The Pomp Podcast - #642 Bitcoin and Human Rights with Alex Gladstein

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

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 bitcoin, human rights, Afghanistan, Cuba, Nigeria, bitcoin development fund, the Oslo Freedom Forum, and what you can do at home to pitch in.  ======================= Gemini is a leading regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy, sell, store, and earn bitcoin, ether, and over 40 other cryptocurrencies. Offering industry-leading security, insurance and uptime, Gemini is the go-to trusted platform for beginner and sophisticated investors alike. Open a free account in under 3 minutes at gemini.com/pomp and get $20 of bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within 30 days. ======================= MiamiCoin, the first CityCoin, is now live! Mining began on August 3rd, and the community has already generated over $1 million of protocol contributions reserved for the City of Miami. This is a community-launched program built on Bitcoin, and it’s far more than a currency: MiamiCoin is a protocol, and a platform for innovation. So, the CityCoins team is announcing something pretty cool: MiamiCoin Makers Month is a bringing together hackers, designers, and creators who are passionate about creating apps to benefit the City of Miami. $25k in total prizes will be awarded to developers who build the winning apps. And, the winners will be announced by Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt, and Bored Elon Musk, everybody’s favorite pseudonymous Twitter inventor and blockchain enthusiast. Visit MiamiMakers.co to learn more and sign up to take part. =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now 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 Bitcoin, human rights, Afghanistan, Cuba, Nigeria, Bitcoin Development Fund, the Oslo Freedom Forum, and what you can do at home to help pitch into this great work. I always enjoy talking to Alex, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as well.

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miamimakers.co to learn more and sign up to take part to help build the future. All right, let's get in this episode with Alex. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Alex, how are you, man?

Hey, Pomp. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Of course. Let's start just real quick with, remind everyone what the Human Rights Foundation's kind of mandate is and how you spend your time every day. Sure. So I joined the Human Rights Foundation in 2007. We exist to help people who live under authoritarian regimes around the world who don't have some of the same rights and liberties that we might have in a society like the United States or Germany or Japan. The kind of cold reality is that 4.3 billion people around the world live under some kind of authoritarian regime. Maybe that's in Cuba. Maybe that's in Iran. Maybe that's in China. Maybe that's in Russia. You know, and

they don't have any sort of semblance or any sort of real way to like push for their own rights or to ask for reform. Obviously, in the United States, there's been lobby groups and kind of corporations and different people kind of pushing back, for example, against undue regulations on, let's say, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. That's not going to happen in China or Russia, right? There's no sort of like reform mechanism for so many people around the world. So for them, you know, the open source code is really their main tool to defend themselves, right? And when you talk about code, I think there's two useful types to think about over the last 20 years. One would be encryption, right? That allows us to transact privately in terms of

our communications. And one would be Bitcoin, right? So with Bitcoin, what I've discovered through all my work at the Human Rights Foundation over the last five years, just kind of surveying activists around the world is that their money's broken. It's not as good as ours. Their currency gets debased. It collapses. Their bank accounts get frozen. They're isolated. They're behind sanctions. They're behind embargoes. They have broken infrastructure. And and yet Bitcoin is there for them. Right. And Bitcoin allows them to save, to send, to pay and to and to interact with the world, you know, at a time when there's just so many bridges, so much surveillance and so much nonsense. So, you know, I think it's probably the most powerful tool for human rights in the world today. When you think about a situation like Afghanistan, let's maybe start there. Obviously, we saw the decision and we covered it. We actually had a funeral for Western Union on the show because it's pretty much over for them.

but Western Union abandons this country of Afghanistan, completely cuts off any sort of technological support or service there. Talk about what the impact of that is maybe first, right? So when the legacy systems fail to provide service or the people of a country don't have access to financial services, like what is the negative impact that you guys see in these situations? Sure. Well, look, a country like Afghanistan, 4% of the GDP comes from remittances. So we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And that's that's really important for a country that doesn't have like thick margins margins. Right. You know, they're like really struggling to get by. And then all of a sudden, you know, an external decision made by basically American power shutters Western Union. Right. It shutters money, Graham. It shutters some of the main ways that Afghan families abroad get money back back to back home.

