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Fear vs Freedom in Venezuela: Socialism, Hyperinflation & Bitcoin | Mauricio Di Bartolomeo
01:30:27
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- [00:00]
A
Not only did he not let the aid come in, he shot 100 people that day. I saw somebody get shot and never get back up. He died. Maduro's government just had no checks and balances. And then he would basically say, well, what are you going to do about it? And nobody did anything about it. We need to create owners of things. We need to give people agency to own stuff. What I think is beautiful about bitcoin is that it's digital property. You can buy a dollar worth of Bitcoin, $10 worth of Bitcoin. My life is bitcoin and I love bitcoin. But my other passion obviously is Venezuela. We are now in a based country. What I will not tolerate is we might stumble, we might fall, but we're gonna get back up and we're gonna keep walking. The regime is petrified of people losing the fear f around. Find out.
- [00:55]
B
Greetings and salutations my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes. The value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. And if you're listening to this right now, remember you are still early. If you're not already, go ahead and subscribe to this show wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. If you want to follow me in the show on nostr and X, just head to the show notes to grab the links. If you're enjoying the bitcoin podcast and want to support it by becoming a paid subscriber, you can download the fountain app, search for the bitcoin podcast and subscribe. By paying with bitcoin via lightning or Fiat via card you'll get access to ad free episodes and early releases of select content. Plus you'll help support this show.
- [01:46]
C
Head to the show notes for product discount links go to walkeramerica.substack.com to get.
- [01:51]
B
Episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk foreign.
- [02:07]
C
Those things where a lot of people, I think just recently you saw this, all this stuff with on, on X where Nikita Beer I think it is. Who's the guy who like is basically like running product. He basically admitted like oh yeah, anything that's like bitcoin crypto related. We are, you know, we're, we're just deboosting essentially. And, and it was like a lot of people were like oh shit, Well, I guess, you know, maybe, maybe Noster is not such a bad thing. Maybe this is actually a nice, nice idea. And it's like, well, yeah, no shit.
- [02:38]
A
If only there was a plan B where all the bitcoiners are.
- [02:42]
C
I know. If only there was a place where you could go full of bitcoiners where people talk about bitcoin. Well, okay, Noster has it. We have, we have more topics over there now. You know, it's a, it's not just exclusively bitcoin, but there is obviously a massive bitcoin cohort there, which isn't a bad thing. You know what I mean? Like, you need power users to be able to actually bootstrap any sort of network, right?
- [03:04]
A
Absolutely. You got to start with a very targeted group. And I think that's like, that's like a very important principle. When you're building anything and you're trying to launch anything, if you try to bite off way too much from day one, you're just not relevant enough to any specific group of people. And so you need to start with fans and then fans get you customers and clients. But at the beginning, you know, the more focused, the more narrow, the better. Generally, I guess it's my experience and an impression, but I think it's a good strategy. It's a long term strategy because like, you know, they're not VC backed, they're not paying people for clicks, they're not paying people to sign up. And so it's the grassroots, you know, long way, but easy come, easy goes, right? Like when you build stuff slow and steady, it's very hard to break it. The foundation is very solid. We've seen this with many other, you know, what was it, Mastodon, A few of these others that came out guns blazing and then just Noster's just like this one. It's like that thing that doesn't go away. It just keeps growing and growing and growing like a weed. And no one's throwing money at it in the way that they're throwing money at these other companies. So it's super interesting. I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful.
- [04:20]
C
Yeah, it's cool too. I mean, all of this, all this stuff around like Nostr and I've been talking to a lot of people about this that are Noster devs and they're building things that are okay. They're utilizing NOSTR as just the communication protocol because right now it's like the initial implementation is let's use it for social media, right? Let's build what people know, let's build the short form blogging clients that like look like X kind of, but there's all these other uses for it. Like you see with Bitch that Jack DORSEY Built on iOS, you know, just like a weekend vibe, you know, I don't know. I don't know if it was vibe coding or regular coding. He obviously can real code, not just vibe code. You know, there's a lot of evidence of that, but. But he built bitchat and then Callie ported it over to Android. It utilizes nostr just kind of like in the background as another communication layer to be able to relay some of these messages around when you do have Internet. Like, obviously it works without Internet, but I'm curious honestly, if, if just Bitch downloads have been starting to spike in Venezuela just amidst everything going on there. I don't have any, any data on it, but I would have to imagine we've seen, we saw huge spikes in Uganda. They just had their elections today. We'll see what the results of those are. But they had like massive download influxes because turns out the regime shut down the Internet and it's like, oh, well, this is the cool thing though, Mauricio. We're at this time, we're like, we're living in this digital age where all of our communication primarily is digital. And so that makes it actually really easy for dictators to shut off access to our communication. But then something like bitchat comes along where it's like, well, we'll just communicate without the Internet. You don't need it. It's peer to peer. And I feel like this just like it changes the power dynamics in such a beautiful way. It's very exciting.
- [06:05]
A
I completely agree with you. Two interesting points to pull on that thread that you just did. So one of our engineers at Lehden actually runs, I think it's the largest Noster relay. He's deep, deep, and I think his relay is one of the biggest ones. I don't want to dox him because I want to talk to him first, but I know for a fact we have very, very big fans and contributors of NOSTR at Leaden within our team. And the other thing I'll mention, which is interesting, around the Venezuela case, so you're right. Dictators shut off access to information. They don't want you to see the truth. They want you to see their version of the truth. They don't even want you to listen to debate because debate might fill your head with ideas and arguments and facts. And so they kind of stop that. They nip it as fast as they can. And Venezuela, as many countries had Twitter banned. X was banned in Venezuela for many years. But funny enough, literally yesterday, access to X was restored to Venezuelans. And so again, after you extract a murderous dictator, amazing pro freedom things can happen. And so we're starting. What I'm actually thinking is Venezuela had seen a gradual depletion of its liberties, freedom of speech being a big, big one of them. And we are starting to slowly regain some of those liberties. Interestingly, there's been. So one of the biggest things that the regime is trying to control right now is they were very successful at injecting fear into the population, particularly after the 2014 election where they went out and straight up murdered 100 protesters. I think it was. I think the day that Trump. Not Trump, Richard Branson did that concert with Shakira. I don't know if you remember it back. I think it's like four or five. I think it was Trump's first term, if I remember correctly. There was a big push to get aid into Venezuela because people were starving and dying without medicine and food. And so there were literally containers of food and medicine parked outside Colombia. And there was this massive concert. Shakira, Richard Branson sponsored it. Trying to basically get Maduro to allow aid, not even like accept democracy or elections, just allow aid for free to come into the country. And not only did he not let the aid come in, he shot 100 people that day. I have to get the actual. I mean, obviously there's no government faxed around this. These deaths are reported by NGOs and other sort of independent reporting bodies. But there were many deaths, many deaths and people basically associated. Keep in mind, these shootings were already starting in 2014. I was in a protest where I've mentioned this often times I heard real bullets at the protest and I saw somebody get shot and never get back up. He died. And I knew he wasn't my best friend, but I knew the guy, okay. And that when you see that, you just. There's. When your life's at stake and you have an ounce of desire to build and be free and live a life and not. Not waste your life in a completely. In a fight where the power is tilted completely out of your hands, right? Like if you're a protester going up against a murderous regime that's acting with impunity. Because don't Forget, up until 12 days ago, Maduro's government just had no checks and balances. Nobody went in to say, hey, you're being a criminal, or you will be deemed a criminal. And he turned around and say, oh, so what? What are you gonna do? Come and. Come and get me. Yeah, come and get me. And he would say it. He would say, come and get me. Don't be a coward. As he was. He was turning around basically killing innocent people. And people would turn around and be like, you're a dictator. And then he would basically say, well, what are you going to do about it? And nobody did anything about it. And so they. You as a. As a. As a Venezuelan, when you. When you're going through this, when you go through years and years of him coming around, cleaning house with people around you, basically killing people, and you're turning around and you're saying, no, the international community will never allow this. Surely there will be some type of action, The actions from one or two countries being like, we condemn the death of so and so people. Please stop shooting them, Mr. Dictator. And