannot be solved unless you solve money. And so, so, so I would say from a, that was, that was a huge breakthrough at the conference, but I don't think it's widely, widely understood. It takes people like Luda, it takes people like Leo Lopez, it takes people like a whole bunch of the activists that are all around the world that now have made the connection and now can talk through a different lens. I wanted to touch on something, Luda, you said earlier, there's this misconception that Bitcoin is for all these illicit activities.

And you said, well, but it's helping people too. And I had a conversation with one of the organizers at the Azzell Freedom Forum. And she was, and maybe this will segue us. into kind of our different causes in the way that we've used Bitcoin. But we were chatting and I said, oh, I'm one of the Bitcoin educators here. And we got into a conversation about it. She was asking about the approaches. And she said, well, I see a lot of this kind of ground up stuff.

But she basically had the same mental block of, well, what about more of a top-down approach so that, you know, there can be control and prevent, you know, bad people from using it. And I kind of, I walked through, I walked through and I said, well, our current system effectively is top down. And so everybody has a different view of, you know, the good people and the bad people. but in essence, the quote unquote good people, if they have control of this top down mechanism, they can stop the bad people from transacting and so on and so forth. But the inverse is true as well when you get an authoritarian government and they have total control of all of the money.

They get to stamp out all of the dissidents that are trying to protest what they're doing. And so Bitcoin kind of eviscerates all of that and just gives a, a total flat equal access to everybody where, yes, bad people are going to use it, good people are going to use it depending on your definition of either of those things. But, you know, in an authoritarian government, sure, that dictator can do as they please with their money. They can use it. They could do the same thing when they have total control of the money system. The difference is those dissidents in their midst now have the same access to that financial freedom and can fund their protests and so and so forth. It ended up coming up in conversation.

And the opinions and how people picture what happened in Canada tend to vary vastly and it tends to be quite polarized. but it came up in conversation with her that I, you know, I had had a hand in helping along some of the fundraising for the Canadian trucker protest. And so maybe we can, and she kind of, I could tell that she was on the, kind of the opposite end of the spectrum of opinions on what that meant from myself. but we had a conversation and I think near the end we were kind of more closely aligned than not. And so, Luda, I wanted to go to you and maybe let's dive into some of the details of exactly what you were involved in and continue to be involved in some of the challenges and kind of how you came to Bitcoin as a potential solution for some of the problems you're facing.

Yeah, actually, I wanted to touch this topic because it's interesting for me, it was interesting how people basically came to a use of Bitcoin. And I have to say that it was some point forced to do so. Because as organization, as Open Dollar Foundation, as a human activist, which is basically working on different kind of international conditions on money coming to a threat rate rate regime. for example, we were capable to freeze macrofinancial aid, which is more than 100 million of euro to Moldova at some point, on a rule of law and human rights condition, right? So thanks to our advocacy together with civil society and opposition from Moldova, we block this money until the moment when all political prisoners were released

and judges and lawyers were stopped to be persecuted. And for this reason, authoritarian regime of Moldova at that time it was the leader of Plachatnuk, they initiated a criminal case against me. And at that at that point, I was in Belgium, and Belgian authorities received mutual legal assistant instrument on my case, on fabricated case. They refused to do any kind of procedures to persecute me, but bank system, since its automatic request,

shut down my account. It was first time. So I was effectively debunk until, until the moment I opened the new one bank and it again was shut down because there came another one request from other return state and in the end you know in Belgium there are only a few banks which can provide services for civil society organization particularly as a international organization I was debunk right then there was another problem then COVID started and literally all of our sponsors and for us it's first of all I mean civil

it's like civic person. I mean, it's just activities, being businessman, journalist, medical workers, etc. They, of course, has out of their sources, so they were not able to support us. And at that time, my brother said, okay, you always was kind of skeptical for Bitcoin and anything what is related to it, but just try. Just try. You will see that you are debunked. What are you doing? Let's try. And I said, okay. And then we organized first our campaign, actually with using crypto, how we can, I mean, crypto, for me, it's Bitcoin. At some point, I was not after also, I for sure differentiate crypto and Bitcoin, but before it was not that clear for me, and I think it's for a lot of people also not clear.

So maybe if there is such person like me who doesn't see different, they belong from you more, and for me that it's actually a huge difference, because it's the only decentralized actually available crypto, we can say like this, right? So after this, when we organized first our small campaign with use of BTC and support medical workers collecting for them money to provide hot meals, it was like small action, but again, we sent money to of bank account it was again the bank. So we just didn't have any good experience with banks in Belgium, but it works in Poland. And for some point it was like, you know, I was using it as a trader, like also my friends are using Bitcoin to trade. But the real, let's say use the real

value when we feel it was the first day and hours of invasion of Russian invasion to Ukraine. Because, you know, 24th of February, all of us, we were just paralyzed because we understand that from the speed, how really quickly we're capable to buy protective equipment, life of our family members, of our friends, basically the closest people who are in Ukraine depends directly. And of course, it was a huge problem because banks were basically blocking every kind of transaction where you have like support for bulletproof west, support of helmets. So they assume it as a weapon. And now it's changed.

I mean, now everyone at standards, actually, you kind of treat as a weapon, bulletproof west and helmet. You have to be able to buy it to save lives. But at that time, it wasn't like this. So a lot of organizations as us who started to collect money, just individual persons, in Europe, they suffered a lot because their bank account were basically frozen. And thanks to this usage, I mean, my small experience with Bitcoin in the past, I said, we have to try.