Um, I mean, that's an absolutely brutal situation because at the same time, the central bank has been closed off in Afghanistan, right? So the flow of dollars that props up the Afghani, the local currency has also been closed. So not only do you have the, the, the banks getting cut off from their normal source of funds, but you have private individuals and families get cut, you know, getting cut off from their, their, their source of funds. And, you know, what's going to happen is quite predictable. I mean, the currency is going to get weaker. It's going to devalue. Prices are going to go up for goods. You're already seeing this. Just this summer, the Afghani has gone from something like 70 something per dollar and it went all the way up to near 100 per dollar.

it's kind of floating around, but, but we kind of know where this goes and whether it's, you know, whether you want to blame this on the United States government and pulling out too fast, or you want to blame it on them for being there in the first place, or you want to blame it on the Taliban at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter because the average person is suffering. Like they're the ones that are going to pay the price. So regardless of like how we want to argue about who's at, who's at fault here, the average person is going to suffer because their currency is going to collapse and their banking system has frozen up. Like if you basically if you didn't get your money out before Kabul fell, you don't have your money. Like like

it's it's gone. Like there's no way to withdraw that from the bank. Right. So even the people who made it out who didn't want to live under the Taliban, if they didn't, you know, plan ahead and get their money out, they had to leave without their wealth and savings. Right. So Bitcoin fixes this quite literally. This week, I'm profiling a remarkable Afghan entrepreneur named Roya Mahbub for an essay I'm doing. And she was telling me that, I mean, she's a Bitcoin OG. I mean, she's been using Bitcoin there since 2013. I mean, when she first learned about Bitcoin, it was $10 for a Bitcoin. And when she bought her first Bitcoin, it was 100 bucks. So she's been in it for a long time. And she's seen kind of this technology appreciate and she's seen

fiat money depreciate. I mean, she really, really deeply understands how powerful this is as a tool of freedom. And she went to Kabul earlier this year, and she tried to convince her parents to buy some Bitcoin. And she regrets not being persuasive enough because they ended up not buying Bitcoin. And then they had to flee, and they weren't able to bring their savings with them, right? But those who were thinking ahead in this way, seeing around the curve, they were able to help themselves. And she has amazing stories of, you know, paying women way back then, even in 2013, 14 in Bitcoin, because in Afghanistan, like, you know, women are sort of either not allowed to or discouraged from having a bank account and their fathers and brothers and

uncles often will just take their cash if they have it. But they all have cell phones or a lot of the young folks have cell phones and Roya would pay them in Bitcoin. And then that was like freedom to them right no one could take that from them and they had you know control and sovereignty right which is a very powerful concept and really like you know she's like a cypherpunk basically she just doesn't know it right at the time uh she's fighting for she's using technology to achieve what what politics and what society won't give her right and you know she tells me the story of one of these women that she paid in bitcoin who had to flee because of like basically attacks on her and her family, you know, not the government necessarily, but not even the Taliban, but like

local kind of conservative religious elements didn't really like the fact that this woman was working, was in technology. So she had to leave, but she was able to bring her Bitcoin seed with her on this perilous route through Iran, through Turkey. I mean, we're talking hundreds of thousands of Afghans have fled, have become refugees and have gone to Europe over this route, right? and there's all kinds of thieves and brokers and her boat sank in the Mediterranean and all this stuff. And really you end up in Europe, if you make it with nothing, with just the clothes on your back. But she was able to bring her seed and she was able to have that big two and a half Bitcoin she had. And she ended up selling some of it in 2017 when she finally got to Germany

to start a new life. And I just think that story is so powerful and illustrates precisely why this technology is so important. When you think about those two stories, the parents who know nothing about Bitcoin, did not buy Bitcoin before this occurred, and then the folks who were very into Bitcoin before, it seems like one group is prepared, one group is not. What do we do for the unprepared group today? So we've got a bunch of people, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who did not know about Bitcoin or weren't interested in Bitcoin. Kabul falls. Obviously, there's mass chaos and uncertainty both in that city and across the country. There is this very serious, I think, largely accepted idea

that the currency now is in big trouble. And there's also a lot of censorship. And there's also a lot of seizureship that's happening with people's savings or wealth. So it almost feels like the best situation would have been to be prepared for this if you're not what can we do now like how do you how does the human rights foundation think about like what can be done today for those that are in this situation uh in afghanistan whether it's bitcoin related or not well um look roya uh doesn't want to give up so she's going to look she could sit from outside and criticize the Taliban, obviously, you know, a disaster for women's rights, or she could she could try to make a difference, right? So she's going to try and essentially negotiate to keep