Mr. Dictator says, okay, cool tweet, man. I'm just gonna go dig my heels a little deeper now. And so, bringing it back to your question, the what's happening in Venezuela is actually the opposite. Like, we are now at the point where we're starting to regain some of those liberties. And I feel like it's in the process of losing some of those liberties that you find things like Nostr. That you find things like Bitchad, Right? Because as the doors close, you start looking for windows, and so you'll find the window. But, you know, you can be looking out through the window, but then the big doors start opening up again, and you say, oh, wow, okay, there's a world of information here that I wasn't able to access. Think about Venezuela as not being able to access X. You know, X is the number one news site across most of the globe where really you can have sort of open debate and wherever this. Whichever side of the fence you sit on. You know, Twitter is the closest thing to allowing open discourse out there that. Where you can. When you can have a debate and express opinions that may be counter to, you know, counter to the sort of the. The narrative. And it's. It's beautiful to see it, right? Like, oftentimes I would send tweets to my friends. I have group chats with my friends from high school and, you know, elementary and all that stuff. And I would send them tweets, and they would turn around and tell me, hey, we can't open. We can't access your tweets. And so I'd have to take screenshots. I'll try to get them to come into Nostr. Not every one of them is like a bitcoiner. So a lot of them just kind of gravitated to Instagram. But just to show you how some of the fear is still around today, the regime is stopping people in checkpoint and opening their phones and checking their Instagram and checking their WhatsApp. And they're searching things like Trump, Maduro, like they want to see what you've, what you've, what you've sent in terms of messages around those topics or what you've liked, what you've engaged with on Instagram. And it's not. I mean, we've all heard the horror stories of places like the UK and such where they knock on your door because you tweeted something and then somebody will be recording it and oh, what do you do? Oh, well. And then they'll take them in and they'll have like this trial. And so you can see this sort of process in Venezuela. If they catch you with a message or a tweet, you just vanish, Literally vanish. And no due course, no, if you, God forbid you dare record the transaction or the interaction you'd get, you know, you and the person recording will get popped. So that's still happening. But even within that, the biggest fear of the Venezuelan regime right now is they've spent 20 years trying to condition the population to not dare speak up against the regime, not dare tweet against the regime. Even like a photo of something that alludes to happy for democracy or anything in support of what recently happened. Which if you look at the polls, people inside, outside, anywhere, you're polling people, everybody is feeling optimistic about what just happened. But the government's biggest fear is that now that Maduro is gone and now that people in Venezuela feel that there is finally some accountability and someone that's not going to let criminals run loose with impunity, Venezuelans are starting to wake up and you're starting to see these protests, particularly around the release of the political prisoners. So Venezuela has thousands of political prisoners and surprisingly or coincidentally a lot of these started getting released right after the Maduro's capture. A lot of people locally have started gathering and especially student government and universities, which in Venezuela historically, revolutions and all sort of marches and protests have been led by, by these student council groups in these big universities. So the big universities in Caracas have these government bodies that act basically as the student body government, and they are starting to come out increasingly and making public statements in Venezuela demanding that the political prisoners be released. I can't tell you how proud I am of those kids. I can't tell you how much courage it takes to do what they're doing. And it makes me increasingly more hopeful that Venezuela, the free Venezuela that I remember, the good, honest, hard working Venezuela that just wanted a chance to live a life with a little bit of freedom, they're still there, and you're waking and they're waking up. And I think I'm just generally so happy about the prospect of being able to build something back in the country. And it's exciting, but I'll tell you, the regime is petrified of people losing the fear. And the day that you see hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets of Venezuela chanting that day will come, it hasn't happened yet because the death squads are still running. The people that are left are still making open and public threats to not celebrate, to, don't you dare celebrate. Don't you dare, like, post or tweet something in support of what happened or we'll come for you. And there's this big tension right now because the Chavismo in Venezuela has this, you know, double rhetoric, right? On the one hand, Del C is having to go on these calls with Donald Trump and saying, yes, Mr. Trump, yes, Mr. Trump, yes, yes, whatever you say, yes. And on the other side, they have the other spokespeople, her brother who runs the national assembly, funny enough. And then Diosdao Cabello, who is the muscle, the thug, the guy that controls the thugs, they're still out there running loose, threatening people. And so Delsi, on the one hand, is saying, yes, yes, yes, Mr. Trump, don't worry, we'll release the prisoners. We'll protect your American oil company when they come here. We'll reform all the laws that you need reformed. And then on the other hand, you have these other guys saying, we're not listening to America. You're still under our thumb. Like, we'll. The. Our boot is still on your. On your neck. Move an inch will squash you, right? And so people are like, trying to assess, you know, how far they can push the line, right? Because on the one hand, you want to believe that America or the group that helped us extract Maduro is going to basically not kind of forget about it and say, we took this guy out, but we have a plan. We need to keep going with this plan. We didn't just go in to take this guy out. We want actual change. So that's what you want to believe. But on the other hand, there's guns pointed at you. And so it's hard. It's really hard. And I understand. You know, at the beginning, I was frustrated because I wasn't seeing as many demonstrations in the country. And I spoke to so many of my friends, and I heard, like, you can hear the fear in their voice. I was like, why are you guys. Why aren't you going out there? Why aren't you tweeting? Why aren't you saying something? And they were basically telling me, man, that's easy for you to say. Like, you're not. Your. Your door's not going to get knocked on. You know, you're not the one that's going to go missing. How am I going to explain what am I going to tell my kids if they come knocking for daddy, right? And. And it's real, man. Like, it's. It's real. I have relatives to give you some examples. Back in the 2024 presidential election, Marina Machal, who won, we all know Marina. She's in the White House right now talking to Trump. She. Well, she got disbarred, of course, because the regime would never let someone that's actually popular run against it. But she was very clever, and she set up this other guy. She knew she was gonna get disparate, so she sets up this person called Edmundo Gonzalez so that whenever she gets disparate, she goes to her following and says, don't worry, I knew this was gonna happen. Edmundo's gonna run on my behalf. Vote Edmundo. Right? And she picked, like, a guy that had basically no, like, no criminal record. Like, no nothing. Not that she had one. But I'm saying this guy had, like, no way of them trying to put up an argument to say this guy's a bad person. Like, he. This guy was like a, like, straight arrow. Never did anything wrong, always ticked all the boxes. So anyway, as Maria Corina is campaigning through the country, they're making her life impossible, okay? So they're setting up checkpoints wherever she's headed, and they try to block the highway so she can't get there in time if she's flying into a particular city to do a rally. That city's airport just went under maintenance the day her rally was supposed to happen. They've blocked highways. She's had to cross rivers with people in, like, boats. I don't know if you've seen the images, but she's gone on, like, Chalanas, which are a very rural Venezuelan boat. She's crossed rivers on Chalanas because the army was blocking the bridge. She had to get through to get to her rally. So anyway, it was this big story about her getting to these places and the government putting these hurdles and her just jumping over these hurdles heroically every single time. And when. When it was time to do her rally in the Andes region around Merida or San Cristobal, I have relatives that live in that area. And of course, my family is very pro freedom, so we wanted to help her campaign any way we could. So one of my uncles actually lent her, I think it was a few of his cars or trucks or pickups to just move things for the rally and prepare things for the rally. And they jailed my uncle. They literally took him in for helping her. And so, you know, if she would take a photo, her or her staffers, if any of them would take a photo eating at a restaurant, anybody would come in and there was a video of somebody saying hi to Maracarina in a restaurant and hugging them. That restaurant will be shut down. It was crazy. It still is. And so what's happening right now? And this is all to induce fear, like, don't you dare help Maria Karina. Don't you dare tweet in her support. But now it's all changing. So people are starting to test the boundaries. They're like, well, mind you, these kids that are coming out right now asking for the release of the political prisoners before January 3, if they went and did that, not only would you not see them, they would be gone. They would be disappeared. If they publicly went out and said, Mr. Government, you have political prisoners, Release them, and the government will be like, they're not political prisoners. That's very different. These people are criminals and blah, blah, blah. And anyway, and end of rant for now.
