TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #147:Alex Gladstein

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

Join Marty & Matt as they sit down with Alex Gladstein from the Human Rights Foundation to discuss: - Government overreach during the response to COVID19 - The capture of the World Health Organization - Censorship in China as COVID19 was spreading - The economic impact of forced quarantine - much more Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

What's up, freaks? It's Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. It's an immense pleasure of sitting down with our good friend Matt O'Dell. And we were joined by our good friend Alex Gladstein from the Human Rights Foundation. We sat down to talk about Orwellian overreach during this pandemic lockdown. And the response from China, the capture of the World Health Organization and other such organizations, and the misinformation that's been going around, the reactions to people getting the virus and what governments are trying to do to make sure that the virus doesn't spread, which includes things like bracelets, tracking people, stopping people at borders.

We went through the gamut, went down the list, and talked about each reaction and whether or not they are good or bad for civil liberties moving forward. Because remember, once you see these civil liberties, they'll say it's only temporary. Hey, we only need to do this while the pandemic's here. Quote-unquote pandemic. We'll give them back to you once it's passed. That never happens. Never happens.

Never happens. It never happens. It's never temporary, freaks. Don't forget that. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this episode. This episode was brought to you by our good friends at the Cash App. You freaks already know all about them. They're helping you.

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If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. what is up freaks matt odell's uh card block is not on today so we hit record and we're going matt what's going on i'm ready to go excited to have alex here yeah yeah matt just introduced and we're sitting down uh with the human rights foundations alex gladstein alex welcome back to the podcast it's a pleasure and an honor well it's a pleasure to have you here especially right now the block is hot with the coronavirus and the coronavirus has governments overreaching for power around the world. We've got a lot to talk about today. You've put forth a very good list of topics that we're going to just walk through. So there's a crazy amount to cover. Let's start

with just the overarching topic of this episode, which is privacy in the age of pandemics. Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, just, it's so crazy to think about how much has changed in the last year right since I was on the show last time but generally speaking I keep coming back to some of the themes you guys always discuss in terms of how governments have overreached in other times of crisis right when you looked at what happened after 9-11 I was actually reading an analysis done by the law fair blog where they they reposted something that had happened a couple days after 9-11 which was this huge bipartisan group of people came together and said hey look this is really bad. And it was a huge tragedy. But let's make sure to react in a way that does

not violate our freedoms and values. Obviously, they lost right in the way that, you know, security was operationalized after 9-11. But it was interesting to see that, of course, people were thinking about the same things as we are right now when it comes to COVID. However, what I will say is that like, COVID is not necessarily like terrorism in as much as it's much less of a boogeyman. Like, you know, 9-11 was an unspeakable tragedy, but generally speaking, these are events that are disconnected and happen far, far fewer, you know, and far less frequently. COVID is something that's like actually endangering the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. I mean, even by the official numbers, 50,000 have died, right?

um i personally think that more than 50 000 have died in china alone i personally think that more than 25 000 have died in iran alone so you know i think this thing's going to kill at least a quarter million before it's done so it's not really a boogeyman but still we can't compromise our values and i think we have to fight this thing in a way that that reflects and and preserves freedom um but you have to ask yourself what our government's going to do right what's the line uh never let a good crisis go to waste yeah exactly exactly but wouldn't you wouldn't you think that's a bigger boogeyman like than a terrorist attack yeah the boogeyman could be like the war on viruses from here on out yeah i know that that's fair that's actually fair what i mean by that is

that like i guess like the government just like held over our heads this idea that we were going to get attacked as an excuse to take all of our liberties. I know we will see more pandemics and they will exist and they, they will actually kill huge numbers of people. So I guess, do you see what I'm saying there? I'm just trying to provide some nuance here. Like I'm not someone who believes that this is a hoax or that COVID is nothing to worry about, or it's just the flu. I just want to make that really clear. I think this is like a urgent issue that both community wise and humanity wise we need to rise up to meet on the same level as something like sending someone to space or exploring the world 500 years ago like it's something that communities and societies need

to like figure out how to defeat so that we can continue living our lives it's a real real thing in a way that i think this war on terror thing was like a lot less of a real thing but i do see your point but real crises are easier to take advantage than fake crises yeah which makes today's conversation even more important like like i want to lay out like how an open society should react to this thing and at the end of the day there are some pretty clear lines that we can draw and we can have a debate about what's an open society what's not but there are some evidence-based uh reasons to not want to do things like mass surveillance and to basically say that we don't need a police state to fight the virus

in the same way that we don't need a police state to fight terrorism. All I'm saying is that we really need to operationalize and meme these ideas because we will have more of these pandemics. They will happen, what, once every decade or whatever. So we need to expect that even open societies will need to react to them in a way that doesn't compromise our liberties. I think the best way to sort of drive this point home is let's point out the the inability of the state and its institutions to sort of handle this disease

from the onset so we have the world health organization uh basically telling people not to wear masks it doesn't make a big difference we had the mayor in new york city the health director in new york city telling everybody to uh to turn away from racism and go to the Yeah. And so we have all these governments and institutions, basically their first reaction to the virus was obviously inept and incompetent. And now they're leveraging fear to get more power to react to this virus, which to me, at least, obviously they have no grasp on how to handle it from the onset. Yeah. So let's get into values. I mean, there's a guy who's a pretty well-known China, quote unquote, expert. His name is Bruno Machache, I think is his name. He's a guy who had one of the worst takes I've ever seen on Twitter. Very, very hot take last night. He said basically that the religion of privacy is going to get us all killed. And I wanted to, I responded to him basically saying that, you know, who's going to tell

this guy that the religion of privacy, quote unquote, and other civil liberties is actually this core defense mechanism that keeps our societies from devolving into things like Xinjiang in North Korea, like civil liberties and privacy are what we need to aim for and protect. And what I really want to help challenge is this idea that like centralized statist regimes are better at handling this, you know, public health crises than democracies. I just don't think it's borne out by the facts. So what we need to start with is China and Wuhan. I mean, the only reason we have a pandemic right now, the only reason that we're all like social distancing

and some countries are in lockdown and, you know, we're about to enter a very exacerbated, arguably depression, is because the Chinese Communist Party covered up the outbreak at the end of december right so they knew from doctors at wuhan central hospital that there was this dangerous new disease that seemed to be communicable human to human and they refused to put a warning out and they let millions of chinese people leave wuhan on january 1 to go to back to where they came from and they let flights go to seattle go to new york go to bangkok so the new york times did a study on this, 7 million people left Wuhan between December 31 and January 23, which is when finally the Chinese authorities kind of like started to lock down Wuhan. So the pandemic was

sparked by a cover up where the World Health Organization was complicit, right? So World Health Organization officials were alerted at the end of December by Taiwanese authorities that this thing could be communicable human to human. The World Health Organization didn't tweet until december didn't tweet until or issue a public statement until january 21st that this thing could spread human to human in fact as late as the 14th and the 17th they were posting uh tweets denying it basically saying that that it wasn't communicable human to human so this whole thing was born out of a culture of secrecy lies censorship and authoritarianism and i think that's just important to think about and to hone in there at the world health organization will

why do i keep saying that uh and taiwan right it is becoming glaringly obvious that they are captured by the chinese communist party there was an interview last week i believe with a taiwanese reporter who asked the american head of world she's a hero world health organization uh what he thought of taiwan's response and he wouldn't even respond any any he was like what did you say and then she's like i want to talk about taiwan and he hangs up it's actually an incredible clip that you all should see but yeah first he said we already talked about china so he's like trying to concede that taiwan is part of china already so the world health organization is a political organization it excludes taiwan and it it refers to it considers taiwan in its

data sets as a chinese province called taipei and its environs if you actually look up the data set which is so juvenile and childish um and what happens is that the rest of the world accepts the WHO data at face value. So not only do they accept the Chinese death and case count, which we can get into in a little bit, but they also accept the fact that Taiwan is a province of China. So you have newspapers like the New York Times and the Financial Times just kind of regurgitating this interpretation. And you look at all these fancy little charts, these exponential charts that everybody's sharing. Taiwan's not on these charts because folks are basically willing to toe Hu's line. So again, the Hu is a political organization that excludes Taiwan, despite the

fact that Taiwan has done one of the best jobs in fighting the virus. And I think just generally speaking, just to tie up this idea of dictatorship being bad for public health, it goes back to the Chernobyl effect, right? So I don't know if any of the freaks have seen the HBO series. I know it's not entirely historically accurate, but it's an incredible piece of television. And it really helps highlight how dictatorships and climates of censorship can be really bad for humans. You know, the explosion at Chernobyl was caused by human error attributed to people who wanted to make a particular type of energy quota at the time, and they went beyond what was safe for their own jobs and careers, you know, in a way that was reckless and ended up causing

