The Pomp Podcast - 278: Alex Gladstein on Fighting the Normalization of Surveillance

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

Alex Gladstein is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation and the Vice President of Strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum since its inception in 2009. In this conversation, we discuss the culture war over privacy, digital contact tracking, over the skin to under the skin surveillance, and why authoritarian systems are not better for fighting public health crisis. ===============================  BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it.  ===============================

This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Alex Gladstein is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation and the Vice President of Strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum since its inception in 2009. In this conversation, we discuss the culture war over privacy, digital contact tracking, over-the-skin to under-the-skin surveillance, and why authoritarian systems are not better for fighting public health crisis. I really enjoyed this conversation with Alex, and he's always a pleasure to talk with. I hope you guys enjoy it too. But before we get into this episode, I want to talk about our sponsor, BlockFi. As you guys know, I'm a big fan and they've been longtime supporters of the podcast. I'm an investor and a user as well. They've got three products right now.

You can deposit crypto and get a US dollar loan. You can deposit crypto and earn up to 8.6% APY in an interest-bearing account. Or you can buy and sell cryptocurrencies through their new crypto accounts. I really enjoy the way that they think about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, and they're building all of the wealth management services that any investor would need. So go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, that's BlockFi.com slash Pomp to see what they're building and even get a little bit of a discount. They'll be coming out with a Bitcoin rewards credit card later this year, so make sure you check that out at BlockFi.com slash Pomp as well. All right, let's get into this episode with Alex. I hope you guys enjoy this one. purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm super excited to have Alex Gladstein back.

Thank you so much for doing this, man. Yeah, it's been close to a year and a half since I was on last and it feels like we're in a new age. For sure. Let's start just for those that didn't listen to the first episode, maybe just give a quick one minute on your background and then what the Human Rights Foundation's focus is. Absolutely. So again, my name is Alex Gladstein. I'm the chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, which is a nonprofit based in New York City, which focuses on challenging authoritarianism around the world and on helping people who live under authoritarian regimes. So we do a lot of civil liberties work, a lot of free expression work. We help journalists who are at risk. We help democracy movements around the world

using peaceful tactics, using new technology, by building networks and expanding people's horizontal ties to one another. I've been doing this since 2007. My work has taken me around the world. I've worked extensively with Cuban dissidents, with the Cuban underground library movement is where I got started at HRF, basically helping my Latin American colleagues who could travel to Cuba smuggle in kind of forbidden films and books that like people would read and watch inside their homes in Cuba. And this later turned into what is now Paquete, the system where some Cubans have a satellite receiver and they like basically download a bunch of Spanish Netflix type stuff and then distribute it out in their communities. But before that existed, Cubans

relied on organizations like us to like get flash drives and hard drives of content that was forbidden to watch. Cuba is a communist country and the government, you know, doesn't allow you to watch or read anything that they don't approve of. So that was kind of, I cut my teeth on that kind of experience, which taught me that information is power and it could be incredibly powerful to change society. And then I spent a lot of time in the sort of 2009 to 12, 13 era working on North Korea, traveling to South Korea very often, meeting North Korean defectors and refugees and trying to get an understanding of how we could help them. And what they told us is that we need more help sending information into North Korea. So again, we looked at that and

started doing balloon airdrops of flash drives and USB keys and DVDs into North Korea. We started supporting these kind of underground networks that sell foreign media and information into North Korea. So I spent a lot of time doing that. More recently, over the last four years, I've developed a strong interest in financial freedom and privacy. And I came on the show, most notably, to discuss the idea that Bitcoin is freedom in many ways. And we talked at length about why I think Bitcoin matters so much for human rights, especially for the four plus billion people around the world who are cut off from the financial system, who don't have the luxuries and inconveniences that you or I might have, and whose governments are much more abusive and

reckless than the ones we're even looking at today, and who have much more to fear from surveillance than we might. I mean, we're worried mainly about surveillance capitalism and, you know, overreach of marketing in many cases for most people in the West. But these folks are afraid of getting basically bagged and, you know, secretly carried away to some gulag in many of these countries. And at the Human Rights Foundation, we focus on the 93 or so countries that we consider authoritarian. They don't have a free press. They don't have an independent judiciary. You can't sue the government. You can't create an NGO. So they have a very special need set. And my work at Ahrefs is built on how can we help them? So me

personally, I work a lot on the fundraising side, the growth side, marketing side, and again, have developed this massive interest in the role Bitcoin can play in the global struggle for human rights. For sure. So I wanted to record another episode mainly because the COVID-19 virus has created a health scare and that health crisis is now driving an economic crisis. And I think there's a lot of people who are very nervous right now because they say whenever you have a health crisis and an economic crisis like this, the will of free people gets tested, meaning that they're much more open to receiving quote unquote help or having governments implement temporary measures or more surveillance or things that maybe wouldn't be as easy to get across the finish line

during a time when there wasn't those health and economic crisis. And so maybe let's just start with like what how uh bad the problem really is right i know that you guys have done some work on understanding um we see data being presented from countries all around the world around the health crisis uh and the economic crisis but just if it is an authoritarian country like how much can we believe the data that we're getting and how do you guys think about um kind of uh level setting, those data sets versus countries where maybe there's more democracy or transparency and confirmation of the numbers and data. I'm really glad you asked this. And I want to unpack it with you and with everybody who's listening, because I think there's a lot of

lessons to draw here. First of all, I think we're being led to believe in many cases, especially even in open societies, Western countries, that there's a lot of lessons in authoritarianism and that we should grant emergency powers to our rulers in times of crisis. And that like a very strong centralized kind of response is probably best. And that maybe we even want to grant extraordinary surveillance powers and that there's a lot to learn from China and the Chinese government. And I think this is a very wrong and dangerous perspective to take. I think that there's this sort of culture war that's starting to happen, to bubble over, where it's arguably not even so much a war as a battle that's almost won by a particular side. And that's, again,

the side of the public safety is more important than civil liberties. And again, these are arguments coming from mainstream people, the mainstream media, and a lot of technologists, actually, who were like, well, whatever, privacy, who cares? What's more important now is that we save lives. And they kind of look to China and China's quote unquote performance as validation of their argument. And what you're starting to see is people become very laissez-faire about their rights and freedoms because they're just focused on what they're learning about COVID and how potentially these governments can protect them. What's very, very important to understand

is that the performance of authoritarian governments is not what it seems. So you might look at the data now that the Financial Times or New York Times is reporting. You constantly see these little charts that the Financial Times puts out of cases and deaths. And it shows all these countries kind of like going up over time. And then it shows China

