Latest / Simply Bitcoin / Scott Bessent CONFIRMS Americas 2026 Plans for Strategic Bitcoin Reserve | EP 1422

Transcript

Scott Bessent CONFIRMS Americas 2026 Plans for Strategic Bitcoin Reserve | EP 1422 · Simply Bitcoin

• 0:01
  Will America finally buy more Bitcoin, or is there only real
• 0:06
  plan to secretly steal yours? Well, the Treasury Secretary
• 0:10
  Scott Besson just gave us an official update on their 2026
• 0:14
  Bitcoin stance, sending a pretty cryptic warning about the
• 0:18
  Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, so let's check it out.
• 0:23
  You give us an update this year, in 2026, What America's strategy
• 0:28
  is for a Bitcoin strategic reserve.
• 0:31
  And given that the SDNY recently seized Bitcoin from developers
• 0:36
  working on a project called Tornado Cash, what does the
• 0:39
  administration think about that, contrary to Trump's executive
• 0:44
  order saying that Bitcoin should not be?
• 0:47
  Seized Bitcoin should not be sold.
• 0:50
  So a lot of things to unpack there.
• 0:53
  I'm not going to talk about Bitcoin specifically.
• 0:55
  What I will talk about is the administration led by Treasury
• 1:01
  and they are our colleagues on both sides of the aisle and
• 1:05
  Congress passed historic legislation, the Genius Act for
• 1:08
  stable coins. We are working on clarity
• 1:11
  legislation and our goal again, it is the president bringing
• 1:18
  digital assets and innovation on shore to the US We want to be
• 1:23
  the best regulatory regime for digital assets and create and
• 1:27
  creativity to spark innovations. The previous administration
• 1:31
  almost created an extinction event, an extinction event for
• 1:36
  digital asset companies. We are bringing them back.
• 1:40
  I'm not going to comment the on that litigation other than to
• 1:43
  say if anything was seized, I believe it would have been
• 1:47
  seized from the founders. And the the policy of this
• 1:51
  government is to add seized Bitcoin to our digital asset
• 1:56
  reserve after the damages are done.
• 2:01
  So bit the Bitcoin reserve, our view was first you have to stop
• 2:06
  selling, which we have done, and then we can add the assets and
• 2:12
  asset forfeitures. Right.
• 2:15
  OK, Nico, I'm going to need you to political whisper what we
• 2:19
  just heard. What is your take on this?
• 2:21
  Yeah. I mean, look, like we've been
• 2:22
  talking about this for the last couple of like last year.
• 2:27
  This has been basically the theme of the show, essentially,
• 2:31
  yeah, we, we survived Operation Choke .2 Point O We had a very,
• 2:36
  very hostile previous administration.
• 2:39
  The Biden administration tried to basically destroy the Bitcoin
• 2:43
  industry in 1000 different ways. They jailed industry leaders
• 2:49
  like Arthur Hayes, CZ. They all got, you know, prison
• 2:53
  sentences and stuff. And, you know, the Trump
• 2:56
  administration ran on being a pro digital assets.
• 3:01
  You know, administration and I think they got a lot of votes
• 3:05
  for people that were pro Bitcoin, pro crypto in the
• 3:07
  United States and they came in and they've done just that.
• 3:12
  We got Ross. Ulbricht freed in the first
• 3:13
  month. You know, we had the end
• 3:16
  supposed end of operation Joke .2 point O, even though I don't
• 3:21
  think that's completely over. I mean, the Samurai wallet
• 3:24
  developers are still in prison. I saw the other day that some of
• 3:28
  the Bitcoin that was seized was actually sold.
• 3:31
  Well they did clarify and said we actually didn't sell it but
• 3:35
  trust us bro we can't verify. It it's a trust me, bro type of
• 3:38
  situation, right? So yeah, I mean, look, it's
• 3:44
  Treasury. Secretary Scott Besson, I would
• 3:47
  say he, you know it, it's crazy that United States Treasury
• 3:51
  Secretary has this pro Bitcoin stance.
• 3:56
  But what we've been saying for the last couple of weeks or so
• 4:00
  is look, talk is cheap, actions are expensive.
• 4:03
  It wasn't a go. It wasn't a good signs that Bo
• 4:06
  Hines that was in charge of the strategic Bitcoin Reserve
• 4:10
  resigned from the Trump administration.
• 4:12
  He did join Tether. That's a positive.
• 4:15
  And it's not a good sign that Senator Cynthia Lummis, who is
• 4:18
  the pro Bitcoin senator, announced that she's not running
• 4:22
  for office. And now we have the cluster fuck
• 4:26
  of the situation of what's happening with the Clarity Act,
• 4:29
  Like the Clarity Act literally got Frankenstein got Co opted by
• 4:34
  the big banks and it become it became instead of a pro Bitcoin
• 4:39
  piece of legislation, it became a pro bank piece of legislation
• 4:44
  with the with the branding of being pro Bitcoin, right.
• 4:49
  So yes, I like it. It's better than where we were
• 4:52
  before. But honestly, I'm kind of in the
• 4:55
  camp of perhaps we should have been a little bit more
• 5:00
  accelerationist, Opti, you know? Wait, are you finally saying I
• 5:04
  was right? At this point, like is it, is it
• 5:07
  better for Bitcoin to, you know, to be attacked?
• 5:12
  We all know that Bitcoin gets. Harder.
• 5:14
  It gets stronger when it gets attacked or what?
• 5:17
  Is it better for Bitcoin to be embraced by governments?
• 5:20
  Because I was actually talking about this during Bitcoin Day
• 5:23
  over the weekend. I was on a panel with Gary
• 5:26
  Cardone and Chantal from Bitcoin.
• 5:29
  Well, and essentially, like Long story short, I remember the the
• 5:33
  the panelist who was next to me, he was like, look, five years
• 5:37
  ago we were just cheering that, you know, we were going to
• 5:39
  separate money from state number go up.
• 5:42
  Everyone was going to get back their financial sovereignty, you
• 5:45
  know, by by buying Bitcoin and put into self custody.
• 5:49
  And now all of a sudden we're cheering politicians coming to
• 5:52
  Bitcoin conferences like we're cheering on Larry Fink, you
• 5:57
  know, like that. That's how far, you know, the
• 5:59
  movement has gone, right? Some people you're even saying
• 6:02
  that Bitcoin culture is dead, right.
• 6:05
  And in a way, I would say the Bitcoin culture of 2017 to 2020,
• 6:10
  in a way that Bitcoin culture is gone, right?
• 6:12
  Like, those are the good old days.
• 6:14
  We didn't even realize those are the good old days.
• 6:16
  But you know, that philosophy of like separating money and state,
• 6:20
  you know, it's kind of gone by the wayside.
• 6:22
  It's now become this, you know, Bitcoin is a commodity.
• 6:28
  We like it, you know, as AUS government, but you actually
• 6:31
  can't call it money. It's not really money.
• 6:33
  It's actually just a commodity. Bitcoin is just a savings tool.
• 6:37
  The Bitcoin is just property. It's not money.
• 6:40
  Well, news flash for you, Bitcoin is money, right?
• 6:43
  So you know what I'm getting from Treasury Secretary.
• 7:04
  What happened? Oh, there we go.
• 7:05
  Talk is cheap, actions are expensive.
• 7:08
  And ultimately, you know, what I'm seeing is, you know, them
• 7:13
  saying, listen, we do want a, a pro Bitcoin environment in the
• 7:18
  United States so Bitcoin entrepreneurs could thrive.
• 7:22
  You know, we had Pub Key open up a, a bar which got removed from
• 7:28
  Google, by the way. That was interesting.
• 7:30
  They opened up a bar in DC Scott Besson was there.
• 7:33
  You know, Senator Cynthia Lummis was there.
• 7:35
  I know the Bitcoin Policy Institute has an office at the
• 7:39
  Pub Key Bar in DC, but simultaneously I, I just, what I
• 7:43
  fear is that people forget the roots, like people forget the
• 7:47
  fundamentals. People forget the reason as to
• 7:50
  why we are here. And the reason as to why we are
• 7:53
  here is because us Bitcoiners fundamentally believe that
• 7:57
  Bitcoin is better money. Bitcoin is actually a
• 8:00
  replacement of the dollar. You know, even though we're not,
• 8:05
  we're not seeing that. We're not seeing that.
• 8:08
  It's kind of, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's Bitcoin, it,
• 8:12
  it's the dollar and Bitcoin is like a, a dollar adjacent.
• 8:16
  That's what we're seeing. And then I think the fundamental
• 8:20
  question before I pass it on to you, Opti, is, are the are the
• 8:24
  two things compatible? Can we see a world where, you
• 8:28
  know, the dollar is a currency, Bitcoin is its own currency and
• 8:34
  could those worlds coexist? Right?
• 8:37
  That I think that's really the question so far.
• 8:41
  That's exactly what's happening. You have the propagation again,
• 8:44
  this is the free market. This isn't just me saying this.
• 8:48
  You have the propagation of stable coins all around the
• 8:51
  world. Thank God the people that run
• 8:54
  the largest stablecoin, Tether, are hardcore Bitcoiners.
• 8:57
  Like, that's fantastic. Like that's really good for our
• 9:00
  movement. But ultimately, I think the
• 9:03
  dream that we had when we got into Bitcoin many, many years
• 9:08
  ago was that Bitcoin was going to become the global reserve
• 9:11
  currency, That people were going to start using Bitcoin to
• 9:15
  transact. People were going to start using
• 9:18
  Bitcoin as money. And in the process of them doing
• 9:21
  so, they would escape, you know, the slavery that is inflation,
• 9:26
  the slavery that is currency debasement.
• 9:29
  So yeah, I mean, that's my take. Like this is great.
• 9:32
  I I love the change in tune. Last year we thought we were
• 9:36
  going to get arrested. This year, I feel like we've
• 9:39
  been Co opted a little bit, right?
• 9:41
  Like, you know, like what's better, like, you know, being
• 9:45
  the enemy or essentially being Co opted, you know, by, by
• 9:51
  politicians. I don't, I don't know.
• 9:53
  But listen, the base case is this, you know, if Bitcoin can't
• 9:58
  survive this type of attack, I don't even know if you want to
• 10:01
  call it this type of attack, this type of embracement, then
• 10:04
  you know, Bitcoin isn't the best money that we've ever seen.
• 10:08
  I, I still think it is. I still fundamentally in my
• 10:11
  heart believe that it is the best money.
• 10:13
  It has the best incentives. It has a limited supply, has
• 10:16
  absolute scarcity. 21 million has censorship resistant built
• 10:21
  into it. It has the ability for you to
• 10:23
  take self see of it in very, very large amounts.
• 10:27
  So I mean, like the characteristics are there.
• 10:31
  But one of the things that Larry Leopard said at Bitcoin Day over
• 10:34
  the weekend, which actually, you know, resonated with me is like,
• 10:38
  look like one of the worst things that could happen to
• 10:41
  Bitcoin is that people forget that it's an alternative, right?
• 10:45
  Like gold is still ripping to new all time highs.
• 10:48
  Silver is, is, is doing it did really, really well.
• 10:53
  Where's Bitcoin? Like why hasn't Bitcoin pumped
• 10:55
  that? That's, you know, that's what
• 10:57
  comes to mind. And we had Chris on last week.
• 11:01
  I got to see him a Bitcoin day as well.
• 11:03
  And Chris, the the, the theory that he had on the Friday show
• 11:07
  was essentially like, look like Bitcoin's been Co opted not in
• 11:13
  this like, you know, this weird, you know, conspiracy theory way.
• 11:21
  But in the paper Bitcoin type of way, that was his base case.
• 11:24
  I mean, he laid it out. He's like, look like there's a
• 11:27
  lot more Bitcoin that's being sold, that's being actively
• 11:30
  traded than actually exist, right?
• 11:33
  Like if you could audit the amount of Bitcoin that's being
• 11:37
  sold, we'd probably be at like 30-40 million Bitcoin that's
• 11:40
  actively being traded on the market right now.
• 11:43
  You know, that could be a big explanation as to why the price
• 11:46
  hasn't gone up. Another one is OG selling.
• 11:49
  But I mean, OK, fine, let let's buy into that argument of the OG
• 11:54
  selling and that's the reason that the price hasn't gone up.
• 11:56
  That's fine. But I mean, like are, are all
• 12:00
  the O GS basically coming to the same conclusion?
• 12:03
  Like, look, Wall Street is here, might as well just dump our
• 12:06
  bags. We're billionaires anyways and
• 12:08
  let's just ride into the sunset. I refuse to believe that I there
• 12:12
  bro. Some of those O GS, the reason
• 12:14
  that they've held on for so long is because they ideologically
• 12:18
  believe in the future of Bitcoin.
• 12:20
  So again, great. I appreciate the message from
• 12:26
  Scott Besson. It's much better than the
• 12:29
  previous administration that was literally trying to extinguish
• 12:33
  our our industry. I'm super glad that if you're an
• 12:36
  entrepreneur building a Bitcoin in the United States, you don't
• 12:39
  have to look over your shoulder. All of that is positive, but
• 12:43
  simultaneously the Samurai wallet developers are still in
• 12:47
  jail. We still have not gone a
• 12:49
  strategic Bitcoin reserve. The clarity Act, which was the
• 12:53
  only, you know, pro Bitcoin bill piece of legislation still
• 12:58
  hasn't been passed. The one that was offered was a
• 13:02
  pro banking bill. It was a bill to protect banking
• 13:06
  from Bitcoin bill, better said, rather than to protect Bitcoin
• 13:11
  users, which was the whole point of it.
• 13:14
  So yes, I like it. We're definitely heading in the
• 13:18
  right direction. We've definitely made progress.
• 13:21
  But maybe I'm greedy and saying this, I want to see more, I want
• 13:25
  to see more, I want to see more. Let's have another conversation.
• 13:28
  Look, we're we just dip below $90,000 again.
• 13:32
  Whoop Dee Doo. So I want to see more.
• 13:35
  I want to see Bitcoin AT200K by the end of the year.
• 13:39
  I want to see Bitcoin AT250K the following year.
• 13:43
  You know I want to see something bro, because the real.
• 13:45
  Wait, you say 200 K this year and 2:50 next year?
• 13:47
  Dan, you are at. Least minimum, dude, minimum.
• 13:51
  Like I want number go up to come back again.
• 13:53
  I think if number goes up, comes back, I'll, I'll forgive
• 13:57
  everything else because that's the only thing that President
• 14:01
  Trump promised that he hasn't fulfilled.
• 14:04
  He's fulfilled everything else. He's fulfilled everything else.
• 14:07
  But I, I I. Want to see number go up again?
• 14:10
  That that's my take. That's my.
• 14:11
  I mean, we can both agree on I want to see number go up too.
• 14:14
  But anyways, I do want to answer one of your questions.
• 14:17
  You said something on the lines of is there going to be a future
• 14:20
  where the dollar and gold or Bitcoin exists together?
• 14:24
  And I think that's where we are right now.
• 14:26
  And I've always, I've said this a long time ago and I just got
• 14:29
  reminded of it because we used to talk, or I used to talk on
• 14:32
  the show about like a bimetalism era where you know what we saw
• 14:36
  with gold and silver, you know, you kind of used both, you saved
• 14:39
  in gold, you used silver where you could basically to transact.
• 14:43
  I think we're kind of not necessarily fully there yet
• 14:47
  because obviously like people are dumping, dumping Fiat right
• 14:51
  now probably record speeds and and that's basically going to be
• 14:54
  the theme of today's show. We have a lot of news updated on
• 14:57
  treasuries on Fiat currencies. Ray Dalios at Davos basically
• 15:00
  saying what those bit corners have been saying.
• 15:02
  But I think that is probably going to be the next decade or
• 15:07
  two is going to be like a bimetalism era where it's like
• 15:10
  you store in Bitcoin and use the dollar to transact.
• 15:13
  But I do believe in the theory of eventually we get to a world
• 15:17
  reserve currency status of Bitcoin.
• 15:18
  Now on the Scott Besson clip, I think I'm going to take a, a, a
• 15:23
  totally different view on you on than you on that clip because I
• 15:28
  heard essentially one thing there.
