Summary
➡ The discussion evaluates the global socio-economic conditions in context of money printing and debt. The speakers highlighted movements like Occupy Wall Street and the shift in public perception towards central bankers. They additionally remarked on the impact of systemic fraud, bemoaning the fact that the US economy is largely centered around it. The conversation also touched upon first mover advantages in adopting financial changes, noting El Salvador’s innovative stance on Bitcoin. The importance of El Salvador’s success as a prototype for cryptocurrency was stressed for the potential global impact it bears.
➡ The text discusses the detrimental societal impacts of the system of legal plunder, highlighting its role in disrupting peace and security for people over many years. The author applauds changes in El Salvador under President Bukelli’s leadership, focusing on economic freedom, bitcoin adoption, and the creation of public goods, likens it to the Renaissance in Florence. The long-term success of these changes is facilitated by a shift in the perception of the country and the end of dependence on the IMF. The author encourages patience with progress and highlights the necessary changes to societal expectations due to the instabilities of the fiat money system.
➡ El Salvador, under the leadership of President Bukele, has made significant strides, such as adopting bitcoin as legal tender and driving comprehensive social reforms. Despite global criticism, Bukele’s approach is both transformative and unprecedented, with some likening his rare leadership style to legendary figures in history. This uniquely successful approach attracted many people, evidenced by the increasing immigration to El Salvador. Comparisons are drawn to the long-term vision Medici had for Florence, suggesting Bukele’s current initiatives may not bear full fruit within his lifetime.
➡ The above discussion revolves around El Salvador’s shift towards more freedom, attracting entrepreneurs and businesses interested in Bitcoin. It elaborates on the country’s initiatives like the ‘Freedom Passport’, granting citizenship for a $1 million donation, making it easy for foreigners to move and start a business. The President has managed to reshape the country, reducing gang dominance, and promoting economic liberty. They anticipate attracting Bitcoin early adopters, ‘whales’, and billionaires looking to make an impact. Risks discussed include potential political changes.
➡ The text discusses the simultaneous launch of ETFs from various financial institutions, a highly unusual occurrence that suggests a politicized agenda. A regulation that only allows the public to own ETFs could lead to a situation where people who want to self-custody Bitcoin move to countries like El Salvador. Furthermore, the possibility of Bitcoin being outlawed or heavily regulated in the form of a security is considered, though this is viewed as unlikely given its decentralized nature. The text concludes by noting Bitcoin’s perdurance, drawing from natural human trade behaviors, and suggests that governments trying to control it will inevitably fail.
➡ The speakers appreciate the progressive steps being taken in El Salvador, relating it to a competition and encouraging support for the country’s advancement. They highlight the opportunity to obtain El Salvadorian citizenship via an investment of $1 million which offers a chance for personal freedom. They emphasize the importance of legacy and contributing to something larger that will significantly impact future generations. The conversation concludes with a call to action to adopt El Salvador.
Transcript
There’s a lot more social unrest, and I think that’s what we would attribute to the fiat money system and the central banking system more than any political aspect, this is really the result of all this money printing. All right, here we go. Max and Stacey, the now, I don’t know, is it official or unofficial tourism board of El Salvador? I got a lot to talk about. I’m excited that you’ve taken the time to sit down and talk with me.
So thank you for that. I want to talk about El Salvador, obviously, something I’ve been super excited about, which is like, this passport system. I’ve been asking you guys about it since you went down there. I know there’s news about that. I want to talk about that, but I want to start up a little bit higher up on the food chain, if we can, and sort of talk about maybe the example that El Salvador is really kind of creating for the world and maybe the direction that the whole world seems to be shifting in.
Maybe at this point, and if you’re looking at mainstream headlines, there’s a rise of nationalism or far right extremism sweeping across Europe and things like that. Obviously, I don’t think either of us think about it like that, but really, maybe it is sort of the pendulum, as I call it, swinging back. And I saw a tweet that I think Max had put out, which, by the way, I haven’t been on Twitter for five months now.
Someone hacked into my account, reset my two fa, and I haven’t been able to get in Twitter in five months. But you said something about that living outside the US for 20 years gave you an edge. And so I saw that there’s a whole bunch of old footage of you guys that’s been resurfacing. You guys have been sharing, and you’ve been talking about these types of topics, sort of fiat money ruining the system, the bankers, the kleptocracy there even before bitcoin.
And so what is this that living outside the country for 20 years and reporting on this has sort of given you this edge to see how the world is shifting right now. Right. Hi, Mark. Yeah, so the global empire that is America is a debt driven, it’s a financial empire. And once you leave the United States, you see it more clearly how it works in other countries. And Max and Stacey have been reporting on this now for many years.
Stacey and myself both met as expats. We had both been living out of the country for many years. And so we came together and were able to speak really on the same wavelength about kind of seeing the US from this perspective of living outside of the US. And I think that’s why our financial reporting had an edge to it, because we were able to put it into context of the global economy and the way other people see it, other countries see it.
And I think that’s kind of what I was getting at there. Yeah. So just a different perspective. I know I travel a lot, so I understand that being in a debt based economy, I mean, it’s not just the. I mean, I know you were over in Europe quite a bit, reporting on Europe and so mean, that’s also a debt based monetary system as well. It’s not the dollar, but I mean, they’re still sort of on the dollar system or the euro dollar system or printing euros.
So I mean, they’re basically in the same boat, sort of. The whole world’s in this fiat money boat, if you will. Yeah, exactly. And you’re right. All the countries starting in 1971 went on a pure fiat money standard. Europe, of course, has the European Central bank and the bank of England and the Federal Reserve bank and Bank of Japan, but they all kind of feed back to the mothership that is the Federal Reserve bank.
