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Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 360 | Milei Has a Free-Market Mandate in Argentina | Guest: Agustin Etchebarne
00:53:01
Matt Kibbe sits down with Agustin Etchebarne, director-general at Fundación Libertad y Progreso, to discuss why Javier Milei has become so popular
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I'm talking to Augustine Echobarne with the foundation for Liberty and Progress in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We're obviously talking about this big victory that Javier Milei just had and we're going to talk about his Austrian economics influences and where he gets the ideas that are turning on young people in Argentina. Check it out. Welcome to Kibby on Liberty. Augustine, good to see you.
- [01:03]
B
Nice to see you.
- [01:05]
A
You are in. You are in Buenos Aires.
- [01:10]
B
I'm in Buenos Aires, yes, exactly.
- [01:12]
A
I want to talk to you about this. It's not really hot news right now, but I think it's going to be hot news for a long time. The success of Javier Milei in the elections and what that portends for his agenda and all of that. But let's start, if you wouldn't mind, just introduce us to your work, who you are and what your foundation does.
- [01:41]
B
Well, I'm the CEO of Libertadi Proreso, which means Freedom and Progress, which is a think tank in Argentina. And we try to. We have like two goals. One is the battle of ideas, the cultural change that we need in Argentina. And we've been struggling for this for the last 18 years. And the second one is we make public policies and we gave the public policies that we write to the government and then we try to help them to implement them. And that's pretty much what we are doing, of course with ideas of liberty in mind.
- [02:13]
A
Yes, very much influenced by the Austrian economists, if I understood, if I remember.
- [02:20]
B
Yeah, exactly, you're totally right. The ideas from the economic point of view is from the Austrian School of Economics, which is not a mainstream economics. And also of course the Chicago School of Economics and the Public Choice School. And from the philosophical point of view are the ideas of liberty. What.
- [02:47]
A
And I recall I listened to another interview you had but Ludwig von Mises himself actually attended presented some lectures in Argentina. When was that?
- [02:59]
B
That was in the 60s. Now we have Oriza. The president of our academic council in LibertyPoreso is Alberto Venegas lynch, but he's the son of another Alberto Venegas lynch who was the one who brought Mrs. To Buenos Aires and he gave six lectures and it's already published in a book. It's a very nice book to read that are wonderful. And then there was a school of teachers of economics of the Austrian School of Economics in Argentina for the last 50 years that was developed there and even we had a university that's called Esiade where they taught the. The principles of the ideas of the OSKAR SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS I've been teaching some economics myself for the last 30 years. I was one of the maybe 20 or 25 teachers that we were trying to spreading these ideas in Argentina.
- [03:54]
A
So for your entire life, until recently, there was a strong intellectual tradition in Argentina promoting free market ideas. But your politics were quite different, dominated by the Peronists.
- [04:10]
B
Actually, our school of economics was not the mainstream in Argentina either. We were like a small group of teachers that we were trying to. The thing is that in Argentina the Austrian School of Economics is very interesting because of inflation. Inflation was so high that was pretty much ridiculous to try to teach Keynesian economics. Although Keynes the economist, John Minor Keynes was the main economist that has been the author that is being teached at the schools and in the university for many, many years in Argentina. Even the main university in Argentina, which is the Buenos Aires University, I would say that Keynes is the idol there. And still now the people that are in the opposition, they still feel the same. Saskansians. And so we were in a small group of people, but we have the ideas and the power of the ideas. I think the power of the ideas is the things that are changing Argentina right now.
- [05:16]
A
Yeah. And let's talk about what happened in the election. I think everybody watching knows at least who Javier Milei is. And they know that he's been influenced by. By the Austrians and they may know that he has dogs named after Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman, which is awesome. But these big elections just happened and it was kind of do or die for Javier Milei's agenda and he was quite successful.