absolutely devastating effect obviously on hundreds of thousands of people then after the catastrophe it happened the soviet union censored the news and prevented anyone from learning about it in fact the outside world only learned about it from like uh you know different readings that they started seeing in their equipment in sweden and in germany so the chernobyl effect is what happens when a a government a totalitarian or authoritarian government um puts loyalty to the state and party over the public health and public good. And that's what you saw with the Wuhan outbreak and the cover-up in China. And it's what you saw the World Health Organization be complicit in. And this organization needs a complete overhaul, in my opinion. It has actually

been dangerous and has been harmful for humans, not only for the reasons that you point out with regard to misinformation about masks and whether or not it's an airborne disease, but most importantly because they refuse to acknowledge that China, actually the Chinese government, spread the disease at the beginning. There are all these amazing conferences that the WHO did the end of January, early February, where they're sitting with Xi Jinping on a stage

talking about how great of a job China was doing. And it's just, you know, it beggars our belief and it really, you know, it's kind of just so condescending that they would think that we would agree with them on this. No? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty disgusting, actually. Yeah, and The Economist did a study over the last 50 years

looking at open societies versus closed ones. And generally speaking, when it comes to epidemics, democracies like handle them better. I mean, you don't want a climate of fear and a climate of censorship when it comes to a public health crisis. In the same way that Amartya Sen, who's a really famous economist,

he did a study of famine. And he basically pointed out that like famines have never happened in a liberal democracy for the reasons of free information flow free press things like that um for the same reasons uh you know epidemics are much less likely to happen in a society that prizes openness and free flow of information and doesn't have censorship um so societies that most tightly adhere to those values i believe are actually going to be most performant in these times of crisis yeah i mean just to hone in on the censorship aspects from china particularly like they censored the doctor who uh brought up the

fact that this was spreading and i believe he's even called it like early december and then uh as people were being quarantined and forced quarantine and welded into their houses throughout china they were trying to share information on wechat uh and a lot of people were just getting uh vanished from the app and then some people even said getting arrested personally as well disappeared i mean some of the doctors who found this thing were detained citizen journalists were disappeared obviously there was mass censorship of conversation on this topic among the country's social media machine um and although sadly a lot of those doctors ended up dying of the disease um dr lee uh being being sort of the famous one

became like a martyr. But there are others too. And this same thing happened in other countries. I mean, it wasn't just China. There had been a big construction kind of collaboration between the Chinese government and the Iranian government. So a lot of people flying back and forth between Wuhan and Iran. So we saw Iran become like the second epicenter, right? And it's like what it's like April 1, Iran is like disappeared from the news, you don't read about it anymore. but the virus continues to ravage iran and what was so crazy was at the end of february you were seeing stuff like you know you know numerous people inside the iranian regime were just getting it and dying from the disease the health minister the top health minister got it

more than 10 of the quote-unquote you know rubber stamp parliament got it um numerous aids to even Khamenei himself. So this disease totally ravaged Iran, continues to. There are satellite images of mass graves, and yet they're reporting only 3,000 have died, right? The worst thing was, and we can get into this, and this is a tricky subject for some folks, but this idea of like religion, religious liberty versus like common sense, right? So in Iran, they have like these holy sites, right? And the religious authorities in Iran are under a lot of pressure, right? They are under not only their own pressure from spending all of their money that they have on, you know, an occupation of Syria, essentially, but they're also under pressure from US sanctions, etc. So they're tight. And now they're even tighter because of the price of oil, right? So rentier oil state. So they're really, really screwed. But to keep, you know, their popularity alive, they have to kind of appeal to the conservative base, right? so they were like continuing to encourage people to go on these pilgrimages to these holy sites in

february and and people were doing some wild stuff like there are some of these sites where people like lick like certain like artifices and they weren't like stopping people from doing this this one city calm became like an epicenter and there just weren't limitations so people kept flocking to it and the government continued to deny that there was a problem and now they have like this thing and the crazy thing about the virus is it doesn't discriminate and you're seeing that right with like what like what at this point three of the seven leaders of g7 countries are you know in quarantine at home like this thing doesn't only go after poor people right so it started to as matt was saying it started to go after some of the people in in the regime and they started to

spread it amongst each other um and the fact that iran is going to have is going to be so devastated by this disease it reflects the character of that government uh 100 percent and the worst thing is they have a state-operated airline called Mahan Air that, you know, because the operators in Mahan Air were not allowed to tell their employees that this was a severe or dangerous thing, they kept running flights, flights to London, flights to Italy, flights to LA. And, you know, people just would get off these flights and not be checked by authorities in the secondary countries, in the transit countries. So Iran was key in the whole super spreading of this thing. So, you know, dictatorship and lies and secrecy were so elemental and instrumental in the global spread of this disease from day one.

and again talking about liberal democracies probably being able to respond better to this even if they are able to respond better the the inability or not inability the the uh the lack of willingness for these despotic governments to actually be forthright with the data and uh alert the rest of the world really puts us uh again like we're starting a couple steps behind trying to react it's our problem right marty i mean like this whole as highlights the whole interconnectedness of the world now like we can sit here in america and say oh whatever it's happening in iran and china and that's literally what like millions of americans were doing and our government millions of us and our government too so our white house

and us we were sitting here on twitter in late january watching i mean we all can remember at least i know that three of us can uh watching wuhan go on lockdown and being like whoa they just put like a city of 10 million people on lockdown so that's when i was buying my masks right i was like this is getting a little crazy but most people were like oh whatever it's over in china um and i think that people like kyle bass who you had on the show recently are helpful in explaining this but like there is no over there anymore it's all connected right especially as america america's supply chains and uh employment base are so connected with what's happening in these other countries so it's kind of like a riff on that mlk quote but you know um uh you know that

like an injustice anywhere is is an injustice that we all need to worry about right um and it just becomes so clear with these examples of china and iran so it kind of goes to the work that we do at the human rights foundation which is you know we're we're working on promoting civil liberties and freedoms and inside closed regimes around the world and this highlights the importance of what we're doing uh because really like dictatorships anywhere are a threat to open societies anywhere yeah and now they're weaponizing their their lack of willingness to be forthright against the countries that are now suffering so china is probably over the hump of its peak of uh of infections and now it's turning to the rest of the world with like acting like a humanitarian

regime like let us help you let us help you we'll send so much propaganda so much propaganda so first of all yeah like so first of all you have the idea that china at the beginning and the world health organization were basically saying it was racist to have travel restrictions on chinese people in january february now you know once once sort of like you know there's that meme where it's a whatsapp group and it's like china created the group uh covid 19 and then china invited italy china invites around china invites the united states china invites europe china leaves the group so you know they're they've kind of like spread this disease out uh you know arguably in many ways um because of decision making within the communist party and now that they've realized that

you know maybe they're over the hump now they're closing it down so they basically are they're restricting travel from everybody else so each major carrier gets only like one flight a day into china now it's like basically impossible to go there so they're total hypocrites and they're combining this with a narrative that unfortunately works so well, so well. So the narrative is twofold. Inside China, they're promoting to the Chinese people that this was an American bioweapon. And this is taken very seriously. There's a guy named Paul Moser, who I recommend all the freaks follow on Twitter. He was the New York Times tech correspondent in China for the last almost 15 years. So he's the one who was really sounding the alarm on when WeChat was

first being created, like what it meant, and how all this surveillance tech was was evolving. He just got thrown out of China. But he was saying that among his friends, he was sharing this on Twitter that he just sort of estimated among like well educated people that he knew in China that half of them believe now that this was an American bioweapon. So their propaganda is really effective inside of China. Outside of China, in Europe and United States, they're trying to go with the like humanitarian narrative. They're trying to say, Oh, look how generous China's being. So China's like airlifting, like masks and things like that throughout Europe. And other dictatorships are getting in on the action too. You're even seeing Cuba doing it. The crazy part is it's all a very

wise propaganda investment. It doesn't cost them that much to do these things. And it wins huge because the international media is so gullible. So they're willing to be like, oh, look, China's helping Italy or Spain. Meanwhile, what did we find out this week? That a huge percentage of that equipment is bunk or doesn't even work right so it's it's all part of a grand scheme to kind of like fool the world into thinking that the the chinese government was the one that's handling this the right way and is the one that we should follow uh and what makes it more difficult is that most of the world's democracies have been totally incompetent right no totally and i think this is a good point because the narrative the narrative a lot of the narrative in the mainstream media

