 Alright, so the reason why I wanted to hear it today is I've been following very closely what's happening in Venezuela and bordering countries as well. I mean, you hear a lot of things in the news, you know, and I'm like, okay, I'll take that with a grain of salt. So I want to hear from the horse's mouth and thank you for coming in and talking with us and like, just tell us, man. First of all, what has been going on, let's do a little bit of history. And then kind of like let's transition into where do you think it's going to happen and how does crypto play a role in all this? That's a great framework. So I guess a bit of history, you know, it's hard to summarize 20 years of, you know, communism or I guess a transformative process in the country in a few minutes, but I'll do my best. So I think it's good to set the tone of how Venezuela was prior to Chavez. So prior to Chavez, which was in the early mid-90s, Venezuela was a country that did have inequality. There was a big divide between the haves and the have-nots. And there were two main ruling political parties that essentially were quasi-Republican and Democrats where they would alternate the presidency. And there was two or three parties that would alternate the presidency. And they just, you know, the Venezuelan people had become used to these. These were the three actors, all right? So around the mid-90s, Venezuela is going through some, you know, there's inflation still. There's some, you know, the economy is not doing so great. But you know, in the leading up to the 99 elections, Hugo Chavez, who was a military that at the time was in jail because he had tried to overtake or overthrow the presidents twice. He tried twice to do a coup fail. He would have been thrown in jail. And in 98, he gets pardoned by the, you know, at that time, outing president called Rafael Caldera. And this pardon, this release from jail, enables him to campaign for the upcoming presidential election. So he frames his campaign as 21st century socialism. And he starts talking to the people saying, we're going to create, you know, a vast safety net of government programs that's going to allow you to get a better paycheck. It's going to give you more unemployment benefits, you know, these kinds of things. It's going to create a better health system. So this concept of 21st century socialism, at first, he very deliberately sold it as a middle way for companies and people to work together and kind of build this new type of socialism. And the people that were in the sidelines, you know, spectating the run up to the lead up to the elections had already said, this guy is lying. You know, how can you believe this guy is trying to overtake the government twice? He's just, you know, lying out of every inch of his body and he's just trying to get the power. But his allure was such that he rallied a lot of people. He even created his own political party, which is the Venezuelan United Socialist Party. And so this party has effectively become the leading political party in Venezuela over the last 20 years and it didn't exist. So it's a pretty crazy phenomenon that he actually built this whole thing from the ground up. Now when Chavez comes into power at 99, he wins, you know, by a majority vote. And the first thing he decides to do is he wants to rewrite the constitution. So he already started showing that he wanted to flex his muscle. Can they have the power to do that? Well, he had won with a majority and there was a big momentum building behind him. And so he said, to kind of carry out my plan, I have to get these things done. And people were like, well, you know, we already voted him in. I guess let's look at his proposed changes. And at the time still, the opposition party was heavily criticizing all these changes that were going to be made to the constitution. But again, the momentum was such that people kind of wanted to give him this shot at building the 21st century socialism. So he changes the constitution and he changes. And this already starts showing you where he was going. So he changed our flag, changed the number of stars in the flag. He changed the direction of our national crest, the direction which the horse was facing because the horse was facing right and the horse was going to face left. He changed the name of the country and he changed the time zone. Was he always a Marxist though? The people that knew him from before knew that or said that he was always a Marxist. The people that were new to Chavez didn't really know him. So they didn't know what to look back and be scared of these things. So the changes to the constitution go through and, you know, people already start feeling like, oh, wow, this guy came in. The first thing he did is started, you know, doing all these really crazy things to kind of show his power. But then things got worse because Venezuela being a, you know, I would say 90% dependent on oil, saw its oil export revenues, 10X over the six months that he was the first six months that he was in office. So he took office, I believe at $17 a barrel. And he nationalized everything. It was already nationalized. So that's a misconception. I think people think that Chavez nationalized oil in Venezuela. The Venezuelan oil had always been nationalized in the 70s. It became nationalized in the 70s. So when Chavez basically takes power, it makes these changes to the assembly. And the country's revenue, 10X. And so he starts getting this, you know, this kind of, I don't know, I don't even know how to call it, but it's this air of invincibility, right? Like he's got 10 times a budget now. He's got popular support. And all of the people that are opposing him, you know, he's very quickly able to fix anything that gets pointed out by throwing money at it. Sure. Like, oh, hospitals don't have medicine. Bring in the best, you know, you know, hospital beds and revamp the whole thing. Oh, we're having power outages. Bring, fly into power generators from Houston and park them in and make power go back on. And so people were like, oh my God, this guy is, you know, socialism is really working. So and that's, and that already starts poisoning the minds of people because they start linking the increased revenue to socialism. And so it starts getting worse. So then he decides that, so people get upset for, you know, let's put a, an example that was common in Minnesota, beef. People say, oh, you know, with all this socialism, you know, really wish we could afford more beef. You know, beef is still very expensive in Minnesota. So Chavez goes in and says, oh, beef is, you know, going at $10 a pound. That's ridiculous. I've gone through the numbers of production in Venezuela and this beef should be selling at $2 a pound. And the producers would all come as a group and say, we can't make that. There's no feasible way we can produce this. And he said, no, there is, and if you can't do it, I'll just expropriate your farm and I'll do it myself. And the guys, you know, the, the producers were like, you know, A, they're not going to get fair pricing if they expropriates, B, they're going to lose money if they continue operating. So they, you know, they, there was a bit of a stalemate, but eventually the guys were like, take it over, man. I'm not going to lose more money. Take it over. So Chavez says, no problem. I take it over. And then to show people that they could quote, unquote run these and still maintain the levels of production that people were used to, they started flying in beef because they had all these dollars coming in from oil. They start flying in beef from