The Breakdown - Bitcoin, Cellphones and the Citizen Tools of Anti-Authoritarianism, Feat. Alex Gladstein

Episode Date: June 3, 2020

Alex Gladstein is the chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation. He is a powerful voice for the role of bitcoin in combating authoritarianism around the globe.  In today's episode, he and NLW discuss:  What the protests tell us about the state of democracy in the U.S. The potential impact of protests and COVID-19 on surveillance norms  The potential for a "biological Patriot Act"  The implications of China's push to absorb Hong Kong  The relevance or irrelevance of China's digital currency The role of bitcoin in promoting freedom

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, Crypto, and Beyond. This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and CipherTrace. The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. And now, here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Tuesday, June 2nd, and today my guest is Alex Gladstein. Alex is the chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, which is a non-profit dedicated to building or enabling or encouraging more free, open, and flourishing societies and combating authoritarianism around the world. Alex's perspective and experience is obviously hugely contextual today in a world where we're dealing at home in the U.S. with these protests and trying to piece out what a successful strategy for

combating police militarism and police brutality is, where we're thinking about and having to understand a rising surveillance state. And of course, the larger global context of not only surveillance, but huge geopolitical issues, like the relationship between China and Hong Kong. Alex is well known in Bitcoin communities as he thinks and believes pretty deeply that Bitcoin is one of the key tools, the key anti-authoritarian tools for people around the world. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And please keep in mind that whenever we do these long interviews, they're edited only very lightly. So I hope you enjoy it.

All right. We're here with Alex Gladstein. Alex, it's good to talk. I was about to say it's good to have you back. But actually, you haven't been on the show. We just, I think, think about similar things a lot and talk about similar things a lot. And, you know, it's funny that we're finally connecting the dots here. Yeah, happy to be here to hang out.

So there is a lot going on. I mean, let's just start, I guess, high level. For anyone who doesn't know, what do you do? What is the Human Rights Foundation? What is your remit? What is your mandate? Yeah, so since 2007, I've been working at the Human Rights Foundation. We're a charity, a nonprofit based in New York City.

And our mission is to promote civil liberties and individual rights around the world, especially enclosed in closing societies. So we have this mandate, this focus to help people who live under authoritarian, regimes. And there are today about 4.3 billion people in about 95 countries who live under what we would consider some kind of authoritarian regime, where there is no independent judiciary, you know, no real way to do independent journalism. You can't really do peaceful protests without being persecuted or attacked. You can't sue the government, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's important to point out that all governments restrict civil liberties of their people in some way.

But these particular governments are sort of systemically different. There is, for example, if you live in the United Kingdom or the U.S. Or even a place like Chile, Costa Rica, Estonia, one of the world's many democracies, you can start like an amnesty international, right? Like you can start the equivalent of like an ACLU or even like if you're into digital rights, something like the EFF and you can rent an office and do your work and annoy the government and sue the government and write out beds and generally be like a thorn in the government's side, right? That's just not possible in China, right?

So, you know, I like to say, unfortunately that all governments do bad things, but some governments are structured differently to allow the people to hold their rulers a little more accountable. And HRF focuses on the many, many people in this world who don't have the same accountability mechanisms as maybe some of the rest of us. Yeah, it's super interesting. I mean, you know, I think that we've all had cause to think about power more broadly in the last, you know, certainly the last week, but even beyond that in the way that we have or haven't responded to COVID-19. And, you know, I was going back through your Twitter feed. And, you know, And obviously, you, you know, you tweet a ton, you share a ton.

But it feels to me in some ways that, like, the subcontextext is always about power. And it's almost more dimensionalitys of that power, right? It's the money dimension of power. It's the surveillance dimension of power. It's the state force dimension of power. And it's the citizen tools for reclaiming power, dimension of power. I mean, is this all about power? Is there a different way?

You know, what's the heuristic, I guess? What's the lens through which you look at this broader pursuit? of kind of a better world that you're engaged in. Yeah, I mean, I think kind of. It's about power. It's about authority. And it's about recognizing that authoritarianism is bad for humans. I have spent my entire career focusing on different kinds of governments that humans create.

