Not only did he not let the aid come in, he shot a hundred people that day.
I saw somebody get shot and never get back up. He died.
The 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.
and my other passion obviously is Venezuela.
We are now in a rules-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.
Greetings and salutations my fellow plebs.
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk.
It's one of those things where a lot of people, I think,
just recently you saw all this stuff on X where Nikita Beer, I think it is,
who's the guy who is basically running product,
he basically admitted like oh yeah anything that's like bitcoin crypto related we are uh
you know we're we're just de-boosting essentially and and it was like a lot of people were like oh
shit well i guess you know maybe uh maybe noster is uh not such a bad thing maybe this is actually
a nice nice idea and it's like well yeah no shit if only there was a plan b where all the bitcoiners
are i know if only there was a place where you could go full of bitcoiners uh where people talk
about Bitcoin. Well, okay. Nostar has, 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? 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 you you and the more
focus 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 it's it's a long-term strategy because like you know they're
not um vc back 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 and a few of these others that came out guns blazing and then just nostrils 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.
Yeah, it's cool too.
I mean, all of this stuff around like Nostra
and I've been talking to a lot of people about this
that are Nostra devs
and they're building things that are okay.
They're utilizing Nostra
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 a bit chat 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 bit chat.
And then Cali poured it over to Android and it utilizes Noster 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 just BitChat downloads have been starting to spike
in Venezuela just amidst everything going on there.
I don't have any data on it,
but I would have to imagine 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 it turns out the regime shut down the internet.
And it's like, oh, well, this is the cool thing though,
We're at this time where 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 like it's very exciting.
I completely agree with you.
two interesting points to to pull on that thread that you just did so one of our engineers at
let and actually runs i think it's the largest nostril relay um he he's deep deep and he's he's
uh i think he's not i think his relay is one of the biggest ones i don't want to i don't want to
dox him because i want to talk to him first but he uh i know for a fact we have very very big fans
and contributors of nostril at let and within our team um 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
what I actually think is
Venezuela had seen a gradual
depletion of its
liberties
freedom of speech being a big one of them
and we're 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 was
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, you know, 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, it's there's no government facts around this.
These these deaths are reported by NGOs and other sort of independent reporting bodies.
but uh there were many deaths many deaths and people basically associated that no keep in mind
these shootings were already starting in 2014 i was in a protest where i i've mentioned this
oftentimes i saw i i've i heard real bullets at the protest protest and i saw somebody get shot
and never get back up he died and i knew i wasn't he wasn't like my best friend but i knew the guy
OK, 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 the power is tilted completely out of your hands.
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'd turn around and say, oh, so what?
What are you going to do?
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 turning around basically killing innocent people 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 Venezuelan when you went 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.
Oh, 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 going to go dig my heels a little deeper now. And so bringing it back to your question,
the what's happening in venezuela is actually um uh the opposite like the we are now at the point
where we're starting to regain some of those liberties and i i feel like it's it's in the
process of losing some of those liberties that you find things like nostor that you find things
like bid chad right because the as the wind as the doors close you start looking for windows
right and and so you know 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 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 narrative and 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 them.
We can't access your tweets.
And so I'd have to take screenshots
and I would try to get them to come into Nostra.
Not every one of them is like a Bitcoin air.
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 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 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 so that's
still happening but even within that what i the biggest fear of the venezuela regime right now is they 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 so surprisingly or coincidentally a lot of these started getting released right after the
maduro's capture and a lot of people locally have started gathering and and especially um
uh student uh student government and universities which in venezuela historically uh revolutions and
sort of all sort of marches and protests have been led by these student council groups in these bigger
in these big universities so the big universities in caracas have these like government bodies
that act basically as like the student the student body government and they are starting to come out
increasingly in 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, hardworking 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, you know, 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
uh the the people that are left are still making open and public threats to not celebrate to don't
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 Chavismo,
the Chavismo in Venezuela
has this, you know,
double rhetoric, right?
On the one hand,
Delcey's 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 Diosdado Cabello, who is the muscle, the thug, the guy that controls the thugs, they're still out there running loose, threatening people.
And so Delce, 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.