Certainly after World War II, the US took this global role as being the world’s kind of banker. And as a result, everybody kind of answers to what’s happening in the US. Up until maybe things have gotten much different with the advent of bitcoin and geopolitics has changed somewhat. But yeah, you’re right, everyone is kind of in the same boat. So the stuff that we are reporting on would relate to.
Everybody has that understanding and they want to know why they live in this fiat money system, why it’s so crummy. And so it does relate to everybody because we’re all living in a similar situation. It seems like for people that are paying attention and sort of understand this, it seems like. Well, it doesn’t just seem it is that the fiat money system is broken. It’s broken from the start.
I think it’s probably a lot of people, Harry Dent Jr. Who’s been writing books for twelve years, calling the end of the market to crash. People have been calling for the death of the dollar. On one hand, it seems like the central bankers continue to have more and more magic tricks up their sleeve. And are you surprised how long they’ve been able to keep this charade going? I guess, like I said, how many tricks they can pull up their sleeve? Well, I don’t think it’s really working because the purchasing power of fiat money all over the world continues to decline and people are starting to feel the inflation.
Even at the mothership country in the US, inflation is really starting to rage and we see the wealth and income gap spread all over the world and we see poverty rates increasing. That’s a result of the fiat money system. So the tricks are not really working and we see it on the ground. There’s a lot more social unrest, and I think that’s what we would attribute to the fiat money system and the central banking system.
More than any political aspect, this is really the result of all this money printing. I would also add that I am not very surprised, because, look, you have perfect money that is bitcoin, and yet there are also like a million shitcoins, let’s call them that. And the reason why those exist is because of that fiat mentality. That is, the majority of the population will always be like that.
They will take the airdrops, they will take the student debt forgiveness, they will take the Biden bucks, they will take those free checks, they will take the PPP loans, they will do all that stuff, and that’s what they like, and that keeps them in that system, and that keeps that system afloat. I’m not surprised that it exists because, look, I just saw a headline that Joe Biden was considering a help to buy sort of scheme.
Now, this is a scheme that will help 500,000 Americans buy their home. Well, Max and I were living in London back after the first financial crisis, when, of course, Satoshi in the Genesis block put chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. Well, around that same time, they introduced a help to buy scheme soon after that, and it was called help to buy. And the taxpayer would fund for a lucky few individuals 20% of their deposit for their properties because the property prices were too high because of all the money printing from QE to bail out the banks.
So, yeah, that’s the system. That’s the system that most people like. If they could get a free home off the taxpayer, they’ll take the free home. Many people in crypto, very few people in bitcoin, took those PPP loans, right. Anybody who took more than $100,000, I believe, were made public in the US. So remember, these were free loans. They were loans that you didn’t actually have to pay back.
Well, look at the number of billionaire crypto folk that took those loans. This is what they do. That’s their mindset. So it doesn’t surprise me. I always think back to the quote from Vladimir Lenin. Supposedly he was talking to John Maynar Keynes, and he said that the best way to destroy capitalism is to debauch the currency through inflation. And he said, at the end, you lose all relation to money, and the best way to get rich is through gambling and theft.
And if that doesn’t sum up, sort of where the world is today, gambling and theft. To your point, all the altcoins, the gambling, the Defi and the theft. Right. Just outright theft everywhere. But Max, I love that shift that you said, and that’s actually kind of what I was thinking about and wanted to ask you about. When you think about fiat money crashing, what do you consider crashing? Just because the governments have been able to stay in power and keep kicking the can down the road doesn’t mean it’s not crashing.
But really, if you look at the societal impacts, I mean, it’s bad. I mean, if you look at the mortality rate in the US is dropping, to your point, the social unrest happening all over the world and you see it happening more overseas, the stuff that I’m seeing out of Europe seems really bad, I guess kind of what Stacey just said there about everybody wants to get that free house.
Not everybody, but a lot of people are happy to get that free house. And so I’m a little bit surprised. And I just want to get your take on this. I kind of thought that with democracy being sort of this tyranny of the minority, if you will, once 51% of the population has learned they could just vote themselves more money, why wouldn’t they just continue to vote themselves more money? Why would they ever vote to give themselves less? And so it almost seems like there’s no way out of it.
But seeing what happened in Argentina, where the people voted for a new president to gut the whole government handout system, sort of shocked me. I don’t know. What were your thoughts on that? Maybe this pendulum swinging and the people are ready to vote themselves less money, right? Well, we’ve called it the global insurrection against banker occupation. Or know, we coined that phrase on our show maybe seven years ago, and it came after Occupy Wall street.
Remember, Occupy Wall street was really the first time activists targeted Wall street and targeted the money centers as being the source of problems. And that meme, that idea has grown ever since. People starting to understand that it’s the bankers, it’s the money, it’s the central bankers, it’s the Ron Paul ideas that have been talked about for many years. And to your point, about looting becomes a way of life.
I know Stacey refers to the Bastiat quote about this, and it bears repeating, it’s so true. Looting essentially becomes a way of life and it becomes normalized. Or I would say, I’ve said in interviews before, where if you took fraud out of the american system, there would be virtually no economy left. It’s an economy based on fraud, built on fraud, and without the fraud, there would be very little left.
It’s a mechanism to encourage fraud. I would also add to that, of course, mentioning Argentina and then the US and Europe, is that the Ponzi scheme nature of it means that, of course, the further you are from the money printing center and there is only the US dollar, right, in the fiat world. Everything else is based off of that, like trades against the US dollar. So the US, what you see, like, they’re just entering the debt forgiveness stage for the young people.
