TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #15: Eduardo Medina and Zah

Episode Date: February 28, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Eduardo Medina to discuss Venezuela, the country's current crisis, the Petro, and how Bitcoin may help. Zah joins us for this episode to help draw parallels between Venezuela's situation and Zimbabwe's run-in with hyperinflation. This is why we Bitcoin.

What is up freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent. Actually recording this separately, this intro separately than when the actual podcast was recorded. Unfortunately, we had our episode with Eduardo Medina interrupted midway through because the guys at Barstool were putting together a Fire Flames rap song, basically coming at michael rapaport uh due to the aftermath of his fallout with barcelo sports unfortunately we did not catch the first half of the interview but uh luckily we got kicked out of the studio uh not luckily got kicked out of the studio but luckily after being kicked out of the studio we were able to recover pretty nicely and have a very very very uh interesting conversation

about venezuela its current state how it got to where it is uh and uh maybe how bitcoin can help out going forward. So I hope you guys enjoy this conversation I had with Eduardo Medina. We're going to start it midway through, unfortunately, but alas, these things happen. There's nothing you can do about it. But I still think it's a very, very, very quality conversation that everybody should hear. So I hope you guys enjoy. ah it looks like we have somebody joining us ah is entering the studio now uh he was telling me earlier he wants to sit on this he just just finished his dinner he's going to join us eduardo if you don't mind not at all welcome um thank you um yeah so i guess what i'm curious to learn is

is you came to the states what in 2005 that's right yeah 2005 and what was the uh what was the environment like in venezuela when you left obviously not as bad as it is now um what were the conditions like then yeah it's been getting uh worse and worse uh every year for the past few years night and uh back in 2005 uh to put it in context so chavez came to power in 99 right and um things were imperfect before chavez of course the reason why he actually came to power but uh by 2005 uh things weren't that bad um as a part of the as part of the venezuelan diaspora i've uh ended up reading a lot about um you know migrations and exodus and how that how that goes down because it's obviously not particular to venezuela uh and uh it would usually it turns

out that it's usually on like cycles and waves right um you know the people who can leave first they do and then uh you know it goes by waves and then as the situation gets worse and worse and worse more people leave uh so by 2005 you know it was uh the people who were paying attention they could see like from far far away like yeah this is not looking pretty um and and started leaving but things weren't that bad back then yeah they were they were still it was still like a livable country more or less um right now it's not it's not the case at all no no obviously not um actually if you hear the stories coming out of venezuela they're pretty pretty pretty heavy um yeah people eating out of trash and famine basically a fat would you

would you consider it a famine going on or um yeah i mean because we could get down to the details of how do you actually define a famine but but yeah i mean people are are starving uh to death uh to some points right so if that's uh enough of a of a data point to to be considered a famine then yeah fuck man and then so who'd you come over with or did you come to straight to america or uh virginia right yeah yeah the virginia lived in virginia for about seven years almost seven eight years um i came with uh with my family yeah it was it wasn't my decision at you know like i was freaking like 14 years old back then i i didn't want to leave um but yeah my uh my parent my dad uh uh works at the the main or he used to work at the main oil company back

in venezuela um and as a matter of fact by 2005 what had happened was that uh the main the first sort of hit the the the the yeah the the very first hit that the government received uh happened in like 2002 2003 uh it was uh what do you mean by hit well okay so it was a a national strike that happened okay 2002 2003 and this national strike was actually um not coordinated but a big part of it was that the the uh oil uh company the the nation-owned uh state uh company uh they were like part of the national strike so it was like a big deal you know this this company which it's called um they you know they they run the oil and the oil is the main thing in venezuela so as they were part of the the national strike it was like a big deal it was like uh for two or

three months or something like that um you know everything was like paralyzed uh and it was a an attempt to put pressure on to the government and uh and you know and looking for a change um that didn't turn out so well uh it was it was it was messy uh you know there were some some deaths uh there was some blood on the streets uh at the end like chavez ended up resigning but then came back and it was like a it's like a huge it's a huge mess um but what what was certain and true after that was that um you know pedevesa wasn't the same after that okay as a matter of fact uh the after after that whole episode uh chavez like went on like national television and like he actually fired like a bunch of people and uh and you know pedevesa like you know this just wasn't

the same um so by 2005 yeah like you know my dad was yeah after that whole episode he was definitely looking at other opportunities and and so yeah we migrated uh with my family uh my mother mom and brothers uh lived in virginia for a few years um and and yeah now i'm here the situation in venezuela though gets at this point it's getting worse by the day um because it's just it gets it's worsening right uh um uh by by the day today i mean it used to be like every year back then but yeah it's uh it's hard to quantify it that's um that's one thing we were talking about when za was was on the podcast that like it's impossible to quantify it's you'll get to the point where it's going to be getting worse by the minute exactly yeah if we're yeah if we're not there yet

um because it's just you know there's there's no data like the the the official institutions uh don't release data and when they do it's it's not not not reliable one thing i'm curious to see is like do you think the failure of this petro launch will delegitimize the government to a point where it's like all right that was like the last straw it gets finally like proven that this guy is so fucking incompetent that we have to overthrow him or i'm not gonna put the onus on the people of venezuela to overthrow their government yeah yeah it's an interesting question because that's uh i hope you know that's what i hope um if anything what has been happening in the past in the past few years is that this this uh you know this mask that the the regime had it's been falling off

and you know it's gotten to the point after the the events from last year that you know they they lost a whole ton of credibility and in uh and yeah and this this petro is like a sort of the the latest car that they're playing, and yeah, I do hope that if that turns out, that it just helps for the deterioration, right? Yeah. We got Nate entering the studio as well. Hello. Welcome, Nate. Thank you for having me. I love this podcast.

Well, thanks for joining us. We love having you on. Eduardo, one thing we were talking about before we hopped on here, I was asking you, so obviously there's people that have to hold up this government in the form of an army and Maduro's sort of regime. how's the regime been holding up like how how how are is the regime like the people maduro's like underlings that that carry out sort of uh his orders how are they viewed has has their numbers dwindled over the year um sort of what's that situation of the people who are actually like do they get do they get special treatment are they getting money on the side like what's

going on there yeah well they've been pretty much playing the number of uh you know the strong hand right uh in usually uh if you look at venezuela's history it's like a very uh a military country right it's all sort of being like in our dna type of thing and this this government is uh it's a military government right chavez was a military himself um so right from the beginning it was it was you know coming from that um from that angle from that militaristic sort of stance right exactly and it's uh it's still it's still true today of course uh you know the military has been always sort of the the car that okay well if the military does this and maduro will fall this and that um but at the end of the day you know the the people who are still

um sort of benefiting from that um uh you know which may be apart from the the military but also beyond uh it comes down to you know they're just you know grabbing a piece of that of that pie of that oil pie and uh and just basically you know trying to take advantage of the whole situation and getting you know some type of money from that just a kickback um damn man it's fucking heavy shit like i can't imagine like that's what we were talking about so like we were talking about the famine earlier like i don't want to call famine people just being hungry like we can't imagine being like hungry like people are in venezuela right now i'll tell you what marty i hopped in thinking we were gonna have like an upbeat conversation about like

stuff so i was like all like feeling myself walking in here like hey i'm gonna jump on the crypto podcast real quick and then i've just been sitting here like oh this is this is not what I expect it at all. We're getting into heavy geopolitical situations here. So I don't know if you know, Nate, Venezuela launched a cryptocurrency this week. No, I've been following it a little bit. I don't completely understand it, but- Nobody does.