And the facts are, if you just look at any number of metrics, which I think a lot of us would agree would be good for people. whether it be equality, peace, scientific innovation, gender equality, income equality, you know, patent rates, any of these things, if you actually start looking at like genie coefficients or, you know, literacy rates or maternal health rates or patent rates, humans thrive under open society. and they don't thrive as much under closed ones. The most extraordinary example, obviously, is the Korean Peninsula, where you have North and South Korea. And the South at night, you can just see the difference in this bright satellite image. And you can see the country that has birthed K-pop and Oscar-winning films and the phones in your pockets and the cars that you drive in.

and the same exact people, right, genetically are just right there on the other side of that border, but they're in darkness and their only export is suffering. And that's because of the government model that they live under. So that's how powerful this issue of authority and authoritarianism is. And that's an extreme example, but there are many. I mean, there's Belarus and Estonia. I mean, which side would you want to be on? Costa Rica and Cuba, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia.

Yeah, et cetera, et cetera. So, I mean, like you would even say, you know, at this point, Taiwan and Xinjiang or Taiwan and, you know, name and equivalent province inside China, right? So there are, no matter what religion or background or ethnicity, you know, you are, there are vivid examples all over the earth of open and closed societies. And when you do just like a side by side example, people are going to, you know, when you offer them a choice, they're going to want to choose the open society. because it's just more fair. It has more opportunities. There's rule of law. There's free speech.

And at the end of the day, again, allows humans to thrive and achieve. There's some interesting data with regard to things like refugees. Like 95% of all refugees come from closed societies. No two liberal democracies have ever fought each other in war when it comes to like peace and violence. when it comes to things like countries where people have clean drinking water or countries that have abject poverty, there are some really interesting correlations there as well, where generally speaking, you know, one or two exceptions, you really want to be in an open society, all things being equal. So I've learned this and I've seen this through my work.

And I know that all societies have issues and problems, obviously, as we're going through right now in the United States. But generally speaking, people don't want to live under a dictator. And that's just kind of what pushes me along. And I've seen that there's tools we can enlist in our service in this struggle. Like, for example, information. You know, when I first started, I was helping my organization send films and books and movies into places like, like Cuba and North Korea, right? And then later, encryption, like this powerful idea that two people in the world can communicate

digitally without government spying on exactly what they're saying is super powerful and very, very important. And for you to say that, oh, that's going to be, you know, taking advantage of by bad actors is really missing the forest for the trees. It's not that the dictator can secretly message with his daughter or whatever. No, it's the point is that the 10 million people living under the. the dictator can all talk to each other secretly without him knowing what they're saying, you know.

And then Bitcoin is in this squarely in this category of this tool that I think is in the service of people who are pushing for more free and open societies. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. So I want to come back to a lot of that. But one of the interesting contrast that you made is, so you started off with this idea of the, the blaring, you know, visceral visual difference between North and South. South Korea. But I think a lot of the challenge, right, is not in the, like, not when the difference is so clear, but more in the context of how do we drive societies to be relatively more free

and open versus relatively more closed and controlled, right? And so I guess, you know, as you have been watching both the response to the COVID-19 crisis in the U.S. as well as these protests, are there signs of creeping authoritarianism? Are there things that are, you know, worrisome going on that are that are worth noting and that are worth highlighting for people? Well, I think the important thing is to take a look at what constitutes an open society. Like, if we're going to talk about how do we get there, we have to look at what is the constitution of an open society. And for me, I'd like to break that into four pieces for people. Free expression is the first so, so important.

And I don't mean, you know, whether or not a company can kick you off its social platform. I mean, I mean a government, like a government making speech illegal tends to really be bad for humans. So you want protections of free speech, first of all. Then you want civil society. So you want there to be, whether it's sports teams or stamp collectors or, you know, bloggers. You want people to be able to come together in groups that are outside of the government's permit and authority. That's super important. To have a vibrant civil society is very important for humanity.