• 15:31
  The only way they're going to stack more Bitcoin is by asset
• 15:33
  forfeiture. Though there is a way where you
• 15:36
  hear what he said at the very end.
• 15:37
  Again, replay the clip. He did say 2 or rather three
• 15:41
  things, even though it sounded like he just said two things.
• 15:44
  One, the first thing we do with the strategic Bitcoin Reserve is
• 15:47
  not sell. Now there has been a couple of
• 15:50
  like, I don't know, maybe concerns about that, especially
• 15:53
  with the Samurai wallet case, but it seems like they're very
• 15:56
  adamant about not selling the Bitcoin.
• 15:58
  Now. The last thing he said was, and
• 16:00
  you could say maybe he just meant to say the only way we're
• 16:05
  going to add to the strategic Bitcoin reserve is through asset
• 16:08
  forfeiture. But he did say we won't sell
• 16:11
  Bitcoin, we will add Bitcoin and we will also add asset
• 16:15
  forfeitures to the strategic Bitcoin reserve without actually
• 16:18
  saying all of that. But so I don't know, he might
• 16:21
  have just said it might have just slipped that he said they
• 16:23
  are actually going to buy more Bitcoin.
• 16:25
  But really, like on the surface of it, it sounds like they're
• 16:29
  just coming for Bitcoiners Bitcoin as a budget neutral way
• 16:32
  to get Bitcoin. And, and, and I did check
• 16:34
  bitcointreasuries.whatisit.net this morning.
• 16:38
  Let me pull it up. They have officially updated the
• 16:42
  US Bitcoin holdings to 328,000 Bitcoin.
• 16:46
  So they're totally taking the the whole China hacker Bitcoin
• 16:54
  and adding it to the reserve. So I haven't done enough
• 16:56
  research to go, you know, on chain check that that's actually
• 17:00
  happening or fully been happening and and actually in
• 17:03
  the US control. But as of now, the US is very
• 17:07
  clearly in the lead, though we still haven't heard any update
• 17:10
  on if we took Venezuela's Bitcoin or if they had Bitcoin
• 17:13
  let. Me chime in here for a SEC
• 17:15
  'cause like OK like here's the thing though, this is all trust
• 17:19
  me bro. That's that's kind of what I'm
• 17:21
  saying. That's kind of what I'm saying.
• 17:23
  Like El Salvador has really set up the standard in terms of what
• 17:29
  a strategic Bitcoin reserve should look like.
• 17:32
  Their reserve is completely public.
• 17:36
  Anyone could see it all the time.
• 17:38
  They can see whether that Bitcoin has been moved or not.
• 17:43
  This whole, you know, way of doing things where it relies on
• 17:47
  a trust me bro model is completely outdated.
• 17:51
  And at the end of the day, you don't need to trust me bro,
• 17:55
  right? Like if you don't want to show
• 17:58
  your proof of reserves, that tells me not to trust you bro.
• 18:03
  Like you shouldn't have anything to hide and that holds people
• 18:07
  accountable. Because this is what you guys
• 18:10
  have to understand. The gold that was seized because
• 18:14
  of the six one O 2 order, that gold hasn't been publicly
• 18:19
  visible since I believe like in the 1970s when they went 'cause
• 18:24
  they everyone made a big deal that there was no gold in Fort
• 18:27
  Knox. Do you remember President Trump,
• 18:30
  what he was saying about auditing Fort Knox?
• 18:32
  Yeah, where's the audit, bro? That fell by the wayside.
• 18:35
  So he hasn't done everything he said.
• 18:37
  So they took they took all this gold from U.S. citizens via the
• 18:42
  6102 order. In the 1930s, early 1930s, they
• 18:47
  built Fort Knox to hold all of this gold and we haven't seen
• 18:52
  this gold since 1970. And ever since it's run and run
• 18:59
  on a trust me Bro model. Now with all of the I'm going
• 19:03
  to, I'm going to say this in a very politically correct
• 19:06
  fashion, OK, with all of the capital misallocation that's
• 19:12
  been happening, for example, with the daycares, right?
• 19:16
  Like, you know, again, I, I, I just, I, I just don't trust you,
• 19:23
  bro. And El Salvador has proven that
• 19:27
  you can publicly show that you have a Bitcoin treasury.
• 19:32
  There's been other companies, very public companies in Bitcoin
• 19:36
  that they show their Bitcoin balances.
• 19:42
  So you can do it. You can do it.
• 19:45
  I would say that's the standard. Now with golds, they, they could
• 19:49
  have said, oh, it's unfeasible, right?
• 19:51
  You can't just show everybody that the gold's always there for
• 19:54
  security reasons. But with Bitcoin, you could drop
• 19:57
  the address there. Yeah, but yo, let's be honest
• 20:01
  though, like. That's probably not in EU s s
• 20:03
  best interest. But that's what I'm saying.
• 20:06
  How much? Is that US is different than El
• 20:08
  Salvador let's. Talk, come on.
• 20:09
  No, no, But I, I don't accept that argument because how much
• 20:12
  of that gold is actually there? How much of that Bitcoin is
• 20:15
  actually there? Well, I agree with you.
• 20:17
  We haven't gotten out of yet. Of that Bitcoin bro, Trump
• 20:21
  released an executive order in the beginning of the year
• 20:24
  specifically asking the federal government to audit how much
• 20:28
  Bitcoin they have. It's been over.
• 20:31
  A year. No, it's been exactly, Yeah,
• 20:33
  that Trump got inaugurated exactly a year ago.
• 20:36
  It's been over it literally. It's been a year since he
• 20:40
  released that executive order and we still have no idea how
• 20:44
  much Bitcoin the United States government has.
• 20:47
  And you don't. And, and I don't buy the
• 20:49
  argument of, oh, no, it's not in EU s s best interest.
• 20:52
  It is in the best interest of American citizens to know how
• 20:57
  much Bitcoin their government, which is supposed to represent
• 21:01
  them, is holding on their behalf.
• 21:04
  And also, you know what tends to happen when you have a a public
• 21:08
  reserve like El Salvador, it becomes very difficult to skim a
• 21:12
  little bit off the top, all right?
• 21:15
  When everybody is seeing the reserve and everyone has
• 21:19
  eyeballs on it and everyone has eyeballs on where the Bitcoin is
• 21:24
  going and how much Bitcoin is being received, that is called
• 21:28
  accountability. When you have absolutely no
• 21:32
  accountability whatsoever, you create a situation where you
• 21:37
  incentivize certain people to be, to behave in certain ways
• 21:42
  because there's no accountability.
• 21:44
  There's no consequences if they skim a little bit off the top.
• 21:47
  There's no consequences If millions, hundreds of millions
• 21:51
  of dollars get sent to daycares. There's no consequences for any
• 21:55
  of that because it's a black hole.
• 21:57
  You don't know. Look, you, you pay your taxes
• 22:00
  that the taxes get sent to the federal government and that's
• 22:04
  it. You don't know where that money
• 22:05
  is being allocated. Look, with Elon Musk going in
• 22:09
  there with Doge, discovering what he discovered with Doge,
• 22:12
  like there's a massive amount. Let's just be, let's just be
• 22:17
  frank here, a fraud, right? And how do you stop that fraud?
• 22:22
  Transparency and accountability. So I know you disagree with me
• 22:27
  often, you say. No, dude, I fundamentally
• 22:29
  disagree with you. Like, I agree in theory our
• 22:32
  politicians should work for the American people.
• 22:35
  I fundamentally disagree that they actually are working for
• 22:38
  the benefit of the American people.
• 22:39
  That's where, that's where we have a full depart here.
• 22:42
  Exactly. But how do you change that?
• 22:44
  You follow the Bouquet model, right?
• 22:46
  Like Bouquet? Yeah, throw them all in jail.
• 22:48
  No, I never. I never, I never said that
• 22:51
  you're putting words in my mouth.
• 22:52
  I never said that you follow the Buchele model in the sense that
• 22:56
  look like he's proven that you can have a government that
• 23:02
  properly reflects the wants of his people.
• 23:07
  And El Salvador went from being one of the most dangerous
• 23:10
  countries on planet Earth to being one of the safest
• 23:13
  countries on planet Earth. What did he do?
• 23:16
  He locked all the violent criminals in jail.
• 23:19
  Of course it wasn't perfect, but it it's much better than some
• 23:23
  American cities in terms of safety.
• 23:26
  I can walk around El Salvador like Opti and I have taken Rd.
• 23:30
  trips and stuff like that. Remember we got into that
• 23:33
  situation where the car ran out of gas.
• 23:35
  We had to like go up a dirt Rd. We had to like, go up a dirt.
• 23:39
  Road. Anywhere.
• 23:41
  Else in in Central and South America, I would have literally
• 23:45
  been in fear for my life, but I felt safe because I knew I was
• 23:49
  in El Salvador and what Bukele did.
• 23:51
  So Bukele has proven that, listen, you can run a government
• 23:56
  competently. You can do it if you choose to
• 23:59
  do so. So this argument that it's like,
• 24:01
  no, you can't have that in America because you know, you
• 24:05
  just can't have that. It has to run on a trust Me Bro
• 24:08
  model. I think the Trust Me Bro model
• 24:10
  is what's gotten us here. Because like, even if you're a
• 24:14
  supporter of Tim Walls or whatever, like even if you're an
• 24:19
  independent and you're in the middle and you don't give, you
• 24:22
  don't care about being a Republican or being a Democrat,
• 24:25
  You're just going to vote for the person that you feel better
• 24:29
  represents your interest. Like as soon as that fraud was
• 24:33
  discovered in Minnesota, Tim Walls literally said I'm not
• 24:37
  running for re election again, right?
• 24:39
  Like he literally he's like, I can't, I'm not going to run for
• 24:42
  re election again. That is what I mean by
• 24:44
  accountability. Transparency and accountability
• 24:48
  is what's going to get people like Opti, said.
• 24:52
  The politicians that are not acting in the best interest of
• 24:56
  the American people to start acting in the best interest of
• 25:00
  the American people because you're creating the right
• 25:02
  incentive structure. As long as they're able to
• 25:06
  obfuscate and not be transparent on what is being done with the
• 25:11
  money, you're going to you're going to continue to see levels
• 25:16
  of fraud and you're going to continue to see these
• 25:19
  politicians act in their own self-interest because it's not
• 25:24
  being covered. Like the biggest smoking gun
• 25:27
  that I ever saw after the whole daycare thing happened in
• 25:31
  Minnesota was the fact that none of the legacy media outlets that
• 25:36
  have billions of dollars of budget, none of them covered
• 25:41
  what happened. They, in fact, they provided air
• 25:45
  cover for what was happening. They tried to discredit Nick
• 25:49
  Shirley rather than go in there and confirm what was happening,
• 25:54
  right? Again, this is all you need is
• 25:57
  accountability. Listen, this is an 8020, a 9010
• 26:00
  issue like this isn't a this isn't a partisan issue.
• 26:04
  What I'm talking about, I think that if you pay your taxes in
• 26:09
  the US, you want your taxes to actually go towards the things
• 26:14
  that they say those taxes are supposed to be going towards,
• 26:17
  right? So anyways, going back, weaving
• 26:19
  back in the strategic Bitcoin reserve, we don't even know if
• 26:24
  the US has the Bitcoin that's listed on the Bitcoin Treasury's
• 26:28
  website that that we don't even know if that's the case.
• 26:31
  Half of that Bitcoin could literally be stolen and gone.
• 26:35
  We know that the Biden administration, even after Trump
• 26:38
  won the presidency, was selling some of that Bitcoin.
• 26:41
  Even a couple weeks ago, the the Bitcoin that was seized from the
• 26:45
  Samurai wallet, they were selling it.
• 26:47
  They were selling it. They had to go out and walk it
• 26:49
  back and say, Oh no, we're actually not.
• 26:51
  How do you know that? How do you know?
• 26:54
  That it's all. Trust me, bro, right?
• 26:57
  And again, there hasn't really been a very good track record of
• 27:02
  of giving me the confidence to believe in their word, to
• 27:07
  believe in what they're saying right.
• 27:09
  So at this point, it's a don't trust verify type of situation.
• 27:14
  And again, it's not really giving me that much confidence
• 27:18
  that our Treasury Secretary is basically alluding that the way
• 27:24
  they're going to stack Bitcoin is by basically seizing it.
• 27:28
  You know, that's not a positive. So anyways, are we in a better
• 27:33
  position today than we were a year ago?
• 27:40
  Debatable depending on debatable depending on how you want the
• 27:47
  game theory to play out. Because a lot of people,
• 27:50
  including Opti himself were on the acceleration as camp.
• 27:54
  They're like, listen, look like let things just get so bad that
• 28:00
  people just don't have an option but to get Bitcoin.
• 28:03
  I think what happened with with the Trump administration, I'm
• 28:06
  very thankful too. Like I'm super glad that Ross
• 28:09
  got free. I'm super glad that some things
• 28:12
  change on a regulatory perspective.
• 28:14
  I'm super glad that we're, we're not actively being attacked
• 28:18
  right in the open. I'm super glad about that.
• 28:22
  But again, as someone said on my panel at Bitcoin Day this
• 28:27
  weekend, do we really want governments holding Bitcoin like
• 28:33
  El Salvador? I don't have a problem with them
• 28:35
  holding Bitcoin because I know it.
• 28:36
  They show how much Bitcoin they're holding and they show
• 28:39
  what they're doing with their Bitcoin.
• 28:41
  It's public, it's transparent. But I think as governments
• 28:45
  continue to play this game of obfuscation, listen, this is
• 28:50
  your government. Technically that gold in that
• 28:53
  vault belongs to you. Technically, that Bitcoin that
• 28:58
  the US government holds belongs to you.
• 29:01
  It belongs to the American people.
• 29:03
  So is it too much of an ask to say we want transparency?
• 29:08
  Because only with transparency you will get accountability.
• 29:12
  Is that too much of an ask? I don't think that's an ask at
• 29:15
  all. I don't think that's a crazy.
• 29:17
  I don't think that's an unreasonable ask.
• 29:19
  And I don't think I think that's a crazy ask either, But again,
• 29:21
  it it it's not, it's not a good sign.
• 29:24
  So hopefully they print a shit ton of money this year to try to
• 29:29
  keep the house and hopefully that money printing sends
• 29:34
  Bitcoin to new highs. I'm at that point, dude.
• 29:36
  I'm at that point. Maybe I'm a little bit, maybe
• 29:41
  I'm a little bit jaded. Like maybe I'm just like, oh
• 29:44
  man, I got, maybe, maybe Nico needs to take a break.
• 29:46
  But like, I'm at that point, dude.
• 29:49
  Like I'm at that point 'cause it's, it's just crazy.
• 29:52
  It's crazy to me. The budgets that these TV
• 29:55
  stations have, the budgets that these, you know, that these
• 30:00
  agencies have are so huge. They're enormous, right?
• 30:06
  Like there should be no reason as to why there should be no
• 30:12
  reason as to why there should be no reason as to why they're not
• 30:19
  able to do this. Please let me know if you
• 30:22
  disagree. In theory I totally agree.
• 30:26
  I I think there is a lot of reasons though.
• 30:28
  I, I think it's just that, you know, a lot of people will say
• 30:31
  that the system wasn't designed this way.
• 30:35
  Maybe I'm more black pilled than most.
• 30:36
  I think the system's working exactly as designed.
• 30:39
  And therefore that's why I think there, there is a huge reason
• 30:42
  and it does go into the corruption.
• 30:44
  It does go into the incentives, it does go into the lobbying.
• 30:47
  It does go into the financial industrial complex, military
• 30:50
  industrial complex. Like I think those are all very
• 30:52
  big reasons. Like follow the money.
• 30:54
  That's, that's the reason is they don't want this stuff to
• 30:58
  come out, which is why I, I keep trolling you of like, I agree.
• 31:02
  In theory, we should have a more transparent government, you
• 31:05
  know, run by the people for the people where we currently are.
• 31:09
  In reality, that is not the case.
• 31:12
  That's that's just kind of my my basic heuristic here is where I
• 31:16
  start everything from. But anyways, Nico, let's keep
• 31:19
  this moving because we got a lot to talk about for the rest of
• 31:23
  the show. So quick commercial bake and
• 31:24
  we'll be right back. Today's episode is brought to
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  stampseed.com store. All righty then guys, we are
• 33:40
  back and the current Bitcoin price is 89,820.