It kind of took, I really thought I was going to hop in and we're going to be like, yeah, this, oh, yeah, like high five. And I was like, oh, shit, I'm just going to sit here and kind of listen for a minute. Well, this is the reason why we have things like Bitcoin for situations like this. So this is probably a good segue. Thank you for providing a segue here, Nate. How can Bitcoin help in this situation, in your mind? Like, how do you, I mean, I don't think Bitcoin's going to solve Venezuela's problems, but you've

obviously been driven towards Bitcoin. How long have you been into Bitcoin? I first found out about it about 2014 or so. It was during a hackathon. A friend of mine convinced us to, like, go to this hackathon, and, you know, it was, like, Bitcoin-related, and I didn't know what Bitcoin was, and I was like, I have an idea, and whatever. It was in Las Vegas, so we ended up going.

um and ended up going well and that's like when the first time i heard okay bitcoin is like a thing um but i came out of that and i i sort of dismissed it like most people do right um you know i i realized that it was like an important thing like in the finance world and yeah like people were really into it and that's fine but i didn't i kind of sort of dismissed it um and i didn't really pick it back up until i realized that that it goes beyond the the potential of it goes beyond the finance realm right um and uh and you know have to blame santi for that and sort of the the whole um uh angle that they were coming from like okay they can actually help in in changing things uh as broad as like you know democracy and this and that uh that's when i

that's when i first found out about it and and yes indeed you know venezuelans have also found that about it uh the hyperinflation that's currently eating away everybody's savings in venezuela uh it's it's only natural that people try to you know escape that uh the the main thing you know you go to venezuela um let's say like three or four three or four years ago everybody was trying to buy dollars and like they you know you got dollars like i'll buy you dollars like And everybody's trying to change their bolivars to dollars. Ever since Bitcoin became a thing and started gaining influence in the whole world, really, Venezuelans turned to Bitcoin, of course.

Venezuelans turned to Bitcoin, seeing that it was an alternative. It was a way, they saw it as a solution, right? A way to escape the hyperinflation. and uh as as it's only normal yeah at first it was only the geeks and the nerds and you know the younger generation too of course yeah uh people who would mind this and that uh but it's gotten to the point where like my aunts were asking me about it like non-savvy people yeah really yeah it's definitely gotten to that point like sending you a wild address like hey and i think that's important when the older generation realizes that oh this is kind of

like our way out of the system where it just adapts adapts adapts and the older generation gets involved in it and then all of a sudden you're not reliant on the government and you can kind of take matters into your own hand right right because i mean something we should like be clear about is that um venezuela is an outlier right now you know like the the situation in venezuela it's like it's um it's it's extremely particular to to its own to its own case right it's an outlier in an outlier in the sense that you know something like this would happen like Like the older generations maybe will have a harder time coming around to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. But when you're in a situation like the older generation in Venezuela is, then yeah, it changes the whole spectrum, right?

Backed up against a wall, forced to adapt. If you're facing a 3,500 plus percent inflation and whatnot, if you're offered anything better than that, then why wouldn't you? Yeah, exactly. And so one thing that's been going on is, so before Maduro launched the Petro this week, he was using, or this is the story that's going around, using the energy grid, sort of trying to find where people were mining Bitcoin and shutting those mining operations down. What do you know about that in particular? right right uh as venezuelans turn to bitcoin as a as an escape to the whole hyperinflation thing um they they started they started mining right uh the people who could who saw that there was an opportunity there started mining the electricity in venezuela is actually rather cheap uh but unreliable um as in you know you'll you'll you'll get a lot of uh uh light outs and whatnot every now and then uh but yeah people started people started mining and then the the the regime caught

on to that right and they realized that you know there was like there's an actual people were actually making money there um and as it's in their own nature to try to control and centralize everything that's that's what they do uh you know they started getting onto that too so it started as you know every now and off cases like okay you know they found this this miner blah blah uh you know confiscate the the whole equipment uh it would usually be to like to basically bribe them uh and you get like ironic situations where like okay they would confiscate the equipment and then like ask the same person to like help them like install and blah blah yeah it's a man pretty ironic like that um but apparently it's gotten to the point where it's uh it's been more um it's

just becoming more and more of a thing right like they're actually going after apparently uh looking down trying to hunt down the the miners and uh trying to get a hold of that situation right uh this this that's the regime this regime that's what they need to do they need to grab out they need they can't lose their grip of power right and so to do that you need to control and centralize everything they love centralizing do you think that grip's getting a little weaker i hope so uh yeah i hope so it's hard to tell but um but it's when the what's true is that when you when you're facing the such of the type of economic disaster that i had for venezuela this year um you need you it's something you can't you just can't you can't really you know put it to the

side and and avoid that or whatever right uh in the past few years uh because venezuela is such a heavy oil driven country whenever things were going wrong if there was at least money coming in from the oil then you could sort of off-put the other things but

it's not always the case there are highs and lows with the bearer of price and so that definitely influences what the regime can or cannot do just re-upping on the whiskey now this is a heavy conversation yeah

i mean a lot of that so i mean za it's good to have you in the city so listening to eduardo now like how how can you relate yeah yeah it's it all sounds very familiar you know the timeline the process that follows as i was mentioning before we started that it's You know, these models are called models for a reason. It's the same. Yeah, each situation will have its own unique thing. So, like, for example, what's different between your situation and ours is you guys have oil. Okay.

You guys have oil. And, you know, the cultural differences, too, I believe. I believe Venezuela is a bit more violent than Zimbabwe is, too, that aspect. So there's little subtle differences, but the process just sounds the same. But what I found interesting just listening to that was, well, in our situation, I was curious, with this whole presence of Bitcoin now in this present time, I'm just trying to imagine us going through those times that we did. Our situation was pre-Bitcoin. So it was 2008, and I believe Bitcoin started in 2009, right? Beginning of 2009, yes.

Our dollar, our Zim dollar collapsed completely in 2008. So it's interesting if we had this out, for lack of a better term, this out in Bitcoin for our situation, it would have been really, really interesting to see how that dynamic will play out. Yeah, because people have been using Bitcoin to get supplies into the country, right? Into Venezuela, is that correct? they've been like using it to buy amazon gift cards yeah yeah absolutely because one of the problems is that you you'll get you have this huge scarcity issue right so you you can have you'll have money like i'll send you i'll send my my family dollars and like you'll have money

you'll have cash but then you can't actually find anything right you can't buy stuff you can't you can't find the food you need or the medicines you need um you can right there's there's no way around that if you have cash or not right and so what some people are doing uh more tech savvy people of course because this is not something that anybody can do they would they would rely completely on bitcoin and then like yeah buy stuff on amazon and have a ship to to deliver to to venezuela and like this whole complicated thing to like get groceries or something like that yeah i can't imagine having to work that hard to get food on the table yeah well that's the thing it gets to the point where like right now venezuela you don't you don't live in venezuela you survive

in venezuela you know what i mean damn it's um i like that that's that's very true it is it is situation it's it's hard to like imagine it even for me right because i lived in 2005 and you know i was still living i wasn't like surviving i would i want to say um but but it's you know a lot can happen in 10 years 10 12 years and yeah it's gotten to a point where they're just it's just you just survive and it's no but it's not a coincidence that's what you need to realize right it's not it's not um this is not happening out of the blue uh it's happening because they want it to happen they their regime right you know the the whole premise is that you know they're they're following the the cuban recipe and um in in in this what's the end game though