- [05:49]
B
Yeah, the campaign was very difficult, was a very dirty campaign. In the last four months has been very difficult in Argentina and there was a kind of capital flight and the country risk doubled in the last four months until the elections. And the interest rates skyrockets towards 60% per annum, which is huge because now we have an inflation of it's going to be around 30%. So real interest rates were very, very high in the last few months. And Saudi economy also stopped because it was growing at about 5 or 6% since 2024 and the beginning of this year. But then it suddenly stopped. And it's true, because the problem in Argentina is the opposition. It's not like a typical center left opposition. These guys are against the system. So they say that they would not pay the debt or they are really like a far left opposition. And that's why it was very scary to see that there was a possibility that Milei could not win the elections. And Actually, on September, last September, Milei lost a local election in the province of Buenos Aires by 14 points of difference to the Kirchnericht. And that was very scary. And that was the worst moment of the markets in Argentina. And imagine what happened not last Sunday, but the Sunday before. Just 10 days ago, we went to the elections and the general elections, the 24 provinces of Argentina. And Milei got 41% of the votes. It was a kind of landslide, because previously he got only 30% of the votes in 2023. Then in the second round, he got the 54%, but as his own party only got 30% of the votes. So he got a very small part of the deputies on the lower and the upper house at Congress. Now with a new election now he climbed from 38 deputies to 110. So he's almost reached half of the lower chamber. And with some allies, he would easily reach the half of the chamber, which is very important. If you have half of the chamber under presidency, then you can get laws, you can pass laws through Congress. And we need three or four reforms that are very, very important in Argentina. And now the probability to get this reform is very high. Probably not to have 100% of what I would like to be like, for instance, the labor reform. We are not going to get this 100% that we want, but probably we will get like 60% or something like this. And it's a huge progress. I think it's going to be a huge progress in the second part of his term. Remember that this is the midterm elections.
- [08:50]
A
Yeah. So talk about what Milei had accomplished before this election. And perhaps that has something to do with why he had such a successful midterm election. And then talk about the big ideas that are now possible.
- [09:09]
B
Well, Milei, what he did is it was extremely successful because what he received was a country that was in completely dire straits. We had 211% inflation, and we had a central bank that was completely bankrupt. For instance, we had the debt of the central bank for three times the amount of the monetary base. It would be the all amount of currency that we had in the country, three times that and paying an interest rate of 270%. So it was really, we were in hyperinflation. And what he did is he cut expenditures, government expenditures at the federal level, by 25%. It was amazing in the very first month. And he achieved to decrease the fiscal deficit from 6% to zero. And we have surplus since then. And with this surplus, he achieved to decrease the debt. But Also to decrease inflation. It went from 211% in 2023 to 118% in 2024. And it's going to end this year probably near 30%. And our estimates at the foundation at Libertai Proreso, we believe that next year is going to be about 15% and probably in 2026 it will reach a single digit inflation, which in Argentina is something very unusual because we have in Argentina we had the most high inflation for the last more than 80 years worldwide. If you take all the years that you have more than 20% of inflation in Argentina, I think we are number one in the world with higher inflation for the last 80 years. And so it's going to be something unusual, something very interesting. And the interesting thing is that by cutting expenditures, what happens is exactly the opposite that Lord Keynes would say, because we cut expenditures and the economy made a recovery in a kind of V shaped recovery. And the economy started to grow at about 4% or 5% as I was telling you until of course this election, that all the uncertainties and the increase in the interest rates in the last four months, it stopped. Now what I believe last week it was impressive. It was really impressive because the stock market skyrocketed. It went through the roofs 70% in one week. So it was really impressive. And the country risk decreased 400 points in just two days and now 600 points lower than it was just a few months ago. So it's really impressive what is happening. And of course it helped the Mr. Scott Besant and Trump support that was very important in the previous weeks of the election because we were, the government was experimenting something very difficult with the people trying to buy dollars and running out of Argentina. And now this is, it stopped and now the money is coming back, I think into Argentina. And so our expectation is that interest rates are going to go down quite rapidly and then the economy is going to rebound again.