her programs running. She thinks it's possible. And she's going to keep educating women in Afghanistan about Bitcoin. I think that that's her narrow goal. And that's what she's going to do. More broadly, that's what we all can do. I mean, it's just a matter of time. And I think it's a confluence of confidence in us, like as users of Bitcoin, you know, when Roya first started using it in 2013, yeah, it was great that Bitcoin went from $10 to $1,000 in a year. Think about that, went from $10 to $1,000 in a year. And she felt invincible. But guess what happened at the end of 2013? It collapsed. Okay. And she had to offer, she had to go back to all those women that she had paid in Bitcoin. And I just think this is a mark of her character, but she offered to pay them

back in fiat at the amount that they were paid in fiat terms. So she ended up losing a lot of value at that time because of that Bitcoin crash. But the idea of being your own bank just kind of burned in her mind. Even after this crazy crash, she couldn't forget it. She couldn't forget this principle, this idea. So we live in a day now where Bitcoin's way less risky. I mean, we're not going to have a Mount Gox situation. It's just so much more mainstream, so much more acceptable. So we have the confidence as users that maybe they didn't have five, six, seven years ago. And you also have the tools, man. I mean, I would encourage people listening to download something called the Moon Wallet, M-U-U-N. It's on iOS, on your iPhone, it's on

Android. You can open this thing up. You don't have to write down a bunch of seed words when you open it. It's very intuitive. You just literally download it and you can just start receiving lightning or Bitcoin right away. So I think the apps and the UX and the confidence in ourselves make it a lot easier to talk to family and friends. And then it's about the stories. I mean, now her parents know, you know, now they know, right? So oftentimes it comes too late. But if you can explain what's happened in different countries, whether it be Venezuela or Palestine or Cuba or even China or, you know, of course, Afghanistan, if you can explain how how money has been used against the people, has collapsed, has been seized, has been confiscated,

then it helps. So I think we're in a better position to do more Bitcoin education today. But I think it starts with you and it starts with your family and it starts with the people that you care about. I mean, there is a great opportunity to educate people about Bitcoin today, right now. We're still at 200 million or so users, okay? We're at about 2% of the world population. We're at about 1997 for the internet. You want to compare Bitcoin adoption to the internet? We're at about 1997. We're still at the end of the dial-up era. Think about what happened in the 10 years from 97 to 2007. We went from your little machine making noises trying to connect to the internet to the iPhone. You're an early user if you're listening to this. You will be very

grateful that you invested at least your time in learning about Bitcoin and educating your family and friends and people you care about, in 10 years, that's going to look like a really smart decision. So I think that's what we need to focus on right now. One of the fascinating parts about Afghanistan right now is obviously everyone is very focused, rightfully so, on the individuals that are suffering in that country that are kind of at the hands of a very, very bad group of people. And there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of chaos. There's a lot of moving parts. And I think over the next couple of weeks or months, we'll figure out kind of more of what's going on and how people get help. But the country itself has also been a victim of this censorship

that exists inside of the legacy financial system. My understanding is that they have a bunch of gold that is the country's gold, right? So the actual nation state itself has gold reserves, but they are held outside of the country, I think here in the US with the New York Fed or something like that. And that has now been frozen. So all of the assets being frozen. How do you think about that? Like, it's so weird where the individual citizens are obviously being affected, but also the nation state level is also being affected by something very similar and probably could have benefited from having Bitcoin themselves. Yeah, so we discussed the personal level, which is sort of the human level. And I think that that is why we all should be in this. I mean,

the ability that Bitcoin has to change individual lives is staggering. But there's also a geopolitical element yeah and you know regardless of who's running afghanistan it is broken that you know almost all of the country's savings is in new york whether it be in treasuries cash gold other instruments that's broken i mean that's that's like a dependency system and you know i spoke to roya about this and you know obviously she's no fan of the taliban but you know she does hope that one day her country can actually be independent, right? I think no Afghan wants all of their country's money to be in New York City. That doesn't make any sense. And if you actually think about and look at how the war went over these 20 years, a staggering amount of the

