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- [00:18]
A
Hello and welcome. This is Gabriel custodiet of watchman privacy, privacy practitioner, consultant, author, and frontline fighter in the push for privacy. I know why you're here. Like the rest of us here in the resistance, you're trying to escape the technocratic apparatuses that you see enveloping you and crushing your freedoms. That's why I created all of this, all without sponsors. I hope you enjoy this show. But then when you're ready to take the next steps to secure your privacy and your future, Visit my website, escapethetechnocracy.com to start the real journey. Your support alone does not determines the future of the show. See you there. I'm very pleased today to be speaking to Maya Parbu, who is a fascinating person. She's very directly connected to Suriname, which is a country, one of those three small countries north of Brazil. Doesn't get talked a lot about. It's her talking about it. Put it on the map for me. In a real sense, she's a bitcoiner. She was running for president of Suriname at one point in time and had some fascinating plans to fix it, starting from scratch, essentially, with free market policies and its own kind of internal reset. And I found Maya to be a very interesting person. So I'm very pleased to have her on the show today. Maya, how are you doing today?
- [01:31]
B
Great, Gabriel. How are you?
- [01:32]
A
I'm doing all right. I'm doing well. You know, I want to say up front that I'm sure a few people listening, they're probably aware of you or tangentially aware of you, and they might connect you with a certain article that was written critical of you. And so I will get to that. But just to kind of spoil that a little bit, I read that and I didn't really think much of it, but we will get to that. For the people who have that kind of on their minds now, we should probably at this point discuss Suriname, the country itself. Briefly listening to your past discussions about Suriname, it is, you know, interesting enough place, right? It's a. You mentioned that it's a carbon negative, one of the few carbon negative places in the world. It has a ton of rainforest. You mentioned the Newmont mine that is there. But it does have some characteristics of the third world. You know, serious inflation, average salary is low, especially compared to the price of goods, lots of corruption, things of this sort. Tell us a little bit, especially people who are not familiar with Suriname. And again, it's one of the three tiny countries above Brazil on the Atlantic Ocean. Talk a little bit about Suriname. What are the most important things that people need to know about this place?
- [02:47]
B
Well, to be honest, like we. We did Surinam or organized a conference as well. Suriname decentralized. It was exactly about this showing, showing people that came from all over the world what it is about Suriname that makes it different. One Samson said it really accurately. It feels like traveling to a different planet because it's really hard to get here. You have to either travel from. Yeah, well, now you can grab a flight from Panama, Miami or Amsterdam. But if, you know, if you're coming from anywhere else in the world, it usually is tough to figure out travel. We had to help a lot of travelers with their tickets. It feels like you're traveling somewhere that you don't find anywhere else in the world. It's like traveling back in time too, a little bit because there's such a gap in development that it, you know, most. Most stores here don't even have a website. They use Facebook primarily. And not even all have it. Not all are in Google Maps. So your credit card doesn't work everywhere. So it does really feel like traveling back in time. But I think the most important thing about this country is the fact that you feel a certain sense of freedom that I don't have anywhere else in the world. Everywhere else I've been, whether it be Asia or anywhere in Europe, anywhere on this continent, the Caribbean or the US I still feel too much of the system. I don't know how to better explain it. But it's not just the financial system. It's media. It's everything, right? Whereas here we are really our own little planet. And I don't feel walls and control here as I do when I lived in Europe, for example, or working in the U.S. you know, I traveled back and forth a lot to the States for, For both companies. And I don't know. I, I always. Especially when. When. When it's tax season right now. Now it's tax season. When you're filing with the IRS or when you're filing your taxes in Europe, it. You. You just kind of feel like, okay, yeah, this is, this is the reminder that basically everything is controlled. And, and it's. It's all about calendars. And, and it's. It's, I think, the best description we have here for, for life in, In Europe, for example, like in the Netherlands, we say you, You. You live to work. You don't work to live.
- [05:54]
A
Sure.
- [05:54]
B
It's. It's like your work is almost everything. Your calendar, everything is planned. If you want to see Friends, it's like a month in advance appointment and even then you might be too busy and then you have to reschedule if you want to see family. It's the same thing. Whereas here I had friends from Europe and I had a lot of bitcoiners also come down and they say what we have is unique. It's like friends come over randomly throughout the day, whenever. And everyone treats you like your family. And you see your friends regularly. You see your family constantly. It's normal here to live with family or to live nearby family or see your family a couple of times a week, have dinner with them once a week. It's. It's just a part of life. And I don't know, in other countries, I've never seen that with, with, with, you know, with anyone I know. And other than that, it's just. Things are pretty, pretty. It. Well, that's a Caribbean thing. But I think here it's still a little bit different than what I know from Curacao or Aruba or any of the other islands. Here things are slower paced. It's not as fast. It's not go, go, go, go, go. It's not as corporate. You know, even corporations here are not as corporate as corporate US or corporate Europe. It's just a completely different life. And even with things as, you know, getting your. Getting a stay here, a residency permit or getting a driver's license, I don't know, everything feels simpler, less constricted now.
- [07:42]
A
Maya's mentioned spending time in the Netherlands Suriname former Dutch colony. Dutch being a language of Suriname. So you'll find a lot of interviews with Maya speaking Dutch. Speaks perfectly great English as well. There's. It's a. It's a very multicultural place. Many different languages being spoken as well. But I just wanted to kind of go back to a little bit of the basics here, Maya, and maybe just tell people a little. A little bit about yourself, your journey to where you are now. Because I think it's a pretty interesting story.
