Hello, and welcome to 21 and 21. I'm Haley Burko, and today I'm speaking with Alex Gladstein. Alex is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human's Right Foundation, and a powerful advocate for how Bitcoin can empower people living in authoritarian societies. Alex, it's so great to see you again at Presidio Bitcoin.
I love coming here. Love what you guys are doing here.
Well, I always appreciate an Alex visit. You've been here a few times, so thank you for taking this time.
Won't be the last.
Great. We love that.
I think you've seen this show before, so I'm going to start this clock.
Let's go.
We're going to get into it. Let's go.
Before you came such a strong voice for Bitcoin, what got you into the human rights space?
So in short world events, I was in high school during 9-11 and the Iraq war, the American invasion of Iraq.
And it made me very curious about the world around me.
and I wanted to seek knowledge that would help me interpret and help me understand what was going on.
So I started looking at international relations in college.
I was actually going to go into hard sciences.
I probably would have ended up like one of these engineers here.
But I went to international relations and Middle Eastern studies
and I started looking at that part of the world
and that's what led me to my internship at the Human Rights Foundation
was looking at civil liberty stuff.
so really the spark was trying to understand the the wider world around me
i guess if you already had an interest in hard science maybe bitcoin was kind of
perfect blend of this equation of all of your interests i mean bitcoin's a mirror i always
say that it's reflects back at you what uh what you want to see and it reflects back at me
everything that i want to say all the things i'm interested in i can find it in bitcoin
And yeah, it's been my greatest teacher, I would say, for sure, of any course or college session or seminar.
Bitcoin's taught me the most about the world around me.
So you obviously have done a lot.
You do a lot.
You write.
You speak.
Travel.
You put on events.
What's some of the things that are most top of mind to you right now?
Well, you all did a event here that looked at the intersection between Bitcoin and AI a few months ago. And that's something I'm pretty consumed with, especially the open source AI tool stuff. How can activists use that? So we've started a new program at Ahrefs that seeks to sort of take the blueprint of what we've done with the Bitcoin program, with the financial freedom program, and then do what worked best with AI tools.
So we're going to do two things, kind of like how at the Bitcoin program at HRF, we have a CBDC tracker that tracks the rise of CBDCs all around the world. And we have research that looks at how governments are attacking Bitcoin users. And at the same time, we're just heavily investing in open source Bitcoin work and communities and education around the world.
so same thing we're going to expose and track how governments are using ai to repress people
but we're also going to heavily heavily invest in and support open source tooling for for activists
so they can scale their work and it's probably the thing i've changed my mind the most on
five years ago if you'd asked me i really thought ai was a communist state control thing that was
going to be a disaster for civil liberties and there still is some of that obviously but i'm now
so much more bullish on the impact it's going to have for individual freedom.
Well, I was actually going to ask you later on about AI and the intersection with Bitcoin.
So I'm glad that you're thinking about it already.
I mean, obviously in San Francisco, AI is like a really hot topic.
It's like everywhere you look.
But mostly buzzwords.
Mostly buzzwords.
But also using it a lot as a tool and work, especially kind of on the creative marketing side.
But just in general, like I use AI a lot.
I'm curious if you're seeing human activists using AI too, and if so, how?
Well, I think it started with LLMs, right?
So just helping with research and writing is huge.
I mean, just the fact that you can say, because you have to understand that human rights activists and small NGOs spend a lot of their time reporting to donors and filing grant reports and writing grant proposals and interacting with their donor base is a huge chunk of their work.
and if you're a founder who's really focused on street activism or some sort of creative activism
or the thing that you're doing like environmentalism or investigative reporting or labor rights,
whatever it is, it sucks to have to spend all your time raising money and reporting to people.
So the fact that now you can just use a state-of-the-art LLM and just be like, hey,
please scour the web for the work we've done in the last year and use some of these documents too
and write me a 24-page report on our successes. And then you just send that out or, you know,
hey, you know, write a letter that goes to the people who support this foundation that's kind
of like ours. I want it in this tone, in this style, and I want you to help us raise money
with it. And then it's like, it can expand what's possible with a small team by 10x.