• 33:46
  I told you guys expect some volatility yesterday and look
• 33:49
  guys it happened exactly as I said it would.
• 33:52
  Anyways, it is a 28.8 percent discount from all time high.
• 33:57
  The market cap is 1.79 trillion and the current block height is
• 34:01
  900 and 33113. OK, so as I told you yesterday,
• 34:07
  it is currently Davos World Economic Forum week.
• 34:10
  We haven't really seen too many speeches conversations yet, but
• 34:15
  we've kind of got a few clips trickling in.
• 34:18
  So I, I'm pretty sure this week we're going to have a bunch of
• 34:21
  clips. I do know that the, the main
• 34:25
  theme for this year is quote, the spirit of dialogue, which,
• 34:28
  you know, who really knows what that means, But I know that
• 34:31
  they're going to bring, you know, there's going to be quote
• 34:32
  a lot of crypto conversations here, at least that's what
• 34:35
  they're saying. So I expect a lot of a lot of
• 34:38
  Bitcoin or more like, you know, crypto stuff coming out later on
• 34:41
  in the week. But we did get a very
• 34:44
  interesting Ray Dalio clip. This was actually, you know, on
• 34:47
  Squawk box CNBC. And even though Ray Dalio isn't
• 34:53
  like the biggest Bitcoiner per SE, he he's definitely on the
• 34:58
  Fiat doom and gloom monetary reordering page right now.
• 35:02
  So this is his take. If you guys have been following
• 35:05
  his Twitter, he's been going very hard on this.
• 35:07
  He thinks we're starting to see the monetary order basically
• 35:11
  crumble in real time, the political order crumble in real
• 35:13
  time. So this is his view.
• 35:15
  This is what he says. I personally tend to agree with
• 35:18
  a lot of the things he's saying. I probably disagree with the
• 35:20
  solutions. But let's listen to Ray Dalio.
• 35:23
  See where his head's at right now, starting off Davos.
• 35:28
  Let's step back from the sensational and and be clear
• 35:31
  about what I mean. The monetary order is breaking
• 35:35
  down, OK. What I mean by the monetary
• 35:39
  order is that Fiat currencies as and and debt as a store hold of
• 35:46
  wealth is not being held by central banks in the same way.
• 35:52
  And that there was a change. The biggest market to move last
• 35:56
  year was the gold market, far better than the tech markets and
• 36:00
  so and so on. And the US markets
• 36:03
  underperformed foreign markets because of the fact you could
• 36:09
  see it in the numbers of the central banks and so on.
• 36:12
  So let's just look at the fact that on the other side of trade
• 36:17
  deficits and trade wars, there are capital and capital wars.
• 36:23
  And so as we're looking at that and you reported what the stock
• 36:27
  market and so on, but you didn't report that the gold market is
• 36:30
  also up three we. Did say that earlier this
• 36:33
  morning. It's up to record.
• 36:35
  Levy So if you look at the what is happening and why it's
• 36:39
  happening and who's buying it. So let's let's just take a
• 36:42
  moment on that capital war issue, OK?
• 36:46
  We know that both the holders of U.S. dollar denominated debt at
• 36:53
  which is money and the those who need it, the United States are
• 36:59
  worried about each other, right? So if you have other countries
• 37:03
  who are holding it and they're worried about each other and
• 37:07
  we're producing a lot of it, that's a big issue, right?
• 37:10
  So you have to explain what is going on with Fiat currencies,
• 37:14
  generally speaking. And now if you take the
• 37:17
  conflicts, you can't ignore the possibility that capital wars,
• 37:23
  in other words, maybe there's not the same inclination to buy
• 37:29
  U.S. debt. And So what we at least need to
• 37:32
  talk about those possibilities and find out who is buying and
• 37:36
  selling what that is behind these market movements.
• 37:40
  And what? I mean, dude, if that broke like
• 37:46
  two years ago, three years ago where like Ray Dalio, you know?
• 37:51
  Is trashing Fiat currency. Is saying like Fiat currency
• 37:54
  Davos are going to zero and on the Chiron, it literally says
• 37:59
  the 2026 world order. We would have ripped like 50% of
• 38:05
  the day, right? Like like you guys like perhaps
• 38:08
  you guys are like one of part of like one of the new classes of
• 38:11
  Bitcoin. But like this is the type of
• 38:14
  headline that like would have moved Bitcoin like 50% back in
• 38:18
  the 2017, 2018-2019 era, you know, and what did Bitcoin do?
• 38:24
  We dumped right so. Yeah, I mean, look, fine, fine,
• 38:30
  fine. Ray Dalio, I believe you.
• 38:31
  I believe you. I believe you.
• 38:33
  Fiat current maybe. You know, I was much happier
• 38:36
  when they were saying Bitcoin was going to 0.
• 38:40
  You're not happy now that it's saying fiat's going to 0?
• 38:43
  The monetary order is crumbling. Well, the exact opposite is
• 38:46
  happening, right? The exact opposite is happening.
• 38:49
  I mean, but he he, he is right in that sense.
• 38:52
  I mean, gold is reflecting that. But I, I, I would say like, I
• 38:56
  wonder why Bitcoin isn't. Isn't reflecting that either.
• 39:00
  I know Ray Dalio's been orange pilled.
• 39:03
  I know he. He he believes.
• 39:04
  In Bitcoin, yeah. I mean, later the part gave him
• 39:06
  the big print book. You know, he's reading Bitcoin
• 39:09
  content. He is tentatively like you
• 39:11
  should invest a little in Bitcoin, but maybe not that
• 39:14
  much. He's come around a long time,
• 39:16
  but. But like dude, like.
• 39:17
  He's just not fully there. It might because of it might be
• 39:20
  an age. Thing maybe I don't know, but
• 39:24
  you know like. Like when when nobody believed
• 39:28
  in Bitcoin. Like I feel like it was better
• 39:30
  you. Know what I'm saying?
• 39:32
  Like I feel like, like I feel like it was better like at least
• 39:35
  from a volatility perspective, like when.
• 39:38
  People did it volatile today, just not the right way.
• 39:41
  Like a 1 thousand 2000%. Move it's.
• 39:45
  It's better than the stable. Sorry, 1000 dollar 2000.
• 39:48
  Dollar, what are you looking at it you seeing?
• 39:49
  It over here, I'm looking at my laptop.
• 39:51
  Oh, Oh yeah, it's hey, it's not stable though.
• 39:55
  You. Can give me that?
• 39:57
  Neither are Fiat currencies, bro.
• 39:59
  Fiat currencies aren't stable. Like even like the inflation
• 40:04
  rate ain't 2%, bro. Like, let's be real.
• 40:09
  Yeah, allegedly it's lower. No way.
• 40:12
  Yeah, the true inflation. Numbers are like one point
• 40:14
  something. Damn, bro.
• 40:16
  I mean, not like the real trueflation index, but the
• 40:20
  trueflation what they're kind of rolling out.
• 40:22
  It's under 2%. Allegedly.
• 40:24
  Allegedly is the big word. Here, Prezi Trump is allegedly
• 40:29
  he's crushing. It allegedly.
• 40:31
  I mean, he's at Dabos being like, look, I'm literally here
• 40:34
  to just tell the world how great America is doing right now, and
• 40:38
  we're going to take Greenland well.
• 40:41
  Let's talk about that. But wait, hold on before we do
• 40:44
  that. Like I, I, I do, I think
• 40:47
  fundamentally agree with the Ray Dalio thesis.
• 40:49
  Like I think we are seeing a monetary reordering right now.
• 40:53
  There is, as I've been saying, as I've been kind of, you know,
• 40:57
  seeing a lot of what Simon Dixon has been writing, as I see what
• 41:02
  other people are, you know, outside of not just Bitcoin are
• 41:05
  saying. It's like it does seem like we
• 41:07
  are entering A multipolar world where the US is destroying the
• 41:12
  purchasing power of the dollar, trying to lower interest rates
• 41:15
  and basically just becoming a regional power.
• 41:18
  Hence this move for anything in the Western Hemisphere and now
• 41:22
  maybe Greenland. So to me it it is.
• 41:26
  It is all in the line mate. It just isn't as Fiat doom and
• 41:29
  gloom as Ray Dalio might might be saying.
• 41:32
  Greenland is in the Western Hemisphere.
• 41:34
  Yeah, that's what I that's what I said.
• 41:35
  Then you said the Western Hemisphere and Greenland.
• 41:37
  Well, I said the Western Hemisphere like acquiring
• 41:39
  Venezuela and Greenland. The US acquired Venezuela.
• 41:43
  Wow, we took their oil. It's enough back I was like
• 41:47
  this. Is mine now.
• 41:52
  Oh. Mauricio's with us today.
• 41:53
  We're. Going to be right back after the
• 41:55
  break and we got Mauricio, the Co founder of Leaden joining us
• 41:59
  on the show. We're going to be right back.
• 42:01
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  house. What's up dude, how are you?
• 44:44
  I'm doing great, man. I'm doing very well, thank you.
• 44:47
  How are you, man? Venezuela.
• 44:49
  This is the first time we've done a show since.
• 44:52
  I know. The events of January 3rd.
• 44:55
  I know man, how crazy is that dude?
• 44:58
  Like the whole the memes that were dropped, Like dude, I want
• 45:02
  to, I want to know how you feel about it.
• 45:04
  I was, I was pretty when it happened on XI was pretty.
• 45:09
  I was holding myself back because I had a lot of thoughts
• 45:12
  and emotions and I was like, no, I don't want to.
• 45:13
  I don't want to regret, you know, going too hard in the
• 45:16
  paint, but you know, I did make my voice known one on the
• 45:20
  podcast. I went pretty hard.
• 45:21
  I went like on a 15 minute monologue.
• 45:24
  But I want to know how you feel, dude.
• 45:26
  And for anyone who doesn't know, by the way, Maudicio and I are
• 45:29
  both Venezuelan. Our families are Venezuelan.
• 45:32
  I'm I'm more my tomato than. Venezuelan because I grew up
• 45:35
  here in Miami, but my entire family is Venezuelan.
• 45:38
  I speak Spanish. I want to know Maudicio, how do
• 45:41
  you feel dude? Because.
• 45:43
  This is this is a historic time for, you know, our home country.
• 45:49
  Yeah, absolutely. And I think like you, I, I took,
• 45:54
  I took more than a minute. I took I think probably the
• 45:57
  whole day or two days after the the after Saturday morning.
• 46:02
  It is, it is a obviously it's mixed emotions, right.
• 46:07
  You're, you're watching your country go up in, in bombs going
• 46:12
  off in Caracas, right? No, nobody wants that.
• 46:14
  No, no Venezuelan wants that, myself included, Right.
• 46:18
  At the same time, they took away the person or one of the people
• 46:25
  mostly responsible for the demise of millions of people's
• 46:30
  lives. So many families got broken up,
• 46:33
  mine included. Many people have to relocate.
• 46:37
  Many people lost everything. I saw people's farms get
• 46:41
  expropriated on national television buildings.
• 46:45
  I saw entrepreneurs had spent decades building their
• 46:49
  factories, having to hand them off to the government for
• 46:51
  pennies on the dollar and get wiped.
• 46:55
  So clearly getting Maduro out of there is something it's a, it's
• 46:59
  a, it's a, it's a reason to celebrate as a Venezuelan and
• 47:02
  even and ask, don't, don't take it for me and ask any Venezuelan
• 47:06
  the, the, the feeling is of immense happiness.
• 47:09
  And once we, we, or at least myself and others learn how
• 47:13
  surgical of an operation it was in that I think there was 2
• 47:17
  civilian casualties or three. I think it's what's been
• 47:20
  reported and my little killed a a a fair deal more than that
• 47:27
  during the time they were there. And and so it's a personally, I
• 47:31
  think it's a great thing for the country.
• 47:33
  I I think even after it in the in the few short weeks since
• 47:36
  this has happened, we have political prisoners being
• 47:39
  released. We have the US dollar exchange
• 47:42
  rate finally stabilizing. We have oil production plants
• 47:47
  finally looking up. We have the the same
• 47:52
  authoritative officials of the government that were basically
• 47:57
  mocking and screaming anyway, mocking people from the
• 48:00
  opposition on live television. Their tone as it has changed
• 48:04
  dramatically. And so the country in in a few
• 48:08
  short weeks, what happened on January 3rd has managed to
• 48:12
  accomplish things that Charismo wasn't able to do in 26 years.
• 48:18
  You're you're having Chavismo officials come out and say that
• 48:21
  now now, and that's the keyword now the oil isn't going to be
• 48:25
  given now to the to a few select like the government itself.
• 48:29
  The regime itself is admitting that they were stealing and
• 48:33
  mismanagement and mismanaging the entire, you know, the entire
• 48:38
  economy. And I think that the clean up
• 48:42
  process is well on its way. I've had, you know, I, I, I've
• 48:48
  every so often I've been out of the country for, I think the
• 48:51
  last time I was there was about 10 years ago.
• 48:54
  And every so often I would have these waves of sadness that that
• 49:00
  would come in. You know, anyone that's left
• 49:03
  Venezuela probably experiences something similar where it
• 49:06
  would, some, it was somebody's birthday or it was Mother's Day
• 49:09
  or it was Christmas and you had this, it dawned on you that you
• 49:15
  were never going to be able to see the people in Venezuela
• 49:18
  again, at least for me, right? I, I've, I had forgotten, I've
• 49:21
  divorced myself from the idea that I would ever be able to go
• 49:23
  back and, and have my children meet the people that raised me.
• 49:27
  And I used to get these waves of sadness And I just, I remember
• 49:32
  feeling very frustrated and, and, and sad about what had been
• 49:37
  taken away from us. And I'm ever since then, ever
• 49:41
  since January 3rd, I, I have these random waves, but they're
• 49:44
  no longer waves of sadness. They're waves of joy that I can
• 49:48
  now start thinking about going back.
• 49:51
  And, and you know, I've had lots of calls with my friends.
• 49:57
  Obviously I still have assets there.
• 49:58
  I still have a lot of friends and everybody's now the, the,
• 50:02
  you know, the conversations were always, when are you leaving?
• 50:04
  When are you leaving? When are you leaving?
• 50:06
  Now the conversations are when are you coming back?
• 50:08
  When are you coming back? When are you coming back?
• 50:10
  And it, it, it isn't, it is crazy that everything can change
• 50:16
  so fast. And I'm I'm, you know, the
• 50:18
  entire world went from being negative around Venezuela and
• 50:22
  the prospects to now it it's become one of the most exciting
• 50:26
  opportunities in the continental Americas to rebuild.
• 50:30
  So I'm very, very optimistic. I think Venezuela has a massive
• 50:35
  opportunity right now because we're starting from zero again
• 50:38
  and we have to rebuild everything.
• 50:42
  The financial system, the legal system, infrastructure, energy,
• 50:45
  schools, everything has to get redrawn.
• 50:48
  And we have an opportunity to get it right this time.
• 50:51
  And I'm just very, very excited and hopeful that, you know, if I
• 50:57
  can in some way, I'll be able to chip in however I can to make
• 51:01
  sure Venezuela becomes what every one of us thinks it can
• 51:03
  become. I'm optimistic.
• 51:06
  I'm happy. I think that echoes every single
• 51:09
  Venezuelan I've spoken with short of the people that are on
• 51:12
  the Internet that, that have, you know, a lot of people in
• 51:15
  Venezuela were so ingrained into the regime that in some cases
• 51:22
  the regime not being there means they've lost their, their golden
• 51:25
  goose egg, meaning they'll, they'll be able to, they won't
• 51:28
  be able to steal their money anymore.
• 51:30
  And moreover, a lot of people now, now that there's like the
• 51:34
  threat of justice being done in Venezuela, a lot of people not
• 51:39
  only are seeing their golden goose egg go away, but they're
• 51:42
  now staring at the real possibility of having to face
• 51:45
  justice. And I think there's a small
• 51:48
  segment of the Venezuelan population that was, you know,
• 51:51
  the, the, the guys that were perpetrating all these horrors
• 51:55
  up until two weeks ago, They're, they're seeing their whole lives
• 52:00
  fall apart. And it's just, you know, in
• 52:04
  Venezuela. In Venezuela.