- [12:45]
A
Thank you for joining me today on Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now let's get back to it. So what was he unable to do without this presence in its. You call it Congress. Right? I don't want to use the wrong word.
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B
Yes.
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A
And is there a house And a Senate.
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B
Exactly.
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A
Okay. And. And you now have about half of. Of both of those institutions.
- [13:40]
B
No, you. You only need half of one of those institutions because you have the president.
- [13:46]
A
Yeah.
- [13:46]
B
So if you want to pass a law, you can do it through the, what we call la camarades, which would be the lower house. And if you pass the law there, then it goes to the Senate. The Senate can make changes, but it comes back to the lower house. And the Senate, they would need like two thirds of the votes to change the law. And if not, you can pass the law. And with the lower house, that's enough. But I think it is probably that we will reach for certain cases also. And it would be very important as a political explanation or as a political move to show that also the Senate would pass the law. That would be the most desirable. I would wish for that. But probably we only need the lower house. That's a fact. And I think we will get that. So it's possible that we will have, like, we need, like, three major reforms. One is the labor reform, which is very important to be more competitive in the labor sector. And we need to have, because we have a lot of informal economy, underground economy, what we call the black market, is huge In Argentina, like 45% of the people is working in the underground economy. So what we need to do is to be more flexible in the labor laws so that we can increase the formal market that is more productive with higher salaries and is better for everybody. And then we need to make a very important reform, which is to decrease taxes to simplify the system. We have like 155 different taxes. You move and they tax you. Whatever you do, if you save, they are putting. Putting your tax on your savings. If you spend, you have taxes for expenditures. If you, whatever you do, if you go to the gas station, they will charge a special tax on gas or whatever you do, you have a special tax. So we have to simplify the system and have lower, lower taxes. This is another very, very important law that we have to pass.
- [16:04]
A
And maybe the big one is the central bank and dollarization. Is that back on the table?
- [16:13]
B
Well, I think it's back on the table, but not immediately. It's something that maybe the president will aim to do that, but maybe it will take a couple of years. It's not going to be something immediate. The other two has to be done in the next, I don't know, six months or so is something that we need very, very important very soon. And I think we will get there. The thing is that he solved the most important thing, which is that the central bank was completely bankrupt. And now we have a sound central bank with positive reserves. Even if the imf, they say that we cannot use to show the people that we have these reserves, because some of part of these reserves has been a loan from the imf, but they are in the central bank. So the loan was taken by the treasury and they bought with that money, like bills from the central bank. And now we have these reserves of the central bank, which is very important to have a more sound central bank. And they decreased almost to zero. The debt of the central bank, it was very high and paying 270% of interest rate. That was what we call a quasi fiscal deficit, because we have to pay so much money for interest that we have to print money every month. And we were printing money so fast that the inflation was going up and up and faster and faster. And now inflation is going more slowly and it will keep going more slowly in the previous years. So in the one year.
- [17:54]
A
Sorry, yeah. So why do you think Milei had such a decisive election? He spoke very bluntly early in his term about how difficult and painful some of these, particularly spending cuts would be. From your point of view, are the Argentinian people so frustrated with the decades and generations of hyperinflation and the poverty that that creates that they were just willing to try anything else? Or do you think he has sold them on the power of markets as a positive alternative to the status quo?