- [08:12]
B
Well, I was born and raised in Suriname. My grandfather was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country, if not the most. I grew up with a pretty big family. My grandmother's house had all of six children, my dad's brothers and sisters living there. So I grew up with my entire family around me. I grew up with. My dad owned two soccer teams, so I grew up with soccer and he owned the or. My family owned two buildings in the city. So I grew up in the heart of the city. After school, you know, I. I go to what later turned into the hotel. I would run around the entire city. I do odd jobs at some of the shops around the city. So I was always really curious and I think wanted to copy what my dad did. And my parents were doing, working all day as entrepreneurs. Went to high school. Here was a private school. Know most of the, most of the families in. In the private sector in this country because of, you know, the schools you attend, sort of lower, lower grades and in high school. And then my dad passed away when I was or was assassinated when I was 12 years old. That was also something that I was in the Netherlands at the time at family and my mom was traveling to. To Argentina for the World Cup. You know, that's, that's how kind of how. How I found out. I woke up and it was on tv. It was on the news in the Netherlands.
- [09:48]
A
Geez.
- [09:49]
B
Yeah, so it was pretty. It was a pretty big deal here. I think it was one of the first really public. It was in a very renowned cafe in the heart of the nightlife of the city where all the bars and the tourists and cafes are. And he was at a cafe. He was going to fly to the Netherlands to visit me the next morning. Yeah, it was assassinated. We have. We had about, I think 15,000 plus people at, at the ceremonies at our house. And it's all a little. I have flashes of memories of that time. You know, it was shortly before September 11th. So I remember that happening during some of the ceremonies. After he passed away, our family basically lost everything. My mom and I moved around quite a lot. We lost our family home to a friend of his also in a very fucked up corrupt deal involving a notary here. And we went around from family to family until we eventually stayed at a house that was owned by a. Like a group of friends in a. How do you say this in English? A stiff thing like a cooperation of friends of my dad's and we were going to buy that house. But also. Yeah, something I think in terms of incentives or they had different priorities than letting us buy it. So when I was. I think this is 2010, so I was 22 at the time. I got a mortgage from a bank I was working with. I started working when I was about 15 and opened my first business account when I was 18 starting an import company. My mom would drop me off after school at the port and I sit in fiesa as a port operator here. I'd sit in their warehouse with customs officers and figure out how to get products that people want to order on Amazon here. As quickly as possible. That company kind of made sure that. That I could get a mortgage to buy that first home, which I still live in at the moment. And basically from there just grew that company. It was literally a house with one bedroom and a garage. And then we turned the garage into an office. It was like this, you know, plastic PVC walls and really not very durable, but we made it work. And it was like, most of. Most of the people that work for me are still friends. So it was two or three friends from high school that asked me to work together, and they started working here. And we kind of built that, continued building that until I renovated, built a warehouse and two apartments on top of it on the same plot. And that kind of sustained us also during economic downturns. You know, like, we very much work as a team. I never took a salary from the company. And the, the other guys, they, they all grew with the company. But also when things got hard, like, for example, we had one employee steal like $17,000 and $17,000, a lot of money for us at the time. And the economy went completely to shit. Like, inflation went from 2.8 for, for $1, 2.8 SRD for $1 to around 16 at the time.
- [13:43]
A
Whoa.
- [13:43]
B
Yeah, it didn't go as fast. It was progressive. But From I think 7.6 to 16 was pretty fast. And then we had to survive that, of course, as a company. And I was like, you know, hands in my hair, had no idea how it was going to survive that. And then basically without me knowing, none of the team took a salary for, I think it was two or three months. And then I looked at, I was looking at our numbers and I'm like, this doesn't make sense. We have more money in the bank than, than, you know, than our admin, admin shows. And then they, they told me that they weren't taking a salary. And like, guys, you need to, you know, I mean, everybody was still studying at the time, so you don't have as much responsibility as you. You do when you're older. But still, you know, they were supposed to take their salary. So they started taking again. But that just showed the kind of commitment we had to making sure that it survived. And that one has been going on for about 23 years now. I started in 2003, and around 2015, I was getting a little bit bored of, you know, doing just the import shop for, like, the import company for such a long time. And it has its own manager, you know, he manages the team. So there's not, there's not much of a challenge in it. And I was on my way from a shooting competition in Aruba and I was sitting next to Serish Chin Wong Yu, who's my cto. And the second company is Icarus jio. So we wanted to innovate in infrastructure, you know, completely different focus, civil engineering, it's completely different space. And the goal was to hit more than a million in revenue because with Gray Micah at organic growth and year over year we had steady growth. We reached around 800K. But you know, it was really hard to break that million dollar revenue hurdle, let's say. And Suriname is a pretty small country, pretty small economy. So there aren't many companies that do more than in a million US in revenue. So it's pretty challenging. And he gave me a list of products, one of which was Presto Geo. It's a US based company. They manufacture geocells. The US army actually invented it. And it's used in infrastructure works to build roads and channels and dams and dikes. And our first customer was Newmont, also a U.S. publicly traded company. I think one of the largest or first or second largest gold mining company in the world. And they have the 8th largest mine here in Suriname. And we were working with them during the entire construction phase. So we did most of the haul roads for Newmont as well. And we hit that million, I think in the first eight months of operation without any, any investment whatsoever was literally bootstrapped. I, I think I spent maybe a couple hundred dollars just to, to set up the, the company itself. And then we did, we, we just did cold outreach basically and told them, hey, you're going to need this as soon as rainy season hits. Yeah, we grew that company year over year to about, I think Our peak was 5.7 million US which was big for us. That gave the opportunity to invest into something else. And around a few years before, I was already following and deep into the bitcoin space. I joined this telegram group early on called Whale Pool where you had everyone like you know, everyone from all the exchanges that worked at, at, at the exchanges, the CEOs, the executives, you had Samson, everyone basically was, was in that group, the