money that was invested, let's say, in Afghanistan, I mean, you know the numbers, there's more than a trillion spent on the war in total, but there was about 170 billion spent in what we might call investing in Afghanistan. So like infrastructure programs, et cetera, et cetera. The crazy part is something like 80 to 90% of that went back into the United States. So it was paid to like American contractors, et cetera, et cetera. So very little of that, that really big number that you see that like, oh, we, we, you know, this is what it costs. Very little of that trickled down into Afghan society and was absorbed by local institutions. If anything, anything, you know, most of what was absorbed locally was absorbed by local thieves i mean if you think ashraf ghani i mean the head

the leader of afghanistan who just escaped i mean he allegedly had 170 million dollars in suitcases there's a video you can watch him when he's getting on the aircraft to leave you know there's like a bunch of suitcases and allegedly he stole a bunch of money from the country and you know this is a this is this guy wrote a book on fixing failed states and he went you know he's taught at all these elite universities in the United States, these guys are, you know, professional grifters. I mean, at the end of the day, um, and, and he's out of there now. And, you know, at the end of the day, like a lot of that money that we, that American taxpayers spend a lot of that money that, that we went into debt for, um, you know, is wasted or went, you know, into corruption.

And I think that like Afghans know this and they would prefer a different system where they could be a little more independent. And certainly Bitcoin helps there, right? So if you have a future Afghanistan, that's, you know, instead of taking, I mean, right now, Afghanistan can't even take the debt from the IMF. The IMF was supposed to give it like 400 million, $450 million of what are called SDRs, which are like credits that basically Afghanistan could then like swap for hard currency. They can't, obviously the Taliban can't even get those because the Biden administration doesn't want them to have any money, right? So, I mean, yes, I understand it from a realist foreign policy perspective, but it's also kind of like economic terrorism on the people.

Like what's going to happen is they're basically strangling the Afghan economy, right? And I get it. They don't like the Taliban, but like, guess who's going to pay the price? Not the Taliban. Like they have plenty of, you know, opium fields, like they'll be okay. The people will struggle, Right. So when we have Bitcoin, you can see it as this tool, again, to help on the individual level can also help on that international level. Like these countries in the developing world, they're going to be able to instead of again, instead of taking out these loans from the IMF, which if they don't pay back, then they have to do like structural reforms and, you know, maybe get overthrown in a coup for like having passed austerity measures. No, they can like harness their energy in their country and mine Bitcoin or they can do Bitcoin energy bonds like El Salvador is doing. And I think there's a lot of ways that Bitcoin can help at the geopolitical level. And at the end of the day, I hope a lot of these developing countries in the future don't

have to have all their savings in New York. They can have it at home. Two other places that I know that you spent a lot of time thinking about, writing about or learning is Cuba and Nigeria, both two different situations. Maybe talk a little bit about Cuba first. that we talk about Nigeria, just in terms of during this kind of revolution or protest that's going on in Cuba. Obviously, there tends to be kind of a Bitcoin movement that goes along with it. So what's going on in Cuba? Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously to us, but most people don't

see what's happening with Bitcoin in Cuba. I wrote a kind of a deep dive into what I would call Cuba's peaceful Bitcoin revolution for Bitcoin Magazine two weeks ago. I think it's important to note that Cubans are going through the hardest time economically that they've gone through since the early 90s. Ever since Fidel and Che created modern Cuba in 59, they became incredibly dependent on the Soviet Union for everything. They basically exported all their sugar there soviets bought the sugar at a higher than market price uh really the soviets kind of kept cuba alive so when the soviet union fell cuba went into something called the special period in the early 90s where they they you know they just were sort of strangled economically they didn't

have any way of generating money and the peso collapsed their currency went from being like five to a dollar to like 150 to a dollar um and people started like using dollars actually there was like a dollarization that happened in cuba similar to what's happening in venezuela now um and to prevent that from like really taking over because obviously that's like the enemy's currency if you're fidel right you don't want people using american money he created a fake dollar called the cuc or the convertible peso in 94 um and this was this has been you know was used heavily until earlier this year and what ended up happening was like the greatest rug pull of all time because between 94 and 2004 cubans used dollars they used these like cucs they used pesos

and it was kind of all floating and Cubans owned dollars, like Cubans had dollars at home. They had dollars in bank accounts in Cuba, like US dollars, right? In 2004, the government came out and said, no, no, no, no more dollars. So they took all the dollars and they replaced them with these fake dollars. So what you saw is like the Cuban people holding the hard currency, the actual USD, all of a sudden the government was holding it and they were holding a bag of this fake dollars, which were just phased out right earlier this year. So this is like a giant rug pull where the government is like stealing time and energy from the people. It's really tragic. So now they have a new scheme called the MLC, which is even crazier because essentially in Cuba, there's like