What you saw in Argentina was that Milay won because of the young people. The young people are not the ones that get the money printing first. And all the debt and all the schemes that have been plundering Argentina for the last 2030 years has all gone to the boomers. Well, the same thing has happened in the US and Europe, but the US is able to prolong it longer because they have the money printer.
They have the number one money printer, and so they could know, you see it in the US, with the discharging of the student debts. Every week or two, there’s another new round of debt forgiveness for millennials and zoomers. Right? So Argentina and Europe can’t do that so easily like the US can. And I think that’s why you’re seeing massive political shifts in places like Europe and Argentina. First, the US has a higher tolerance.
They’ll be the last fiat man standing. And I think that’s bad for them, in a way. I think they’re going to be the last ones to. I guess the meek shall inherit the earth. They’ll inherit the earth that they’ve created. That their fiat debts have created. Yeah. To add on to that point, in a recent conversation, an interesting point came out in that the world seems to be entering into this fourth turning this idea, this convergence of various cycles at the end of kind of a nasty or beginning of a nasty period.
But there seems to be one country that’s the first to emerge from the fourth turning, and that is El Salvador. El Salvador had already went through its horrendous multidecade collapse. And starting with the election of President Pukelli in 2019, it has now emerged. It’s emerging from that. So this is what makes El Salvador so interesting, is that it’s really the first out of the box to lead the world in a way that people used to associate with the United States and other countries.
But actually, El Salvador is becoming a world leader because it’s already had the tough times. It now has the leader in President Pikelli, and it is now showing the way, which is why we’re here, really, because we want to be a part of that. Yeah, I love that. And it feeds into. We’ll move into that. And it feeds into what basically Stacey was just saying, where the US will probably be the last one to move because the US has everything to lose.
Right? And so it’s like a business can’t really disrupt themselves. That’s why Kodak didn’t introduce the digital camera, so to speak. And so since the US sort of has the US dollar the most to lose, they’ll probably be the last to move, unfortunately. And in this world of game theory, the first mover has the advantage. And so El Salvador is certainly there. But going back to sort of this game theory, and when you think about the way competition works, competition always provides different tests and hopefully better service, better products, better prices, so to speak.
And so to see El Salvador sort of stand up with this model and sort of demonstrate it for the world, it puts this game theory into play. There’s a lot riding on that, though, right? Because it is that first mover. It is this kind of model for the world. It needs to be successful. Do you feel that pressure, like a lot is hanging in the balance there? Yeah, we feel an enormous amount of pressure to succeed.
And you see, just as you said, that it is really important that we win. And we know this for a fact, because the biggest loser will be the centers of power of the fiat system. And you see them wish for our failure the hardest and most vocally so. Washington, DC, New York City, London, that’s where you find the most FuD, the most anti El Salvador, the most anti bukele sort of FUD is from those centers of power and their media lap dogs.
Right? So that’s where you’ll see the most negativity about us because they understand just how important it is for them that we, you know, Max and I really do work around the clock, seven days a week here to make sure that we win. Not only establishing that really solid foundation of education system, of the regulatory system and regime, the pure excellence. So, for example, look at what happened in New York City.
Look at the number of collapses. Celsius, Bloxfi, SBF is through the US system. Even though it was anomaly in the Bahamas, they could get away with that. Nobody’s like talking about the failure of the US system. But had we had even one, like, even a tiny one, not even those multibillion dollar collapses, if we had had a $100,000 or $200,000 scam coin here, we would have been shut out of the global system.
The media would have just jumped for joy and just pointed fingers at us. And this was a proof that bitcoin has failed there sort of thing. So we know that we can only be gold medal runners, we can only finish first. We can’t slip up at all. So we know this for El Salvador and for bitcoin, that we must win. When you say that it’s so important that we succeed and that we win, what does success look like? I mean, is this like a path that you’re on? Or is there like an end goal? Like what does success or winning look like? It looks like President Bukele, right? The guy doesn’t put 1ft wrong.
Every speech he makes, every I told you so, he tweets. That’s what winning looks. Right? Like. Everything we’re doing is what winning looks like. So I think so far we have just been winning, winning, winning, winning. And whether it’s the homicide rate, we’re now the safest in the Americas, right. Even the spanish press now wrote an article this past week where they were saying that El Salvador is a miracle, the Bukele miracle, right.
They were following on what Colombia had written in their La Semano, the most read magazine in the country just a few months ago said, it’s a Bukele miracle. Right? Columbia said that. Yeah. Magazine in Colombia, the country. So they said on the COVID it said, the bukele miracle. And this is part and parcel. It’s the same person, it’s the same leader with the same virtues, like fortitude, like patience, like all the things that President Bukele has that delivers not only bitcoin, but also the security state, right.
The peace and security that had long been unable. Nobody here had peace or safety for 40 50 years, because plunder was a way of life for a group of men in this society. So they plundered rather than protected. And I think that it totally makes sense that he would be a bitcoiner and provide, secure those blessings of liberty so that you would have the leader of the country who gave you bitcoin.
Legal standard would also protect life, liberty and property. And that’s what he’s done. Those are classic enlightenment ideals. That’s what Bastiat said in the law when he said plunder. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in society over the course of time, they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it or glorifies it. So that’s what we had here, and that’s what we no longer have.
The legal code no longer authorizes it or justifies it or condones it. And the moral code definitely has changed radically, that we just want to be winners, that we don’t want to be the losers that we were under that system of plunder. We want to be winners. And it feels good. Yeah. For the listeners. She was quoting from the law by Frederick Bastillet. Highly recommend reading the book.