the dumb mainstream media here in the west is don't think this way that's racist so i think this is a good point of this episode to uh to de-alienate between the chinese people and the ccp we're not being racist totally chinese nationality or we we are against the chinese communist party here yeah i mean i the ccp is the one who covered up the outbreak and triggered this thing and i personally believe more people have died in china than anywhere else from this so this thing has hurt Chinese communities more than more than anyone. But if we actually start to look at some of the reactions of other states, it brings it brings in it brings up some nuanced and complicated and controversial things. So like, what do we do? Right? So how do we fight this

thing? I think there's some obvious things that that maybe maybe the freaks would agree are good or bad or whatever so we can go through kind of some of these um so what i'm going to do is i'm going to list off uh a bunch of things i want to get i want to get you guys i want to get a thumbs up or thumbs down from marty and matt on on a bunch of different things that we think society should do to prevent pandemics so what about hand washing thumbs up or thumbs down that's a thumbs up all right all right so we got hand washing what about masks i'm not talking about forced swearing of them but like as a general idea all right masks are cool bonus masks fluster uh facial recognition so we like that here i just want to say that i don't think it's a coincidence that

the only measure to the the only part of all the measures that help fighting this virus that they're not recommending is the one that helps our privacy all the other ones hurt our privacy and those are the ones they're recommending this is a great point and you know some people may say that like just between masks and hand washing that's like 75 percent of how of how to fight this thing right um or at least a huge chunk all right what about testing lots of testing having testing available to people if they need it all right that seems obvious all right what about this is interesting what about temperature checks like for example like if you guys went to pick up some food um next month like if a new protocol for the public safety of your town or city was that like the

chefs and the people on the lot coat line cooks and the delivery people had to take to had to take their temperature how do you guys feel about that the i'm in the middle there yeah the middle the testing and the temperature stuff it becomes it depends on how everything else falls in line with it because if you have to protect privacy at the same time you can't you can't force testing and you can't um you can't then you know like we see in south korea where they dox everyone's information out in public oh that's right we'll get to that what i'm talking about is so where i guess where i'll draw the line is like i'm okay with live temperature checks i don't want temperatures taken off of biometrics and wearables and whatever the chip when we have it right so

that's kind of how i would draw the line but no but temperature seems to be yeah we're anti-chip um so what about this what if you're a free country or a sit what about your citadel matt so you got your citadel someone's coming in from the outside um are you gonna ask them to quarantine for a few days like is that cool is that that reasonable oh yeah absolutely right so would you just say screw the screw the nuance with the phone here's your bracelet wear this for 14 days and then take it off or how would you how would you enforce your 14-day quarantine would you take them at the word least privacy intrusive would you ask them to install a phone app and do geo fencing which is what taiwan is doing right or would you just be like here's where

this freaking bracelet and we'll take it off in 14 days how would you enforce your quarantine well it depends if it's a citizen or not right because say it's like your friend who came in to hang out with you like you want him to like chill out and and distance for 14 i think if it's a citizen then then no but i think if it's if it's someone that's not a resident that's you know a foreigner you know doesn't live in my citadel and they're coming here for refuge or for trade or something then they should have extra precautions put against them right i guess i'm just saying the whole like phone app thing is such a it's it's just we should just do away with that like if you're gonna actually come out and say you want to like quarantine someone and

monitor them say it say you want them to have a bracelet you know and then and then be done with the whole like nuanced like confusion here the bracelets one step away from the chip the bracelets one step away from the chip it's not planted in you i want to hear what marty has to say about this well i'm just thinking about my own situation like i sought refuge in new jersey from new york and people are people start to freak out right now there's like license plate shaming going down where i am uh and like i could see if people were allowed to have their way down here they'd probably try to make me download let's just put it this way let's say new jersey said this all right marty you want to come into jersey you got to wear this thing or download this app for 14

days after that you should take off you could take it off no i want to do that or whatever i say no because i honestly i i have been quarantined up to i'm up to like day 20 right now and i was able to do that by myself i i can't speak for anybody else but i just know me personally like why all right so we're gonna say no to no geofencing and no no bracelet marty's at a home that that his family owns right he's true there's a direction that's what i'm saying it's different if it's you know a flood of new yorkers coming in and staying in like airbnbs or something like that also do you want to explain to the freaks what geofencing is matt so they they know well It's like, so you have a phone app, you set location parameters.

And if they go outside those location parameters, the cops come. Yeah. So look, I'm, all I'm saying is that like, Hey, maybe a democracy would want to enforce something like this. I'm not entirely sure that that's unreasonable. So I'm going to put that one in the question mark. Like, I, like, it just depends. Like I, obviously if you look, if you're, if you're a sink, if you're a city state,

that's a free country, you have no positives. You're going to want some immigration restrictions. but for your citizens you should not be forcing your citizens in a pod no i'm saying foreigners foreigners foreign visitors what do you think yeah i mean i'm cool with that yeah well it seems like a question it seems like a a blurry area what about what about old school contact tracing so oh matt you're positive can you can you i mean can you think of who you were in touch with this week can we can we call them and warn them do you feel like that's reasonable to do yes i i definitely think it's reasonable to do matt what do you think

yeah i mean that's voluntary disclosure yeah yeah voluntary non-technological you're not looking through my phone to see correct stay at home if possible how do you guys feel about that i mean it depends what your job is i said if possible so yeah obviously yeah yeah yeah well my only issue with the stay at home thing is i i still pissed off that they're not recommending people cover their face if they have to go out like if you're gonna go if you're gonna go full tilt and tell us to stay at home then you should at least do the bare minimum and say people should cover their fucking face yeah so they're starting to do that in hong kong and taiwan like if you go out you have to wear a mask um what about the restriction of like big gatherings now here's

where we come into the the friction between religious liberty and and common sense where do you stand on like i mean would it be up to the pastor or the imam or the rabbi or who do you think makes the call here that's a very tough one i don't like de blasio threatening to shut them down if they do do it but i do think they should not do it the city of seoul is has a lawsuit currently against the shinoguchi sect so the 61 year old woman was part of this whatever i'll call it a cult it's probably not fair but we'll call it a cult um well a lot of things could be cults but um she was like in their wuhan chapter and she flew home to south korea to do like in january and she was the one who went to this 4500 person ceremony or service and she was the super

spreader and that's one of the main reasons south korea has so many cases right now is this one woman so the city of seoul has now sued this uh organization um do you feel like that's is that something you want to see i mean you saw the the what was it the pastor in florida got arrested yesterday or something right yeah but then you also see like the oldest catholic church i believe in jerusalem where they believe like jesus was hung they shut their doors for the first time since the spanish flu i believe yeah i mean look i'm not i'm not i mean no and this is is why new york brooklyn has a huge outbreak specifically is that his civics uh have not dispersed i'm gonna i'm gonna side on common sense on this one and just say that like

i think it's okay for local and federal governments to to uh to issue like restrictions of public gatherings but i agree that's controversial but what about protests there that's that's the tricky one so in hong kong it appears that the protesters are still protesting with masks but less so less so less so and of course that's one of the conspiracy theories out there which we should certainly mention uh that a lot of people that are i think pretty legitimate people actually believe is that this thing was a bioweapon made by the chinese to um to sort of end the hong kong protests well i'll say for all i'll say one thing uh if you asked me in november if there was a clean way for the ccp to get out of hong kong i would say

it's impossible they've dug themselves a hole no one's going to back down it's going to be messy as fuck and now it just it seems like it's a very clean way well i'll leave that in the conspiracy theory drawer for now but uh it's certainly something that really affects people's ability to protest uh it's very very difficult too so um in general i think that um restricting gatherings is okay but uh man that's a tough one but what about no no what about lockdown but one sec but then we go back to our earlier conversation which is trusting the numbers that the governments report in the first place so maybe this time it's fine you know i i think that the coronavirus is a real threat i don't think this is like a hoax crisis i think this is a real crisis but once

you set that precedent right a hoax crisis could happen that stops protests makes it automatic criminal to be to be a protester basically right you said you do set that precedent so so here's what here's why i would i think it's helpful to differentiate between uh restrictions of gatherings and enforced lockdowns so restrictions of gatherings is one thing but so the country the government of sierra leone had no cases last week and declared a national state of emergency and you know seized all these different powers so that's where i think that's the reason i think like lockdowns quote unquote are obviously undemocratic and probably not really desirable i mean i think so look look in the bay area you have um i mean people call it a lockdown but it's very different