early OGs at least. And that's where I kind of learned and stayed connected to the community. And once we had a chance to invest, I knew I wanted to, you know, I saw bitcoin as a solution to all of my country's problems. So I knew I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to it. So I flew to New York and tried to convince the admins of that group and some of the people, like some of the OGs from the industry to do what actually happened in El Salvador, in Suriname. And then yeah it, I just. We built an exchange we were supposed to launch here. The state oil refineries, public bond issuance and at that time our central bank governor got arrested. So the whole process got delayed and afterwards just you know, bureaucracy and corruption one year after the other. And at a certain point I, my professor from Oxford, he, he'd been asking me to move to, to either London or Boston or to one of the big cities to, to build a startup from there instead of focusing on, on you know, building from here. So in 2022 when there was also I had some security issues here as well and I went to Switzerland and that's when I started Daedalus Labs and kind of focused on that, focused on bitcoin surinang, building, you know, things that I knew that didn't need in government that I could try to just encourage bitcoin adoption here. We started in a fork of the German iron Swanso that didn't really take off here. It was pretty, you know, it's really focused on Maxis. So you have to have pretty extensive knowledge about bitcoin already which most people here don't have. Like, even the, like I haven't spoken to a single person here that knows more about bitcoin or the industry than me. So it's really hard to attract people for something like that. So that took off in the Netherlands actually. Like I worked at the booth. I, we did organized a booth at the First I think first conference in 2023. It was or 2222 or 23. It was around the same time that I, I went to, to Riga, to Prague and most of the car like Miami for example as well to just volunteer. So I just volunteered doing Enantuentz Huanza stuff and like I had the first 21 nights party in organized in Riga. So I just volunteer and on the side work on the bitcoin real estate investment trust which was something I thought I could focus on before I focus back on the exchange. Yeah, that's kind of I think short summary of my journey with entrepreneurship and then how I got into bitcoin.
- [20:54]
A
I noticed you left out your, your run for president. I think if people search for your name online that's, that's, that's one of the main things they'll find just your, you know, your, your thoughts quick or, or, or extended on, on how that played out.
- [21:07]
B
Yeah, I, I completely forgot. And, and the January came here. So I, I went to, to Miami, Lugano, Plan B. At Plan B, I asked what do I need to do to get what happened in El Salvador to happen in Suriname to get bitcoin bonds and things like that. And they told me I need to convince Samson to get on a plane. And before that I'd reached out to. I went to el Salvador in 2012 and also reached out there to the organizers of the conference and asked them, and they pointed me in the direction of Ayn and Swanson. So it's funny how I just keep kind of looking for a solution and that kind of determined my entire life's trajectory. Yeah. So they told me to convince Samson to get on a plane. So in Miami I spoke to him and then kind of hounded him afterward. And that took about a year going back and forth with him and the ministers, several commissions here, the Central Bank, Minister of Finance. He had several meetings over a span of a year before they, they came here to actually meet the President. So he was here. And that was, it's funny how that went too, because the, their, their, like, their schedules were not easy to match. And I knew on 25 November, which is independence Day, happens to be my birthday too, the president has to be in the country because it's, you know, Independence Day. So I planned it around, around that, that date, so I knew they could both meet. And Sampson came here with Ben. Ben Fan Ho. Ben came afterward as well in March. And I worked with them for, I think, a couple of more months to try to get some projects off the ground here. We were very focused on hydro and solar in the interior. I had another bitcoiner that also moved here from Australia and he was helping with these projects as well. So with just adoption, I was full on with bitcoin selling as well, focused on merchant adoption and increasing that here and holding monthly meetups. And it was actually during a meeting with, with Samson and I think it was the state oil refinery here. And then maybe someone, maybe I think the Banking Commission that after a while Samson just said, you should run. You know, you, you understand everything. The problems, the economy, the fixes, how Bitcoin can fix it, like the, how you can structure financial instruments with Bitcoin to benefit the country and its development and its people. And honestly, when he said it, I, you know, I laugh, kind of laughed it off. It has been something that friends and people that work with me, customers that know me and have always, you know, Heard me or followed me. How I speak about politicians and politics and government and solutions for the country. They always encouraged me before, but I don't know, you never kind of take it seriously. And then after Samson left, I was called to parliament for a meeting and I was given a. How do you say this in easy to understand for others without actually saying it. I was given a warning. Yeah, and a slight warning about, you know, the path we were on and whether or not if I wanted to continue on it. The president, for example, he said that he wanted to follow in the steps of El Salvador. He wanted to be, you know, innovative and, and wanted to adopt bitcoin so he would, you know, get. Get it done, make bitcoin legal tenor. Because it was literally, it's a one page document that has to be issued by the Foreign Exchange Commission here. So it's not a long legal process to actually recognize bitcoin as currency. He. The president said that one of his advisors had to. Had to advise him on it, so he had to go through it first. And I had worked with this same advisor previously. He had tried to recruit me to build the stock exchange and support with the stock exchange during the previous government. And he was the chairman of EGOV and wanted me as part of the EGOV team, focused on payments and the exchange. But he wanted 50% of the fees. And I wasn't okay with that. Giving some advisor to the President 50% of the fees of an institution that's supposed to be developed to the benefit of the people. So yeah, that I quit and that didn't work out. And some of the proposals I had worked on during that time, like oil securitization, bitcoin mining, similar to how gold mining is done in the country for the people. They had taken those proposals and done it privately and then restructured them in a way so that it benefits them, you know, so they were all corrupt deals. And once I found that out, because people started reaching out, you know, because we were in the media about bitcoin again. So people started reaching out and they shared this information with me. So April of the year after 2020, so 2024, I went to the helping party in El Salvador to kind of lay low while an interview that I did about, you know, whistleblowing about that corruption went viral in the country. And that's when I decided, that's when I also announced that I would go into politics