Jailed by a Dictator, Fighting Back with Bitcoin | Leopoldo López - What Bitcoin Did

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The judge concluded that I had the capacity to send subliminal messages,

(00:08):
and he told my wife,
tell your husband to quit the hunger strike because we're going to let him die.
Venezuela today is a criminal economy,
contraband, the extraction of gold,
the corrupt and dark sale of oil, and cocaine.
Thousands of new political prisoners,
people being tortured, entire families being disappeared,

(00:30):
I've been a victim of financial apartheid since 2008.
I've not been able to have an account in Venezuela.
It's impossible to use the banking system.
So one, Bitcoin for resistance.
If we make that about a common hope that the world should be free, it could be very, very strong.

(00:51):
We wake up every single day thinking of what are we going to do today to change the world.
Cheers, sir. How are you doing?
Good, man. How are you?
I am great. This has been a crazy few days.
It's been great.
I've just been seeing you in only the cool places recently.
Surfing in Bali.
Now we're here talking about freedom in Nashville.

(01:13):
I don't know if your audience knows how good of a surfer you are.
I don't believe the hype people.
We had fun, though. It was good.
We had fun, yeah.
Surfing in.
You should show them pictures, your barrels.
Big drops, brief breaks, strong waves.
I cut myself up pretty bad.
Yeah, me too, man. My legs are.
It was fun, though.

(01:34):
But you've got a crazy fucking story, man.
There'll be obviously a group of the audience that may not know who you are
and what you do and did.
Do you want to start there?
Sure.
Well, I'll give you a brief context.
I'm from Venezuela.
I was born in Caracas, Venezuela in the 1970s.

(01:56):
At that time, Venezuela was a beacon of democracy and prosperity, high oil prices.
It was an island of democracy in a very autocratic continent, infrastructure being built, and
social mobility was happening.
And that started to change.

(02:17):
It actually started to change in 1983, when the currency got devaluated for the first
time.
And ever since, it's been a downward slope.
Then I had the opportunity to study in the United States.
And I graduated from grad school and came back to Venezuela.

(02:40):
I could have stayed in the U.S.
I had good job offers, but I decided to go back as I always wanted to.
And I worked at the oil industry as an economist at the Office for Strategic Planning of PDVSA, the national oil company.
It's a great job because at the time, the oil industry was opening to the private sector.

(03:00):
And the vision that we had at the time for Venezuela that was producing 3.2 barrels of oil per day was that by 2010, we would be producing 5 to 6 million barrels of oil with private investment.

(03:20):
Today, we're producing 800,000 barrels of oil.
I can get to that later of what happened.
And then Chavez came to power in 1999. He had a promise to change everything by changing the Constitution. So I decided to quit my job and ran for the Constitutional Assembly, and I lost, and I was unemployed.

(03:45):
So I decided, alongside with another group of young people that were not part of the traditional political parties or the party of Chavez, to run for office.
So I ran to become the mayor of the center part of Caracas, my home city, my hometown.

(04:05):
And I won. I was the underdog in that election.
I had a door-to-door campaign.
How old were you when you first ran?
27.
Okay, so you're super young.
Yeah, and I did a really fun campaign.
I would hunt for traffic.
My metric was how many hands that I would shake per day,

(04:29):
how many people I would give my cell phone to,
how many leaflets I would leave to people.
And we had a super out-of-the-box campaign, and I won.
And that gave me the opportunity to build a very good, committed group of young people that wanted to change the world. Idealistic people with foot on the ground. People that had been trained in different areas of expertise, from healthcare to architecture, to security, to budgeting, to legal. And we transformed that part of the city. Completely transformed it.

(05:07):
And what were you promising?
What was it that sort of captured everyone's imagination?
Well, we actually...
By the way, sorry.
I didn't show you a picture. I had my cell phone.
Like my...
I got a non-alcohol beer. I'm so sorry.
No, it's all right.
I've rugged us.
Tastes good.
So we invited people to dream of a better city.
From simple things to be a safe city,

(05:30):
to having the possibility of having schools
that were as good or better than the private schools,
to having a healthcare system that would function
to fix the streets, to put public lighting,
to build parks, to build pedestrian sidewalks.

(05:51):
So we had a very ambitious plan.
And I went back to that plan that I gave to the citizens
in the year 2000, and we did everything, everything.
And one of the reasons why we were able to do it
was that we changed the tax structure. We made paying taxes very simple, very transparent,
so it became an attractive part of the city, and we were able to be autonomous from the central

(06:18):
government in order to plan and execute all of those programs. What did you change about the
tax structure? Well, we made paying taxes simple. We lowered taxes. Primarily, those were the two
things that we changed. And we invited the citizens to participate with the local government

(06:39):
in the budgeting process. So that was something completely new at the time. We would spend a lot
of hours with the people of the municipality, getting their ideas with the business community,
getting the ideas. So I think the secret of our management style was our budgeting process,

(07:00):
which we took it very seriously.
I actually took three weeks at the end of the year, every year,
and I went outside the municipality,
and we would have every single director of every area of the municipality
to come with their programs, defend their programs,
and then we would have to make choices

(07:21):
because having a priority is not what you choose,
but it's what you choose not to do.
I mean, that's a tough thing of budgeting,
especially for a city or for a government.
So we made the people that were leading each one of those areas,
the owners, the captains, we made them accountable to me as a mayor,

(07:43):
to the budget itself, but also to the citizens.
And it was incredible.
I mean, we really changed the face and the living standards
of hundreds of thousands of people.
and that part of the city was at the heart of Caracas.
So that at the time was, there was a lot of protests

(08:06):
because in parallel to all of this, Chavez was in power
and protests were already starting.
And there was a square like the Maidan Square
or the Tahir Square that was the Plaza Altamira.
And all of the protests were happening there.
And I was wearing always two hats,
my hat as mayor and my hat as activist.

(08:27):
And I was always supporting all of the protests
that were taking place.
So what was Chávez doing at that time that was...
Like, where in his kind of story arc of being a dictator was he?
Well, he... The very beginning,
the beginning of the end was changing the Constitution.
So that was the groundwork of everything that came after.

(08:50):
It was very clear that it was a hyper-presidential model, that there were no checks and balances, that there was a gate to politicize the military, to control the judicial system, and to censor the media.
And that all started to play out gradually but consistently.

(09:14):
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So at the same time that you're doing this very transparent leadership within Caracas,

(11:44):
there's almost like a black box of corruption and control and censorship at the national level.
Yep. And there was also a lot of polarization and a lot of protest taking place. So 2004,
I ran for re-election and I won with more than 80% of the vote. And we continue to transform the city.

(12:07):
but I started to look beyond the municipality as it's normal in a political career.
You know, what's the next step?
So my next logical step was to become the governor of the city.
And I started to do different things to work in the areas of the city that were controlled by the Chavez regime.

(12:27):
And very quickly, we started to grow from the bottom up with a model of organizing people around social leadership.
We had this idea, and I would always say it to our team, if you want to be a political leader, you need to be first a social leader.

