278: Alex Gladstein on Fighting the Normalization of Surveillance

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. ===============================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  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

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

  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/pomp as well. All right, let's get into this episode with Alex. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm super excited to have Alex Gladstein back. Thank you so much for doing this, man.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been close to a year and a half since I was on last and feels like we're in a new age.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  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,

• 3:17Speaker 02

  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's a communist country and the government, you know, doesn't allow you to watch, read anything that they don't approve of. So that was kind of, I cut my teeth on that kind of.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  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 the, these kind of underground networks that sell foreign media and information into North Korea. So I spent a lot of time doing that.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  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, you know, 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 conveniences 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.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  I mean, we're worried mainly about surveillance capitalism and, you know, overreach of marketing in many, 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. You know, 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, you know, my work at HRF 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, you know, the role Bitcoin can play in

• 6:12Speaker 02

  the global struggle for human rights.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  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

• 6:59Speaker 01

  health and economic crises. And so maybe let's just start with like how bad the problem really is, right? I know that you guys have done some work on understanding. We see data being presented from countries all around the world around the health crisis 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 kind of level-setting those data sets versus countries where maybe there's more democracy or transparency and confirmation of the of the numbers and data?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  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

• 8:18Speaker 02

  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 being almost won by a particular side. And that's again, the side of, you know, 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 are like, well, whatever, privacy, who cares? What's more important now is that we save lives. And they kind of look to China

• 9:00Speaker 02

  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 about their rights and freedoms because they they're just focused on what they're learning about COVID and 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 it shows all these countries kind of like going up over time. And then it shows

• 9:41Speaker 02

  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 in Gulag in Xinjiang, in the northwest part of China. In the northwest part of China, we can see from outer space using satellite imagery

• 10:24Speaker 02

  that there are vast numbers, a huge network of concentration camps, prison camps, where the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, is imprisoning male Uighurs. They're a Muslim minority, ethnic minority. And they're 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

• 11:07Speaker 02

  in Silicon Valley are basically looking at China and saying, "Yeah, we might have to, you know, follow some of their measures." They've, you know, I know, you know, they're like, "Well, you know, they might be doing some things we don't like, but, you know, 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?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  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 are 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.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  And the final piece to this puzzle is that if, 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, that's their honest argument. Then we need to consider the fact that how is it possible that the, 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 in human history, did such a bad job controlling the outbreak at the beginning in December and in January,

• 13:12Speaker 02

  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, 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

• 13:57Speaker 02

  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, the kind of axes of censorship and control and surveillance to win the day, we're not going to like the results.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  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

• 15:01Speaker 01

  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?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  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, 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. This is, there's no like conflict in that.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  So that's kind of where I'm coming from. And I'm looking at this from the perspective of who's, 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. There, I mean, look, there are even parts of the United States, there are large country-sized states, you know, 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.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  And these are all, 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. Hand washing is number one step. And that, 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.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  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 sized metropolitan area to New York City, which has, you know, 25-plus-thousand deaths. How, 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 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

• 18:34Speaker 02

  the facial recognition in the surrounding state. 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, 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,

• 19:14Speaker 02

  you know, without an undue imposition on our civil liberties. And then you have, you know, the, you know, a couple, a couple, a couple of other things. But when it, 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, 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.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Where I have a, 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

• 20:39Speaker 02

  social distancing, and they've shut down certain businesses and, you know, have certain measures to prevent people from gathering. That is why they are doing swell, not because of contact tracing. The health minister essentially of Taiwan was interviewed recently.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  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 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 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.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Okay, so we have some data from quite a few countries saying that there's no real evidence that this thing 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, etc. So we're talking about a third of the world could come under surveillance from this particular idea. And people were cheering, dude. 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.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  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 to prove that they care about your privacy? Seriously? And people look at this, I don't know if you've looked at the documentation, but it's very thin, very vague, very utopian for their plan to basically use the Bluetooth technology in your phone. And the very brief way that I'll 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?

• 23:08Speaker 02

  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... Your phone and that phone can exchange 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.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  I was looking at something today that said that basically the problem comes from when 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.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  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 cellphone 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.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  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. Their current triangulation of cellphone tracking doesn't allow them to do that. If you listen to the, for example, the Rogan episode with Snowden, he talks about how your phone has a unique identifier, it has a, your SIM card has a unique identifier, et cetera. And, 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

• 27:14Speaker 02

  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?

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, my whole thing is 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.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  It's a euphemism. It sounds great. Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  If I said to you, we're going to surveil the population, and then we're going to label who is positive and who is not, all of a sudden, that sounds a lot more scary, a lot more worrisome, right? And so the language, you know, there's a joke that I always go back to, and 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.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  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, whoa, timeout. I don't want 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. How do we do it? We agree to digital contact tracking.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  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. 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, it can, again, you know, the science of marketing, we can make it sound slick and call it digital contact tracing. You know, where does it end?