We have an network because we know where is ATM. I mean, like, for Bitcoin and in Ukraine, we checked immediately. You can go there. You can pay with cash, even if your bank account is frozen, you have some cash at home. So you can send it to someone from your diaspora or someone. You can find a person on Facebook. This was, you know, something incredible because this trust, this is emergency situation. It boost us to organize all of our forces to transform money to find money at one point.

And we were capable to collect enough money in two hours to buy first 100 bulletproofest. So on the 26th of February, so two days, just two days out after invasion, we were already sent to leave 100 bulletproof fest. and helmets. And then just like until the moment with bank account for Frozen, we were capable to do it. But there was a second reason why we also have to use Bitcoin because we were basically throughout from Goa Fund. We just wrote, you know, requests can be, because we saw that there is a bunch of huge organization like UN agencies, some Ukrainian big, big organization, which raise money for protective equipment,

but at the same time, they have no capacity because they are so huge bureaucracy until the moment you would be able to proceed to buy it, and you have to have special license at the time to buy this protective equipment. So we used to have this experience, we used to have suppliers, we know how to do it fast,

and we already done it three times at the time where we applied to GoFund, but GoFund just not only blocked this particular fundraising campaign, they basically blocked and, you know, taking money for other other other campaigns because we, for example, at that time, we're collecting money for victims of massacra during January events in Kazakhstan. Before Ukraine was invaded by Russia, Russia did bloody work in Kazakhstan in January. So they feel completely impunity, I mean, and punished in Kazakhstan for.

shooting peaceful protesters. And then they just came with the same forces to Ukraine. And Ukrainians killed this particular militaries who actually, you know, massacred people in Kazakhstan. This kind of interesting for me was experience that, you know, at some point, if no one is going to stop them, you have to be able to defend your land. If you're not going to defend your land, you can lose your life, you can lose your country, you can lose your houses, your relatives, just close people to you. And yeah, I was extremely upset with this discrimination. It's like really discrimination because at the end of the day,

Red Cross, UN agencies, they go to us, asking us, could you please give Bulletproofest and helmet to our driver with humanitarian aid because we cannot buy it. We are waiting for it. So, you know, they have capacity to collect money in the airport they have capacity to collect everywhere money. And we just wanted to have it from go fund it, and we were not allowed.

And there was kind of strange link for me because I learned, I knew that this kind of model and troubles used to be with Conway of Freedom in Canada. I was observing, I mean, I think like everyone from human defenders and just activists with a huge interest, what's happening there. Because at some point, we have to be as,

civil society as basically democracies, more careful what methods we are taken, what methods we are implemented in other society. If we follow just blindly for methods used by authoritarian regime in other societies can destroy our democracies, and we have to be extremely careful with this. So I'm really always standing on, you know, like those dissident, those activists who are saying for democracies, especially for members of the parliament, for. for governments. Be careful what you copy, what you admire in authoritarian regime. There is no in effect afterwards like, you know, let's say, light authoritarian regime. Or you comply with human rights or you stand outside of human rights or you violate them. You cannot be in the middle.

Actually, every time when you allow someone to violate your rights, that means that's next step is going to be more and more. And I think it's really important that in Oslo, we have a possibility to exchange of people, to meet in person, to unite our forces, that now we would not make any, any, this kind of mistake in the future, because you have our experience as human defenders and we have your vision. We should start to speak about freedom of money. we should start to speak about money at all, why they are important,

because it's some kind of self-censorship, but it's like you feel shame to speak about money, but you shouldn't because this is our biggest tool, how to implement our freedoms. Without money, you can't do it. And with bullet professed, we were capable to buy thanks to Bitcoin technology, it shows me once and once again. We should have this kind of tool.

We should have this technology and should be accessible for as much as possible people. So, yeah. Wow. And you said, how long was it going to take to get supplies into Ukraine using, like you had no idea at the time, but how long was it before? On first days, we just had a few hours. Why? Because, you know, there are a lot of monopolies on a market. And this is very specific market. So everyone, I mean, there is two sides. Those who try to get the money and to support defenders of Ukraine are buying as cheap as possible the good equipment and those who try to sell us on the highest as possible. Right. And you know, it's a civil society organization. We have limited capacity to find a lot of money in a short period of time. We just don't have money. We are most of us volunteer. And in case of entrepreneurs who just look at this as a doing business, they have plenty of money. They have possibility to borrow money from bank. You know, they have different instruments. So the goal was to be able to buy those bulletproof vests with a good quality.

on the lowest possible price because you can supply for more people with protective equipment. And yeah, thanks to Bitcoin, once we were capable, we really knew that, for example, a few people, a few hundred people afterwards, you know, like two hours and everything changed just like it just was escalating, escalating, scaling, scaling. And it was at some point that, yeah, in two weeks, I was just sitting on my iPhone on telegram and sending everyone instructions what they have, do how they can use Bitcoin, how they can send money.

Second, what we use, the part of Bitcoin, because some people are afraid of change of price. It was USDT, but Bitcoin was easier because of this ATM special machine which you can easily send money immediately, right? And then someone can cash them and go to donate to us and we were capable to pay for the bills as soon as possible. What I have to say also, in Poland, the bank was not that much aggressive to crypto as in Belgium.

I think it's also the matter because they just clothe there to the border of Ukraine and they understand if they don't supply, if they don't allow us, a civil society who's helping to save lives of defenders, that, you know, it can be in Poland because it's quite close and, you know, even the third week of invasion, Russian basically used missile different kind of weapon next to the border of Poland. So it was

extremely, extremely nervous at that time. And thanks to this point that Ukraine is capable to defend, to keep the border safe, a lot of Europeans in the moment, they can drink coffee, sleep, walk, you know, safely.