(12:49):
So social work was very key to the way we were doing politics.
and we were also having the showcase of what was happening in that part of the city.
Like more than a million and a half people went through that part of the city every day.
So they would see the safety.

(13:09):
They would see the lighting.
They would see the public works.
They would see the theater, the market, the healthcare system.
I mean, and it became a showcase of the possible, of doing things differently,
of a different promised land.
So I started to build this movement.
And in the year 2008, there was an election

(13:32):
and I was disqualified.
I was simply taken out of the ballot.
They opened a bogus case against me
and I was taken out of the ballots.
As for a podcaster, they take the mic from you.
Or for a boxer, you can never go to the ring.
like it happened to Muhammad Ali when he was not listed to go to Vietnam, or to a medical doctor.

(13:56):
You can no longer treat people with disease.
And the reason they did that is obvious, like you were too dangerous to their system.
But did they give you any reason? Did they-
Well, yeah, they opened a case. And they opened a bogus case that was linked to the fact that I
I was paying the fire department and the teachers by modifying the budget, which is something that

(14:19):
you have to do several times throughout the year. And the city council does it. So the city council
did that in order for us to pay the teachers and the firemen. And they just opened a case.
And I remember having a conversation with the controller general, and I said, you are
disqualifying me to run for office for 15 years. And there is absolutely no evidence that there was

(14:44):
a single cent missing in misallocation. And he said, you're right. There is no proof, but this
is just a decision. He said that straight to my face. So I was not able to run. Well, I actually,
I started to run. I had more than 70% of the support, but then they ratified the disqualification

(15:06):
and I was out.
I supported another candidate
that at the time had only 3%
and I became the head of his campaign
and he won.
So I was unemployed again.
This is 2009.
And I decided to start a new movement.
And I started from a very small office,

(15:26):
my garage,
and I had this idea of building
a grassroots movement
that was focused in nonviolent action
and social work.
So I went around the country primarily looking for young people, community leaders, union leaders, social leaders.
And we started a movement that in the year at the end of 2009, it became legal.

(15:52):
And the first decision we made was to call for an open election for the party.
Anybody could vote and anybody could run. And this had never been done.
I mean, this is democracy on steroids. And everybody said that I was crazy. You cannot do that. No political party had ever opened its doors that way. And more than 200,000 people voted in an internal election of a party that was just starting.

(16:21):
But the key to that was that that was the seed to many leaderships, to many leaderships, because the people that won those elections were leaders.
So the movement started to grow in the year 2013. Chavez died. There was another election.

(16:41):
Before that, there was a primary for the presidential candidacy. I ran in that primary.
I was doing very well, leading the polls, but they again ratified that I could not run for office.
So again, I became the head of the campaign of the candidate that was able to run.
The election was in April of 2013, and he actually won the election by a very slim margin.

(17:08):
And I remember telling him at 7 p.m. that night, I said, the election is no longer going to be decided by whatever the electoral board says.
It's going to be decided in the streets.
So you better call the people to protest in the streets.
At first, he said, I agree with you.
But then his advisors came and said, you know, this is a time for you to behave as a statesman.

(17:33):
You know, we got to go through irregular channels.
Let's manage this in a way that we can engage in dialogue.
I said, you're making a very big mistake because they're going to steal the election from you.
And that's what happened.
So that's when Maduro came in.
That was when Maduro came in, in his first election in 2013.
At the end of that year, we had municipal elections.

(17:57):
Again, I went around the country and we actually won the largest number of municipalities of any opposition party.
We came from zero to becoming the largest party in the opposition.
And we won in places where Chavez had traditionally been winning in their strongholds, in the frontier with Colombia, in the Andes, in the municipalities close to the military bases.

(18:23):
And we won with a narrative that was very clear to people.
We want mayors that are committed to taking Maduro out of government.
Again, everybody said, you are crazy. People want to vote for mayors because they want clean water and functioning schools. But our narrative was, in order to have clean water, running schools, a healthcare system, safety, lighting, and all of the rest of the things that you need, we first need to get rid of the dictatorship.

(18:56):
And we were the first movement that started to call Maduro a dictator. We were the first movement that started to signal Maduro as a narco leader. We were the first movement that started to talk about the repression that Maduro was doing in different sectors of society.
So come January of 2014, and we decided to call for protest. So I went around, talked to different political leaders, invited them to lead a movement, a street movement of protest.

(19:31):
and most of them said no. The only one, a couple of them said yet, but one that was very relevant
as well, Maria Corina Machado, who is today leading the opposition and she's in hiding in
Venezuela. She said yes. And with a couple of other leaders, we gave a small press conference
that was censored, but we could only promote through social media and people came out.

(19:57):
and then we called for another protest in February the 12th
and more people came out and the regime started to repress.
So that day they killed three people.
They killed Basil Da Costa, a young man of 21 years old,
carpenter that was also starting at night.

(20:18):
They killed him in, they shot him in the back of his head
and this was all in film.
We later knew or learned that the detail of the Minister of Interior were the ones who killed Basil Da Costa.
They killed Juancho Montoya, and they killed Robert Redman.
By the end of that day, there was a warrant for my arrest because they were accusing me.

(20:41):
So I had to go into hiding.
I went into hiding, and the regime raided my house.
They raided my parents' house.
They raided our movement. They imprisoned 17 people of my closest collaborators, and they were threatening that there was a plot to kill me if I didn't turn myself in.

(21:06):
So my wife, you know, called me up. She was very nervous. And I told her, listen, I have three choices.
I can go into exile, I can stay in hiding, or I can turn myself in.
And I am going to turn myself in.
Why? She said.
Because if I don't do this, we will not be able to show the true face of what Maduro is as a dictator, autocrat, and the way he's repressing the Venezuelan people.

(21:36):
But when you're deciding to turn yourself in there, I'm guessing you don't know what's going to happen to you.
You could have been killed.
Mm-hmm. Like other people, yes. When you're in the front lines, that's always a risk.
And if you went into exile, you could have taken your wife with you, but you decided that wasn't
worth it? It wasn't worth it because it would have been abandoning the people that for the past three

(21:59):
years I had been leading and telling them that we needed to take this to the limit. And my commitment
to them was that if they were going to come after us, I was always going to be in the front line.
And that if they were going to imprison me, that I was going to take that risk.
But I expected them to take the same risk.

(22:20):
And that's what happened.
That's insanely brave, though.
I obviously just think of what I would do in that situation.
And I think most people would probably just leave.
Well, it depends, you know.
I think if you think about it from your current position now,
maybe that's the decision that you would make.