- [22:48]
C
No, I love it, man. I mean, I love the rant. I don't love this. What's happening, still happening there. And I think that's the difficult thing for people to grasp, especially people who do not have still the family or the friends there, you're hearing these things from them firsthand. You have, obviously, you are Venezuelan, so like you, you have a much deeper connection to all of this versus somebody who's just kind of casually reading about it on the news. Because people may have the false assumption that, okay, Maduro is. Is gone from power, right? He's removed. Okay? Everything just snap your fingers and it's. And it's better now. It's fixed, but it's not the case. It's. It's. I mean, it seems to me from everything you're saying and from everything that I've been reading that it's a weird limbo state right now. It's like, yeah, there's, you know, Maduro was taken out of power and the the regime is understandably probably a little bit freaked out that hey, if they step too far out of line, will Trump take them out as well? You know, like, okay, there's that. But at the same time, they clearly know that they can still keep doing a lot of the stuff that they were doing before. Maybe they covered a little bit better, maybe they obscured a little bit better. But like they're kind of pushing their as much as the people are pushing the boundaries to see what can we kind of get away with under the regime. It seems to me the regime is pushing the boundaries to see what can we get away with under Trump. Is that a fair kind of analysis of sort of the duality of that.
- [24:08]
B
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C
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- [26:07]
B
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- [27:12]
A
Yes, 100%. And obviously there's a lot of that. There's some anxiety or, or anticipation that, you know, the, the U.S. now, what I will say is that what's become really, really clear is that the regime is saying a lot of, of. Of verbiage coming out of their mouth. But when you look at what they're doing from an institutional perspective, right, like they are reforming. They reopened the US Embassy, okay? So takes quite a bit of mental gymnastics to say, oh, they just bombed us and took our president, but we're gonna reopen their embassy. Because we think that it's, you know, doesn't matter what you insert here. Everybody knows you're lying. Everybody knows you're doing it because they told you to, right? So they can say whatever they want. And this is why people are starting to lose fear, because there's inconsistencies now between the message and what they're doing, right? Like in the past, it was, if you protest, we're going to shoot you. You protest, they shot you. And you said, okay, they are doing what they're saying they're doing, right? They would say they would get pressured to release political prisoners. And they would be like, they're not political prisoners. We're not releasing anybody. Thanks. Right now it's flipped because now it's saying there's so many videos and for example, there's many videos of us, Venezuelan government officials saying on national television, we will not sell one drop of oil to the US if they ever put a finger on us. Not one drop. And people were like, many, many of these such videos, okay? And the same guy, okay, had to go on national television after they bombed Caracas and took away Maduro to say, well, you know, we've always sold oil to Chevron. If Chevron wants to come and take, you know, and take our oil and pay US Dollars, we're going to do it. It's a commercial transaction. So they've had to really walk back and eat it. And you can see it in their eyes. They're just seething. And again, it's about pushing. It's about pushing. The, the both sides are pushing, right? Like, I think the government knows it's up against the wall, right? I think that the sort of, the, the, the scale is slightly more tilted to the people's side at the moment because the people have a, they have, they're in the right side of history. That, that's, that's number one. And number two, they now have the backing of, of the biggest army in the world, right? And they're, they're just like emboldened by this support. And I think that I don't believe we're going to walk back our path to freedom. I think we're going to keep walking forward. It's going to be slow, it's going to be rocky. We might stumble, we might fall, but we're going to get back up or we're going to keep walking. Because I think that right now what, that the, the trend that this has started is irreversible. So I'm, I'm hopeful that we're going to continue walking towards freedom.
- [30:40]
C
It's, it's obviously very, it's very tricky because at this stage it's like, again, people have this, they want to believe it. Like, you know, if people who, let's say on the US Side were like, very happy to see, there's obviously mixed reactions on the US between people who are like, how could Trump do this? This is, you know, unconstitutional. He didn't have the right. Da, da, da, da. Other people saying, good, you know, he did this. Look at the Venezuelan people. They're, you know, they're celebrating. The Venezuelan diaspora around the world is celebrating. This is a good thing. Okay. It's good that he did it. But the real question becomes like, what happens next and what is the follow up? How much involvement does the US have and what is actually done to ensure that it doesn't just become more of the regime faithfuls staying in power because they have sort of a tacit agreement with the U.S. how do you make sure that Venezuela actually moves away from what is like the, the problem, which is the socialist, communist, you know, totalitarian government there. That is ultimately what is repressing the people of Venezuela. That's what's stopping the entrepreneurs like yourself, you know, from, from building in Venezuela. It's what's stopping the people who are still there from, from being able to meaningfully get ahead. It's what has been contributing to the massive currency devaluations that happened under these socialist regimes which just eat away people. Everything people have worked for, it eats it away year after year after year after year through hyperinflation. So I'm, I'm curious, do you think, I mean, do you see a path forward for Venezuela like a successful path forward where their go, the government is still able to remain, quote, socialist? Or do you think that that has to be one of the things in order for Venezuela to actually move further along this path? Not to either move back or stay where they are, but to move forward towards where you would like to see your country, your home country go to. Do you think that necessarily means getting rid of that socialist structure? And, and how feasible even is that? You know what I mean? Like, because that's, that's entrenched. That's deeply entrenched.
- [32:36]
A
Yeah. So let me walk you through why I'm hopeful and why I think this has to reach a resolution, a resolution that will probably get rid of a lot of these draconian communist rules that exist in Venezuela. And there's a simple answer. The simple answer is that if we play this out and say America wants strategic access to Venezuelan oil, like, let's just, let's just start at that. Because I think every Venezuelan you ask will tell you, yeah, we know they want the oil and we're perfectly fine with having someone help us extract it. Because first of all, these guys were not even playing for our. They're not even playing for the home team. They're playing for the away team already. They were giving the oil away to Russia and Cuba and China and we're getting nothing for it. Right? Because all these other countries that we used to partner with were enablers of our regime because ideologically it rhymes with theirs, right? So China didn't have an issue kind of being in cahoots with the regime and helping the regime at the expense of the people. Because from a strategic perspective, they had an ally in a continent that, where there was really nothing else other than Cuba. And same thing with Russia. Cuba loved it because Cuba is a starving island. They produce nothing because they've decimated the productive apparatus the same way every other communist country has. But in Venezuela, they found a lifeline. Venezuela was a buddy now that would exchange oil for intelligence, staff and protection. So I don't know if people know this, but talk about an invasion, talk about invading national sovereignty. Maduro's first ring of security. Maduro's security detail. The Venezuelan president's security detail was 32 Cuban Secret Service officers. 32 of them, all of them taken out by the, by the Delta Force when they came in. But there was 32 presidential guards, Cuban presidential guards guarding Maduro. Maduro didn't even trust Venezuelans enough to guard him. So that's just to put it out there.
- [34:49]
C
But going back, I did not know that.