from the lockdown in wuhan right i mean the lockdown in wuhan you had to you had to like have permission to leave your building i can leave my house right now and go on a jog and pretty much go anywhere they don't have checkpoints on the highways but what about someone like paris paris has has a pretty strong lockdown right there's different kinds i think what the barrier has done is reasonable um i think it's obviously really unfortunate and terrible we can get into the economic aspect later but you know non-essential businesses are on are closed and maybe maybe that's to be debated but i do think the way the barrier has done it generally speaking has been has been pretty good. And that's been borne out by the numbers. Like we don't have like a fear right

now, at least talking to folks in the hospitals around here, that there's going to be this death rush that just doesn't really seem to be happening. And in a way where, look, we have, you know, technically, like, again, I can go out, I can go to the store, I can go shopping. Like a lot of things are closed, but like, I'm not going to get questioned for being outside, I can do what I want. And I feel at this point, me personally, that like I'm protecting myself at this point. So I feel like this, if you're going to do a quote unquote lockdown, I think it can be done in a way that's more minimal. I think the way that it's being done in Italy and Paris and Wuhan obviously is too much. I mean, you can't be like jailing people inside their own homes, right?

No, I agree. And I think this really touches into the negative externalities that come from a lockdown, right? Like how many people are going to go psychotic from this and go mad? how many people are not getting paid checks and like just thinking about that while they're locked down fresh air is important yeah i believe it was burma they had i think like 15 cases or excuse me like 50 cases one death uh but there are two deaths attributed to the coronavirus the police beat a man to death who was outside of his lockdown so so we've covered some things that are like uh obviously we should do like hand washing masks social distancing uh lots of testing We've covered some things that are very debatable, like lockdowns and restrictions of gatherings and geofencing.

What about the things that are obviously not acceptable in any circumstance? So for me, I have four. I have cell phone tracking, financial surveillance, more surveillance cameras installed in public places, and public doxing of positives. How do you guys feel about those four? Agree across the board. What the South Korean government is doing is insane. I mean, literally, if you test positive, they're putting your last name, your general neighborhood where you live, not your address, but like near where you live, plus your birth date and a whole bunch of other stuff on a website, public website that people can look at. And then they'll text you saying, hey, that person was near you yesterday.

And what it's leading to is like social stigma. So some of these people operate small businesses and they're getting crushed because of this. And a lot of it may even be based on inaccurate data. And who's going to get tested to me? Who's going to get tested if that's what happens? You stay home and you don't get tested. Yeah. And I think like,

it may be easy for us to like, and the freaks to understand like why financials are stupid. Well, then you get on the not tested list. And is that a good list to be on? But the public doxing is outrageous, but look, the cell phone tracking is,

I think where I want to end this and where I want to spend a little time talking about this. Cause you're seeing a lot of folks online and I've been chatting with Matt about this, but, and others, but like there's a lot of like people who are saying look let's make a way to do cell phone tracking that doesn't violate privacy there's a ton of these people impossible yeah and they

they're like they don't understand that like you cannot anonymize location data matt do you want to do you want to color that in for people they know where you work and where you live that's it they know everything to identify you there's no way to anonymize it this little dot went to this home every day for the last week i wonder who that little dot is it wasn't the um the new york times article series that came out i believe in november or october november that was able to track some department of defense members from the the climate crisis service i think right too yeah i've done i'm i'm prepping for an event that i'll tell you guys about later but i'm doing a lot of research into this right now and there's kind of two camps

there's one camp that's just like what the israeli government is doing which is just like oh we're just going to take everybody's cell phone data you guys could deal with later then there's a camp that's like what the mit folks are trying to develop and what um the uh folks at in singapore are doing which is like we will like encourage you to download an app that uses bluetooth to like you know uh tell uh to tell you whether you've been in touch with anybody and i feel again this is like this has problems not only because it seems impossible to anonymize this data set but also how are you going to bootstrap the thing it's not helpful if like only three people have downloaded the app right you kind of need everybody to have the app right

i would imagine yes i mean matt what do you think about the the whole bluetooth the bluetooth is a little bit better because you can kind of do it is a little bit you can kind of do it a little bit more privately um your phone basically knows what other phones it's been in proximity of um but obviously there's major privacy implications there and like you said you need a critical mass to actually buy into the um buy into it so and like people shouldn't be walking around with open bluetooth connections just in general but that's another story yeah and it's given rise to this really bizarre thing that i've seen numerous companies say and it's like look you donate your blood um why don't you donate your data how do you feel about this idea

literally that's what they say it's a false equivalency doesn't make any sense we're gonna get peer pressure into the chip we're gonna get peer pressure into the chip here's the quote from a german company um people give their stem cells for patients that need a stem cell transplant they give their blood he says we hope that people think about the crisis and are willing to give their data well that's i'm sorry are you gonna keep going there no that's it that's the quote yeah well that's i mean bitcoiners say this a lot like analogies are terrible way to make arguments and this is what this is just terrible analogies um yeah i know you love them but they're not great for arguments where i'm worried about this is we all know this

is a slippery slope yeah and it doesn't get rolled back that's the key it's not gonna get rolled back it's not just the crisis well not only that but i mean look we know we all know where this ends and and there's been some wonderful videos coming out from you know foreigners who are still in china right now stuck there who are taping what's happening and it's like you gotta like scan your phone now when you're emerging from lockdown in wuhan and you have if you don't have the right status on your phone you can't get on the bus you can't use public transit you can't buy stuff so if you're they're green yellow or red right so if you're red you're like totally screwed but even if you're yellow you're limited and if you're green you're like it's almost like you are

um a prized commodity because you can actually go places it's causing a crazy social stratification thing and the wild thing is there's a video of like a there's some british uh uh business guy who happens to be in china right now and he made a little video which went viral a few days ago which i thought was really good and he's he's talking to a chinese person who's green on her phone but he's yellow and they're in the same room like he's spitting distance away from her and they're not wearing masks and it's like his yellow is not affecting her green the whole thing is so stupid um and it's really just an excuse to continue to like track and color code people right and to basically give them these like citizen scores so this is why i would say

generally speaking, I'm not a fan of any kind of cell phone tracking at all, even if it is done with privacy, quote unquote, in mind. Do you know what I'm saying? You end up with like a Stanford prisoner experiment kind of situation where the people that it benefits probably ends up being the majority. And those majority go along with whatever authoritarian government is there to push the system because it benefits them. They're like a vip in the system yeah and you know look in europe in germany italy austria um the mobile carriers themselves and as it happens in taiwan too you know they're sharing cell phone location data with health officials and they claim it in an anonymized format but as we know that that's not

it's not it's not possible like you can you can easily de-anonymize folks based on their data but this is what we're up against even in the uk on the 19th of march the national the nhs that it was developing a you know digital tracing app so all these governments are even in our own country i mean we haven't seen any evidence yet that the central government is has implemented anything but it looks like from like wall street journal reporting that um the government's using like mobile advertising data to start to look at like where people are so you're seeing the like um the overton window on privacy is changing is what i want to say so like before covid people still were like uneasy with this sort of surveillance on the phones thanks to things like snowden right

but today you're seeing people basically give up on all of their hesitancy and say fuck it let's just you know let's just burn it all down like screw privacy we want people to be safe so you're seeing the overton window much like the overton window is changing for things like ubi and you know the treasury minting money by itself and scrapping the feds independence and all these other things you're seeing the overton window shift on privacy in a super alarming way so this is why we need to be like really loud about the fact that we don't need a police state to fight the virus and it just needs to be like repeated over and over and over again well like we were saying it's a combination or we said it on twitter i don't know if we said it in this podcast yet

it's a combination of the reaction 9-11 and the financial crisis of 2008 and so the care the cares act it got through didn't it get through it mandates that the cdc has to create a tracking app within 30 days or 60 days. So it'll probably look like what the NHS is doing or who knows, maybe there'll be a mix of what the Israelis are doing and the Koreans are doing and the Taiwanese are doing. But you know, the sad fact is there doesn't really appear to be a country at least that, that, that is not doing any of this. Now, the interesting thing is, is what I would, what I would say could be the model is actually California. I don't know what the government of California is doing right now. I don't know what kind of surveillance is happening. I haven't seen

anything. I'm hoping that they haven't done any digital contact tracing here. I'm not sure. But if San Francisco Bay Area, for example, 3 million people, if we successfully flatten the curve here and don't have a big outbreak and don't have a ton of deaths, and we do that without violating privacy, that would be amazing. So I mean, I'm just trying to watch things here carefully. So maybe the Bay Area can actually be a model for the world and can literally prove to people that you don't, again, you don't need mass surveillance to fight the virus. You know, we don't need to change our expectations or traditions. We don't need to move the Overton window here.