Third would be checks and balances or kind of a separation of powers. Inside governments, you want there to be balance and competition. So it's okay to have special interests and the military and Wall Street. And it's okay to have a court system and a legislative system and a legislative system and an executive branch, as long as not one is more powerful than all the others. You really want there to be this competition and balance of power. And with those three layers down, free speech, civil society, and separation of powers, then you add the fourth, which is free and fair elections.

But the elections only matter if the others are strong and there as a foundation for a free and open society. Every dictator has elections, I mean, including Kim Jong-un, where he's the only option on the ballot. And election is not necessarily helpful. It is kind of like the cherry on top of a free and open society. It is the mechanism through which the leaders change. But if the underneath is broken, an election is not going to fix anything. So I think oftentimes when we talk about democracy or open society or good governance, elections are overrated.

They're like the mechanism through which we change our rulers, but we have to have all these other things on the bottom. And that's where I think we focus on if people want to help, it's their community locally where they live, you know, it doesn't, it zooms down. So you want to help free speech. You want to help local press reporters. You want journalism. You want local journalism. That's super important. So you want to like help your community, help local journalism. And you want there to be separation of powers and balance of power no matter where you are. So whether you're thinking locally, regionally, at a city level, municipal level, government level, national level,

you want these three things. You want there to be civil society, free speech, and separation of powers. So in that context, the one that's most interesting to me or the one that's most worrisome to me is the free expression, right? In the context of the response to protest. Well, actually, there's two contexts. One is, I was just tweeting about this. So Chimath just tweeted out that he believes that we're going to see a biological Patriot Act, right? where basically everyone has to be contact traced, et cetera.

And I know contact tracing is something that you were talking a lot about and debating quite frequently and vociferously a couple months ago. And I tweeted out that, you know, I was at least glad that we have context to look at a different type of, you know, quote unquote, contact tracing right now as you see basically people argue for better surveillance tools for protesters, right? And then there's the added dimension of this idea of categorizing Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, right? Which opens up all sorts of new opportunities for surveillance.

So I guess what is your take on, you know, are you more or less worried about that freedom of expression than you were, you know, a week ago and maybe three months ago? Yeah, I mean, I want to be worried realistically. I think that nothing necessarily has changed in terms of in the last year, in terms of the government's ability to track citizens or the citizens' ability to defend themselves. Hopefully, apps like signal increase in popularity continue to grow. I mean, at the end of the day, could we see 500 million daily active users of signal in a few years? I mean, that would be great.

As long as there's like a strong minority of people using this tech, it really prevents the worst case scenario from happening. As far as, you know, authorities using... public issues and crises as excuses to expand their authority. Yeah, we're going to get that. We're going to have that, right? So we had that happen with COVID, right? And a lot of the news seems to have paused, but the actions have not paused.

We're all reading about protests in the United States right now, but it doesn't mean that Google and Apple have stopped their plans to roll out this exposure tracking software to phones in your up that remains on course to happen this month. And as you just mentioned, you heard the Minneapolis authorities in Minnesota mentioned contact tracing is like a thing now that they're trying to do, not just for trying to figure out if sick people came into touch with certain others, but what, you know, where, you know, where quote unquote criminal elements came from. So I think there's always going to be this growing thirst from governments and learning more about the people, like that they want to.

to vacuum up as much data as possible about you. And look, the good politicians want to do it for good reasons. They want to keep you safe. Let's just be fair to them. But they are a small in number compared to the politicians who either don't care or who have worse intentions. And these systems tend to just continue to just grow and feed on the population in terms of the data they have.

I mean, it's a very different ballgame than it was 50 years ago when we didn't have any of this. There was very little that was digital of nothing, perhaps nothing at all. But today, everything is digital and everything can be put on the cloud and analyzed. And that's what I'm hopefully trying to help people see that we should have some checks and balances there. So we should try to reduce some of what we give up to the cloud. You know, we should be thinking about local compute and storing more things locally and on local encryption. And obviously, being self-sovereign with regard to money is something I'm pretty bullish on. I think that's very important.