- [34:51]
A
Yeah, that's wild. Most people don't. So this is, this is a. And don't believe me, Google it. In fact, Cuba broke the news about its deceased officers before Venezuela ever reported any information around the casualties in Venezuela. So they kind of, their hand was forced. They were forced to admit that 32 Cubans have been killed because Cuba had to go out and explain to the Cuban population why 32 of its elite forces were basically missing. And so this basically forced the hand of the Venezuelan regime. And then they had to say, yeah, no, there were some Cubans that died. They didn't really say how many. They tried to kind of brush it off. But Maduro's security ring was all Cuban. So to go back to the question around which side will win, how do we ensure that Venezuela doesn't just have a, a bad government that just cuts a deal with America and continues to be bad? Right. Here's where I don't think that that's possible. Right. It's clear, I believe that there's strategic importance to the Venezuelan oil industry. Right. Whether it's extraction, whether it's from an extraction basis and like an ongoing supply basis or from a, from a strategic reserves point of view. Okay. If that's true, and we've seen the press conferences with Chevron and ExxonMobil and a bunch of other companies now in America and Trump was very clear that they're going to retake Chevron's assets that were expropriated by Chavez. So Chavez, to give people context around some of this, why Trump says Venezuela stole our oil, Venezuela stole our this or that, is because Chavez did, did in fact expropriate a lot of facilities and infrastructure from Chevron and several other US Companies when he basically dismantled the Venezuelan oil industry. So there are assets there that Chevron is going to try to reclaim and that other companies are going to try to reclaim and they're going to try to re spark production and Venezuela is right now, I think at around 900 to a million barrels of oil per day. I've heard rumors, I'm not, I haven't, I don't have any sort of evidence or proof, but the sort of Running rumor in Venezuela is that the US is trying to get Venezuela up to 3 million barrels a day in 18 months and north of 3 and a half million barrels per day in 24 months. From my friends that other people that I know in the oil industry, that sounds like an incredibly ambitious goal just based on how long it takes to get this production online. But to keep playing down that thread, oil production, you heard it from the Chevron CEO himself, these are multi decade investments, okay? These companies are private. They will not. And they made it very clear in the statement from Trump or in the press conference with Trump, we cannot invest a dime in this country unless we have certainty that we will be protected. And we ought to realize the return on that investment, which may take decades. He explicitly said, you need to reform labor law, you need to reform environmental law, you need to reform oil production law, and basically supply chain management law. And literally the next day there was a motion in the National Venezuelan assembly to basically overhaul the entire rule set of corporate law, environmental law. Every checkbox that Trevor asked for was basically like, we're reforming this and that and this and that. And it just happens to be. Because this is the right time, obviously the. Exactly. Obviously the US has given the regime a laundry list of bare minimum things that it needs to go and complete, and it seems to be well on its way to complete that. Many things can happen, obviously. But my view is that because the nature of the oil industry, this needs to be a sustained change. This cannot be optical. You cannot try to get American level productivity and give comfort to an American company on a completely outdated and communist set of labor laws. Like in Venezuela. You cannot fire a person. Like it's, it's, it's legal. Like technically you can, but practically it's impossible. Okay? And so no company is going to go higher under those, under those rules, right there, there's many, like contract law, the environmental rule set is insane in Venezuela, labor laws don't even get me started. So a lot of those things have to get reformed to get those people in. And the other piece is that I don't know how many Chevron executives are going to feel comfortable living in Venezuela when there's roaming death squads still around, right? And they're under threat and America's the enemy and people are going to go on and protest and burn American flags like nobody wants to be in that country. So I just think that what America wants to get out of it necessitates long lasting change. And so because of that, I'm hopeful that it'll drive to a sustained improvement rather than just, oh, we'll cut a deal and let Chevron come in and we'll just do like a little handshake on the back. And like these types of deals aren't really done on a handshake at least with American companies that might have flown with, with Russian and Chinese companies likely won't fly with American companies.
- [40:54]
C
So that's another interesting piece too. And I forget I saw just this was some random video of a Venezuelan like right after Maduro had been taken out. And some reporter was asking them, you know, like, oh, like how do you think about like America, you know, coming in and like trying to take over your country and, and I'm paraphrasing here, but basically he was like, what do you think China and Russia have been doing this entire time? Like, what do you, what do you think that like I would. And he basically said like, I would rather have America here than China and Russia was the, was the effect of it. And so, because that's kind of the, the interesting thing, and not that Venezuela is, should be some like geopolitical football to be, you know, thrown back and forth or anything like that, but it's just that like the reality of the situation is, is that it's kind of like in this world that we live in right now, smaller countries are either going to align with the United States, the Western powers, or they're going to align with China and Russia. This is just like the reality of it. And it seems that China and Russia had a vested interest in making sure Venezuela stayed dysfunctional, stayed as a, you know, as a socialist state, stayed under the control of the Maduro regime because it allowed them to get what they want. If they would have wanted something different, they would have probably overthrown Maduro themselves. Right. But clearly they liked the status quo. Is that fair to say?
- [42:11]
A
That is fair to say. And Venezuela is like this rich communist kid that keeps giving money away to his communist friends. Right? So the problem with Venezuela is that Venezuela is the rich communist kid that kept Cuba from collapsing. Venezuela was the rich communist kid that financed left wing political campaigns across all of Latin America. I don't know how closely people listening follow Latin America, modern history. But Chavez, there were members of the Chavista regime that were caught with briefcases of cash flying into Argentina to support Kishner, which was the party that eventually won and basically broke Argentina, which led to Milei, which led to basically the snap boat back to restore balance and freedom. Chavez financed Correa's campaign in El Salvador, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Lula in Brazil, later Dilma in Brazil. And he just did this like on and on and on. And he would buy, he would buy votes at these international organizations. So Chavez learned very quickly that when you're at the OAS or the UN the vote of St Vincent Grenadines is worth as much as the vote of the United States. So there's a reason the second largest airport in Haiti is called the Hugo Chavez Airport. Chavez would go around donating infrastructure to these Caribbean islands. He also created this thing called Petro Caribe. So Petrocareve was like a Venezuelan funded oil piggy bank or oil pinata rather that basically little countries in the Caribbean can come and hit to get some oil and then in exchange for obviously votes and applause and supporting Chavez's resolutions. And so Petro Caribe, this is called, anyone listening can go Google Petro Caribe. And petrocariba is just that. It's basically like a grant foundation started by Chavez to push his ideology. And so of course, if you needed a new airport and Chavez was willing to give it to you, and all he wanted was for you to say this or that or paint the airport red and show the greatness of the Chavismo power changing America or changing Latam for the better. He was very good at driving narrative. And so of course, if you are in the, if you're in an ideological battle, right, if you're Russia or China and you're basically having, you have this ideology, number one, why would I think it. It serves them well. Number one, it keeps the ideology alive in, in the continental Americas and not only through Venezuela, but through Cuba and Nicaragua and a few of the other bodies who don't have any money, they've all gone broke because they've been communist for much longer than Venezuela, sadly as that might be. But Venezuela has this black thing that comes out of the ground and no matter how incompetent or corrupt you are, it still oozes out. You just can't stop it. And so they have this. They can just basically do all the wrong things and they still get paid and they're going out and financing their other bodies because nobody wants to be alone, right? Like you want to have people to talk to. And so they're doing this. So on the one end it keeps the ideology alive, on the other end it keeps pumping migration to the west which causes, which wreaks havoc in places like the US A lot of, a lot of the rest of the LATAM countries, some Europe it doesn't really make it. The hit to Europe is not as bad, but it's still bad. And so it helps in more than, more than one way. Right? And the other thing is you can now have military bases, you can have military assets in, in your, your, your, your enemy's backyard, right? And so there's a lot of real, a lot of strategic reasons why you would want an oil producing country to remain in a particular ideology at the expense of its people, right? So you know that, that's the real, you know, these guys were already using Venezuela as a pinata, right? And Venezuelans were seeing none of it. So now, and this is why you see so many Venezuelans kind of laugh. I don't know if you caught the trend that Venezuela, after the, after October 3rd, many Americans or many reactions in media were, they want our oil. You know, Venezuela, they're going to take all of Venezuela's oil. And Venezuela basically started this meme movement back, basically making the point, making these outrageous comments about oil to make the point that we never had the oil. So like, they basically were saying, you know, some of the jokes were, oh, you know, I'm out of milk this morning. I'll just throw some oil in my coffee, just taste a little better. It's like, oh, the water's out. I guess I just have to go bathe myself with the oil that I have saved outside, right? And so they'll be like, look, my mom dressed up the oil barrel for Christmas. And it was like an oil barrel with like Christmas ornaments. Be like our house. We always dress up the oil barrel for Christmas. So it's like this, this complete sort of like none of us had access to any of this oil. Never. None of us saw a dime of this oil money. It was basically being used to buy guns to hurt us. So when people, when you hear Venezuelans say, yeah, we know they want the oil, all the other guys wanted it too. It's, yeah, it's, it's basically like saying, you know, you know, oh, Venezuelans, you know, when a Venezuelan hears, oh, somebody wants Venezuelan for their Venezuela for their oil, Venezuelans are like, yeah, we know, right? It's like saying, oh, you know, a certain producer wants to cast Sydney Sweeney for a movie because she's a great actress. Does that make sense? Like, like, not. I'm not saying she's not a good actress, but I'm saying like, no, no, I got you. People get it. Like, we're not dumb, right?