Argentina, Texas, wherever it needs to get into from, and they subsidize it so that it's priced at the, at the, at the, you know, cost he said it would. Yeah, two bucks, yeah. And so now you have, you know, a socialist guy who has taken production from the hands of the capitalist thieves that were running these things. And now all of a sudden has made it so that everything appears on the shelves and it's really, really cheap. So that's, so that happened with beef, then happened with rice, then happened with beans. Slowly, but surely the state took over the vast majority of all effective production means in Venezuela. But not only were they doing this, whenever they took over a factory, they would take out trained engineers, managers, guys that were coming in and they would put in his cousin, his friend, military Rodriguez, guy that he. Glad you brought that up. I think one thing that irritates me with, I'm also, my parents come from former Yugoslavia socialist country. So we have direct, same, exactly the same shit. My grandparents left, they stole our company and see you later. People think the money alone or having, having the ability to run the company is success. It's like, it's so easy for capitalists. It's like, you have money. I'm like, are we living in like parallel universes? If it's that easy, everyone could do it. And so all the intellectual capital, human beings being the most important commodity, what do they say? Fuck off. I'm out, I'm out. So that is, that creates the biggest problem, which is in an authoritarian regime, brain drain starts happening, but brain drains start happening from the top down. So you lose your most qualified. And that is the most painful thing for a country to endure because as things start getting heated, the guys that see the signs are usually the most educated, the guys that have experienced a few things and have the luxury or the can afford to question strategically where the country's going. Most people tie it on a day to day. They don't even get to pick their head up and see where this is going to just keep chugging. So the brain drain that starts when that happens is huge because now you have the factory owners are leaving. The best employees are leaving. And everybody, everyone that has like, anyone that has like a very, I would say common sense to see what's going on, like I'm gone. So, but now the flip side to that is that that is precisely the reason why brain drain at the beginning, is not a problem for the neighboring countries. Actually, most people benefit. Yes. Most of the neighboring countries start benefiting from this brain drain. So there's this weird moment in this, you know, the first desire, the first desire destination for most Venezuelan immigrants is Miami, Florida. Of course. The second most is Madrid. Madrid, yeah. Madrid, yeah. Because it's Spanish, no language barrier. And the communities themselves start getting gravity because the more Venezuelans are in place, the more opportunity Miami is pretty much. If you don't speak Spanish, you're fucked. Yes. And Miami was, there was a lot of Cubans there already. We went through a lot of the same. So there is a bit of a, you know, almost like a pre-made home for Venezuelans. And they, you know, in Miami, the Miami community was very opening. Opening. They welcomed them, I guess, with open arms. And now the Venezuelans have in fact taken over parts of Miami, like Dorales, like fully Venezuelan. West End, which is a city just north of Florida, north of Miami is also. So when did they start leaving, like early 2000s? So we left, my family is an interesting concept, an interesting story. The Chavez took office in 1999. We left in 2000. But we only left for two years to Miami. And I think that actually illustrates the thoughts that a lot of Venezuelans had at the time. It was like, oh, Chavez came in, let's take a two-year or five-year vacation until he goes out of power. And then we'll go back and continue doing our business. So in some Venezuelans at first, we're like, OK, well, let's wait until this guy runs out of steam and runs out of money. But the problem is, oil just kept chalking up, chalking up, chalking up. And he, very smartly, with his oil money, started financing like-minded presidents around him. And so Chavez effectively set up his communist, I call it a communist franchise, because it was exactly the same cookie-cut concept and offerings to the people. And so he first sets it up. I don't know exactly the order in which it happened, but Ecuador goes red, Argentina goes red, Brazil goes red, Bolivia goes red. Nicaragua was already red. But you saw this phenomenon of- He did what Che Guevara wanted to do. Well, I mean, these guys are- I hate to sound a little bit outlandish, but these guys are monsters. They're sociopaths. Yeah, they put idealists before human rights almost, and they just get drunk on this idea that they're right and that they're doing the world a greater good without really thinking of what they're actually doing. So it's really scary. Are we saying there's a red alarm when you meet somebody that says, I have a solution for people and I'm gonna implement through a means of force to implement my better solution? That should be like your number one red alarm. Yeah, I think, I don't know where I read this quote, but it was a society that puts equality above freedom is doomed for mediocrity. Or- Yeah, it's something like, I don't know- That's on my Facebook profile. Oh, there it is. That's probably- That's like my banner. So yeah, there it is. So like that, and I firmly, no, I don't firmly. I think largely that's why the United States has continued to maintain its liberties because they almost are allergic to social- That's a constitution. They're two things that keep them in line. It's a republic as opposed to democracy and they have in the constitution freedom of speech, regardless if you like what a person sang or not, and the right to bear arms. Right. Well, the right to bear arms is an interesting one. Venezuela is a very, you know, gun-friendly community or society. And I think some of the theory behind owning a weapon or protecting yourself is that, you know, the society at large will come together in arms and stop the big bully government from doing all the bad things. I think that's a great idea, but having seen what happens in Venezuela, there's just not- Venezuela, a lot of people have weapons. Like, it's widely held. It's not really about the weapons. It's about the ability to organize. Yeah, that's the point. And I think governments are very good at shooting down the ability to organize. So it doesn't matter really how many guns you have if they're not talking to each other and doing a coordinated attack. It's actually- Do they have a black switch for internet down there? Yeah, and they've used it recently. There's hard evidence showing they've been phishing information. So Venezuela, the Venezuela regime has been using, Venezuela, the way they ensure that products are cheap for people is by controlling the supply of those products. And they do this with the internet. They do this with power. They do this with water, like basic services. And the subsidized internet service that they provide feeds approximately, I think, like 70% of all internet or all devices. And because they control the ISP, they control what the ISP shows. So there's evidence of them phishing in Venezuela, like phishing for information on Gmail so they take your login, phishing for your Twitter information. Like they'll actually spoof the landing page and fish for your information. There's actual hard evidence. I just tweeted this yesterday from a couple of researchers in Venezuela. And more recently, which is like, this guys are, sorry to say that, but they're like, they're vicious. They're like, they're vile. They've, so in this recent bid for Venezuela and the new president, the new Venezuelan president Juan Guaidó is rallying volunteers to sign up to basically aid in the allowing of the human or humanitarian aid to enter through the border. So they put up this website so that you can sign up as a volunteer. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up already. And they've actually spoofed the landing page internally in Venezuela so that they can get all the personal details of the people that are trying to sign up from this volunteers page. And these are volunteers in Venezuela? In Venezuela. And so the Chavez regime has gone as far as actually, so one of the attempts that was done to show the amount of discontent that there was in the country towards Chavez was this list, you know, the opposition at a time started collecting signatures for people that were requesting for presidential referendum. And this list got very big. I can't remember exactly how many people it was, but I think it was an order of 40,000 people. And this list was, you know, on the premise that the names are gonna be kept privately because it's huge privacy concerns. Nobody should know who you vote for or where your political inclination is. Venezuelan government, of course, took it and used it for political means. So it was an open secret. There was no clear guidelines, but if you had signed on that list, you were never gonna get approved for any loans from the government banks, any government-issued travel cards for using the Chinese social credit system. So even the scariest part is this thing has morphed now into a system called the Fatherland card. I don't know if you've heard about this. So the Fatherland card is this crazy state control experiment. It's being powered by Huawei technology. No, this is a fact, you can go factor this. So Huawei has had the Venezuelan government produce these cards and they're essentially, they call them the Fatherland cards. And they're trying to make them a replacement for the Venezuelan ID system called the Cellula that's been standing for decades. But they're now trying to replace this. And it's a Fatherland card that essentially is a political affiliation card. Like you only have this Fatherland card if you are with the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. And you have to line up and go to all of these events to get all these subsidies. So this card tracks where you live, where you work, how many cars you own, if your car was rented, how many benefit programs are you using monthly, how many kits you have, where they go to school. And it has now a real-time location chip that Huawei is tracking. So that when they need you to go vote, they'll know exactly where to pinpoint you and they'll go pick you up and take you. And so this card, if you don't have access to this card... You're a second-class citizen. You're a second-class citizen. You have no access to gasoline. You have no access to loans. You have no access to subsidized food. You have no access to subsidized services at hospitals. And so your only way to get these benefits is by creating this. And then they use the sign-up numbers on this Fatherland card as a political, oh, we have this many million families that our party is helping. And these services won't be happening under any other government. And so they are, I mean, they're a terrorist state. So what's happening right now with Maduro and everything? Maduro's a crook. Yeah. I mean, we've told you this, that's my opinion, right? And I speak from my experience there. These guys are not politicians. They're not diplomats. These guys have held no, not a single one of the alleged things that they said they were gonna commit to. There's been attempts at negotiations before between the opposition and Maduro. And all the requests that have been made by the opposition have been ignored. None of the timelines or commitments have been honored by the Maduro regime. So what do you think it's gonna take, though, to bring back, let's say, some form of a democratic move? My very personal view is that Maduro is being held in power by a group of, I would say, no more than a couple hundred generals that are not themselves, the guys with the guns. They are the guys at the top. They were awarded. So these guys are not willing to fight for Maduro. However, they know that if Maduro leaves, they go to jail, or they have to leave with him. And it's easy for a head of state to negotiate amnesty, not so much for these guys. Right, so Maduro is basically being held in the country by these weapons, because they say, if you leave, you're good as dead, because we're done, and we're not gonna let you just walk away. Right, so that's one. The second piece is the lower ranking officers, the guys with the guns, they are hungry, they are not getting their medicine, they are not getting paid on time. So they have no political allegiance. They are, in fact, I would dare say, a vast majority of the lower ranking officers are already just waiting for leadership to emerge within the military ranks, so they could just switch sides. However, nobody wants to be the first guy out of the gate because there have been documented events where uprising military personnel gets murdered while openly surrendering, like Oscar Pérez, he put it up on Instagram, he was actively surrendering, they wouldn't stop shooting at him, they murdered him, a bunch of kids, and a bunch of women that were with him on the camp. This is fact with the national community, doesn't matter, because they drown all the media. All we get is social media, and social media, as anyone that's witness to what network attack can tell you, it's almost as easy to put fake news on social media as it is. Is there a media agency or company or syndicate that you would recommend for people to watch or get information from? There are, in English, Human Rights Foundation is really good, Alex Gladstein does a great job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I connected with him, he's a really great guy, he's doing a lot of great work. They put out some very interesting research. CISIS puts out some really good... CISIS here? CISIS... The organization? Yeah, I believe it's CISIS. Yeah, it's Canadian CISIS. Yeah, but I'm not sure if it's CISIS, I'll put it on the show notes, I'll send them to you, but there are a few links in English that are very good. In Spanish, there's a very good YouTube network called Venezolanos por la información, and it's VPI. VPI, okay. And they have, they're an independent network, they're a YouTube channel, obviously Maduro has taken out any mass media that doesn't only speak favorably about him off grid. So the only way to get not government news is... Sure, independent. Yeah, through YouTube or social media, because they have dismantled all of the, you know, all of the broad-reaching narrative is controlled entirely by them. So this would be a really important question is, because I know you're working on really interesting solutions right now, how does Bitcoin and crypto fit into all of this? Yeah, there's good and bad, and you have to, you know, we don't really know when the markets are controlled by, the market in Venezuela, well, I guess let's start from the beginning. Venezuela has had currency controls for the last 20 years. Yeah. So over the last 20 years, it has been illegal for Venezuela to buy