(22:41):
But if you are dedicating your life to a cause
with a group of people that are committed to that same cause,
that are willing to take risks, you take the risks.
Because not taking the risks is not taking things
to the limit where you know things can change If you don take the situation to the limit there is no change possible So what happened Where did you take yourself into Just like a local police station

(23:11):
No. I went into hiding and I posted a Twitter video because I was censored from regular media.
And I called for people to protest. And I said, I'm going to turn myself in. I ask all of you
to wear white, to be very peaceful, and to be in this particular part of Caracas where we always

(23:37):
protest. It's a huge avenue called Avenida Miranda. And that morning, very early in the morning,
around 4.30, I went into the trunk of a car and went from the outskirts of Caracas to the center
of Caracas. They were looking for me. They had been raiding different houses of people close to me.

(23:59):
And I went to a friend's house, stayed there for, you know, we had breakfast, we had a conversation.
And then noon came.
And that's the time when we had called the people to be in the streets.
And there were a lot of police looking for me.
So I asked my friend if he had a motorcycle.
He had a motorcycle and he had a full helmet.

(24:21):
So I took the motorcycle, put the helmet on, went through a couple of checkpoints.
They didn't stop me.
And then there was a final checkpoint before the protest, but this checkpoint was being managed by the police of which I was the mayor.
So I said, I'm going to take the risk.
I had not been mayor for six years, but I always kept in contact with them.

(24:43):
So I said, you know, I'm just going to take my helmet off.
So I take my helmet off and all of them just, you know, they stood up and they're like, mayor, go right ahead with us.
Wow.
That's incredible.
And I went to a protest, and that was my last day in freedom. Hundreds of thousands of people. And you can look at all of these images in YouTube. They're really impressive. Everybody wearing white, an incredible energy. There was no sound system, nothing.

(25:12):
and it got to a point where there was a barrier of maybe 2,000 military men with armored vehicles,
motorcycles, and the disorder police or the order police, however you want to call it, gear.
The riot police.
The riot police.
And so I had the opportunity of just standing in a statue that was there.

(25:37):
I took a megaphone, gave a short speech.
my wife was there
she came up and she gave me this cross
that I've been wearing ever since
and
I turned myself in
they took me to an armored vehicle
and the people
in the armored vehicle was the head of the
National Guard, his second aboard

(25:58):
and a couple of other people
people started to shake the armored vehicle
and the head
of the National Guard got very nervous and he was
talking to Maduro and
he was
calling for the Rio police to start repressing the people.
I said, don't do that.
If you do that, you are going to incite violence.
Don't do that.

(26:19):
I said, so what do you suggest?
I said, give me a megaphone.
And I can commit to asking people to be nonviolent.
He says, I can't make that decision.
So he calls Maduro and he says, you know, I have Lopez here and this is the situation.
And he is saying that he can get, you know, he can calm the people.

(26:39):
so he approves and there again there are pictures of all of this it's it's like you know it's
completely absurd i am the person being put into prison and i was leading my guards and the entire
military with a megaphone telling them let's do this let's do that you're not telling the people
so that went along for like three hours then they took me to an airport at the center of the city

(27:01):
and there were three helicopters there and the three helicopters um went to different parts they
He put me into one of the helicopters and took me to a military base and then from the military base to the courthouse.
We got to the courthouse and the number two of the Maduro regime named Diosdado Cabello, he was driving the car.

(27:24):
We get there.
Time goes by.
Half an hour, 45 minutes, one hour.
And I asked, you know, what's happening?
And he said, we don't have a case against you.
What do you mean you don't have a case against me?
So you arrested me without a case?
Yeah, nobody thought that you were going to turn yourself in.
So nobody did the homework of putting the case.
And in front of me, he started to call the president of the Supreme Court, started to

(27:48):
call the attorney general and just saying, give him like political instructions.
You know, we need a case to prosecute this guy.
So time goes by, I go in front of the judge.
And of course they say, I have to be in prison.
And they take me to a military prison that is an hour and a half away from Caracas.
called Ramo Verde.

(28:10):
At the time, that prison had like 500 prisoners.
It had two buildings.
One building had 499.
And in the other building, it was just me.
They take me to the fourth floor
and they put me in a cell.
And that was a cell where I spent
the next four years of my life
in solitary confinement.

(28:31):
Holy shit.
Four years completely on your own.
No interaction apart from with guards.
Well, yeah, yeah.
No, interaction with the guards. I had sporadic interactions with some of the inmates when I went to Mass.
After a big push by my wife for them to allow me that privilege, then I was allowed to go out and see the sun.

(28:54):
But I had to be alone. Then at some point, there were a couple of other prisoners for a couple of months that were there with me.
But the rest of the time, I was me, myself, and I in solitary confinement.
Do you think, did they keep you on your own to try and break you?
Oh, absolutely. That's what solitary confinement is about.

(29:14):
But it was also for me not to talk to other prisoners.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
I wonder if they were worried that you were going to, you know,
the rest of the prisoners would be behind you.
Well, and they were correct because we actually did that.
I was able to organize a riot in the prison.
We took control of the prison.
So the way I was able to do that was by when I went to mass, there is a part of the mass when you stand up and you give people peace.

(29:45):
And you give people, you give them a hug and you say, peace be with you.
So what I did is I went into the room.
Maybe there were like 30, 40 people there.
And you just, I scanned the way people looked at me.
And when you're in this type of situation, you are in complete alert mode.
I mean, you really develop a way of understanding your surroundings that allows you to make very quick decisions.

(30:13):
So I chose the people that I knew were with me, and I would tell them, tell your wife to tell my wife who are you, and we'll get back to you.
So, in a span of like three or four months, when my lawyer came and my wife had the opportunity to visit me, I told both of them that these people were going to approach them and that I needed to know in what part of the prison they were.

(30:43):
So, I wanted one person at least in each one of the floors.
And then it took a couple of iterations.
Then I told them, let's organize a plan to take control of the prison.
And one day, and this is the way protests most of the time happen, is that they are sparked by something that happens.

(31:04):
One day, they tampered with a baby that was going to visit their father that was in prison.
And that's like a big no-no.
I mean, like they opened the diapers of the kid.
They touched the genitals of the baby.
And that created complete rage.
and we activated the plan to take control of the prison.

(31:26):
And for like 12 hours, we had control of the prison.
After that, I went into a more severe solitary confinement
and I went into a hunger strike.
So I did a 28-day hunger strike
and actually focused the hunger strike

(31:47):
on an issue that I knew we had high probabilities of winning, which was to call for the parliamentary
election in 2015. Many people do hunger strikes. The key to have a successful hunger strike
is that you have a petition that is probable that can happen in a time span of maximum 30 days.

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(34:11):
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So I've got so many questions on this.
Let's start with four years in solitary confinement.
How do you even manage that?

(34:32):
What did you do?
Well, I grew up with a lot of stories about prison because my great-grandfather was a political prisoner.
Then he went into exile.
He died in exile.
And his story always shocked me.
I couldn't believe, like growing up listening to the story, that you could go to prison for your thoughts, for your beliefs, for your ideas.