And that's just the LLM stuff. I think we're getting to the point where, I mean,
keynotes, graphic designs, animations, we're not quite there yet, but you can see that within the
next year, we'll be there. Like right now, the graphic design stuff doesn't, it's still like
confused, but like we're going to get there and it's just going to wipe out so much of the tedious
work that activists have to do. And it's going to make it a joy for them to do that. All the vibe
coding stuff is just going to be so huge. I think so. It already is for many. I mean, I've seen
activists that don't know how to code. They're already vibe coding stuff that work in protests
to coordinate like things like the bit chat type idea that Jack created. Other people have created
similar things for protests specifically, like already, like in the last two months. So we're
excited to be at that intersection of vibe coding for human rights.
It is crazy how much you can do, especially as like a less technical person.
So it incredible to hear that activists can really use AI in ways that can empower them and their productivity and work and impact So what do you think the ideal role of government is if any
Well, that's quite a question.
Well, for starters, I like government for the people.
I think government should serve its people.
And when you think about the word democracy, like the Greek root, I mean, it's really supposed to be people-powered government.
And that's very different from an oligarchy or a tyranny or any other, you know,ocracy that you can think of, right?
And I think we're on the pathway there.
There's no perfection.
There's nothing even close, right?
But I do think, generally speaking, what we have is in the right direction in a place like America, domestically at least, where you have...
a federal government in charge of certain things. But a lot really needs to be done,
I think, more at the community level, at the local level, at the state level.
So I like the fact that we have that kind of system. It's not great when there's like central
bureaucracy, like in the EU that, you know, is making decisions for all these different people,
all these different cultures. And that's tough. It leads to tough outcomes. So I think local
governance is really important. And I hope to see a world with a lot more local governance.
and you know at the end of the day government is there to to mediate disputes and to help
prevent people inflicting violence on each other and those are two of its most important roles
and and i hope to see a reduction of what the the sort of federal government does
and maybe stronger local government structures so that would be that would be interesting to me
kind of on that topic of you know local government the power of bitcoin and there's just generally
just a lot of narratives around bitcoin and how people get into it um have you seen the human
rights angle kind of shift maybe perspective of people those who are skeptical of bitcoin or
anti-bitcoin yeah for sure but it takes an open mind right it's you know it's like all the
arguments about Bitcoin mining. If you think Bitcoin is useless, of course, it's a waste of
energy. If you don't understand what it does. So I think the work we do in helping explain to people
that it's actually this really revolutionary human rights tool is very important because once you
understand its utility, then you look at things like the power use and the criminality aspects
differently. Once you know it's this thing that's so important and we have to work on it,
then it changes completely the framework of all the other FUD. Like the FUD dice that Nick Carter
once made, you know, has all those things on all the different FUDs. That really changes once you
understand that this thing's of vital importance for civilization. Once you understand that,
then we can have different conversations about mining and energy use and criminality and
volatility and all these other things. So I think ultimately the human rights piece is important,
but people still have to be open to it. There are still so many people in denial who won't even talk
about it. They just, you know, they're like, oh, you're just making this up. There's a heavy,
heavy amount of salt out there. It's really tough, even today still. But we're winning. I mean,
we're getting there. It's like nuclear power. I mean, we're always going to have some deniers.
It just sucks that like 90% of the world is still like full on denial mode or ignorant about it.
I think in the next decade, that's going to change completely, though. And I do think Bitcoin
is going to be driven a lot by activism in the same way that technologies like
PGP and Signal and then even Twitter itself were, you know, one of Twitter's big moments was the
Arab Spring, right? That really turned it from like a micro blogging community in San Francisco
to like a global events thing. That's what Jack said. And I agree. So I think human rights
communities are really going to push Bitcoin too, because they're the ones that really need money
that the government can't control. Yes, it can be hard for people who live in the United States or
countries that have more privileges to see the use case for Bitcoin as much?