Our boot is still on your neck.
move an inch or 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, you know, the, yeah,
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, right?
Like we need to keep going with this plan.
We didn't just go in to take this guy out, right?
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 aren't you going out there?
Why aren't you tweeting?
Why aren't you saying something?
And they're basically telling me,
man, that's easy for you to say.
Like your door's not gonna get knocked on.
You know, you're not the one that's gonna go missing.
How am I gonna explain?
What am I gonna tell my kids
if they come knocking for daddy, right?
And it's real, man.
Like it's real.
I have relatives
to give you some examples
back in the 2024
presidential election, Maria Corina Machal
who won, we all know
Maria Corina, she's in the White House right now
talking to Trump
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 going to get disbarred
So she sets up this person called Edmundo Gonzalez so that whenever she gets the spark, she goes to her following and says, don't worry, I knew this was going to happen.
Edmundo is going to 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 uh way of them trying to put up an argument
to 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 uh if she's flying
into a particular city to do a rally that that city's airport just went under maintenance the
day her rally was was supposed to happen uh they've blocked highways she's had to cross rivers with
like 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 uh 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 there it was 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 uh we wanted to help her campaign as any
way we could so one of my uncles actually uh lent her uh i think it was a few uh a few of his cars
or trucks or pickups to just move things for the rally and prepare things for the rally
and uh they jailed my uncle uh they literally they took him in for helping her and uh 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
maria corina in a restaurant and hugging them that restaurant will be shut down it was crazy
it still is um and so so what's happening right now and this is all to induce fear like don't
you dare help maria corina don't you dare tweet in her support but now it's all changing it's it's
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 3rd if they
went and did that not only would you not see them they would be gone they would be disappeared
uh 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
they're that's very different these people are criminals and blah blah blah and anyway um
and end of rant for now no i i love it man i mean i i love the rant i don't love uh this what's
happening you know still happening there and i think that's the difficult thing for for people
to grasp especially people who do not have the uh still the family or the the friends there you
know you're hearing these things from them firsthand you have obviously like 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 gone from power, right?
He's removed.
Okay, everything, just snap your fingers
and it's better now, it's fixed.
But it's not the case.
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, Maduro was taken out of power
and 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 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?
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And obviously there's a lot of, there's some anxiety or anticipation that, you know, the U.S.
What I will say is that what's become really, really clear
is that the regime is saying a lot 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 U embassy Okay so it takes quite a bit of mental gymnastics to say oh they just bombed us and took our president
But we're going to reopen their embassy because we think that it's 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 it's flipped because now it's saying there's so many
videos and for example there there's many videos of u.s of venezuelan government officials saying
on national television we will not sell one drop of oil to the u.s 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. Both sides are pushing, right?
I think the government knows it's up against the wall, right? I think the scale is slightly more
tilted to the people's side at the moment because the people have, A, they're in the right side of
history that that's that's number one and number two they now have the backing of the biggest
army in the world right and they're they're just like emboldened by this support and i think that
i i don't believe we're gonna walk back our path to freedom i think we're gonna 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 and we're going to keep walking.
Because I think that right now, the trend that this has started is irreversible.
So I'm hopeful that we're going to continue walking towards freedom.
it's it's obviously very uh it's very tricky because at this stage it's like again people
have this they want to believe it like ah you know if people who let's say on the u.s side were like
very happy to see there's obviously mixed reactions in the u.s between people who are like
how could trump do this this is you know uh unconstitutional he didn't have the right
other people saying good you know he 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 U S 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 also like the,
the problem, which is the socialist, communist, totalitarian government there, that is ultimately
what is repressing the people of Venezuela. That's what's stopping the entrepreneurs like yourself
from building in Venezuela. It's what's stopping the people who are still there 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 curious,
do you think, I mean, do you see a path forward for Venezuela, like a successful path forward
where 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 there, 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 how feasible even is that? You know what I mean? Because that's
entrenched. That's deeply entrenched. 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 it's a simple answer. The simple answer is that
if we play this out and say america wants access to 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
in 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 uh 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 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 that's that's just to put it
out there but going i did not know that yeah no that's wild most people don't so this is this is
and don't believe me google it in fact cuba broke the news about its deceased uh officers before
venezuela ever reported any information around the 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 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 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 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 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 in fact expropriate a lot of facilities
and infrastructure from chevron and several other u.s companies when he basically dismantled the
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 don't have any sort of evidence or proof, but the sort of running rumor in Venezuela
is that the U.S. is trying to get Venezuela up to 3 million barrels a day in 18 months.
and north of 3.5 million barrels per day in 24 months.