(34:55):
I mean, it was completely foreign to me.
and but I was always interested and as I was getting closer to calling for the protest
there was a lot of threats against me and I would be giving press conferences and giving speeches
always calling Maduro a dictator calling Maduro for the links that he had with the narcos

(35:21):
and I remember journalists and people saying you know don't you think that you're putting yourself
in danger, they're going to imprison you. So it was very clear to me that there was a very high
probability that I was going to be imprisoned. So I started to prepare myself, started to read

(35:42):
about what people did in prison. I read the usual suspects, Mandela, Gandhi, and many others,
but especially venezuelan political prisoners and um all experiences are different but they all have
in common one word routine you need to develop your routine so february the 18th 2014 the day

(36:08):
my first day in prison of the seven years i spent in prison i dedicated my focus to
deciding what my routine was going to be. And my routine ended up being something very simple.
I would do three things every day. I would pray every day. I would do something with my mind. I

(36:29):
would read, write, draw, try to play imaginary chess or chess or just do something with my head.
And I did physical exercise. And if I did those three things every day, I won the day. So my
my view, my universe was a sell. And my way of knowing that I was winning was doing those three

(36:55):
things. If I did those three things and not thinking about what's going to happen next week
or the week after, or what's going to be the date in which I'm going to be in freedom,
I was going to be able to keep strong. And that's what I did. And I was very disciplined in doing
that every single day.
But that's crazy mental toughness, because you hear stories of people getting broken

(37:18):
by 24 hours in solitary, and you did four years.
When you decided to go on hunger strike, why did you think that the Maduro government would
care about you being on hunger strike?
Well, that's a key.
So, I mean, we can do an entire podcast about hunger strikes, because I remember reading
the hunger strikes of the IRA people that were protesting,

(37:42):
I think it was in the 80s, that they died.
And that really shocked me.
And I started to...
I had read a lot about hunger strikes and the way they fail.
Most hunger strikes fail.
So at the beginning, I wanted to do a hunger strike
to ask for the release of all political prisoners.
But that was... It was not possible.

(38:04):
Too big of an ask.
Too big of an ask.
But at the time, this is May of 2015, there was an election that had to happen by the end of that year.
And according to the Venezuelan constitution, for an election to take place, it had to be called six months in advance.
And there was a lot of pressure from internally, all of the political movements, the press, internationally, for that election to take place.

(38:33):
But Maduro was not doing it.
So I decided to focus on that. So the hunger strike was not about me. It was not about the political prisoners. It was not about our conditions. It was about the hope for freedom for all of the Venezuelan people.
So we became the reference and it became the reference to the point that every day we were on CNN.

(38:58):
After I started the hunger strike, more than 100 other political prisoners started their own hunger strike.
And more than 150 people that were not in prison also went into a hunger strike.
So it was an entire focus.
my wife went to speak with the vice president and he told my wife, Jorge Arreaza, he said,

(39:18):
tell your husband to quit the hunger strike because we're going to let him die.
Would you have gone that far?
Well, I was very focused and I was very focused and very strong. That has been the most spiritually
intense experience I've had in my entire life. It was like, I don't have a bad memory

(39:42):
about that moment.
For me, it's one of the experiences of my life
that I remember as the more intense.
And it's just, you need to be very disciplined.
The first week is very hard.
The first three days, then day seven, day eight is very hard.

(40:04):
But then you go into a plateau.
And you need to also do certain things
that are counterintuitive.
You need to move around.
You need to exercise your body.
You need to be active.
And I had read a bit about it, so I was very focused.
And I remember the day that they actually called for the election,

(40:28):
the director of the prison and a representative of the attorney general's office,
they come to my cell and they say,
now you can lift your hunger strike.
You won.
and I said, I don't believe you.
And they showed me, they got their phone,
they showed me the news.
And I just, I mean, it was such a sweet victory.

(40:50):
And they had to come and they would put every day,
they would put a very tasty plate of food
with a camera right in front of myself.
Every single day.
They would desperate for you to have some.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Because with a camera and what they were,
you know, they were looking is that I would sneak
and try to take, you know, a part of that food.

(41:11):
So just do, yeah, disqualifying.
So why was it so spiritually enlightening?
Is it because in that scenario,
you have no control over anything,
but that's the one thing you can control?
Well, that's exactly it, you know?
When you're in solitary confinement,
you realize that you don't control anything.
You don't control what you wear.

(41:32):
You don't control what you eat.
You don't control when you see the sun.
You don't control when you speak to anyone.
You don't control anything.
But you do control something that is very sacred.
You control your mind and you control your heart.
So I became very focused in that, in controlling my mind, in controlling my heart.

(41:56):
And I actually went to the extreme to start it to, I realized that my heart, not just in the soul sense, but also in the physical sense.
They would raid my cell every other week.
Like six, seven hooded armed men would come into my cell, just pressure me.

(42:16):
And it was very tough.
It was very intense.
They would frisk me every single day.
So I was always under a lot of pressure.
And the first times that this happened to me,
I just remember my heart just beating as if it was going to explode. So I realized that I needed

(42:39):
to physically control my heart. And I came up with this way of training that I would do like 50 burpees
and then I would sit and only think about my heart, close my eyes and only think about my heart
and my breathing and trying to bring my heart rate as low as possible, as fast as possible.

(43:01):
And I had a lot of time. And since I had a lot of time, I did this, you know, every day,
several times. And it got to a point where I was really good in self-controlling, like my breathing,
my heart rate, and just self-control. It was part of the buildup towards the hunger strike.

(43:22):
And then I did the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius.
I am Catholic, and this is a meditation by St. Ignatius,
who was a warrior that became a man of the church.
And he developed this, the father of the Jesuits,

(43:47):
developed this way of praying, this way of meditating,
that starts by saying the same way you train for your body,
you need to train for your soul.
So it's incredible.
And I did that.
And I got to a very, very strong spiritual and mental stage.
And I was only focused on that.

(44:08):
I mean, this story is already crazy, but it gets even crazier.
So you're four years in solitary confinement.
How many times do you see your wife, by the way, in that time period?
I would see her sometimes every two months,
sometimes every month.
How did she handle it?
She's a warrior, man.
My wife is incredible.
My wife, she's a schoolteacher by training.
Then she became the national champion

(44:30):
of kitesurfing in Venezuela.
Then she had a very famous program for extreme sports
that was top rating.
And she had nothing to do with politics,
but she's a very strong woman.
And I remember telling her the day I went into prison,
And I said, now it's on you.
You're my voice.

(44:51):
And she took that very seriously.
She was very committed with my mother as well
and the people from my movement.
And she became the voice of the Venezuelan people.
She advocated in ways that nobody had ever advocated.
She is, I think, maybe the only Venezuelan
that met with Biden as vice president

(45:14):
and then with Trump at the White House.
She met with the Pope. She met with medical Macron. She met with Latin American presidents.
She just went around talking about what was happening in Venezuela. And because of her advocacy, it became very clear that Venezuela was no longer a democracy.