Now everyone is tired because of news of Ukraine, but it's as a perception when you are in Ukraine, you know? Yeah. Now, maybe I'll get Jeff to tag in here a little bit. Ludo was talking about how there's not too much of a gray area as you start to move into policies that would be enacted by authoritarian regimes and it can be a slippery slope. and we've kind of

we at least here in Canada in regards to the the freedom convoy and everything a large portion of the country the word freedom even almost became a dirty word and same with a lot of people cheered on go fund me

freezing any donation nations that were given. There was there's kind of this mass good shut them down it's fine you know shut them up shut them down. Why do you think why do you think that mentality is is so prevalent here where it may not be so in other areas? I think it's prevalent everywhere. I think it's a human nature thing. And that's that's kind of at the root of this. When money is broken, the worst in human nature comes out because of the control over money. And when money isn't broken, the best in human nature comes out. But money is broken today. And what it presupposes, if most of the government's revenue comes from inflation instead of taxes,

and that inflation is theft from one group of people to another group of people and a transfer. of power, and we don't have a vote in inflation, then we don't really live in a free society anymore because it presupposes the government is making all the rules. And then with that, they control the media and everything else. We have no vote in the inflation rate. And so we believe we live in a free market with individual rights and freedoms. But those freedoms must be taken at an ever increasing rate to, to support the existing regime of inflation, which we don't have a vote for that has to go higher and higher.

And no one's going to vote from that system to collapse the economy through deflation. So they'll vote for kicking the can down the road and transferring more of their individual rights and freedoms to the government who has to use coercion to keep the game going. And so that whole path is very, very predictable. And I think what would what Luda said in Oslo to me, which was really kind of, it really hit me emotionally, is because I didn't, even though I predicted this kind of all over the world as a result of this and a result of two different systems, I didn't predict it in Canada at that rate. And through that, you can see the hypocrisy in Canada and that hypocrisy of Trudeau government

and anybody supporting the Trudeau government around a peaceful approach. and the Indus is a right to stand up and say this is wrong. Now, you could argue in this, there are some people in that protest that are, I'm not, I wouldn't agree with, or blocking of a bridge or something like that that I wouldn't agree with. But if you can't peacefully protest, then effectively, and you get shut out of a financial system, and then in retrospect, get your bank shut down, well, the media, essentially makes up lies about terrorism and funded state terrorism.

You can see it looks exactly like any other banana republic state that can do that to its citizens. And what Bluiter just said is that line gets very narrow. And why that line gets really narrow is communism and democracy look exactly the same underprinted money. It turns into control of the state by money printing, which is a theft from people to other people. If I interrupt you, because I think it's a very important point, what you just said, that actually at a return regime, they use normal banking system. They have no problem to keep stolen, corrupt money in European, in other democratic country, their money. But us as human defenders would be easily attacked. Every kind of dissident who is abroad could be easily attacked.

The account can be easily frozen. And you would spend years, sometimes really huge year, I mean, money to be able to defend your rights for banking. And this is something we have to fix. And this is where actually Bitcoin helped me a lot because, you know, in the moment when every corrupt regime with whom I fight on international level just to define human rights, is capable to do so. And banking system just, you know, you have no legislation. You have no possibility to deal with this compliance black box.

They have no obligation to explain you why they defend you. You have no instruments how to defend yourself in the court afterwards. This is what I experienced. And this is the reason why so important what you just said, that, yes, actually now, every authoritarian regime use the same money as democracies. They use it as a tool to punish and as a leisure, you know, as a tool to repress. And there is no instrument to stop it. So let's keep going on, because it's important to where things go.

And then we think we're safe because of the laws, because when we grew up with different money, laws were enshrined to be able to protect us. So we think we're safe because we're looking backwards in a different time around a democracy that we believe in, unaware that the laws will change because of the money. And a bunch of advocates come in and they say, okay, we have to do the laws, unaware that he who controls the money

controls all human action as a result of the money because people will do crazy things to other people because of that money. They'll hide. And if you think about what happened to you and I and Greg and the other's Ben, and all we did is held a key for this. And then probably I would guess 70% of humans in Canada were believing the narrative of the government and the media saying effectively we were terrorists too.

And then in retrospect, try to debank us. And so when you realize that, okay, if it's not okay to stand up for peacefully for individual rights and freedoms in Canada, then I don't want to be in Canada, right? If that becomes not okay, and that becomes a real political,

hotbed and people take sides of it because they take sides of a specific issue that affects them instead of the wider issue. But what it says is how susceptible we are to hear the media and reinforce the media. And if that's true, how strong the authoritarian state is to make most people believe their narrative and alienate people with different ideas. And so that's that slippery slope that Luda talked about, which ties into it. laws ties into everything else. We believe we are protected from that. We're not protected from it at all if money is broken. It has to get worse and worse around the world. It's just a structure of money. And so what I see in a lot of the, it's changing now because of people like Luda

who took, just you and I, what that looked like for us, how terrible that was. And and standing up for something that's we believed right, individual rights and freedoms and the right to peacefully protest. And just all we did created a mechanism that couldn't be taken from the state. And what it looked like. So from my companies, I had letter writing campaigns trying to get me off boards. I had, it was brutal. And I know what you were going through at the same time,

what your family goes through. Now you can look through that lens and you could say, say every activist all over the world, if they're fighting against the worst regime in the world, they're fighting in that same fight. And you can empathize with what they're dealing with. And then when Luda said at Oslo, that your path and the hypocrisy of the Trudeau government gave us a path to save lives, pretty emotional considering the swing from what we were doing, what we were doing and then how it those uh that they the ripple effects or butterfly that touches people all over the world it was pretty profound yeah it's um and and i think it's important

to juxtapose these two these two issues that we're discussing here these two um different movements that that on their face most people would interpret as being totally disparate, being totally opposite ends of the political spectrum. And yet, three of us have found a relationship where we're saying that we share a lot of the same ideals and general principles. And a lot of people, you know, people that I know, would look at one issue and say, this is a legitimate use of fundraising. And so, so and so forth, and then they would look at another and say, this is, this was an occupation. Or, you know, they, they look at it from totally different angles and they would approve the seizure and censorship of funds in one and not in the other.