with this like amazing flattening of the curve and now it looks like things are cool there now and the financial times as one of the papers of record in the in the world to be honest kind of repeats this day daily over and over and over again they're hitting people over the head with the idea that china has has solved the problem and the problem the core problem is the core issue is the financial times is regurgitating data from the chinese communist party they're regurgitating lies. The Chinese Communist Party, remember, has been lying for the last half decade to the world about the prison camps and gulags in Xinjiang, in the northwest part of China. In the northwest part of China, we can see from outer space using satellite imagery that there

are vast numbers, a huge network of concentration camps, prison camps, where the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, is imprisoning male Uyghurs. They are a Muslim minority, ethnic minority, And they are imprisoning, according to the latest estimates, we have anywhere from one to two million people in these camps. And this is such a shocking thing, such a visible thing. See it from outer space. And yet they lie and deny that they exist. So we're going to take this regime's word that there's whatever it is, 4,000 deaths is what they're reporting. And all the mainstream media and all of our policymakers and all of these influencers in Silicon Valley are basically looking at China and saying, yeah, we might have to follow some of their measures. I know they're like, well, they might be doing some things we don't like, but you can't deny the results. And I'm telling you, you need to deny the results. Those results are fake. There are extensive reports in Hubei province, where Wuhan is, where the epicenter of the outbreak originally started, where people have just been watching the funeral homes,

and they've just been looking at the urns that are coming in and out. And this was back like a month ago. But basically, local residents estimated that there had to be at least 40,000 deaths based on just what they saw in that one city alone. Okay. I would be shocked if the actual number of COVID deaths in China was less than a quarter million. I'd be shocked. And yet the news media, you know, and I say that in a, in a kind of half loving way, I mean, free press is really important, but people have become so gullible in believing what China is saying that we're kind of getting sucked into this mindset that we should be more like them. Like there's so many arguments and articles written by influencers in Britain and the United States saying there's a lot to

learn from China. And I'm telling you, yes, there is a lot to learn from China. We should run as far away from their government model as possible. And the final piece to this puzzle is that if it is true that we should seek a more authoritarian structure in our societies so that we can handle public health crises more effectively. Let's just give them the benefit of the doubt and say that that's their honest argument. Then we need to consider the fact that how is it possible that one of the most authoritarian governments in the world, one of the most secretive governments in the world, the government that has the most censorship and surveillance per capita of any society and human history did such a bad job controlling the outbreak at the beginning

in December and in January that, you know, even with all their Orwellian surveillance tech and all the control they had and all of this strong centralization under Xi Jinping, they failed. The virus became an outbreak and has killed untold numbers of Chinese and devastated their economy and, you know, has basically ruined their global brand. So if they couldn't stop this thing with all the centralized control and surveillance in the world, then I think the lessons that we need to draw are that we need to take a different approach. We need to fight this particular crisis, COVID, other public health crises, and any sort of national disaster, whether it be from another nation state or from a natural perspective, economic perspective,

we need to fight these things with a spirit of openness and innovation and a free flow of information. If we allow the kind of axes of censorship and control and surveillance to win the day, we're not going to like the results. And so I guess part of this is there was an outbreak, people got sick, that then spread across the entire world. And there's kind of two separate bodies of work here, in my opinion. One is analyzing what's already happened, right? And understanding, you know, both to prevent it from happening again, but also to try to inform the second body of work, which is what do we do now? Part of that first body of work is as we go to understand what's already occurred, there's a bunch of talk around using

various types of contact tracking or surveillance mechanisms in order to understand who's been infected, who's been where, who's come in contact with somebody who's infected, you know, all of these different approaches. And maybe we can dive into what exactly is contact tracking? What are some of the things people have proposed? And then where is the line between trying to understand what's already occurred and also protecting the civil liberties and personal freedoms that people should come to know and expect, especially in democratic countries? Yeah. Well, before we get too deep into contact tracing. Let's just define some terms. And I'd like to just clarify my own position on how seriously I'm taking COVID. I mean, I shared a Venn diagram with some of my

followers recently that I saw that I really liked, and it kind of had three circles which overlapped in the middle. And one was that I think COVID is very dangerous and needs to be taken very seriously. One is that the economic devastation that will happen as a result of government response to COVID is dangerous and needs to be taken very seriously. And one is that the authoritarian overreach from governments with regard to civil liberties and surveillance is very dangerous and needs to be taken seriously. You can believe all three of these things. There's no conflict in that. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. And I'm looking at this from the perspective of who's actually handling the virus the best from a perspective of statistics

and data, like who's actually doing the best with regard to number of deaths, number of cases, et cetera. And the reality is that some of the best countries in performance, pure performance are democracies. We can look at countries like Taiwan, South Korea, et cetera. I mean, look, there are even parts of the United States, there are large country-sized states in the United States that have very few deaths, you know? So there are certain countries like Portugal, like New Zealand, like Iceland, that are doing really well. And these are all countries that have chosen to fight this thing in a more open way. And what are the tools they're using? So let's actually break that down. So if you look at each kind of thing that we as a society can do to

fight epidemics, let's say, let's say virally spreading epidemics. Handwashing is number one step. And that's completely compatible with civil liberties. We should all wash our hands all the time. Okay. That's like obvious. That does not take any sort of authoritarian measure to impose. Masks. See, masks are very important. If you actually look at a country like Hong Kong, I got the pleasure of interviewing Joshua Wong, who's like probably the most famous Hong Kong protester recently. And, you know, he told me, I asked him, Joshua, how is it possible that Hong Kong can only have seven deaths? Seven. This is a similar size to metropolitan area of New York City, which has 25 plus thousand deaths. How does Hong Kong have seven? And, you know, is that

because of Carrie Lam and the Hong Kong government? Are they doing a great job? And he said, no, no, no, no, no. The Hong Kong citizenry had a decentralized response. We understood the risks because of SARS. And the data says 98% of Hong Kongers wear masks and have been wearing masks since January. And 80% of them stayed home as much as possible. That's why there's only seven deaths, not because of an authoritarian response from Carrie Lam. So masks are really, really important. And bonus for folks here who like freedom and privacy, masks help you obviously against the facial recognition in the surrounding states. So we like masks here. Testing. I mean, testing is so critically important, massive amounts of testing. It should be super easy to

go get a test. Finally, it's becoming easier in California to do that, but it's been really frustrating to watch the last six weeks of failure by officials, federal and local, just not getting tests. But societies that can do massive amounts of testing obviously can more quickly separate those who are sick from those who are not and get us back to work. I think that social distancing is very important, obviously. I mean, hopefully not permanently, but for now, it's something that can be recommended, you know, without an undue imposition on our civil liberties. And then you have, you know, a couple other things. But when it comes to contact tracing, you know what, contact tracing is really important. Contact tracing is something that's not done with

technology. Contact tracing, as a term, is a medical operation that's done by health officials where they sit you down once they realize you're sick, and they interview you, and they figure out where you've been, and they ask you who you've come into contact with, and then they call those people, and they warn them, right? That's actually really, really important, and we need to do a lot of that. The tactic that I have a problem with is digital contact tracing, this idea that we can automate the process by using our cell phones and the location data of our cell phones to figure out who's come into contact with who. And from what I've seen, there is no evidence to suggest that this works, all other things being equal. Meaning if you look at a country like Taiwan or South