It’s like an hour read. He was defining the term legal plunder. So they steal from you legally. They create the system. So go read that book. So winning is like not getting anything wrong and continuing to make progress both in life, liberty and property to the point that you made. What about a longer, like, you know, there was a lot of fud, if you will, coming out on El Salvador because of now, the IMF isn’t going to continue to give them loans and are they going to be able to pay it back and things like that.
So is some of the success being able to, say, build enough of an economy around tourism and industry that they’re no longer dependent on the IMF for handouts? I mean, is that a big piece of that? And how realistic is that? Well, success looks like proof of work, right? Proof of work delivers success, and we work and work and work. And one of the metrics of success that Max and I look at, and contrary to what the mainstream media, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, have all written articles about El Salvador.
And what they look at is they pick a metric that they decide is what matters and that decides whether or not it’s a success. And so they come here and they look to see if every single papuseria is accepting bitcoin and therefore, they say if they don’t accept bitcoin, just 20%, they say accept bitcoin. Therefore adoption has not happened. Well, to me, what adoption matters is who around the world, the best and the brightest around the world, which of the best and the brightest are adopting El Salvador not only as their home, their headquarters, but also their spiritual home, like, where they feel, just like in previous centuries, previous decades, people were spiritually connected to the United States and the notion of the republic that we stood for and the shining city on the hill, they were spiritually connected to that.
We meet people all the time that hadn’t been to the US but wanted to be in the US. They wanted to be citizens of the US, they wanted to move to the US and work in the US and build in the US. Well, that’s the sort of adoption that we’re looking for. So, for example, when you look at Silicon Valley in the, you know, you didn’t have Bloomberg and Wallsfield Journal and Financial Times go there and go to every cafe and see if that cafe had wifi or an email address to see whether or not the Internet was catching on and whether or not they were adopting the Internet.
Well, no, what was really going on was the best and the brightest builders in the world of Internet systems, of websites, of platforms, of the Internet, they were there. Right? And that’s why it became the massive success that we believe will become, like, that’s what our future looks like for bitcoin, capital markets and the post fiat world. Yeah, I think the fiat money system has just driven our society to a point where we’re just instant gratification on everything, and so everybody just expects way too much too soon.
And to your point, you wouldn’t go to Silicon Valley and like, oh, it’s been three years. How come everyone’s not using it? The Internet was around for two decades and we still had less than 10% people had ever bought anything online two decades later. So things happen slowly. So you have to sort of look at the signposts along the way and you can see a lot of that.
And it starts with creating that freedom culture and these strong property rights, and it has to start there, and it’s going to take a long time for that to start gaining traction. So you have to be happy with the progress, not just the end result of that, but does the end result, and maybe this is three, four, five decades, I mean, the end result would hopefully that it could sort of get off of this debt money system and stop being dependent on the economic hitman if you will, of the IMF.
Yeah, well, we have a few things going in our favor here. First of all, you have what I call buchleanomics, which is that different from bidenomics, the opposite. Well, it’s all about private property and economic freedom, but there’s also a push toward expanding the public domain. So you see, for example, this new library that was opened in historic downtown San Salvador that’ll stand for 100 years, 150 years.
That that’s going to be a long standing institution that will outlive everybody around today. But that’s a public good. The public domain is expanded. I remember back in the 1960s, America celebrating freedom of speech gave us the pushback against the Vietnam War. It also, the United States government put a man on the moon. Right? That was a government project. So that was a combination of the two. So here you have President Bukelli, who’s all about economic freedom and bitcoin, but he’s also expanding the public domain and doing so in a radically transparent manner, a very cost efficient.
So I see these trends kind of continuing into the next five years of his presidency and really just being that beacon of hope, that shining city on a hill. And you’re going to just see a lot of folks mimicking that and emulating that and saying, if they can do it, why can’t we? So it’s just become this tremendous power of example that’s changing people’s minds. In terms of changing people’s minds.
What we’re also doing here under President Bukele is changing the perception of El Salvador in a way that guarantees long term success. So when he opened the library, in his speech, he referred to, in terms of the public space being better than the private space. He referred to ancient Rome and ancient Greece. And if you think of Florence, like I always say, what we’re building here is Renaissance 2.
0, that this is Florence 2. 0. And the reason why we know Medici is, yeah, he was a rich guy, right? But there were quite a few rich guys in the italian city states, right? There were some probably richer than Medici, but we don’t remember them. Why don’t we remember them? Because they didn’t build a renaissance, right? They weren’t the ones. I mean, they obviously participated. They followed the know, they copied the Florin in.
You know, of course, Venice was also quite associated with the Renaissance, but everybody remembers Florence because of what Medici did, what he left behind, like the David in the public square in Florence. Now, did Medici finance that with the hope of flipping it as an NFT or was he hoping to flip it and gain more money? Or was he thinking that 500, 600 years from then, people would still be going to Florence and marveling at this masterpiece, what we’re creating here? And Max often says it is a masterpiece, and I think President Bukelli is creating a masterpiece here.
Yeah. I took the family to Florence this summer for the first time, and we hired a guide, went on a financial tour, toured the whole Medici thing. It was really awesome. And I was consistently just blown away by just how big, how grand all that stuff was, right? But I mean, thinking about how much time, effort, energy, but how much money that cost to build back then. And Florence was just a textile hub.
I mean, like, fabrics. And then we went to Venice, and I see all these cathedrals. I mean, it just blows my mind. And it just made me think, like, only on a gold Florin, only on a sound money standard, could you do something like. Like, there’s just no way we could do that today with inflation where it is, but going back to sort of building that sort of monument and sort of helping to fund that shift, I think it’s even bigger.