like what is the end game for them like how like are they that convoluted in the mind that they just are they that they're megalomaniac are they megalomaniacs that like are so self-centered that like they honestly believe that they should have everything pretty much yeah um no it comes down to the the money uh being a uh a very true factor money can definitely corrupt you and you know it gets to the point where there's so much money in venezuela with all the oil that's just sitting there that you know gets people corrupted and they're just corrupt to the bone corruption ends up being like the the the core the core issue and for them it's like they have you know they have the grip of the power right now and you know there's uh they have the they have the money and

you know if they let loose they're not they're not just they can't just really just like walk away and then like live a happy life and there'll be like consequences after all they've done yeah so they they can't they can't like that's yeah we saw what happened to uh gaddafi in libya after he got run out of his uh and right his his uh his dictatorship went down right until he got a knife to the asshole it's not a good way to die right right yeah um you want to get dark so down to get dark but let's get more optimistic let's change let's change the tone here um let's get back to bitcoin you discovered bitcoin in 2014 you said and you work for democracy earth you're trying to bring an open source democracy spin this in a democracy earth how is democracy

earth that's what the project you're driven to i would i would imagine you're driven to it because of what's going on in your home country like why why are you inspired by democracy earth well uh okay um let me put it this way so in uh in venezuela you know um i was born in the i was born in 1990 so for you know kids my generation we grew up in that venezuela where uh you know the word revolution was always in the air right you know like we don't really know anything other than the chavista and the chavista period the chavismo um and because of that uh elections like the election day there were always like a very big thing you know like we just it was just the situation we were living in right uh with all the the political unrest and this and that

elections were always like a very like emotionally charged day and like it was like a thing like we we thought it was like the way out and blah blah um that's obviously not i mean it hasn't worked out it wasn't the case uh but for me always like looking at democracy from that from that lens uh elections were always like a very uh you know voting itself was like a very interesting and um important thing for me and um i was telling you the story of how like yeah i heard about bitcoin back then in 2014 blah blah it was more for like the you know it was like a it was like a fintech hackathon never thought of it and from the other angle um and then i started sort of you know looking into what what santi was doing back in buenos aires with the partido de la red um and

the way they were proposing you know a new way to look at a democracy right democracy for the 21st century they were they were saying um and then that sort of evolved to the point where okay democracy earth you there was it was actually going straight at or looking at bitcoin in the blockchain as a as a as a technology to to use as a as a solution and it was since it was because of the combination of all these factors that you know that got me definitely drawn into democracy earth right uh and you know i'll see i see what's happening in venezuela you know the the elections and the voting itself and and what it meant to me and then okay the potential that this this you know blockchain voting could have that's sort of how i uh i got i got drawn into it um but it's

it's still you know it's still complex right it's still it's still broad there's still a lot of work to do uh and it's obviously bitcoin uh the bitcoin blockchain itself can can offer many other things as well um so i'm really just diving into that world so what are sort of the biggest problems you guys have faced at democracy uh democracy earth like what are some of the biggest hurdles you guys have to overcome um so the the sovereign is the the app itself that we have uh developed to implement liquid democracy right can we while we have zha in the room can we describe liquid democracy could you define it for us like yeah how how would it compare to uh the representative democracy that we have here in america yeah yeah that's a good point so liquid democracy

um sits in between direct democracy and representative democracy that you mentioned right direct democracy being the uh direct democracy being you know every individual every citizen voting directly on every issue every topic sort of you know the way um the the greeks were doing it back in the day um in the in the agora you know everybody getting the assembly and then just vote directly and whatever um on the other side of that spectrum uh representative of the democracy is what we have now most western democratic countries uh where yeah every four or five years uh you know citizens get together and vote and elect all of your power all of your votes all of your decisions on on on a person um and then and then that's that's pretty much it you

know you can come back again in four or five years some countries and then uh vote again liquid democracy is in between that look at democracy um proposes that okay you know you We can have citizens vote directly on votes, like a direct democracy, or delegate your vote to somebody else, somebody else that you trust to vote for you. And so we want to make it more dynamic, more flexible, right? Today, it's way too much restricted. It's binary, yes or no, this and that. we want to make it more flexible where you can delegate your trust to somebody else uh delegate your your vote i'm sorry to somebody else that you trust and and have have it be so that you

can revoke it you know if at any point if you don't if you don't like what they're doing for example uh that's sort of what liquid democracy is and so to go back to what we were talking about earlier um for democracy itself uh right now you know sovereign itself is the app that we have developed that implements liquid democracy from a very you know basic sort of standpoint and the the main challenge that we have ahead is actually implementing it with the the blockchain component to it right okay we want to offer the you know while using the the blockchain component you know we can offer that that incorruptible feature right which is which is what we're going for you know i keep mentioning corruption as the

main problem in venezuela and yeah the corruption is what we're trying to we're trying to eradicate or you know at least you know toned down yeah and that's what i was talking to santi about today at lunch he's very excited for the lightning network to come sort of experiment with that and see if you can use micro transactions of this quasi like colored coins to yeah to vote with yeah absolutely we're excited about that yeah um and then so what's it been like like building this like what's the type of research you've been doing what what what uh what type of technologies are you guys working with on sovereign and obviously you're you want to hook it into a blockchain eventually it's yeah it's you guys have not hooked it up to to a blockchain yet that's what we're doing right

now yeah yeah what we got to do the and and it's it's quite a challenge as you can imagine because Because we got to acknowledge and recognize that the blockchain technology, the blockchain space right now is still somewhat at an early phase, right? Yes. And so there's a lot of exploration and research that we're doing right now that we still need to do. But yeah, no, it's been fun. Working at Democracy Earth has definitely been fun. the like i was telling you earlier that i mean the team itself has been distributed from from very start uh so you know being an open source project that's that's distributed it that itself

comes with with uh some benefits but some challenges as well um what are the challenges well you gotta get right the the communication for example right um and being able to work in a in a sync way uh which i think we're doing no pretty pretty good about um but it's not it's not i don't know i don't think it's the the the normal default for everybody yeah um and then obviously you know uh open source projects have a history of having a hard time of funding themselves right um and that's uh we're not we're not exempt for that as well so those are those are some of the challenges but at the same time you know it brings it brings a lot of uh good opportunities as well i mean open source projects by nature you know you the the way santi said it

was if there's somebody out there in the world who truly cares about your project, they will find you. They will find a way to find you. That's kind of what happened to me, really. We connected. How did you find Santi? We connected on Twitter.

I first saw a video of him. This is for the World Economic Forum. He participated at once. I saw a video from him once, and i was like okay this this dude is like you know i think it's talking some sense um started following him on twitter and then the that's when they were doing the whole particular red thing uh but i was just you know sort of following from the distance uh and then i found out that they had moved to san francisco uh and they were doing the the y combinator uh program right and

that's that's when democracy os sort of evolved into democracy earth in a way uh and that's i was living in San Francisco at the time as well. So that's how we connected. But the point I was trying to make is that because it's an open source project, I approached them and they were like, yeah, do whatever you want. That's the nature of open source projects.