(45:34):
And at the same time, she was a mother. At the time, I had two kids. Manuela was four and my son Leo was one.
And it was very tough for them.
But she was such an incredible mother
that she was able to handle all of the advocacy
and to nurture and to explain our kids what was happening.

(45:59):
And they were able to keep strong.
So I'm very proud of everything that she did.
Yeah, that's incredible.
So four years in solitary what happened And why did you have then three years I assume in like general population prison No then 2017 we called I always call for general population prison by the way

(46:20):
Every time I was sentenced to 14 years, my trial was, just as a footnote, my trial was because I was being accused of inciting violence through my speech.
and the entire trial was analyzing my speech.
And since I've never called for violence,
he was not able,

(46:40):
there was no proof that I was calling for violence.
So the judge concluded that I had the capacity
to send subliminal messages to the Venezuelan people.
And this is on writing in the sentence.
So they sentenced me to 14 years
and that was serving time.
But in the year 2017,
our movement started another cycle of protest that went along for three months. Three months

(47:07):
of massive protest every day in every single city. It was, the country was burning. So they
sent me to house arrest to calm the protest down. But while I was in house arrest, I made a video
and called for the protest.
So they took me back to military prison.

(47:28):
It was like going to purgatory and then back to hell.
And I spent another period in the military prison
and then they sent me back to house arrest.
So I spent in house arrest a year and a half.
They made my house a prison, not just for me,
but also for my kids and my family, my kids and my wife.

(47:51):
Every time they went in and out of the house, they had to be frisked.
There were like 30 people guarding my house with hoods, machine guns.
And it was very intense.
And it was even harder for me, house arrest than solitary confinement,
because I had the weight of having my family also in prison.

(48:14):
So a lot of things happened.
2019 was a very bad year.
Maduro stole yet another election. And there was a lot of frustration, but we had won the National
Assembly. We had won two thirds of the National Assembly. And we had a political agreement that

(48:36):
every party was going to have the presidency of the National Assembly every year. And our turn
was 2019. So we came up with this idea that was based on the constitution that stated that if the
elected president doesn't show up for the swearing in at the National Assembly, then the president of

(48:59):
the National Assembly becomes the interim president until there is a new election. And this was a slim
window of the constitution. So we started to work on this and trying to get countries to support us.
uh, Ivan Duque was the president of Colombia and he supported this idea. And then Trump was

(49:19):
president at the time and his administration supported this idea. I remember writing a one
page memo about our, our approach. And we got, we got support from primarily the U.S. and Colombia
and Juan Guaidó, a member of our party, became interim president.

(49:41):
And then he was sworn in as the became the president of the National Assembly and then became interim president.
And that was 2019. And it was a moment where there was maximum pressure from the Trump administration.
Sanctions started to pile on Maduro. There were a lot of protests in the streets and things started to get.

(50:05):
very tense. And one day I received a signal message, self-destructive single message that had
a general in the background, a general from the military, one of the top ranking generals of
Maduro and a civilian. And then the message disappeared. A week after that, the civilian

(50:29):
in that video shows up to my house at midnight and he says, we want to help. What can we do?
And I said, if you really are who you say you are, allow me to talk to some of the military
and the police that I've been contacting over these years. And they said, all right.

(50:50):
So for three weeks as a prisoner, my house being guarded by 30 guards and armored vehicles,
people from the military and the police started to come to my house to legitimately plot against
Maduro. So this was the start of a military coup? No, I wouldn't call it a military coup. I would

(51:13):
call it a legitimate military uprising.
Okay, fair.
Because a military coup is the debunking of a legitimate government. Maduro was not legitimate.
So this is a legitimate military uprising that we were planning. So for three weeks,
I met with the head of the national police, the head of the political police, the military that

(51:37):
were in charge of the security of the national assembly of the Supreme court, the head of the
heat squad of Maduro, very intense conversations. And I remember asking all of them, you know,
why are you doing this? And they, some of them were, I think, more patriotic than others,
but they were all fearing the impact that sanctions were going to have on them and their

(52:01):
families. So we came up with a plan and the plan was to have a popular military uprising
that was going to come along with a decision of the Supreme Court that we were also coordinating
with. And on April 30th of 2019, I walked out of my house as a prisoner with a convoy of the

(52:29):
military and the police waiting for me. My guards were waiting for me outside. I was wearing a
jacket with the flag of Venezuela. And we all had a blue band around our shoulders. And I remember
coming out and all of the military just squaring and saying, all right, let's go. So that morning,

(52:52):
we had this uprising. Things didn't go the way we wanted because the decision of the Supreme Court
never took place. And it was very intense. Again, tens of thousands of people in the streets,
the military, and the only way out that we had was to seek refuge at embassies.

(53:14):
So long story short, I-
Because at this point, you're definitely going to get killed if they get their hands on you.
Absolutely. Absolutely. They were already shooting people.
And it was very clear, but it was a very confusing moment because
everybody thought that this was the end of Maduro.
So everybody was very, very energized.
But I knew that the plan was already failing.

(53:36):
since the very beginning. So I was in the middle of that, you know, five years before, no, six years
before that, I was taken to prison. My last day in the streets was in the middle of a huge protest.
Now I came out again in the middle of a huge protest and I had to seek refuge for me and for

(53:56):
the military. So I first went to the Chilean embassy and I started to call presidents in Caracas,
started to call presidents from the region, and some of the embassies were already closed.
So I remember talking to the president of Panama, and he said,

(54:17):
I know exactly what you're going through because I was looking for an embassy that could take the military.
And they opened the embassy of Panama to more than 30 military men that were with us in the uprising.
and the Chilean embassy had very weak security
because the ambassador was not there.
And there were already five people from my movement

(54:40):
that were staying there.
So my wife went there and she said,
we can't stay there.
And I said, you know, this is where I am.
I need to deal with this situation.
I need to take care of the military
and I need to take care of their security.
So she called the Spanish ambassador
and asked if we could go there.
And he said yes. So we went to the Spanish embassy, and that's where I stayed for the next year and a half. And the Spanish embassy was also under siege. They cut the electricity, they cut the running water, they cut the trash services.

(55:16):
and at the embassy, it was only the ambassador, his wife,
and the equivalent of the Navy SEALs of the Spanish government.
And it was actually an opportunity for me to meet these incredible people.
These are, I think, in terms of teamwork, you don't get better than that.
You don't get better than a special forces team.

(55:37):
And I've always been inclined to training and to combat sports
and we would train every day.
We would do combat sports in the morning and CrossFit in the afternoon.
So, and in the meantime, between the two training sessions, I was working 16 hours a day, like helping Guaidó to run the interim government.

(56:00):
And it was very intense until the end of 2020, when things started to get way more difficult.
It was already COVID.
And my mother got very sick.
She was going through dialysis. She was waiting for a liver transplant.
I had not seen my kids for two years. I had not seen my wife for almost two years.

