Philip Glazman got involved with Students For Liberty in high school when another local coordinator began mentoring him and sharing reading material.
Glazman said, “At the time I was really into political philosophy and he introduced me to Hayek and Bastiat.”
Armed with this new knowledge, he started a reading club for fellow high school students with similar interests.
Continuing the fight for liberty on campus
With a full ride scholarship to Ramapo College in New Jersey, Glazman became a local coordinator.
In college, he says, he was: “doing the meetups, going to the conferences, going down to DC from where I was in New Jersey.”
As an “aggregator of opportunities,” SFL gave Glazman some of his favorite memories.
“One of my favorite memories was hosting the SFL Tech Freedom conference at NYU in 2016. We invited a few people from the tech community and we talked about tech impacts on liberty, bitcoin, privacy, obfuscation. It was a lot of fun. At the time, a lot of libertarian conferences were more policy-focused and I wanted to bring in the private sector.”
How Bitcoin inspired his passion for liberty
Working on a regional conference in Philadelphia and attending LibertyCon DC both motivated and inspired him.
“You not only get to meet those in the American bubble, but you see that the things we are concerned about are less tangible than the problems people face outside of America. It’s a lot of eye-opening conversations that you don’t get in New York, for example. It grounded me in my interests.”
For Glazman, being part of SFL was “one big awesome community to tap into.”
He told us that, while immersed in this college liberty community, “You’re young and bouncing ideas off each other and it’s one big community. At that time, people were doing traditional academia and policy work. I tried to give it a shot through a Koch fellowship, but I realized that wasn’t for me.”
He realized he wanted “something with more immediate impact. Something that manifested the libertarian ideas and had immediate impact, and bitcoin was the perfect thing. It is the zeitgeist. I learned about bitcoin at an SFL conference; it had everything that I think is important. After college, I worked at Bitmain in Amsterdam, the largest producer of bitcoin miners and they also do wallets and other things. After that, I moved to San Francisco and joined River Financial to help build the best place to buy, sell, and use Bitcoin..”
This job is “like I never left SFL in some ways. At our River Financial office, we have a poster of Hayek in our office, we have copies of Bastiat, and it’s sort of like continuing what I was interested in in college and in school but in the “real world.”
Working in the Bitcoin space at River Financial has a direct relationship towards advancing liberty, according to Philip.
He believes that “the technology enables the separation of money from the state. It’s money that is digitally native, censorship resistant, and has a fixed supply.”
The large public budget deficit and significant money printing over the past year strengthens his belief that “creating easy on ramps to Bitcoin has never been more important.”
Giving back to the next generation of leaders of liberty
Working with River Financial is not the only way Glazman kept SFL in his life.
“I keep in touch with the friends I made through SFL; It’s a foundation of my life in a lot of ways.”
Now that he’s a working professional, he gives back to the next generation of leaders of liberty.
“I try to donate to SFL a little bit each month. I donate back for the in-person events and the opportunities that it brings. What really SFL prodded in me was the opportunities to host events and invite like-minded people.”
SFL matters to Glazman because it teaches things that students won’t learn in school.
“It was never about convincing people, but an exploration of the truth. There was never this type of avenue in traditional schooling, so SFL provides a separate option to let me learn more about economics and philosophy that school was not able to provide as well as build meaningful friendships. That’s why I donate, to give other people that opportunity.”
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This piece solely expresses the opinion of the author and not necessarily the organization as a whole. Students For Liberty is committed to facilitating a broad dialogue for liberty, representing a variety of opinions.