So, sure, they left that stuff that we go look at today, and it’s still there. And like I said, I was just there. It was amazing. But really, with El Salvador, sort of with this first mover advantage, it’s not just about what’s being built in El Salvador. It’s what they could influence the rest of the world to do. And so, really, I’d love your take on this, seeing that you’ve lived around the world for 20 years, but South America, Central America, the Americas, if you will, somewhat culturally different, obviously much different than you might have in the Middle east and the arab nations, et cetera.
But we have these two different paths that are being chosen, it seems like. So you have, like, you know, pro freedom, if you will, and then next door, Nicaragua, like, they’re going full communist. In South America, you have Chile adopting a communist constitution, Colombia adopting a communist, but then you have, like, Argentina going to a libertarian. So we’re sort of seeing that playing out in real time. Is that how you’re framing that is how you’re seeing that? Well, like Hayek said in that famous video in the austrian economics is great in theory, but we will never see it in practice because we’ll always be subject to fiat money in the central bankers.
Only if by some workaround, by some fly mechanism, would we have a money that was separate from the state, could we ever really see if this stuff would work. And at the time, people said, yeah, of course, that’ll never happen. But in 2009, it did happen. Money was created. That separates money from state, is totally decentralized money. And that’s the key. There’s before bitcoin and after bitcoin and El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender.
And it matches perfectly with the leader, President Bukele, as somebody who has leaned into that and seen that decentralization and giving power back to the people and letting the people decide. He’s always making a reference to this. I’m here for the people. I serve the people, let the people decide. And has worked wonderfully here. So I think that for the first step for other countries is to understand the role bitcoin plays in all of this.
Obviously, in communist countries, we know that it never works. So we know the end game there. It’s failure. It always is. 100% failure. In the case of countries that are going to rely on a fiat money standard, we know that now, definitively, after 300 years of experimentation, the central bank fiat money system, it failed. It didn’t work. I also want to add to this is this. There will never be another El Salvador, I believe, not for another 500 years.
Because that’s the thing. When you talk about communism or capitalism or republican party or democratic party, these are like political parties and political ideas that are now dead. President Bukele is a leader, and we don’t know what that looks like. That’s not something that we in modern history have any sort of. We don’t recognize that. We don’t know what he is, because we’ve never seen a leader like that.
He’s a one in 500 year sort of leader. There’s only been like, maybe 50, mostly men throughout history who have been leaders, right? And he’s one of them. So to have that is very hard work. How you know that nobody recognizes what it is, is that they keep on calling him a miracle, or the Bikelli miracle, that it’s like, divine from out of this world. It’s nothing that we’ve seen before.
But that’s because we don’t create leaders. Know, Alexander the Great, who was his teacher, was like one of the three greats of philosophy. Aristotle, Socrates, or Plato. I think it was so like they were trained to be great. He was trained to be great. He was destined to be great because that was how we trained people back then. That’s what mattered back then. And I think President Bukele, and, by the way, all his brothers.
So I think it’s like he was trained his family, taught them those virtues. Like, if you look up the cardinal virtues or the heavenly virtues, and you look at just through his actions, not just his words, look through his actions and see how many of those that he had, so how many he has, right? And I always talk about the fortitude and patience because those are the things that stand out to me the most, and especially the fortitude.
He stood really firm when all of the world was mocking and laughing at El Salvador for adopting bitcoin and then soon after know, securing the rights to life, liberty, and property for the people. Like they were calling him horrible names and jeering and threatening El Salvador because know, kicking out the gangs and arresting the gangs and stopping them from plundering the know, he, he remained firm and believed in his vision of what he saw El Salvador as becoming.
So that’s why I think, and I said this on the stage at Miami, 2023, is that I don’t think there will be another one, not because I’m, like, in some cult or drinking some Bukele Koolaid. I just think from my own observation, even not knowing him personally, but just through his actions as a leader, you could see that we haven’t had a leader like this for many, many hundreds of years, especially if you put it into the context.
We’ve had great orators, and that’s one important ingredient, to be a great leader, to have that ability to persuade. But we’ve never had somebody overcome the obstacles that were in the way of somebody like President Bukeley running the most dangerous country on earth in debt and impoverished country. So that he overcame those and that we’re treated, that the world knows our name now is quite remarkable for this little country, to Stacey’s point.
So if, in fact, the El Salvador Bukelli miracle is irreproducible, and instead of waiting for another country to become the next El Salvador, the only option would be to move to El Salvador. So I think that’s what’s going to be driving a lot of folks to actually move to El Salvador. And we see that in the numbers. Right? The number of people at the southern border in the United States who are fleeing South America and Central America.
Well, one country is an outlier, and that is El Salvador. There’s now almost equilibrium. There’s now almost as many people fleeing to El Salvador as there are people leaving El Salvador. So that speaks to the uniqueness of what’s happening here. And I also want to bring it back to Florence, because, again, there were a load of very wealthy rulers of the other city states. And yeah, they did finance some public art, and yeah, they did finance some of the same artists, and they did copy the Florence and they had the Ducat and other currencies like that.
But it was Medici more than just that. It wasn’t just he was rich. It wasn’t just that he had good taste, aesthetic taste. And who was it that said recently that, oh, the ambassador to El Salvador from China mentioned in that public of the inauguration of the library, he mentioned how that President Bukele, who Max calls a philosopher king, that he has this amazing aesthetic taste. Well, yeah, okay, so Medici had that.
But what Medici also had was fortitude, of course. And the strength of character is very difficult to have. Remember, he stood up against the Vatican, and the Vatican. The pope excommunicated the entirety, the entire population of Florence because they stood behind Medici. And they stood behind Medici because Medici stood behind them. So that was in those days, it was a very powerful tool to cut somebody off, to excommunicate them from the church.