- [18:40]
B
I think that was part of the explanation, that the people were fed up with what happened for the last 80 years, the decay, but also with the inflation growing and growing. So the first thing is he showed that he could decrease inflation. And he was, like you said, very frankly and transparent what he was going to do something tough. So the people were expecting something tough. And now they showed that they are going to support the President, even if it's not so easy. But also he made something very important, which is he's supporting poor people. So he increased the social plans for poor people in real terms. And so poverty and also inflation went down. Inflation is a tax on the poor. So if you decrease inflation very fast, it's like relieving the poor people. And actually poverty went down, went down from 52% to 31% is still very high. Because 31% of poverty in Argentina is something maybe 40 years ago it would have been unimaginable. But now to decrease from 52% to 31% is a nice step forward. And the idea is that the People, I think in the lower part of the economy, the lower income of the people that have lower incomes now, they have improved their standard of the people in the middle were suffering because of the cutoff expenditures, were subsidized for electricity, gas, transport and all these things. So now they have to pay for that. And so those people that are in the middle ground or the middle of middle income people, well, they are suffering the cutoff expenditures, but they supported Milei. And that's the interesting thing because they think that this time is going to be different. This time we are doing a tough job, but we have hope that the economy is going to grow. And we already have a very nice week with new investments, huge investments in Argentina. Because now we had in just one week the announcement of a 30 billion investment that any foreign from Italy is going to do in ypf, which is the Argentine oil company and that is going to make like 300 billion of exports of Argentina from now to 2050. Also at the same time, PI, everybody knows ChatGPT, they are investing in Argentina. They are going to make a contract on Argentine company and they will buy like the use of the data centers that we are going to build in Argentina for about 20, 25 billion. So in just one week we got 55 billion that from the Argentine economy. These are very important investments. And so we see that we are going to have huge investments in oil, gas, in energy, in renewables and also in mining. And then we are going to see also in the data centers, which is the economy of knowledge, which is interesting in Argentina. So we have like three sectors that are going to be booming. There are others that are going to be laggards. And these are the ones that are fighting to stop melee because they feel that they had been for many years they had been like near the power. All the chronic capitalists that we have in Argentina, we had chronic capitalism for eight years. So to change the system is really very tough. It's very difficult. But what Milei has is a very good support of young people, young people below 30 years old. They are in favor of Milei. They want something different. They have hope that the future is going to be much interested. And I think they are understanding that the way is capitalism. So the ideas, remember Ronald Reagan that he said the government is not the solution, the government is the problem. And I think we are getting that. We are understanding that the government has been the problem of Argentina. And now is the moment for the private sector to make new companies, new investments. Completely different from the last 80 years.
- [23:15]
A
You know the reference to Reagan, who was called the great communicator in our country. And. And quite often that was said with a little bit of derision because his political opponents hated the fact that he could communicate and sort of go around the corporate media and speak directly to the public. Milei, is that on steroids? Because I would call him. I can't think of a better word. But he's very much an influencer. He's a performer, he's audacious, he's controversial, he speaks bluntly, he drops the F bomb once in a while. And I think in this modern world of social media, that looks real, that looks honest, that looks so radically different than the canned talking points that career politicians always give you. Is that your assessment? Like, why is he such a charismatic political figure? What turns him on for young people?
- [24:23]
B
I think you are totally right. Of all the things that you are saying, because this is exactly how Milei is. He seems authentic. Everybody sees, like, he's transparent. Maybe old people like us, maybe they see that. They don't like the manners of it. He has not British manners, of course, but he's something different. He's quite a character. But they see that he's transparent, that he's authentic, that he's honest and he's courageous and he's wild. And maybe we need somebody wild to cut taxes, because if not possible to cut taxes like a Swiss surgeon, you need somebody with a chainsaw. He comes with a chainsaw and he says, I'm going to cut taxes. And then in the people that are working in the gun, they say, well, we have to do something, because if not, this guy is going to come with a chainsaw and he will cut all the things very brutally. So it's something that is interesting because it's very difficult for an engineer or a surgeon that he has to cut with a scalp. No, no, no. He's doing really tough things to cut expenditures. You cannot do it slowly. He had to do it the very first month and the only way, with a change. And of course, he made a lot of mistakes. When you do that, it's impossible to do it perfectly. Well, no, he made tons of mistakes. And so the people that are in the opposition, they had plenty of things to show that were not correctly done or perfectly done. But the bold thing is that the people understood that we needed to cut taxes, expenditures. So if you want to cut taxes, you have to first to cut expenditures. You have to cut expenditures to get a sound fiscal balance, to have a sound central bank, and then the economy started to bounce back and now we will see that the economy will still grow next year, probably at about 4 or 5%. And then you can cut more taxes. So you are going to enter into a virtuous circle. So the very first years are the most difficult ones. You remember for instance In Poland when Mr. Basarowicz made all the reforms the first three years he got negative GDP growth, 10% the first negative, 10% the first year, then 4% negative, then 1% negative, and then 1% surplus in the fourth year. Argentina is doing much faster than that. Maybe we didn't. I think Basaroz did a major reform bigger than ours because he came from communism, which is even, maybe even worse than Peronism. Not very much, but a little bit harder than Peronism.