But it's really important that people realize that there, there's shades, different shades of, of the same issue, which is that we don't have a free and open money until now. Ben, can I just jump in on that? It's pretty simple. It's really this simple. A democracy cannot survive under-manipulated money. So the belief that it can is because it has for some time, and it hasn't been in liberal democracies, it hasn't looked as bad as it looks today

because of the increase, kind of the manipulated money was a smaller portion. And as it gets bigger and bigger, the democracy must fail as well. I wish that wasn't true, but it is true. And out of where society goes under manipulated money, because it presupposes that 12 people or a certain number of people can control everything else for everyone else,

and they can manipulate media, everything else because of the money. And people will race to where the money is or hide in the system, and it'll get worse and worse and worse. So a democracy cannot survive under manipulated money. It doesn't look like a democracy anymore. I was just going to say, what can be said to help people make those connections? Because when people hear stuff like that, like democracy will fail because in their head, they think, well, what, are a few percent inflation?

our inflation's high right now, but they don't make the connections of how that manipulation of money ends up in shifting power so totally that a democracy would no longer be a democracy. So if you just said, and that's why Bitcoin is so profoundly different, and it's such a change and it breaks people's brains, because they're living in one world measuring a system from that system and getting, and it's getting worse and worse. And there's more and more puppet. states all over the world today. There's more and more of this all over the world. It's increasing, not decreasing. So if it wasn't, if it was getting better, you would expect, okay, it could work, but it's not getting better. It's getting worse. And it's getting worse at an accelerating rate

because the money has to be broken under accelerating rate. What people don't see in Bitcoin in the transition, and it's really hard to see if you're measuring the system from the system, and you've looking backwards at you growing up and what it looked like, unaware of looking forward what it will look like, is really hard to comprehend what Bitcoin does, and it's early in Bitcoin. But what it actually means, the powerful thing over time, it's going to take some time to get here, early countries, early people going on are going to win more of the share.

But what it actually means is a democracy like we've never seen before in a lifetime. that. Winners set the, if we look back through history and we realize that control of money sets, sets kind of war machine, everything, everything else, and the winners set the rewrite the history books, then we've actually never had an innovation. When we look back through history, we actually probably be hard to piece out what happened in each of these things, in each of these events that got us to hear because the underlying system had to always look like this. And you went through peaks and valleys of authoritarianism and then more freedoms, if you said Magna Carta, and then U.S. Declaration of Independence setting up the freedoms that would set up

society to have more innovation and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, rights and freedoms that led to productive societies. And then as a product, as it's had to sit on essentially corrupt money that had to be more corrupt over time, how it concentrated back in. We went to war to start the whole process over again. We've never seen an invention or discovery like Bitcoin that could set up rules where truth would, truth matter, politicians would have to tell us the truth instead of hiding an inflation rate because we will vote for that inflation rate all the time.

We'll vote to the human natures. We'll say, I want more than you can give me. So to any politician, if any politician said, here's our, here's our funds, and here's what it looks like, here's our economy, here's what it looks like, and here's what we can pay for, we essentially, through inflation, say, tell us a lie. Right? Tell us a greater lie and pick the pocket out of our back pocket and transfer wealth. But we want that, right? We wouldn't vote for anything different. So it almost has to be imposed on society through rules. And as a result of that rule change through Bitcoin, what it means is politicians will over time, they'll either change, they'll get voted out because people don't demand it as a bottom up movement, but it'll bring honesty to government.

that's really hard to see from our world today what it looks like, complete dishonesty. But that's what it'll look like over time. By my jump. Yeah. It's something. I know that for you, first of all, because normally if you are on a front line, you actually, you collect the biggest, you know, attack on your side, right? But I want to say something what actually impact all of this process.

in Canada had far, far away from your country. Because actually, your example became multiplied in many, many countries, not only in Europe, but even far, far away from Europe. As I said, we work a lot, for example, in Kazakhstan, right? I know that even in Russia, Rutgers started to actually use your technology, not I mean Bitcoin, but I mean technology, how to oppose violation of your rights, how to defend your freedom

with agonizing this kind of protest of truckers. And Russia, afraid is so huge. And actually Kazanan also afraid is so much. In many countries, just because they didn't want to repeat situation in Canada, they already

started to listen carefully what society demands. And they give up from different kind of measures they wanted to implement. And I think this is an important message of solidarity. solidarity and possibility to scale your tool, how to protest peacefully, how to unite your force, how to organize protests, and how to defend it also financially.

This is something extremely, extremely important. And this is something what we have to share, we have to develop. Because societies, especially in democracy, they should be able to defend their rights. Whenever anyone is in the power, we have to be able to do so. Otherwise, it's always risk that someone who is in power, who was elected, can abuse the power. And this is something we have to face. We should be able to do with it because no one is capable to escape mistakes. And we should be able to have this tool to stop it.