• 30:10Speaker 02

  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, regardless of whether the virus has been beaten back or not, they are allowing people to start to like, leave their homes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  So who decides what is green and what is yellow? There was a video I watched, which was quite informative, from a British guy who's 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

• 31:36Speaker 02

  if you're, 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, uh, you know, what kind of loan you can get, where you can travel, what kind of, um... 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.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  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, there's an old Soviet joke that HRF's chairman Gary 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 gonna in six months delete it off your phone. No, they're gonna find a new reason for it. The FBI is gonna look at and be like, hey, this is actually really useful for this other thing that we need.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Or some other company is gonna 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 like 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 this slippery slope to color coding. And it's gonna 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,

• 33:44Speaker 02

  to wearables that we wear on our wrist, to eventually a chip, dude, that's gonna be either in your wrist or your retina or whatever. Sure, that's gonna 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 gonna kind of go from kind of over the skin surveillance to under the skin surveillance, which is a concept that Yuval Noah 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 gonna 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

• 34:28Speaker 02

  challenge people on the Apple and Google project. People are calling me a religious fundamentalist, a privacy absolutist, whatever. 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 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

• 35:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  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 the Apple headphone or kind of the in-ear headphone that still had a cord on it, right, and plugged into a device. Now we've got iPods with, or I'm sorry, the AirPods, which will go in your ear. They're wireless. The belief is that at some point, we continue to get closer and closer. Eventually, that'll

• 36:11Speaker 01

  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

• 36:53Speaker 01

  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?

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, yeah, of course, you could leave your phone at home if you want to, or you can put it down. You can do things to your phone to prevent it from tracking you, meaning you can, 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 Tor browser and different apps on the phone to basically be completely private. It's really, really cool. But that stuff is going to be 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. So I think it's important

• 37:47Speaker 02

  that we like, fight now, to make sure that the open source, pro privacy, you know, technologies and narratives are strong. There's a good, really good book that I recommend your listeners read called The Mandibles. It's very, very important. And

• 38:07Speaker 02

  It's a fiction book that describes 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 starts to have on people. Like, one of the characters lives in Brooklyn. There's a refugee 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.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  And it's obviously a dramatic narrative plot device, but it is something that is something we should think about. Like, you know, 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 this ends. There's no, like, good outcome.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  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 to fight the virus. We don't have to go down that road. We can fight the virus 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, investment in public health infrastructure.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  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 what, 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, into 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,

• 41:00Speaker 02

  these two authoritarian systems, 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 know, 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. Like, 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 1,000 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

• 41:45Speaker 02

  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 bogeyman then was terrorism, which was real and devastating, but you know, did not excuse what happened after. Similarly here.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  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, is just a really, really bad idea. And, 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, the, again, just to repeat, the way you're, you know, you, you can currently be tracked on your phone is, 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

• 43:11Speaker 02

  to the inch, whereas the current tracking can't. And, you know, why would you trade off even more of your privacy and freedoms for something that may not even work? So I hope you can, I hope you can remember this as we, 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 US 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, 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 I, my advice to people

• 43:55Speaker 02

  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, with Bitcoin, we can have, 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.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  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,

• 45:23Speaker 02

  this effect named after this British economist from the 19th century, who basically realized and described that the people who are 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 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 your future where we have governments. But what it will change, hopefully, as we move farther into the future, is this idea that bureaucrats, who aren't even elected,

• 46:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  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 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's, you know, said to somebody, hey, you won't stay

• 47:23Speaker 01

  in quarantine, fine, we're literally gonna put a GPS enabled ankle bracelet on, right? And we're gonna 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 US or other developed nations as well.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, I haven't got, you know, when I was going through all the different tools that are at governments' 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 the good news is in 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.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  It has not been perfect, and there may be an overreaction in many, many ways with regard to this restriction on our civil liberties and freedom of movement and things like that. Personally, I think the way California's doing it is, is, is kind of perfect as much as possible. I mean, it's as good as it's gonna get. Maybe not, I'll take that back, it's not perfect, but it's as good as it's gonna 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, I can 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, parking lots near national parks and the beach are closed down.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  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, and, and, and basically more surveillance, then I'd be very proud about that model. And I hope, I'd hope others could learn from it. But there's no doubt that, 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 a hundred 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.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  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, 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, and will cause death and suffering. And on the other hand, that we do need to take the virus seriously. The, the one thing that, look, democratic society should take from this is they should look again at Taiwan as, as, 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

• 50:37Speaker 02

  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 of the United States to not have a plan and to appoint, 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 the, 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, 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

• 51:20Speaker 02

  have a mutually agreed thing we're going to do when a pandemic hits, there doesn't, 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, we're not planning ahead right now in the United States. We're planning for right now. We were 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. Like, we do not want to be more like the

• 52:04Speaker 02

  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 in 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

• 52:45Speaker 02

  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

• 53:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  This is literally the worst dictatorship in the world that has some massive population, 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 Melisunawi, 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 going to favor the authoritarian model, and he's going to, you know, basically