We need to check our financial privilege, basically. That's what I think.
Yes. What do you think, like, what's a world on the Bitcoin standard look like to you?
That's a really great question. I think ultimately, as an American, it's a world where
we have more of the best sides of our nature as a country and a society and less of the bad sides
of our nature as a society and as a country. I think that in a Bitcoin standard, people have
more power over their lives, more power over what they can do with their time.
These are huge generalizations, but I do think they're, I believe them to be true, I think.
I think the government will be less wasteful in terms of being able to do things like
expensive foreign wars in places that the average citizen can't name, crazy sort of
militarized policing and industrial prison complexes that the average person doesn't
really want to see. There's a lot of excesses in our current system, war on drugs type stuff,
massive amounts of surveillance. A lot of this is done without consent of the people because
it's been able to be funded by essentially by the national credit card. So if that's not possible
to do anymore, if spending really requires consent of the people, and if you basically
have to tax for it or get them to give you money in the form of bonds, which is how we
used to fund warfare back in the day, and we used to fund all these social programs this
way, then I think we'll have a more collaborative society that's both more prosperous and dynamic
at home, but especially abroad.
I do think if Bitcoin standard is going to completely change the way America interacts
with the rest of the world, and I think in a good way.
I think we have a chance to be a lot more collaborative and less exploitative with the rest of the world.
So I'm super excited about that.
And as far as how does it look like specifically, we could just think about the fact that everybody will earn the same currency.
So you won be able to do this game that companies play today where they pay someone way less in some other country just because they make some other currency No everybody going to earn sats And you may not I don know if we going to be on chain I don know That for a different discussion but I don know if everybody going to be on chain but everybody going to be denominated in sats
I think, obviously, in a Bitcoin standard. So it's a little different than when you,
today you have Naira and dollars and pesos and lira and governments can devalue people's time
in half because they're on different standards, 180 different standards. Under one standard,
that's at least one thing you can't do anymore. You can't just like press a red button and just
steal from everybody. If everybody's on sats, the idea of currency devaluation goes away.
The idea of these overnight massive currency devaluations that billions of people have
suffered from go away. So Bitcoin standard did not fix everything, but it does address
quite a bit in terms of, I think, fundamental individual human dignity and control over your
time and control over the fruit of your labor. So you just said the word sats four times.
Yeah. I'm a sats maximalist.
Okay, your stats, Michael.
Obviously, there's a lot of talk going on about how we speak about the fractions.
Yes, sure.
Your team stats?
I mean, I would confess that it's not at my top of my priority list, and I don't mind either way.
I would just observe that it's an organic phenomenon, and I don't see any issue with stats.
Like, if you look at how the dollar and the dollar system evolved with denominations, you know, it used to just be,
you'd walk into a store and it'd be like one or two or they wouldn't even say what what you know
cents or dollars it's just like a thing and it changed over time so we'll see i don't think it's
one of the biggest priorities not not not an obstacle in my mind like people do not get a
human rights act this is not something that somebody actually gets confused about that i've
seen but now maybe other people have different experiences so they know the difference between
sats and bitcoin and it's not if you depend on it you learn pretty quickly yeah that like
100 million sats is different from 100 million Bitcoin, which doesn't exist. So yeah, but it's
got to take someone, if someone's actually like using it in their business, or they're sending
money to a friend abroad, they immediately, they'll have to understand, they will learn about
that. It's not that complicated, in my view. Plus, I like honoring Satoshi. So we'll see.
So leaning more into people using Bitcoin as a form of money or just relying on it,
What are some of the UX challenges that you've heard from activists in regards to Bitcoin?
Well, I mean, going back a few years, the idea of like a Bolt 12 offer or a lightning address was something that was really wanted back in the day, like three, four or five years ago.
We started doing this work with activists, I guess more than that now.
And those exist now, which is super cool.