- [27:19]
A
Yeah, Peronism is more crony capitalism, maybe this much misunderstood word, fascism, which is government control of the means of production. That's more the Peronist model. Is that correct?
- [27:38]
B
Yeah, it's like corporativism, it's like protectionism, statism, very high taxes and very high regulations in everything. And so you need the approval of the state if you want to make profits. And the Secretary of Commerce can make you make a profit or going down. And so power of the state is maximum and the power of the people is minimum. And that's Peronism. And of course that they are using all this power in favor of poor people, which is not a fact, because actually poverty climbed.
- [28:15]
A
If you've made it this far into the show, it means I must be doing something right. Key Beyond Liberty is just one of the amazing products we create at Free the People. We tell emotionally compelling stories and produce educational videos for the Liberty Curious. Our award winning documentaries personalize all things liberty, independence, creativity, hard work, integrity and perseverance. After the show, check out our work@freethepeople.org and if you like what you see, donate to support what we do. That's freethepeople.org now back to the show. So I think Hayek, Friedrich Hayek, would say that in practice you have these ideological differences between various flavors of authoritarianism, socialism, communism. But in practice, fascist countries and socialist countries effectively are pursuing the same policies. So to me it's freedom versus authoritarianism of some flavor or another, sometimes pretending to be an intellectual tradition, and sometimes it's just about raw power. So I'm working on a project. I want to get your advice on this. I'm doing a project called Austrian Economics and Popular Culture. I'm particularly interested, starting with Hayek's decision to make the Road to Serfdom a popular and accessible book, the foundation for Economic Education. Fast forward to things like the Ron Paul phenomenon, who, very much like Milei, used political office and political campaigns as a cultural soapbox to reach people. And you know, his, you know, Ron Paul's campaigns really didn't explode until technology allowed people on social media to discover for themselves what this alternative was. How much is. I want to go back and sort of trace Milei's roots because he is a. He is an authentic Austrian. Like he's read all the books. He describes himself as an oracle capitalist. And as I recall, he got some of these ideas from some of the folks in your constellation at your foundation.
- [30:45]
B
Well, actually, yes. Alberto Venegas lynch, who is the president of our academic council, was one of his teachers. And it's very interesting because Milei is very honest and he's an intellectual, honest man. So he said that he had been teaching economics maybe for 15 or 20 years. He had been teaching bad economics until he discovered the ideas of the Austrian School of Economics. When he discovered the ideas, he's like a fanatic because he went there and he read everything at a very high speed. And he has a great brain and probably is the most brilliant guy that I know because he not only reads everything, but he has an incredible memory. And so he can make a conference or whatever in all these type of ideas. So he read a lot. He understood the roots of the problem, and he understood that the roots of the problems are the philosophical ideas. To understand that is the individual against the collectivism. So if you have, like you are telling, it's the same if you are a socialist or if you are a fascist, in the end are pretty much similar. Because remember that like Lenin in the ussr, Lenin discovered that communism was not working at all. And so he managed to get the commanding heights of the economy. So he said, you can have the companies, the firms, but I'm going to have the control of the firms. I'm going to control who is going to win and who is going to fail. And that's why you got the grip of all the capitalists in your own fist. And in that way, the government has a lot of power and the individual has very little power. And that's the struggle is the power of the individual against the collectivism. And I think that he understands that each of us, we have to be the owners of our own body, our mind, our spirit. And so we are the owners of the produce of our hands. And this is private Property. So it's the right of life, liberty and property. And that's the foundation of every economy that works fine because it's not only the economy, it's life itself. It's like the possibility to be creative and so on. And I think the Austro school of economics is the one that understands that in the center of the economy is the entrepreneur. Entrepreneur is the one that is making innovation is changing things. And you need freedom, you need private property and you need to make your own decisions and you need to make your own mistakes and to accept the responsibility for your own mistakes. This is a very important thing. And then you have then the creative destruction that Schumpeter shows with this capitalism. It's the new things developing new ideas like AI or AGI maybe in the future, or ACI or all these things that is happening very fast. And this is going to be a destruction of the old economy. And then you will see that there is a new economy that is going to bounce. And I think that Milei is the one that is explaining these things very easily in everything. All his campaign he was teaching economics. And that's amazing.