dollars from anyone other than the government. Now, the government has used an artificially low exchange rate for a couple of reasons. One, it helps them say that their numbers in dollar terms are better to humanitarian organizations. So if I am the government and I say that the exchange rate is two bolivores per dollar and a person minimum wage is 1,000 bolivores, you're making $500 a month. But if the actual real exchange rate that I believe it is 100, you're actually making $5. But no one actually does the, everybody just says, okay, what's officially exchange rate? Oh, whatever the government says. And then that's what gets queued into all these formulas. So for one, that and two, the other purpose of that is to reward allegiance to the government. So for example, if I am an importer of beef, right, and I need to bring in a pound of beef that is being sold at $10 a pound, if I were to acquire those $10 in the black market at $100, a hundred bolivores per dollar, I'd have to spend a thousand bolivores to get that pound of beef. But if I'm a friends of Maduro and they approve $10 at the two bolivores per dollar exchange rate, I now can buy that beef for 20 bolivores. The same beef that cost a thousand. So what happens is I buy at a 20, I bring it into the country and I sell it in the black market for 700 bolivores. And then I use a 700 bolivores, multiply it times two and I have 300 of it. So this, this was a virtuous cycle where he would reward only his friends. So only his friends were the importers. And so if you were an importer in the Maduro era, you're rich out of your wildest dreams. Like you don't know what to do with your money. And I saw a picture of Maduro eating like a $300 stake. With Naserit? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people are fucking hungry. So the interesting part about this is that works great until you're out of oil money. Yeah, you can raw Peter until Peter's broke. Exactly. So when oil starts collapsing, a couple of things started coming together all at once in the Venezuelan government. So first of all, Chavez died. Yes. Chavez dies in 2014. A lot of people even then thought Chavez was the only thing keeping the lid on social change because there was just no way that they were going to keep it together without Chavez. And myself and many others thought that that was going to be it for Chavez, well, we were done when the country was going to turn around. A lot of us went, it was a historic vote. The night of the vote, the elections results came out when a very, very, very questioned results were made by Moldova by like half a percent or something like that. Everybody felt those elections were rigged and there were large demonstrations right after that election happened. And the opposition, there were, I would say almost a million, hundreds of thousands at least, I would put in the millions of people out on the streets like really enraged that they had been robbed in an election and now it was going to be five more years of this disaster. The leader at the time was a guy called Enrique Capriles and he made the call after three days of protests to say, we're going to concede because I guess he was trying to negotiate with these guys to get them to accept that a recount at least, but they wouldn't, they wouldn't, they wouldn't, they wouldn't and Capriles at the time made the decision that said, this is going to end in civil war, I'm just going to concede and I'm not going to have this on me. At the time, and I still feel those elections were rigged and had he made the call to go out and take the streets, we'd probably be in a different Venezuela, but that was not what happened. So Chavez dies. Maulo is sworn in again for another six years. The country is kind of bracing itself for another five years of shit. So as this is happening, the first few pioneers, they're discovering Bitcoin. Around 2014, 2015 is when mining, some people are different, the hubs of people across the country start finding out about mining, they put two and two together, they're like, okay, heavily subsidized hydro, I'm getting this internet money, my costs are artificially lower than the rest of the world, and I can now monetize this subsidy and earning an income and hard money. That's like the first light bulb starts going off. So the first few guys that did it, I would say there was about 10 of us, groups in different cities that started. Out of the 10, I would probably say seven or eight were incredibly secretive about their operations. They didn't want anyone to know, they didn't want it. And a few other groups in ourselves were more of an open book because we were just more excited about it. And we kind of saw it as, hey, we want to help you guys do the same. And we helped a bunch of people get set up, like hundreds. And you would see the light bulb go off every time you would explain it. You're like, so here's your computer, you're gonna earn this Bitcoin, this Bitcoin is worth dollars. And it's actually increasing its value in dollar terms. So you're actually saving. And they felt like they were entering this world of this mixed of ready player one with Wall Street, where they were like, they couldn't immediately now, they were connected to this new global system and their wealth was growing. And it was great to see. We saw guys that had depreciating assets, like a car, they were doing taxi runs. They were making 100 bucks a month after everything and the car had wear and tear. So we would explain to the guys, hey, you're making 100 bucks now. If you're tired, it was flat. Are you gonna replace the tire? And they're like, well, I don't know. We're like, well, if you sell this car for $3,000, you can buy one S9 or two S9s and off you go, you're making 600 bucks a month. So, and you don't have an depreciating asset and you don't take the risk of getting strangers in your car and the light bulb. Light bulb and sell the car, get the miners. Guy moved to Argentina like a month later, still lives from money from the miners. We're like, so after you see that, you're like, man, every person that comes your way. You're like, you sell whatever you have, mine. And that worked really well in Minnesota. So for a couple of years, we kind of really helped people and we were able to scale ourselves growing or your operation is, you know, we grew, you know, when we tapped out a facility, we went to another one. And so, but eventually we had to point where we said, okay, this is changing the world. This isn't just happening here. This is happening everywhere else. So what can we do that is gonna be a benefit in addition to this, you know, this, well, how can we help this system? How can we help people save more? How can we help people, you know, keep their Bitcoin for a longer time? And so the idea for lead and really came from that, which is if you work so hard to earn a hard asset in those countries and you know, your mom goes sick or something happens where you need a short-term cash need, that actually is your highest quality asset and your most liquid. So you end up sacrificing it and you buy it. And there's a lot of friction coming out of Bitcoin in Minnesota. So it is a very unfortunate event to happen to someone that's worked so hard to save. So the idea with lead and was, okay, first we're gonna create a Bitcoin back loan that we can offer North American rates of credit. So like, you know, 12% is our current rates, which is relative to international credit available is I think incredibly competitive. And so for 1% a month, that person can take the money they need and essentially pay it back