And so I started contributing as anyone else can contribute. And I care enough about the project that I decided to focus full time. Awesome. So that's pretty cool. That's incredible. And what are you doing? Are you doing development?

yeah research yeah development um development development front and back end yeah i mean a lot of uh as it happens with small organizations small startups uh you end up doing a lot of things so it's not just development uh there's a lot of sort of uh from the the community aspect a lot of things that that i've i've helped uh with before uh i have a background in in education too so i want to i want to help on the on the education side as well um but yeah mostly development there's a there's a lot there's a lot we need to code yeah yeah um that's fucking incredible i mean and that's like that's what i think a lot of people don't get in today's day and age i've said this online i said this on twitter before people it hasn't hit people in earnest yet that

you can truly like learn anything online and then contribute like pretty quickly uh this is something that i talk about a lot in the newsletter and on this podcast is that the pace at which technology is evolving we can't handle it like as a species like it's been growing at such a pace that like that generations before us like are like getting completely lost to my like completely lost in the sauce like what the hell is going on and i feel like the onus is on us as the younger generation to sort of like catch up to the pace of change and sort of evolve as fast as these technologies are and i'm still trying to figure out whether or not that's possible or like is it possible like too because i think i don't know if it was with yuza but like i was talking with

somebody on this podcast like i fucking remember when caller ids came out and that was like a huge thing in my mind and and now that we have fucking supercomputers in our hand we have the blockchain now we have bitcoin we have a completely peer-to-peer censorship resistant money like people couldn't fathom that 20 years ago and now it's here and and now we have to live in a world in which it's here and sort of wield it to to our needs and to to our wants to an extent i think it's the right mentality to have right to to try to have a what they call like a growth mindset right and be adaptable and flexible

because you know soon I don't know if you know but soon we will be the old soon I'm already feeling old as fuck dude

I mean think about it somebody born today 2017 2016 like this is the worst piece of technology they'll ever see

right and they don't they won't know what a CD is yeah it's crazy that's not

not even a cassette tape a CD yeah Yeah, when's the last time you've seen a DVD? Exactly my point, right? Everyone just Netflixes, whatever that is. Been a while, yeah, yeah. And for us, I think we all grew up with the Internet,

but the Internet itself was the same thing, right? For the people who were pre-Internet, right? They were probably saying the same things we're saying right now. I don't know. um for example i i heard a story once of um the okay so i heard a story once of a cuban it was this was in a different podcast of a cuban who was also migrating from cuba um and the the country that he went to was venezuela and in my mind i was like dude like why don't you pick a better country like you're going you're not not really making a change but

what was interesting is that in that in this podcast he said that that that venezuela was like it was it was better it was okay um and the point that he was trying to make is that in venezuela they had he had internet he could access the internet and so to me i think of it and okay the cuban revolution you know that happened back in uh 59 or whatever it was 50s when jfk was still And, you know, back then the Internet wasn't a thing as it was in 99 when Chavez came in, right? So that's like one difference between Cuba and Venezuela and both of the revolutions that happened. And it's true. Maybe because there was actually – there was Internet by the time Chavez came in, that changes the whole thing.

We were already using that technology. And that sets us apart from what happened in Cuba, for example. Yeah. i don't want to equate it like i don't want to say like the fact they had the internet puts you like in a better placement maybe it does but like the the repercussions of the regime are just a threat just a diet you know yeah it's a good point too how do we solve the world's problems guys are we going to solve the world's problems tonight that's what i want don't know exactly we can give it our best shot that's um it's a it's a bigger um it's a bigger

conversation of so this is this is one thing i can dive into you to with you two is you guys are immigrants you moved to america like midway through your lives like how would you like what is your take on america right now we've got donald trump as president we've got a butt ton of debt we got a bunch of people watching bravo some people are saying we're in the bread and circuses phase of of our empire um what would you guys say as outsiders coming into this country um so i'll let you go first um it's honestly it's it's not as bad as as as uh people make it i guess it goes back to the whole exposure thing you know it all depends on what you're used to and all that So if I'm comparing this situation to the situation that I ran away from at home, this is, I mean, it's a no-brainer.

It's way better. So it all comes down to that old exposure. Yeah, I can, the thing is I've been here long enough, well, and I believe both of us have been here long enough to see, you know, to actually witness changes and stuff. So you can relate to what people are saying around here. you can see what they mean that you know with donald trump in you know you compare that to to when obama was in before that george bush and all that you could you know you can you can relate to that but comparing it to the situation that you ran away from at home light and day yeah it's a no-brainer yeah uh yeah it's so it's all relative right um because i'm not particularly happy of

the the situation in the u.s right now well like you know with with uh with the current president and all this and that but but yeah i mean coming from from what i've seen before like i lost trust in the government a long time ago right uh and you know we've had clowns as presidents in venezuela for for a while so it's not it's not nothing new to me um but but yeah i mean i um i uh i think uh as an immigrant in this country like yeah i think the u.s has given me tons of opportunities and you know and i'm grateful for that and and as i says it's yeah it can always be worse trust me it can always be worse no obviously obviously it can i'm just worried about everybody getting complacent

That was one thing growing up, playing lacrosse with the coaches that I had. One thing that they continually drove to us is don't get complacent. Don't get complacent. Don't ever get complacent. Don't ever think you're the best. And I just worry that at some point, in some regards, we're getting complacent here. And I don't know if it's a fact that, like, so it comes down to our government. In my mind, politicians are some of the scummiest people on earth.

obviously our politicians are not as bad as your politician maybe they are but they don't have the powers to to wield like your politicians do right but i i don't trust i don't trust a goddamn politician as far as i could throw them like and that's something that like like it it's just been time after time again they promise you the world and then give you give you the complete opposite of what they promise and that's one thing i worry like even though we have a great here i mean i who am i to fucking complain like like sitting here talking but you should that's the thing i mean you don't want it to let it get to the point where you know venezuela zimbabwe is like it's like you don't want to be us yeah do you you you you should feel worried and yeah you should

complain and that's the whole point of democracy right everybody can can express their what they're thinking yeah and that's one thing yeah like i said that's one thing i worry too people getting too complacent here and it's just it's a weird time to be alive it is it is because we're really um it seems we're witnessing uh a paradigm shift right with with the internet and technology with technologies like the internet and and the bitcoin blockchain this and that um it seems to be it seems to be a higher level like macro change from like you know one place to to another so it's not specific to to venezuela or zimbabwe like you know maybe venezuela is like more ahead of uh in in the down the down the path but um but it's uh it seems to be like a higher level

um sort of change that's happening right yeah i must feel like it's a consciousness change like within our species like fucking as humans like i could just like with twitter in particular like you can reach out and connect with anybody like it is an empathy creator like i've talked about this before but like yeah it is just like the access to information and access to other people around the world that we have right now it's like holy shit like most people on the internet are realizing like hey we're all just people with the same needs at the end of the fucking day and and a lot of people are realizing that they see eye to eye with people they otherwise thought they wouldn't if they didn't have the internet you know and that's because the narrative

nobody controls the narrative anymore the narrative plays out online and it's a free-flowing thing and so dynamic too right constantly changing too it's crazy it is um that's one that's one thing i'm very interested in and is is the paradigm shift that we're living in and and trying to help people realize that we are living within a paradigm shift and i don't know i don't know how to how to express it at times like it's it's hard to put your your it's hard to put words to it's hard to produce words to explain it because it's just to me it's like a feeling it's like i can almost like fucking talking with you guys like meeting you guys and and talking about these problems, it's like, ah.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, like, we connected over the internet. We connected over Twitter, so it is empowering. It's very, very empowering, and I think we're still trying to figure it out, like, what this all means. But again, you know, like, the kid who was born in 2017, like, you know, they're growing up in this, so for them, it's going to be a given.