• 52:06
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 52:07
  And justice may take its time, but it surely arrives.
• 52:12
  And I, I'm just excited to see things get done right, being
• 52:20
  back in, in the country that has rule of login and, and, and, and
• 52:24
  I know that if you give the right liberties to Venezuelans,
• 52:29
  we're going to thrive. And, and we've already been
• 52:31
  slowly regaining liberties back to the point I was making around
• 52:34
  how much has changed in just two weeks when as soon as we gained
• 52:37
  access to X Twitter. And I know that sounds silly,
• 52:41
  but I would always send tweets to my friends in our group
• 52:43
  chats. And they were like, sorry, man,
• 52:45
  you keep forgetting we don't have X.
• 52:47
  And literally they, they got X back a month ago or sorry, a
• 52:51
  week ago. The Venezuelan regime has now
• 52:53
  created an X account that looks like the, the White House's 24/7
• 52:57
  account. The whole thing is just done a
• 52:59
  180 in two weeks. There's still ways to go, but
• 53:04
  it's going it's, I see it trending in the right direction.
• 53:07
  100% man. And and you know, I, I never
• 53:10
  forget I got a call Mauricio at 2:00 AM from my mom and like
• 53:18
  right when it happened and you know, she was over the moon.
• 53:22
  She's like my Ludo's out and my wife's family again, Venezuelan
• 53:28
  and my entire family is Venezuelan and we were ecstatic.
• 53:32
  And I remember like parts of Miami like it was so fun.
• 53:37
  It it's like it's, it's poetic in a way, right?
• 53:39
  There's in there's in Una de Paso, which is like a Venezuelan
• 53:44
  like restaurant next to the Chevron.
• 53:47
  So everyone was like partying at the Chevron.
• 53:50
  They had flags, they were singing the Venezuelan national
• 53:53
  anthem. But like you guys have to
• 53:56
  understand like this is and for people that don't understand the
• 54:00
  country, it's one of the most beautiful countries on planet
• 54:02
  Earth. Number one, it's one of the most
• 54:04
  resource blessed countries on planet Earth.
• 54:09
  And back in the 50s by GDP, it was like one of the literally in
• 54:13
  the top five wealthiest countries on planet Earth.
• 54:17
  And the population wasn't that big, right?
• 54:20
  And then what you saw since, you know, the beginning of Chavismo
• 54:24
  was you've seen 8 million Venezuelans flee the country.
• 54:29
  And the population's like, I think it's like 28 million
• 54:31
  people. So it's like basically like Long
• 54:34
  story short, 1/3 of the population fled.
• 54:36
  Like people are talking about refugees.
• 54:38
  It was it. It's been 1 of like.
• 54:41
  The worst, you know. Refugee, refugee catastrophes,
• 54:46
  you know, the world has ever seen and no one talks about it
• 54:49
  like no one talks about this stuff, right.
• 54:52
  So the only people that I saw like complaining, first of all,
• 54:57
  you know, I, I, I felt a little bit insulted because you saw a
• 55:01
  lot of these protests pop up in like very big cities and like
• 55:06
  people are like, leave Venezuela's, leave Venezuela
• 55:09
  alone, like. You know, and and like, and I
• 55:12
  would I remember I said this on the show and Opti was there.
• 55:14
  I was like the only effing people that are not happy that
• 55:20
  this happened were either people that were like literally
• 55:24
  stealing, as Mauricio said, or if you had alternative
• 55:28
  political, you know, motives because the vast majority of
• 55:32
  people are. Over the moon.
• 55:34
  This happens, right? So like, you know, getting
• 55:37
  lectured by like foreign countries and like whatever,
• 55:40
  it's like you're invading, you know, Venezuela's just like
• 55:43
  dude, like what the hell are you talking about?
• 55:45
  And then let let's talk about the oil.
• 55:47
  Thing for a second, right? It's like, do you think Trump
• 55:51
  went in there and. This isn't my line so I'm not
• 55:54
  going to. Take credit for it.
• 55:55
  But do you think Trump went in there to get that IPA recipe?
• 56:01
  No F no. Do you think Russia and China
• 56:05
  and. Cuba.
• 56:05
  The Cuba thing is very interesting, Mauricio, right?
• 56:09
  Do you think that they were in there because they wanted
• 56:11
  arepas? No, they were in there because
• 56:14
  they wanted oil, right? So it's like, I would much
• 56:17
  rather the oil go to the United States, and not only that, the
• 56:22
  United States go in there and provide jobs and infrastructure
• 56:25
  for the country than this oil being stolen by all these other
• 56:29
  countries. Because that's what it was.
• 56:30
  And during the raid, which was really interesting, Maduro
• 56:34
  didn't even trust his own countrymen to be his bodyguards.
• 56:40
  He trusted Cubans and I love Cubans.
• 56:43
  I'm from Miami, right this I love Cubans, great food, great
• 56:46
  people, but he had essentially Cuban marksman Marxist as
• 56:52
  bodyguards because he couldn't even trust his own people.
• 56:56
  And by the way, in Mauricio, I'm sure you've seen this interview,
• 56:59
  there's a very famous Unu Isiyong interview, a very, very
• 57:03
  famous Mexican reporter where he asked him, he asked Maduro.
• 57:07
  He said. Do you have?
• 57:10
  You know. The Cuban military in the
• 57:12
  country and he like, he was just like pounding his chest.
• 57:15
  He's like, listen, we have painters, we have artists, we
• 57:19
  have all these people, doctors, doctors, but no military
• 57:23
  whatsoever. That ended up being bullshit.
• 57:26
  Another thing I want to, I want to tell you, Maudicio, is he
• 57:29
  talks. So much shit like.
• 57:33
  If he talks so much shit, and if you speak Spanish, you have an
• 57:37
  appreciation of the amount of shit my Ludo talked like, it was
• 57:41
  like, you know, like he was talking shit on Elon.
• 57:44
  He was talking shit about Trump. He's like Trump, if you want to
• 57:47
  get me, you have to come here. To me, that was like the White
• 57:50
  House equivalent. You have to come here.
• 57:52
  You have to get me yourself. Well, listen, he fucked around
• 57:55
  and he found out. He fucked around big time and he
• 57:59
  found out and now he's in GO New York.
• 58:01
  So that's my take on that. And you know, anyone that has a
• 58:05
  different, again, it's like I, I, I said this, I said this
• 58:08
  when, when I offered commentary on this one, he said I was like,
• 58:10
  look, like, if you're not from Venezuela, like I don't really
• 58:13
  care about your opinion that that was my, that's been my
• 58:16
  stance at this point. Yeah, it's, it's been
• 58:19
  interesting because you know, you, you can tell and I've had,
• 58:23
  I have friends from all sides of the political spectrum and, and
• 58:25
  many of them, you know, a lot of them came to me with like a big
• 58:29
  congratulations. A couple others were like, are
• 58:31
  you OK with what happened? How do you feel?
• 58:33
  And I was, I found myself explaining him because I guess I
• 58:37
  think it's, it's, it's a bit strange for some people to, to
• 58:41
  have such strong approval for, for having a person, you know,
• 58:47
  another country come in and eject a dictator.
• 58:50
  Because a lot of the, a lot of people reading news were under
• 58:53
  the impression that this guy had been elected.
• 58:56
  And that, and that's the problem, right?
• 58:58
  Like you, you because also Venezuelans had no independent
• 59:01
  media. There's no way for us to get our
• 59:04
  version of the truth out to the world.
• 59:06
  Our way to do it was X. And guess what?
• 59:08
  They cap pretty quickly X right. They don't want you to get
• 59:12
  ideas. If you turn on Venezuela on TV
• 59:14
  and you go through the and you go through the programming grid
• 59:16
  and it's all propaganda. It literally it's all
• 59:20
  propaganda. There's a there's a network the
• 59:22
  Chinese created called Telesur, which is basically the communist
• 59:25
  TV. And that was put on the grid of
• 59:29
  all the Chavez alive countries. Bolivia just took it off the
• 59:32
  grid. But the point I'm trying to make
• 59:35
  is the, the, the playbook for dictators is, is so draconian in
• 59:40
  so many ways because all they did was they, they, they shut
• 59:44
  off all independent media locally.
• 59:46
  They in Venezuela up until a few weeks ago, if, if you got pulled
• 59:51
  over, the, the corrupt Maduro's death squads would take your
• 59:55
  phone and they would go through your Instagram or your Twitter.
• 59:58
  There was no Twitter, but they would go through your WhatsApp
• 1:00:01
  and they would search Trump on your WhatsApp.
• 1:00:04
  They would search the word Maduro on your WhatsApp and they
• 1:00:06
  would see what you have been sharing and saying.
• 1:00:09
  And if you've been saying anything that they didn't like,
• 1:00:11
  you would be taken out of the car and nobody, nobody would
• 1:00:13
  know about. Like they basically would
• 1:00:16
  disappear. And there was no way for us to
• 1:00:20
  put out any version of the truth.
• 1:00:22
  They every time the the a news outlet tried to get in, they
• 1:00:25
  would they were blocked. The only people that got let in
• 1:00:27
  was Maduro aligned reporters to write Maduro's version of the
• 1:00:31
  story. So when you were reading things
• 1:00:34
  in the New York Times and and other media, us Venezuelans are
• 1:00:38
  yanking our hairs like who's writing this stuff?
• 1:00:40
  Right? And now if you look at the polls
• 1:00:43
  from The Economist, OK, The Economist, The Economist isn't
• 1:00:47
  out there trying to do any favors to anyone.
• 1:00:50
  If you know, if you follow their sort of editorial line, the poll
• 1:00:54
  from The Economist shows that over 60, no, I think it was 60
• 1:00:59
  plus percent of Venezuelans are in Venezuela are in favor of
• 1:01:04
  what happened. And if you pull the ones outside
• 1:01:06
  of Venezuela and even Americans broadly, there's over 60%
• 1:01:10
  support across the board for what happened.
• 1:01:14
  And again, going back to your listen, first of all, I got FOMO
• 1:01:18
  that I wasn't in Miami to go out and do these celebrations
• 1:01:21
  because those look like that, that we all wanted to just
• 1:01:25
  scream and do it because in Venezuela, we're still not able
• 1:01:27
  to do that. If you notice, there were, there
• 1:01:29
  hasn't been celebrations within Venezuela because people are too
• 1:01:32
  scared they're going to get shot.
• 1:01:34
  But outside of Venezuela, we're all celebrating for them.
• 1:01:37
  And the Miami protests were something I would have really
• 1:01:40
  loved to go and just hug anyone that I know.
• 1:01:43
  I, I, I, there's a few Venezuelans here where I live in
• 1:01:45
  Cayman. And I went, I called them all
• 1:01:47
  that, that that day or we, we made a Casillo.
• 1:01:49
  We, we had a Casillo Casillo like we did a Casillo, which is
• 1:01:52
  a traditional thing you do when you celebrate something good in
• 1:01:54
  Venezuela. And so, but in Miami, I wanted
• 1:01:57
  just to go hug everybody, but I wasn't able to join those, those
• 1:02:01
  protests. What I also saw was some of
• 1:02:03
  these anti Maduro getting taken out protests in places like in
• 1:02:10
  some parts of Europe, even in in DC, I think there was one.
• 1:02:13
  And many Venezuelans, of course, like, listen, if you, if you've
• 1:02:16
  been kicked out of your country because of corruption and
• 1:02:21
  political prosecution, finally the guy that took you out and
• 1:02:25
  made 10 million people leave the country has been taken out.
• 1:02:28
  And you have some some people pretending to be Venezuelans mad
• 1:02:31
  at this. Oh, we took that personally,
• 1:02:36
  like many of us. Many did.
• 1:02:38
  And they went out to these events and they with their phone
• 1:02:41
  recording, they were going around saying, find one
• 1:02:44
  Venezuelan can can can, can, can one Venezuelan person in this
• 1:02:48
  protest. Come talk to me.
• 1:02:50
  None of these events had any Venezuelans in them.
• 1:02:53
  Anyone, any, not a single person was Venezuelan in that.
• 1:02:57
  And even one guy got so mad. He's like, do not hold my flag.
• 1:03:01
  Like he. And then anyway, this video went
• 1:03:03
  viral, this guy in Switzerland. But what I will say is like, you
• 1:03:08
  know, you will be very hard pressed to find anyone that's
• 1:03:12
  not happy about this that's outside of Venezuela.
• 1:03:17
  He's the reason many of us have to leave.
• 1:03:20
  Yep. And so how do you expect
• 1:03:23
  Venezuelans to be like, what do you think?
• 1:03:25
  Do you think Venezuelan lawyers and and doctors wanted to leave
• 1:03:29
  the country to go drive Uber in Miami?
• 1:03:30
  You think that's what they wanted you?
• 1:03:34
  You think a guy that had a freaking shoe factory wanted to
• 1:03:37
  go be a janitor in Michigan? Nobody wanted that.
• 1:03:43
  And now we have a chance. Imagine, imagine for a second if
• 1:03:47
  you lost all of your professional career because of
• 1:03:50
  some political, some, some something a politician did and
• 1:03:54
  you've lost your, your practice. You've now, you've now, you've
• 1:03:57
  now been reduced to driving Uber in Miami.
• 1:03:59
  Nothing against Uber's by the way.
• 1:04:01
  I, I love anyone that has a hard working job.
• 1:04:03
  And again, this is not, nothing against Uber, but these guys are
• 1:04:07
  building a career. They went to school for five
• 1:04:09
  years to do this. This was taken away from them.
• 1:04:13
  How do you think the guy that's been driving Uber for two years
• 1:04:16
  feels about the the potential of being able to go back and become
• 1:04:19
  a lawyer again? It's, you know what I'm saying?
• 1:04:25
  It's hope. Man, it's hope and, and it's,
• 1:04:27
  it's, it's, it's very, and again, Mauricio, like it's, it's
• 1:04:32
  like multiple of my family members, right?
• 1:04:39
  People that have incredible, very impressive degrees, right?
• 1:04:46
  And they don't it, it's, Can you imagine spending that many years
• 1:04:53
  in school, that many years preparing that many years, you
• 1:04:57
  know, building up a career to basically start from zero,
• 1:05:01
  right? And that isn't, that wasn't a
• 1:05:05
  rarity that, that, that became something that you, you'd find
• 1:05:08
  quite frequently right here in Miami.
• 1:05:12
  And honestly, it's not only in Miami, like it's all over the
• 1:05:15
  US, lots of Venezuelans in Spain too, right?
• 1:05:18
  And the Dominican Republic, a lot of people had to flee and
• 1:05:25
  basically leave everything behind and basically start from
• 1:05:29
  zero. And the how the media reported
• 1:05:33
  on this, they didn't report on it.
• 1:05:35
  You know, it's like as if it never happened.
• 1:05:37
  But again, you know, if 1/3 of the country leaves, that's
• 1:05:42
  that's a big news story and, and no one really talked about it,
• 1:05:46
  right? A. 100% and and not only that,
• 1:05:51
  Chavez, not Chavez with Venezuela under Maduro was a was
• 1:05:58
  being used as a pinata to support ideal other ideological
• 1:06:03
  governments in the region like the the the the sole reason
• 1:06:06
  Cuba's still around is because it's been drinking Venezuela's
• 1:06:10
  oil for 26 years, right? Like the the people that live in
• 1:06:15
  Cuba, they get, you know, they go weeks without chicken, right?
• 1:06:20
  Like imagine what Cuba's going to be like now that the
• 1:06:23
  Venezuelan oils free oil supply is gone.
• 1:06:27
  Guess what? Guess what they were paying us
• 1:06:28
  for that oil, 32 Cuban bodyguards around Maduro, right,
• 1:06:33
  who were really taking jobs away from proper Venezuelans.