Korea and you look at their track record and you look at how well they've performed, there is no clear indication that it is because of this mass surveillance that they're doing well. It is much, much, much more likely that it is because citizens are wearing masks and social distancing, and they shut down certain businesses and, you know, have certain measures to prevent people from gathering. That is why they are doing so well, not because of contact tracing. The health minister, essentially, of Taiwan was interviewed recently, and he basically said that despite the fact that Taiwan is, in my opinion, doing some worrying surveillance, even in Taiwan, that they're doing some worrying surveillance where they're using kind of telecom data. They're trying to

look at people's cell phones and figure out what's happening. This has only been helpful in one case, he said, on the record with a journalist, one case. Singapore, which has been doing a ton of this stuff, and people were pointing to as a success story, has seen a big outbreak recently. so it's not working so well for them and even in Israel which was one of the first countries to do like a very aggressive phone tracking program the officials have recently come out in the last few days and says it hasn't really been helpful okay so we have some data from quite a few countries saying that there's no real evidence that this thing is is a difference maker and yet when Apple and Google came out with their announcement that they were going to collaborate on a digital

contact tracing platform for the world. And remember between them, that's covering 3 billion people. You think about all the people who have Android devices, Apple devices, et cetera. So we're talking about like a third of the world could come under surveillance from this particular idea. And people were cheering, dude, like people from Silicon Valley, investors, media, they were all like this is so great and i'm sitting here being like this is the culture war over privacy this is this is my side losing how is this possible how are people so short-sighted that they've forgotten what has what has google done in the last decade just to prove that they care about your privacy seriously and people look at this if you if you i don't know if you looked

at the documentation but it's like very thin very vague very utopian for their for their plan to basically use the Bluetooth technology in your phone. And the sort of very brief way that I'll kind of summarize the way it works is that your Bluetooth technology in your phone, when you have an app that uses Bluetooth running, basically can send out a little signal to other phones in a particular radius, okay? It's not tracking your exact location. It's just kind of sonaring out right and it's just kind of beep beep beep and whenever you come into contact with someone else who also has this happening um your phone and that phone can exchange um like an encrypted number okay and then like your phone basically monitors who the other numbers it's

come into contact with and uploads this list of numbers to a database and then that database alerts your phone if you've come into contact with someone who ends up being positive that's like the way they pitched it the problem is that there are a lot of vulnerabilities in this system even at the base layer i was looking at something today that said that basically um the problem comes from when you did you declare that you're positive right so when you declare you're positive all of a sudden like your identifiers are declared as positive and companies can start marketing to you, understanding that you're positive. Governments obviously know that you're positive because you have to declare yourself positive. And there's a lot of vulnerabilities even on that

level. But even if we're to assume that they make it as privacy-protecting as possible, this Apple-Google infrastructure, they're not building the app. They're just building the protocol. So governments and companies are going to build the apps, folks. So just remember, Apple and Google aren't building the app. They're building a protocol for phones to talk to each other. And that might be privacy preserving. I still think there's vulnerabilities. Moxie Marlin Spike, the creator of Signal, has a really good thread on this that you can look at. I still think there's possibilities for issues even on the base layer. But we have to remember that governments and companies are actually going to make the app.

And what they're going to do is combine this kind of like very accurate Bluetooth tracking technology. Bluetooth tracking technology can be accurate to the inch, whereas GPS or cell phone tracking, generally speaking, is much less accurate. You know, it's not that accurate. I mean, you can't even use it for digital contact tracing because it's, you know, it's not accurate within 10 meters, et cetera. But Bluetooth contact tracing is accurate to the inch. So what we're doing is, you know, society is in the process of cheering on two companies that are known privacy violators, Google, of course, everywhere, and Apple in China, especially. And we're cheering them on for implementing a brand new, much more potent location tracking system for potentially

billions of people. And it's just stunning for me to watch this happen. And it's really sad. And I think people haven't thought about the implications. And I can guarantee you that the actual products that people use later on top of this platform are going to have all kinds of personal data. So again, even if we take them at their utopian, noble word that their platform that Apple and Google are making is going to be as privacy preserving as possible. Again, they're not making the apps. Companies and governments are going to make the apps and they're going to take this incredible new tech that's being invented essentially on the spot that's going to give them the ability to monitor people based on their Bluetooth interactions. And then they're going

to combine that with your name, your phone number, where you've been, et cetera. And they're going to have a real-time understanding of every single person that you've come into contact with. And they can't do that right now. The current triangulation of cell phone tracking doesn't allow them to do that. If you listen to the, for example, the Rogan episode with Snowden, And he talks about how your phone has a unique identifier. It has a, your SIM card has a unique identifier, et cetera. And, you know, they're tracking you. They're looking at your phone and they're triangulating you.

But this is way, we're talking something that's way more accurate. So this like base layer protocol can be used in combination with your other personal data to give a government or company real time understanding of every single person that you speak to or encounter on a daily basis. And they didn't have that before. And the masses are cheering for it. And that's what I think people need to think hard about. What are we trading off for this? And does it even work? I was so stunned to see that everybody's so excited about this as if they think digital contact tracing even works. There's no even evidence that it works. I mean, what's your reaction to that? Yeah. I mean, my whole thing is the words really matter. And so if you think

about it from a marketing standpoint, if you call it digital contact tracking, all of a sudden people are much more open to it, right? That they're, Hey, we need that. It's a euphemism. it sounds great yeah if i said to you we're going to um surveil the population and then we're going to label who is um positive and who is not all of a sudden that sounds a lot more um scary a lot more worrisome right and so the language you know there's a joke that i uh always go back to and i i gotta go back and figure out who it was it was chris rock or who the comedian was but there's basically they're saying something to the effect of the greatest marketing campaign in the world was the use of the word insurgent. So we went into Iraq and Afghanistan. We said, hey, we're

taking on the insurgents. We're going to go kill the insurgents. And everyone in the United States looked around and said, well, I'm not an insurgent. You're not an insurgent. I don't know any insurgents. Go kill them all. Kill all the insurgents. But if instead we had said, hey, we're going to go kill people who are pissed off that we invaded their country, or we're going to go kill humans. People say, well, time out. I don't want them to kill the humans. I thought we were just going to kill the insurgents, right? It's got a different kind of connotation to it when you change the language. And so I think that this is another example where digital contact tracking sounds very scientific. It sounds very kind of health oriented. It sounds like it's