From my friends, 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.
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 will to realize the return on that investment, which may take decades.
he explicitly said you need to reform labor law you need to reform uh environmental law
you need to reform oil production law and like basically supply chain management law
and literally the next day there was a motion in the national venezolanan assembly to
basically overhaul the entire rule set of corporate law environmental law every check
box that chevron 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 U.S. 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 of 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 like technically you can't but practically it's impossible okay and so no
company's going to go higher under those uh under those rules right uh there there's many like
contract law the environmental rule set is insane in venezuela uh 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 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.
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, how do you think about like America, you know, coming in and 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 uh 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
to like the reality of the situation is is that it 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 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 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?
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 there were members of the Chavista regime that were caught with briefcases of cash flying into Argentina to support Kirchner,
which was the the the party that eventually won uh and took and basically broke argentina which
which led to milay um which led to basically the the snap boat back to restore balance and freedom
chavez financed uh correa's campaign in el sabedor evo morales in bolivia um uh lula in brazil later
Dilma in Brazil. And he just did this like on and on and on. And 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 Granadine 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.
So Chavez would go around donating infrastructure to these Caribbean islands.
He also created this thing called Petro Caribe.
So Petro Caribe was like a Venezuelan funded oil piggy bank or oil piñata 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 Petro Caribe 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 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 serves them?
Well, number one, it keeps the ideology alive 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 communists 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 buddies 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 wrecks havoc in places like the U.S., a lot of the rest of the Latam countries, some Europe.
The hit to Europe is not as bad, but it's still bad.
And so it helps in more than one way.
And the other thing is you can now have military bases.
You can have military assets in your enemy's backyard, right?
And so there's 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 piñata
right and venezuelans were seeing none of it so now and this is why you see so many venezuelas
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 where 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 um 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 being like our house we always dress up
the oil barrel for christmas so it's this this complete sort of uh like none of us had access
to any of this oil never none of us saw a dime of this oil money and 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 basically
like saying you know
oh Venezuelans
you know when a Venezuelan
hears oh somebody wants Venezuela for their
oh Venezuela for their oil
Venezuelans are like yeah we know right
it's like saying oh you know
a certain producer wants to cast
Sidney Sweeney for a movie because
she's a great actress
does that make sense like
people
I'm not saying she's not a good actress, but I'm saying like,
no, no, I got, yeah, I got you.
People get it.
Like we're not dumb, right?
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.
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. It'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 now I think where we're at in in the arc of history now is like you have all these people who think that socialism can somehow still work.
That even despite 100 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 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 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, 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 acting. 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 this activity of participating in society.
And what do I mean by that?
I mean, if you take the sort of two factors of an economy, right?
You take capital and you take labor, okay?
Let's take production and then the working class or capital and labor.
Maybe that's the best way to frame it, right?
So 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
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. 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. I can go elsewhere and do this in 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 the labor and capital analogy, if you try to reform labor laws
such that it protects workers from basically doing no evil,
like they can never get fired, nothing bad could ever happen to them,
their pensions are through the roof, it's a great deal if you're over here.
Capital won't work.
We won't be able to make our business work under these terms.
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 like 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 it 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, you know, event that pushes you here and you never
can come back out of this. This is what happened 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 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.
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 like privileged Western elites like, you know, Zoran Mamdami 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 just, it just, it blows my mind that despite 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 have fucking idiots like this who come in and say we're good but we're
gonna do it right in new york city and it's like uh 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 communism 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.
You know, I find that surprising
when I see stuff like that
in countries like the US, frankly.