- [48:38]
C
Like, yeah, well, it's, it's funny too. I Think your point about the fact that the reason that kind of socialism in Venezuela like was able to sustain itself for so long isn't because they like figured out the socialist model, like it wasn't working, was not working for the people of Venezuela. It never works and socialism never works. But the point is that they, Venezuela had something that a lot of other countries don't, which is massive, massive amounts of liquid black gold, like you said, oozing up out of the ground and so you can sort of paper over. But the irony of course is like that wasn't used for the, for the betterment of the, you know, the social, the socialist ideals in Venezuela. That was just used to enrich the people at the top, which is what happens every single time in every single one of these communist countries. You know, hey, we're all equal. We're all equal, right? Except for, you know, some of us are more equal than others. Everyone at the top gets ridiculously wealthy. That's the same thing across, across, you know, all the different, you know, Eastern European communist countries as well. It's the exact same playbook. The people at the top get super rich by basically extracting anything of value from the country that is supposed to be shared with the people. Right? Like that's the whole point of your socialist communist ideas. But of course it never is. And it's like this, you know, now I think where we're at in, in the, the arc of history now is like you have all these people who think that socialism can somehow still work. That even despite a hundred plus years and hundreds of millions of people dying because of socialist and communist ideas. Despite all of that, they think, well, we'll just get it right this time. And they have these little socialist experiments. And especially it's like in the, in the US or in any, any so called developed or western countries, whatever you want to say, the only reason that socialism, socialism appears to work for any length of time is because it's standing on the back of capitalism. It's standing on the back of a rich, a country that's already rich. Socialism and communism has never made a country more prosperous. It's never done that. Capitalism has made the whole world more prosperous and it's allowed us to, for some academics to basically say, see, look, socialism is working here in insert country. It's like, but it's only quote working because you're on the back of capitalism. But people don't want to admit that, right? They don't want to admit that their precious little experiment is just, it's Just cosplay, right? It's just, it's just acting.
- [50:56]
A
I wholeheartedly agree with that idea. And I also think that even, listen, look at Venezuela's example. Even with an infinity money supply connected into the back of the model, it still bankrupted the country. And I think for me, the lesson of this whole thing is that you can only build prosperity when everybody is gaining something from the transaction, from, from this activity of participating in society. And what do I mean by that? I mean, if you, if you, if you think, if you take the sort of two factors of an economy, right? You take capital and you take labor, okay, let's, let's take production. Production. And then, you know, the, the working class or capital and labor, like those, maybe that's the best way to frame it, right? You cannot. An economy necessitates to engage both capital and labor, right? Both people need to win. This transaction needs to be mutually beneficial. Like capital needs to benefit, labor needs to benefit, right? It's very similar. And I draw this analogy because I spend so much time in the loan world. A loan has two clients, right? So if we play this analogy out, the lender in this side would play the capital and the borrower in this side would play the working class or the labor, right? When I'm building a loan product, I have to make sure that whatever structure I land on benefits both the capital provider, the lender, and the person borrowing it. Call it the worker, or whatever it is in this, in this capitalism example. So if I go out and I build a loan product that's built only to the specs of the capital, the borrower won't play. They'll say, I don't want to hit those terms. Those terms don't work for me, right? If I build a loan product strictly on the terms of the borrower or the labor, then capital won't play. They'll say, I can't reach those terms. Those terms don't work for me, right? Like I can go elsewhere and do this within a more beneficial way. So you have to strike a balance. Because if you don't strike a balance, you don't have a business in, in labor. And in the labor and capital analogy, if you try to reform labor laws such that it protects workers to, from basically doing no evil, right? Like they can never get fired, nothing bad could ever happen to them, their pensions are through the roof. You know, it's a, it's a great deal. If you're over here, capital won't work, right? Like, we won't be able to make our business work under these terms. Right? Similarly, if you do the reforms and you basically put no protections on labor and everybody can get fired and there's no security, no sort of assurances or guarantees, then labor will probably move and go work somewhere else. So no economy works when you take it too far into either extreme, right? So this is why it's important to have these, these. These balance. The balance sort of frameworks where you can win, they can win, and you both feel that you're walking out of the deal with something to gain, right? When you go too far at any side of the spectrum, doesn't matter how much oil you have coming in or how much external funding you have on the other side, there's no organic engagement between the two parts of your economy. And so this is where I think things break, right? Every so often, we have political waves that move us a little bit here, they bring us a little bit back. And every so often you have this radical event that pushes you here and you never can come back out of this. This will happen to Cuba, what happened to Venezuela, North Korea. You know, you can go on and on down the list, right? The pendulum stopped swinging. It just went and it just. It just stayed. But I think it's important to have a balance because capital needs labor, labor needs capital. And so the second either one isolates the other, it breaks.
- [54:55]
C
The interesting thing to me is that despite all of these examples that we have, whether it be Venezuela or North Korea or Eastern Europe or anywhere, pick any socialist communist country you want. Despite all of these, you still have privileged Western elites like, you know, Zoran Mamdani in New York coming in and just giving you every, like, I mean, like, extreme communist. Like, he's a democratic socialist, but like, I said this the other day, but, like, democratic socialists are just communists who don't have control of the guns yet, right? Like, it's just like, it's gonna. It's gonna happen. I mean, but, like, it's just.
- [55:30]
B
It just blows my mind that despite.
- [55:33]
C
All of the evidence to the contrary, despite none of these policies ever working, despite all of these communist policies always ending in people ending up poor, in people ending up less free, in people ending up less happy because they are under the yoke of an oppressive government. Despite all of that evidence, you still.
- [55:51]
B
Have fucking idiots like this who come.
- [55:53]
C
In and say, we're good, but we're going to do it right in New York City. And it's like. And the sad thing is, he'll be able to limp it along for A little while. Because again, it's sitting on the back of commun. Or of capitalism, right? He's going to be able to paper over it a little bit for a little while, maybe trick more people into saying, see, look, I don't know what those crazy, those greedy capitalists were saying. Socialism can work just fine. It worked here in New York. Of course, you go five, 10 years in the future and you're going to see the long term results of this which are going to be ultimately destructive. But it's like, I wish, I wish we could for once like learn from history, but it appears we are always doomed to repeat it.