• 1:06:38
  But not not only that, but it shows you the level of Cuban
• 1:06:41
  influence in Venezuela. I know for a fact that Cubans
• 1:06:45
  also run some of the key strategic facilities in
• 1:06:49
  Venezuela like energy generation, oil production, oil
• 1:06:54
  distribution. If you go into those offices,
• 1:06:57
  the people there are Cuban. I, I know because I've seen some
• 1:07:01
  of the many years back, I saw some of them in some of the
• 1:07:04
  electrical key electrical facilities and my friends that
• 1:07:07
  are in Venezuela and industry every so often when you get high
• 1:07:10
  up enough, when you're dealing the government at any level, you
• 1:07:12
  reach a Cuban. And what, what, what do you
• 1:07:17
  think Cuba could be paying Venezuela for that oil if they
• 1:07:20
  can't feed their population? What were we getting paid for
• 1:07:25
  that oil? Nothing, right.
• 1:07:29
  And so not only that so, so that allows Cuba to stay around,
• 1:07:34
  right. They were also really good
• 1:07:36
  friends with Nicaragua. And right now you're starting to
• 1:07:39
  see the political balance sort of shift back into, I would say
• 1:07:44
  the right from for a while in, in Latin America, you're seeing
• 1:07:47
  elections in Argentina, Bolivia, etcetera.
• 1:07:51
  But Chavez, Chavez's oil budget, the the Petro diplomacy with
• 1:07:56
  what he did in the 90s or in the in the 2000, early 2000s, he
• 1:08:00
  painted the entire continent red, red as in communist.
• 1:08:05
  And he financed the political campaigns.
• 1:08:07
  There were Venezuelan officers caught with briefcases full of
• 1:08:10
  cash, dollars getting into Argentina to finance the
• 1:08:14
  Kitchener campaign. And so Venezuela is not just a,
• 1:08:19
  a, you're not just helping Venezuelans, you're helping
• 1:08:23
  break the chains of populism and, you know, communist ideals
• 1:08:28
  from the entire continent. And This is why I'm, I'm, so
• 1:08:32
  I've been writing for a while about this.
• 1:08:34
  I think Latam is going to go through a period of, of economic
• 1:08:37
  and cultural renaissance led by Debuqueles Demilaise, the, the
• 1:08:43
  changes in Bolivia and us in Ecuador right now.
• 1:08:47
  If you look at the map of LATAM, by the way, Colombia and Brazil
• 1:08:50
  have elections this year, which actually I think is probably
• 1:08:54
  feeds into the reasons as to why the events in Venezuela happened
• 1:08:57
  when they happened. But those are the last two
• 1:09:00
  bastions. If, if, if Colombia and Brazil
• 1:09:05
  swing back right, all you have left is Mexico and Cuba's just
• 1:09:13
  TikTok right like it it, it is not going to be around for too
• 1:09:16
  long with too much longer without Venezuela's oil.
• 1:09:19
  So I, I think again, you're giving a Latin America in
• 1:09:21
  general a chance to reset and rebuild.
• 1:09:26
  There's no reason. Again, putting politics aside,
• 1:09:29
  why would you choose to have your best trading partner
• 1:09:32
  halfway across the world where you can be up the street?
• 1:09:37
  Again, politics aside, why would it the best trading route not be
• 1:09:45
  your own contiguous landmass? It makes it makes no sense that
• 1:09:49
  we're having to structure these relationships without even
• 1:09:51
  getting this one right. So let's let's unify again as
• 1:09:56
  sort of a great America before we start trying to go to see
• 1:10:01
  what else is on the on the other side, right.
• 1:10:03
  I think I think this is going to be a huge opportunity to answer
• 1:10:06
  a lot of manufacturing in some parts of America and create a
• 1:10:10
  new trade sort of regime within the continent.
• 1:10:15
  Yeah, I, I'm 100% agree with you, man.
• 1:10:18
  And I'm already like, there's there's there's whispers and
• 1:10:22
  there's things that I'm hearing over here from family members in
• 1:10:28
  terms of opportunities already, you know, being opened up in
• 1:10:33
  Venezuela. And it's serious guys.
• 1:10:36
  Like I know that Trump was not exactly.
• 1:10:39
  And I he does this for strategic reasons.
• 1:10:41
  He wasn't very, you know, detailed in terms of when the
• 1:10:47
  reporters were asking him like, OK, so like, how do you plan to,
• 1:10:51
  like, control the country? And you had the director of the
• 1:10:57
  CIA, you know, visit about a week ago.
• 1:11:02
  So things are changing. Like, this is real.
• 1:11:04
  It's happening. And I remember asking, I think
• 1:11:09
  it was my father-in-law. I was like, hey, like, you know,
• 1:11:13
  like how they going along with this and he's like, Marisa, have
• 1:11:18
  you seen the video of, of, of, of the chavista like describing
• 1:11:23
  like basic like him just like he's like, like he's like, you
• 1:11:26
  don't understand, man. Like, like we started bleeding
• 1:11:29
  from our noses. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:31
  Like he's like, look, we were just so like they just killed
• 1:11:34
  everybody, you know, like, like it was, it was like we had we
• 1:11:39
  stood no chance whatsoever. And it kind of goes along with
• 1:11:44
  like the the way that my father-in-law was describing.
• 1:11:46
  He was like, he's like Nico, like they're scared shitless.
• 1:11:49
  Do you know what it is for Like all of a sudden they literally
• 1:11:53
  just kidnapped the president of the country and no one dies on
• 1:11:59
  the American side. Like, and it just happens in two
• 1:12:02
  hours. Like, do you know, like the fear
• 1:12:04
  of God that puts into people, Like, of course they're going to
• 1:12:08
  go along with everything, right? So, yeah, man.
• 1:12:12
  And I think it's also wise, the strategy that the US is
• 1:12:16
  implementing, like they learned from the past.
• 1:12:19
  Like one of the things because I, I think that this was like
• 1:12:22
  somewhat, this was somewhat unpopular.
• 1:12:26
  Like, like one of the questions that President Trump was asked
• 1:12:29
  was basically like, like, why don't you, you know, why don't
• 1:12:34
  you put the opposition in charge?
• 1:12:36
  And he's like, look, like, did we not learn from Iraq?
• 1:12:39
  Like, you know, you fired everybody who was in charge and
• 1:12:42
  they became ISIS, right? So like, this is like this
• 1:12:45
  transitionary period. But things are changing.
• 1:12:49
  Like, there is no doubt there. And I'm very, very hopeful for
• 1:12:53
  the future. And I also got to give credit
• 1:12:56
  where credit is due because in the press conference, this
• 1:12:59
  wasn't really like talked about shout out to our boy Marco
• 1:13:03
  Rubio, right? Because if you want to know who
• 1:13:07
  the architect is behind a lot of this guys, Trump, you got to
• 1:13:12
  give him credit 'cause he ultimately agreed and pulled the
• 1:13:15
  trigger. It's our boy Rubio, right?
• 1:13:17
  He's a Cuban American. The, the, the Miami metro area
• 1:13:25
  was one of the only areas in the 2024 election that voted right.
• 1:13:32
  Like usually cities, they don't vote right, right.
• 1:13:36
  But because of how many Venezuelans and Cubans that
• 1:13:40
  escaped communism live in the city, it voted a certain
• 1:13:44
  direction. So, you know, and Marco Rubio
• 1:13:47
  represents that community. Even Trump mentioned this during
• 1:13:50
  a press conference, right? So I'm equally as excited, man.
• 1:13:54
  I think there's going to be so many opportunities to go back,
• 1:13:58
  guys, like I was saying earlier, Venezuela is one of the
• 1:14:01
  prettiest countries on planet Earth, has some of the most
• 1:14:05
  beautiful beaches. You can't even imagine.
• 1:14:08
  It's just, it's just not it's, it's really not that well known,
• 1:14:11
  right, I'll say. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it is
• 1:14:16
  I'm, I'm starting to rewatch some of the videos and this and
• 1:14:18
  I was, I've been fortunate enough.
• 1:14:19
  I've been to to the Amazon Angel Falls, I've been to Roques, I've
• 1:14:22
  been to Margarita, I've been to the Medanos.
• 1:14:26
  Yeah, I've gone as far and as wide as across the country as I
• 1:14:30
  possibly can. And it is a stunning place with,
• 1:14:36
  with the right leadership. Venezuela's potential is I think
• 1:14:41
  is unmatched. And I agree with you on the on
• 1:14:46
  the topic of like the fear of God has been delivered to the
• 1:14:50
  Chavismo group, you know, for, for people, you know, maybe,
• 1:14:53
  maybe people haven't been watching as closely as we have.
• 1:14:56
  You had the director of the CIA land in Venezuela.
• 1:15:00
  This is 2-3 days ago or as I think it was like last Friday,
• 1:15:04
  the guy who was in the room with Trump watching Maduro get taken
• 1:15:08
  out, took a plane down to Caracas.
• 1:15:13
  It was greeted by the Venezuelan vice, the interim president,
• 1:15:17
  with smiles across their faces. And that guy that got like, so
• 1:15:24
  again, if a person like that who had a key role in taking on
• 1:15:29
  Moodle can freely land and walk in Venezuela and meet with the
• 1:15:32
  president, I think that tells you pretty clearly who's calling
• 1:15:35
  the shots, right? And you know, again, and it is
• 1:15:40
  it is going to take some time. Those guys are still the bad
• 1:15:43
  guys. They're still in in power
• 1:15:45
  technically, but I don't think they're going to get a, a free
• 1:15:50
  pass. I think, I think in due time,
• 1:15:53
  justice will come. It has to be gradual.
• 1:15:55
  The one difference I I have and that I wanted to mention, and
• 1:15:59
  again, this is funny because I'm, I'm Venezuela.
• 1:16:01
  My wife's was born in Venezuela and, and raised in Venezuela,
• 1:16:05
  but her, her dad is, is from Iran.
• 1:16:07
  He's Persian. So obviously the first week of
• 1:16:09
  January was crazy at my house because you had free Venezuela
• 1:16:14
  and now you had the uprisings in Iran.
• 1:16:17
  There's a big difference, though, between what happens in
• 1:16:20
  the Middle East and what happens in Venezuela, which is
• 1:16:22
  Venezuela. There's no religious fanatism.
• 1:16:25
  The, the Venezuela is, is a sort of communist ideology that was
• 1:16:32
  perpetuated by corruption and really just like abuse of power,
• 1:16:39
  right? And Venezuelans are just, we are
• 1:16:41
  so ready to shake that off and rebuild like our, our God
• 1:16:46
  doesn't change our allegiance to our faith doesn't, is not
• 1:16:49
  impacted by this. Our, our, our, our sort of world
• 1:16:53
  view isn't really impacted by this, which I think is a big
• 1:16:56
  difference when you compare it to a place where the government
• 1:17:00
  is religiously aligned. And a changing the government is
• 1:17:04
  more of an existential transition than just simply
• 1:17:08
  swapping the color of whoever's got the, the little P next to
• 1:17:11
  their name, the president, right?
• 1:17:13
  And so I, I think it's a big difference.
• 1:17:15
  I think a lot of people are sort of trying to draw analogies
• 1:17:17
  between Venezuela and Iraq. And, you know, look at what
• 1:17:21
  happened to Afghanistan. Look what happened to Iraq,
• 1:17:23
  right? Yes, those were messy.
• 1:17:26
  Those were not done culturally speaking.
• 1:17:29
  I don't think there was the right sort of strategy there.
• 1:17:32
  Venezuela is very different. Most people actually like
• 1:17:35
  America. Venezuela like they're, they're
• 1:17:38
  pro like I grew up before communism.
• 1:17:41
  I grew up watching USTV shows. I would go up to the US to
• 1:17:45
  vacation with many other Venezuelans.
• 1:17:48
  There were, my mom told me when she was young, Venezuela was so
• 1:17:51
  wealthy that there were wings in Miami hotels that the
• 1:17:56
  presidential suites, like they, they, they were entire hotel
• 1:17:59
  wings that were set aside for Venezuelans for like the VIPs or
• 1:18:02
  the high rollers. That's how much was taken away
• 1:18:07
  from the country. But I guess all this to say that
• 1:18:09
  I think that the, the ingredients in Venezuela are
• 1:18:14
  there to cook a delicious Stew, if that makes sense.
• 1:18:18
  If, if we, if we, you know, if we, if we warm it up right and
• 1:18:21
  we, we cook it right, that it could be great.
• 1:18:25
  But that's a very different set of circumstances than, say, like
• 1:18:28
  a Middle Eastern religiously aligned government, because it's
• 1:18:31
  completely different. 100% I mean the, the cultural
• 1:18:35
  similarity again, it's not exactly the same, but you know,
• 1:18:39
  but Venezuela's, I mean most popular sport is baseball,
• 1:18:44
  right, right. Like the cultural similarities
• 1:18:48
  between the United States and Venezuela are, are much more
• 1:18:53
  aligned than, you know, for, for example, a country in the Middle
• 1:18:57
  East, right. So the ability for, you know,
• 1:19:01
  I'm a great example of that for the ability for someone to
• 1:19:04
  assimilate. Maybe Miami's like kind of like
• 1:19:07
  this weird place. But anyhow, again, the, the
• 1:19:12
  ability for, for someone to immigrate to the United States
• 1:19:17
  with a, a, a, a Venezuelan background, you, you have a lot
• 1:19:21
  more cultural similarities with the United States than, for
• 1:19:25
  example, someone coming from the Middle East.
• 1:19:28
  And it, it's a totally different situation.
• 1:19:31
  I completely agree. And even in Miami, despite all
• 1:19:36
  the horrific things that happened, you know, if you go to
• 1:19:42
  Doral today, that was literally built by Venezuelans, right?
• 1:19:46
  It was parts of Miami, just like the Cubans before them that were
• 1:19:50
  built by Venezuelan immigrants, right?
• 1:19:54
  And the Cubans have been here a lot longer.
• 1:19:57
  But Cubans today in Miami, you know, some of the most
• 1:19:59
  successful businesses, some of the most successful
• 1:20:02
  entrepreneurs in Miami today are came from that Cuban, that Cuban
• 1:20:07
  immigration. Right, that again, we're fleeing
• 1:20:10
  communism. But what's really exciting about
• 1:20:13
  this is that that could all be coming to an end, right?
• 1:20:17
  Like I see Rubio and I see laser eyes, you know, and he's like,
• 1:20:21
  all right, you know, this is the opportunity.
• 1:20:23
  And that's what a lot of people don't understand.
• 1:20:26
  And you see President Trump like responding to a lot of these
• 1:20:30
  questions when they're like, so you going to Cuba next?
• 1:20:33
  And he's like, I'm not, I'm, I don't have to Like they were
• 1:20:36
  being propped up, you know, by this, this government.
• 1:20:40
  I like, I don't need to do anything like it's just going
• 1:20:42
  to, you know, fall on its own, right.
• 1:20:45
  So again, this is I think this is a huge victory for freedom.
• 1:20:51
  Nothing is perfect, nothing is goes 100% your way.
• 1:20:55
  But I will say, Mauricio, that things are looking good at the
• 1:20:59
  moment from my sources and from what I'm hearing that things are
• 1:21:03
  definitely heading in the right direction.
• 1:21:05
  I hope that they continue that way.
• 1:21:08
  And I think what's really holding it down is the fear.
• 1:21:11
  Like it's. Like but but they're slowly
• 1:21:16
  losing it. Nico Venezuelans are slowly
• 1:21:18
  losing fear. I, I think this is what scares
• 1:21:20
  the regime the most, is that all those years of repression to try
• 1:21:25
  to basically train Venezuelan muscle memory to not dare speak
• 1:21:29
  out against the regime, right? Because you see what would
• 1:21:31
  happen, you speak up against the regime, you get disappeared.
• 1:21:36
  Slowly this starting to change. And I want to give a huge kudos
• 1:21:42
  to the Venezuelan student bodies because it's the it's the, it's
• 1:21:48
  a student like student government.
• 1:21:52
  It's the student government bodies at the major universities
• 1:21:54
  in Venezuela, which have historically been the guys
• 1:21:58
  leading revolutions and social uprisings.
• 1:22:01
  Historically, it's been the student bodies of the main
• 1:22:05
  Venezuelan universities, mainly in Caracas, Que lo Nuercia,
• 1:22:08
  Central de Venezuela. The USOE is one of the major
• 1:22:12
  ones. This the the leaders of the
• 1:22:16
  student government of the USOE risk their lives.
• 1:22:20
  They've been risking their lives all last week and this week
• 1:22:25
  demanding the release of the political prisoners.