It’s the equivalent of excommunicating and sanctioning from swift, for example. So those sort of threats get issued today from the modern papacy, that is, the New York fed and the Washington DC elite. So those are their sort of tools. And yet the population here stood behind President Bukeley throughout everything, and the same that happened in Florence. So there are many traits. Well, there are seven virtues. Another parallel that I’m just thinking of as you’re talking through is back to what I said earlier about this long term perspective.
And so Medici was building these buildings that were taking forever. I mean, some of these things he was doing wouldn’t even be know in his lifetime, for example. And what Buchailey’s doing in, you know, he may not be alive to see, really the full fruit of what he’s planting right now, today. And just compare that to Biden in the United States. I mean, just this week or now, last week, the Fed pivoted off of their stance of tightening monetary policy because we have an election coming up.
It’s like, let’s just focus on the next nine months. Forget about my kids and my grandkids. Let’s focus on the next nine months. And so it’s like, that’s in stark contrast. Another stark contrast is you have Europe putting in these laws over the Internet, which is basically going to make them have a great firewall like China. I mean, literally, that’s like the path they’re going down. And so we see this one shift towards more communism, if you will, and one going towards more freedom.
I want to go back to what you’d said, stacey, because I’m pretty interested in this. I’ve been trying to get information from you guys since you left to go down to El Salvador, but you talked about now starting to attract some of the best and the brightest people into think, you know, people to your point, sort of attach to it spiritually. They want to go to a place that has freedom.
And even though it may not be as nice as where they’re at, the direction is right. And if there’s strong private property rights and freedom, then this is a good place to start businesses and things like that. So what is the path now? I know they just recently announced some sort of initiative to get people to come down there. There’s like a new freedom passport or something like that.
What’s the path for somebody to come down? Move down there, start a business, invest into the country, build companies, et cetera? Well, of course, you can email us at the bitcoin office on BTC at Presidentcia Gov SV and we will help onboard any bitcoiners. Also, we will be having a website soon for bitcoiners. In particular, we have a freedom passport, and that is part of our renaissance 2.
0 and attracting the best and the brightest. So you can see what President Bukelli has managed in just two years. Yes, he’s been in office for four years, but for the first two years, he did not have any control of Congress. So for two years now, you’ve seen what he’s done with the ability to lead. And what he’s done is quite remarkable. Not only has he transformed the economy through bitcoin, but he’s transformed.
He’s rebranded the country from the most dangerous on earth to the coolest place that everybody wants to be. Right? So he’s rid the country of gangs that had plagued the country for decades. He rid the country of these two plunder politics, right? These two parties that plundered the nation over and over. When we’re doing a lot of work with volcano energy and the bitcoin mining here, one of the things you note is that a lot of the electric grid was basically plundered for the past 40, 50 years by those two parties.
Any money that came towards investing in the grid, they just stole it. The president of the time would steal it and flee to Nicaragua or flee to the United States. There’s one former president of El Salvador that stole a billion dollars, and he’s in the US being harbored there I saw Zelensky’s buying, like, a $20 million house in Florida now. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So that’s what we had here, and that’s what’s over.
And he’s done that in just two years. So what we’re trying to attract is, yes, we already have the best and brightest coming here in terms of a lot of bitcoiners moving here, individuals and entrepreneurs and companies setting up headquarters here. And that’s the sort of adoption we want to see. There is a pretty easy path to, certainly residency here. It doesn’t cost much, and it’s pretty easy.
You could just move here. It’s not difficult, like, say, moving to Canada or the United Kingdom. It’s super easy and pretty cheap. Now, with our freedom passport, which is a million dollars. It’s $1 million. It’s a very fast pass to passport. Most people should qualify within six weeks. They get a new passport based on our KYC criminal background check, all the stuff you have to do. But it’s a million dollars and it’s a donation.
It’s citizenship by donation. It’s not an investment. There’s no big, vast bureaucracy around this. It’s like you’re donating to what President Bukeley is doing. He’s expanding the domain, the public domain of economic liberty. That is his policy. Bitcoin, by the way, falls under his larger policy of economic liberty. Economic liberty also encapsulates what he’s done with the security and securing life, liberty and property for the people. So basically, it’s attracting a lot of very early bitcoiners, bitcoin whales, billionaires who want to be the one to make a change.
They want to leave a legacy, right? Because anybody could go buy a passport in St. Kitts and hang out with Roger Vere for 200 and 5300 thousand dollars. But here you could be in the history books as part of, like, if Medici had invited you to come have dinner with him and da Vinci and Machiavelli and Bodicelli and all the cool people hanging out, Michelangelo hanging out in Florence, you would do it, right? You would pay a million dollars to be at that table and have a say in building the future that Florence did achieve.
Yeah. So a million dollars, if you want to fast track it and donate to the cause and sort of have that passport. Otherwise, anybody could move down there, start a business, and just apply for, I guess, probably temporary residency, then get a permanent residency and sort of go down that path. It’s probably a five year path. I’m guessing it’s a five year path, and there’s two sort of entities that could help you with onboarding to that path of residency and business formation and ultimately citizenship.
And that would be acceleratesv IO. So accelerate SV is the country symbol for El Salvador, IO. And the other is asobitcoin, the association of bitcoin in El Salvador. So asobitcoin. org, and they’re also on Twitter, so you could go to them. I don’t know. Don’t quote me on the numbers, but it’s like less than $1,000 to get legal help to help you on board. But you could do it yourself.
If you can read Spanish, and a lot of it is in English. If you go to the migration website of El Salvador and you could figure your way out there, it might be less than $100 to apply for a residency visa. What are some of the long term risks here? And I think, if I’m not mistaken, you had told me that Bukhaili sort of like, stepped down. So he’s rerunning for election potentially.