something that we as a society have to do to stop the virus right this invisible enemy what how do we do it we agree to digital contact tracking but the second that you say no we're going to surveil the society and we're going to label people it's a whole different yeah so just when you hear digital contact tracing just think in your mind citizen surveillance and look i was even surprised to see snowden and the aclu come out and say basically hey we're watching this carefully but maybe it could be good i mean it can only be bad i mean let me explain the slippery slope um if we become more comfortable and if this normalization of mass surveillance is made possible through this crisis if the governments take this crisis and see an opportunity and say

hey here's an opportunity for us to make mass surveillance more palatable more reasonable we can we can it can again you know the science of marketing we can make it sound slick and call digital contact tracing. You know, where does it end? And I'll tell you where it ends. It ends with something called color coding, citizen color coding. So in China, in Hubei province and elsewhere, now that they're, quote unquote, coming out of lockdown, which, you know, in and of itself is arguable. And I think a lot of it is a Potemkin village, based on what I know. But let's just assume that okay so China is is regardless of whether the virus has been beaten back or not they are allowing people to start to like leave their homes etc etc etc so in order to like leave

your home go to work get on public transportation your phone needs to display a certain color green yellow red and if you're red you can't go anywhere so you need to be green so who decides what is green and what is yellow there was a video I watched which was quite informative from a guys living there now and you know he's he's he's yellow and he's sitting in a room with this woman who's chinese and she's green and they're not wearing masks and they're just like within five feet of each other talking and you know her her color is not going to yellow so like i don't know how it works but it's it's clearly probably a little more propaganda than actual science the point is that you are going to be color-coded based on how the government perceives you as a

threat to the operation of society so it's not like uh you know it's it's it's not like the app is capable of actually understanding if you're but you know infected or not or have a particular issue or not some human tells the app you know what what you're doing like and it gives you a score so this builds into what we i think touched on on on the last show about how over the last decade the chinese government has been building this idea of a citizen score which is kind of like a credit score, but it also adds behavior, your friends, things like that into your basically reliability score. And for them, it's more like a patriotism score. And your patriotism score dictates, you know, what kind of loan you can get, where you can travel, what kind of schools your

kids can get into, etc. So on top of that infrastructure, which is built out, you know, at the municipal level, it's built out at the corporate level, there's a lot of different experiments all around China, each region has a kind of different one. They're now adding this like color coding to the mix. So now they're basically able to control your movements in China based on like what color you have. And there's an old Soviet joke that Ahrefs chairman Garry Kasparov likes to say that nothing is more permanent than a temporary measure. And, you know, that could not ring more true right now. It's not like the color coding is going away. And even in the West, even in our countries, it's not like the Google, Apple, Bluetooth, digital contact

tracing is going away. It's not like they're going to, in six months, delete it off your phone. No, they're going to find a new reason for it. The FBI is going to look at it and be like, hey, this is actually really useful for this other thing that we need. Or some other company is going to say, hey, this would be way easier for us to understand the marketing behavior of our customers. We want to keep it. That's coming to stay. Every time we add one of these new innovations in citizen surveillance and behavior tracking, it doesn't go away. It stays. That's one thing that we have learned. And you have to think about this idea that we are on the slippery slope to color coding, and it's going to get more inescapable because

our devices, as we've all seen in the last two decades, are shrinking. I mean, the things that we use to communicate with each other and rely on are going from computers that sit on our desks and we have to like go to, to phones that go in our pocket, to wearables that we wear on our wrist, to eventually a chip, dude, that's going to be either in your wrist or your retina or whatever. Sure, that's going to happen in the next 20, 30 years. Absolutely. And you have to think about this like evolution of your digital identity and how it's going to kind of go from kind of over the skin surveillance to under the skin surveillance, which is a concept that you've all or Harari, the historian talks about. But I think this all ends in something that I want to call

privacy shaming. I think that's what's going to happen as we get further down the road. And you're starting to see it now. Like I'm getting shamed on Twitter, for example, for basically sounding the alarm on the digital contact tracing thing and trying to challenge people on the Apple and Google project. People are calling me a religious fundamentalist, a privacy absolutist, whatever. um i'm getting shamed and i think like down the road especially with the young generation i think what you're going to see is like it's going to be cool to have these like wearables chips whatever like new devices and people who are like caring about privacy and rights and freedoms will maybe be uncool i think that's going to happen in the future and we're

very worried about that and it's something i that kind of keeps me up at night and we can we can stop it by creating an alternative narrative that privacy is cool, you know, that it's actually cool to have rights and freedoms and it is essential to the backbone of our society and the country we've built here in the USA. It's actually cool to protect your livelihood and the information about yourself. And that's a narrative that I would want to do my best to help build. Yeah, I think part of what you're talking about here is this idea that technology continues to get closer and closer to the body, right? So if you take just a traditional technology trend, there used to be kind of very large headphones, kind of like you're wearing now, where they're kind of over the ear, very big. People will remember even ones with like Walkmans or CD players.

then we got to um the apple headphone or kind of the in-ear headphone that still had a um a cord on it right and plugged into a device now we've got ipods with or i'm sorry um the airpods which will go in your ear they're wireless uh the belief is that at some point we continue to get closer and closer and eventually that'll be just implanted whether it's in your brain or somewhere and so technology in general continues to get smaller, more powerful, and kind of closer to being some sort of embeddable. And that may take 10, 20, 30 years, but like that's the general direction that technology is taking. It would be no surprise then that the technology that is used for nefarious things do the same thing, right? It's not like the nefarious technology is going to

fight the trend of getting smaller, more powerful, and getting closer to an embeddable type product. And so I guess, you know, as you look at this, is there a difference between the chip embedded in your hand or your retina or something like that versus what's on the phone and kind of what they're trying to do now? Or is it the same type of surveillance, but just in a different form factor on the technology side? Well, I mean, yeah, of course, you could leave your phone at home if you want to, or you can put it down. um you can do things to your phone to prevent it from tracking you meaning you can um a friend of mine matt odell who runs the tftc podcast he has a good series of guides showing you how to take your like google phone and basically strip it of all the google software and install something called graphene which is a very privacy protecting os and you can use uh tor browser and different

apps on the phone to basically be completely private it's really really cool but that stuff is is going to be uh limited as we get close as this technology shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and becomes more proprietary less open source and eventually comes into you um so i think it's important that we like fight now to make sure that the open source pro-privacy uh you know technologies and narratives are strong um there's a good um really good book that i recommend your your uh listeners read called the mandibles it's very very important and um it's a fiction book that describes uh 2028 2029 america where we basically default on our debts and hyperinflation starts to come to the united states it was written maybe 10 years ago and it talks about all the