That's my hope. No, I think it's also important to drive home the logical inconsistency of depending on the government and the institutions below it to solve this problem when they didn't even see it coming and their initial reactions were terrible like it's they're not going to solve it for you and i you have it on the list here build communities be kind like actually like talk to your neighbors and and and just not socially shame to the point where you run after people but if you see people in large groups you can just be like hey come on be careful about what what the spooks are saying so you know this was a wall street journal op-ed written by someone who's

a VP at In-Q-Tel, which is like, you know, the VC for the defense industry, right? And then this person used to work at the NSC, National Security Council. So she says that she's like, she's claiming that she's a privacy advocate, right? So she's writing this op-ed as a quote unquote privacy advocate. She says, what we need is a contact tracing app that Americans would voluntarily download. After a user provided consent, each phone would generate an anonymous ID number. When app users are in proximity, the numbers would be exchanged via Bluetooth and stored for quote-unquote a limited time when an individual who signed up for the app test positive for covid the app would send a notification to alert other users who'd been near them recently

they would then know to begin self-quarantine monitor for symptoms and seek testing in this social compact the more who participate the greater that benefits the community so they're basically selling surveillance as a community benefit these days so just be careful be careful yeah i mean we they we talk about this with with the ring technology basically sending all their data to the local police stations it's just that taken to another limit um yeah but again like people are crying for it right now the fear the fear is really really something to behold like how people will just give up this stuff with fear and that's that's where we've been talking about this matt and i and other people have been on this podcast last

few weeks like it's totally nuanced this is definitely a disease that's spreading we should be worried about but like the media is making it seem much worse than it is and really driving home fear as everybody's stuck in their house for a couple weeks and they're all just watching tv and getting more and more scared and freaking themselves out like we need people to have clear eyes take a couple deep breaths and say hey this is pretty heavy but we're gonna get through this and let's react appropriately yeah and if you get suckered in just remember where does this slippery slope end of getting more comfortable with sharing your private data. It ends with green, yellow, red. It ends with the color coding of you. It ends with the social stratification

and the citizen score. So just be careful. But I guess to be more optimistic, what do we do? What lessons do we draw? So I've been trying to think about the three main things that people can do, like what are practical things people can do? So you can rely more heavily on encryption, right you can preserve your private communications you can use tools like signal number one number two you can get more involved with bitcoin use bitcoin store your wealth with bitcoin number two and number three you can be kind to one another and you can focus on your local communities so this is kind of like my guiding uh advice right now to folks as far as like they're freaking out they don't know what to do they're worried the walls are closing in well if you kind of like

refocus on encryption bitcoin and kindness i think it can help us get us through this mess yeah and i think we are actually are seeing that you're not seeing it in the media but just again i've said this told this story a couple times on this podcast but my in-laws my parents just seeing how their communities are reacting everybody's looking after each other the younger couples are going to the grocery store for the older couples they're standing outside on their porches at 5 p.m every day to do a little check on everybody to socially distance and that's the other thing socially distancing is like a bad or willing term it should be physical distancing it's like socially distancing like uh is like a is a weird a weird framing where you should like

just like avoid people and and just listen to us we'll tell you what to do um but yeah no i think we are seeing examples of communities actually being kind to each other and looking after each other. We're just not seeing it on the news per se. So when it comes to the economic angle of this thing and Bitcoin, I thought Nick Carter said something that really resonated with me recently when he basically said, look, we don't know if in the near term we're going to actually see high inflation in the United States. It's very possible that we'll start seeing prices of goods go up as assets devalue and go down. This is personally what I think is going to happen even as soon as this year. But we don't even need to have that situation to start

to understand why Bitcoin is so important. What he basically said is that it's a protest against the sort of Cantillon bailout idea, which is what we're really fighting against, right? Is this idea that like the people who make the money can make the money spigot flow in a way where the people who are closest to the top benefit the most and that's the that's the piece that needs to be like broken and shattered that's like the wheel that needs to be broken and that's kind of what i've focused my thinking on because honestly this narrative that uh oh the fed's gonna or the treasury is going to print a bunch of money and it's going to inflate the dollar that's not necessarily going to happen in the near future simply because the rest of the world is even

worse than us so they're going to all want dollars and there's other other factors there but like you may not see prices rise in the in the next few months but it doesn't mean that bitcoin's not valuable i think that the the arguably the most important thing to think about now is that it creates a different financial system where you know that the the money itself cannot be produced in a way that is siphoned off to uh you know an elite group right i mean yeah and it's i would also add that, I mean, I think this whole crisis is going to accelerate the move to restrict cash usage worldwide. So when you add that into the mix, and cash is obviously the main way people are able to make private purchases without exposing all their purchase history. If that

happens, and I think it was going to happen regardless, and I think with the crisis, it got accelerated, then you're going to need a private money. Otherwise, all of our purchases are going to be tracked for perpetuity? So I need to help people understand like what a worst case scenario could look like. You guys have discussed this book, The Mandibles on the show before, I think with American Hodl, right? You guys talked about it a little bit. I would definitely recommend everybody read it. It's a really amazing, funny book, but it basically describes how hyperinflation would happen in the United States. And without giving too much away, the general idea is that we have a president who decides to default on our debt. And there's been a conspiracy with

other governments to create like a new world standard currency. And it gets sort of adopted. And therefore, everybody flees from dollar from dollars and from treasuries and things like that. And, you know, it shows the life of people who live in Brooklyn, as prices skyrocket, and as like a Venezuelan scenario happens. And the funny part is, the mainstream paul krugman type economists are in the story and they're in denial at the beginning because they're all saying that like no we can save the system if we do x y and z and then that those characters become uh obviously completely demoralized and defeated throughout the story as the dollar like just inevitably becomes almost worthless right but what i wanted to discuss here

was the role of gold because you know i know you had roy on the other day and i think it stands to reason that um gold will will become increasingly valuable i mean look it's gone from 300 bucks to 1600 bucks right since the year 2000 so thing with gold though and you really learn you really think about this as you read the mandibles is you got some gold in your house yeah there's going to be some like jackbooted thugs who come and take it from you right so this idea that you know a large amount of gold that you could actually put your family's value in is going to be a little a large physical space it's going to be hard to move around it's going to be a real limitation for a lot of people and the idea that you can't move it from one country to another

it starts to get comic in the idea of like you know how worth how usable is this thing so i just think like if you actually think about the events of the mandibles things would be so different had they had bitcoin and the crazy part is like we don't have to live the events of the mandibles we have our own world where we have bitcoin we don't have to live in that world where there is no way to you know teleport your your assets um in a way that's confiscation resistant and censorship resistant we actually have that tool so it'll be really interesting to see how this unfolds here um but i am pretty hopeful and optimistic that we don't have to go down that road so much and that that it is a pop it is possible for anybody regardless

of whether they had even a passport or an id to put their time and energy into an asset that can be moved permissionlessly anywhere um and can be stored and and transferred in a way that's very hard to censor and very hard to confiscate so just massive bonus for the human race as we enter these traumatic times that's it's it goes without saying like it is crazy how how much and that's another thing too that we've been talking about as well as the the accumulation of gold by governments like china and russia and it seems like they've been posturing over the last two decades uh specifically like they're stacking gold bars man if you look at that list of you look at how much gold america has i mean oh my god we have so much gold it's wild and you know

what i mean it's kind of funny because we make fun of the government for making all these short-term time just short-term sort of time preference things well you know what stacking like the Most gold in the world is a pretty nice long-term time preference decision by the U.S. government. So they're just keeping it in there, man. But as we're seeing now, as the conversation you had with Roy suggests, how do we trust the fact that governments even have the amount of gold they say they have?