- [34:15]
A
Yeah, it's amazing to see someone that knows how to deal with substantial intellectually substantive ideas and still go on social media and. And mix it up and break it down to a tweet, which is something that, all due respect to some of your academic friends, sometimes academics are not so good at this.
- [34:38]
B
Yeah, I agree 100%. And he also had a theater show. So he went to this theater and he was describing himself as a psychologist. And then you have the people that were coming and he was describing things. And the final act, Hugh, he got like a hammer and he was destroying the central bank because he was blaming inflation. He was blaming that the central bank was creating inflation. Remember Ron Paul? You are telling about Ron Paul and the Fed fight the Fed. So he was going with the hammer and actually destroying the central bank in the theater. So he got this idea. He's also like a rock star. He used to be a guitar player and also a soccer player. And so he had this type of idea of he's not only an academic, he has this historianism that you can show things by actually acting in different things. And he also made a huge concert for the campaign. And in the media everybody was like telling against Milei because it was a kind of a show and not a very academic thing or whatever, but young people loved it and was in the rebounds of his campaign in the last month. It started with that concert, you know.
- [36:00]
A
I was just at Ron Paul's 80th birthday party. And a big part of the celebration that day was about the musicians and the comedians who had gotten into politics, but Austrian ideas through Ron Paul. So it was like a. It was a big party. It was fun to be part of that. And it strikes me that Millay has again taken that to the next level as well. There's something we could all learn from, for sure.
- [36:32]
B
Well, we learned a lot from Ron Paul. I. I have seen many, many videos of Ron Paul and with the social media, we have sent it to many, many people. So Ron Paul has a lot of funds in Argentina also. You know, also the people that are in bitcoin as Argentina, we had high inflation for such a long time that we were one of the first that developed all the things of blockchain together with the people. There are people in Argentina were like exchanging mails with Satoshi or WhatsApp or whatever. And they really made a fortune also. So there you have very young people, probably now they are like 30 years old, but they started when they were 15 years old or 17. And that was part of what is happening in Argentina also. There is kind of new generation that they are thinking completely different from us. They are the digital guys. They know that the world is changing. Economists and most of economists, I think they are not understanding what is happening because we have an explosion of wealth that you cannot trap with the GDP numbers because you have like doubling, tripling, multiplying per 1 million the things that you get in your phone with the same price. So you have a lot of wealth in your cell phone, but you pay for the same. And this is part of the wealth that is being created, but with zero price. And so economists cannot measure this. We have to use Hayek, because Hayek talk about Catalactics, catalytics is the exchange not only with you have prices. Maybe you are exchanging for instance your videos for likes. But it's a big change and it's a very important exchange. And the thing is that you are developing huge new things, a lot of new things with zero price and creating a lot of wealth like AI, like you are now. You can make your own Aristotle's 2.0 or Socrates 2.0, or you can make, I don't know, Agustin Ebarne 2.0 and you can talk to him and you can learn from him and you can. For instance, I read a book, I was reading a book about Deutsch, about the AI and on the streets I'm talking with the AI and discuss I want to discuss with Deutsch. So I make a prompt to discuss his book with Deutsch and then you start debating with him. It's amazing the possibilities that we have right now. And you are paying nothing for this. This is at zero price. So there's a lot of wealth that is being created, or is being created all the time, that the economists are not understanding what is happening. You cannot measure it with the prices and nothing interesting.