and keep their Bitcoin. And if Bitcoin went up 10% during their loan, it's their gain. And they're getting the greenback, USD currency. Yeah. And so that is not a, we don't put them in this forex race. So how would it work? So I would collateralize it with Bitcoin and it would be like a wire transfer or okay. Exactly. And it depends, right? So like some of the things that are interesting about international loans is, you know, how do you get people dollars? Some people have dollar accounts? Yes. That's no problem. Some people don't. Don't, yeah. So they prefer to get it sent through like networks such as RTM or other ways like physical kiosk to get cash. You can get virtual dollars delivered. So that distribution is something that, you know, we are working right now with the US dollars, but we're- Or you said the number one use case right now is for the loans. In Canada, it largely has been, you know, Bitcoin entrepreneurs, people that own Bitcoin businesses or mining operations, et cetera. Guys that have had Bitcoin for a long time, they probably held it, you know, from one to 20, now it's a three. They don't really want to sell it. And they believe that it made, you know, that it will turn back around. So they get the liquidity they need today. They invest in their business. And the cost of carrying the loan is, you know, in their view and ours, lower than the potential benefit from that Bitcoin. And then the other product that we're most excited about right now is the deposit account. Essentially, an ability for people to earn interest on their Bitcoin. And that I think is gonna be a very meaningful product for Latin America. Because in Latin America, it is, Bitcoin is becoming more and more a part of your savings portfolio for retirement, for, because the way I see Bitcoin for people in emerging countries is that it is now a higher quality asset even than their own homes. Because it now competes for financing from companies in North America, which is something that none of their other asset classes have. A Venezuelan car will only compete for Venezuelan funding. A Venezuelan home will only compete for Venezuelan credit. A Bitcoin is a Bitcoin. It doesn't matter where it is. So it actually gets the entire modern world competing to finance that loan. And so I believe Bitcoin is gonna become, is gonna continue to rank higher and higher in the, as far as quality in those portfolios and people are gonna start going overweight more and more on that asset. And looking at like the local Bitcoin volume, do you say that's pretty accurate what's happening with the total volume in Venezuela right now? I would, and I would say that there was a really cool paper on Twitter making the rounds that showed local Bitcoin volume relative to income per capita and also including a degree of authoritarianism in that country. And what it depicts really is that local bitcoins works best in countries that don't have authorized on and off ramps. And those countries tend to be authoritarian, heavily controlled currency markets. And if you look at the local Bitcoin volumes and you look at the map and it blows up in red in countries like Venezuela and China and Iran, there are other countries that have ridiculous controls where people can move their wealth in restrictions and they are, they don't have legal on and off ramps. So people still find their way to get to Bitcoin. And so local Bitcoin volume just hit its record peak last week was at 2485 Bitcoin traded in one week. So that's roughly about eight and a half million US. So just over a million bucks a day and trading volume in a country where the average person makes a dollar a week. So my guess along with others in this space is that the Venezuelan government has been target of a lot of sanctions right now and they're suffering from a lot of restrictions in their US dollar denominated accounts. So I have the feeling as well as others that they are printing cash and dumping it in the P2P market to get Bitcoin. Interesting. And interestingly, one of the- They're meeting the government? Yeah. So the red herring that I've been tracking to come to this conclusion is a dollar worth of Bitcoin generally trades at a small discount to a dollar. Yes. Because there tends to be some friction to getting it out of Bitcoin. In Venezuela, this has normally been the case except starting April of last year, another site and then myself prompted by that and a couple other things started tracking this. The parity between a dollar worth of Bitcoin and a dollar. And the waves of the premium comes in waves. So like there are moments in time where a dollar worth of Bitcoin will be trading at 30, 40% premium to a dollar. Really? Yeah. And I've seen that premium go as high as 70%. And what that mean, in my view, what that means is that there is a disproportionate demand to acquire these Bitcoins relative to dollars. And people are deciding to pay 30 or 40% more just to get that value in Bitcoin and not in dollars because of the censorship resistance aspect of it. And frankly, I think it's because there's no demand for dollars because they're so sanctioned even once they get them, they can't move them around. And so my take is that the general public, it's not that they're being non-dewyzer, it's that they're making a premium on that arbitrage spread. So the people ask, oh, where are the Bitcoins continued to come? Who is selling the Bitcoin in Venezuela? And if I have a person in Venezuela that can sell a Bitcoin in the open market at a 40%, 50% premium to a dollar, then get those bolivares, turn them into dollars, send it to my cracking account and buy it again, I'm gonna do that all day. Yeah, you're arbitraging all day long. And proxy, by doing that, you are inadvertently laundering that Bitcoin for the Venezuelan government. So the Venezuelan government gets its way not without enriching some privates in the process. But if you play that, it feels like it's working against the Venezuelan people today. But if you play that down the run enough, what happens when you do that is when you're printing an organic fiat just for the purpose of acquiring assets, your fiat will get to a tipping point where nobody will want it anymore. So right now in Venezuela, the most common way of paying something is a US credit card. So you'll go and you'll swipe your Bank of America card to pay for a burger. You'll send a Zelle transfer to a burger. And nobody wants the boulevard, nobody. It's a hot potato right now. And so it seems like it's working or it's dealing a shitty hand to this government, to the people today. But I think we are in the early stages of a type of hyperinflation that we have never seen. Because the hyperinflation that we've seen today, which was just a million percent over the last year, they could still trade over the last year. They could still transact with one or two countries. From this year on, all they can do is print to acquire in a bid to acquire local assets that are still being sold. Didn't they also do like their fucking ICO, the Petro dollar? The Petro, man. Yeah. What the fuck was that? The Petro, I have my own personal view about what the Petro was. So I mean, sometimes I say, when I'm talking about Venezuela, I have to catch myself because it's actually hard to, when I'm speaking, when I'm telling it, it sounds like surreal because it sounds like something that people wouldn't actually do. And it's scary because it's actually, all of this is true. And I say this because I think the Petro, the Petro came at a very funny time. The Petro came at around Christmas, 2017. Yes. Right? And