A lot of this stuff could be rehypothecated, et cetera. You can't verify it like you can with Bitcoin, right? So we'll have to see. A lot of that might be a house of cards scenario. I mean, that's one of the big conspiracy theories out there is the golden fortnox is it in the basement below the new york fed it's a cardboard box yeah yeah so we'll see i mean how much have they been selling off to flip to keep things afloat i mean it's a it's a very good question i mean and that's that's the crazy that's the other beauty of

bitcoin right it can be audited you can audit it with your node if you have your keys and your possession like you know that you have that and uh it is it is infinitely better than gold what do What do you guys think 30% to 40% unemployment looks like in the year 2020? It's very different from the year 1935. But what do you think it actually looks like in the next 6 to 12 months? What do you think is going to happen? I assume you don't ascribe to the idea that this is going to be a V-shaped recovery. No, no.

I don't know, man. I mean, so you have unemployment coupled with the boomer retirement happening at the same time as their retirement funds implode. Where's my pension, baby? Wait, did my pension? Wait, my pension invested in risky high-yield things because they needed to get to a particular quota? Oh, maybe that was a bad idea.

Yeah, I mean, and so where does it go? I hope not civil unrest. It's hard to see civil unrest not happening, at least in some capacity. I do hope the avenues of communication which exist today help us sort of communicate outside of the government and try to make it like you said earlier be kind build community and fix this from the ground up i mean dude the mandibles has a scene where there's a refugee camp in prospect park

that's probably gonna happen in the next six months dude sorry to say i mean i don't i personally almost everybody i know is affected there are people i know who are who have covid there are people i know who a lot of people have already been laid off who are as who are seeking these loans and they're seeking different i mean this is like even just within my small social circle so i mean it's things are getting we've never seen this before matt you're seeing the effects firsthand right um but two things first of all um i'm not sure if there'll be a refugee camp in prospect park but if there is i just want to highlight that i don't think san francisco is going to be able to avoid this this bomb either i think san francisco i think people overestimate

how much of the issue is in new york um maybe my bias is showing but we have been testing really well here um and this thing spreads really easily so to without doxing myself i don't live in san francisco i live in the bay area yeah well i think the bay area is gonna get hit hard as well but anyway okay just investment real estate alone fucked completely going to get wrecked absolutely wrecked people aren't going to be able to pay their rents whether that's retail or residential we have full economic shutdown right now and the the the knock-on effects of that are fucking unreal you know and and there's two things that people have underestimated in terms of this crisis um and they're both kind of similar they're tangential um the first thing is that healthy

americans have nothing to worry about most americans are completely unhealthy so that's complete bullshit and then the second thing is healthy as well exactly that's the second thing the second thing is most americans are living paycheck to paycheck and when you take away that paycheck the ripple effects are absolutely unfathomable i don't know where we go from here and you know it keep it keeps me up at night we we shall see what happens but i'll tell you one something the only thing that that gives me hope and gives me certainty is my bitcoin so to me the the value prop of bitcoin has never been more clear um and yeah i agree completely i mean look there's this video that i do encourage people to watch um some bitcoiners shared it with me

and the author of the video is discredited now for several reasons but is ray dalio actually so uh his fund seems to not be doing super hot right now he was very adamant that the dollar was going to become really weak and hasn't etc etc but he does a very nice animation called how the economic machine works where he shows that like for governments they really have four options during a during uh not just a recession but what he calls a deleveraging which is like you know a depression basically three of the options are uh deflationary and one is inflationary um so in the deflationary camp they can raise taxes uh they can uh do like debt restructuring um uh and obviously they can cut spending but obviously people don't like this and this

usually leads to protests and get regimes getting toppled so what do they do they they lean on the fourth option which is printing more money and he has this idea that oh this these things can be like in a beautiful balance and he says there can be a beautiful deleveraging which is like insane to me because it's never going to be beautiful it's always going to be ugly it's going to be so terrible and he gets the videos wild at the end the beautiful deleveraging but he does he has this interesting model where he says that okay um he thinks that there's like over time economies grow with productivity which i agree with over time but it's sort of a linear trend um so in the short term there's what like he has the short-term debt cycle and the long-term debt

cycle so he has these in like these waves so he has the short-term debt cycle between five to eight years which obviously we've seen are are you know if you go back in time you can see this pretty easily in America, at least. Then he has the long-term debt cycle, which he calls, it takes every 75 to 100 years. And he says, in the short-term debt cycles, you see recessions and you see boom cycles, et cetera. But the long-term thing is the period of time between deleveragings. The thing is, and if you actually look at the stock market crash in 29 and the Great Depression, I don't necessarily think that 2008 was the deleveraging. I think it was the beginning of the deleveraging but i think it got put on pause with and it was it was actually the

federal government managed to hold it off for another decade but i think what we're witnessing part of this it's sort of the same thing that's happening now they kick the can i don't think it's a different phenomenon they kick the can down the road but we're about we're about to experience the real deleveraging is all i'm saying and in that world you're gonna want you're gonna want to understand what bitcoin is and be able to tell your family and friends about it i mean it's it's at this point it's it's a pretty serious um matter i would say that that at least they should have the knowledge of what it is and how to get it um and i'm grateful that we live in a world that that has it no i completely agree and you just look at the reactions from henry paulson tim

geithner ben bernanke in 2008 he literally had that meeting over the weekend where they had to decide whether they're going to save the banks or not and henry paulson was like hank paulson was like we don't do this there's not going to be cash in the atms tomorrow well the amount of leveraging that had to happen to save us from the great deleveraging in terms of if you look at these i was showing you guys this thing with these uh corporate bonds like apple had none before 2008 now they have like some astronomical amount but like 200 billion or something like that yeah some like 75 of all these assets were created since the 2008 crisis and just to kind of keep everything afloat along with stock buybacks and all these other things so all these synthetic things have

kind of kept us on life support but we're gonna eventually start to slide down that road yeah but at least apple has like a shit ton of cash reserves they like manage their they manage their book better than most people and most companies i mean like they do but they're still gonna have layoffs yeah one of the issues i see is like not only with with with investment real estate not only like people think you know paycheck to paycheck you think like the gig worker right you think the guy who's who's working for uber as an uber driver or something but the people that are paycheck to paycheck are also the landlords because they they are all waiting on their rent checks because they're highly leveraged up right and it goes all the

way down that that route is they're just all fucking you know hand to mouth and that that's going to turn on this so hard and right now i feel like our government is treating this as like recovery spending but we haven't even gotten through the crisis yet like right now the whole focus should be on on solving this crisis getting as many masks out as possible getting as much testing out as possible and solving the root of the problem here instead of trying to just jump into recovery mode and they're just they're shooting all their guns like prematurely yeah And it would be remiss of us not to cover at least a little bit how incompetent the American administration, at least the White House, has been throughout this whole thing in terms of joining the who at the hip, in terms of lying to the people about different things and covering things up, et cetera. But you do have the president now saying we should do $2 trillion of infrastructure spending, which may have been a good idea a year ago, actually.

You know, like, look, debt powers the world. Most money in the world is debt. That's just the reality, right? So would you rather take out debt to have a television set or a tractor that can actually help you be more productive? Like there's a clear difference here. So rather than take out debt to prop up dead companies, we should have been taking out debt to actually make our infrastructure really good. I actually understand that. That makes sense.

But to do it now seems like it's really going to break the back of the system. And the fact is, what's so crazy, if you survey the top 10, 20 economists ranging from the Austrians all the way over to the MMTers, no one knows what's going to go down. Nobody knows. Everybody's totally clueless. They don't know what's going to happen in the next six months. There's all these arguments between dollar bulls and dollar bears. And I mean, all the quote unquote experts have no idea what to expect. And the crazy part is very few of them understand Bitcoin.

You know, they're just kind of like missing it. My point is the only infrastructure spending we should be talking about right now is building mask factories. Like, what the fuck is going on? Like, you have a bunch of people that are unemployed looking for work. We have a huge shortage of masks

and he wants to do infrastructure spending? We have unlimited money? So you're saying like 50 billion to the airlines shouldn't have gone to the airlines? Make fucking masks. Put the people to work, man. And make some masks. How about those drive-through?

Now in South Korea, And again, I know I was very critical of the way they use surveillance, but they have these phone booth testing sites that are incredible. How come we don't have those everywhere in our great country? We did the drive-thru. It's just really pathetic. The drive-thru testing. I was happy to see that. You need drive-thru testing.