And we can turn this back to Bitcoin. Like, so they're born in a world that they've never lived in a world where bitcoin didn't exist like how do you think that's going to change going forward like in bitcoin in particular like how do you see it evolving if if it succeeds like what what what do you think it could do like to change the world what potential does it have to change the world in what ways i think um you know throughout history it's what we've seen is more or less the same the same pattern like when when a technology comes around that's orders of magnitude better than what's available

will eventually get good acceptor I'll eventually get it will become mainstream um so you know again for the kids being born in in 2017 this year 2018 2018 um as an uh as andreas has said it before the one and only you know when you when you present it to them like okay you can either go to the bank from nine to five monday friday blah or you can do this bitcoin thing you know uh anytime any anywhere blah blah board it's gonna be a no-brainer for for for them and um it's i i mean i'm not a history expert but i think it's just what happens when a technology is is better than the other it eventually takes over yeah i'm one of those optimists on this uh on this uh topic with how bitcoin is going to impact the thing with

impact the future and i mean with the growing importance of of the internet everyone's on the internet now you know it's it's only i feel like it's only a matter of time until you know we we we take our financial institutions to the internet which means you know bitcoin as it becomes more mainstream as people uh learn about it especially in situations like ours you know it'll start in situations like ours where you know we we have no other option so the next the next uh country to have to have like a financial crash when uh when uh bitcoin is actually now you know steady and mainstream they they probably that's that's going to be an option that's going to be a solution and you know it's it's there why not take it why why do you why would you uh go through

the suffering and pain that zimbabwe went through when we we we had no access to money yeah you know if we had bitcoin at the time that's you know that's and it's mature and people trust it more you know that's it's an option that's a that's a great point because people aren't going to revert to the shitty things that led to the problems that they got and i mean satoshi he created bitcoin as a i don't know if it's a direct response to the financial turmoil of 2008 the financial the world financial crisis of 2008 but he fucking hashed it into the genesis block like like the chancellor on brink of second bailout of the banks like he made an overt statement right off the bat like we can do things a better way and hey this is bitcoin and it's very powerful

statement yeah really it really is it's like and it's crazy that we live in a world with bitcoin and just this thing just came out of nowhere let's get into satoshi narratives what do you who do you think satoshi is do you think it's a person you think it's a group do you think it's an ai do you think it's an alien uh satoshi uh satoshi is all of us we are satoshi we are all satoshi we're all satoshi yeah i like that i don't know i don't know if it's a it's an ai or group or he or she but it doesn't matter that's the thing that's that's a beautiful thing of it right um it doesn't matter who satoshi is because that's that's the whole point him or her or them remaining unknown just sort of allows and unleashes everything that's happened, right?

Yeah. So I'm not worried about it. I'm not, you know, if he or she ever comes out later, it'll be like quite a thing. But for the time being, it's probably better if they remain unknown. Definitely. And that's one of the things I've been talking a lot recently is the narratives.

And I don't think anybody's ever going to beat the Satoshi narrative. um people people get really religious and really like religion right yeah like there's going to be there's going to be a religion made that revolves around satoshi not in our generation i don't think i think like in two generations down and i'm not a religious person like i i grew up catholic i was raised catholic went to catholic school went to catholic high school same year i i mean i believe in the golden rule all that i don't really agree with the church at all but and sort of their hierarchical structure but i will concede that throughout history humans have developed these religious narratives around things like the resurrection of christ the

immaculate conception like satoshi just dropping bitcoin is similar to the immaculate conception in my in my mind like i can see generations from now uh humans building a narrative around around this this airdrop of bitcoin yeah on a mailing list well we humans like stories that's a that's um i think uh uh by now a truth by now right if you want to get to the the fucking love stories we are brainwired to like stories that's like that's how we work um if you want to get to the Yuval Harari narrative, right? Stories are what drives us, and it's just how we work. What narrative is that?

Yuval Harari, the author, he wrote the Sapiens book. Okay. Get into that a little bit. What's going on there? Sapiens is a book that was published, I don't know when it was published, five, six years ago or something like that. This is a new Tales from the Crypt Book Club book. Go up and pick it up, Sapiens.

and it's a pretty good book yeah yeah it's a pretty good book uh he actually came up with a sequel to that uh that's just as interesting um and anyways in one of the points that he makes in the book is that that uh you know humans are the the way that we can cooperate and work together it's because we are you know we like stories like we we are driven by stories and um And everything is a story when you kind of think of it. Like, you know, money is a story. Religions are a story. At the very core of how we work,

narratives sort of drive, you know, the way we function. Are humans dumb? Are we dumb to an extent? Obviously not. I'm speaking into a microphone. We're going to record this and put it on the internet. We're smart to an extent. But we're dumb to an extent, too.

Yeah, it's a double-edged sword. We're driven. That reptilian part of our brain still drives a lot of what we do. Yeah. We can take a break and think about what we want to talk about. Well, if you want to talk about books, I know you like The Sovereign Individual. I like The Sovereign Individual. You want to get into that?

Yeah, why not? i mean because i think it's directly related to a lot of things that we're talking about right all right let's jump into it what do you want to talk about with it like do you want to talk about like how so one of my favorite themes in the sovereign individual they predict a bitcoin on page 25 revenge of nations i can probably read it verbatim to you but i've done that too many times and the big theme throughout the book is the subject of the logic of violence and the fact that when you get a money that's cryptographically secured and distributed that is not centrally dispersed,

you give power to the sovereign, to the individual, to withhold money from governments trying to collect taxes. It's a heavy thought. People cannot even fathom withholding money from governments. And that is what Bitcoin, like it or not, that is probably the biggest innovation that that that from a monetary perspective that it provides is that you can withhold your money from governments to an extent right um yeah yeah and that's the you know the reason why i even i even bring it up is because yeah i think it's definitely

related to everything we're talking about like this whole like paradigm shift of you know with technologies like the internet and bitcoin how it changes uh how we can you know how we can organize ourselves as a society how we can do things and and yeah i think it's uh it's something to pay attention to for sure what um so what what else in the sovereign individual interests you do well they go hard uh yeah they go hard at the um the whole topic of nation states and how they see that it can that can change that can evolve right and obviously that's yeah my my guest last week jw weatherman he argues that the nation-state died like 30 years ago when cryptography became mainstream and we're just we're just waiting to realize it that's a good

point that's a good point so let's dig a little deeper into that like what is the whole the transition from a nation-state world to to the sovereign individual world how would you describe that i mean it's uh it's obviously kind of complex it's not going to happen overnight it's gonna it's gonna take time but it at the end of the day you know you can look at it uh i like i think in the summer and do it like they look at it as a if you if you look at a nation state as a as an organization as a company um where the customers can have control right i I think that's the way they put it. As of right now, you know, the nation states have control

because they actually, you know, own the currencies and this and that, and they're supposed to provide for security. But as that changes, you know, as something like Bitcoin emerges and now there's a sound form of money that we can use that's not tied or related to a government, then then things start to change right then then maybe okay we can think of ourselves as as customers and we can demand demand to the the government this or that and then they're they're just you know inevitably start losing losing power at least on paper right this is something

we don't i don't know like we don't know what the fuck is going to happen but at least on paper they they they just start you know they're going to start they're going to start becoming more and more irrelevant yeah and that's like uh i've got a troll on twitter shaft shaft gunk shout out shaft gunk he's a incredible twitter name i appreciate you shaft gunk i don't know if you're listening to this you're probably not but his big thing he's like he's like bitcoin's gonna fail because these governments are just gonna come after you guys with guns like you're you're shit out of luck like it's a it's a nice little pipe dream you got there but at the end of the day these governments got arms and they're they're going to use them that and that's the scary part