that was peak ICO, peak crazy, right? Peak everything. But if you are an observer of Venezuelan history, the Chavismo regime, Maduro and Chavez had gotten in this habit of gifting things to the Venezuelan people in December to keep votes and just to keep popularity. So this started with this event called the Dacaso, which I believe was Christmas 2015. Okay. So Christmas 2015, there's some discontent growing. Maduro just won the elections. People were like really upset and there was just a lot of discontent on the streets. So what Maduro does around Christmas, he goes to the biggest electronics store in the country, which, you know, the equivalent of Best Buy. Sure. And he says, all of your inventory is mispriced. You're using the black market dollar rates. You are, you know, the government of Venezuela is seizing your inventory and selling it at the official rate, which is essentially 80% off. Or 90% off. Of course, the people of Venezuela, new TV, new fridge, new everything. For nothing, Maduro, the greatest. So next Christmas comes around. And then the same thing, discontent on the streets, people are mad. Maduro's like, guess what guys, I'm gonna bring you all a leg of ham. Every family that is joined in this home fatherland program gets a beautiful Christmas dinner. And they went in and then along with that, they went into a few shoe stores and they did the same 80%. And so, oh my God, lo and behold, everybody got a bonus. No one said, people are happy, okay, again. Christmas 2017 came. The electronics companies weren't bringing stock around Christmas. The shoes companies weren't bringing stock around Christmas. Everybody knew that they were just gonna be the next ones on the shopping block. So nobody brought anything. So everybody's kind of sitting there, right? But who was bringing a lot of things over 2017, the clay miners. So we have brought in, not we, as a group, all of us had invested millions of dollars in mining equipment. And it was plugged in Venezuela. Like full A6. Full A6, earning dollars. And so as 2017 is unfolding and everybody's like Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, ICO, ICO, ICO, these guys get word that, hey, not only can you use Bitcoin to overthrow, like overcome these ridiculous sanctions, you have all these guys that have brought in all these dollar-producing machines, and you have no law for it. So you can just go take it. You literally, you can just go take it. Covertly, overtly, matters little. There's no law in Venezuela. At least the only law is whatever they decide. And so the Petro starts as a campaign to say Venezuela is gonna raise Bitcoin and screw you sanctions and screw you, swift the banking system. We are gonna get our money through Bitcoin and your empire can have its own. Like we don't care about what your empire does. The Petro obviously failed. Nobody believes or trusts the Venezuelan government and nobody was stupid enough, thankfully, to give them a dollar in exchange for a dumb coin. But what the Petro did do was that as they were promoting the Petro, they basically informed the Venezuelan society at large of crypto that they're like, these machines make dollars. This is what they look like. This is what they sound like. This is how much they make a day. So hey, you were looking for a Christmas bonus? Yeah. You found them. Go get them. And so all of us miners out of the blue start getting calls from the government service agents, start getting visits from the electricity company. And they're basically, at first they start as like polite. I try to be friends. Why do you do it? Right? Then we start hearing words. We start hearing about guys that, they start sending like armed brigades and like knocking down doors and being like, you guys are financing terrorism. We're gonna take you to jail. We need $20,000 or you're going to jail. All your machines are gone. Cause like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like here's $20,000, let me be. I don't want none of this. Then they go on to the next guy. And they're like $20,000, blah, blah, blah. Oh, guess what? Give me $20,000 and I'm gonna own half of your facility. If you want no one of us to come fuck with you again. And so they do that. And effectively the military crooks either by force or by force partnerships start acquiring his equipment. This happened to us. So Christmas 2017, brigade knocks down my brother's mining facility, threatens him of taking him to jail, demands $15,000 in cash, did not take him to jail. We of course denied because we had imported all of our machines legally and everything. We had registered everything legally. So we said, we're not at fault here. We're doing a legitimate activity. We're not gonna give you $15,000. And they're like, great, you're going to jail. We're like, well no, like there's gotta be due process. They're like, we are the due process. You give us $15,000 or you go to jail. My brother's like, man, like, so we start calling people to see if we can get some help. But the response is where it's coming from higher up. It's coming from above. It's coming from above. My brother picks up his two kids and his wife drives through the Colombian border with a bunch of cash. Starts paying off the people as he goes through the border. Gets out of the country. Haven't returned since. Is he safe now? He's in Madrid. They've, my two brothers have done, they've done like an ATM network around Spain, which is like Bitcoin again, has enabled a lot of Venezuelans to not only migrate with their wealth, but reestablish themselves around the knowledge they already formed. It's like myself and my brothers, we leveraged everything we learned about Bitcoin during more years in Venezuela for our businesses today. So it's like a legit, it's happening, you know, like. So the petrol was really this almost a marketing effort so that the lower ranking officers could get low hanging fruit and keep the ranks to some degree, you know, at bay. And it happened and it actually is working because today most of the mining facilities, again, this is hard to prove because there's no hard data. All I have is anecdotal evidence. But my sense is that at least, you know, 60 to 70% if not higher of all of the large mining operations in Venezuela and by large, I mean 20 plus machines are partially owned by a crook official. I wouldn't surprise me. Same thing with the mining, I don't, the mining workers in China, they have to be government owned. Yeah, they have to be. Yeah. And the funny part is there's rolling blackouts in Venezuela, Venezuela has a power shortage. Really? Yeah. But these guys control- Which majority of the power are water based? Water based? Yeah. The really bad part is these guys actually have to assign rolling blackouts to parts of the country. And they've assigned rolling blackouts to parts of the countries that have hospitals and things, but not where their operations are. Yeah, of course not. So, you know, it's hard because you feel, as I understand that you're constantly like just screaming the alarms and all these terrible things that are happening. But it's almost like if it's not coming from a, you know, a stamp on a TV and a talking head, it's like people say you're exaggerating. You're just, oh, you're just an imperialist, you know, oh, you're just like a dog of Donald. I'm like, dude, like that's the last thing we want to be. We're trying to show you that there are criminals right now literally setting innocent people back. And there is nothing we as an innocent or as a law abiding Venezuelan can do to change this condition. Is there any, I don't