Luda, I just want to build on that because a couple of times you referenced your technology. And the difference with Bitcoin, it's nobody's technology. Every single person on the network makes the network stronger whether you like them or hate them. And they make it stronger for all other people, whether you like them or hate them because it's truly decentralized and secure. And it's such a profound difference because what that actually means is we inadvertently give the system more power than And we believe that system is going to take all away our rights and freedoms because it's always going to do it and it's going to control us. What Bitcoin is, is it actually puts every human in power.

It gives them back that. And if they only knew how fast that changes, instead of standing up and facing persecution, if they just adopted the platform and started using the platform, regimes would collapse. it would steal their money. It would steal the power. And what that says is, is you can fight a system by trying to give it more power, but you're actually going to make this system stronger by doing so, or sometimes change a face, but keep the same system, or you can fight it from a different spot. And you can, and all technology that gives more value to people faces the same thing. It's not as profound as this because it's not a foundational kind of base layer technology that like the internet,

but all technology that essentially takes monopoly power, and in this case money, and gives way better access and way more value to the people most hurt by the monopoly, starts at the bottom up. And so this is, to me, this is painfully obvious why a whole bunch of nations in Africa, South America, everything else will go first. And they'll create innovation around this because their people need it more. It's painfully obvious in Ukraine what ended up happening, why that would make a bigger difference.

And how equally people in North America could be blind to this because they haven't faced this problem. When I speak about your technology, just because you share this knowledge, you know, it's like your legion, it's the same, you know? So, associated with you. Your protest, you attract protest, because you're associated with the... Well, now it's your technology. I mean, I am Satoshi, so...

We are all Satoshi. Yeah. Yes, exactly. I wanted to kind of segue into discussing a little bit about the tools, that can be used because it's not as simple as, okay, you know, we're having trouble with legacy banking. We have a movement and we're trying to fund it. We'll just, well, Bitcoin.

That's, you don't just say Bitcoin and problems go away. I want to kind of look at it from, from two standpoints. One is, sure, Bitcoin is a mechanism to, to move value globally with with nobody to tell you no. It's also difficult to confiscate, not impossible, but difficult. So in terms of moving the value globally, once it gets to its destination, there's then the hurdle of what do you do with it, right? You've got to have those on and off ramps or you've got to have that peer-to-peer ability to transact

locally to get the good services, local currency, whatever it may be. Maybe, Luda, I'll ask you, what did you experience with those types of hurdles? What mechanisms were you using to effectively use Bitcoin? Because it's not as simple. It's just getting it. Yeah, exactly. So in case of Ukraine, we had a good infrastructure because Ukraine was kind of already developed. So a lot of people, they understand what is Bitcoin or at least how to use it to transfer money

because it's a huge, terrible legislation, Ukraine with the banking system. So you cannot keep sending money from Ukraine to abroad and back. So it's just disaster, honestly. This is the reason I think why Bitcoin is so popular. So this is the first point. So it was easy for me in Ukraine to announce it with social media with telegram to collect it from my friends and then to scale it for quite extensive number at the end in money, right? So technically it was like people who already had their ballots.

They helped those who didn't have it to collect money on their wallet and they buy Bitcoin through exchanges and then send it to someone else in Poland who already has a wallet or who already has a wallet on exchange and then technically send it to a bank account, right, after exchanges. So this was one point. Second one, which was, let's say, the best, it's just go to BTC in Ukraine and send it to someone who has wallet and this person came to BTC ATM in Poland, right? So Ukraine, Poland, they have this quite enough for that moment for us, network of this machine and we were capable to do it very fast.

And then they send money to our bank account. This was like the easiest way and we were capable of it. But you cannot do it, for example, in Kazakhstan. You cannot do it in other countries where there is no such kind of machine or they are total control of special services or where a person just have no capacity to open account on exchange. So, yeah, it's a huge challenge. Or you just have local bitcoins, but again, for example, in Kazakhstan, we kind of do like this because it's just a lot of people who are under control of special services and that

retired regime, it's too risky. So for us, it's open question. For me, for example, on Oslo Freedom Forum, I was asking constantly everyone, how we actually can deliver to such country where it's not developed like in Ukraine, where we have a problem. Because I know a lot of African activities, they also use Bitcoin as a saving tools as a, you know, to protect their freedom, financial freedom.

But it's not a case for many other countries. So how we, I mean, China ban actually Bitcoin effectively. So this is a huge problem, right? So yeah, it was possible, I think, just mainly because Ukraine was friendly to Bitcoin. If it's just in another way, I would not be able to do so. This is the reason why I'm saying that we have to explain value of as a total Bitcoin, why we have to work extensively more with legislators. I know that a lot of Bitcoiners stay basically extremely skeptical.

for many reasons which are justifiable, right? But at the same time, we have to change their perception. We shouldn't allow them to over-regulate it. We should expose as much as possible, why it's a value, why it's helped save people's lives. We need to bring as much as possible human defenders together with bit-corneres to explain all of these issues. And I'm sure that because I work a lot with different politicians,

from different parliaments. And there are a lot of politicians who were in the past activists who would understand us, you know? And it's not like I'm idealistic and I think that everyone is going to support. No, no, it's never like this. But we would find a person who would help us. And this is the reason why I think we should work together

to stop this over-regulation. We should work together to be able to develop this technology as a startup. We can explain it as a startup, but it can be scaled and can be. saving tool, for example, for delivering humanitarian aid for Africa for other countries. Because for the moment, what we see, that democracy sending money for corrupt governments in third countries, right, developing countries. And then while they are on the road, a lot of losses.