A lot of people had accused him of being a dictator because of the way that he had to sort of reform the court system, the two political parties. To your point. I don’t know if he stepped down. He’s rerunning. Correct me if I’m wrong, but maybe to sort of prove that, hey, I didn’t just take this over. You can reelect me if you want, do these run on four year cycles like the US.
And what happens if there’s a color revolution doesn’t get reelected in four years from now? What does that look like? It’s five year terms here and he’s following the constitution. The Supreme Court year said that if he steps down or he takes a leave of absence for six months prior to the inauguration, which is June 1, then that qualifies under the constitution, which was written during the military dictatorship in the 80s, early eighty s.
So he’s doing that in terms of, I don’t think there’s going to be a color revolution. The US has seen with their own two eyes the remarkable achievements here. And the US ambassador, who was only appointed in 2023, the US ambassador to El Salvador, who is a really good guy. He’s a lifelong diplomat. And so he’s less political. For example, like a lot of us ambassadors are friends of the president.
This guy, he’s a smart, good guy and he’s honest. And he said what he saw here and what he saw here was the people living in freedom for the first time that he’s ever seen. And he’s been here many times over the past few believes, and the United States believes that there’s now peace and security here and life is being protected and the people are happy. And they said recently, and including somebody from the State Department was here and they said that let the people decide because we believe in democracy.
So if the people don’t like it, then on February 4, they could let their voice be heard at the ballot box. And the polls Gallup shows that basically about 93% plan on voting for him and his party. Let’s talk about some predictions here, Max, not price predictions. If you wanted to, you could throw that out there. But right now we’re sort of sitting on the precipice of potentially multiple etfs getting approved potentially here in weeks, although they’re quickly changing the registration to where they’re, I guess not physical.
Now there’s going to be cash settled. So it sort of defeats the whole purpose. But as that’s know, the evil empire, Blackrock wants to launch their ETF, etc. While that’s happening almost in unison, we have Elizabeth Warren passing this horrible bill that would basically could potentially make bitcoin and cryptocurrency illegal, potentially. And potentially the attack vector there is like this self custody. Maybe I’m reading in this too much, but if they could take away the ability to self custody, but you can own it through Blackrock, so to speak.
Do you think those two things are coming together sort of in unison for a cause? And if so, does that, I would imagine help what El Salvador is mean? If I can’t own it in the mean, maybe I’ll own it on paper, but then I can move down to El Salvador and custody it myself at some point. The answer would be yes, but to give some more details there.
So yeah, the etFs, it’s interesting, I’ve been in finance for over 40 years, and to see the coordination and the multiple launch of a product simultaneously like this is highly unusual. I’ve never seen it quite before. So I think there is an agenda going on simultaneously. You’re saying like the laws and the ETF launched together? I’m saying that multiple etfs being launched simultaneously from 15 different financial institutions or all have an ETF in the works.
Usually it’s first mover advantage, and somebody comes up with an ETF and they kind of get the market and they are like the GLD, for example, was launched. And I believe HSBC or Morgan are the custodian behind that. And they launched it and they captured the blind share of the market, and they have that product. And that’s typically the way products are launched. But here they’re saying to Wall street, we want you to coordinate a product launch simultaneously amongst all of you financial institutions.
So that looks like there’s a highly politicized, looks like a highly politicized kind of coordination going on there. Simultaneously, Liz Warren is saying what she’s saying and attacking bitcoin and so called crypto. So to your point, that does this set up a situation where the public is only allowed to own etfs, which are derivative of bitcoin and cash settled similar to gold. If GLD gets into trouble, they have the ability to settle in cash.
They don’t have to send you gold. They can send you fiat money. To your exact phrase, it defeats the purpose. So an ETF bitcoin that’s settled in cash is almost point, but nevertheless, it will bring in a lot of capital simultaneously. They could say, well, self custody of bitcoin, according to Liz Warren, could be banned. So now you have a situation where only the government can own actual bitcoin, but the public can only own a derivative.
Now, would that help El Salvador? Of course, because everybody who has lost their bitcoin in a tragic boating accident would immediately book a flight to El Salvador, because the leadership here would recognize this is a huge opportunity. President Bukelli is a fantastic leader, and like all fantastic leaders, his ideas are fantastic. Plus, he capitalizes on other people’s mistakes. Like when other countries make a mistake, he jumps in and capitalizes on that mistake.
That’s part of being a leader, I think. And so if these other countries want to make that mistake, El Salvador is happy to be the beneficiary. I also think that what they’re going to do is they know for a fact they can’t outlaw bitcoin. They know that because they know that it’s genuinely decentralized and that there is no CEO and there is nobody to arrest. And it’s global.
So it’s more difficult to do, like, a gold confiscation sort of scheme like they did in the 1930s. So I think what they’re going to do is they present this whole, like, we’re going to ban everything and we’re going to arrest you all. And then they’ll say, like, okay, what we’re really going to ban is any coin with a CEO or marketing budget and a marketing department, those are easy to criminalize, right? Because there is somebody to contact.
So they’ll do those first, and they clearly, however, Gary Gensler has said it all. The chairman of the CFTC, all the officials know they’re pretty good at signaling to you with their words. Like, if you actually listen to the stuff they say, they’ve told you years ago that bitcoin is a commodity, everything else is a security. So I think that’s what they’ll to. They’re not going to ban it.
Liz Warren is playing the crazy person, right? This is just good cop, bad cop. This is just a negotiation tactic. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to regulate all. Well, they’re going to do kind of what we did here. Bitcoin is money and everything else is a security. Because if you didn’t say everything else is a security, what the shitcoiners and scammers said is like, well, you haven’t defined us, so we get to operate with impunity.