So these tools remain at our disposal. Maybe we're treading water. Maybe we're taking a couple steps forward. But governments continue to accumulate power. What's been very interesting actually has been to see the power of technology in regards to holding authorities accountable. here in the United States is, of course, the cell phone. You know, we wouldn't be having a huge national conversation right now about police brutality had, you know, people not captured Floyd's, George Floyd's death, right?

Or if not captured it, shared it virally, you know? Like, sorry to say, but, you know, unfortunately, the reality is that there's ongoing police violence in the United States and there always has been, right? at least in the modern era. And this one just lit a match, right? It was especially terrible and people saw it. And now they're rightfully so pissed off. But there had been a lot of examples of similar cases like that that you don't know their names, right?

Or you didn't hear about it over the last three, four years. Like, it's kind of like we reached a boiling point in 2014 with Ferguson and now we're back. But the cell phone is such an important tool there, right? And it's like a way that citizens can be empowered. So it kind of fits in there with like free expression and civil society. Like this idea that citizens can kind of report what they see is a very, I'd be very optimistic about that. That's obviously, as you're seeing, quite helpful in holding the government accountable. Yeah, it's interesting.

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It's interesting to hear you speak about this. It's almost a, and you know, correct me, feel free to correct me if I'm interpreting it wrong, but you almost have a technological determinism about this where governments are going to, of course, try to accrue more power. And to your point, some people want that power for theoretically noble or good means, you know,

safety versus security or whatever. And so the real question almost becomes less like, what are the events that will create narrative context for government to do what's government's going to do, but more, how much countervailing weight do citizen technologies have to hold them accountable and to provideable work, right? Is that a fair way to kind of look at your view? Yeah. And, well, I just would add that. That was part of it. Yeah, I would add that the more open your society is, the less risky these new government programs and new government powers are.

They are still to be challenged and checked. But if you live in Norway, the truth is you're just, you're not going to be as worried as if you live in China about newfound government surveillance powers. Like in Norway, there was a COVID app that the government was promoting that was just kind of just serving up your location data on a silver platter to the, to the, health authorities, right? Showing, like, where you were walking and everything based on your cell phone. And, yeah, it was a little blurry because the tech is not great.

But the point is that, you know, I was, it was interesting to see Norwegian journalists discuss this. And, yeah, hopefully in Norway, given that it's an open society and the people can have conversations in the newspaper that then politicians have to address, right? It's a very good mechanism. There's a good chance that those systems won't ever become popularized because people will speak out against them. But in general, like, Norwegians have a lot less to fear from their government than,

let's say, the Chinese do, because it hasn't grown so big and large. And there's this really helpful separation of powers. And there's almost like a, you can just feel the way the citizens control the government in Norway. Does that make sense? Like, when you're there, you can kind of feel it. Like, the people are in charge. There is no dictator.

There's just a bunch of politicians who. go in and out, in and in and out, in and in and out. There's no deep state. It is pretty amazing, actually. You know, I've spent more than a decade going there three, four, five times a year, and it's amazing to watch. And I know a lot of that's been underwritten by oil and by Norway's incredible luck with oil. But you've also got Denmark and Sweden and other, in Finland and other northern European

countries that are similar that don't have, you know, that don't have oil. So it's just kind of inspiring. It shows you how humans, you know, what kind of societies humans can create, you know? Yeah, that's super interesting. Let's go to the opposite side. You mentioned, you know, China. How much are you paying attention to the China digital currency project right now? I know there's some ridiculous article that's actually trending on Twitter somehow,

or at least it's in there what's happening about how their new digital money could challenge Bitcoin and even the dollar. Yeah. It's just another attack vector on people. People's liberties. You have cash, which is, which was certainly, you know, created from a economic, organic perspective, right, as an easier way of doing commerce, right? To the point where I just learned this recently, I was doing some historical reading in this area.