to fight the system from the inside because this is never going to change. And you know, things were really bad back then as well like our hospitals were run over. They were sorry, overrun and they didn't have basic materials. Babies were dying in, in the NICU in. And like six babies had died in one year. It was. Or in one period. It was really crazy and it was just, you know, basic because of corruption. There were no basic materials or medicines. So it was. We were really heading towards Venezuela and we also had leadership that you know, was if, if they had won in 2025, it would have. The country would have probably headed exactly down that route. So that's when I announced April 2024. And then we, yeah, I worked with like we had former. Former banker here, former CEO of the largest banks. He, he actually quit a couple of years before and he was really loved by the people he was, he was supporting. We had other activists, you know, people that were leading protests, they were all supporting. So we, we had a good team going and started to build momentum. We were focused on first setting up a, like a completely new political party. But it was one. It was risky because the president has to approve and another political party was already having issues even though they, you know, they're like an established party for multiple decades. So we weren't sure if I would get on the like on the voting list with a new political party or we. If we would get it on time. So I joined the same party that I had myself had voted for my entire life, it's the oldest political party in the country. And then basically worked my ass off to get on the. On the list. And I announced that I was running for president later on also because of advice from another activist and lawyer who supports most of the political parties here. And he represents most of the activists, political activists. So any like the, let's say the, the opposition to the status quo, he usually supports. Supports those. So he advised to announce what I was running for because most of the candidates traditionally were over 60. Same corrupt system, all corrupt leaders. And I had, you know, I had momentum going being younger and having actual solutions and a vision to develop this country to get the younger vote because it's also going to need majority younger people voting in this election. So that's kind of how it, how the election process or how it all started. And then October I spoke at Bitcoin magazine started getting more momentum as well from the Bitcoin community. We focused on also I didn't want to do traditional, just the traditional campaigning. So we also focused on doing actual projects that could be sustainable and have an impact on the community. We focused on orphanages taking People from the poorest neighborhoods in. In the. In the country, and then teaching them how to, you know, how to work a job and how to be able to provide and save for themselves and teaching them about bitcoin as well. And then, yeah, then it was waiting until March, because March is when the candidates are publicly announced officially, and so all political parties announce their lists and then election starts. Or like, not election. The campaign. You're only allowed to campaign for about 60 days, and that starts around that time as well. Like two months before. Exactly 60 days before the election. Yeah, That's. That's a little bit. You know, I've been going on for a while now. That's a little bit of how we got into. Or how I got myself into that mess in the first place.
- [32:20]
A
Let's talk, Maya, about the. So I know the. The presidential campaign has. Has fallen through for you a little bit, but when I was listening to some of your. Your. Your. Your pitches for it, you had some really interesting ideas about how to transform the country of Suriname. You were consulting with Austrian economists about all sorts of things. Obviously making bitcoin legal tender, lots of corruption in Suriname, as. As you've noted. What was your idea for rooting out that and maybe some of the other obvious problems, whether politically or economically in Suriname. What were some of your ideas to tackle those sorts of things? Because, you know, small country, less than a million people, you can transform a place like this, like Bukele did in El Salvador. You can, unlike these large countries, the U.S. whatever, you can actually fully transform, in a certain sense, a place like Suriname. What were some of your ideas that you had come up with to solve some of the problems that Suriname has?
- [33:21]
B
So we. We had an amazing team assembled, you know, Parabylant, Raheem Taghi, an entire team of Austrian economists, and Samuel Coleman, for example, was helping out with our constitution. So basically reforming everything, like looking at the entire structure of government and then rebuilding it as it should be or as it's supposed to be. I'm a firm believer. I've always. Even as a kid, I was always against any form of government, actually. And when you grow up, you see that there is maybe a need for government in certain aspects of civilization. You know, you might need. Similar to Switzerland, you might need one organization to be able to organize a canton, for example, but you don't need them in the extent to which they've grown in countries like ours. Basically, almost every country except for Switzerland has a government that's overextended itself. So we have the same thing here. And we looked at, okay, what do you actually need to keep. Keep the country running and how can you transition to that? So we looked at ministries. We had. We have 17 ministries in Suriname. So we looked at how can we. What is the optimal amount of ministries that you would need, which ones are necessary and what, to what extent is their role. You know, I'm. I'm a firm believer in government shouldn't be controlling us. It should be in service of the people. Right? So more like utility. More like a utility company. Whereas now it's. It's. You vote for them once and they basically do whatever they want for five years. And then in five years you're so, so pissed off at everything they've done in those five years and what they haven't done or that they were supposed to do that you vote them out and you vote basically the same thing back in. So how do you restructure the system in a way that you change it from its core and build something new, something better? And the constitution? We were working on getting a draft of the constitution. Samuel was helping out a lot with that. He already made some drafts and some suggestions because, you know, a constitution is something that needs countrywide support. You can't just write it for the people then expect them to accept it. So he was helping with that to make it more decentralized. So we have districts here, for example. We took the model from. From Switzerland, Switzerland as cantons. And we could apply the same decentralization to governance. I'm very pro having a similar federal structure where you have, you know, an X amount of presidents basically, that rotate, you know, every year. So you've. You have seven, I think, Switzerland, seven leaders. And basically one is president for a year. And they rotate constantly. So that seems like something that would inhibit and limit corruption, but also not just corruption where someone does something that is financially wrong or morally wrong, but also it prevents them from being corrupted. Right? Because as you know, like. How do you say this in English? They say. In Dutch we say Mach Korempert, you know, so power, power