(56:24):
So I decided to escape. And I never wanted to escape, but that's what I had to do.
Because essentially when you're in the Spanish Embassy, you're just in another prison.
Like I'm sure it's much nicer, but you're still trapped.
Oh, absolutely.
So how did you even plan to get out? Because again, I imagine there were people,
if they heard you'd escaped from the embassy, they're going to be hunting you down on the street?

(56:46):
Oh, absolutely. So I called a friend of mine with whom we've done different special operations
before, like many extractions. And this is a guy that was not even a member of the movement. He was
not even, he was a business person, but a good friend of mine. And he, for years, had been doing
all of these things with me. And he knew that one day I was going to call him. So I call him up and

(57:12):
I say, hey man, what's up? What's up? Okay. You know, you know, and he knew. And he started to plan.
And a month after I called him, we decided on the date and he was ready. So I left the embassy
in the trunk of the car of the ambassador and went through the checkpoints because of the Vienna

(57:34):
convention. They couldn't frisk and open the car of the ambassador. And several blocks away,
I transferred to another car. From there, we went to the basement of an office building.
And in that basement, I saw a group of six of my friends and two cars that were of the electricity

(57:55):
company of Venezuela. And my friend started, you know, after we spoke and we hugged each other,
And he said, all right, this is the plan.
We are an electricity commission.
These are your IDs.
These are your uniforms.
This is what we're going to do.
This is where we're going to go.
And he had planned every detail, like even who was going to sit where, how we were going

(58:19):
to react if we were detained.
And we went through for like 16 hours.
We went through like 20 checkpoints, not a problem.
and we got to the border between Venezuela and Colombia
at the Meta River.
On the other side, it was terrorist territory
of the FARC and the ELN.

(58:40):
These are terrorist organizations.
So we had called the president of Colombia to support.
So there was secret service from Colombia
waiting for me on the other side.
So Colombia and Maduro aren't like...
At the time, they were at odds, yeah.
Okay.
At the time.
Now, the new president of Colombia is an ally of Maduro.

(59:03):
So we went through the last checkpoint.
There was nobody there.
It's like, all right, what do we do?
So we cross, we go in the boat, and we're about to start crossing the river.
And then like eight military, they storm at us with the machine guns.

(59:23):
And they say, hey, you know, who are you?
and they called us out and they started to frisk all of us. This is the end of 2020, COVID,
no vaccines yet. So we all had face masks. They started to ask us, who are you? There are two
things you always need to do if you're doing a cover-up operation, status of being and status

(59:49):
of action, which means why are you here and who are you? And you can go down a rabbit hole with
each of those questions. Like, who are you? It's not just your name and your ID. Who are you is,
you know, where you live? Who are your parents? Where did you go to school? You know, on, on,
on, on, on. And why are you here is, you know, you're an electricity commission. So that, that,

(01:00:10):
you know, you can go down that rabbit hole. My role was to be very sick. So immediately I started
to cough. I started to, you know, I would shrug my shoulders and I would sit down. I would say,
you know, I feel very sick. And remember, this is before vaccine. Everybody was scared. So
I was the only one that they didn't ask to take the face mask out. So they asked my friend,

(01:00:41):
um you know who are you they frisked him and they they found some cash and they you know the lieutenant
tells him so you you're not an electricity commission who are you and my friend said all
right man i'm gonna tell you the real story i have a case against me in caracas and i have to leave
to colombia uh and he says but it's no political no no no no no no it's financial it's it's a

(01:01:06):
Private case. All right, I'm going to call the general that is supervising this region.
And he said, oh, wait, wait, don't call him yet. Think about this. If you call the general,
he's going to take all of that cash and you're not going to get a single dollar of that juicy
amount of dollars that you have in your hands. He thought about it for like 30 seconds. And then

(01:01:30):
he said, all right, get the fuck out of here. Oh my God. And I imagine you're panicking while
your friends. I was sitting with another friend and I told him, I said, listen, I'm not going back
to prison now. I'm not going to give this Christmas present to Maduro. I'm not going back.
If this is going to get tougher, I'm telling you, I'm going to run to the river and I'm just going

(01:01:55):
to start swimming. I took my boots out. I had cowboy boots on and I was just ready to do that.
So, you know, when my friend comes out, we started running and, you know, we got in the boat. We crossed the river and then I boarded a military plane from the Colombian government, went to Bogotá. There I met the U.S. ambassador and some Colombian officials. I called the president and they said, you need to leave immediately.

(01:02:24):
they put me in another plane, and they sent me to the US with nothing. I had no idea. I had nothing.
So I landed, and the next day, I boarded a plane, again, with no passport, with no papers, nothing,
to Madrid, where my family was.
And so what was it like when you landed in Madrid and you were free, really, for the first time in,

(01:02:48):
I don't know, close to a decade?
Well, it was bittersweet. It was bittersweet. It was sweet because I was with my family.
It was a very happy moment because I could see my kids, my wife.
But it was bitter because I felt frustrated that I had to leave the country.
I never wanted to do that.

(01:03:08):
And to be very honest, exile at the beginning, it was tougher than like psychologically and emotionally was tougher than prison and house arrest because I felt defeated.
I felt frustrated and I still had no clarity of what I was going to do in order to continue

(01:03:31):
my fight for freedom.
And so that was in 2020.
At the end of 2020, November 2020.
So between then and the election that was a little over a year ago, is that right?
Yeah.
What did you do?
Well, I continued to be very involved with Venezuela, with our movement.
But then I had the opportunity to go to a Oslo Freedom Forum that took place in Miami that year, 2021. And I met Masia Linejat, who you met yesterday. And I met Garry Kasparov. And I met many other activists. And it became very clear to me that, and to us, that what I was going through in Venezuela was the same thing that they were going through in their countries.

(01:04:16):
So my speech was that we need to create an alliance of freedom fighters.
So we decided to create this movement alongside with Masiy Ali Najar and Garika Spadov.
And that's how the idea of the World Liberty Congress started.
The World Liberty Congress has become the largest global alliance of democracy defenders and freedom fighters.

(01:04:38):
And today we have representatives from more than 60 countries.
and these are people that we are very different in any way you look at us skin color religion
language history but when it comes to talk about uh our fight for freedom it's the same story
you met tanatron who is the leader of uh the opposition movement in thailand

(01:05:03):
when i talked to him he's it's as if we had always been in the same movement his movement
is the same. His life story is very similar to mine. He always says, but I still haven't been
to prison, but everything else is the same. The color of his movement is orange. The color of my
movement is orange. The way we, the challenges we have to organize movements is the same.

(01:05:28):
So it became a natural alliance for us. And for me, it's been an incredible growing experience
just to meet people all over the world to understand. And I truly believe in this idea now.
Before I theoretically believed in this idea, but now I fundamentally believe that freedom and human

(01:05:50):
rights has no borders. And if you truly believe in freedom, you cannot be selective about the
countries that are entitled to democracy and freedom. And if you believe in freedom, you need
to believe in democracy because there is no way a citizen can be free in a system that is not a
democracy. There is just no way. So I've dedicated my life and most of my efforts over the past years

(01:06:16):
splitting between focusing in Venezuela and building the World Liberty Congress.
And your political party was orange and now with World Liberty Congress, you're using Bitcoin.
Yep.
So maybe it's worth getting into that. This is a Bitcoin show. We're here at a Bitcoin event. How are you using it?
Well, I started in 2020 when we were going through COVID.