that well not not not the guns thing is that they they still have more of the control as to the success of bitcoin like for example as i think you mentioned earlier that uh they were looking at the energy the energy use in venezuela and targeting the the the miners and stuff like that so they still have those yeah those uh those ways of trying to shut it down which is i i you know i find it uh find it scary yeah i find it uh really scary that uh they have that yeah and i don't know but at the end of the day is people in the military are people too like how that's so that's another interesting topic we get into is politicians and people in the military owning things like bitcoin like at a point like it is in their best interest to to

to vote and to act in a way that that makes bitcoin succeed to an extent so this is something where you can sort of trojan horse like santi likes to say the trojan horse like an idea into a corrupt structure and maybe that idea is so strong that it holds on that those people are more willing to fight for that idea than the pre-existing structure that they work for yeah yeah maybe i mean it goes back to the the point of you know if there are two things on the table and one is or just a magnitude better than the other eventually you know it should it should win out but it doesn't think it takes time though it's not it's not gonna happen overnight it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of time um that's another thing i harp on here is patience people

need to exude some form of patience yeah um you're asking for a lot martin human beings are not patient you're asking for a lot yeah even though i'm sure it is it is and that's what pisses me off a lot about the space and the cryptocurrency space in general is that people are fucking impatient it's like i want everything out of the box like to work how it should work i need a world computer right now it's like yeah yeah doesn't quite work like that right no it doesn't it does not um trying to think where else you guys want to go well but so to circle back we started we started out uh talking about the petro right and so to circle back to the the petro and how that relates to like you know everything we're talking about the petro like

it's it's kind of boring in a way like you know it's it's a um a government a desperate regime trying to you know play their cards so they can sort of hold on to power uh but when you look at it from the from the higher level point of view uh it's not it's actually not that interesting like you know it was it was news this week but it's probably gonna like die off or whatever um and and and what's more interesting is sort of the the macro level like okay what's actually what's actually going on right like how how bitcoin and and you know crypto space in general cryptocurrencies have can actually influence and impact the the geopolitical landscape uh you know on a global level um i naval was uh was saying about well i mean he's always saying

But he was talking about how the real movie to watch is the whole, like, elites versus the masses. I don't know if you saw that tweet. I did not. And I think there's a lot of truth to that, right? Because it's sort of what's happening in Venezuela. But, I mean, Venezuela may be an outlier in a specific case in itself, but it's happening at a global level. It's a symptom that can be seen more or less from anywhere in the world. Yeah, I think I'm going to add some more books to the book club here.

I think Nassim Taleb's Inserto series has really opened up people's eyes to the intellectual yet idiot sort of class. Which one? What's it called? Inserto. It's a series. So it's fooled by randomness, the black swan, anti-fragile. um and now skin in the game it's coming out soon has not come out yet okay um but basically what he talks about is he's he's got a probability and statistics background and just talks about how a lot of the world is run or a lot of what we do in the world is based off of models created by intellectuals or academics that think they know how the world works and they've got these models

that they plug numbers into and in particular economists who central bankers who are trying to predict growth and inflation rates they use these models that have no connection i mean they have somewhat of a connection but at the end of the day you can't model out growth and you can't model out sort of how the world's going to evolve and a lot of people are trying to do this and it's like people are starting to wake up to the fact that these people that we depend on to make heavy decisions like monetary policy and geopolitical policy for us are basically using information that has no no semblance of reality to an extent and more and more people are becoming aware of this fact that hey these fucking assholes that have been telling us what to do for the last

few decades actually don't have a great idea of what they're doing and i think you two know that better than most obviously uh with how your currencies have been depreciated but sometimes i feel like here in america we're frogs boiling in water because we're letting these these intellectuals sort of drive decisions and old people from an old world drive decisions that really aren't going to work out in this new paradigm that we're living in dude we're all frogs um in venezuela i mean that metaphor is quite quite uh quite powerful really think about it why is that well i mean in venezuela it's the same it's the same you know we we use at literally the same the same metaphor right really yeah yeah it's not so i i i find it i find it

interesting that you think you know uh that right here right now like americans are are frogs in a boiling water because i mean i can say the same thing about about venezuela and then maybe he's like the same thing about zimbabwe so um it would be interesting to see to i'm a i'm a pessimist to a degree degree i mean i'm trying to be hyper aware i i i like to see you as a realist yeah you're not you're not yeah you're not pissed i don't think you're pessimistic at all no i would agree to actually i'm gonna turn that completely contradict what i just say i would say i'm an optimist but i am trying to be a realist to like help people recognize like hey motherfuckers we should be paying attention to this shit like you cannot be you cannot be growing your monetary

base from 800 billion dollars to 4.2 trillion dollars over the course of six years like that's just unnatural and it does not bode well for the future generations and let's say this we're all is that you're 27 yes i'm 26 you're 27 yeah like we're all the same age we're the average millennial and this is the fucking world we gotta build like this is the world we're gonna like move into like what what's our stamp on the world gonna be are we just gonna let things happen the way they have been happening or are we gonna push that paradigm shift faster and harder than than than generations before us could imagine and i am for the latter i would really like to change things as not as quickly as possible but like as drastically as possible over the course of our lifetime because

i think it could be better right obviously it can be better you can never get again never get fucking complacent like yeah right i mean i think we we have to go for the ladder because of you know what we know that things are not working right yeah i mean maybe if we i mean it doesn't matter like we're 27 right now but if we happen to live in a world where like things were working then we weren't thinking about this you know like we'd probably be doing like i don't know what regular humans trying to have a good time this and that um and so and so i think it's because of where we are right now the situation

like the times we're living in then yeah of course we're going to try to look for better solutions better alternatives yeah

to quote the sovereign individual understanding the way the world works means developing a realistic intuition of the way the human society

obeys the mathematics of natural processes holy shit reality is non-linear but most people's expectations are not to understand the dynamics of change you have to recognize that human society like other complex systems in nature is characterized by cycles and discontinuities whoa i don't know i'm uh whoa i mean that's exactly what i've been fucking preaching is

like we just need to realize that this world is changing faster than we expect like our expectations are linear like you said and this change is parabolic i mean yeah we've been that's what we were taught right like you at least i was you go to school you get a degree you get a job and your your your curriculum is supposed to be like this this linear representation of like you know this next job or whatever and it's just not the case reality is non-linear and um and i mean i think to the degree that each person or individual can can can cope with that then then yeah you can make sense of out of the out of the world the way you want to but um but it's just

it's just you know the facts you know it's what we're presenting today like with the internet and

bitcoin everything changing so fast the acceleration of technology right being so so fast

I think it's it's what we're sort of thrown into right yeah that's why we're

in the studio right now to try to make sense of all of it what the fuck is going on yeah

wish we knew that's crazy oh man so where are we right now in this podcast I'm getting a little lost in this

I'm a fucking drunk I don't know about you too what do you got in that book right there Eduardo's got Eduardo's got a notebook open he's got some notes down I know you want to talk

about something what's in there it's just some notes that I took you know some preparation for this but no I think we've

we've hit most of the points we're talking about Venezuela and sort of the contextual history of you know why venezuela is where it is right now uh and when you look at the petro from that from that optic you know from that from with that lens and yeah you can you can totally see that the petro is just uh you know another car that the regime is playing to finance themselves and trying to you know bypass the sanctions the u.s sanctions and this

and that uh and it's nothing new it's nothing nothing new did you actually did you know they've tried something like this before already as a matter of fact. I did not know this. Venezuela? Yeah, but this was pre-Bitcoin I don't know when it was exactly but I'm pretty sure it was pre-Bitcoin it was a coin called Sucre

and it was a digital coin that they tried to make happen between a specific number of countries so they've been thinking of ways to To scam their citizens for a while now.