corrupts. Right? So if. If a leader doesn't have the. The call it the throne, whatever for. Or the seat for the presidency for longer than a year, then that limits the. The risk of that happening. So I'm very pro that model. And that is what. What we started, know, lobbying for, fighting for. I started arguing with my entire political party to. To be able to get a discussion on the. About the. The constitution going. And from the constitution with that decentralization that basically brings the budget closer to the people and gives the people a director right to vote because they can actually vote for something when it's happening, not five years after. You know, if they need a bridge, they vote for it. Now if someone wants to implement Covid measures, they vote for it. You know, in Switzerland, not all cantons were on lockdown because they simply voted against it because their economies couldn't handle it. If, you know, they're dependent on ice skating, for example, or sorry, skiing and the ski resorts all need to be closed. So the same level of sovereignty and decentralization also from a budget perspective. And then at the, at the, you know, at the, at the central government level, we had six ministries, the most essential, of course, but then we also were looking at each ministry and how to reform each ministry. So like for example, education, right now there are all public schools and it's a very low price to pay for education for your child. It's not super expensive, but they're all poorly run. I supported it. We did a project at the school that hadn't been painted in 23 years and they had no materials for the kids. So we were looking at how to privatize education, basically shifting incentives as well, you know, and removing the organizational aspect away from government. You could basically, if we have, we don't have a very large working population, it's about 140,000 and half of them work for government. So you can easily, if we looked at the, the economics of the country as well, and you could easily shift around and if you lower taxes, for example, since it's just us taking royalties or income and then paying government like 68,000 half of our working population, you could easily lower taxes and remove the amount of subsidies that are going to, you know, to these schools. And instead of it being a subsidy you could give. And this is something Arthur Laffer actually suggested. Dr. Laffer suggested we give vouchers to certain people that, you know, can't afford that education, for example, or a certain class completely abolish taxes from until a certain income so that they can grow and prosper and you know, create, you can incentivize them to be more productive. So we really were looking at how to restructure the tax brackets and also, you know, how spending is done. Because if you have, for example, what we were looking at is a sovereign wealth fund and funds of the population, royalties go directly to, to education, to healthcare, to these sectors that need them, for example, then you don't need government in between as the intermediary Right. All they need to do is do a public tender and the same for healthcare. You know, looking at strategic ways to shift healthcare and other sectors here. How to privatize most of the government company. We have 380 plus state owned companies that really need to be privatized and that also a source of source of income. And we have about 2.8 billion in oil royalties at a minimum flowing in starting 2028. So how do you prepare for that coming in and how do you structure the sovereign wealth fund and the ministries and government in a way that the country and its people ultimately benefit from it? You know and we can actually have an economic boom here and see the country develop as I've seen El Salvador develop in the past five years. And core to this for me was, was Bitcoin just being money because we have a, a pretty inflationary local currency with which doesn't really function because everybody saves and transacts in US dollar or Euro anyways for anything that matters. Our local currency is just yeah a way for, for the government to be able to yeah sort of placate the population I guess. And you know we've you know all, all bitcoiners have studied inflation and know exactly what, what that is, how it works and, and what it causes. And I, I really see that or I truly believe that you need to separate money from state like actually remove the, the, the capability of printing and money that can be printed from, from a country as, as a whole. I think that's how you get you know, actual adoption of Bitcoin as money because then you can really have a country where you're using this as currency. And you know, even with the, with, with the, with the Austrians I, with the economists, we were having so much debates about how that would actually work because nobody had really thought about it or is, is actually looking at the specifics of how would this actually work in economy. Right. Because if we right now El Salvador is, is a dollarized economy. It's you know the dollar is, is plainly used. They still have a central bank. Bitcoin is adopted as legal tender now. It isn't anymore but it's still, it's, it's used as legal tender. The, the, the, the circular economies do they. But it's still at a government level. The same amount of control and centralization still exists. The corruption just displaces itself from cartel only or government only to now financial sector as well. So it's still a very corruptible system. I think if you change the currency of an actual country. And it's been done here before. It's not our first, it's not our first currency and the currency that is actually in rotation, our economy is not that big. So it can actually be done. Everyone would earn more over time in comparison to every other currency in the world. Right, because then our currency would just be SATs, just to be Bitcoin. So your salary would be worth more over time. And that creates of course other cross question or raises other questions and issues because how do you do with, with exports, you know, things like gold or foreign companies that, that are active here, how do they pay local salaries that keep increasing every year in, in, in dollar terms? So wasn't an easy problem to, to mull over or, or figure out. You know, Rahim, for example, he, he didn't think that making Bitcoin a currency or that that would work or how that would work. We had endless debates about it and I think it would be. We'd have to pilot test transition or figure out how to transition. So that's what we were mostly debating out debating about like how would you transition fully to Bitcoin as money? You know, making a legal tender here, that's one, one paper, one, one Foreign Exchange Commission. It just has to, has to adopt that and then it's money countrywide. But that doesn't mean that people are going to trade their dollars or their euros or their SRD for bitcoin to actually live on it. And the core, the core problem is where does the Bitcoin come from? You need to locally mine, so you need to have an energy positive economy. So we need small modular nuclear, we need hydro, we need. There's another dam in the plans. They need to build that for example. Those are solutions that you can look at to mine Bitcoin. And then that creates a source. One, one source at least. And then the other would be converting royalties, you know, received from oil and gas and converting that and maintaining it in a sovereign wealth fund for the people. That could be a source. But it's still. Yeah, that's, that was still a pretty