• 1:22:28
  Those guys standing in front of my camera saying that would not
• 1:22:34
  be here if Maduro hadn't been taken out there were there would
• 1:22:37
  be nobody saying these things, right?
• 1:22:40
  They're starting to come out and say do it.
• 1:22:42
  They're starting, they're starting.
• 1:22:43
  People are starting to congregate outside the prisons
• 1:22:46
  at night to demand the release of the political prisoners.
• 1:22:49
  Those people would have got dispersed by rubber or lead
• 1:22:52
  bullets few weeks ago because God forbid there's a there's a
• 1:22:57
  take that shows, you know, families awaiting the release of
• 1:23:03
  their unfairly jailed husbands, right?
• 1:23:07
  That's starting to change. I'm seeing more comedians.
• 1:23:12
  Comedians. If you would listen back to some
• 1:23:14
  of the comedians, they would joke because the way they would
• 1:23:17
  have to speak about the regime is they would make these
• 1:23:19
  baseball analogies. I don't know if you follow El
• 1:23:21
  Quatrico, but they would basically be like 4-2 guys
• 1:23:24
  playing, talking as if they were talking about baseball.
• 1:23:26
  It's like, oh man, the game's really bad right now.
• 1:23:29
  You know, we're down by 6. And then the other guy would be
• 1:23:31
  like, are we talking baseball? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're talking
• 1:23:33
  baseball. And so, but now the the same
• 1:23:37
  group of comedians went out and did this whole baseball analogy
• 1:23:41
  around the around what happened. It's just like, you know, I
• 1:23:45
  guess that's why they call them the Bronx Bombers.
• 1:23:47
  Like, like analogies, like very clearly talking about what had
• 1:23:51
  happened. And at the end of the of the
• 1:23:54
  skid where they where they always say, are we talking about
• 1:23:57
  baseball? And they always say, yeah, we're
• 1:23:58
  talking about baseball. The last one, they asked the
• 1:24:01
  guy, are we talking about baseball?
• 1:24:02
  And the guy said no. So again, even little things
• 1:24:06
  like that, like little things like that are huge signs.
• 1:24:12
  I'll tell you the other that you know, the Otha Al Cabrello or
• 1:24:14
  you're familiar Otha Al Cabrello most.
• 1:24:16
  OK, so the Otha Al Cabrello is like the world's worst villain,
• 1:24:22
  OK. Like, imagine the worst James
• 1:24:24
  Bond villain. This guy's twice as bad, OK?
• 1:24:28
  He's he's the guy that runs the thug like the, the, the Maduro's
• 1:24:32
  death squads and everything. He was a guy famous for
• 1:24:36
  ridiculing people's tweets every week.
• 1:24:38
  He had a show where he would put a board up and it would find
• 1:24:42
  these tweets against the Venezuelan government and he
• 1:24:44
  would basically ridicule and target people tweeting against
• 1:24:48
  the regime. He does this show that he does
• 1:24:51
  to do every every week. It's called El Mas Odado.
• 1:24:55
  Since Maduro has been taking out, he's done this show without
• 1:24:57
  an audience and an undisclosed location.
• 1:24:59
  But the most important sign that I've seen from this interviews
• 1:25:02
  is he was talking about the tweets one day and he's like,
• 1:25:06
  today, I'm not going to read the tweets because obviously because
• 1:25:09
  of what happened. But I still have my my
• 1:25:12
  collaborating patriots that have given me a lot of these great
• 1:25:15
  tweets. And the camera starts panning
• 1:25:18
  out to focus on the guys that are helping him.
• 1:25:22
  And he goes don't, don't, don't show them.
• 1:25:24
  Don't show them on the camera. Please don't show them on the
• 1:25:26
  camera. His eyes will get sinking panic.
• 1:25:29
  This is the guy that controls all the death squads.
• 1:25:32
  And this is the first time I've seen the other Al Cabello
• 1:25:35
  trembling. If you could see the guy was
• 1:25:39
  like shook and you that, that the people see that.
• 1:25:44
  People see that. And I, I trust Venezuelans
• 1:25:48
  because I've been there. I grew up there.
• 1:25:50
  I know the moral fiber that supports that culture.
• 1:25:54
  And I know this isn't going to be one of those Maduro's gone,
• 1:25:59
  but we continue. We're going to get those people
• 1:26:00
  out of there and we're going to rebuild this thing.
• 1:26:03
  It's going to be, it's going to be awesome. 100%, man, I'm I'm,
• 1:26:07
  I'm equally as bullish as you are.
• 1:26:11
  We're going to build a simply studio and Lohroques and it's
• 1:26:15
  going to be awesome right on the beach.
• 1:26:17
  Opti's going to be there and it's going to be fantastic and
• 1:26:23
  Manisto's going to be we're going to do an in, we're going
• 1:26:25
  to do an in studio recording in the simply studio on the beach.
• 1:26:30
  It's gonna be fantastic. It'd be great.
• 1:26:32
  It's gonna be good. Good time, good, good time.
• 1:26:34
  You know where I haven't been, bro?
• 1:26:35
  I remember because I again, I haven't been back in like 10
• 1:26:39
  years. But Ganaima, man, that that shit
• 1:26:44
  is people don't understand, you know, the movie, The, the
• 1:26:48
  balloon movie, The cartoon balloon movie.
• 1:26:53
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's based on that like
• 1:26:56
  geography, because it's very unique.
• 1:26:58
  It's like these giant mountains that come out of like out of
• 1:27:02
  like the earth basically, but they're flat on the top, right.
• 1:27:06
  So it did these plateaus and you don't see that anywhere, by the
• 1:27:11
  way. It's like very unique.
• 1:27:12
  And then that's where Angel Falls is.
• 1:27:15
  Angel Falls is the largest waterfall in the world, but it
• 1:27:17
  and it's and it's absolutely beautiful, man.
• 1:27:20
  So it's like you got beautiful beaches.
• 1:27:24
  Caracas was dope back in the day and yeah, man, I'm I'm very I'm
• 1:27:30
  very I'm very I'm very excited about the future event as well,
• 1:27:33
  and I hope things continue to trend in this direction.
• 1:27:36
  Anyways, guys, we're going to be right back just a bit.
• 1:27:38
  We're going to a bit. We're going to be talking about
• 1:27:40
  all things let in. I already see someone in the
• 1:27:42
  chat let in has been a lifesaver.
• 1:27:44
  Keep up the good work, gents. So I already see a fan in the
• 1:27:47
  chat. So are.
• 1:27:48
  We talking about all things let in right back after the break
• 1:27:53
  guys. Stay tuned and of course, smash
• 1:27:55
  that like. Button Here we go.
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  Yo, we're back. How you doing, Mauricio, guys?
• 1:29:58
  Well, let's talk about all things lead.
• 1:29:59
  And I want to talk about my own personal lead and experience.
• 1:30:04
  And Mauricio was very and Mauricio's a busy guy.
• 1:30:07
  Like I'm, I'm so happy he did this for me.
• 1:30:09
  But I'm, I'm, I'm sure he's used to this.
• 1:30:12
  But anyways, I, I, I run a Bitcoin business and obviously
• 1:30:17
  you don't want to sell your Bitcoin sometimes, right?
• 1:30:20
  But you, you want to, you want to tap into your Bitcoin
• 1:30:23
  somehow. And Leaden provides that.
• 1:30:27
  So essentially I was using an alternative service before
• 1:30:31
  Leaden. And I remember I hit up Mauricio
• 1:30:34
  and I'm sure he remembers this on Telegram.
• 1:30:35
  And I'm like, yo, dude, what's up?
• 1:30:38
  And he hand held me like a baby, like onto the platform.
• 1:30:43
  And one of the first things that I noticed, and I think you guys
• 1:30:48
  added this to your your advertising copy after I
• 1:30:51
  mentioned this to you. But one of the first things that
• 1:30:54
  I noticed was after switching to the platform is I took out a
• 1:30:58
  loan. So you you send your Bitcoin as
• 1:31:01
  collateral and you get your what happened to Modisu?
• 1:31:05
  Oh, there he is. You send your Bitcoin as
• 1:31:07
  collateral. You know, you get cash and as as
• 1:31:12
  as long as you maintain your loan to value ratio at a certain
• 1:31:16
  size, you're fine. But one of the first things that
• 1:31:18
  I noticed was that there are no monthly payments.
• 1:31:22
  So essentially you take out a Bitcoin loan you sent you, you,
• 1:31:26
  you, you send your Bitcoin, you cash in return.
• 1:31:29
  Your Bitcoin stays on the leaden platform, which has proof of
• 1:31:31
  reserves as collateral and the interest accumulates on that
• 1:31:36
  loan over time. But one of the things that
• 1:31:38
  happened, because I got super paranoid, obviously I don't want
• 1:31:41
  to lose my Bitcoin, is like, I messaged Mauricio.
• 1:31:44
  Maybe I even deleted the Telegram thing because I felt
• 1:31:46
  like stupid. I messaged Mauricio.
• 1:31:47
  I'm like, dude, like how do I make the payments?
• 1:31:51
  And Mauricio's like there are no payments.
• 1:31:55
  So it's fantastic. Like if you have, you know, some
• 1:31:59
  Bitcoin, you don't want to sell it.
• 1:32:01
  You're you want to huddle it, you're a Bitcoin business,
• 1:32:03
  you're thinking about long term, but you want to tap into it.
• 1:32:07
  You want to. And this is by the way, what
• 1:32:09
  the, this is how wealthy people tap into their wealth.
• 1:32:12
  By the way, like if you're Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or any of
• 1:32:16
  these people and you have a ton of stock, they don't go and sell
• 1:32:20
  that stock. What they do is they, you know,
• 1:32:23
  they take that stock, they basically take a loan against
• 1:32:27
  it, right? And essentially you're not doing
• 1:32:31
  exactly the same thing, but you're doing something very
• 1:32:33
  similar with your Bitcoin And it's a kind of like a winner,
• 1:32:38
  like everybody wins type of situation, which again, sounds
• 1:32:42
  way too good to be true in Fiat world.
• 1:32:46
  But in Bitcoin world it's, it's, it's not, you know, it's, it's
• 1:32:50
  not that crazy, right? In a world of alignment of
• 1:32:53
  incentives or, or, or incentives aligning.
• 1:32:57
  And it's, it's fantastic, man. And the Monistra we're, we're
• 1:33:01
  talking about this. When we were in Lugano, we, we
• 1:33:04
  had this awesome interview. We timed it perfectly when the
• 1:33:06
  sun was going down. It literally looked like Lord of
• 1:33:09
  the Rings. It was crazy how it turned out,
• 1:33:12
  but there's been so many stories for me.
• 1:33:15
  I used it for my business, but there's been so many stories in
• 1:33:19
  terms of how people are, you know, tapping into the wealth of
• 1:33:24
  their Bitcoin without having to sell it.
• 1:33:26
  And it's a very, very powerful tool.
• 1:33:28
  Now with all tools, you kind of have to know the lay of the
• 1:33:32
  land, right? You have to be careful in terms
• 1:33:36
  of, you know, don't put all your Bitcoin into collateral because
• 1:33:40
  again, Bitcoin has volatility. So you have to be responsible.
• 1:33:44
  You have to, you know, watch, you know, you have to watch your
• 1:33:47
  LTV. The leaden team will send you
• 1:33:49
  emails every once in a while, you know, if the volatility is
• 1:33:53
  is too up or too down. But it is a fantastic tool as a
• 1:33:58
  bitcoiner that you can use to hold your it's like have your
• 1:34:02
  cake and eat it too. You hold your Bitcoin without
• 1:34:06
  having to sell it, but you also are able to get cash out of it.
• 1:34:10
  It's fantastic. It's a great tool.
• 1:34:12
  And again, they have proof of reserves.
• 1:34:14
  So it's not a we, we spent the whole beginning of the show
• 1:34:17
  talking about the trust me bro situation that a lot of these
• 1:34:20
  governments have when it comes to custody and Bitcoin.
• 1:34:23
  It's like, yeah, we have 200,000 Bitcoin.
• 1:34:26
  OK. Do we have the at Like can we,
• 1:34:28
  can we verify this? No, you're going to have to
• 1:34:30
  trust me, bro. It's not a trust me bro type of
• 1:34:32
  situation. So yeah, I endorse it 100%.
• 1:34:38
  And it's not only because, you know, they, they partner with
• 1:34:40
  simply, but I use the product myself.
• 1:34:43
  That was one of the things too. I've been going on a dialogue
• 1:34:45
  for a while, but that was one of the things too, that Marisa was
• 1:34:47
  telling me. He's like, dude, take out a
• 1:34:49
  loan. You got to use the product.
• 1:34:51
  You got to use the product. I use the product.
• 1:34:53
  I I think I took out two more loans.
• 1:34:56
  So yeah, big. Fan No thank you man, I
• 1:34:59
  appreciate it and and a few threats to put on there like #1
• 1:35:03
  is you know I love Bitcoin education.
• 1:35:06
  I, I, I I've learned about Bitcoin largely through
• 1:35:09
  educators and and people putting out content and I love
• 1:35:13
  supporting. We let and collectively love
• 1:35:15
  supporting Bitcoin education. That said, when we're choosing
• 1:35:18
  who to work with to help us, you know, let the world know that we
• 1:35:23
  exist and what we do, we do want people to genuinely have used
• 1:35:28
  the product, understand it and know what it's about before
• 1:35:31
  going out there. And just like reading something
• 1:35:34
  of a page, right? Because to me, I, I don't, I
• 1:35:38
  don't want people to just pay lip service.
• 1:35:40
  I want people to actually believe in what it is that we do
• 1:35:43
  and find value in what it is that we do.
• 1:35:45
  Because in that point, your message lands a lot better than
• 1:35:50
  if you're just reading your people can tell right away.
• 1:35:53
  If you're just reading stuff and you don't believe in it, you
• 1:35:55
  never used it. And what I'm proud to say is
• 1:35:58
  everybody that you hear outside of Latin that is talking and
• 1:36:01
  promoting our products has at least once used the product.
• 1:36:05
  Most of them, I argue, if not all of them have active business
• 1:36:09
  with ladder because they find value in the business and they
• 1:36:11
  they use our loans to grow their business, but build a new
• 1:36:15
  studio. We're actually one of the things
• 1:36:18
  I'm most excited about 2026 is not it's Bitcoin treasury
• 1:36:22
  companies, but not the public ones, OK, Like the public ones
• 1:36:27
  are these financial engineering connections designed to acquire
• 1:36:32
  as much Bitcoin as possible, whatever that means and and
• 1:36:34
  borrow, you know, try to use financial engineering to get
• 1:36:37
  Bitcoin on the cheap. Those aren't the Bitcoin
• 1:36:40
  treasury companies I'm most excited about.
• 1:36:41
  What I'm most excited about is the landscapers that have
• 1:36:44
  Bitcoin on their balance sheet and they're using our loans to
• 1:36:47
  buy a second truck, right? I'm excited about the the
• 1:36:50
  healthcare provider, a guy that runs a dentist clinic that's
• 1:36:54
  taken out to do a dental to build a second dental location
• 1:36:57
  and another clinic. We're about to announce an
• 1:37:00
  exciting business that's using our loans again.
• 1:37:03
  We also love supporting businesses that use Lenin.
• 1:37:06
  So in some cases we've had businesses come to us to borrow
• 1:37:10
  and what they're doing is so amazing and so inspirational to
• 1:37:13
  us that we asked him, can we, can we Share your story?
• 1:37:16
  Like, can we bigger, can we be bigger partners of what you're
• 1:37:19
  doing? Can you, can we let the world
• 1:37:21
  know that you're using Lenin to grow your business?
• 1:37:24
  And many of them are excited about it.
• 1:37:25
  We're about to reveal one in El Salvador, which is going to be
• 1:37:29
  super exciting. It's, I think probably one of
• 1:37:31
  the most inspirational stories around Bitcoin, at least for me
• 1:37:34
  personally. And so I'm really, really
• 1:37:37
  excited to release that. And Nico, you and I actually
• 1:37:39
  have another one that came to us.
• 1:37:42
  I don't want, I don't want to spill the beans here because I
• 1:37:44
  think we're going to make an episode about that one too.