- [39:47]
A
And as you point out, this process is very Hayekian. And if you want to understand how the world works, I feel like the Austrians are in a unique position.
- [39:57]
B
Exactly.
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A
To get people to think about this expansively in terms of real entrepreneurship, which is creating something that, that wasn't there before. Because the Austrians think about the market as a process. I think this, this makes it easier to explain. And I also think it's important that the Austrians actually use words instead of exotic mathematics to explain human action, because I think, I think it makes it more accessible to all those young people at a bitcoin conference. And they're, they're living free money. But then they realize that there's an intellectual tradition that supports what they instinctually get already.
- [40:45]
B
Exactly. And then when you see what's going to happen in the next few years with acceleration of the returns, of accelerating returns of technology, that is amazing. Exponential. And I think the only way to understand this is with Austrian economics. You cannot put this in the models of mathematical models that are building into the GDP numbers or the aggregates of Keynesians aggregates, because much of this economy is not there. It's in the digital world. And we are going to see something that is, or we are watching it evolving at a very high speed. And I see that, for instance, you cannot measure productivity the way that we used to. Now you have to measure productivity, for instance, in bits, how many bits? And you need to get new words for that, because first was bytes, then kilobytes, then you need megabytes, then terabytes, and now you need yottabytes. And each time you change the word, you are multiplying per 1,000 times. So it's amazing. It's exponential. Exponential means that all artificial intelligence, if you compare one flop of artificial intelligence, which is a unit of artificial intelligence, to a drop of water, like in 2013, you can feel a pool, an Olympic pool. Now you can measure the same amount of the total amount of artificial intelligence in drops of water. You can feel the Chicago Lake, the lake of Chicago. And in just a few years, in 10 years, you could Feel you will be able to feel all the oceans of the Earth. This is the amazing way that is improving. That's an accelerating times that we are, we are going to see the change that is going to be amazing. Argentina is going to be part of this because we also have a problem to develop this, you have like bottlenecks. And the bottlenecks are the rare earth water, the cooling that we have. For instance, in the south of Argentina, we have like natural cooling for the big data centers that you need to cool down. So you have low temperatures, which is very important and very low energy costs. So we have the things that we need. We have in Argentina, we have rare earth, we have copper, we have lithium, we have very low cost of energy and we need to develop all this. So we are going to be a player on AI. Not a big player like China or the US but as a partner of the US I think we are going to have a strategic alliance with the US and it's also, it could be a tipping point for Latin America because if you compare from the geopolitical point of view of the world, the problem with the US is that you have like 340 million people, but Chinese are 1.4 billion and Indians 1.4 or more because they are 1,450 million people. And so if you see the amount of engineers in the US you have like 1.6 billion engineers. But in India they have 3 million engineers and in China you have 2.6 million. So in this age of AI, who is going to reach the general AI, which is the AGI is going to be. You need to get there. But to get there, you have these bottlenecks, rare earth, energy, water and certain places. And I think that's a strategic plan of Mr. Trump and Scott Besant and Milei. We're going to be part of this deal.
- [44:44]
A
So give us a couple maybe, you know, some of the books that really turned Javier Milei onto Austrian economics. Give us some reading assignments.