big how to, how to, how to implement was, was a pretty big, big problem to solve. But other than that we had. You can for example, do an asset issuance on rgb. It's one of the protocols you can do smart contracts with on Bitcoin, not one of the crappy scammer ones you could do. Yeah, we could do a digital SRD then for example, and transition. But then you come too close to cbdc. So how do you fix, you know, it's just like you open up a can of worms and you start, you know, trying to go through and figure out a solution for everything. And then on the other hand, you also wanted that free market dynamics do their thing. So we're kind of in that process or in the middle of that process. And I think the main, the main objective is especially in government funding, once the government uses it as currency, is transparency. Because in that instance you actually want to know and see where the money's going, flowing and how it's used and if it's done in an open source way, anyone can see followers or know how spent, how funds are spent. That isn't to me an immediate solution to corruption. Right? Because they can't, they basically can't cheat the system. And if they cheat the system, they'll, they'll be caught or found. And that in combination with an ERP system should fix any and all problems and related to corruption. But you know that, that doesn't solve the entire economy. It's, it's, you have to, we have to diversify as well. We're, we're very, very, very dependent on commodities. So our economy rises and tanks with the international gold, gold and oil prices and we have no liquid capital market, no functioning capital market. And if I look at, you know, the capital markets in the US then that's not a direction we want to go into. We can, we much rather build a capital market similar to that of Singapore. So there are examples, teams we've worked with, we've worked with MIT as well. They have an MIT rep program that's focused on developing innovation hubs. So diversifying the economy with 1 energy, 2 new forms of energy, creating a favorable environment for the innovation of these energies as well. Biotech was one of our focuses and yeah, innovation, the innovation hub itself. So anything tech related, whether it be Bitcoin or AI or whatever kind of startup is looking for a, a frontier environment, this would be it because you're building from, from scratch basically here. So it gives you, it gives you a, a pretty dense market that isn't, you know, it's not big, it's, it's not a large market where you could maybe run into two issues. And then legacy markets, for example, because of the way that legacy markets are structured, you can test and implement here and build completely new products or new innovations just from scratch, literally. And the fact that we're small too, that gives us an advantage to swiftly be able to change government and these structures, change the ministries Change how the funds flow, the incentives flow and gradually be able to convert the entire economy to a bitcoin standard. Yeah, I can go on for hours, Gabriel. They can even stop me here.
- [51:18]
A
No, it was fascinating listening to your quite serious discussions now and in your other interviews leading up to your presidential candidacy about how you would restructure things with a real possibility to do so if you were the president. So I found all that very fascinating especially to do it in a free market oriented way. So it's all very fascinating. We'll have to discuss that further at some point. I wanted to though. Maya gets to the what I can only imagine is part of what I detect in the your somber tone in this interview compared to some of your other interviews and maybe just address something that is on your record for better or worse, which is there was an article published about you in Bitcoin magazine in May of 2025. It was called Maya Parbu's credibility Crisis. Suriname's unlikely to be next Bitcoin country. Now this I think is the reason why some people had. Have had a bad connotation with you recently. And you know, just kind of going over a couple things in there which I think there's a lot of silly stuff in there. And first of all, I think for Bitcoin magazine to claim that somebody's overhyping something is quite amusing and quite ironic. But you know, they said things about how you overstated your odds of becoming president of Suriname. I mean, okay, they were telling anecdotes about how you treated your security team. I mean why is that stuff even in there? They made this claim that you're controlled opposition but then they say they don't really have any evidence of that. They mentioned, you know, they suggested your father may have been involved in. In. In the corruption surround on but. Right. What does that have to do with you? And I think that kind of the overarching thing besides just taking these random shots at you was that you were collecting funds for your presidency when they claim you didn't really have a chance at winning. So I don't know. I read it. I kind of shrugged at the end of the article. I'm like why? Why was this written? But this clearly had a big impact on you and your reputation. I wonder your thoughts on that. You know what. What is your response to all that?
- [53:34]
B
So you know, the entire thing was I think one of the most. 1. It was one of the scariest times of my life but also one of the I think strangest because I still can't really make sense of everything. Like, I ended up in the hospital in mid March with early contractions and then had a really bad experience at the hospital because, you know, hospitals here were going to shit at the time. And also, as a politician, that carries certain risks with it as well. I ended up in the hospital the second time in labor at the end of. At the end of March. And I was in the hospital talking to people, bitcoiners, everyone, my team, people I work with, and they noticed that I was constantly. I'd have full clarity and I'd speak and be energetic, and then suddenly I completely go silent and be tired and need to sleep so they could tell something was off. And at the time, there was a lot of uncertainty and, and odd things happening at the hospital as well. They tried to put me out of the hospital even though I was in labor. And there was a. A doctor at one of the. Like, she wasn't even on our floor. She wasn't an attending on our floor. I think that's a. The way you say it in English. And she, you know, she. She asked the. The nurses to put like, medication in my. In my drinks and in my food. So things like, weird things like that happening. You. You had this woman that was suddenly hired to. To clean the room, and she would just stand there staring at the wall while I was talking to people, you know, while I was on the phone or outside at my door listening in on conversations. So weird, weird things like that were constantly happening. And we were not sure whether the hospital was equipped to. They didn't have, you know, all the machines that you need to be able to deal with a prematurely born baby. And it was. Yeah, it was just a really scary time. And I was getting threats from. From other political parties. It was. That was ongoing for a couple of years already, but it was. It felt like it was getting worse around that time. And a bitcoiner from Mexico, a couple of others had also offered to help out with. With security and help, you know, figure out the security details so that I could also speak freely publicly against some of the things happening here. And when all that was happening, they were looking for a specialist, like a gynecologist