• 1:37:46
  But the, the, the things that people are using our loans for
• 1:37:50
  are so meaningful. It's, it's, I don't want to, I
• 1:37:54
  don't want to spill the beans, but we can clip this and put it
• 1:37:58
  back when we, when we speak to them.
• 1:38:00
  But it's, it's incredible the amount of things you can do
• 1:38:04
  when, when you just put the right product in front of the
• 1:38:07
  right person at the right time. And it's so, yeah, I don't mean
• 1:38:13
  it's hard for me to keep saying more without kind of spilling
• 1:38:15
  the beans on the on the businesses.
• 1:38:17
  But again, you know, we're helping so many private
• 1:38:20
  businesses. And by the way, Leton supports
• 1:38:22
  private businesses. If you're listening, you have a
• 1:38:23
  company and you want to onboard your company, we can do that
• 1:38:26
  too. So let us know.
• 1:38:28
  We're going to make that much better this year.
• 1:38:30
  But again, we do that today. We service many businesses.
• 1:38:34
  And I think it's going to, I think it's a trend that's going
• 1:38:37
  to increase even more because if you think about who's buying
• 1:38:40
  Bitcoin, like who's holding Bitcoin, if you think about
• 1:38:43
  who's broadly buying Bitcoin, especially when I speak to these
• 1:38:46
  clients, these are very educated people.
• 1:38:52
  We are no longer selling Bitcoin to random people on Reddit that
• 1:38:57
  show up with a hoodie, right? These are people that are very
• 1:39:00
  sophisticated. And I would argue that in some
• 1:39:04
  ways Bitcoin has become so such a great hedge, such a sort of
• 1:39:10
  the way it trades right now. It it, it no longer attracts the
• 1:39:15
  people that want to make wealth overnight, which it did in the
• 1:39:19
  past, but now we're no longer in that realm.
• 1:39:23
  I find that the people that are buying and holding Bitcoin and
• 1:39:26
  the people that see value in Lennox business are true long
• 1:39:29
  term Bitcoiners with sort of Austrian economic ideals around
• 1:39:33
  the basement, etcetera. And they see it as a long term
• 1:39:36
  investment. And more importantly, they have
• 1:39:37
  the patience to wait. Most of the people like not not
• 1:39:42
  everybody has the patience to wait.
• 1:39:43
  I would argue most people don't. And I think it's going to be
• 1:39:47
  more and more of the sophisticated sort of serious
• 1:39:51
  long term. I'll put in the work.
• 1:39:53
  I'll lower my time preference because I know that in the long
• 1:39:55
  term this works, right? That's just going to be our
• 1:39:58
  client. And I think those are the people
• 1:39:59
  that have businesses, businesses in particular.
• 1:40:02
  Businesses you're coming in every day, especially small
• 1:40:04
  business. You have to be precise,
• 1:40:06
  otherwise you get swallowed up by the big behemoths.
• 1:40:09
  So they care very much about how they manage Treasury.
• 1:40:12
  Right. And so more and more the people
• 1:40:15
  that are using our products are more mature, more sophisticated,
• 1:40:21
  more long term thinkers, right and that is who we cater to.
• 1:40:25
  This is why I think businesses are going to be a big investment
• 1:40:27
  and Paula from Tether agrees. I had it in the chat that we had
• 1:40:31
  in Lugano when we announced the investment like he agrees he
• 1:40:34
  thinks he sees a big opportunity and and small private businesses
• 1:40:38
  starting to adopt Bitcoin under treasury and they don't have
• 1:40:40
  access to the public markets. But guess what, you want to hear
• 1:40:44
  something crazy at Leonard you can borrow at 11 point 9/11 .9
• 1:40:48
  right now is our is our starting rate.
• 1:40:51
  But if you use, if you use the promo, it's a simply promo, by
• 1:40:54
  the way. You get 25 bits off, so you're
• 1:40:56
  at 1165 and guess what? Do you know how much it cost for
• 1:41:00
  Michael Dubaro, STRC from the market right now?
• 1:41:05
  Michael uses SDRC to source dollars to buy Bitcoin.
• 1:41:08
  How much money does, how much interest does Michael pay on his
• 1:41:11
  dollars, 11, 11 and that's the headline rate.
• 1:41:18
  There's administrative costs in there, there's issuing fees,
• 1:41:21
  etcetera. So the cost at which Michael's
• 1:41:24
  sourcing dollars and the cost at which you can source dollars
• 1:41:27
  through Leadin are not that far off.
• 1:41:31
  Again, they're not identical products, OK, SDRC and borrowing
• 1:41:35
  from Lenin are not one for one equal, but they're very similar
• 1:41:39
  in that both are supplying dollars using Bitcoin as
• 1:41:42
  collateral or to buy Bitcoin. And so the sort of the, the
• 1:41:47
  evenness at which like let's just say you're a private
• 1:41:50
  company and you need liquidity, like the difference, the rate at
• 1:41:55
  which you're borrowing those dollars.
• 1:41:56
  Again, it's not that different than what Michael has to pay for
• 1:41:59
  SCRC. And I think these rates are
• 1:42:01
  going to keep coming down. That's our job.
• 1:42:03
  This is all we do. And I know people say, well,
• 1:42:05
  then rates, your rates are high like it is, it is, it is a
• 1:42:09
  product of our cost of capital and it is a product of our
• 1:42:12
  strategic decisions. There is cheaper money out
• 1:42:15
  there. They just, we're just not
• 1:42:17
  comfortable with it. We could never get comfortable
• 1:42:20
  with it with people that we hypothecate and don't share
• 1:42:23
  financials so we can assess anything or they're not.
• 1:42:25
  They don't agree to keep the collateral on chain or they
• 1:42:28
  don't agree to legally ring fence it so that we're legally
• 1:42:31
  protected in the case of bankruptcy of any of our
• 1:42:33
  partners. If you don't meet those clauses,
• 1:42:36
  I don't care if your money is free.
• 1:42:39
  Does that make sense? Because we've seen what happens
• 1:42:41
  when you just, when your North Star is just lowering the rate
• 1:42:44
  at the expense of the safety or at the expense of your risk
• 1:42:47
  management. We've been here for now 8, we're
• 1:42:51
  running on eight years and I want to run another eight.
• 1:42:54
  I want to run another 80. I want this thing to outlive all
• 1:42:56
  of us, right? And that we weren't going to get
• 1:42:59
  there if we're just trying to cut corners and lower the price,
• 1:43:01
  right? Like we will lower the price
• 1:43:03
  responsibly as we have from day one, right?
• 1:43:07
  But you, the, the commitment from Latin is he will not cut
• 1:43:11
  corners. We will not cut corners.
• 1:43:14
  We will not sacrifice risk management for anything, for
• 1:43:19
  anything, even if it's painful, because we have to compete
• 1:43:24
  around the time when Celsius was throwing out money at 1%, OK.
• 1:43:28
  There will be at times things in the market that do not make
• 1:43:31
  sense. And a lot of people look at it
• 1:43:36
  and they'll say, well, I want to take advantage of that because
• 1:43:38
  this is a dislocation that I'm seeing in the market.
• 1:43:43
  Those dislocations for sure will not last forever.
• 1:43:46
  And the problem is you don't know how those dislocations will
• 1:43:49
  resolve themselves. It may be that the dislocation
• 1:43:52
  is that the company offering you the service went belly up.
• 1:43:57
  And it was great while you were taking that sweet 1% money.
• 1:43:59
  But what was the cost of that 1% money?
• 1:44:02
  At the end of the day, you lost you all your Bitcoin.
• 1:44:05
  And so with Lenin, you always know you're getting the safest
• 1:44:09
  place in town. Like this is the most trusted,
• 1:44:11
  resilient and the time proven like platform to do what we do
• 1:44:16
  and that that fills us with pride and we think of it as a MO
• 1:44:21
  but, but, and, and it is, you know, it is.
• 1:44:24
  I had a client actually that that I spoke with for a very
• 1:44:29
  long time, I think earlier last week.
• 1:44:31
  And he was, he was talking to me about like, you know, he was
• 1:44:34
  getting offers from some other companies at a lower rate.
• 1:44:38
  And I asked, did you know what they're doing with your
• 1:44:39
  collateral? He says, well, it's not.
• 1:44:42
  They don't have proof of reserves.
• 1:44:43
  And I'm like, can I at least tell you whether it's in custody
• 1:44:46
  or not? They can't.
• 1:44:49
  So, so I kind of kind of walked them through how it is that
• 1:44:54
  people can get cheaper loans because you could just sell the
• 1:44:56
  Bitcoin collateral and give somebody the money and buy a
• 1:44:59
  call option and try to figure out you will get, you'll take a
• 1:45:03
  huge risk, but mathematically you can offer a lower price.
• 1:45:06
  So once I broke down the whole thing and, and, and he went and
• 1:45:09
  asked all the questions, he came back and was like, you guys are
• 1:45:14
  you guys don't charge enough, right?
• 1:45:15
  Like he's like, he's like, you're right, you're right.
• 1:45:16
  I don't think your rates are sensitive anymore.
• 1:45:18
  Because now I understand, right? And this isn't to say that
• 1:45:23
  Lenin's the only game in town, but the reason we are the way we
• 1:45:26
  are, there's a good reason for how why we are the way we are,
• 1:45:29
  which is we are optimizing for resilience and longevity.
• 1:45:34
  We're not optimizing for our numbers this quarter.
• 1:45:38
  We're a private, we're a business like everyone else.
• 1:45:39
  We're going to make profit. But for us, it's survival and
• 1:45:43
  longevity is way more important than what we do next quarter,
• 1:45:47
  right And. So absolutely, and and and I
• 1:45:49
  just want to you know, but I want to emphasize that that
• 1:45:53
  point, right, which is the reason that what you guys
• 1:45:58
  perceive as oh, these rates are more expensive.
• 1:46:02
  No, no, the reason that the other, and I don't want to name
• 1:46:06
  any names, but the reason other entities, right, that offer
• 1:46:10
  similar service is cheaper is because they cut corners on
• 1:46:14
  certain things, right? That's why they're able to
• 1:46:16
  provide what you perceive as as as a cheaper loan.
• 1:46:21
  But as Celsius showed, right, at the end of the day, you are
• 1:46:27
  giving up custody of your Bitcoin.
• 1:46:29
  This is what people have to understand.
• 1:46:31
  So it's like, yeah, you might get a cheaper loan on paper, but
• 1:46:35
  what does that matter if the company goes belly up, goes
• 1:46:39
  bankrupt, right? Like was, you know, getting that
• 1:46:43
  loan at what, 5%, you know, artificially because that's the
• 1:46:49
  only way they're able to finance it, right?
• 1:46:51
  Like this is what people have to understand.
• 1:46:52
  Was it really worth giving up your your your your custody of
• 1:46:56
  your Bitcoin to pay that quote, UN quote 5% loan where if that
• 1:46:59
  company goes under like you lose your Bitcoin entirely, right,
• 1:47:05
  that that's going to cost you way more than that.
• 1:47:07
  You know, then what you perceive it to be another very another
• 1:47:13
  feature that I've used your product so much at this point
• 1:47:15
  that I know it from like the back of my hand.
• 1:47:18
  Another very interesting feature too, is you can refinance the
• 1:47:22
  loan, right? So all you do, you go to your
• 1:47:25
  leaden dashboard, you can refinance it.
• 1:47:28
  I think I've refinanced one of my loans like 3 or 4 times the
• 1:47:31
  last, you know, six months or so because the interest rates have
• 1:47:34
  been going down, right? So you're able to get a lower
• 1:47:38
  interest rate, right. So that's another like that's
• 1:47:41
  another aspect of it too is that, you know, you just stay on
• 1:47:46
  top of the dashboard, stay on top of what's going on.
• 1:47:50
  You can refinance the loan. You could do it like
• 1:47:52
  instantaneously, right? And it like resets the clock
• 1:47:55
  too. It's pretty cool.
• 1:47:57
  But I do want to do want to give a shout out to some of these
• 1:47:59
  comments. Can I have a dollar that says
• 1:48:02
  thank you simply Bitcoin for letting me know about Leaden
• 1:48:06
  Florida Swamp monkey said dude is going to give us a special
• 1:48:09
  code for 5%. There already is a special code
• 1:48:12
  not for 5% off, but I think it's like .25, but go check it out
• 1:48:19
  will since 79. So that just got my first loan
• 1:48:22
  through Leadin. Thank you to simply Bitcoin and
• 1:48:24
  Leadin. Now here's to Mauricio, bro.
• 1:48:26
  Mauricio is the one that built it.
• 1:48:29
  Let me see will Leadin alter existing loans to be competitive
• 1:48:34
  with the new Bitcoin back loans coming to market?
• 1:48:37
  I mean, I, I kind of already answered that question.
• 1:48:41
  What else? I'm waiting for the interest
• 1:48:43
  rates to hit 5. You're going to be waiting for a
• 1:48:45
  long time, my friend. Can I transfer a a leaden loan
• 1:48:50
  to another company? So yeah, I did the opposite.
• 1:48:54
  So I transferred a A loan from one company to leaden.
• 1:48:59
  But it's not like it's not within the platform.
• 1:49:03
  You have to like pay off the loan and then so, but like
• 1:49:09
  ultimately you're like it, It's not like it's pretty painless
• 1:49:13
  because it you're not really, you're just moving things
• 1:49:15
  around, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
• 1:49:19
  What else? I saw 7% on another platform is
• 1:49:25
  26th a year of Bitcoin back loans.
• 1:49:27
  So that's a good question. What is you?
• 1:49:29
  I, I, I think so. And, and just on the comment
• 1:49:31
  around the, the rates that, that we were just discussing, this is
• 1:49:35
  just more like a broad comment, right?
• 1:49:38
  MicroStrategy is, I think it's the second largest company in
• 1:49:42
  Bitcoin or third maybe after tethered Coinbase.
• 1:49:46
  They're paying 11% on SDRC. So you could, you could
• 1:49:51
  literally lend dollars to Michael Saylor right now at 11%.
• 1:49:56
  If anyone's willing to lend you dollars for less than that, you
• 1:50:01
  should really ask yourself who's behind those dollars and why are
• 1:50:06
  those dollars not trying to get competitive rates?
• 1:50:08
  Because why? Again, just incentive wise, why
• 1:50:15
  would anyone be happy to get 5% on their dollars when they could
• 1:50:21
  be getting 11 on a arguably on a public listed US vehicle that is
• 1:50:28
  buying Bitcoin with it and has the longest track record of
• 1:50:32
  doing this? And so again, the outlier here
• 1:50:37
  isn't Michael or our rates or broadly speaking rates of other
• 1:50:42
  Tier 1 lenders that you will see out there.
• 1:50:45
  The outlier is this lower rates, right?
• 1:50:49
  Like it's the, it's the sevens and whatever it is that you're
• 1:50:52
  seeing, because that's the one that doesn't make sense.
• 1:50:55
  You know, why would anyone be getting it in a free open market
• 1:50:59
  that we where there's an option to get 11.
• 1:51:03
  If you're getting anything less than that, you're like, if it's
• 1:51:06
  a fund doing that and I have money in that fund, you know,
• 1:51:11
  think put yourself in the shoes of the guys with the dollars,
• 1:51:14
  right? Like are you going to be giving
• 1:51:16
  it out of five when you can get 11?
• 1:51:19
  Like why would you ever do that? There's more, there's more to
• 1:51:22
  the story, right? And This is why This is why the,
• 1:51:26
  you know, the Celsius stuff which was happening, right?
• 1:51:29
  We could, we could talk about companies that are dead right.
• 1:51:33
  The Celsius, This is why the Celsius guys were so cheap is
• 1:51:36
  because they were, they were able to monetize in a different
• 1:51:39
  way right in the back end. And then they were able to offer
• 1:51:42
  you an artificial right. But like it wasn't, it wasn't
• 1:51:47
  sustainable through the market, right?
• 1:51:50
  And I've, I've had this conversation with Mauricio all
• 1:51:52
  the time. It's like, again, not to name
• 1:51:54
  any names and not to be specific with any companies we love, we
• 1:51:58
  love everybody. But it, it's like they're able
• 1:52:03
  to do this. They're Mauricio's Mauricio.