different kinds of stores, right? You have your like rations, like bottom barrel kind of essentials that the government kind of hands out, which are not enough to live off of at all. So you have to actually go buy stuff with money in stores. And the stores today that have good stuff only accept something called an MLC. Now, an MLC is almost like a gift card account. You have to top it up. But get this, you can't top it up with pesos. So most people in Cuba, they work for the state, they make pesos or their pension is paid out in pesos. So they have to go to the black market and exchange their pesos for MLC at the black market rate. And the government says the rate's 1 to 24 in terms of a dollar to peso. On the street, it's 1 to 70, right? So the government's

just stealing from the people and they're forcing them to actually get their family abroad to top up their MLC account with pounds or euros or Brazilian currency, et cetera. And that's the only way you can buy stuff at stores to survive. If you need like an air conditioner, if you need good food, meat, whatever, you got to use MLC. So this is another rug pull where the government is basically paying its workers in collapsing pesos, but collecting hard currency from abroad. And there's just so much injustice in this. And yes, the United States embargo is a big part of the problem, 100%. Really, at the end of the day, it's like the dictatorship and this economic kind of exploitation system they have. I mean, think about it. Cuba's biggest export is essentially

indentured servitude of medical personnel. Literally, their biggest export, it's like $11 billion a year is sending nurses and doctors to countries abroad. And the state takes 75% of their wages. Second biggest export is, you know, either tourism or sugar, etc. But like, this is a state built on exploitation, and people have had enough of it. And what's interesting is in my interviews with Cubans all over the island, it's not just dissidents, or, you know, pro democracy opposition folks who are using Bitcoin. It's also the communists. This is, we call this money of enemies i mean anybody can use it so you have people who are hardcore communists who believe in the revolution and all this stuff they're using bitcoin and then of course you

have all the you know people who are more like uh screw the government they're using bitcoin too um but it's it's just remarkable to see and it is a microcosm of what you're seeing all across the world today and people are fed up with the money system it doesn't work it's essentially a scam in many places um and they're opting into something that's not a scam they're opting into something that's like hard money that's going to be there for them in the future. When you think about a place like Nigeria, is it a lot of the same elements of what's happening in Cuba? Or is there complete difference in that the government is different? And also demographically, there's a bunch of young people with smartphone penetration, and that's why it

ends up being so popular for Bitcoin. What is the difference that you see as to why Nigeria seems to be so embracing of Bitcoin? Yeah, I mean, at first you would think, oh, there's nothing, you know, they have no similarities. One is a small communist island that's largely cut off from the outside world and has a centrally planned economy. And the other is a vibrant, you know, uh, oil rich, um, you know, state that's the largest country in Africa with an incredible dynamic, you know, young population and all this stuff. And you would look at the two and you would say, oh, there's, there's no similarity. So they have a big similarity though the money's broken right and it may be broken in different ways um but in nigeria you've

got 15 inflation you've got 20 30 food inflation um you have a population that doesn't trust the government uh you have a government that steals from the people even with these like uh kind of like special police units they go around robbing people uh you have a government that has almost total immunity i mean you know horrible things happen and no one goes to prison um and again people are opting out, right? So it's similar in that way. The money system is broken, people are opting out into Bitcoin, right? And in Nigeria, you're seeing kind of like, it's kind of like one of the capitals of Bitcoin in the world today is Lagos. I mean, it's Nigeria. People are innovating so rapidly. Yes, only about half of Nigerians have sort of constant internet access, but millions of