You know, you don't know in the end who is going to receive this money. If you have technology, which clearly shows you that these pieces, of money came to this person. You don't have anyone in the media, so there's no losses. That means that this humanitarian aid would effectively helpful. That means that my taxes, which I'm

paying to the government, is going to deliver it to the other government, would be spent effectively. And this is something what I want to have. And that means that we can really support these people who, nowadays only one step of hunger because of Russian occupation

of Ukraine, because of, you know, blocking basically food and initiating food crisis, who is kept as a hostages, the whole continents. So if we have financial tool, which is scalable, which is okay for the moment maybe as a startup, but it's scalable. So we're not over-regulated. That means that we can fix a lot of problems in the future. This is a reason I think we need to be together where we need to show some positive examples, how it works, why it works. To the end of the day, every phone can be also just over-regulated saying, oh, you know, some drug, you know, human trafficking, gunsters, everyone using the telephone,

let's forget the telephone, just over-regulated so you can't touch it. No, we know it's basically destroying a mobile phone, right? We use it. The same with, in a war with Bitcoin. We should be able to use it and we should be able to transact money as much as possible transparent. So we stop all these corruptive schemes. Sorry. Go ahead. I just wanted to touch on one more thing on the ground there because I don't know the exact details of this, but back in late April, I saw some headlines in and around Ukraine's

central bank banning the purchase. of cryptocurrency with with local currency because they were worried about capital flight. And I just wanted to touch on like, yes, obviously the more kind of friendly regulation around this stuff we get the better. In the absence of that, I'm thankful that Bitcoiners build tools that can be used by anybody because there are peer-to-peer markets that are available globally, just listing off a few. Bisk, hoddle, hoddle, Robosats. These are all tools that can be used for the peer-to-peer exchange of Bitcoin and local currency

or gift cards or lots of other different payment mechanisms that can then be used locally. So if you're in a country where maybe you don't have access to online exchanges, there are other mechanisms that you can explore to go and, and, you know, exchange your Bitcoin into something else and use locally. So I'll link a little playlist of how-to-to-does for those tutorials on those peer-to-peer mechanisms that people can look at. It might be something that's useful. That's actually what I wanted to comment on.

So when people are looking at the Bitcoin right now, and what's happening. And I want to be careful because it's not a company. It's not a startup like a company. It's protocol level, protocol layer. And why that's really important is protocol layers are the hardest to understand. Out of anything, people can understand companies. And even if you understand a company what they're doing,

we miss the value that they bring and we miss how our minds change. Like if you look at what the BlackBerry phone did and then the iPhone, we thought we would use BlackBerrys forever, and then an innovation changed our mind, and it changed everything. We changed the market immediately because of the value. But protocol layers are way harder to understand, because nobody wants to get into the plumbing of what everything is going to be built on top. They can't understand the plumbing. So right now, right, you know, people are in Bitcoin are trying to explain the plumbing. And it becomes hard to use. And what, or not hard to use, it's getting easier and easier to use as more products like Ben just said

are being built on top, exploiting the plumbing and giving value to people. But we're really early in that process. But if you look, and that's actually one of the areas that as a venture fund we're investing in. And if you understand what's coming, if you understand what's coming on top of this protocol layer, you go, wow, what's going to bring more and more people on? So today you have Bitcoin, you could say it's a 120 million person nation growing exponentially. And as that nation is trading between themselves through peer to peer, is growing exponentially. It gets stronger and stronger and more innovation happens on top of that protocol layer.

And it makes it stronger and stronger. And that's all that's happening. And we can't see what's not there yet. We can't see. So people are looking at this system through a way, by looking backwards and saying, oh, it's still hard. What am I going to lose my keys? I'm self-custody. What does that look like?

Well, all of this innovation is happening on top of it that's going to bring on billions of people. But it's hard to, it's hard to understand. So if you, if you regulate a protocol layer like the internet and you overregulate a protocol layer, what it means is, stopping innovation in your country from developing on that protocol layer. And you don't stop the protocol layer from advancing. You just stop your citizens from having the advantage of it. So that's what it looks like. And I spoke to, I was just in Portugal and I spoke to government officials on both sides of the,

all sides of the aisles. And one of the leaders of finance committee and one of the parties, kind of highlighted something that he said, I get it now. I finally get it. He said, society has never had decentralization and trust at the same time. And that's what Bitcoin does. And we've, because we've only had to trust in people, but trust in people or institutions. But those institutions over time change and become less trustworthy. And that's what's happening with money. and then the legacy is, oh, we still trust in people. But the innovation here on Bitcoin is you have decentralization and trust.

Now, that plays into even a bigger picture because on a blockchain, you can only solve two of three parts of the triangle, decentralization, trust, and scalability. And it opened up a window for all these competing cryptocurrencies to scale. But because they can only solve two of three, too, they had to sacrifice decentralization or security. And why they always fail or become centralized is because, and if you're going to centralize everything,

you would never use a blockchain. It's too expensive. You'd use a database. And so when you understand that framework and how important decentralizing trust is, and now you can scale on the second and third layer, it's that piece. But if you understand what's happening,

kind of as the protocol layer is advancing, and how that whole thing that I just said would confuse a whole bunch of people because it would naturally create pyramid schemes and everything else in crypto. And people would get burned. And then the regulators would come in and conflate the two things together and say,

we have to regulate the whole thing. That's where we are in this cycle. That's where we are in this cycle. But it doesn't actually change the protocol layers advancing and the technology is advancing on top of it. And so all it changes which countries are going to take advantage of it, which countries aren't. And I've got to, again, mention, there's some really great people out there

that are now actively working on driving that distinction. You know, you get your Corey Clipsdine's and your Samson Mous and your Natalie Brunel's and people that are hitting the news cycles and trying to differentiate the two, saying this Bitcoin is something very, very different than crypto. So in that it actually, what it was created for and its qualities of decentralization and censorship resistance. And it's uncompromising in those things, whereas the rest are, you know, there's a colorful rainbow of terms for them, but they're just not the same.