But again, that's the challenge
when you have the gap between the wealthy
and the working class is large.
right it it's almost like it's like i think i think it was elon who who tweeted about this
this difference between uh poverty and and and envy which is poverty is just like there's a
difference between the the poverty and envy right like poverty as in meeting basic needs
can can and probably is very close to being resolved through technology right like a place
to sleep a place to eat a place to work some basic access to health care 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 a second range rover right and all i have is this
fiat this fiat car right like hmm i wonder what billy's doing right like billy's probably billy's
making so much money that you know 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 money because billy has two range rovers and i only have a uh 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 i really you know my my daughter's starving right because i
can't get food for her right i i don't know i mean i'm not 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 um 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 uh maybe maybe it is maybe they maybe they don't
have enough but but i think some of it is actually subjective right like uh i i 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 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
that risked their lives to get to that, to cross the Dariang, to get to America.
And, you know, some people are in America, arguably, in better conditions than a recently
arrived immigrant, but they just want to be better.
They want to be like the other guy, right?
And so, the other part is that it's a good narrative.
It comes from a place of good intentions.
Does that make sense?
It's 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 all, we should not all have access to healthcare.
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, oh, my God, why would he ever be against everybody having access to health care?
That sounds like a noble thing to say, right?
And why not?
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 then you go to the reality of, like, go run the hospital.
You go run that hospital, right?
And that's the thing.
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 my 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.
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 foundation.
Yeah, the right conditions for capital to be there.
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 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, it's like, where do you want the wire?
right like yeah and so that's the that's 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 the the the the horrible thing about brain drain is that
happens from the top down the first every the people that leave the first are the guys with the
most wealth the most opportunity the most options and then it's just 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 the first immigrants
uh leave by plane right like you you pick a plane you go out you get you get you 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 there oh well we got 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 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 pants and whatever they're wearing because the regime has just taken everything
from them right as a nation i and this is the reality every every nation wanted us when we were
the plane guys i remember this because there were no visa restrictions everybody was like oh yeah
venezuelans come oh great talent coming from venezuela do you know anybody that's like we're
happy to hire and then the second wave was like okay well you you have great qualifications we
can pay you less than when 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 weren't able to make it to university or they went to some, the
only thing they could afford was some regime indoctrination university And that degree is as good as toilet paper And so they have very really fortifications
And of course,
when those guys start coming in,
all the governments were like,
we have a migration crisis in our hands.
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? 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's free again
you would really have to think hard
if that's 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.
Right. 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 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 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 think we can get it back.
I think we can get us back.
I'll include myself in there because I would love nothing but to help rebuild the country.
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 in El Salvador.
We've now with also a massive diaspora of people who left El Salvador.
Different circumstances than Venezuela, but murder capital of the world for a very long time.
And Bukele obviously changed that paradigm.
And now I know personally multiple people who moved to the States from El Salvador years ago.
Their families came.
And now they're moving back.
They're bringing their families back.
That says a lot.
It says a lot when people who fled a country 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 of 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 U S and there,
but it's like it's an amazing story to watch because whatever whatever 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 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 was 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 whether 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 regulations so i can accept that i can accept you know i don't mean this isn't
the case in venezuela but i can accept crappy weather or the seasons of crappy seasons of
weather like i can tolerate that um what i will not tolerate is the the my my physical safety the
physical safety of myself and my children or the perception of 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 be in a country in Central America
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
try to go and do that in Nicaragua
go try to do that in Honduras
go ahead, go try to do it in Guatemala
or Venezuela
or Colombia
anywhere you go
just try it
try it
you won't dare
you'll have people
walking right by you
be like
hijo guarde eso
like
son
put that away
put that away son
like people
good Samaritans
will come and tell you
right
anywhere
so
what really
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
I'm listening to you be there.
See you.
See you in El Salvador.
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 have to park my car at 6 p.m.
It was too dangerous to drive at night.
Now I can drive all throughout the night.
I can drive all throughout 3 a.m., 4 a.m.
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 5 p.m.
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.
I'll tell you from experience, it is very hard to focus on anything productive when you're always
checking, oh, lock your windows, thing to thing, be back by seven, be back by seven, dude, 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, it's like, take two cars, take two cars, don't you dare go there
in one car because god forbid your tire goes flat at 10 p.m you get a flat tire in a minnesota
highway at 10 p.m man good luck um so again going back to what i think it'll take
i think it'll take cleaning up the death squats i think it'll take
knowing that the rule of law has come back i think it'll take some uh 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 stop until they 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'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 Venezuelans go back and put a toehold back in the country.