Right, get away with it for a while. But again, Bitcoin is like this huge train coming down the road, so nobody can avoid it. It is. That's what Santi and I were talking about today at lunch. Bitcoin is a living organism that is just basically contracting out humans to make it stronger to an extent. so people humans are they are they are like that you they're like and the way you do that is you

create an incredibly perfect incentive system with the way the game theory the mathematics the economics work out when it comes to these miners competing for bitcoin like bitcoin has literally entered the world and like contracted humans to keep it alive via mining and humans will do this because we're inherently greedy or ambitious whatever word you want to use and we want to get ahead so the the idea that oh my god if i plug in this this fucking miner to the wall and it can produce money uh it could potentially produce money in the form of bitcoin like a lot of humans are going to join that race to win that bitcoin humans like that story right it's a great story it's a great narrative and that's what it sounds like something something that santi would

say yeah it's it's a living organism so ralph we were talking about ralph merkle who basically started the discovery or discovered the technology that would eventually lead to bitcoin which is merkle trees and i don't know if that's the only technology that would lead to bitcoin but it's one of the core technologies merkle trees and basically he described bitcoin as a living organism that because it's geographically dispersed yeah between many people like it can never die like you can you can it's like the hydra you can cut off one of the heads yeah six more will grow in its place and and it's copied across many many many computers across the world and yeah the network's only getting stronger as more and more computers join to to mine for it

and it's the Lindy effect. Every day that it survives makes it more probable that it will continue to survive going forward. Wasn't he the one who said that there could be like a nuclear war or something, a catastrophe? Yeah, cockroaches and Bitcoin survive. Right. We humans could die,

but Bitcoin could instinctively keep on living. Yeah, it's definitely here to stay, I feel, because it's, I mean, the purpose, you can see the purpose. you can you can see it you know you can see the purpose that it serves and especially especially coming like from from countries that went through you know a monetary crisis and are exposed to corruption it's there to solve that so i i personally think as soon as it'll take time i mean it's it's young 2009 that's that's 10 years people will hop on board and once people people

on board that's you know i wouldn't be surprised if someone if someone came up to me and said you And 50 years from now, Bitcoin is going to be the U.S. dollar of the world. I wouldn't be surprised, to be honest. I would not be either. And that's the one thing that sort of, I don't want to say it freaked me out, but it was a big eye-opener last week. The dude I was talking to, J.W. Weatherman, he's a hardcore cypherpunk. He's been working on technologies like Bitcoin for years

and the computer science and security world. And he was like, it's going to happen faster than we think. he thinks it's gonna like i was like maybe 10 years like it'll be somewhat mainstream he's like it's gonna happen a lot faster than than we think and we can fathom and i can see that to an extent like so what is bitcoin at the end of the day it's a hedge against a monetary a global monetary meltdown and nobody knows when that happened it's going back to nassim taleb inserto series part of the book club too we're gonna get a book club list don't worry people but what he talks about is in that book the life of a turkey like making it like compare like comparing black swan events

to the life of a turkey like before thanksgiving so the turkey will live and each day it lives its life gets better and it gets more comfortable until the week before thanksgiving and then all of a sudden gets its head chopped off and it's not living anymore that growth that growth and contentness and happiness stops abruptly and immediately goes to zero and that's sort of the way these systems are going to break down like it's going to seem like it's getting better stock market's going all-time high forever and then one day something happens don't know what it is it's probably mass loss of trust and in the system but it just gets its head cut off one day and it's pretty intense it's very intense but these are things you have to worry about and sort

of take into consideration i would i would argue am i pessimist or am i a mop optimist i don't know i think i agree with you realistic yeah yeah i yeah i watched that video that you shared the other day of um uh how they were talking about bitcoin from like the generation point of view of like what has happened tom lee's video yeah yeah yeah yeah and i think he explained it pretty well right like yeah it um you look at asset flows across time like it's pretty crazy how they line up with like we are the average millennial right and then he was talking about like what like uh for somebody from you know 25 35 or whatever like they start investing and like okay so for somebody right now like where would they invest it's gonna be crypto yeah especially

after you see the gains that people got last year like you're talking about 10 000 gains in one year like how could you avoid that asset class right if you're and it just makes more sense for us at young age to dive into these assets because we're we're able to take bigger risk at this age because we have more time to recover like an extent like we get blown up before we're 30 right you still have enough time to build sort of a nest egg before you retire that's even possible but right we can take the bigger risk and i think we are gonna we are taking that risk and i will continue to take that risk until proven otherwise right all right we have the the age right factor to to our advantage um but yeah no it's it's interesting because at the end of the day it's

there's always going to be a risk of course there's always going to be a risk game and we don't know nobody knows exactly what's going to happen but that's the name of the game you gotta you gotta risk it gotta risk it for the biscuit and uh we're about two hours in here i think unless you get oh really I think so it's 8.07 but we could rip

a three hour guy I mean I could talk about Venezuela all fucking night the similarities if you really want me to go

tell me what you what do you want to talk about just go no I mean what were you saying the similarities what the similarities

in the story is is incredible yeah it really is between Venezuela yeah

when I was listening to your podcast I was like I fairly saw it or yeah Bitcoin Bitcoin is

I I I don't know what it's gonna do for your situation to be honest it might I

it's interesting yeah it's the cryptocurrency aspect of it I feel is is it's it's gonna

it's probably gonna prop you prop your regime your regime up i feel like venezuelans you you need to take advantage of of and i don't mean any offense by this but anyway by the way sorry you need to take advantage of the whole uh the the rise of the populist movement okay take you know take take this this is the time you've you've seen it before you're seeing it now you know it's italy and it's all through europe the middle east and all that capture that and you know get uh get rid of these guys because we we zimbabwe have actually just gone through that too we just we just toppled the mugabe

last year was right towards the end last year so get get rid of the yeah so the people currently empowered yeah who yeah sort of rose up because of the whole populist uh movement as well oh the and oh actually yeah they did they did maduro right maduro he he did coming through yeah well dude maduro's just a clown to be honest um but but yeah like uh when if you go back to to chavez and when chavez rose and yeah i mean it was it was uh the it it offered or showed all the the the factors that you need for like, you know, this, what, what, what a populist movement can be, right. It was, uh, it was this, uh, you know, person from, you know, that came from the, from the bottom, low income, rural family, blah, blah, blah, uh, promising change, promising this and

that. Um, and, and, and yeah, Venezuela was at a point where, where change was needed. Like, You know, it was the pyramid that had been formed because of the whole oil-centric economy and all the clientelism. Do you know, is clientelism a word? Do you know what I mean by that? Yeah. What is it? Clientelism? Climate?