know, because right now there's talks about a new prime minister or president that wants to come in. Juan Guaidó. Yeah, Juan Guaidó. What do you believe is the outcome in the next couple of years for Venezuela? So, I mean, I don't think it's going to be a friendly negotiation. Okay. I don't think Mauro and his crew are diplomats, like I was mentioning. I would like to believe in a happy, and this is what's best for the country. Here's your amnesty, let us take over. I don't think this can happen. I think my, you know, my guess would be that, as I mentioned to you earlier, I think what's supporting Mauro is just 100 or maybe a couple hundred officials. None of the guys that are actually going to be doing the shooting or the fighting. So, those guys feel that they can control their ranks really well right now. Based on the incentives and threats to hurt our families and stuff if they turn. So, right now, they feel like they still have a grip on those people. I think what it takes to break that is for that regime to feel like they're not the only ones with weapons in the country, unfortunately. And for that to happen, I think you're going to see, the way I think things might unfold is, humanitarian aid hits the border. Venezuela actually ticks off the mask and brings tanks of people and actually shows the criminals and animals that they are. And then the international community is like, wow, these guys actually brought guns to point at food. And then they're like, okay, we can't just send trucks without guns because we're just gonna shoot them like they've been shooting innocent people inside Venezuela. And so I think there needs to be political will from the international community to bring in an international military convoy just to protect. I'm not saying enter shooting, asking questions later. We should have a convoy that ensures that the food gets through. Because right now you have the rightfully elected president requesting the food to come in. And you have a group of armed thugs blocking that entrance. The international community, if we're going on this path that we recognize way though, should treat those guys on the border as insurgents and shoot them down. I mean, that's what I would do. I mean, if there are insurgents that are preventing an international coalition of aid and medicine to enter a country, how do you politely remove them? Do you think the United Nations will get involved or? I think they have to. They have to, yeah. I think they have to. I think the biggest block there is Russia and China. But I think that Trump being Trump, China's going through a really hard economic time. They lost their geopolitical allies in the region like no Brazil anymore, no Argentina anymore, no Ecuador anymore. So what do they have? It's a very expensive fight for them right now. And I feel like Russia, I mean, my view is that US and Russia kind of already made truce about this whole thing. And they're like, okay, we're gonna slowly start tweaking the narrative so that we don't look bad. So Russia I think is not that big a concern. China is gonna be something that we have to work on. Yeah, well like any nation they just care about profits. And what Guaidó has been doing really smartly, which I commend him for, the lifelines for this regime have been Russia and China. That's it. There's nobody else that sent them any money. Cuba has just sucked in wealth. The only people that have actually thrown money or lifelines when they needed it was China and Russia. Guaidó, like any Venezuelan aspiring president should go meet with Putin. And what's the guy in China right now? Chang, I forget his name. Yeah, so anyway, you need to be requesting meetings with those guys. And actually sit down with them as an investor and say, here's your portfolio in Venezuela. Here's what it's producing today. Here's what's gonna happen if you continue with these douches. And here's what I can offer you. And I can offer you upwards and to the right. Yeah. You just have to get them to say yes, they care about money, like you're very well said. They care little about anything else. Make a business argument. So you think Trump will actually intervene for some stuff? Because I know he's backing now. Guaidó. I think they have to, man. I mean, I think they've gone, I mean, nobody has to do anything. But I, A, I would like them to. I equate the Venezuelan situation, and I've mentioned this before, but I'll say it again, because I think it's a good analogy. If you're walking by a house, or you're walking by a street, and you look into a house, and you see that there's this big guy beating the crap out of a helpless woman with a bat. And this woman is visibly beat, bleeding. No chance she's getting up. What do you do? I go in there and I do my thing. You go in there and you do your thing, right? There are some people that say, that's not your house. You need to, they need to figure it out by themselves. What private property, right? Like how, so. The difference between though, like if you're comparing like the, especially the states that have, you know, the historical context that matters, you know, they've been intervening in South Latin America since the get-go. Of course. You know, putting their own despots in power and siphoning off the resources as much as possible. The IMF has been there for years and doing their most ridiculous loans possible. There's no good presidents. I understand. And so it's like, I think it's come to a point where intervention by means of military is not affordable, as in not profitable anymore. Fair. How do you create a system? This is what's interesting, like you said at the beginning, these thugs, they're not gonna go down without a fight because it's a house of cards. Cause if one person goes down, they all go down. So it's a cartel. Now, if you look at like one example of a country was, he was fucked too. I was in Africa. I was Idi Amin. Okay. The general. Okay. And he was a dictator, like a ruthless dictator. Killed millions. And they eventually kicked them out, but the only way they can kick them out properly, they made a silent deal and he left to Saudi Arabia and lived off with a millions of dollars, even though he's a dictator. So I'm always trying to figure out ways of like, you know, always have to ask yourself, like whether it's China, Russia, United States, the only reason why they send military in is they make money. And the whole idea of people thinking in like, people are doing things that are ultra-wistic, like nation states, like you and I as individuals would do like ultra-wistic things. I don't benefit at all, right? But nation states is like, billions of dollars must be deployed to create those weaponaries, to deploy the soldiers. So it has to be made. Yeah. Listen, I wish it didn't have to be that way, but I understand that's the name of the game. Frankly, I think Venezuela is a place that has so much potential for the international community at large. Venezuela is a place that has been sequestered by thugs from oil exploration. So most of the oil exploration that's been happening in Venezuela is the childless regime. It's nonexistent. There has been no research and development in the Venezuelan oil space for 20 years. The numbers have been dropping since I can't remember. There might be one black swan event that fucks up Venezuelan oil prices is there's been talks of Saudi Ramco going public. The biggest fucking company in the world with the most oil reserves. You know why they wanna go public too? Cause the United States became the number one supplier of oil through fracking. And so top barrel