Yeah. And Ben, I'm going to publish a piece shortly that gives an. easy to use framework for, because what I really understand is what, how hard this is, how easy it is to conflate the two. When I'm speaking to different politicians and different people in different areas, what I realize is if you just say it and somebody can't hang off the why and explain it to somebody else, it doesn't matter. So they need to know the why, why this, why it works like this.

So I'm going to get, I'm going to put together a framework that, that hopefully helps a lot foreign people understand that. Yeah, absolutely. I'm wondering if we could, I'm conscious of time here, but I, I wonder if we could touch on one other thing in relation to the tools. And that is privacy, because in some places it's, it's, can be maybe not a concern for a short period of time, but even in Canada, we learned here that that privacy is not to be taken for granted. And, you know, Bitcoin on chain is not, is not private.

It's not inherently private. But there are tools available to help with that. Now, Luda, I'm unsure if you guys, you didn't really have to worry about privacy on that, on this front, thus far, have you? We actually have to, but we didn't, you know, at that moment when we did collect all this money, we more cared how to get this money to be able to buy equipment. But, you know, my experience in Poland, our organization persecuted just because we delivered humanitarian aid even 2013, 2014, for Ukraine. Because at that time, there was normal government, then the government changed,

and they started to violate rule of law in the country, constitution, persecute lawyers, judges, humanitarian activists. And they don't want to have kind of such a powerful protest, which was, you know, in mind what people in Ukraine during Euromaidan. So, and since we were as an organization, one of the most prominent organizations who organized international humanitarian aid, but also human rights aid for Euromaidan,

in 2013, so it's 2014, we became as a, you know, as a like one of example, how you can be punished just because I'm Ukrainian, right? And my husband, he's a Polish citizen and we together came on protest. We were like symbols chosen by the government to be punished. And everyone who was funded our organization for Ukraine, I mean, we at the time had more than 2,000 people, both companies, but it was private, it's not government. And now we have more than 11,000 of also companies, private person, who donated us to support Ukraine. And I'm afraid that we can have the same problem,

but it's going to be after, you know, for the moment, the same like in 2013, 2014, we more worry about how to deliver this help, but I'm aware that I'm going to face it. And of course, if there are any tool which can provide more security to all of our donors, I think it's inevitable to have because something crucial for such an organization like us. Yeah. Well, I mean, just when you think about, like you said, for the donors in particular, if a Russian citizen were to donate to a fundraiser helping Ukrainians,

that could be a huge problem. And so one of the things that was kind of gleaned over the past few months by myself was, you know, I made the mistake of thinking that, you know, one, that we wouldn't raise very much money and two, that it would continue to be legal in the eyes of our government. Silly me. However, there are definitely tools that can be used, you know, things like when you're, when you're accepting donations, a static, just a static Bitcoin address is not ideal because then it's very easy to point to that address and say, okay, check every bit of money that went to that one particular address and then go check where it came from, see if it came from any Bitcoin that was bought by people in this jurisdiction. So using something like there was a presentation that was done in Oslo by Rockstar dev on BTC pay server, which generates a new address every single time.

And that's very useful. All of this stuff that I'm talking about, I'm going to link down below. Anybody that's curious, there's going to be full tutorials on everything. So anything like in terms of raising money, BTC pay server, super easy way to go. There's also things can be used called Paynims, which is basically like a publicly shareable ID. Instead of saying send donations to this Bitcoin address, it's just like a public kind of name. And that person can then establish a link with you and be able to generate addresses and send money as many times as they please. And none of those are ever revealed publicly.

You know, coin join is is a great one because it breaks the links between people and their coins. So if they want to donate to something, they can coin join first and then donate so that there's no direct. I bought Bitcoin and it went here. It's I bought Bitcoin. Something happened. We don't know which Bitcoin are yours. And then some Bitcoin went to a fundraiser. you can definitely break up stuff like that. There's tons of innovation in and around this stuff.

I'm going to link to literally every privacy video I've ever done in the show notes so people can check that out if they're curious about it. But it does need to be easier. We do have Lightning Network, which we've been talking about scalability in terms of how many transactions we can do and how easy it is to use. Lightning will definitely help with that. It's got better default privacy than just the base layer of Bitcoin. But there's a lot to learn. And I was speaking when we were in Oslo to Matt O'Dell, who anybody watching or listening that's unfamiliar, maybe, he is on Tales from the Crips and he does Citadel dispatch, both really great pieces of material in and around Bitcoin. But

he said it it we need to get bitcoin to the point where the average citizen can in in a moment's notice spin up a bitcoin wallet have a you know like a lightning address or some easy identifiable piece of information that can be shared that anyone can donate to that affords them and all the donors privacy in in no time at all and I think that's the idea able to strive for and I'm and I'm hoping for that to come down the road. Watch pediment. Watch that. Watch that space.