Yeah, no, clientelism. So, as in clients. I think it's a word in English. I think it's clients, but I've never heard the term clientelism. it's just uh buying votes so uh you know you will vote for me if i if i build you this this basketball court that you want for example yeah that was like the way things worked back in the day and still work right now in venezuela and it's also true for you know other countries in latin america uh and you know there's this it was like a huge pyramid of clientelism that was

that was established in venezuela and and and you know chavez was elected basically to dismantle that you know like he was sort of uh singing and proposing all this this uh these solutions for a change and a revolution and this and that um and of course end up all being being you know vaporware um but um that's it yeah that's how that's how we got to where we are right now Power corrupts, man. Definitely corrupts. And that's why for rich, resource-rich countries, and I keep going back to this whole resource course,

it's been studied before and it's just what happened. It's happened to Venezuela, it's happened to other countries, and the money will corrupt people. Is that why you're sort of drawn to Bitcoin? Is it because there's no one in charge? There's no one person too corrupt? Have you thought about this before? Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, I think that decentralization aspect of, you know, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general speak to me and speak to anyone who would, you know, sort of anyone who has been through the situation like a Venezuelan would where, you know, where you lose all trust from the government and, you know, the central banks and this and that and your currency is worth nothing. Yeah, it definitely speaks to me for sure. um i think can play a part of you know what can come in the future um even well even in venezuela like what you see right now um part of the the dissidents group uh the various dissidents groups that are sort of like rising in venezuela uh they look at it from a network perspective like you know they're they're they're starting to change their mentality and they're they're not they're trying to move away from you know like oh the one liter one liter is going to come it's going to save us all like one liter this and that in this pyramid structure and they're starting to look at

it from a different angle okay like we we should you know we we can be we can be networks human networks we can be we can work as um uh check and balance the system together with without needing to depend on one person right right and and have it be so that it's way more decentralized and And so, yeah, I mean, that definitely speaks to me personally. Damn. Fuck. There's so much. There's so many problems to solve.

And there's so much to do. Exactly. That's why it comes back to the patience, right? Like, yeah, I mean, there's so many problems to solve. There's so much work to do. And it's not going to happen overnight. We've got to keep working hard. Well, all right.

I think this is a perfect segue to a wrap-up sort of exit question is how do we as individuals like how do you how do we work individually towards this goal of like a distributed network like what what can you do as an what would you advise individuals to work towards uh to help make this reality become true or help this idea become a reality excuse me Well, I think to start out, it's realizing that, yes, as an individual, you can have a say. You can do something about whatever it is that you care about. In my case, for example, becoming involved with Democracy Earth, it ended up being a

matter of, okay, I can do something about democracy. an individual i can i can provide i can put my little grain of grain of salt um and so just taking that first step of like actually acknowledging and realizing that yeah like as an individual you can do something about whatever you you care about uh it's a it's an important step uh and then it's it's it's really a huge or yeah it's it's a long learning road to i mean at the end of the day right nobody really has all the answers um per se like nobody really has all the answers like and on a personal level but on a collective level we can hopefully figure stuff out um so once you realize okay like i can do something about this then you start connecting

you know that's that's what the internet is for and you know that's what you know you can learn online and you can do this and that and and then just try to connect and you know find the people that are out there, you know, sort of working for the same goals that you're working for and then work together. I mean, but nobody has the answers. That's all the work we need to do, right?

That's the stuff we got to do. Figure out how you can best contribute and work towards that. Zai, you got any advice for the people out there? By Bitcoin? Sorry. That, yes. I mean, it's courage.

you know, you just got to be courageous, and I mean, and I know, like, the situation, the situation in Zimbabwe doesn't really harness that, it's very hard to, you know, to actually capture that aspect of it, you know, because it's a society, it's a suppressive society, so, you know, it's just being courageous, I don't know how, especially, I don't know how like uh the the institutions how quickly the institutions will will adapt to to uh um to capture that that that aspect because i mean the the generation our older generation are because of our medical advancements and stuff like that are living longer we in zimbabwe you know being being 40 years old 50 years old in politics is is very young and these are the

people that are you know the the 70 year olds are the ones that are making decisions for us so yeah it's it's just got to be courageous and as you mentioned the patience the patience aspect too you know change uh change takes it takes a while yeah and you know you just got to stick with it sometimes it'll it'll look like you know you're hitting a dead end actually most of the time it'll look like you're hitting a dead end but i you know as most people most people that have been able to succeed you know they they have similar stories they will tell you that you know There was a point where I thought that this is where I capped out. But I kept with it, kept with the program and was able to overcome.

So just being courageous and patient. Courageous, patient, and persistent. And persistence, there you go. Persistence, just keep going. Gentlemen, this has been an incredible conversation. Yeah, it was great, great learning. Thank you for letting me sit in, by the way, unannounced. It was great really hearing about the Venezuelan situation.

it's it's completely it's i want to go to zimbabwe man you should you should and i want i want to go maybe not not now uh maybe give it a few years um but um but yeah i feel like there's a lot in common yeah i met i met uh that was in florida before this i was in tampa florida and uh a couple a couple of my very close friends were with venezuela there's a lot of venezuelans in florida Yeah, Caracas, and I forgot, one of my former housemates, she's from the second city. I forgot what it's called, but I remember it's the second biggest city. Yeah, there's a lot of Venezuelans there, yeah.

There's a lot. So I'd love to, love to visit. All right, we'll make it happen. Yeah, there we go. We're doing, maybe we can do a content trip. There we go. Let's do it. Eduardo, Zah, and Marty travel the world.

Oh, there you go, go to Venezuela, Zimbabwe. You want to come with? I'd be down. Me hablo muy poquito español. You don't speak Shona? I don't speak Shona. I'll teach you. How many languages are there in Zimbabwe?

So there are two major, well, three counting English. So two native tongues, the natives of Zimbabwe, then depending on the part of the country that you're in, so depending on which country you're bordering, You might get a little bit of the Botswanan lingo if you're on the west side. On the east side, you might get a little bit of the Portuguese aspect from Mozambique. South Africa's influence in the south, and the north is the Zambian influence. But our ones that are, I would say, the three major, major Zimbabwean languages are English.

Shona is the one that I speak. That's my major one. And within those languages, too, there's dialects. So it's spoken differently and all that. And yeah, Neville is the third. Hey, we aim to teach people here at Tales from the Crypt. And you just learned about the languages as a ball boy. There you go.

And we learned about a lot tonight. And we're going to wrap it up here because we've been here for a while. Eduardo, where can we learn more about you? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. It's at Medied. medied it's m-e-d-i-e-d um and yeah definitely check out the work we're doing with democracy.earth as well um i'm easy to find i'm online and my my twitter just because of the nature of what i do should not be taken literally and seriously just because of the nature of what i do

so but you know if you're with me conversation person to person that's when you'll actually learn a lot about me that's why i love having you in the studios because i get to learn about you which my my persona on the internet is completely different to yeah i still i still love that persona i mean yeah but is that is that intentional entertainment yes it is it is very intentional it is very intentional yeah yeah i know i know a lot of i know i know a lot of the fans might not listen to this so you know i'm not really disappointing that many people and hey man i'm I'm trying to pitch this to Dave, all right? Every Barstool fan should be listening to this.

You should be listening to Marty. You should be. No, it's good stuff. You'll learn, actually. If you want to know Zai, listen to Marty. That's where Zai will actually come out. If you want to know the midget Zimbo, then follow Twitter. Nice.

Yeah, it's been a great time in the studio here on this Friday night. We literally crushed half that bottle of whiskey. I think we're all three sheets to the wind right now. You can find me, at Marty Ben, on Twitter. if you like this conversation this ramble that we just had please subscribe rate review um let me know if i'm doing good doing bad uh share with your friends looking to get into the space subscribe to my newsletter marty's bent you can find that link on my twitter bio bio um and that's all we have for this week freaks uh hope you guys learned a lot hope you enjoyed it uh peace and

love no thank you thank you for letting me that's fun man great great pleasure man it's it's so fascinating yeah it's incredible how how because my brother my brother tells me this that you know a model i have a finance background uh-huh okay my academic training is in finance yeah my brother tells me that a model is a model of every type of thing yeah you know it's it's um i'm i'm a believer of a model there's a model to an extent but my brother i'm not i don't have yeah an economic background