Like the idea of a lightning address is very helpful.
and having alphanumeric bolt 12 really cool 12 cash type stuff if you can rig it up the right way
i think what we need now is more like um you know because bitcoin is like this push system or
whatever so more of something where it's like you're on the internet and you want to donate
or buy something you can just have your alphanumeric identity or email or whatever it is
set up in such a way where it can be almost like debited from um that's obviously not what's really
happening because bitcoin doesn't really work like that but that it's that it's plugged in in
some way where you don't have to generate do an invoice every time and interact with it like
definitely the invoices have improved a lot since a while ago but the ideal world is one where you're
not you can load something in that's some sort of static identity at least that doesn't betray
your secrets that can just be like interacted with by merchants you know so that would be the
next level for me like if we could get there and i know some people have already gotten there in
some ways which is cool uh like using bitcoin admin money is so much easier than it used to be
like whether you strike or cash up on the custodial side or like i'll be on the self-custodial side
and you're like i was just buying something on the internet yesterday with lightning and i was just so
shocked by how easy it was just go to the store through the thing in my uh shopping cart put in
where i wanted to be shipped and then hit pay and then scan the code and it was done and it was just
amazing and and that was not the case five years ago so we've made a lot of strides i think
being money that we can actually use and i think what square is going to do with the
the readers is going to be really interesting like that's going to start to get very exciting
and I'm going to be spending a lot of Bitcoin.
Yeah, it's going to be fun.
I'm excited for it too.
So HRF does a lot with funding open source contributors.
What would you say kind of some of the biggest learnings
of the grant program have been?
Well, at first it was like hard to find good projects
in five years ago when we started the program.
Now it's like a deluge of people coming to us with ideas
And there are way too many ideas that we can possibly fund is what I've learned, is that the space is really maturing.
Whereas five years ago, you didn't have that many Bitcoin educational initiatives in South America.
Like, this just didn't really exist.
Today, there's dozens and dozens and dozens, right?
So they keep multiplying every day all around the world.
Translation projects, hubs, spaces like Presidio Bitcoin, places like local hosts that are supporting local developers,
uh ux design projects merchant adoption stuff each world region has so much of that each going on
and uh we just see it in the deluge of cool projects that get submitted to us
cold storage multi-sig all kinds of interesting stuff new wallets that do different things
um all kinds of lightning and e-cash things complementary tech with nostr it's just uh
it's dizzying now so what i've learned is that the space has like really matured and the number
of people dedicating their lives to Bitcoin
and Bitcoin related stuff is orders of magnitude more than it was in let say before the pandemic You know it just we really really matured So big lesson there Any specific projects that are doing impactful stuff that you want to shout
I mean, I really like what Africa Free Routing is doing and what BTC Data are doing in Africa.
I mean, Africa Free Routing, you should follow them.
They're like doing these incredible live boot camps where you take developers and they start
hacking lightning.
and there's 20, 30, 40, 50 people in the room
and they were in Benin
and now they're going to be in Zambia
and they're going all over the continent.
It's amazing.
And those people are all going to have skills
that they can, especially with AI tools,
that now they can like work for companies abroad
and they can get paid in sats
or they can at least do stuff
with companies like Stackwork
where they can do micro jobs.
Like it's getting very exciting.
Like a replet equipped lightning engineer anywhere
who can get paid in Bitcoin,
you know, can start basically competing
with someone who just got a PhD from Stanford.
Like it's getting really exciting on that front.
BTC Data does work with helping women
in different communities in Africa
learn how to use Bitcoin,
how to save in it,
and how to use it as a,
like a sword and a shield basically
to fight for their place in society.
So those two projects are just
sort of totally next level, I think.
And hopefully we see a lot more like that.
A couple more minutes.
A few more questions.
So I have to get at least one spicy question for you.
Do you have any controversial Bitcoin opinions?
Controversial Bitcoin opinions.
Well, obviously, it was very controversial that I thought it was.