(01:06:43):
We had the interim government and the U.S. government had seized, frozen accounts of the Maduro regime.
And there was one account that we were able to use those funds.
but it required an approval of the Treasury and the OFAC.

(01:07:04):
And it was COVID, and we wanted to do something for the medical doctors
and nurses that were at the front lines.
At the time, a nurse was earning $3 per month.
A medical doctor was earning $5 per month.
And it was very clear that this was a recipe for disaster
in terms of just dealing with the COVID crisis.

(01:07:27):
So we came up with this idea.
Why don't we give cash transfers?
All right, that's a great idea.
So how do we do it?
We can't use the banking system.
I've been a victim of financial apartheid since 2008.
I've not been able to have an account in Venezuela.
My movement never had an account in Venezuela.
It's impossible to use the banking system.

(01:07:50):
And to get resources, the only way we could do it was by using, at the time,
what we used was stablecoin. So we put together this program using USDC and we were able to do it
in a way that was so beautifully put together that we got the OFAC license and it was the

(01:08:16):
first ever OFAC license that mentioned crypto and stablecoins. And this is back in 2020.
The program was rolled out and we were able to support 80,000, almost 80,000 medical doctors and nurses.
That's incredible.
And it was very public because we were making, you know, we were talking about it.

(01:08:38):
And the regime tried to shut it down in all sorts of ways.
They couldn't.
So it was very clear to me that this was a very powerful tool.
Then I came out and I met Alex Glastin and I met this community and we started to do the same, but with Bitcoin.

(01:09:01):
And we of course understood the benefits of Bitcoin And to date we still support 20 activists monthly of different political parties and different sectors of civil society with this tool that it been in place since 2020 Last year there was an election in Venezuela and we were able to use Bitcoin to support the people

(01:09:27):
that were in the front lines, guarding the vote in each one of the 14,000, 16,000 voting centers.
And that election was clearly not won by Maduro, but he kept power.
So do you want to explain what happened there?
Well, what happened there is that we won the election. Maduro, I think he miscalculated. He disqualified the candidate that had won the primary the same way I was disqualified years before. And we were able to register a candidate that was completely unknown.

(01:10:04):
Edmundo Gonzalez. He was 75 years old at the time, a completely unknown diplomat, very soft-spoken
person, by no means the charismatic leader that will go and rally the people. And we were able to
register him. And everybody rallied behind him. And he was able to win the election. And we were

(01:10:30):
able to prove that the election was won because we had people in each one of the voting centers
that were collecting the voting tallies, and it became clear with proof the Carter Center,
the UN, and many other independent organizations did the audit and actually concluded that we won

(01:10:54):
the election with 70% of the vote. What happened afterwards is what happens in autocratic countries.
Maduro decided not to recognize the election and he did do another coup. He announced bogus results,
took the people, came out to the streets. He took the military and started to repress the people.

(01:11:19):
And for the past year, year and a half, it's been a completely new territory in terms of the way we do politics.
Before, we were semi-clandestine.
Now, we are fully clandestine.
Thousands of new political prisoners, people being tortured, entire families being disappeared.

(01:11:41):
And it's become a very suffocating situation for the Venezuelan people.
So it's obviously amazing that you can pay these people who want to protest in Bitcoin.
And like you say, you just can't do that with the normal financial rails.
But if every time, you know, the parties that you're getting behind win an election, Maduro just says no, then what's the hope?

(01:12:06):
Like what can change?
Well, at this moment, I don't know if you've been following the news, but the U.S. government has deployed the U.S. Navy to the South Caribbean.
Yeah.
And it's been pressuring Maduro.
And I think that the Trump administration and Rubio that is leading this, they are on spot by framing the problem of Venezuela, not just as a problem of an autocrat that stole an election, not just as a problem of massive human rights abuses,

(01:12:44):
not just as a problem of a humanitarian crisis that has led to 10 million Venezuelans, a third of the population, to leave our country.
But they have framed the problem at the root cause, very rightly so, as a law enforcement criminal issue.

(01:13:09):
Understanding that Maduro is the head of a criminal organization.
Maduro has been indicted by the U.S. government in 2020 as the head of a drug cartel.
And as I told you before, we know this very well in Venezuela.
I was sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment for calling Maduro anarcho.

(01:13:31):
So this is not a made-up story.
We know this in Venezuela.
We know that we are no longer an oil economy.
Venezuela today is a criminal economy that has different pillars, contraband, the extraction of gold, the corrupt and dark sale of oil and cocaine.

(01:13:52):
And in all of those areas of that criminal economy, Maduro has deployed the military and the business enablers that have created a web of interest that allow that criminal structure to grow and to go beyond borders, not just to the Latin American region, but to the United States.

(01:14:15):
When Trump says that cocaine is going from Venezuela to the United States, he's completely
right.
But it's not just the United States.
It's also crossing the Atlantic and going to Europe.
So I think that this pressure moment against Maduro as the head of a criminal organization

(01:14:35):
is a window of opportunity that can spark the moment of a massive popular reaction that
our hope happens soon that will allow us to finally transition to democracy. It's not an easy
path to go through. It's not a straight line, but it's where we are now. And we are very hopeful.

(01:15:00):
So are you more hopeful now than you were a few years ago?
Well, I would say that we've been in baseball terms. We've been in third base many times.
It's been hard to go to the home plate.
So we are in third base again.
And yes, I am hopeful.
Last year, when we had the election, I was hopeful.
In 2014, when we were in the streets, I was hopeful.

(01:15:24):
So I am an eternal optimist.
And I think that's a necessary characteristic in this business of fighting against dictators.
I mean, you cannot be a cynic.
Well, you just wouldn't do it.
Yeah, you just won't do it.
You cannot be a cynic and you cannot be completely rational.
You cannot be rational about your motivation.
You need to be rational about your strategic approach.

(01:15:46):
But, you know, it's what we all are now in Venezuela.
We're hopeful.
I've seen the videos of, like, the drug boats being blown up
coming out of Venezuela,
and I've seen Trump ramping up the pressure.
And Maduro must be feeling insane pressure right now.
What I can't figure out is he can't step down
because he's going to go to The Hague,

(01:16:07):
or he's going to get killed somewhere.
So is the only real outcome of this,
someone needs to kill Maduro?
Well, Maduro could take the decision of negotiate.
That's always an open position that he has.
But not negotiate for him to stay in different conditions.
For him to negotiate, to leave power,

(01:16:27):
and to be part of at least having some say
of how the transition could happen,
as it happened in Chile, as it happened in South Africa, as it happened in many transitions where
the incumbent autocratic regime had a lot to say in what the transition was going to look like.
But that's one alternative. The other alternative is that nothing happens. I hope that that's not

(01:16:52):
the scenario. And the other one is that there is more pressure that will just
will suffocate Maduro somewhere or another.
Yeah.
And a military uprising is probably a likely one as well in there.
Well, I think a military uprising,
it's something that could happen,
but it won't happen in a void.