different social impacts that that may that this starts to have on people like that one of the characters lives in Brooklyn. There's a refugee, you know, camp in Prospect Park and people are fleeing and there's all this civil unrest, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what ends up happening throughout the book is that, you know, your reliance on the government becomes so severe in this time of crisis that they end up installing a chip in you. And then that's like, you know, if you try to remove it without the proper procedure, it kills you. And it's obviously a dramatic narrative plot device, but it is something that is something we should think about. You've heard all kinds of folks in the humanitarian sector basically write things about

how they wish they could have chips for refugees so that they could keep their digital passport on it and we could know if they've been vaccinated or whatever. I think this is a very dangerous road to go down because I know how it ends. I mean, I know where the slippery slope goes and the slippery slope ends in Xinjiang in northwestern China right now, where the government does have those capabilities and they have all of that surveillance and control and power. And what does it result in? The mass incarceration of millions of ethnic minorities, of people the government doesn't like. That's where the sentence, there's no like good outcome. There is no utopian outcome here. And I think that, you know, another general point to make here is that,

you know we just don't again we just remember we don't need this um to to fight the virus we don't have to go down that road um we can fight the virus in a in a way that it does not require a police state you know remember not need a police state to fight the virus we can fight this thing in a decentralized way that reflects our values again we can do all these things that don't require civil liberties intrusions whether it's hand washing masks testing social distancing public investment in public health infrastructure. There's public education that can be worked on. All sorts of things we can do that don't require the stripping of our civil liberties and freedoms and that don't require us to go down the path of a country like China or a country like Iran.

Iran is very similar to China. They also covered up the disease at the beginning. They also knew how dangerous COVID was, yet told their population that it was fine. And the population continued to go on these religious pilgrimages and continued to infect each other. And even the state airline kept flying flights to LAX and to Italy and to Europe, etc. And the staff on the flights didn't know it was dangerous. And Iran was largely responsible for the spread of the virus to Europe. So at the beginning, you had these two dictatorships, these two authoritarian systems in the Chinese Communist Party and the Iranian mullahs, who were responsible for spreading most of the disease to the world because of censorship and lies. And you look at that model

and how devastating it's been for people who live in those countries. We don't want to go down that road. Let's go down the road of whether it's Iceland or New Zealand or Taiwan or arguably even California. I mean, I know it's been rough here and we've had about a thousand deaths, but in a country of 42 million, we've done pretty well and we haven't used mass surveillance. I'm very proud of that so far. So even here, we can do it in the largest state in the United States. So I think we should follow, you know, our values and try to fight the thing in a way that won't have lasting implications, because we have to think about basically this whole digital contact tracing thing and emergency powers is the new Patriot Act. I mean, you know, right after 9-11,

our society was scared, and we needed to shelter in an idea of unity and in the strength of the government. And we gave them extraordinary powers, whether or not we did it specifically or not. We allowed them to take all kinds of crazy powers over us that have led to a dramatic erosion of civil liberties, even in America. And the boogeyman then was terrorism, which was real and devastating, but did not excuse what happened after. Similarly here, COVID is real and devastating, but it does not permit, it does not excuse the government to, you know, erode the values that we've built this nation on. I think that is a very folly thing. So I think the idea that we can fight the virus with surveillance technology is just a really, really bad idea. And, you know, one thing

people say is they're like, look, what do we have to lose? We're already being tracked on our phones anyway. Who cares? You know, I get a lot of this and I'm like, no, you don't understand. You know, Again, just to repeat, the way you can currently be tracked on your phone is a lot less accurate than Bluetooth beacon tracking, which is what this Apple Google thing wants to do. I mean, remember, folks, this can track you to the inch, whereas the current tracking can't. And why would you trade off even more of your privacy and freedoms for something that may not even work? So I hope you can remember this as we kind of move forward and think about a way to have a decentralized response to COVID. I mean, obviously, we're seeing, Pomp, we're seeing a shift to the local, to the regional, right? Everywhere, in our communities, in our countries. I mean, the U.S. is going to pull its supply chains back from China and other countries. We're going to manufacture more internally.

It's going to change the world and it's going to change us in a way that I think the last two big crises we had didn't really change our communities. And my advice to people is comes in three. I've said use encryption, use something like Signal to communicate with your friends and family. Let's double down on that. Be kind to others and use Bitcoin. and learn about Bitcoin, because I really believe that Bitcoin is such an elegant response to the two big threats that Americans are facing. The first threat I've gone over in detail, this threat of an authoritarian overreach on our civil liberties. Well, guess what? With Bitcoin,

we have a system to transact with one another that is pseudonymous and can be very private and doesn't need to leak or disclose information about us to third parties. That is like one half of the genius of Satoshi's vision. And we can build a financial and communications network that, again, does not disclose our full identity stack. And that's like the most exciting part of Bitcoin for me. But on the other hand, Bitcoin is also a response to the way that money is distributed and created right now. I mean, it's buried in the Genesis block, right? It is a critique of the bailout of the banks in the last financial crisis, right? So Bitcoin kind of does two things. Again, it provides us a platform to build pseudonymous, more private, sovereign

communications and financial transactions. And on the other hand, it removes the sort of Cantillon effect possibility, this effect named after this British economist from the 19th century who basically realized and described that the people who were closer to the money spigot, to the money creation point, benefited more than the folks who weren't, right? And we're seeing that on full display right now, right? I mean, guess who got all their, you know, bailout packages first, right? Corporations, not the people. So Bitcoin is a response to that. It's not going to change corruption or inequality or the fact that governments issue debt to pay for things. That will always happen because we are always going to live in societies, at least in the near future

where we have governments. But what it will change, hopefully, as we move farther into the future, is this idea that like bureaucrats who aren't even elected can decide to create more money and then issue and distribute it in a way that is built on favoritism. That is not possible with Bitcoin. It is an open market competition. It doesn't favor anybody over anyone else. and there can't be a manipulation of the money supply in that way. So that's why I get really fired up about Bitcoin and why I think you all should learn more about it and understand it because it can really help us on these two fronts right now

that really threaten our society. And I think one of the pieces I keep hearing is like, hey, I'm sure that there's bad shit going on in Iran or China or elsewhere in the world, but I live in the United States, right? i live in a democratic kind of free country and that stuff doesn't happen here but what i continue to try to explain to people and i'd love to hear your opinion on is a lot of this is happening here and in other developed countries right so you know i don't know if you saw the video that floated around on twitter uh in australia of a helicopter with night vision literally finding three guys

drinking beers on a roof and using a microphone to tell them to come down and then they get arrested or in Kentucky, there's a judge who said to somebody, hey, you won't stay in quarantine, fine. We're literally going to put a GPS-enabled ankle bracelet on, right? And we're going to know where you are. And it just feels like, yes, it is bad in some of these other places that we know are authoritarian, but it's also we're starting to see signs of it being bad here in the U.S.