• 54:26Speaker 02

  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, the what, you know, later on, with the benefit of hindsight, what we've watched is we watched 7 million people leave Wuhan between January, December 31 and January 23. There were no restrictions at all.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  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, saying it's not, nothing to worry about, saying there's not, there's no human-to-human transition, 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.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  But because the World Health Organization doesn't consider Taiwan a country, 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, and the WHO were saying that it was under control. And there's a video from late January of Tedros onstage with Xi Jinping, where he's praising the Chinese leader's handling of the virus. I mean, it's actually so crazy Orwellian.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  And then you saw this continue to proceed where the WHO, um, at first was saying that it was racist to stop travel from China, uh, at the end of January. And, and, and they were condemning essentially the US government and others who were trying to stop travel from China. Um, meanwhile, at the end of March, once China decided it was time to shut down their own travel and only permit one flight to Perdida 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.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Um, 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.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  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, um, you know, very skeptical of what people say. Because essentially, what you have now is, um...

• 58:25Speaker 02

  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 can run a massive deficit and it's fine. And, you know, maybe they're right for the, 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, 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

• 59:09Speaker 02

  is trending towards MMT in most countries. I mean, this is kind of the future of government money is 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?

• 59:52Speaker 01

  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

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was crazy.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  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

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Right, we're going to censor that. And I, 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,

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  The World Health Organization denies that Taiwan's a country, helped China, 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 can we, 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.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  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 US government, right? In various local state or in some cases, those governments. And so to me, it just feels like we're getting into this very slippery slope where you can hide behind policies. 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?

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  Like, I don't, I think this whole idea that like, deplatforming and...

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Like, you know, corporate censorship on our social media platforms is is is is a huge and dire threat 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 for a particular person. I do view what's happening with YouTube very is 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. It's

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  the 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 it's happening. And in that context, I think we can internally

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  and in our own communities, again, rely on on 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. And hopefully, we can, we can, we can, we can see some good out of this. 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

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  feel comfortable just going right now? Like what would have to be the reality?

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  I'm probably the wrong person to ask this question mainly because I generally am of the belief that if you are concerned about your health, you ultimately have the personal responsibility to take care of yourself, right? And 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.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  All of those things are kind of a first, ultimately a personal responsibility.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  When it comes to somebody like me, who, you know, is very fortunate to be younger, to not have any of the pre-existing conditions, right? To kind of be at a lower level, maybe not of getting infected, but definitely of having kind of the death rate affecting 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?

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  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 where everything is, you know, where literally people are coughing on you and stuff like that, that's one thing versus to go and actually sit in a theater, right? Or some sort of much more open seating.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  I guess what I'm getting at is...

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  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 because, look, we do live events, we bring people together, and that may not be able to happen for a while. We gotta do a lot of things virtually. But if you think about like, if you're parents and you wanna, when are you gonna 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 gonna expect the waiters to wear masks and gloves and for the chefs to be temperature-checked? Is that a reasonable expectation? I mean, what, the only society that's, that seems to be like promoting it's, "We're back to normal" in an aggressive way is China, and they're like, you know, probably more similar to London or New York or one of these big metropolitan areas

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  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, you know, there's no one in the crowd, the crowd, but they're playing, you know? So I'm hopeful that like, we can get sports back, we can get music back, but I think it's just gonna be this process.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  And when, you know, I think people need to understand that that's gonna have a very long-tail economic effect on, on our lives. I mean, we just saw this data point today. Another four-plus million people are unemployed. I mean, we've got probably close to 30 million now. I mean, 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 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 you, some of the countries I'm, I'm kind of, I'm talking to people working in certain countries, I mean,

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  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 to really feel it, right? So if you look at Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, 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

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  of cases. 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

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  the right answer. I mean, whether you live in America or or in China, like your government has betrayed you, right, in in in a certain amount, in a certain way, right? And I just think we need to 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 has just never been more clear to me 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

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  we do have, you know, our families and communities that that we can, we can work with and build and build from. And I think a lot of people probably are 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.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  There again, like you're talking about

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  two of the world's largest corporations are unrolling a new surveillance system to track potentially 3.5 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.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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 gonna be a sea change moment,

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  just like the 9/11 was for for for civil liberties and privacy. However, the good news is we now have more tools at our disposal than we did back then. I mean, people can, there was no signal back then. I mean, 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 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 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

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  than we are doing right now.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Human Rights Foundation, again, nonprofit that focuses on helping people around the world who live under authoritarian societies, the 4 billion that don't have the rights and freedoms we do. You can find us at hrf.org or on Twitter at hrf. 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 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

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  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. You don't have to have a particular political opinion or particular knowledge about economics or technology to read the book 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.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Awesome, man. Well, listen, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. You guys are doing incredible work over there. And I think that, you know, people just need to stay vigilant and you guys should lead in the charge. So just from everyone else, thank you for all the work you're doing and we'll have to do this again.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. Very grateful.