You need masks. I mean, I can sympathize with the way that we as a country would need to mobilize in a statist way, like in wartime for these things. I understand that. I'm not a total anarchist. but um the fact is we haven't been doing that we've been mobilizing to save corrupt corrupt corporations is what we've been mobilizing to do it's really really frustrating um and meanwhile marty where we are meanwhile marty's not allowed to go on this beautiful empty beach outside his fucking house because it's against the law for him to do that like that's that's

that's the priorities and the other priority they have is they've they've increased the screening of packages coming into america and they're seizing kn95 masks that are over a thousand masks that's their priority their priority is to step in there and enforce fda regulations on fucking masks the the american government in you know it's been it's federal system so there's all different different examples i think california's done a lot better than other countries but rather other states but um the fact is where would you rather be right now florida or singapore Like, I'm sorry, I'd rather be in Singapore right now. Even the hardcore freedom advocate that I am like, so that you're going to see some fallout, you're going to see a horrible effect, not only on the death toll of our country, but also the economy. It's not worth arguing about, you know, whether or not X or Y or Z should be done, but we should prepare ourselves accordingly. now the thing is with bitcoin how do you guys contextualize the fact that i think a lot of

bitcoiners are waking up to the fact that even though we understand kind of what it gives us and the power it has and the tool it is and the revolution that it is most people most people still treat it as a speculative asset so they're going to sell it in times of crisis so its dollar value is going to go down when people need to sell to make margin calls and things like that How are you? Is that are you guys adjusting your priors at all or is that something that's in line with what you've always believed? Well, to go back to your point about hyperinflation may not be coming, at least not very quickly. I mean, that's the thing. It's all confidence game. Right. And actually had a good conversation with Charles Marone from Strong Towns a few weeks ago. And he actually brought up the Waymar Republic. And what we're actually doing now is very similar to what they did and how their hyperinflation started, where they had an economic crisis.

they did a bunch of infrastructure i think it was maybe even the spanish flu was had something to do with it um they uh they had to like they had to restock the the economy and they're doing like infrastructure spending and printing money and it just came out of nowhere basically where you have the government and their central bank trying to fix things all at once and so i could see that happening here and then in terms of bitcoin i think maybe it's following a similar path that gold played in the 2008 crisis where initially uh people sold off risk assets to cover margin and leverage but then it had a huge run like six to eight months after that started and i think at some point again this is all confidence game like like you have the opportunity cost of

all right if i dump my bitcoin for these dollars that are about to hyper inflate is it really even fucking worth it so i think we may yes we did have a huge sell-off initially when this crisis started but i think bitcoin's held up relatively well since then uh all things considered yeah but i guess this brings us to the idea of like um like different different ownership different ownership groups people who own bitcoin and and like the people who who are going to sell it to meet margin calls are not the the believers right they're not the people who are working sometimes they are believe in it sometimes they are they might need the cash like Like, we can't buy things with Bitcoin yet.

Like, I 100% agree with Marty. I think, well, two things. Like, obviously, no one in charge believes that they're leading to hyperinflation when they do it. Otherwise, they probably would not do it because it does hurt them long term. And even short to medium term, it hurts them. So it does always catch you off guard, historically speaking. And then the second thing is, is like if you have a global free market asset that allows people worldwide to invest in it and take custody, then of course, in times of global turmoil and crisis, when people need real goods, it's going to go down in price. Like that's exactly what you should expect.

If it was a manipulated market, it might not go down in price. And then you should you should question that. Like, I think if we have a global pandemic and you have full economic shutdown in the Western world, that asset that is that is supposed to be a global store of value that's permissionless is going to go down in price like that should be exactly what's expected. But we all know this is a long term game. Yeah, and that's that's the key takeaway here is that you have to keep thinking about what is this asset going to look like in 10 years, 20 years. um and i think that unfortunately some of the same people who are just viewing as a speculative investment some of these institutional folks and many others um uh you know they're going to be the ones who and they own significant amount of bitcoin right

i mean they're also going to be the ones who eventually push these like social attacks on bitcoin like they did three years ago right four years ago so they're going to be pushing these attacks of inflation and they're going to be blocking privacy tech and we're going to have to respond accordingly and keep our eye on the on the long term right um i mean you know that the same people who pushed for uh bigger blocks i mean they're gonna they're gonna come back at some point in the next couple years um probably push for inflation they're gonna push for a block to any sort of like meaningful privacy upgrades bigger blocks bigger blocks was a direct threat to privacy because you totally because you couldn't run your own decentralization of the

system but i'm just saying like they'll come like let's say for example that like people eventually figure out how to get confidential transactions on the main chain without uh violating our full nodes ability to audit the supply of the money like and i know it's a little bit of a pie in the sky right now but who knows maybe in 10 years it's possible they're gonna block that they're gonna say no we don't want that because that's going to prevent our ability to have this as a legal asset in the United States. And they have a lot of power. So we need to mobilize accordingly for that fight when it happens. Same thing with inflation. So they're going to use all of their power to try and fight the developers and others who don't want to change Bitcoin. But there's

going to be more of these fights down the road. You know that, right? Well, I assume, yes, I'm preparing for that. But also, again, this is something I've been just like, I tweeted out like a month and a half ago but i've been just retweeting every day is like nobody's priced in the crisis of confidence that's coming for these institutions like how like will will we even trust the government at that point 10 years from now won't even look like it does now will their power be completely neutered just because of people's reactions to how they reacted to this and how they fucked up everything so bad like so i'm that's one thing that i don't think people take into consideration enough is the fact that people just may completely lose confidence in these

governments and these institutions they look nothing like they do today like we we are at an extreme and the pendulum is going to start swinging another way i got and i've said this too i think we're going to see a huge balkanization of the world not only shutting not only bring the supply chains home but maybe even california in 10 years its own state texas is its own nation state east coast its own nation state like would not be surprised that that happens either so Yeah, and I find myself frustrated because, you know, I'm trying to, over the last three years, educate and inform people about Bitcoin. And, you know, the social attack that actually was the most effective to fight Bitcoin and to prevent Bitcoin's growth was not necessarily the New York agreement. Well, it wasn't necessarily the New York agreement or any of the big blocker stuff.

It was actually the 2014-15 promotion of blockchain, not Bitcoin. um this whole idea that like it's actually blockchain or cryptocurrency and not bitcoin this was devastatingly effective to the point where like when i go talk to the state department or uh philanthropy or any like reasonably smart organization on a different topic where they're like you know well regarded even the un whatever usaid etc i've had conversations with all these people i mean their default position is that it's blockchain not bitcoin even to this day and that's that's that's you know a five-year window that we missed and where bitcoin's ability to spread and ability to be something that people would get interested and learn about

was delayed and maybe you can say that that was a good thing because it kept it under the radar for longer and allowed it to develop and become more robust but it was really like an amazing social attack on bitcoin and you know it wasn't like it was created by one person but this whole blockchain not bitcoin thing was i'm trying to write a long long essay uh or short book about this topic and just digging into it is so crazy the way that it manifested 2014 2015 2016 um and how still to this day so many people believe it outside of you know bitcoin twitter or whatever you walk into a boardroom or a humanitarian aid organization they believe in blockchain today it's crazy but it's true i mean ibm continues to pound my timeline on twitter with this

advertisement of how they're like tracking farmers and my dad loves that advertisement he's like ibm they know what they're talking about it's ibm yeah it's like well we know it's ridiculous but the average person doesn't know that right it takes time they'll figure it out i think this crisis is going to be a massive learning experience for tons of people millions of people billions of people that that whether through their own volition or not have to touch the stove whether or not someone else is holding their hand and touching the stove with it which is a lot of case for a lot of people or if they're touching the stove themselves they will learn over time and it will play itself out i'm not i'm not too worried about it and in terms of in terms of

the traditional economy in terms of where we stand there you know i have a little bit of homework for freaks this is kind of painful homework in terms of what i might uh give you in in terms of tales on the crypt episodes but you should go tomorrow morning you should watch cnbc you should watch kramer on cnbc and tell me with a straight face after you watch that that any of this shit is priced in and and we can take it from there because none of this shit is priced in he is they're on a whole different level he had mnuchin on today my dad watches it every morning so i've been watching it in quarantine and and none of this shit is priced in they're on cloud nine they're on cloud fucking nine they're on v-shaped recovery two three we're gonna get back in action

that's what they think did you see steve leishman try to explain how the fed works he says uh we don't print physical money anymore it's just ones and zeros that we we've we i think he literally said uh we just like bring them to fruition out of thin air um so like they've completely lost the pot plot and then going back to like is bitcoin like are people going to turn to bitcoin again like bitcoin was launched and like dan held says this like when it was launched it was perfect timing and so like yes it grabbed in enough people enough cypherpunks who were looking for this digital cash and at the time that was the perfect time to launch bitcoin now 11 years later another crisis later this is what i wrote on monday like the the iron is hot it's time to strike like this