There's nuance, but that I didn't think that simping for Bukele was like a good idea.
That one, I got a lot of heat for that one.
That one's that one's probably been the toughest.
I mean, I mean, from day one, I was very excited about the Bitcoin law in El Salvador.
in as much as I just think if you're going to have legal tender, I mean, any country that has
legal tender, we should definitely have Bitcoin as legal tender also. So I thought that was a step
in the right direction. And I thought it was just going to be interesting and cool for there to be
like an open environment for the support of things like remittances in Bitcoin and things like that.
But at the same time, I had observed to that point that this leader was showing a lot of
authoritarian signs. And those have really obviously amplified. And, you know, I went there
or four years ago. And since then, he's like, you know, basically gotten rid of term limits,
dismantled any possible opposition, murdered opponents. It's getting really dicey down there.
So from a civil liberties point of view, like, don't get me wrong, he's clearly presided over
a lot of security and safety. But those are not the same thing as freedom. They're different things.
So the question is, can you do both, which is really what you want in a society? You want to
be free and safe. You don't just want to be safe and you don't just want to be free. You want both.
And I just don't think that that model is going to do well. And that's been a very spicy take because everybody loved him for the Bitcoin stuff. But to be honest, like, yeah, I mean, he's bought some Bitcoin, but we don't know who controls it. We don't really know how much he has. Who's got the keys? It's taxpayer money. The taxpayers have no control over it. So it's been, you know, and it's been super disappointing that he started taking money from the IMF and now is scrapping a lot of the Bitcoin stuff that I thought was most exciting in the first place.
none of the mining really came to fruition.
There's no Bitcoin city.
So a lot of these things were promises
that he very wisely made
because he got super famous
and it was sexy to be the Bitcoin dictator or whatever.
But I think a lot of that stuff's falling away
and we're seeing, you know,
that maybe the commitment to Bitcoin
is not really what it once was.
But at least he's not shitcoining, I guess.
That's a, yet, that's a positive.
That is a positive.
Okay, one more question
And we'll have it be a positive one.
Okay.
What gives you the most hope for Bitcoin's future?
I think that each adoption cycle, like we're in right now, another cycle, brings in a whole new wave of new people who weren't in Bitcoin before.
And they add incredible things to Bitcoin.
Absolutely incredible.
And I still believe this, that in 2050, when, if there is still a Time magazine or whatever, we'll see legacy media. But let's say Time magazine still exists and it's still doing like top 10 lists or whatever. When Time magazine does its top 10 most important people in Bitcoin's history, I still think that six or seven of those people at least aren't in Bitcoin yet.
I think they're going to come in through these adoption cycles. They might be entrepreneurs, industrialists, designers, developers doing stuff at a civilizational level that today are like not interested in Bitcoin. But the next cycle, the one after that, the one after that is going to bring everybody in. So I'm most excited for all the human capital that's going to be drawn into this project that we're all working on together and how it's going to drive us even further. And that's just something I'm super, super bullish about.
I love that answer and especially you know emphasizes that people aren't too late and
there's not at all we're at the beginning early innings here early innings remember that like
99% of UX designers still aren't working on Bitcoin 99% of developers still aren't working
on Bitcoin like we're we're not there yet we're not there yet but good start though good start
we're doing good yeah start um well that was the last of my questions that I have time for
so for our listeners
if they want to reach out to you
where can they learn more
any suggestions
books they should read
sure so you can go to href.org
and check out our financial freedom page
if you want to learn about our programs
or webinars or grants
you can follow me on x at Gladstein
I also in my profile have my Nostra and Pub
if you want to follow me on a better social network
that can't be stopped
where you have your control over your data and identity
and choice over what client to use
go over there
And then you can take a look at some of my books,
Check Your Financial Privilege or Hidden Repression,
and hopefully some new stuff I have coming out soon.
So thanks for having me on.
Of course, you're always welcome here.
Amazing.
Great, thank you.
Thank you.