or other developed nations as well. Yeah, I mean, look, I haven't got, you know, when I was going through all the different tools that are at government's disposals and society's disposal before to tackle this thing. I didn't talk about lockdowns and quarantine because I think that's the part that even I'm unsure about. I mean, I know that on some level they are essential in some part, in some way. To what extent is unclear. But if the good news isn't a democracy, we should arguably be able to decide that, meaning like we should have a dialogue in the open media and the press and in our local

jurisdictions and in our states, and we can have debates and our elected representatives can decide whether or not what to do. Um, it has not been perfect and there may be an overreaction in many, many ways with regard to this, uh, uh, restriction on our civil liberties and freedom of movement and things like that. Personally, I think the way California is doing it is, is, is kind of perfect, uh, as much as possible. I mean, it's, um, as good as it's going to get, maybe not, I'll take that back. It's not perfect, but it's as good as it's going to get in the Bay area. I mean, look, I'm, I'm free. I can leave my house. I don't have a curfew. I can go wherever I want, get the car and go shopping. I can support my local businesses by online shopping. I can,

I can do what I want. Certain, certain areas are closed down to prevent people from gathering like national parks, um, parking lots near national parks and the beach are closed down. Um, and maybe the city of San Francisco has some like bizarre decision-making they've been making, But generally speaking, I feel pretty free here. And if we can defeat the virus without like unnecessary impositions on our civil liberties and basically more surveillance, then I'd be very proud about that model. And I hope others could learn from it. But there's no doubt that we are seeing some worrying things happening in the United States. I mean, look, this is the greatest pandemic that we've seen in 100 years. It's the biggest economic contraction since the Great Depression. It's the greatest oil price decline on record. It's the greatest central bank and government intervention in the economy ever that we've seen. So we're entering into a land of unknowns. No one knows what's going to happen.

That's the crazy part. You have all these Nobel winning economists and people with different backgrounds. Nobody knows what's going to happen. We're literally living in the land of the unpredictable. But I do think that there is a balance we need to take where we have to understand that the economic implications of shutting down are going to be really bad and haunt us for many, many years and will cause death and suffering. And on the other hand, that we do need to take the virus seriously. The one thing that, look, democratic society should take from this is they should look again at Taiwan as an example. And Taiwan went through SARS and they saw this. And guess what? They planned for this. They ran like tests and they ran simulations and they knew this

was going to come at some point. This was not a black swan, right? This is a white swan, right? We knew this was going to happen. So for the federal government, the United States to not have a plan and to a point, I don't know if you saw this, but apparently the HHS secretary appointed somebody who ran a Labradoodle company to basically deal with America's response to COVID in January and February is inexcusable. I mean, we had just gross incompetence, but that's not necessary. I mean, we can do better without changing the structure of our government. We just need different people in charge, but we can definitely do better. And we need to plan for these things. If we have a plan in place, then there doesn't need to be any restriction of our

civil liberties, right? So if the plan is in place, and we have a mutually agreed thing we're going to do when a pandemic hits, we don't need to call in the army. We don't need to call in the National Guard. We don't need to have emergency surveillance. We have a plan that we've worked on. Problem is, we didn't have that plan. We're not planning ahead right now in the United States. We're planning for right now. We're all about January 2020, where the stock market's at an all-time high, and Tesla's close to a thousand bucks a share or whatever, and we're just in the moment. We need to think about the long term. And I think we can. And I think we can do that through our democratic processes. And we need to. And we shouldn't say, no, the answer is actually

to give the government more power and to be more like China. I mean, that's bullshit, to be honest. We do not want to be more like the Chinese Communist Party. Again, anything you've ever heard about the way they've reacted to the virus is full of lies and nonsense. And it's a giant Potemkin village. And the virus has absolutely devastated their country, has killed untold people, and has basically ruined the image of Xi Jinping internationally. One thing I wanted to say is that even just our trust in centralized institutions, again, this theme of a decentralized response where we rely on each other and our communities is very important. If you look at the World Health Organization, it is something that didn't shock me. So I come from the human

rights background, and I know how corrupt, for example, the UN Human Rights Council is. The UN Human Rights Council, which is supposed to kind of oversee human rights around the world, has China and Saudi Arabia sitting on it, right? I mean, it's a joke. So I had already seen the World Health Organization in the last 10 years give an award to Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who, if anything, was the sole person who destroyed the health infrastructure of Zimbabwe in a way that is so sad and tragic. I mean, Zimbabwe, he put Zimbabwe back 100 years. Your listeners can read an amazing book called The Fear by Peter Godwin

about what Mugabe did to Zimbabwe. And yet, despite the fact that Mugabe actually destroyed the public infrastructure of this country, the World Health Organization tried to make him an ambassador in like about less than 10 years ago. Secondly, the World Health Organization went to North Korea three or four years ago on a state-sponsored trip and celebrated the Kim regime.

This is literally the worst dictatorship in the world that has some massive percentage of its population in gulags, and yet they were celebrating them. So you have to understand, the guy who's in charge of the World Health Organization, when he was a young guy, he worked for a Marxist-Leninist party. I mean, that's what he did when he was younger.

And when he was older, he cut his teeth working for Mele Senawi, who's probably one of the most brutal dictators in Africa. The guy killed 40,000 of his own people in one sitting in 2005. So Tedros worked for this guy and now he comes to the World Health Organization. Of course, he's gonna favor the authoritarian model

and he's gonna basically side with the Chinese Communist Party. And that's why in December when there was evidence from brave Chinese doctors who noticed that there was a really worrying disease that was spreading in Wuhan, that's why Beijing and the WHO didn't do anything. They instead censored the information, prevented people from learning about it. And then over the next three weeks, later on with the benefit of hindsight, what we've watched is we watched 7 million people leave Wuhan between December 31

in January 23. There were no restrictions at all. So they infected the world and they infected the rest of China for their own self-serving agenda. I mean, Xi Jinping had this big event that he was planning from the 14th to the 17th, and he really wanted it to happen in Wuhan. So they basically just censored all the news and didn't count any cases until after that was over. And then the damage had been done. And the World Health Organization has been complicit the entire time, basically parroting china's talking points um saying it's not nothing to worry about saying there's not there's no human to human transition that transmission the world health organization was still saying that as of january 17th when the chinese authorities knew that this thing was viral

the taiwanese authorities knew that this was viral but because the world health organization doesn't consider taiwan a country they taiwan is not allowed to join the world health organization because it's basically owned by the Chinese Communist Party. And they were like, again, parroting all their talking points. The world didn't know any better. And yes, like, you know, did the American government react incompetently? Very much so. And it's very frustrating and unforgivable.