Nigerians are using Bitcoin. I mean, if you even just look at one exchange alone, Paxful, they have close to 2 million users in Nigeria, 2 million. And that's just one platform out of many, right? There's also tons of Nigerian built platforms, like whether it be BuyCoins or Bitnob, et cetera. So you're seeing an explosion of innovation and of people using Bitcoin there for some of the same reasons you know as you might in cuba um again in cuba it's it's really hard to send remittance right if you live in the united states the u.s government has passed laws preventing you in the u.s from sending money to cuba that's on the u.s side that's not like the cash that's not the fault of the castros right so what do people do i mean they might pay a mule

to like literally take they might wire cash to panama and then pay somebody to get an airplane to go to Cuba. They might wire money to Spain or Canada and have that person top up someone's MLC account. All this stuff is expensive, time consuming. I mean, it's just a huge bureaucratic hassle. So that's why they're just Bitcoin, boom, right there, direct, instantly. If you use something like the Moon Wallet or the Blue Wallet, you can use Lightning. You're sending $50, $100, $1,000 for a couple Satoshis for literally free, essentially. And it's instant, right? um and similar to nigeria like nigerians are largely cut off from from the outside world in many ways um and and yet bitcoin is a great connector like the friends of mine made a an

app called send cash and it allows anyone in the world to send value uh on an app uh with bitcoin to any bank account in nigeria and it settles in minutes i mean with with no fee right if you look at Send Cash Africa. That's an incredible innovation on par with what Jack Muller and Stryker are doing, right? So you're seeing people fight their way out. And again, Cuba, Afghanistan, Nigeria, three countries that all have a pretty strong dependence on remittances. Nigeria is also 4% or 5% for a much larger country, obviously. So you're talking billions of dollars. But some of these countries, Pomp, like, I mean, you think about there are smaller island countries. There are countries throughout West Africa, South Asia. Some of these countries are 30. I mean,

you know, El Salvador is 20, 25% dependent on remittances. So you have a lot of the developing world where like a really large percentage of the GDP of basically the economic engine of the country runs on money being sent home. And you look at the average remittance, the average Mittens, you know, has a fee of, you know, something like six, seven, eight percent that's being taken by middlemen. It takes a couple of days. It could get frozen. That's that's in the past, man. That's in the rearview mirror, hopefully, for a lot of people, because as you as you held the funeral for Western Union, like these these these guys are just they're the next blockbuster. I mean, they're going to go in the trash bin of history because we have a better

technology now that's going to do so, so much better for people. It's going to help them save their time and energy more effectively. And, and it's going to really lift a lot of people up. I could not agree more. Obviously. Uh, I've got my two brothers here with me. Uh, you guys got any questions? Yeah, I'll go first. Uh, Alex, thanks for doing this. Really appreciate you coming on big fan of, uh, everything you guys are doing. I guess my question would be just around, um so the human rights uh foundation like how has what you guys are focusing on a daily basis changed over the last few years and uh off of that how can the bitcoin community help support what you guys are doing uh and amplify your message yeah well i mean the world has

kind of stagnated in terms of democratic progress in the last 15 years you obviously you had this incredible historic you know series of waves of democracy uh in the in the in the 70s in the 80s and the 90s i mean not that long ago europe was was there was dictatorships all over europe you had greece portugal spain um then you obviously had the fall of the soviet union you had open societies pop up all over eastern europe you had a lot of elections you had a lot of uh good good good reforms like amazing progress for people all over the world and then that kind of like slowed down and it actually stopped kind of in the last 15 years. And what we've seen in our work is large countries like Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Turkey, take really big

steps backwards in terms of human rights. So the need for the work of groups like ours, I think, is more important than ever. You're seeing a lot of backsliding and you're also seeing governments figure out how to use technology to repress people. I think that most technology is honestly, unfortunately, kind of authoritarian. If you think about things like big data analysis, AI, this idea of central bank digital currencies, this idea of social credit, this idea of everything going digital and making it easier for the state to do things, that's not great for the individual. So we're up in a difficult time. Our work has changed, again, to adapt to this idea of, wow, we're really like, you know, in a defensive position right now, but also that technology is at the heart of everything. I mean, if you think about what's happening in whether it be Xinjiang with, you know, the persecution of millions of Uyghurs, I mean, it's all done in a high tech police state.