is super cheap now in the United States. So they're actually undercutting everybody in Saudi Arabia. So the Saudis, that's a trillion dollar company. Now fucking Apple and all that. They're like, well shit man, you know like we're losing 75% of our profits right now. It's like, and the whole like scam of like there's like, just not enough oil. You mean barrels? How many fucking barrels they're sitting on? Ungodly amounts of barrels they're sitting on. So they're thinking of going public. One of the kings or princes said we wanna go public. Kinda do like the Walmart model. Right. I mean oil, I wish we weren't so dependent on oil. I think Venezuela has so much more to offer than just oil. That's my, one of my biggest problems is that to start, Venezuela, Margarita Island. Yeah. Doesn't have a Hilton anymore. Doesn't have a Marriott anymore. They left. They left. But they did really well when they were there. Of course. So like for example, Air Canada. Yeah. Air Canada used to fly direct to Caracas. It was a full flight. I took it dozens of times. And our dollar was pretty good. It was super affordable down there. There is an argument for a beneficial economic relationship with Venezuela. Absolutely is. For every country. So right now, Venezuela is not a player in the global economy. That is to the detriment of everybody. So it's hard because you have to, it's a concentrated expense with a distributed benefit. So nobody wants to be the person that makes that concentrated expense. But I think that to your point, people have to make money and not losing money in my books is as good as making it. You know who's losing a lot of money? All the guys taking the refugees. You know how many people have left Venezuela in the last two years? It's like a million plus. Four million people. Four million, wow. No country in neighboring or around has the infrastructure to absorb that much. Colombia is taking a lot of them right now too. Colombia is taking a huge punch. Brazil took another huge punch. That's creating a lot of friction in the border towns. They don't have animosity and pressure. They don't have the services to take on that many people. And so now it is their problem. It's costing them dearly to maintain this. So same with the US. You know how many asylum or refugee claims have come in from Venezuela and Miami alone? Just in judge hours, the United States could probably sign the convoy and it would be probably break even. So there is a real cost to the Venezuelan tragedy. Like absolutely. And I think if you actually do the numbers, I would argue that it's probably a break even if not positive for a coalition to go in and take these guys out of there. But there has to be that will. And I think something that really helped that hadn't happened until Trump took office. And one thing I am grateful to Trump for is calling these guys what they are. Criminal dictators, they own a terrorist organization. The Obama era basically let Chavez run free, setting up their camps of socialism everywhere. And they didn't really do much to stop this thing from spreading. And I'm not blaming, I'm not trying to make this about Republicans or Democrats. I'm just trying to say there is a will right now in the ruling group in the United States to push this change through. I think they are likely the only country that has a political clout worldwide to push this change through. And so we as Venezuelans need to take this for all it's worth and allow for this to happen. Like we need to, I think the next challenge for the Venezuelan transition is to show that we need military help. This can't be done by the Venezuelan people. Venezuelan people are gonna get slaughtered if you ask them to keep protesting without military help, slaughtered. And that's gonna be way worse. And so does the international community need to see more death? Was the hundreds of people that got shot by the Maduro regime during their fraudulent elections not enough? Have the 30 people that have been dying in the last protests not being enough? You know? And so that's what I'm saying, like these people are criminals, we need. The, what is her name? Delci Rodriguez is like the right hand man of Maduro, the right hand woman of Maduro. She's been on TV saying that the food that the United States is sending to the border is carcinogenic. Of course, propaganda. And contaminated. Yep. And this is through the only broadly broadcasted network in Venezuela. This makes North Korean news look balanced. Yeah. Like it's actually disgraceful that this is happening. And for the longest time I felt like, I almost felt like the international community was just this pie in the sky of disappointment that never worked for anything. But after I see what's happening now, I regain my calling, my belief or my trust in the fact that it is everyone's problem and we should take action together as a whole. And I hope the world can see past this US being leading. Cause everything the US leads, like Alejandro was saying on the Peter podcast that was brilliant. Anything in the US. That was a great podcast. Everything that the US does is seen as a coup. Nobody sees it as, oh, they're standing with the people. Everybody says they want the oil. They want the money. The US doesn't need Venezuela's oil. You know what Canada stands for right now? Yeah. Trudeo supports Guaidó. Fully openly. I'm very proud of that, incredibly. I'm very proud of everything that Canada has done. In fact, Canada was on the forefront of the sanctions even before they did kind of follow suit when the president was recognized. So Canada has actually been in the forefront of this and calling these guys criminals for a while. So I'm very appreciative of that. And it seems like it's taken a long time to kind of see past the money that Chavez was throwing and all these events before, but it feels like the mask is finally down. That's good. Hopefully things will get resolved. I hope so. Cool, man. I appreciate you talking and this has been great. Thank you for sharing. If people want to get in touch with you, learn what you're doing with your company and startup and if people want to help anything in Venezuela, what's the best way they can get in contact with you? Yeah, so our website is ledin.io. You can reach out to me. I mean, there's a chat feature on the site that you can reach out to me on. My Twitter handle is cripto nomista. We'll put it in the show notes if we can. Our company is ledin. And one of the cool things that we're gonna roll out right now is a savings account that we're gonna pilot in Venezuela. And we really want to, we really feel like this can impact people's lives for the better. So can the Bitcoin back loans. It's just you need to have more of that asset accumulated for that to be really meaningful. But the Bitcoin savings account can really start helping you from day one. And so I'm very excited about that. If you want to help, I'm good friends with a lot of people doing great work in Venezuela. Randy Burrito in Bitcoin Venezuela is a great person to contact. Happy to put you guys in touch or anyone that's interested in touch with Randy. Alejandro at the Open Money Initiative. They're doing some really cool work and really trying to dig down how people in these countries use reminces and how we can very simply use Bitcoin as a vehicle to make things easier for them. And now I have them subject to these banks. And yeah, the last one is just reach out to me directly. Mauricio at ledin.io and I'm very happy to share any info I can. Cool man, appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thanks you man.