But when it comes to like American society and the media and a lot of policymakers, how are we supposed to know? Like the Chinese government and the WHO were saying that it was under control. And there's a video from late January of Tedros on stage with Xi Jinping, where he's praising the Chinese leaders handling of the virus. I mean, it's actually so crazy Orwellian. And then you saw this continue to proceed where the WHO at first was saying that it was racist to stop travel from China at the end of January. And they were condemning essentially the U.S. government and others who were trying to stop travel from China. Meanwhile, at the end of March, once China decided it was time to shut down their own travel and only permit one flight per day from each major carrier, the WHO didn't have a criticism for that.

So they're totally in China's pocket. They've been distributing misinformation about masks. I mean, they were telling people you shouldn't wear one unless you're sick. Until March, they were distributing misinformation about the way the virus moves, the way it's transmitted. this is not an institution to be trusted and it's emblematic of a lot of our institutions right now these alphabet soup organizations that you know aren't accountable to the public and we shouldn't trust them i mean look even our own cdc was distributing misinformation um obviously the white house was too so in america we need to think for ourselves and think critically and you know we need to double down on our own powers of investigation and um truth seeking and sense-making and build our own communities and question everything basically is is is quite important both on the health side political side and on the economic side um and uh i do think that

there's something about um again to go back to bitcoin i think there's something about it that i don't know helps you fashion a worldview that um is both on the one hand optimistic but on the other hand, very, you know, very skeptical of what people say, because essentially what you have now is the world coalescing around modern monetary theory and basically saying that the government should just print more money without having any tax revenue and that we can run a massive deficit and it's fine. And, you know, maybe they're right for the time being. Maybe we can do that, right? And maybe there won't be inflation or shortages. But, you know, MMT basically dictates that politicians be able to just decide how much money there should exist.

And they should only stop printing money when when we see inflations and shortages. That's literally like what it what it says. If you read the texts of the MMT folks and you know what, like at least Bitcoin gives us an option to not participate in that if we don't want. I think that government policy is trending towards MMT in most countries. I mean, this is kind of the future of government money. It's going to be much more easy money. It's going to be, you know, much more in supply for potentially, you know, a decreasing amount of goods and services. So we'll see how that ends up. But the point is that Bitcoin gives us kind of a parallel thing where we can opt into a different financial system. And the fact that the mainstream media and the world is still ignorant about Bitcoin is something that lines up with my observation that they're also ignorant about the World Health Organization and a huge battery of other things. Like you just got to think for yourself, you know?

Yeah. And I guess part of the thing that I sit and probably scares me the most is even if the people have distrust for those large organizations like the WHO, the CDC, whoever it is, we're seeing other companies use them as the standard, right? So we just saw YouTube, for example, say that they're going to take down any content that contradicts the WHO. And I was sitting there and I think that the CEO literally said in the video, if you tell people to consume vitamin C, right, that is scientifically proven to boost your immune system. Right, we're going to censor that. And I mean, I get it, but like she literally goes on to say, her quote is literally that anything that goes against the World Health Organization's recommendations will be a violation of our policies. And again, folks, the World Health Organization denies that Taiwan's a country, helped the Chinese Communist Party cover up the outbreak and spread this thing to your communities and ruined your lives, celebrates dictators around the world and spreads misinformation. How could YouTube possibly use them as the arbiter of what is truth? But that's the situation we're in now.

So, yeah, be skeptical. Yeah. And I think part of it was just that means that anyone who was saying wear masks three weeks ago, four weeks ago would have technically been in violation of the policies. But now they're being mandated by U.S. government, right, in various local state or in some cases, you know, those governments. And so to me, it just feels like we're getting into this very slippery slope where you can hide behind policies. And it's not just YouTube. It's every major platform that deals with kind of content moderation. But at what point do you reach this line of it is just straight censorship versus you're actually trying to prevent the spread of fake news and protect people? Yeah, well, I'm less. I mean, to me, censorship is about the state.

It's about the state saying this particular speech will not be permitted. if private companies want to censor certain things, I view that as problematic, but it's not the same thing. I mean, what I'm on guard for is actual state censorship. Again, private companies, they kind of do their own thing. There is a good argument that private companies are essentially becoming public infrastructure at this point, and maybe we need to rethink that. But generally speaking, I don't, let's just put it this way. I don't have a problem getting good information right now like yes you have to navigate through a lot of nonsense but like you can be more well educated today than any human in the history of humanity like

i don't i think this whole idea that like de-platforming and um uh like you know corporate censorship on our social media platforms is is is is a huge and dire threat is is a little much Like, I don't know, I can still get opinions of anybody I want somehow on one one way or another. I'm not like prevented. You know, the government is not preventing me from accessing the opinions of a particular person. I do view what's happening with YouTube very, very concerning, but it seems inevitable. I mean, who else are they gonna, I mean, who, you know, who else is going to be their source of truth? I mean, it's supposed to be the World Health. I mean, this is what how broken the world is. The World Health Organization is supposed to be that arbiter of truth. is the UN Human Rights Council is supposed to be the last word on human rights, right? The Federal Reserve is supposed to be the world's, and the IMF are supposed to be the lenders of last resort. And all of these organizations are doing things that are very controversial at best, and in some cases are, you know, outright disastrous.

So what are we supposed to rely on? So again, I think this is why you're going to see this shift towards whether it's the family, the community, localism, regionalism. We're starting to live it, man. I mean, it's happening. And in that context, I think we can internally and in our own communities, again, rely on things like encryption and protect our privacy and protect our rights. I think that the idea of what is desirable for even Americans is going to very much change in the next few years like the idea of wanting an apartment downtown may may not be you know what everybody wants anymore you know and I know that it was only a subset of the population that wanted that but even for those folks they may want to get a little space you know so we're going to see dramatic dramatic shifts um and hopefully we can we can we can we can see some good out of this um but I don't know. I mean, like for you, like, what would it take for you to feel comfortable

going to a concert right now? Like, what would it take for you to feel comfortable just going right now? Like what would have to be the reality? I'm probably, uh, the wrong person to ask this question mainly because, um, I generally am of the belief that, uh, if you are concerned about your health, you ultimately have the personal responsibility to take care of yourself. So what I mean by that first is if you are old, if you are sick, if you have pre-existing conditions and you understand that you have a higher propensity for being infected and ultimately potentially dying, you should take every precaution possible not to get sick. So wear a mask, wash your hands, you know, do whatever you need to do. Don't go outside, you know, don't come in contact with people. All of those things are kind of a first, ultimately a personal responsibility. Of course. When it comes to somebody like me who is very fortunate to be younger, to not have any of the pre-existing conditions, to kind of be at a lower level, maybe not of getting infected, but definitely of having kind of the death rate affect me or anything like that, then it comes down to generally being able to balance the safety of you and those around you with the other aspects of life.