to. I think it's gyno. Yeah, gynecologist to send from the US Here while all this was happening. And then they basically sent two former special forces security guys with, you know, one on one was a medical specialist. And they arrived the day, the night. Well, actually the night that I gave birth. So the night they arrived with also a Lot of pushback from. From the hospital. That was also very weird. It was a big legal battle with my lawyer and. And the board of the hospital about having even a second, like, you know, a medical specialist in. In. In. In the hospital when it's perfectly legally, you know, allowed and possible. So my lawyer had to fight that. And I gave birth. That's that same night. And then, you know, when they came, they. They slept in because they weren't allowed in the halls or anywhere else. So they slept in the same. In the same hospital room as me, which was a pretty big room, usually has two beds. It only had one in it. And they stayed for, I think it was about two or three, three days after. And they were looking for safe houses. They had written an entire intel report with this. The fact that there was an active threat and they were looking for safe houses. They were staying here. There's a full bedroom available for them. They didn't want to sleep there because the room. The house, as they said, wasn't hardened, so it wasn't safe enough. So they stayed at. They slept at certain exits right in the living room, basically. And, you know, it was. It was kind of like they were already, you know, they. They'd experienced me giving birth. Like, that was, I think, one of the most intimate moments you can have with people. And they were pretty nice. And it was kind of like, you know, hanging around with two brothers, constantly around you and goofing around. So I didn't at any point have any idea that something was wrong, you know. And they wanted me to send funds until the end of. End of May or at least for two weeks. My daughter had just, um. She got jaundiced, so she was yellow, had to go to intensive care. So she was in the nicu. And they left at the third day, even though payment was sent. And they got around. I think it was 0.6 in Bitcoin from campaign funds. And also we had a bitcoiner that donated directly for payment while that was all ongoing, so they could stay and be security while there was an active threat that they wrote an intel report about. So it was. I don't know. It was. The whole experience was completely odd to me. Like, why would they leave? Right? And another security advisor told me that the only reason that they would leave is if someone paid them. And around the same time, we got word from another bitcoin. Yeah, bitcoiner in Norway that bitcoin magazine had sent them to torpedo the campaign and that they were writing a hit piece. So I didn't I didn't understand any of it. Like, why would bitcoin magazines, you know, pay them to torpedo the campaign? And I sent them an email, or sent David an email as well, to. To ask, you know, what the hell was going on. And then I think it was maybe two or three weeks before the article actually came out. They reached out to the other bitcoiner that moved here from Australia. He refused to. To, you know, to work along with writing a hit piece. So he refused. And I think he. He taught. I don't even know who he spoke to, to be honest, because he mentions, like, a campaign manager that still needed to be paid 8,000. I don't know any that didn't just volunteer. Like, we had a campaign team the same as Maria Machado, you know, from. From Venezuela. And that team was. Was fairly expensive, but they started in March, and it still wasn't the pricing that, you know, that they. They quoted in the article. Like, he mentioned something like a billboard that there's. There's not, I think $30,000 or something. There's not one billboard in this country that costs that much a month. They. The billboards we rented were two, and they were 800. 800amonth. You know, our highest expenses were the food going to the actual orphanages. So I don't know. The moment we heard about the hit piece, I also. Yeah, he also sent me some questions. And, you know, I'm dealing with my daughter in an iq, and then I hear that there's this hit piece. These guys were sent here to torpedo the campaign. Like, complete confusion. And I was just trying to focus on my daughter. And I answered all of Frank's questions, you know, legitimately, because they also accused me of money laundering, they say, and of being a bad entrepreneur at the same time. So, you know, I also told them, you can email me whatever question or documents or anything you want to see. I'm happy to share whatever, you know, unless it's covered under NDA. And then I'm happy to share it if you sign an NDA as well, about those documents, for example. But I don't know, he just wrote the story kind of. I don't know. It seemed even the story didn't make sense to me because it even said something like, I was mean to poor people. Or I said, you. The only time I was driving with them, that I said, you was an actual. And a homeless guy that was walking on the street between the cars, and he, you know, he was completely nude and flashing. So that, you know.
- [63:43]
A
Yeah, that Also.
- [63:44]
B
Yeah, that's a little bit gross. Exactly.
- [63:47]
A
It's such an irrelevant thing to say.
- [63:49]
B
Yeah, but still it's. They're. They're trying to attack my, you know, my personality for. Especially that since that was something that I was fighting for. I'm working with people from the poorest, you know, neighborhoods, villages in this country and I went to these villages with Gen 3. It's. I don't know, they're attacking specific things it looks like and the transactions. For example, it's Newmont, you know, largest corporate, largest publicly traded gold mining company in the world. I don't know if he doesn't understand how these companies work or how all large corporations work, but they have ERP systems and they do do due diligence. You have to do Dun and Bradstreet filings every year and you have to onboard onto their erp, you know, so everything, like every purchase order, every request for quote, everything is tendered, everything is like very well structured and you can't really fudge around with it with a system like that. And I mean, you know that the, the names of the companies are also on the statement. So even, even that accusation doesn't make sense. I don't know the timing of it as well. Like me and the NICU just given birth right before we're, you know, like our campaign period just started on the 25th of March. So it's in. In the, like in the mid midst of it all. Like, even if, you know, I spend time with Aria every day at the hospital, even if I had those two weeks completely missing and wasn't able to campaign at all, I still had enough time. I still had enough time to put the work in to be able to campaign for the remainder of the period. So they even killed whatever chance we had left. And then also, you know, the security team that they supposedly paid off also ran away with the like a big portion of the. Of the funds that we had left. I really don't know what to make it, to be honest. It's still. It's still like so many things do not make sense.
- [66:12]
A
Yeah, it certainly seems to have derailed you and I'd love to have you back on, like to know more about you. Let's get you back on at some point. But I do want to give you a final question here, which is what is next for you? What are you thinking about? What are you talking about these days and what does the future look like for you?