- [44:55]
B
Well, for sure, Hayek and the Road to Serfdom would be a very interesting way to get into it. I use a lot, I recommend a lot. Henry Haslett Economy in One Election So you don't have any type of mathematics, anything. And it's a very interesting way to get into it. But then you have to go to the human action and to read Mrs. This is tougher, but it's interesting. Then you have. There are certain little few pages that are very important, which is from Donald Reed. That's amazing because in these seven pages of I Pencil you can understand economics more than in the whole general theory of Keynes. You are not going to understand economics with Keynes. You are going to understand economics with these seven pages to understand how are we cooperating between millions of people just to build a single pencil. So this is really interesting, but if you get into Mrs. This is the Human Action is tough because it's a huge book, but it's very important. In Argentina we also have a lot of people that are Randian from ayn rand. Because Atlastruct is a book, it's a novel. It's a 900 pages novel. But if you read it, you understand Argentina. Argentina used to be a very rich country until we got a philosophical problem which was that in each necessity there is a right. That was something that Peron and Evita Peron said. In Argentina, if you have a necessity, you have a right. That's the most stupid thing that you can think of. But they said it many, many times and you can destroy a whole civilization with these little words. So the importance of ideas is immense. And if you read this book, although I prefer the other one, the Fountainhead, which is I think is more beautiful written, but anyway, both are from Ayn Rand. That was very important. Also in Argentina, Ayn Rand with Atlas Shrugged, we have clubs of reading clubs that they are reading and discussing and debating about Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivism. But I think that human action is very important. And of course you can read the Principles of Economics of Carl Menger, which would be interesting. So Mrs. Hayek, Leona Reed, Henry Haslit, these ideas In Argentina we also have an argentenegist in men's, which is Juan Bautista Alberti that he wrote even before then. He wrote in the 1850s and he was very, very good. But I understand that for the rest of the world you have to get the other ones.
- [48:02]
A
Yeah. By the way, Atlas Shrugged is no longer all that fictional. And we keep saying that again and again when we see something happen. But you may be following that the next mayor of New York City is most likely to be an avowed Marxist. So the lights may go out. The lights may go out. You mentioned I pencil by Leonard Read. Sort of an iconic attempt to translate substantial ideas into a short story. Talk a little bit as we wrap up. Talk about some of the work your foundation does that takes the big ideas and translates them so that they're accessible to regular folks in Argentina.
- [48:50]
B
Well, we do a lot because we go to first we go to the press, to the media and we go to the TV talk shows. But Then you have a lot of young people of about 15 years old that they get a part of what you are saying and they are explaining it again, again and again in social media. And so this is a combination of things. Then we did a lot of videos. You know, I went to Atlas Network to make a TT MBA many years ago. And the final day we have to make a campaign on YouTube. So I made a campaign with some people from Sweden and the campaign was Freedom for Bananas. And so started with a joke and then we got like thousands of views. Just to explain that in Europe size matter and size matters because you have a certain size of bananas to get into the European Union there was actually a law that was saying that how you have to build the bananas. It's ridiculous. Well, these type of things are interesting to get something from that is actually true and try to ridiculously to show how ridiculous is some of these regulations. And also you have to I think to see and the young people are the ones that can do it much, much better is how can you get the algorithms works for you? Because it keeps changing all the time. So you have to change things. You have to change the thing that how you are getting to people through TikTok or Instagram or Facebook. All of them are completely different. Or Twitter or now it's X. But I mean. But the idea is to get the things that has to be the more simple as possible. But sometimes you have to spend one hour to explain something well done. And maybe you can get 1 million views. So most of the videos should be be like 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes. But sometime you have to spend time to understand things. I think for instance, Ted is very interesting. They make 17 minutes videos. These are very extraordinary things. You have to think a lot to make one video.
- [51:15]
A
Yeah, yeah, totally. Are you going to be in New York for the Atlas Network this year?
- [51:22]
B
Actually, this year I'm missing because I went for many years and I loved it to be there. But this time I have to go to some provinces. I'm making a roadshow in Argentina. So because we are trying to make the people understand the important things that are going to be these three reforms. The labor reform, the pension reform and the tax reform. This is my main focus in the following six months is going to be there in the provinces in Argentina and.
- [51:54]
A
The Congress obviously a bigger priority. Well, good luck to you and thank you for this and we will talk again soon.
- [52:02]
B
Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
- [52:06]
A
Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about free the people, go to freethepeople.org sa.