right and so what i mean by that is wearing a mask like i'd be happy to go places and if we had to wear masks if that helped me be safer and those around me right definitely to go to something like a concert again if you're saying hey let's go sit in a mosh pit right and kind of be right where everything is you know where literally people are coughing on you and stuff like that that's one thing versus, uh, to go and actually sit in, uh, a theater, right. Or some sort of, uh, much more I guess what I'm getting at is, um, there are a lot of things that we used to do that we're not going to do anymore, or at least for a while. And we're struggling with that at the human rights foundation. Cause look, we do live events. We bring people together and that may not be able

to happen for a while. We got to do a lot of things virtually, but if you think about like, if you're parents and you want to, when are you going to feel comfortable sending your kid back to school if you like eating out at restaurants like when eventually we do get back to that are you going to expect the waiters to wear masks and gloves and for the chefs to be temperature checked is is that a reasonable expectation i mean what the only society that's that that seems to be like promoting it's i we're back to normal um in an aggressive way is is china and they're like you know probably more similar to london or new york or one of these big metropolitan areas that got hit really hard. They're like coming, they're trying to come back online, right? Again, they're

like color coding citizens and doing all these different extraordinary measures. I don't think we need to do that again, as I've underlined, but I think it's going to be quite the process for us as a society. What is inspiring is that there are some societies, democratic ones that handled it the right way, that were careful and that are a lot more normal. I mean, if you actually look at Taiwan, they're playing baseball, man. I mean, there's no one in the crowd, but they're playing. So I'm hopeful that we can get sports back, we can get music back, but I think it's just going to be this process. And I think people need to understand that that's going to have a very long tail economic effect on our lives. I mean, we just saw this data point today,

another four plus million people are unemployed i mean we've got um probably close to 30 million now i mean uh the the st louis fed was projecting that by june there'd be 50 to 60 million unemployed a 30 unemployment rate in our country so i mean that's that's um really sad to hear but that that may happen i mean look and we're an advanced country with a lot of infrastructure i mean think about if some of the countries I'm, I'm kind of, I'm talking to people working in certain countries. I mean, I mean, Kenya has fewer ventilators than London, you know, and it has a much larger population. A lot of countries don't have the infrastructure. We have no clue like whether or not COVID is having a big impact. I mean, Indonesia, the world's largest democracy

just declared today that they're shutting down all the flights. So a lot of these other countries, you know that were spared the initial impact of this thing are now just starting to to really feel it right so if you look at sub-saharan africa latin america sub-southeast asia the middle east i mean they're getting hit the saudi royal family has a huge outbreak inside the royal family latin america has massive number of cases um and again when these numbers spread we get a reaction from these governments so there are like unfortunately like two dozen governments in sub-saharan africa that have declared all kinds of emergency measures to fight the virus right so i take the virus very seriously but i'm very concerned about the longer tail economic and

political consequences and i think we need to act right now to challenge this idea that like an authoritarian response a response of surveillance and of giving up our data and of trusting the government to do the right thing. I don't, that is just clearly not the right answer. I mean, whether you live in America or, or in China, like your government has betrayed you, right. In a certain amount, in a certain way. Right. And I just think we need to, uh, take things into our own hands a little bit and, you know, be, be, as you were saying, be sovereign and be responsible. And that is just never been more clear to me, um, than it is today, But it does give me great hope and optimism that, you know, we do still have ways to communicate with each other privately. We do have an alternative financial system that, again, is not is not controlled by bureaucrats. And we do have, you know, our families and communities that we can we can work with and build and build from.

And I think a lot of people probably are feeling that right now. But again, like, don't fall into this trap of thinking that Apple and Google are going to save us with this digital contact tracing nonsense. I mean, literally, I was I was thinking about this the other day there there there again, like you're talking about two of the world's largest corporations are unrolling a new surveillance system to track potentially three point five billion people. How does that not go wrong? Like, how is that not the opening scene of a dystopic science fiction thriller? I mean, come on, guys, like this is absolutely ridiculous. Don't fall into that trap. Learn more about it and be careful. You know, don't worship these companies for trying to do something that on its face like doesn't even work. And it's just going to have such a bad legacy on our on our civil liberties and privacy. Let's let's not go through the Patriot Act again. I mean, we're still dealing with that, man. there was still a story the other day, you know, the government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this crazy surveillance and they're not, it's not leading to any arrests. Like it's just, it's just bureaucratic waste on top, ineffective bureaucratic waste on top of the fact that it has destroyed privacy and, and has given the government new powers that it didn't

need. So as much as I hate to say it, I mean, COVID is a, is going to be a sea change moment, just like the 9-11 was for civil liberties and privacy. However, the good news is we now have more tools at our disposal than we did back then. There was no signal back then. People didn't have a way to communicate with anyone else in the world in a way that was pretty much assured to be private. Now we do. Bitcoin didn't exist. Not only does it exist now, but it's very usable by whether it's nonprofits, organizations, people, you know, we can send any amount of money we want to anyone else in the world in a matter of minutes and no one can stop it. Like we have new tools and technologies that we didn't have back then, but we have to rely on them. We have to educate each

other and communicate about the potential of them more often than we are doing right now. I think that's a fantastic point. To finish up, where can people go find you on the internet and also go learn more about the human rights foundation work yeah so the human rights foundation again non-profit that focuses on helping people around the world who live under authoritarian societies the four billion that don't have the rights and freedoms we do you can find us at href.org or on twitter at href you can find me on twitter at gladstein g-l-a-d-s-t-e-i-n I'll be speaking at a bunch of conferences virtually in the next few months. And you can also check out a book I co-wrote last year with a bunch of other folks in the

Bitcoin space called The Little Bitcoin Book. It's on Amazon, and it's our take on trying to explain why money is broken today and why Satoshi's invention was so important. and it does it in a plain speak way um you don't have to have a particular political opinion or particular knowledge about economics or technology to read the book in a in a couple hours it's very easy reading and it's now in a bunch of different languages and something i'm certainly proud of and hope it can be useful for folks awesome man well listen i really appreciate taking the time to do this you guys are doing uh incredible work over there and i think that um you know people just

need to stay vigilant and you guys are leading the charge so uh just from everyone else thank you for uh for all the work you're doing and we'll have to do this again absolutely thanks for having me on very grateful