- [56:31]
A
You know, I find that surprising when I see stuff like, like that in countries like the U.S. frankly. But again, you, you, That's the challenge when you have the, when the gap between the wealthy and the working class is large, right? It, it's almost like it, it's like, I think, I think it was Elon Musk who tweeted about this, this difference between poverty and envy, which is poverty is just like there's a difference between the poverty and envy, right? Like poverty, as in meeting basic needs can, can and probably is very close to being resolved through technology. A place to sleep, a place to eat, a place to work, some basic access to healthcare, some access to a basic education. Like those things can be solved for with technology. What can't be solved for with technology is Billy, my neighbor, just bought the second Range Rover, right? And all I have is this Fiat, this Fiat car, right? Like I wonder what Billy's doing, right? Like Billy's probably, Billy's making so much money. Let's just say Billy's a, a banker. Oh no, these bankers, man, like, they're just making way too much money. They should not be making much money. They should be paying me more, more money because Billy has two Range Rovers and I only have a one car, right? Like, I think some of that, I think more of the, of the sort of demand and fervor for these equalizing policies comes from that versus I, you know, I really, you know, my daughter's starving, right, Because I can't get food for her, right? I don't know. I mean, I'm not here trying to tell you that there's poverty in the States and there are no issues and blah, blah, blah. But I'm saying, broadly speaking, I think it comes more from a place of those people are making way too much money than from a place of I don't have enough, right? Maybe it is, maybe they don't have Enough. But I think some of it is actually subjective, right? Like people in Africa would kill to have a suburban, you know, Bronx or Queens or whatever it is that you live in lifestyle, whether as, as challenged as you think it might be, right? A Venezuelan. Venezuelans risk their lives trying to get to America to be whatever they can be janitors, whatever they get, right. And live wherever they can. People in Cuba risk their lives to get to that. People in Venezuela risk their lives to get to that, to cross the Yang to get to America. And you know, some people are in America arguably with, you know, in better conditions than a recently arrived immigrant, but they just want to be better. They want to be, you know, they want to be like the other guy, right? And so I, I'm. The other part is that it's, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a good narrative. It comes from a place of good intentions. Does that make sense? Like who's going to, who's. You have to be a monster to, to get up and openly say, no, you, nobody should have access to. We should not, we should not all have access to health care. That sounds very unpalatable, right? And some of that, it forces you to go out and almost have to say that or take that position to go against the position and then you sound like a lunatic, right? Does that make sense? Because like, oh my God, why would he ever be against everybody having access to health care? Like, yeah, that sounds like a noble thing to say, right? And, and why not? Right? Like what? You as a human, you want your other fellow humans to be healthy and to never be in a position where they can't, you know, but the reality, but then you go to the reality, like, go run the hospital. You go run that hospital, right? And, and that's the things, those of us who have operated, those who have, who have run businesses. Listen, I'm all for everybody being healthy and having everything they need. I just might. I think the thing that many people are saying is we just have to have a plan because nothing in this world is free. This, this, this money that they're giving us, it's coming from someone else, right? And if we start demanding more and more and more money from them, they might say it's not worth it for them to be here, right? Like, look at what happened in the uk. Oh, we're going to increase the wealthy tax. It's going to be great. We're going to double the revenue. They went, they left, they left because that's the thing like. And this. And that's also the challenge. When you're a government, you're trying to balance these two tensions, right? Like, capital has a lot more mobility than labor. Does that make sense? Like, if capital is a lot more mobile than labor, like, if you don't set the right. I don't know, the right conditions. Yeah, the right conditions for capital to be there. Capital. Capital has other options. And capital very quickly can move easier than a person. If you want to move a person, you got to get a visa, you got to get a work permit, you got to get a passport, you got to get. You got to sell your house, you got to sell your car, you got to rent the place, you got to find school for your kids. Very hard to move a person. Moving capital, like, where do you want the wire? Right.
- [62:06]
C
Yeah.
- [62:07]
A
And so that's the. That's the. The other challenge, right? And. And that's also what happened in Venezuela. Capital gradually left. Capital was the first to flee. But then it got to the point where even though all of our skilled workers started leaving because there was no opportunity, so it. Capital leaves first. But that doesn't mean qualified labor doesn't leave. Qualified labor needs capital. So the horrible thing about brain drain is that happens from the top down. The first. The people that leave the first are the guys with the most wealth, the most opportunity, the most options. And then it starts going down the pipe, down the list, down the list, till you get to basically the bottom, when it becomes a migration crisis. There was a saying or there is a saying that says, you know, the first immigrants leave by plane, right? Like, you. You pick a plane, you go out, you get. You get your land, you have a work permit, you have a visa, you have money, you can relocate, no problem. The second wave of immigrants leaves on train or bus, right? They're. Oh, well, I got a friend there, relative over here. He got me a gig over there. The third wave. By the time the third wave comes, nobody wants to accept them because the first guys came with a lot of money. The same. The second guys came with some skill. The third guys are just coming to save their ass, right? Like, they're. They're coming with, like, pants, pots and pans, and whatever they're wearing because the regime has just taken everything from them, right? As a nation. And this is the reality. Every. Every nation wanted us when we were the. The plane guys. I remember this because there were no visa restrictions. Everybody was like, oh, yeah, Venezuela has come. Oh, great talent coming from Venezuela. Do you know anybody that's like, we're happy to hire. And then the second way was like, okay, well you, you have great qualifications. We can pay you less than what we're paying these professionals. And you have the same qualifications. Oh yeah, for sure. Get over here. Then the third guys are coming in. A lot of them without a passport. Many of them didn't, weren't able to make it to university or they went to some, the only thing they could afford was some regiment indoctrination university. And that degree is as good as toilet paper. And so, and so they have very codifications. And of course, when those guys start coming in, all the governments are like, we have a migration crisis in our hands. This is, this is horrible. I'm like, why weren't you ringing the alarms when the people, when the first guys were coming in and buying homes and sending their kids to private school, right? Like, no, they ring the alarms when the last guys show up. And anyway, that's just another added challenge to how to rebuild a country, right? Like your best people leave first. And those guys, funny enough, have the highest chances of making it abroad. And even if you turn things around, if you left Venezuela, you did very well for yourself abroad, and now Venezuela is free again. You would really have to think hard. Is that what you want your kids to go back to after everything you've lived through? And again, the sort of PTSD that you had from having somebody knock on your door and threaten you. And so it'll take time to rebuild it, but I'm confident that we will. I'm confident that we will because Venezuela just has way too much going for it. It's, it's got a great, I think of oil as a blessing and a curse, frankly. It's a blessing in some ways, it's a big curse in other ways. But for whatever, for better or worse, we have it. And in the right hands, it can really help the country. We have incredible, just everything, geopolitical location, weather, potential for tourism, and we have great human capital. It's just that a lot of it is no longer in Venezuela. But I, I think we can get them back. I think we can get us back. I'll include myself in there because I, I, I would love nothing but to help rebuild the country.
- [66:15]
C
Let me, let me ask you, because obviously we have an example of a country that seemed like it was too far over the edge to come back, right? In El Salvador, we've now with, with also a massive diaspora, right, of people who left El Salvador, different circumstances than Venezuela, but you know, I mean, murder capital of the world, right, for. For a very long time, obviously changed that, that paradigm. And now you, you know, I, like, I know personally multiple people who moved to the States from El Salvador, you know, years ago. Their families came, and now they're moving back and they're. They're bringing their families back. That says a lot. It says a lot when people who fled a country for, you know, for America, for the American dream, decide to leave and go back home. What do you think it takes to get Venezuela back to, like, to get it to that level where El Salvador is at, where obviously El Salvador is still, is still building, right? It's still developing. It's not saying it's free of problems, but from all the friends that I have there, all the people I know, I'm happy to be able to say there's like a lot of them now. I've met a lot of, you know, El Salvadorans both here and in the US and there. But it's like, it's an amazing story to watch because whatever you think, like, you cannot deny the reality of people who left their country and now are willing to come back to it and excited to come back to it and to try and build something and have that pride. What do you think that takes for Venezuela? I mean, maybe a better question, what would that take for you?