And, I mean, Americans were pretty dependent on checks 120 years ago, which is pretty amazing. I didn't realize that. Really? Yeah. And whether it was paper notes, like greenbacks or whatever, let's say, from the Civil War, or checks, paper checks, these arose not necessarily because governments decided that we were going to use paper as money. But they kind of arose organically, it seems historically with regard to market forces. If we were to, if we didn't have paper money now, all we had was digital money.

and someone came along and said, hey, we're going to invent cash. They would be laughed out of the room right now, right? Mainly because governments would say, are you kidding? Like, that would be so dangerous because we wouldn't be able to monitor where all the money goes. So cash is this incredible thing that we've grandfathered in from previous times that doesn't fit with the agenda of financial authorities and government officials who want omniscientious. over all payments and transactions. So cash is this kind of like odd man out from a previous era that we should definitely support. And there's some great people out there like Brett Scott and others.

There's a guy named Rohan Gray, Brett Scott. There are people who are promoting cash and that, you know, there's this whole like, you know, hopefully they become a lobby to help underline how important cash is to different communities around the world. But as I think you and I both know, I mean, that cash is ultimately days are numbered, right? And all of our money is going to transform if it hasn't already into this digital system, whereby there are these third parties that just get enormous power and control and knowledge over us. If you look at kind of what Yuval Norari says, you know, they end up knowing us better than we know ourselves, right? So they can start to predict what we're going to do with this kind of,

finger snap ability to just know our previous financial history an algorithm can help authorities understand

that. And this is why Bitcoin is so important, right, is because it provides this alternative parallel economy that's

not routed through a central party and that doesn't have your full ID stack natively in the system. You know, it doesn't have your name or address or email

or travel history in there. Those things have to be kind of pieced together by a detective to figure out who's who. And that's such an important check against government power in this era. Now, when it comes to decept, the Chinese government's project, I mean, I think we should be very aware of it. We should follow it, but let's not overrate its potential right now at the moment. So, you know, I think it should squarely be on our radar. we should keep talking about it. Obviously, it looks like the Chinese government is kind of experimenting with it in a few cities.

There are a few folks that we know that are hopefully sharing, you know, screenshots of what the app kind of functionality looks like. But at the moment, you have, you know, with regard to the Chinese government's ambitions, they have a long way to go. Like when it comes to the RMB, it's not, right now there's no risk of like the dollar or the euro seeding a huge. amount of ground to the RMB. Like, if you look at foreign exchange reserves or if you look at, you know, transactions settled in particular currencies around the world, you know, if you add the euro and dollar, you get 80 to 90 percent dominance, right? And the RMB is like 2 to 3 percent.

So if we're talking about the DSEP project helping the Chinese government take over the world with the RMB, that seems highly unlikely at the moment. It doesn't mean it can't happen in 20 years. but right now that seems unlikely. And then also just with the technology of it, it just, I think the reason why you're seeing such slow advancement of it, and I think this portends similar trends, I think, for something like a Fed coin, which we'll probably eventually see here, is that it's really hard to figure out.

Like, if you think about the way that the money and banking system works, what they want is they want the central bank, the PBOC, they want to have, um, they want to have, um, over all payments. So they want their decept currency to be distributed by private banks to citizens and that citizens would use this thing. And you can understand why. Forget like all the bad stuff that I'm worried about as a human rights advocate. They want to have a big red button they can press whenever there's a downturn in a particular industry to give credits to those particular workers instantly. So imagine if in America, for example, the stimulus check was just like a button that officials could press and just deliver $1,200 in, you know, these accounts of

37% of Americans. Like, that's possible technologically, right? So that's kind of what the Chinese government wants to do. They want to have a tighter grip macroeconomically, right, over society. And if they think it'll help them navigate crises, and that may be true. Of course, I'm worried because it gives them total control over each piece of money. And at the same time, there's this war on cash. there's a demonetization.

But I think that the reason there's stumbling is not necessarily technological. I think it's more financial and economic. Like, if you think about it, if they're replacing the base money, paper base money and deposits with, you know, whether it's the M0 or the M1 of this society with DSEP, it just gets really blurry. Like, no one's ever tried to do this before. Like, how does settlement work? How does, you know, how do clearinghouses work? It doesn't, it's not super straightforward.