• 1:52:09
  The way that Mauricio approaches it is by being blunt and showing
• 1:52:12
  you the, the, the, the reality. And then the way that a lot of
• 1:52:16
  these other platforms do it is that they're able to advertise
• 1:52:21
  you a certain rate, but you guys don't understand what's
• 1:52:24
  happening behind the scenes in order for that to be
• 1:52:27
  economically viable for them. I'll, I'll put it to you.
• 1:52:30
  I'll, I'll, I'll describe it to you that way.
• 1:52:33
  But I, we do have some questions.
• 1:52:35
  Jeff Sami says one year terms are not a long, long term.
• 1:52:38
  You can literally refinance it and reset the loan and make it
• 1:52:42
  more than one year. Another one that I saw was quite
• 1:52:47
  interesting. What are the qualifications?
• 1:52:51
  There are no qualifications, so you don't.
• 1:52:55
  Need. Yeah, it's.
• 1:52:56
  Just having Bitcoin, you put your Bitcoin as collateral.
• 1:53:00
  That is the only qualification. One of the things that I love
• 1:53:02
  about the Leaden platform too is the very small amounts.
• 1:53:06
  So the minimum loan amount is only 500 and you guys are super
• 1:53:11
  international, so a lot of other, not to name any names.
• 1:53:16
  We love everybody here. A lot of companies aren't
• 1:53:19
  international, they're just US focused, right?
• 1:53:22
  So I think that part is super bad ass because at the end of
• 1:53:26
  the day, we are financially privileged.
• 1:53:28
  If you live in the West, you are financially privileged.
• 1:53:32
  That's just a reality. Like even if you're not on the
• 1:53:36
  upper echelon of the economic scale, the fact that you live in
• 1:53:40
  a Western country with a relatively stable Fiat currency
• 1:53:46
  already gives you a tremendous amount of privilege.
• 1:53:48
  Most people in the global S, they do not have that.
• 1:53:52
  So I love that you guys focus. And again, from an ROI
• 1:53:55
  perspective, it's a lot easier for you guys to focus on much
• 1:53:58
  bigger fish than it is for you guys to smoke focus on, you
• 1:54:02
  know, people that are taking smaller loans.
• 1:54:03
  So there are no qualifications. Do you have Bitcoin?
• 1:54:06
  That's pretty much the only qualification.
• 1:54:08
  And and past KYC because we are a regulated business.
• 1:54:11
  So that's, you know, comes with the territory of being
• 1:54:14
  regulated. So yeah, you do have to pass
• 1:54:16
  KYC. But after that it's just having
• 1:54:19
  Bitcoin, right? There's no, we don't look at
• 1:54:21
  your credit score. We don't ask you for the last 12
• 1:54:24
  months pay stubs or a letter, employment confirmation or
• 1:54:28
  references from three people that know you for more than 10
• 1:54:31
  years. Like none of that stuff applies.
• 1:54:33
  It's just are you, can you complete KYC?
• 1:54:36
  Are you in a country we can service?
• 1:54:37
  And do you have Bitcoin? I I when I signed up for my let
• 1:54:41
  in loan, I had to get a letter from Opti.
• 1:54:45
  I don't know what happened but muddy still messaged me.
• 1:54:48
  He's like, I can't accept this unless I get a letter from Opti.
• 1:54:50
  No, I'm just kidding. But no pass KYC and do you have
• 1:54:54
  Bitcoin for the collateral Now these are really interesting
• 1:54:56
  questions. Which is what is your
• 1:54:58
  recommended loan to value ratio to be sure to avoid a flash
• 1:55:02
  margin call. They are pretty good with like
• 1:55:06
  notifying you via e-mail, but I think it's 70% you're in the
• 1:55:10
  danger zone, right, Mauricio? Correct.
• 1:55:13
  So the way letting the way we we structure our loans is it starts
• 1:55:17
  at 50% loan to value. As the price drops, your LTV
• 1:55:21
  goes higher and the the notifications for you to send
• 1:55:25
  additional Bitcoin start at 70% LTV and the automated
• 1:55:29
  liquidation happens when it reaches 80% LTV.
• 1:55:32
  Now we do many things to a filter any sort of exchange
• 1:55:38
  specific flash crashes and we also try to make it as easy as
• 1:55:45
  possible. I think we have the sort of
• 1:55:46
  industry leading number of options and and loan management
• 1:55:51
  and ways in which you can protect your loan.
• 1:55:53
  So first, maybe I'll take a second to to kind of talk about
• 1:55:56
  how we filter out exchange specific crashes.
• 1:56:00
  Because sometimes you'll see in the news that Binance's matching
• 1:56:03
  engine went down and the buy and the price of Bitcoin and Binance
• 1:56:06
  went down to like, I don't know, 60K or ridiculous number for
• 1:56:09
  like 1/2 minute or the same where it happened at Kraken or
• 1:56:12
  potentially Coinbase or whatever.
• 1:56:14
  So how does that make sure that we don't pick up any of these
• 1:56:16
  exchange specific price moves is we are connected to a series of
• 1:56:23
  liquidity providers which are then connected to a series of
• 1:56:26
  vetted exchanges. So overall I would say we're
• 1:56:29
  connected to probably 15 plus world class exchanges.
• 1:56:33
  And every minute, the way the way our system works is we're
• 1:56:37
  always pulling the prices from every single vetted exchange and
• 1:56:42
  making sure we're surfacing the best price out of all exchanges
• 1:56:47
  so that we can place a trade ad or determine the price of the
• 1:56:50
  collateral based on that level. What this does is that if
• 1:56:54
  there's an issue at say Binance, the Binance price will not get
• 1:56:58
  surfaced. It'll be any other exchange.
• 1:57:00
  If and again, from exchange specific issues, we filter them
• 1:57:04
  by aggregating and surfacing the best price across the industry.
• 1:57:07
  So that makes sure that you don't get liquidated because
• 1:57:10
  whatever Binance engine went down.
• 1:57:11
  So that that's how we ensure that the sort of exchange
• 1:57:14
  specific glitches don't don't come back and hurt somebody in
• 1:57:18
  the letter price feed. The second thing we do is, yes,
• 1:57:22
  of course sometimes the move can be market wide, right?
• 1:57:25
  Like it's not an issue with Point Binas, not an issue with
• 1:57:27
  Coinbase. Is that the price actually
• 1:57:29
  tagged 10%? Because because people just went
• 1:57:33
  out and made a big sell At Lenin.
• 1:57:36
  We have a feature called auto top up.
• 1:57:39
  And auto top up was built because a lot of our clients
• 1:57:42
  were taking out these loans and they were going out on these
• 1:57:46
  hiking trips. OK, so I'm not going to bring my
• 1:57:49
  my hardware wallet with me. I'm going to be away from my
• 1:57:51
  computer for a month and I don't want to get margin called.
• 1:57:53
  What can I do now? And so at first they started
• 1:57:57
  over collateralizing their loan. So we would allow them to over
• 1:57:59
  collateralize their loans. And then when they came back
• 1:58:01
  from their trip, if the loan was healthy, we would allow them to
• 1:58:03
  rebalance back the Bitcoin so that they were covered while
• 1:58:07
  they were away. But we built a feature called
• 1:58:11
  auto top up that anyone could use at any time where you can
• 1:58:14
  park extra Bitcoin on your Latin account in the transaction
• 1:58:17
  account within Latin, which sits in bit go cold storage at all
• 1:58:20
  times. It does not move.
• 1:58:21
  It's just there for to manage your loan.
• 1:58:23
  And in each one of your loans, you're going to see a button, a
• 1:58:26
  little radio button on the right hand side of the screen that
• 1:58:28
  says auto top up. You can turn that button on.
• 1:58:31
  And what that does is it tells our system that if and when
• 1:58:35
  price drops and your loan needs Bitcoin, you're pre authorizing
• 1:58:39
  let him to move that extra Bitcoin from the transaction
• 1:58:41
  account to the loan in real time so that you don't have to wake
• 1:58:44
  up at 2:00 AM and do it or go find your hardware wallet in the
• 1:58:48
  middle of the night. And so we try to do and equally
• 1:58:52
  the other thing we do at Lenin is we make it very easy for you
• 1:58:55
  to redeem any excess collateral if the market wants, the market
• 1:58:59
  corrects, right. So there's a lot of times people
• 1:59:01
  are are nervous to send more Bitcoin into the loan because
• 1:59:03
  they're saying they're thinking to themselves, when can I ever
• 1:59:06
  get it back right? Like what if like even if the
• 1:59:09
  price recovers tomorrow, can I get it back?
• 1:59:11
  So at Lenin, if the, once the LTV recovers and your loan LTV
• 1:59:15
  drops below 30% or 40%, if you're, if you're in the private
• 1:59:20
  wealth tier, you can redeem the excess Bitcoin, right?
• 1:59:23
  And so again, that those are things that we, we want to make
• 1:59:27
  super, super easy because the last thing you want to be, we
• 1:59:32
  don't want people to be nervous during a mark a fast moving
• 1:59:35
  market. We want people to know exactly
• 1:59:37
  what to do. Hopefully have planned before.
• 1:59:40
  I already have the playbook and just they get up and they
• 1:59:42
  execute or the system executes for you if you want to move the
• 1:59:45
  Bitcoin from the transaction account to the loan
• 1:59:47
  automatically. But it's a reality of our
• 1:59:49
  business because of volatile asset.
• 1:59:51
  We don't shy away from that. We embrace it and we try to
• 1:59:54
  build the tools to help you manage.
• 1:59:56
  Absolutely one one of these questions too is what's your
• 2:00:02
  recommended percentage of total stack to feel safe without
• 2:00:05
  getting margin called? Oof, it's a good, it's a great
• 2:00:08
  question. I would say, you know, I, I've
• 2:00:11
  run models for loans, you know, I've run this one particular
• 2:00:15
  model that I've run for somebody that take a loan on January 2020
• 2:00:19
  and basically kept alone until today and had to survive the
• 2:00:23
  March 2020 crash and the FDX crash and all these other
• 2:00:28
  things. Everything the market's thrown
• 2:00:30
  at at Bitcoin. The math I get if you, if you
• 2:00:33
  run, if you want to go by the model, you should have at least
• 2:00:37
  half of the initial collateral available to top up, right.
• 2:00:41
  And so I, I would, I would say to people that like anything
• 2:00:44
  between, you know, 30%, the sort of the sweet spot, like you
• 2:00:49
  could, you could probably take it to 50% if, if you feel
• 2:00:51
  comfortable that way, but I would certainly not do the full
• 2:00:54
  stack. Please don't.
• 2:00:56
  And I would try to keep it to less than half so that you,
• 2:00:59
  you're not put in a corner. Let the last thing you want is
• 2:01:02
  like when you're watching the price to when you're basically
• 2:01:06
  glued to your phone watching the price.
• 2:01:09
  Your loan is too big. If if if that makes sense.
• 2:01:12
  You should have it enough such that you can feel comfortably
• 2:01:16
  that you're just not going to be subject to.
• 2:01:18
  It's not a move in price should not alter your behavior or your
• 2:01:22
  plan. And so set it up measured in a
• 2:01:25
  way that you won't be glued to your phone.
• 2:01:28
  If you have to send an equal amount of collateral, you can do
• 2:01:30
  so and it's not going to be a material impact to you.
• 2:01:34
  Different people in different circumstances will look
• 2:01:36
  obviously approach it based on what they need, but I would say
• 2:01:39
  in a perfect world I would I would keep more than double what
• 2:01:44
  I've put in as initial collateral to to service a loan
• 2:01:47
  just so that you don't have to really be stressed during the
• 2:01:49
  loan. Absolutely.
• 2:01:51
  I, I, I would my, my, my base, my like my mental model.
• 2:01:56
  Mauricio is basically, are you able to survive an 80% drawdown
• 2:02:02
  that that's really like in my, in my mind, I'm like, if I'm
• 2:02:06
  able to survive like, and you could do this like you guys got
• 2:02:09
  that little slider. It's pretty cool.
• 2:02:11
  Sure. Are you able to survive an 80%
• 2:02:15
  drawdown in Bitcoin? If you're able to do, are you
• 2:02:19
  able to survive it and feel comfortable?
• 2:02:21
  If you are, then you're within your means.
• 2:02:25
  As Mauricio said, if you're sweating bullets, you know, on
• 2:02:29
  the Bitcoin price, you probably took too large out, right?
• 2:02:35
  You know, but that's my that's my rule of thumb is are you able
• 2:02:39
  to survive an 80% draw? Are you able to collateralize
• 2:02:44
  alone if there's an 80% draw down in Bitcoin?
• 2:02:47
  If you are, you're good. I think if, if you aren't, I
• 2:02:52
  think that's where you know, but, but again, everyone has a
• 2:02:56
  different risk tolerance. For me, I'm, I have two kids,
• 2:03:00
  I'm too old. I don't want to lose my Bitcoin.
• 2:03:07
  No, it's. And listen, don't get me wrong.
• 2:03:10
  Like, I mean, obviously the, the another, another person sitting
• 2:03:14
  here might tell you, oh, use all your stack.
• 2:03:16
  It's so great. Like don't worry about it
• 2:03:18
  because obviously that's more loans, but we're not in it to
• 2:03:22
  maximize the immediate loan. We can get from you or anyone
• 2:03:25
  watching this. This is not the goal.
• 2:03:27
  The goal is for you not to get wrecked because we know that if
• 2:03:31
  you plan properly, you take out a loan and Bitcoin does what it
• 2:03:35
  we know it's going to do. If you size it appropriately,
• 2:03:38
  you manage it appropriately, you're going to walk out a year
• 2:03:41
  plus later very happy about the decision you took.
• 2:03:45
  If I, if, if we put out different messaging and we
• 2:03:49
  encourage people to Max out their leverage and then the a
• 2:03:52
  sudden price move comes and they get liquidated, they're,
• 2:03:55
  they're, they're gone. And so I don't, I, yeah, we made
• 2:03:58
  money on that loan, but I don't want to make money.
• 2:04:00
  Like, I don't think the right thing is to give people the
• 2:04:03
  wrong ideas so that they could just trade and put in
• 2:04:06
  transactions. I think what I want to do is
• 2:04:08
  tell you what I think is a responsible way to do it.
• 2:04:11
  And see you come in with a much smaller loan today.
• 2:04:14
  Take that, do well and your Bitcoin 10 years from now, I
• 2:04:17
  think it's going to be worth 10 times what it's worth today.
• 2:04:19
  So I want to win your business as a client for a decade, right?
• 2:04:25
  Like, and I know that if you get the first loan done right in the
• 2:04:27
  2nd and the third, you're probably going to continue doing
• 2:04:31
  it because it worked. For you.
• 2:04:32
  Addicting as fuck bro. If it weren't, listen, if you do
• 2:04:36
  it right, it's like going to the gym, right?
• 2:04:38
  Like after a while, going to the gym becomes addictive and it's
• 2:04:40
  good for you. And it's like as long as you can
• 2:04:42
  use the things for the way they're meant to be used and
• 2:04:45
  they're generating benefit to you, get addicted.
• 2:04:48
  Like if you're, you know what I'm saying, like getting
• 2:04:49
  addicted to the gym is a good thing.
• 2:04:50
  Like people talk about the bad addictions.
• 2:04:52
  They don't talk about what the kind of good addictions, which
• 2:04:55
  you know, it's, I mean, obviously there's there's a
• 2:04:57
  caveat there, but there's you can use obsession for good.
• 2:05:01
  Yeah, absolutely. It's a great tool.
• 2:05:03
  That you can use. Again, for you not to have to
• 2:05:07
  sell your Bitcoin like it's, it's a great, great tool.
• 2:05:11
  I highly recommend. And Mauricio, thank you so much
• 2:05:15
  for joining us on the show today.
• 2:05:17
  Absolutely love this RIP. It was fantastic.
• 2:05:20
  It was epic. Love you having on on the show.
• 2:05:24
  Please stick around for a second and yeah guys love you guys
• 2:05:28
  smash the like button. Consider subscribing.
• 2:05:30
  We'll see you guys tomorrow. Today's episode was brought to
• 2:05:36
  you by bitcoinwell.com, a Bitcoin only platform on a
• 2:05:39
  mission to enable financial independence.