- [67:51]
A
Great question. And, and this actually gets into an interesting point around El Salvador, which is the biggest thing you can do, is so I have a family, right? Like, I have kids and I'm married, okay. And I. My first, the first thing I think about once, Once you have kids, right? Like, is, are my kids going to be safe? That's. That's my number one priority. Before Bitcoin, before, you know, business, before labor law, weather, I look at security, safety, right? It's one of the things I love about being where I am, which is the Cayman Islands is one of the safest places in the world. Venezuelans, like, listen, I can accept imperfect crypto regulation. I can live with imperfect crypto regulation. In fact, we've been living with it since crypto started, right? There's never been such thing as perfect regulation. So I can accept that. I can accept, you know, I mean, this isn't the case in Venezuela, but I can accept crappy weather or new seasons, crappy seasons of weather. Like, I can tolerate that. What I will not tolerate is my physical safety, the physical safety of myself and my children, or the perception of risk for myself and my family. I think what Bukele has done best In El Salvador. The biggest change to the lives of the people in El Salvador has not come from bitcoin. It has come from the fact that he cleaned up the streets. I know that for many people listening, they might not have the full context, but to be able to, to be in a country in Central America, walked, walk through downtown with your iPhone out recording yourself at night when people in Latam see that. This is why Bukele is a rock star in Latam. Because none of us can do that anywhere else in Latam, as trivial as that may be, right? Like, try going, try, go and do that in Nicaragua. Go try, do that in Honduras. Like, go, go ahead, go try, do it in Guatemala or Venezuela or Colombia or anywhere you go. Just try it, try it. You won't dare. You'll have people walking right by you. Be like, hijo, like, son, son, put that away, put that away, son. Like people, like people. Good Samaritans will come and tell you right anywhere. So what? What really revel and I spoke. I've spoken to many El Salvadorians. I go at least once a year. I'm heading there in a few weeks for plan B. So shout out to anyone listening if you'll be there. See you, see you in El Salvador. Ask anyone, ask any Salvadorian what has been the biggest difference for you since Bukele came in. And they'll tell you. I've been with taxi drivers that said, sir, Bukele actually makes me make more money because in the past I used to go, I used to have to park my car at 6pm it was too dangerous to drive at night. Now I can drive all throughout the night. I can drive all throughout 3:00am, 4:00am taking people to the airport. And I'm making a lot more money and it's great and it's safer. The part of town where I used to live, I would never let my kids out of the house after 5pm now my kids can go out and play and run and kick the ball. Like feeling that way, like being empowered to feel physically safe is the number one motivator for you to go out and do something productive. Like, it is very hard, and I'll tell you from experience, it is very hard to focus on anything productive when you're always checking, oh, lock your windows. Think the thing. Be back by seven. Be back by seven. Don't dare stay by seven. There's so and so. I heard gunshots at so and so. Or they'll call you and they'll say, oh, so and so's kid. Just Got kidnapped. Be careful, right? We got to take two cars. This is another common one growing up. Take two cars. Take two cars. Don't you dare go there in one car. Because God forbid your tire goes flat at 10pm you got a flat tire in a Minnesota highway at 10:00pm, man. Good luck. So again, going back to what I think it'll take, I think it'll take cleaning up the death squads. I think it'll take knowing that the rule of law has come back. I think it'll take some, some very public trials and processes so that people can witness that justice is back. Does that make sense? Like you need to make almost like a, like an emblematic case to show or go after a particular gang, right? Like go crush those gangs. Don't stop until they're done. Jail all of them. Make it very public, right? So that everybody gets the message. F around find out, right? Like we are now in a rules based country. You follow the rules. There's no side deals, there's no handshakes, there's no hit me up over here and I'll let you go. That, that's gone. That's done. Right? And I think Bukele has done that very well in El Salvador. I hope to see the same in Venezuela. And I think once that happens, you're not just going to see me, you're going to see a lot of Venezuelas go back and put a toehold, like a toehold back in the country. Whether we move definitely or go and start making, you know, moves to, to basically position ourselves. But you will see a lot more activity. That's what's holding many people back right now.
- [73:51]
C
I mean it makes total sense. And it reminds me of just like something that Bastia wrote about, which is the. I like, what is the purpose of the government ultimately? What is the purpose, the actual purpose of the state, if you distill it down? Well, it's to enforce the law. Okay, what is the purpose of the law? Well, that's basically just to organize for the collective defense of private property. So therefore, very simply, the only purpose, the real core purpose of the government of the state is just to keep people's private property safe from plunderers. The problem is this is what Bastiat wrote about, right? And you see it coming true time and time again is when the state becomes the plunderer.
- [74:30]
B
They become the ones.
- [74:31]
C
Either they're not, they're one not protecting you from the plunderers, from the gangs, from the whatever, from the people who would do you harm. They're not keeping your, even your physical body safe, which is like, that is the ultimate form of private property. Right. It's like yourself, this body. But furthermore, when they become the ones who are actually doing the plundering of their citizens, so now they're perverting the law. And this is what you see in Venezuela. This is what I mean. Every socialist and communist country devolves into is the people at the top. Because shocker, there are people at the top. Even if in your communist utopia there are always people at the top, they are taking advantage and they are using the law that they have perverted to be able to plunder their own citizens. And that is ultimately like, if you want to have like. That's why countries with strong property rights are ones that people flee to. They don't flee to communist countries, they don't flee to socialist countries, they flee to as close to a capitalist country as we can get, we can debate whether or not we're, you know, we're even at full capitalist because we got central bankers controlling our money. That's a different story. Point being if places people want to go are places they know their property is going to be respected. Because if not, you cannot, you cannot build anything fundamentally. You're not going to build a business, you're not going to build a family, you're not going to buy it, you're not going to buy a house if you don't, if you don't think you can actually keep that house, you're not going to buy a business if you're afraid that the state like Venezuela did will come and commandeer your business and expropriate it. You're not going to do any of those things. Why would you, why would you build anything if the government can just take it away immediately?
- [75:59]
A
Right.
- [75:59]
C
It, it. No one's going to do that.
- [76:01]
A
No. And this is why I think this is, that's spot on. And so many of the problems in societies start happening. So I can't remember who said this, but it stuck with me because I thought it was really funny and, and pointed, which is capitalism is only fun when you have capital. Right. Like capitalism without capital isn't very fun. Right. And so pulling from that thread, property rights are really important if you have property. A lot of people don't have any property. Right. And so this is why the, when the balance of property holders, the non property holders breaks, you start basically always going at the beck and call of the number. Because again, just in the standard distribution, right. Like on average I would want to believe that 50% plus of the population own something. You know, your heart, your house, some stock, whatever, Bitcoin, you know, whatever you want to own, but you own something. So much of the population is paycheck to paycheck. They don't own anything. They in fact have negative property. They have. They have debt. Does that make sense? Like, they've already used other people's property. They need to give it back. So they have basically like no property. They have negative property, right? And on the other side, you have this accumulation of property. And the way things go is like, when you're really good at something, you tend to actually just break away and break away and break away and you make more and more and more money, right? That's why you have these mag seven and like, the winners win big. And. And, you know, the people over here just, they never change. So you always have these increasingly more, more concentrated capital and unfortunately fewer hands, which is something that, you know, we can argue here whether it's. It's a sustainable thing or not. But I think, naturally speaking without guardrails, that's what typically happens. And so you get to a point where you have the property. You know, people with property are like, property rights, Property rights are important. Like, this is why we did all this. Like, we, we create all these jobs, we build all these things. Like, I don't want this to get taken away. It's my life's work, right? But on the other hand, you have these other people saying, well, those property rights do nothing for me, right? Like, I want labor rights. I want. I want you to basically say, you know, you got all that money from me, right? Like, I was the one putting in the hours. I was the one putting in the sweat. I need some of your money. And there's more of us than there are a few. So let's organize ourselves and put our boy here up on the helm. And our boy is going to redistribute all that wealth, right? And so for me, that's why I hound so hard around. We need to create owners of things. We need to give people agency to own stuff. Because only once you own stuff, you value property rights, right? Before you own stuff, or even if you owe stuff, you don't even care so much about property rights. In fact, you want negative property rights because you have negative property. Does that make sense? And so 100%, for me, I've always harped on this idea that we need people to own assets, whether that's real estate or bitcoin or gold or some Asset, just own an asset because owning an asset gives you, agency gives you and ensures that we're always going to want to seek a balance, right. Between property rights and labor rights. And again, it's not about one side is right or the other side is wrong. It's about balance and being mutually respectful.