So I think you'll continue to see DeSepp like stumble and have issues for quite a while, which is good because it gives us time, right? It gives us time to build the alternative system, right? Yeah. Yeah, and I think that the point is super salleant to that, you know, there's a bunch of different contexts for this and we should speak about them in separate terms. And the question of where China, any currency of China is going to fit in terms of of a global reserve system has much more to do with geopolitics and the standing of China

and the world than it does probably with technology, you know, even if it did create a better system from the standpoint of ease and convenience and things like that. There's still that, you know, the whole point is it's part of this large global order. I wrote a piece for blockchain, Bitcoin magazine last year called in China. It's, you know, I think it's something like it's blockchain and two. tyranny versus Bitcoin and freedom. And I stand by that piece and I think that, again, we should be focusing on why the Chinese government would want to create such a thing and the control it would give them

and why they're going to try and get rid of cash and why eventually they're going to, I think, be a lot more harsh towards Bitcoin. But at the end of the day, I don't want to overrate their abilities, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah, I think this is an important thing, too, to be able to discuss. power relatively, right? And to be able to hold concern while also having a kind of blithe, realistic view of how power is organized in the world. I guess one other question on China since we're here, what is your take on what we've seen in terms of sort of their continued absorption of Hong Kong?

Is this just something inevitable? Is it something that it can be turned back? I mean, what's your take from from where you're saying. Yeah, there's this, I'd encourage your, um, listeners to check out this article. It's from October 1989. And it's in the New York Times, but they, they usually have a vault where they allow you to read one article for free from the historical archives. It's by Margaret Scott. And it's called Hong Kong on Barrowed Time.

And it's super, super interesting because it's talking about how, um, in Hong Kong during Tiananmen Square, which of course is about to be 31 years ago on Thursday, there were a huge million-person protests in Hong Kong in support of the students, right? But then like when as plans became clear that in 1997, so eight years later, Hong Kong would start to become part of China. There was a depression that kind of set in among Hong Kongers. And that's just been something that they've been fighting ever since, right? They've been fighting to keep their city free and independent.

while with this creeping realization that eventually their time's going to run out. It's like the hourglass is running out. And the fact that you can read this long essay about these issues in 1989 just speaks to the tremendous time frame that all these people were discussing. It's just, you know, the British in the 80s discussed with the Chinese government, you know, the release of Hong Kong, which wouldn't happen until 97. And then it was an additional 50 years, you know. And now we're, you know, about halfway through that time.

And it appears that the Chinese government is just saying, you know what? We're not going to wait until 2047. We're actually just going to make Hong Kong a Chinese city now. It's no longer going to be one country, two systems. That appears to be what's happening right now, right? And that's really sad. And I think we need to do whatever we can to go back to the themes of earlier in the show to support Hong Kong civil society to support free expression in Hong Kong. and they can help them,

they can help themselves and defend themselves for a while. And if you look at just the way Hong Kong is architected with, with laws and courts and finance, I think they have more power than people give them credit for. But one thing you could do is you could support Hong Kong free press if you're interested in making a difference in Hong Kong. They're an amazing journalist media outlet that does independent work in Hong Kong. And they would certainly be worthy of your donations.

and you can definitely donate Bitcoin to them because a friend of mine helped them get off BitPay and set up BTC pay server. So you can actually donate to them that way. So definitely check out Hong Kong Free Press if you're interested in helping delay the helping put more sand in the hourglass. Let's put it that way. How did you, for you with Bitcoin,

was it something where it kind of hit you all at once? Was it gradual? Was there an aha moment? I mean, I think one of the reasons that that you're such an interesting voice in the Bitcoin community is that you came into Bitcoin from the perspective of, like, if there were no Bitcoin, you would be trying to advance the same sort of agenda, the same sort of world that you were trying to advance with it. You know what I mean?