Whether you think about the surveillance of activists like Jamal Khashoggi, who was a Saudi journalist who was murdered by the Saudi government in a grisly affair in Istanbul. My organization, we made a movie about that called The Dissident that I would urge you to check out. it's done by Brian Fogle, who also did Icarus about the Olympic doping scandal in Russia and the cycling team. Um, so check out the dissident. You'll learn a lot about our work there. Um, we, you know, we, we were out there to educate people on why freedom matters and why, why dictatorship and authoritarianism is, is not good for humans. And, and we're out there to like basically shine a light on voices that are, that are making a difference. And, and we're out there to show you how you can help. And I just think over the last five years, especially for me personally, I've

just seen how relevant Bitcoin is to all of this, to this whole mission. Because at the end of the day, we can do a lot of virtue signaling. We can go on Twitter and we can... I did a big piece on Palestine recently, actually. And a lot of people are happy to tweet about free Palestine or help the Palestinians. Okay, fine. That's not actually doing anything. How are you actually going to help somebody who lives in Gaza? Well, you can actually empower them today by teaching them about Bitcoin and onboarding them and helping them, you know, convert their shekels or whatever currency they're using to Bitcoin, that can allow them to connect to their family abroad and have freedom. So I think it's really interesting because Bitcoin in many ways is kind of like the, it's kind of like

the upper, you know, the implementation of human rights activism. And it's not to say I'm not proud of everything else that we do all the time, I think it's vital. But Bitcoin's really like the, you know the actual integration or like the instantiation of um a lot of the like advocacy or activism you see out there and oh like rah rah we should we should help these people um and then you read something in the newspaper oh we should help these people in this country and then you go back to what you're doing no no you can actually help them right now we just have to like teach them about this powerful freedom technology so in that sense i'm more excited than ever because i I think the impact we can make, especially now when we know that this technology is so

young and it's going to take over the world over the coming decade, the impact we can have today by educating and informing activists about it is just staggering to think about. John, what questions you got? Yeah, Alex, thanks for doing this. Thanks for all the work you do as well. I know it's very important, but I'm interested because you were just talking about how Bitcoin is like that freedom power technology um and in gaza how you can help them by having them convert their money into um bitcoin but how do you think about the education gap and getting those people

actually educated besides outside of just like me here in the u.s thinking about family and friends well i think there's two parts to this one is that like bitcoin's kind of fine like it's weird it's like this organic thing that just grows and it's not going to be stopped regardless of what we do or not do. But on the other hand, people aren't going to be fine, right? So I'm less worried about Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is going to, I mean, if you look at every day, there's more and more institutions adopting it. I mean, yesterday we had Substack. We had the second largest home lender in America. We had Iran reverse Bitcoin mining. We had El Salvador installing Bitcoin machines, you know, ATMs all over the country. Like the milestones are turning

into a blur. It's like the beginning of this hyper-Bitcoinization thing that we all thought may happen. So I think Bitcoin's fine, but I think people need our help. So again, I want to do what I can do to help the leaders of the human rights activist movements around the world. And that's what we do through our Oslo Freedom Forum series. We have a great conference happening in Miami on October 4 and 5, where we have really prominent human rights activists. We have Alexei Navalny giving a speech that he's going to smuggle out of prison. We have the opposition leader of Belarus. We have the secretary general of Amnesty International. We have a lot of amazing speakers on the human rights side, and we're also going to be running a Bitcoin Academy. So my hope is to

put this power into the hands of activists who can then, in this trickle-down sense, educate the rest of the movement in their countries. So that's what I want to do through human rights foundation um but you know i think that everybody can start local you know with their own family and friends and just you know you gotta give them some perspective like i wrote this piece that might be helpful called check your financial privilege which i think is important because so many people in the west are comfortable with their money like they're not dealing with what afghans or cubans or palestinians are dealing with like they have we have venmo whatever it's cool like the dollar's fine like it inflates a little bit it's not a big deal whatever um i can just i have

a 401k and i i you know i can do a swipe i have apple pay all these things like cubans have none of those things right so there's this great disparity um and even a lot of americans don't have those things like tons of americans are underbanked like you know or unbanked and a lot of communities that are that are financially discriminated against i mean i think the work of isaiah jackson is really key in this area obviously you guys have had him on and continue to work with him um so it's really a global conversation um but i do think that that that showing the stories of people struggling around the world and how they're finding some hope in bitcoin it is helpful in convincing people who are skeptical like what do they say to that i mean

there's no retort i mean you can be some snide journalist or you know investor and you're like oh bitcoin's like a scam or whatever and it's like oh really well like you know that is really privileged of you to say that and and i'm you know you know why don't you try living on the sudanese pound for three months and then get back to me about how bitcoin's useless like if these people would just get out of their bubble and and put themselves in somebody else's shoes for three days i mean they would never complain to us about bitcoin ever again so it's just a matter of like helping them understand that like we had a central banker yesterday neil kashkari from the the minneapolis fed he's out there talking about how he doesn't see how cryptocurrency is anything