is the perfect environment in which to educate people about bitcoin where they're going to be most receptive to outside ideas i think i mean i agree but i just want to just warn and caution the freaks like you would think that oh my god infinite qe combined with you know the happening or whatever would would create a massive increase in the price of bitcoin but you know the average person is looking at bitcoin and i'm getting a lot of texts from people over the last month they're making fun of me basically being like oh what would happen in bitcoin you know i thought it was supposed to be a store of value and i'm kind of like hey why don't you wait like 12 months for that text you know let's see let's see what happens you know let's see what happens

because i'm very i'm like supremely confident in the medium to long term um but people need to realize that this asset as you said matt is it's in a free market there are no controls um and people are going to be selling it off to cover to cover expenses basically at this point and that will maybe even escalate so just just you know hodl you know i i've actually seen the opposite it so i i you know there is a price anchoring thing that happens mentally so as far as a lot of the the people that that got in in 2017 they see bitcoin as a twenty thousand dollar asset that's trading at six thousand dollars right now um and they see it as a lot of them do see it as their time to buy right now and i've been getting a lot of texts like whoa are you still bullish on

are you still doing that right and you could tell the text is a text like matt i'm thinking about fomoing into bitcoin i need you to confirm my bias and then i send them a text back and confirm their bias i'm like i'm still all in and then they i imagine then end up buying well it's also just process of elimination i've been you know you listen to all these macro traders and like people are interviewing them like what do you have left like what do you what are you holding and they're kind of like gold cash bitcoin like that like there's no what else are they going to hold right now right so i think also by process of elimination you're going to see a lot of people start to experiment with this asset um i think the next year is going to be crazy and it's going to

be an amazing time to be alive um but you know again we need to like fight for our values and principles or else uh you know we may not like the world um that we're going to be living in now it's time to fight the difference of this top compared to last top is that this top had way more retail investment you had tons of apps and stuff like that that allowed just regular people to get into these to into these equities at all-time highs right and all those people are are kind of gotten wrecked a little bit but they're about to get more wrecked is what i expect right and and so you ask yourself what does the average person where does the average person put their money the average person can't get into treasury treasury bonds they they

can't they can't get into into put options on the s&p they have they have no place to put their money where are they going to put their money they're going to keep it in the bank and make no interest on it during inflationary times or are they going to put it in bitcoin and i think bitcoin is sitting right there you know right in front of them waiting for them that's actually a very good that's a very good point to drive home too because the people the institutions with all the money they sort of don't want to dive into bitcoin because of how illiquid it is and how small the market cap is because there'll be so much slippage to the upside on the price that they get in so this is sort of like a trojan horse way to allow retailers to get in start

stacking sats a little bit at a time and then eventually the institutions will have no uh no alternative other than to dive into bitcoin and gold so they'll probably choose gold first because it's more liquid and has a bigger market cap but slowly over time as more retail investors have more access to bitcoin they just go to the cash app by buy bitcoin they can't do that with gold like it will slowly increase bitcoin's market cap as well and then these institutions come in after this could actually be what i hope like best case scenario happens is they're like somewhat of a smooth transition where we're more of the common man are able to participate which i'm just glad it's an option in a world where our wants are going to be deflated right like

the real estate stocks things that you want to have are going to be deflated and things that you need to have are going to be inflated in price like the daily stuff you have to buy in that kind of world i think it's going to be such a treasure to have bitcoin and you know this whole thing wasn't created uh we'd really be screwed so i'm actually quite grateful that it exists and i just hope we can spread the word as far as possible so that we can educate as many people as possible now as opposed to when it's too late i think one one of the interesting aspects here is you know you did mention that gold has has larger liquidity than bitcoin but in terms of non-custodial gold versus non-custodial bitcoin in times of crises

we see and this is the bitcoin's first real crisis true bitcoin has has has better real liquidity in terms of actually taking ownership of your own asset oh i mean if you look at if you listen to marty's pod with roy like you know the a lot of the gold markets are pretty locked up and they're giving excuses as to why they can't deliver it to you right now as because it's in some other city or whatever it's wild it's a very good point the emperor has no clothes uh let's end this on a more positive note because this is like the thought of i'm very like nervous right now thought of civil unrest and people like i mean this could happen in the course of weeks or a couple months, just a couple months of not paying rent.

Yeah, don't be surprised if stuff happens real fast. Like right now, all the economists are saying it's not going to be so bad. We're going to recover. This thing is going to have permanent effect on our lives and economically things could happen really fast. If you actually go back and study, as Matt was saying, the Weimar Republic, if you study Hungary during the Cold War, if you study Zimbabwe, the inflation rates of these currencies, within 12 months,

they go to a million percent. It's not like a decade-long thing. It is something that happens really quickly. And because it sneaks up on you is when you're caught with your pants down. This also happens in the mandibles. Everybody feels like they're safe with their assets, dollar-denominated assets in America, all the wealthy. And all of a sudden, they can't sell them, and their value goes away, and the markets lock up. And that could easily happen.

So this is why we should be grateful and excited to have Bitcoin, to continue to be working on it, to continue to be able to live in a world where we still do have some privacy and technologies that allow us to communicate privately as these alphabet soup organizations are trying to take it from us in allegiance with the Chinese government, basically. so one on the one hand you have the un and the who and the the itu and all these organizations plotting to take all your rights away well at least we can fight back and focus locally and and hopefully emerge on on the other side in a brighter place so it's a it's a privilege to be on this journey with you fine gentlemen it is an honor as well and hopefully the cypherpunks keep writing code and one more thing to go back to that roy episode and touch on hyperinflation too like it may have already happened the fact that toilet paper has been hard to get shrinkflation exists like hyperinflation maybe already started we just haven't realized it yet and this is

the death row uh slingshot that we're about to experience over the next few months to a year but yes i agree like to end this on an optimistic note bitcoin exists it's not going anywhere people are still working on it still producing blocks i can confirm that miners are still plugging in machines uh things are happening and and hopefully we we've never had a a safety net like this in human history maybe we'll be surprised by how how quickly we're able to rebound because an asset like this exists like talking about how surprised we're about to be maybe we get surprised to the positive side via bitcoin um can i shell something quickly sure so the human rights foundation is organizing a conference we're announcing in the next couple of days on April 13 to 14 called

COVIDCon, where we're going to have an amazing group of speakers ranging from Melissa Chen to Kyle Bass to Naval Ravikant to Gary Kasparov to Ann Applebaum. And we're going to be diving into the authoritarian response to COVID and the attack on civil liberties in countries ranging from Hungary to China, et cetera. We're devoting an entire day to how the Chinese government covered this thing up and worked with the WHO. We have all kinds of famous Chinese dissidents and activists who are going to be with us. So I'll share more information, but stay tuned to the HRF Twitter handle and you can follow me at Gladstein and we can share some good information with you, but it'll be something you might want to check out on April 13th and 14th, COVIDCon.

So I'm assuming that's a live stream? Yeah, it'll be something you sign up for and you'll be able to live stream and ask questions of the speakers um so that'll be fun if you hosted an actual conference then the name would be a great pun you just spread the virus at the conference um it's the philosophical successor to putin khan which we did uh about four years ago well i'm very excited for that that fuck yes that sounds fucking awesome so i'm looking forward to that we uh we'll definitely be showing that on the pod as it as it on the lead up coming up to that i mean i just wanted to finish up just to say two things i mean bitcoiners obviously give me hope bitcoin gives me hope i'm you know that that

part makes me really optimistic i'm bullish on humanity uh i'm bearish on governments uh in their current state you know i think we need more local governance i think this crisis highlights that 100 percent um and then the last thing i want to say is like we're in uncharted waters right now like no one knows what happens next and that's the most important thing to take to take to heart and to act accordingly based on that yes and to piggyback on that like with that in mind that nobody knows what's going to happen next just try to fall back on fundamentals and what you can depend on moving forward and again i i think this wholeheartedly bitcoin provides a deep security that does not exist anywhere in the financial world right now if people are still running nodes

plugging in miners sending transactions bitcoin's going to keep working and you can depend on that unless the internet goes down. But if that happens, we have much bigger problems. So just the intense, deep security that Bitcoin provides is where I'm finding safety right now. In a world where all the experts are being proven wrong, don't overthink it, freaks. And remember, we don't need a police state to fight the virus.

We're going to end it there. Alex, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for taking some time to chat through this stuff with us today. Thanks, Alex. Anytime, guys. alright peace and love freaks take care