And the fact that it fits and is a key part of that, I think, makes a lot of your thoughts on it more resonant for people. And so I don't know if I've ever asked or if I've ever heard you talk about just, you know, how fully formed did your relationship with Bitcoin come? Yeah, it took a long time. We started to get, so in 2013, a guy named Edon, he wrote to me, I still have his email. And he's like, he's basically like, look, I want to talk to you about how Bitcoin could be used to help activists living under difficult environments like for donations. And I was like, okay, so I did a call with him.

And it was kind of on my mind. And then HRF started to accept Bitcoin in 2014. And one of our donors was like, hey, can I give you guys Bitcoin? We were like, all right, this is cool. And we started to accept Bitcoin. But as I'm sure you can appreciate and many can, it takes a long time to sort of have the penny drop. You know, from, oh, this is just some like digital currency project to actually understanding the whole separation of money and state thing takes a long time. So it wasn't really until a few years later that I started to really grasp that.

I would say not really until the summer of 2017 that I started to really start to understand. And then maybe not even another year later until I really grasped it. So it took a long time for me for the penny to drop from when I was first exposed. Yeah, I think a lot of people have that experience. Certainly for me, I've said this before, but I came out of a perspective. So right out of college, I was basically sending kids all over the world. I got my university to allow me to build a program center there because there's this whole generation of students who wanted to go abroad and make a difference and who were absolutely abysmal at it, weren't making any distorted difference at all. And a lot of that had to do with how our education was structured and what their expectations were.

And so I started doing that. And then that led me to end up working with change.org right when it was getting started. And that's what brought me out to San Francisco initially. And then I kind of had this diversion into tech for a decade where I was a BC for a while. and did a bunch of companies that were kind of boring and inside the Silicon Valley norm. And it wasn't actually until I left, extracted myself physically from Silicon Valley

and returned to Bitcoin, which I had been first exposed to. I advised the company that went through Coinbase the same time or went through Y Combinator the same time as Coinbase, right? So I was familiar with it in 2012. But it was the narrative in Silicon Valley at the time was just payments narrative, right? It was just another type of thing competing with Square.

It wasn't until I left Silicon Valley. stopped thinking about it as a technology for payments and started thinking about it in the context of almost just returning to some of these things that I kind of lost along the way that it really triggered for me. So I don't know, I had kind of a similar experience in some ways of rediscovering it almost. Yeah, well, it's certainly something I've grown to appreciate as a key tool in our struggle for open societies around the world, especially as we as we as we. We creep closer and closer and further and further into the surveillance age and the global surveillance state. And, you know, look, to connect it to what's happening now, I mean, I think you're watching people try to rage against a machine, right? And there's been some really useful guides that have been put out there about if you're going to go protest regardless of what country you're in, regardless of what you're protesting against, there's some basic things you need to keep in. And the first one, which is actually most interesting is that you want to stay nonviolent, right?

And I actually did this long conversation, which Etreff is going to publish soon. With Sergei Popovich, the sort of like, he, as a student, he created a movement in Serbia that ended up toppling the genocidal dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, without firing a bullet. Like, it was a peaceful transformation. It took them the 90s to do, but they did it. It's like incredible. And he was just a student at the time. And I interview him and he tells me about his story. And now since then, he's been working with people around the world to help them improve their nonviolent movements, right?

And to grow them. And just the statistics are crazy on nonviolent movements versus violent ones. Like, they're so much more successful and effective. They are three, four, five times more effective. If you look at the last 300 social movements over the last 100 years and you look at which ones succeed in which ones didn't, politically speaking. it's very rare that a violent one succeeds. And it's like 30% chance that a nonviolent one succeeds. It's pretty amazing.

So you want to stay nonviolent. And I think that's maybe been lost a little bit. But I mean, I think most people understand that. But it's not just because you don't want to break stuff. It's because it doesn't make any sense to fight the people who have the monopoly of violence with violence. And you can grow a much bigger movement around you if you are doing things that people are comfortable with, right? This is why you see often in countries when there's propaganda people banging pots, right? Thousands and thousands of people will bang pots to protest that.