And again, some of the innovation that's coming to this space that effectively makes this unstoppable and makes it easier more easier to use. It's not there yet. But watch these things. And that's why if you understand where this is going, it is inevitable. But it might not look inevitable in the short term because we're looking at the current technology instead of what the future will bring. And if you're watching what the entrepreneurs are building on top of this and what's happening on top of this, it's hard not to get really excited about where this goes. So I think what I'll do now, again, conscious of the time, I got to maybe start

rapping a little bit, but I'm going to offer either of you a moment to maybe touch on anything that we didn't touch on that you really wanted to get to or any final thoughts that you may have on anything that was previously discussed. Maybe I'll defer to Luda first. Is there anything that we didn't touch on that you really wanted to mention? I just want to remind everyone what can happen with us if we don't defend our right for financial freedom, if we don't define our rights to basically stand up in solidarity. You just always have to look what's happened in China, you know,

and especially with regard of lust, abuse of COVID restrictions when actually right light on your app can throw the bank account and basically eliminate all your financial capacity. You cannot move, you cannot process, you don't have money. And this is something what normally every single regime, authoritarian regime, wants to do with every person who has their own opinion. And this is reason, whenever you are, who you are, if you live in democracy, you enjoy democracy, it's never for granted. It's because you or someone from your family or someone from your, you know, parents, grandma, defend it. So you have no right to lose it. You have no right to be absolutely ignorant

for what's happening in other countries where democracy is not yet, or where people fighting for their rights and just dying without any support just because you think it's not your cause. It's your cause because it would come in one moment. And this is the reason why I really admire Bitcoiners because you have it as a religion. And for us human rights, it's also religion. This is the reason why I think we can do a lot of things together because you touch something what is extremely, extremely important. Financial freedom, what is normally taken from us as human defenders, what is taken from

people who we are defending. And I want to just to say that every time you look into China, you look into Turkey also, in other states, we are already this hope lost. We are already people cannot, they have no flexibility. It's too hard for them to defend their rights. So we have to stand up with them. We have to have tools like Bitcoin to defend rights and to operate in such crazy countries and the other regions. I'm really glad that you touched on that because again, and to people in Canada that are maybe watching this, I've seen so much dismissal of, again, the idea of freedom and people will say, well, we live in one of the freest countries on earth and what are you protesting? And there's

so much, again, just this dismissive attitude of even using the word freedom again. And it's been kind of disheartening to see, but it is indeed a slippery slope. And when you start to whatever, and kind of brush it off, it can erode quickly. And I think we would all do well to to push back more against infringement of that and to be less dismissive of individuals that are more than happy to push back against infringements on those freedoms. And just because perhaps you don't immediately see a problem with it doesn't mean that others don't. And I think we should be respectful of that. But I'll toss it over to Jeff, either comments on anything that we've said,

anything that we didn't touch on that you want to, it's all yours. It's just if you think by manipulated money by design, it has to divide humans. It just has to, right? And so what ends up happening is we all believe we're immune to it and it's those other humans that don't see it. And that gets worse and worse and worse.

And that's where we are in society. It just has to get worse. and as people go into their information bubble and they believe their religion and everything else or they're all of the people near them, it must get worse and worse and it divides us. The end of that is, unfortunately, it turns into war and global conflict.

With everybody trying to say, okay, my thing matters matters more. And you can see where we are in that society today. What really struck for me and, And we were in northern Norway with Luda and a bunch of other advocates. And one of the things that struck me was from Leopoldo Lopez, who at the end of this said, and by the way, just a quick who he is. He's the Venezuela opposition leader, and he was rightfully elected as well,

a leader of Venezuela, I think, in 2014. And essentially, the controlling party, because he just asked for peaceful protests to take to the streets, to have the election certified, and the ruling party put him in jail. And when I say jail,

solitary confinement for four years. So imagine going through that, and he then was out of solitary confinement. and he escaped. But so he has millions of people following him, rightful rule of Venezuela, Venezuela might look totally different today if it didn't, if that didn't happen.

And what he's, and, and going through that because of the state money, because of what that, that creates, state, state military, creates. And, and, and so he, he, what he said really struck for me. He said, when you're in that silo, fighting for your life and freedom and a whole bunch of other people. You don't see the other silo in Ukraine and you don't see the other silo in China. You don't see the other silo in Russia.

You believe that it's all you and your followers are all that you. And what he said, all of those front lines are actually the same front line as Bitcoin. And now they're merging as people start to see that because it gives all of those people a way to solve a problem in a different way. And so that really struck for me as somebody with a whole bunch of people that understands kind of his leadership. And now if you just think about what just about happened in the U.S., right, what do you think would, whether you're on Trump's side or Democratic side, because they're both doing the exact same thing, right? What laws would change if Trump retained power, right?

What would that look like? And how would you attack your dissidents or now invert it? What would happen if Democrats were doing the same thing? You have to consolidate power. And it turns against dividing people. And that spreads all over the world. And this is the only. So Leo's front lines coming together and it's the same front line.

was a powerful metaphor for what's happening here. Wow. Well, I think I'll wrap it up here. This was a great conversation. I really enjoyed this. I'm glad to chat with you both again. I'm sure we'll do it again in the future. I will link to everything for both these guests down below,

Twitter handles, relevant websites, all of that. And I'll grab them for you after we, We are grabbing them from you after we go offline here. But thank you both for taking the time. And I look forward to seeing you at the next Freedom Forum. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you, bye, bye.

Thank you guys so much for watching and or listening. If you're on YouTube, please do like, subscribe, share. If you're listening, podcasting 2.0, be sure to smash that boost button if you really enjoy the show. You can help the show in another way by hitting up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Shake pay, leaden, bit refill, keystone, bill fottle. They're all down there in the show notes. As well as links to the mentioned guests. They are all linked down below the Twitter profiles

as well as everything that they're working on. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always hit me up with a Bitcoin tip at my strike page, strike.m.me slash BTC sessions. Get there, type in any amount you will like. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice after you hit the tip button or if you tap to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code.

With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your daily session.