I'm really grateful to be able to introduce you to Changpeng Zhao, CZ. He's known around the world as a global businessman and a real influencer in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency. He is the founder of Binance, the author of Freedom of Money, and a friend of mine. And I just want to thank you so much for taking the time. I know that many presidents and heads of state try and get your attention, and you've taken time to speak with members of our community. Unfortunately, they don't have access to the internet, and they may not know all of the influential things you do. And if we could just start very briefly with you talking about the reason that you started to support Prison Professors and help us give free education to people in prison, that would be very helpful.
Sure. Well, thanks for having me first of all. I think basically, you and I both went through this experience of unpleasant prison. And then I was lucky that I only had a short time, but even for me it was a long time, four months, right? For most people in prison, that's a short time. But even just going through that for four months, it's just a very unpredictable, unpleasant, uncontrolled kind of experience. There's a lot of unknowns around, and I think to be honest, I believe many people who are in prison are probably not supposed to be there to begin with. Many people who are there are there for way too long. And to be honest, many people that are supposed to be in prison are not. But we just focus on the people in prison. I think many of them can need a lot of help that's not there. So, I think what the work you are doing is fantastic, and I'm just happy to help.
Well, you certainly helped us a great deal, and one of the things that we are trying to do by working with wardens and prison administrators is to bring our courses into prisons so ultimately, we can create changes that will allow more people to earn freedom through merit. And I'm just curious, if you had that opportunity, CZ, to increase a higher level of liberty based upon your behavior in prison, could you tell me about some of the benefits you would have received if that had been available to you?
I think there's quite a few things. Number one, education, right? There's definitely not enough educational material in prison. There are many fiction novels in the library, but there's just not enough up-to-date education material, which should not be that hard to provide to be honest. Most of the information today given the internet is free. In prison we don't have internet, but it's not just print books. I actually also think it should be perfectly fine to allow a certain level of access to internet, to digital information. You can still control it so that they cannot coordinate crimes outside of prison, etc. But I think for many people there, they would just want to learn. They just want to stay up-to-date, and not having access to real-time new information does not prepare them to leave prison, right? So when they leave prison, they will have no skills to earn a good living. And that actually makes them more prone to recidivism. So all of those are issues. So yeah, I think we see many of those issues.
And if you had had access to those types of pathways where even the system was incentivizing you to pursue education, some of the benefits that I think would have been beneficial to you and thousands of others in prison is you would have served your time in a more favorable institution. You would have had access to time credits. And these are the areas that we're really advocating to change. But one of the things that you wrote about in Freedom of Money and lived is that even though the system was not really designed to help you, you chose to spend your time very productively working in there. And I'd like to talk about how that influenced your time inside, working on your life story, and also how it's impacted the world by you using that time not waiting for the prison to change your life but doing some things productively.
Sure. I think well, many people, you have a lot of time in prison but the time is really divided up. You don't have a lot of freedom to allocate your time and you don't have a lot of places to use your time. So people end up playing dominoes in the common area, watch TV all day long and then just chat. So all of that is actually time wasted. And actually with few things for inmates to do, I actually think that may increase violence, unhappiness, etc. That actually increases the management burden for the prisons. I think the most rewarding experience most people feel is when they're improving a little bit every day, when they're learning something new every day. So that can be knowledge, that can be a skill, that can be a sport, like snowboarding because every day you can improve a little. So I think that's really important there. For me, I spent my time keeping myself busy by reading a book. Many people may or may not be able to do that. I think for people it's important for them to continue to learn about new things. I think prisons should have AI training, should have training about blockchain, should have training about internet, etc. So all of those things are important. I just wish we can find ways to provide that in prison so that people can make the best use of their time and cause less trouble.
Well, you certainly helped us do that by donating Binance Academy. And it may not surprise you that while we're taking courses from Binance Academy and bringing them into prisons, sometimes I face a little bit of resistance saying, 'Well, do you really have authority to provide Binance Academy?' But I would like you to share so I can share it with the wardens that you do think it's important for people to learn about blockchain and Web 3.0 and so forth.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, number one, you have my full permission to use Binance Academy content. It's free. And you distribute to the audience that Binance Academy couldn't reach anyway because the inmates don't have access to computers. It is very important to learn about financial literacy, right? So, if you don't understand money, if you don't understand the technologies powering money, then it's going to be very difficult for you to manage money even if you have a job. Right? So, how do you protect yourself against inflation? How do you protect yourself against other types of scams, etc.? I think all of those things are extremely important for people to learn. I think it's important for people to learn a skill that can help them basically make a living. So, it's important for them to learn technology tools that help them to become more productive. AI, programming, some skill like marketing or some skill set so that they don't have to do what they did before to make money, right? If what they did before was something bad. And then but once you make money, you have to learn how to manage it. So, financial literacy is super important. And blockchain is the new technology. So, it is very important for inmates who spend five, ten, twenty years in prison to learn about these new things so that when they come out they're not blindsided.