- [79:38]
C
Yeah. And I think the, because you've made a bunch of good points there and I think the, one of the key things is that people, the, the mistake that people make, it's reasonable to, to say, hey, this economy, whatever, isn't working out for me. The rich keep getting richer, the poor keep getting poor. What's, something's broken here, right. The problem is that people identify, it's easy to identify like the, the symptoms of the problem. Right. It's easy to identify those symptoms. It's difficult for people to get at the underlying cause, what's the actual disease. Right. And so they think, they try to treat the symptoms and it's like, and if you're, it's like if you're sick with cancer but you have a scratch on your arm, it's like putting a band aid on isn't going to fix your cancer. Right. Or like somebody you know, like, you know anything, like you need to get to the disease underneath. And the problem is that people tend to say, well, we have all this inequality, so what can we do? Well, we need to give the government more power and the government will then fix it. Right. But that's always the solution is let's give the government more power. When in reality, so much of the distortions that we see in the market are caused by market distortions caused by interventionism by the state. Right. And then that's not to say that there can't ever be like some, maybe some forms of like good intervention. But I, I, it's, it's tough to pinpoint them because ultimately anything that a centralized group does, they have to assume that they are smarter than the free market of people making choices. Disparities naturally exist in decide in societies, in nature. Inequalities naturally exist oftentimes. I mean, government subsidies exacerbate those things. Right. Like that's, that's one of the, that's one of the huge problems with subsidies is that they distort the free market. And so that's the difficult thing is trying to convince people that like, look, the answer to this isn't that we need to give a couple of guys in power that are saying words you like a bunch more power and they're going to fix everything. It's all going to be great. That. That just never works. It never works. But, you know, the difficulty is trying to convince them that, no, actually what we need is, like, less intervention or we need less, you know, we need more emphasis on, you know, just generally freedom, right? And the freedom of individuals to make their own choices. That's not as good of a slogan as, hey, here's this guy with a nice smile and a nice voice, and he says he's going to fix everything. And all we have to do is take out these people that I already am envious of and I already hate. So it's like, you're never, like, it's impossible. It's an impossible argument to win to say, like, no, what you need is less of that guy with the nice smile and. And the, you know, and the nice words. You need less of that. You need to give him no power at all, actually, because he's going to make this worse. You may think it gets better a little bit in the short term, but in the long term, it will make it worse and worse and worse. That's why you see actually, like, the disparities in a pseudo capitalist society are large, right? From the richest to the poorest, naturally. But you get into, like a communist, an actual communist society. It's like the halves in the communist society, like the inner circle, they are way, way, way, way, way richer because everyone else is poor.
- [82:39]
B
There is no middle ground.
- [82:41]
C
There is no spectrum. It's everyone is poor. And then there's a couple people that.
- [82:45]
B
Are insanely, insanely wealthy with their offshore.
- [82:48]
C
Accounts with, you know, pillaging the. Pillaging the resources and the. And the. And the, you know, treasures of the nation. And you see this every time. But again, it's like the difficulty. Mauricio is trying to convince somebody that's just barely scraping by that, hey, the answer is actually not more government. The answer is, like, is less government intervention. You're never going to win that argument. Right? So that's why I think your point is so valuable that, well, how do you then actually flip the tide? By creating more owners. And that's where, you know, bitcoin doesn't fix everything, but it at least gives everyone who decides to a way to own something. You can really own bitcoin, right? And that's like, that's a powerful thing.
- [83:32]
A
Absolutely. I think one of the biggest challenges with building owners is that the size of the quality assets. I mean, the ticket size of a quality asset is just so high. Right? Like, a quality asset for most people is Their home that's out of reach for I would argue, 75 to 80% of Americans and most people around the world. So now you have so many people in our generation and generations after us that are saying, I'll never own a house. I'm just going to go gamble my life away on polymarket. Or I'm just going to go gamble my life away on some shit coins. That's financial nihilism. And we've almost divorced them from the idea they'll ever own anything. Right? And what I think is beautiful about bitcoin is that you can start, it's digital property that you can start buying in pennies. In pennies. Worth a shot of a pop, right? You can buy a dollar worth of Bitcoin, $10 worth of Bitcoin. It, it helps you. And at the same time, you know, you could say, okay, stocks are quality assets and stocks can, can. But, but again, stocks require too much thinking. How am I, am I picking the right stock? Am I evaluating their financial statements? What happens if one day they go up and the CEO makes an issue? So you again, there's no real clean. The beautiful thing about the house is you don't have to think about it, oh, I want a roof over my head. I don't want to pay rent. I'd rather be paying down my mortgage. Oh, this is great. I'm just going to go live here. Like, I needed to get one anyway. But a stock is like, which one of these hundred thousand stocks am I supposed to pick? If I pick the wrong one, should I just buy an index? What's the index? Unit cost. And again, you're just like, it's not a simple asset. Like the reason boomers did so, so, so, so well, because they went out and they bought a house because they needed to buy a house and they took a mortgage on it because why not? And they just banked really, really hard accidentally. And now they're great investors, right? But it's not staring at the same opportunity set, right? And I think again, if we need to, as more and more of the boomers are exiting society, and more and more of Argentina society, we're starting to tilt the balance of asset owners and non asset owners because we're rejecting asset owners and we're replacing them with 10 times the amount of non asset owners. And of course you start seeing things like Madani and unfortunately you're going to continue to see that stuff. You know, the, the, the, the beatings will continue until the morale is restored or whatever the saying goes.
- [86:02]
C
Yeah, it's, it's a sad reality. And, you know, I want to be conscious of your time here because I know we're butting up on it there. As you, as usual, when, when I talk to you, we get through about, you know, 10% of things that, you know, we wanted to talk about. But, but that's okay. That just means we'll have to do it again. So just in the interest of making sure I get, get you out of here on time, anything you want to, you want to end with. I mean, people should also, like, make sure to follow you on, on Noster as well. I'll make sure to link your Noster so we can pump up those numbers. But where do you, where do you want to send people and anything or anything else you want to leave people with?
- [86:37]
A
No, I would say, listen, just stay close to the Venezuela story. Talk to Venezuelans. Don't, don't try to get the opinions of Venezuelans from media. Get it from actual Venezuelans. Talk to us. I have the open dms. Dm Me. Dear Javier Bastardo, there's many of us, Jorge, like, I can connect you with a plethora of other views and if you don't want to hear mine, but talk to people on the ground, talk to people with connections on the ground. Don't let some media outlet shape your view. Talk to the real people. And I would say, you know, I think we're optimistic. I think for once, I mean, my life is bitcoin and I love bitcoin, but my other passion obviously is Venezuela and obviously my family. But I've now, I had, I basically had to force myself and make my like, self lobotomize my brain and remove the Venezuela part of my story, just to remove the pain. But now it's here and I think if you want to understand how Venezuela's feel, just reach out to us. We'll be happy to chat and we'll tell you how we see it and why. And we'd love to hear your take. Right. Everybody's views are valid but ours, you know, we are the people whose families are getting impacted by this. Whose, you know, whose lives or livelihoods are at stake, whose life's works at stake. So talk to us. We're happy to chat and, and I'm optimistic. And hopefully you and anyone listening here can one day see the beauty of Venezuela with your own two eyes. And, and if, and when this thing opens up, I'll be, I'll be inviting you and everyone else I know to come down and celebrate.
- [88:13]
C
I I can't. I cannot wait for that. That's. Yeah. I mean, Venezuela looks, like, just incredibly beautiful from everything that I've seen. Like, obviously, I've only seen pictures and videos and whatnot, but wow. It's like this. This beautiful, beautiful country has been, you know, hidden. Well, not hidden, but, you know, sealed off from the world for so long. It's. It's good that there's a. There's a chance that it can open up, because I am sure, like, in El Salvador, tourism would explode, and that's.
- [88:38]
B
A huge boon to an economy.
- [88:40]
A
Yeah. And it's. It's. It's beyond your expectations. It'll surpass your every expectation. I'm sure of it. So I can't wait to see you and everyone else there soon.
- [88:52]
C
I'll hold you to that. I look forward to it. Mauricio, thank you so much for your time, as always. Always great to catch up. Looking forward to chatting again soon, but until then, yeah, we'll be following Venezuela very closely. And thanks to you for, like, actually breaking this down for people, because I think it really matters to, like, hear from somebody who actually knows what they're talking about.
- [89:09]
A
Hey, man, my pleasure. Happy to do this again. Any other time and I'll see you in El Salvador. If not, I'll see you at the Vibes Capital Chat.
- [89:17]
C
Absolutely.
- [89:27]
B
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening, and share it with your friends, friends, family, and strangers on the Internet. Find me on noster@primal.net walker and this podcast@primal.netcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram @titcoin podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.com walker America to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.