but a scam and it's like man like how how you know how sheltered is he man that is just so crazy to think about when there are people in his own in his own state in minneapolis who are who are earning and and saving and really like lifting themselves up with bitcoin forget cuba or palestine there are people in downtown minneapolis doing that so i think it's just a matter of time with these people and we want to be open and and helpful and we want to we want to share this educational material with them i think that's that's quite important if people want to support what we're doing at hrf um you know we're doing a couple things uh we're doing a lot of public advocacy like this right uh we're doing hands-on trainings like i mentioned to you all at our

events through the Oslo Freedom Forum. And then we also have a dev fund where we collect money from donors and then we give it to Bitcoin devs who are working on open source privacy technology, open source wallet technology around the world. We've done a lot of things I'm proud of, sponsoring Moon Wallet, sponsoring Spectre, helping people run nodes, helping people use Lightning. We have a lot of gifts coming in the next couple of weeks. We have a big announcement i'm really excited about um every quarter we give we give funding out so you know you want to support us you can check out href.org slash btc if you want to donate in bitcoin uh or just if you wanted to learn about it go to href.org go to the oslo freedom forum uh would be really

grateful to to get feedback from people and and hear hear how you want to contribute i think the cool part is now that we live in this bitcoin world you can make a difference so immediately you know anywhere you want alex it goes without saying that uh i my brothers etc all uh really appreciate the work you guys are doing it's just you know it's one of these situations where i think on the internet uh everyone likes to yell and scream and act like idiots but the gravity of the situation when you understand how much people are hurting um how bad uh some people are um in terms of the situation that they're in and the help that they need uh i wish that there was a hundred organizations like you all, but, but you guys are continuing to kind of push forward

and really make a material impact in the world, which, uh, you know, is, um, uh, just great to see. And so anyone who's watching this, who, uh, is interested in this stuff or wants to learn more highly, highly, highly suggest going to hrf.org, uh, or hrf.org slash BTC is, uh, is, uh, where you can see that Bitcoin developers fund. If anyone remembers the Bitcoin pizza, we actually took the profits from that and donated it there. And we've got some other stuff that we'll be doing in the future. So, you know, basically, if you want to help, that is probably one of the best places you can go. But I appreciate you coming on here and just talking about kind of the reality of the situation, because I think it's easy for most people to see Bitcoin and the price charts

and yell and scream on the internet and laser eyes and everything is fun. But obviously, this technology is really, really powerful and can help a lot of people. So hopefully, we can continue to kind of push that forward over time. Yeah, thanks for having me on. And just one thing to take away to remember is that before Bitcoin, every fiat currency or every digital currency that ever had existed, the rules about the money were controlled by a small group of people, whether that be bureaucrats, a currency board, a Fed, a central bank, or even a company. If you're a company making your own

currency or issuing your own credit system. And Satoshi gave us a new way forward. Satoshi invented a digital currency where the money rules aren't controlled by a small group of people. They're actually controlled by you. So Bitcoin users, you decide what implementation of the protocol you want to run. And you decide whether or not there should be 21 million. And all the Bitcoin users are united in a particular way that defends the protocol and that keeps the money system the way it is, where it's transparent and open. And I think that's important to point out today. And I'm grateful to live in a world with Bitcoin. If we didn't have Bitcoin, again, all currencies around the world would be subject to change by a small group of people.

And absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that's just the way it is. I mean, look, there's a lot of nice people out there. I'm not doubting people's intentions, but at the end of the day, power corrupts and people, you know, people do find ways to exploit. And even if you're someone who goes into the central banking world and you feel like you're going to make a difference and help people, at the end of the day, all you're doing is doing your best, right? And you're going to tweak things, you're gonna move things around, you're going to do your best. And the same goes for any currency project that has a small group of people who decide the monetary issuance. And at the end of the day, Bitcoin is different. And I'm so glad

it exists as just like an escape. And as a new foundation for a new system. So I look forward to being on this journey with you guys. As we as we enter this next decade. Thanks so much for having me on hrf.org slash btc or go follow alex at gladstein on twitter thank you so much my friend we will uh we will definitely be doing this again so keep up the good work and we'll talk soon thanks pomp thanks guys thanks see you buddy