Whether we move, definitely, or go and start making moves to basically position ourselves.
But you will see a lot more activity.
That's what's holding many people back right now.
I mean, it makes total sense.
It reminds me of just like something that Bastiat wrote about, which is like what is the purpose of the government?
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 they become the ones 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 full capitalist because we got central bankers
controlling our money. That's a different story. Point being, if places people want to go or 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 a house 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, right?
No one's going to do that.
No, and this is why I think 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 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 and non-property holders breaks, you start basically always going at the beck and call of the non-property.
Because again, just in the standard distribution, right?
Like on average, I would want to believe that 50% plus of the population owns something.
You know, 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 and the way things go
is like when you're really good at something you tend to actually like 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 went big and and you know the people over here just they never change
so you you always have these increasingly more more concentrated capital and 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 us 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 of you 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 opening 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 and the other side is wrong. It's about balance and being
mutually respectful. 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 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, with cancer, but you have a scratch on your arm, it's like putting a bandaid on isn't going to, isn't going to fix your cancer.
Right.
Or like somebody, you know, like you try, 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 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 societies, in nature.
Inequalities naturally exist.
Oftentimes, I mean, government subsidies exacerbate those things, right?
Like 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.
That's all going to be great.
that that just never works it never works and 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 uh more emphasis on you know just generally freedom right and the freedom of individuals to make their own choices That not as good of a slogan as hey here 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 an impossible argument to win to say like, no, what you need is less of that guy with the nice smile 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 haves in the communist society like the inner circle they are way way way way way richer because
everyone else is poor there is no middle ground there is no spectrum it's everyone is poor and
then there's a couple people that are insanely insanely wealthy with their offshore 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 less government intervention.
You're never going to win that argument. 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.
Absolutely.
I think one of the biggest challenges with building owners is that the 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 never own anything.
right and what i think is beautiful about bitcoin is that you can start it's 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 ten dollars 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 uh 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 you again you you there's
no real clean the beautiful thing to think 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 gonna go live here like i need 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 is not staring at the same opportunity
said right and i think again if we need to and as more and more of the boomers are exiting society
and more and more of our generation is entering 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 mandani and
unfortunately you're going to continue to see that stuff and you know the the the uh the beatings
will continue until the morale is restored or whatever the saying goes. Yeah, 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.
As usual, when I talk to you, we get through about, you know, 10% of things that we wanted
to talk about, but that's okay. That just means we'll have to do it again. So just in the interest
of making sure I get you out of here on time, anything you want to end with, I mean, people
should also make sure to follow you on Noster as well.
I'll make sure to link your Noster
so we can pump up those numbers.
But where do you want to send people
or anything else you want to leave people with?
No, I would say, listen,
just stay close to the Venezuela story.
Talk to Venezuelans.
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 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, you know, for once, I mean, my life is Bitcoin and I love Bitcoin.
And 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 Venezuelans feel, just reach out to us.
We'll be happy to chat and we'll tell you we'll tell you how we see it and why.
And we'd love to hear your your take. Right. Everybody's views are valid.
But we are the people whose families are getting impacted by this, whose lives or livelihoods are at stake, whose life's work's at stake.
So talk to us.
We're happy to chat.
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 if and when this thing opens up, I'll be inviting you and everyone else I know to come down and celebrate.
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 beautiful, beautiful country has been, you know, hidden.
Well, not hidden, but, you know, sealed off from the world for so long.
It's good that there's a chance that it can open up.
Because I am sure, like in El Salvador, tourism would explode.
And that's a huge boon to an economy.
Yeah.
And it's beyond your expectations.
It will surpass your every expectation.
I'm sure of it.
So I can't wait to see you and everyone else there soon.
I'll hold you to that.
I look forward to it.
Mauricio, thank you so much for your time.
It's 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 actually breaking this down for people,
because I think it really matters to hear from somebody
who actually knows what they're talking about.
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.
Absolutely.
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