But if you're talking about creating like an armed resistance movement, it's going to be a very small fraction of the population that wants to join you, you know? So I think the nonviolent piece is really key. And then just technologically, I've been seeing some very helpful guides out there with regard to like, you know, be careful bringing your phone. Maybe get a burner phone, you know. maybe have signal on that burner phone and maybe go on airplane mode and maybe stop syncing stuff. And, you know, like in a day and age when there's like stingrays and government officials using cell phone tower triangulation and GPS to sort of track people, you know, we can fight back. So I think it's all about just kind of educating folks on tactics and helping them get to where they want to be. Did you see that there's a group of Lebanese organizers had put together all of their notes,

all of their learnings from the last, I don't know, six months of protests in a GitHub for U.S. protesters? I thought it was pretty rad, actually, to see that. Yeah, be careful out there, though. I mean, the cops are very, I mean, there's a guy who's, I would say, in a central follow right now. His name is Radley Balco. And he wrote a book called The Rise of the Warrior Cop. And it's like a history of how the police got militarized in the United States. Like, why do we have people with like all this insane military equipment on them?

Like, you know, just patrolling small towns. And he wrote a history of that. It's really good. And you got to be careful because, I mean, these people feel very entitled. So generally speaking, I think, you know, a lot of the protests we've seen have been pretty impressive in terms of the way people have stayed, have stayed peaceful. But of course, you know, as we've seen in Hong Kong, a lot, like, that's a peaceful movement, right? But as soon as like one group of people inside a massive movement of the 100,000 people break into a store, you know, that's what the government

and the media is going to focus on, right? So this is why it's so important to stay as peaceful as possible, because if the government can paint you as violent vandals and that's what you're doing, then you're going to lose a lot of sympathy among the population, right? So this is exactly what we saw happen in Hong Kong last summer. And it just really is not helpful for the movement to be labeled as violent, right? What is, by way of wrapping up, I guess, what is a source of optimism for you right now? I think a lot of people feel very pessimistic observing everything that we're seeing. Yeah, well, look, I mean, I've been, look, what we're seeing is,

there's some actions that are being taken. So there are some police being fired. There's some accountability being shown. If the protests continue, like hopefully that will continue to happen. And it's nice to see that when there is an abuse, we can all watch it and learn about it and create a social movement and push back

and hopefully change the system. That's a healthy thing. So I would hope that we always live in societies, where this can happen, where when something bad happens, because bad things will always happen, no matter how quote unquote good the government or society is, there will be this accountability mechanism. And right now we still have that. And that's inspiring.

And I hope we can keep that. And we live in a time where we can still communicate relatively privately. And hopefully there's a bright future for financial privacy and sovereignty as well through Bitcoin. But we don't want to lose this moment. So it's nice to see people fighting for this moment and fighting against, you know, authoritarian police brutality no matter what country they're in. I was on the phone today with somebody from Kenya and was joking about our situation with him. But, you know, America is one country out of many, many, many. And everybody deals with police violence.

So I think it's something we can all come together on and, and, and, you know, And as you say, share tactics and hopefully empower ourselves. And, you know, that kind of global solidarity is pretty, pretty inspiring for me. Alex, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. Always appreciate your insights and looking forward to having you back and talking more about what we've learned, hopefully, and, you know, after we're on the other side of this particular instance of pain. Yeah, thanks for having me.

What was so interesting to me about that conversation was something that I mentioned in conversation, actually, this almost technological determinism. And what I mean by that is the idea that, of course, governments are going to try to seize more power. And of course, technology is going to evolve to give them tools, which give them more power. The question that is most important if you believe those two things becomes, do those technology tools overweight benefit the citizens who use them to hold governments accountable, to escape power? It gets to. It gets into, I think, a lot of even deeper conversation we could have had about the role of cell phones and social media. I think his point about amplifying George Floyd from just another brutal,

terrible murder to something closer to a martyr, I think is really right on. Anyways, a really interesting set of things to think about and chew on. And I hope that you have a time to reflect on them as well. So as always, guys, I appreciate you listening. And until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.