Well, no, it’s against the law to scam people. And here’s your avenue to register as a security. Tell everybody that they’re going to lose all their money. And the warning symbols on the back of the cigarette package showing you’re going to die. You’re most likely going to die smoking the same thing with a shitcoin. It’s like you’re going to lose all your wealth, you’re going to end up poor, you’re going to end up like, we’re going to put photos of homeless bums on the street, just passed out, sleeping under a stairwell.
And that’s basically your future on the shitcoin. But, okay, you knew and nobody’s, because in a hard money economy, there’s nobody there to bail you out from your dumb mistakes. Like, this ain’t the US dollar sort of fiat money system here. We don’t have our own printed currency to print and bail you out from your dumb mistakes. Right? Yeah. My fear is, you see, things like the restrict act they put into place, and what Elizabeth Warren’s doing is interfacing with any piece of software or technology that they deem to be a threat to national security could be illegal.
And they’re using words like, oh, it’s a threat to our financial stability. So is that a threat to our security? Hopefully, we’re a long way from that. The Supreme Court won’t allow it. They’ve already done this dozens of times. And every new tyrant in the Senate thinks they could argue differently. But the Supreme Court has always backed free speech, they’ve always backed code, they’ve always done that. I don’t think there’s any chance in hell of her getting what she wants, maybe just she might be able to pass it.
But the Supreme Court’s going to rule against her. Yeah. Remember, bitcoin separates money from state. And that’s true as saying that gold is element number 79 on the periodic table. It’s a statement of fact. And now the state is trying to snatch it back. But the vector that bitcoin is on, it has achieved escape velocity and no state will be able to try to bring it back in the fold.
It’s gone. They messed up. It’s gone. Yeah, Austin Goolsby was right about that. He said we should have killed it while we had the chance. He being under President Obama and Satoshi himself. Message said as such, during when Wikileaks first got involved in bitcoin in 2010, he was worried. He expressed concern, saying that we’re too young and we’re too small to kick the hornets nest. He said, yes, kick the hornets nest.
That’s what he said. And so he was right. But luckily, well, the US had multiple warfronts at that time and it was too small and they didn’t think it was going to be a threat, so they just thought it was Max and Stacey on Kaiser report. So they were wrong. The thing about money, Mark, as you always bring up, is that it is a coded way to promote.
So bitcoin is perfect money, and therefore it satisfies something in us as human beings. So as long as humans still want to be human, bitcoin will be on that vector going away from the state. And the state always ends up coalescing and becoming powerful to the extent of stuffing out freedoms. And therefore, this battle against money versus the state has been lost by the state. They have lost.
They are dead. The only thing left now is to bury them. They’re the walking dead. Yeah. In Alex Fetzky and I, in our book, the uncommunist Manifesto, we sort of made the case that capitalism is not a political modality. Capitalism is just natural, emergent order. We as humans have private property and we use our intellectual ability and private property to trade freely. And that’s just the way the world works, right? Kids are trading sandwiches for chips or whatever.
I had a fire, you had an animal. We share that, right? And so if that is natural and emergent, then we need a way to trade and so we need some form of medium of exchange. And that’s just human nature. The government can’t really co opt that. They could try for a time, but to your max, like it’s already failed. It will fail. It will already fail. And now we’re just kind of seeing that play out in El Salvador.
We have a leader that does a personification of this, who recognizes this, who’s a natural leader based on natural values, ancient values. And so you marry that with bitcoin, and people are paying a million dollars in donation to be a part of it. Yeah, well, we’ve covered a mean Max and Stacey. Both of you guys have been pounding the table on bitcoin longer than anybody. You guys were the psychopath screaming at the top of your lungs from the streets.
But it just continues know play out the way that you see it. And a lot of it’s because it is that natural, emergent process, and this is just sort of how the world works. So, anyway, I appreciate you guys sharing that. I really appreciate you guys being down there in El Salvador and banging the drum on that as well. I love to see this pendulum swinging. I love to see this competition being set up.
We’re all rooting for it to win. Did you have something you want to add, Stacey? Yes. First I want to mention, because we haven’t said it the whole episode during this whole interview, is we’re talking like Zoomers now, by the way. We might be, he’s a almost I’m a Gen X, but we’re talking like Zoomers here because this is the new way of them doing it. They hold their labs in their hands.
Even Bloomberg, I’ve noticed this in my Twitter stream, or, sorry, my ex stream, that they’re always holding these. But I just wanted to say that. And also that if you’re interested in acquiring freedom, you could apply for freedom here in El Salvador for $1 million. You, your spouse, your dependent children all get a passport within six weeks if you go to adoptingel Salvador Gob sv. So just go there and forward slash freedom if you want, double the freedom.
We’re going to make sure we link that in the show notes down below. The one thing I just want to add to that, that Stacey’s talking about, and if you’ve been listening to this interview, we talk about this long term perspective. And so I just keep reminding myself, I’m kind of old now, too, and I got enough money. I could just go disappear and ride out the rest of my life on the beach.
But I got kids and I got grandkids, and we need a legacy. This is bigger than just us in our short lifetime that we have back to the Medici’s or whatever these leaders that build for future generations and so be a part of it. Be a part of something bigger than yourself and that lasts much longer, hopefully. I agree. Do it. Adopt El Salvador. Adopt El Salvador. All right.
We’ll go ahead and sign it off. We’ll put the link to that adopting bitcoin, the passport down in the link below, and with that, we’ll sign off. Thanks so much, guys. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. .
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