- [66:31]
B
For the like for the past year, I focused on my daughter and my own companies, you know, because I really neglected them while focusing on bitcoin and the campaign. So I refocused and I focused everything I had on my daughter because I've wanted a child for over a decade and she's finally here and it was quite the struggle to get her here and it's, it's been an amazing time being able to enjoy with her. And I've like the companies are. We just moved to a new location with quick ship, a bigger, bigger office, bigger warehouse. We're merging with another company so that should double our revenue. And Icarus, we're still, we're doing a channel project in Guyana right now and still supplying Newmont and Rosebel here and looking at some other projects that are expanding in the country and hopefully some infrastructure works will start again somewhere next year when more royalties start flowing in and the government has more spending capacity for infra. And other than that, I've been working with a team in Norway on a really cool project that I can't say too much about. They're close to launch, we're testing right now. But it's one of the things that I've spoken about in podcast I think over somewhere over the last five years and now it's finally, finally happening. So that, that's a pretty cool project that, that is a bitcoin only project. So that's something that has without, you know, being too much in the public eye kind of kept me and gave. Given me that feeling of fulfillment that I'm actually still contributing. We still do the meetups here and we refocused, certainly centralized the conference to be an annual event. So I structured a new team, an addition to the team actually that organized the conference and they're focusing on basically promoting events and creating events throughout the year for the on conference. And I've also been working with another project I can't really say so much about but similar to what everything we've talked about for you know, and how to restructure government and how you would diversify the economy and with a special, with a focus on special economic zones. So that's a project I'm. I'm working on with a developer of, of special economic zones and lobbying with government to get this true through. So I can still, you know, I'm still pushing most of the policies that we'd worked on before elections. Just you know, that's. I don't. There's not much to share yet or it's not something that like the community can help out with at this point. You Know like the elections, they could help with feet on the ground and physical help and helping to get funding so I don't have to get funding from you know, local sources that are usually corrupt. This is just something that I need to do with yeah, local entrepreneurs with the special economic zone developers and some of the ministers here that are required to, you know, work on a project like that. So I'll share more about that when it gets more legs and yeah, when we have something to announce hopefully within the next couple of months. And other than that I'm basically just focusing on building the Fuente app for Daedalus. We had a roadmap of products and we're focusing on launching here in Suriname with Fuente. So that's live now Finte IO or onboarding merchants. It's like a delivery eco multi vendor e commerce app with lightning as payments enabled and that's how we're trying to increase adoption here. Another thing, that bitcoin surname is still ongoing. We're still kind of struggling with how to push for adoption here without you know like it just being meetups or just being education. We do meet premiere courses but those are still small groups of people constantly learning. And one of the things we've kind of been struggling with is NFC cards, you know, so that people can like the bold cards so that people can use the bold cards at events. It seems that some, you know, some, sometimes plugins are or some, some tools are deprecated or don't, don't really function as they should and then you need to update the whole thing and yeah, there's still some things in just bitcoin development that could actually still, you know, use some, some polishing or, and, and have people actually building them out. So you know, those are some small side projects that we're focused on. There's a team that do events, organize events here, pretty large scale events too that want to do that. But you know we've been talking about that for two years. Yeah, we've been talking about that for two years but the entire like we had a entire bitcoin ice solution that we'd worked out and had tested out at some piloted at some events but that system's not working anymore. So now we need to figure out how to do it. Yeah, it's interesting. So we have some side projects and I'm just focused on still doing the work.
- [73:15]
A
Yeah, I can tell you got a lot of things going on. So Suriname decentralized. Is this a conference that's happening in 2026?
- [73:25]
B
So it's what we did the first time was it was an on conference. So we went boating. We went into the Amazon with people that came here.
- [73:38]
A
Right. It seems like. Seems like a great opportunity if somebody's listening and they want to visit Suriname with like minded people.
- [73:44]
B
Yeah. So what we're doing now is we're collaborating with other events as well throughout the year. So we have some. Something like Pagua festival, for example, which we're. We're a very multicultural country. And you know, you have a synagogue next to a mosque here. We. We all celebrate each other's holidays. And Pagua, that's an Indian holiday where you play with. With colored powder. And it's one of my favorite holidays that we celebrate here. And that's one of the events, for example, that we're promoting. And we had a group of bitcoiners come out from. Come down from Germany, I think 21. A group of 21. And they went to the festival as well. So it's events like that. And then we have Suri Palooza, which was the most attended event during the on conference. We had more than 1500 people attend. And we're doing one of that as well in September. And we're collaborating with esports. So, you know, esports, gaming, it's kind of the same community we want to have on board as well. And they have a really nice. Pretty big community here. So we're collaborating with esports and then doing the unconference part where we do workshops and have speakers. That's in September. And then we have December, the end of the year festival here. Something that you really have to experience at least once in your life. So that. Yeah, that's. That's all being promoted by the Surinam decentralized team. And they're working on all those events collaboratively as a team.
- [75:25]
A
Gotcha. Okay, so if you're. If you're interested in Suriname and you don't just want to kind of show up randomly, definitely follow Maya. We'll have her Twitter links and such in the show notes and you can follow Suriname decentralized also on Twitter. And yeah, with that. Thank you so much, Maya. This has been a great introduction to you and Suriname and I really appreciate it.
- [75:47]
B
Thank you for. For having me. Yeah, it was. It was an interesting conversation. It's crazy to. To think back about how much has happened and I'd be. There are actually quite a few bitcoiners moving here this year. A lot of them came during the last conferences and we're during NEON conference and we're so convinced that they decided to move here. So there's more people coming. The community's growing. We're, we're building. So keep following and, you know, visit. There's. I, I can try and explain this country, but you really have to be here to, to know what it's like to, to, to. To. To be somewhere where, where you feel just completely and utterly free.
- [76:39]
A
Hey, thanks for listening. I could really use your help. Real quick, if you could share this episode with someone, engage with me, leave a review anywhere. This helps me to break the technocratic shadow banning that is happening with my brand. And of course, if you really want to escape the technocracy, go to escape thetechnocracy.com privacy, tutorial series, books, newsletters, consulting, and of course, you can leave a donation. Thank you very much.