(01:17:14):
I mean, it won't happen without an action.
The military uprising could be a reaction
to what's happening now
and to what I think is going to happen
in the upcoming weeks
that we are going to see
strikes inland. So far, we have seen strikes against boats that are carrying cocaine at sea.

(01:17:36):
I think this is going to move to targeted strikes inland that could, you know, there is a wide range
of possibilities of what those strikes could look like. I hope, and this is what we need to work on,
is that one of those strikes,
or one of those actions,

(01:17:56):
leads to an internal reaction,
which is the way and the path to a transition.
And that reaction is people.
It's people power.
It's people in the streets.
So let's say all this happens.
I hope it does.
I hope that the Venezuelans
manage to get their country back.
But what did he say?
A third of the population have left

(01:18:17):
over the past few decades.
No, in the past decade.
In the past decade.
So just to put that into context, because, I mean, that's very easily said.
10 million people.
Okay, what does that mean?
That means a third of a population.
So the U.S. has, what, 300 million people?
Imagine 100 million U.S. citizens living in 10 years.

(01:18:37):
It's crazy.
A third of a population.
And that third of a population is mostly young people, professionals,
people who are looking for a future, for opportunities,
because they cannot find those opportunities in Venezuela.
And this is where it gets tricky in terms of, like,
if all this happens, the Venezuelan people get their country back.

(01:19:00):
How do you rebuild?
Because you've lost so many people,
and the people that are leaving are probably the middle class of society,
I would guess.
No, no, no, no, no.
Is that not true?
No, no, everybody.
I mean, I don't think that today there is a family in Venezuela,
middle class or the poor classes, that they don't have someone from that family that has not left

(01:19:22):
Venezuela. So this isn't like they're leaving to go to a university in the United States.
No, no, no. They're walking out of the country going to...
Oh, yes. They are walking. So let me tell you a story. I was in Costa Rica two years ago,
and I see in the roads a group of seven people walking. One of them had the Venezuelan flag,

(01:19:44):
So I stopped the car, started talking to him.
This was in January.
And I asked him, so when did you leave?
He said, after Christmas, I left.
And where are you going?
And he said, I want to go to Canada.
I said, to Canada, man, how are you going to cross the border?
And he said, you know, I'd rather have the uncertainty of how I am going to cross the border

(01:20:06):
than the certainty of staying in Venezuela and not being able to feed my kids.
And that's, I think that story, that mentality is what motivates millions of people that have left.
Walking. Imagine walking from Venezuela to Mexico to the US. Walking.
Crazy. But so how do you rebuild?

(01:20:29):
If so many people have left, if the country's been stripped of, you know, all of its resources by this dictatorship, how do you rebuild?
Well, the first I think that we need to understand is that we will be rebuilding at a moment where everything has been destroyed.
So all of the rebuilding process, it's going to revert the current tendency of continuous and prolonged destruction.

(01:20:55):
So just reversing the tendency is going to be a big win.
I think that there is going to be a main challenge, which will be to have a stable transition.
So the security aspect of it is going to be very important.
But in my view, the quick win that will lead to more stability will come from addressing the purchase capacity of the population.

(01:21:23):
And if we are able to show that we can stabilize the economy and start the economy to grow and people start to see the benefits of living in a non-inflationary economy, in having wages that can actually buy what they need, I think that that is going to be the beginning of a reconstruction that will have to touch everything.

(01:21:50):
education, healthcare, infrastructure, energy, oil, you name it, everything will have to be
reconstructed. But the priority in, I think in the first months and year will be the political
stabilization, security, and the economic stability. It's a big task. It's huge, but it's

(01:22:11):
one we're dreaming for. Absolutely. It's a far better future than... Oh, absolutely. And we all
know that. And, you know, I think that the fact that 10 million Venezuelans have left our country,
it's also a huge potential. We heard in the conference, a couple of Venezuelans speak about
what they're doing. So there are, in the Bitcoin community, there are tons of Venezuelans that are

(01:22:34):
doing incredible things. And this is happening in all industries, in all industries. I don't think
everybody will go back physically. But I think most people, especially people that have been
successful in whatever area, they will figure out a way to be part of the reconstruction of Venezuela
with ideas, with capital, with connections. And that's, I think, one of the biggest assets

(01:23:01):
that we will have for the reconstruction of Venezuela.
Well, Mauricio was saying it on stage yesterday. He was saying that he's obviously left Venezuela.
He left quite a long time ago now, but he's still hiring people in Venezuela.
He said there's some of his best workers there.
He's still trying to support the country.
And I think there'll be a lot of people doing that.
So in terms, this almost feels like a bit of a trivial thing when this is such like a human story.

(01:23:26):
But you have talked about the opportunities that Bitcoin has in Venezuela.
You have a ton of power.
Like, do you think things like Bitcoin mining will play a part in this rebuild?
Yeah, I'm convinced.
So let me give you, so I think Bitcoin has a lot of potential in two phases.
The current phase, which is the resistance phase, that as I said before, I hope that soon we will be walking towards transition.

(01:23:55):
But we need to prepare for all scenarios.
So how can Bitcoin support the resistance movement?
And we're working in evolving what we have been doing, as I said before, supporting activists, supporting different sectors of society through Bitcoin and stablecoin.
And we are working on this idea of decentralized resistance using not just Bitcoin, but also Nostr.

(01:24:21):
I think Nostar has a huge potential because when Nostar came out, I had a conversation with Jack Dorsey two years ago, and he was very pumped about Nostar.
And I listened to him and said, well, it sounds cool, but, you know, I don't see the use case.
But a year ago, after Maduro stole the election, X was banned in Venezuela and WhatsApp was criminalized in Venezuela.

(01:24:46):
So something like NOSTER is very useful now. So we are working to onboard activists on NOSTER in a completely private way, in a completely anonymous way, and in a way that we can support them directly through microsupports and SAPs.

(01:25:10):
and many people require support to do things or even for their personal emergencies that are less
than a hundred dollars to get a grant from an organization not even a hundred let's say five
thousand dollars it's it's not possible so there are many things that could happen in terms of

(01:25:32):
supporting people by sapping just small amounts of money so we are working on this idea of um
decentralized micro-philanthropy through NOSTER. And what we want to do is to
onboard hundreds and hopefully thousands of activists that will be anonymous. We will be

(01:25:53):
able to verify them. We will be able to take the content from NOSTER, export it to other social
media through our own channels, and to link those activists and whatever their activities are
to people in the Bitcoin community
that could engage in this micro-philanthropy.

(01:26:13):
So that's something we're doing now with Bitcoin
for the resistance.
So when we were in Bali, you were telling me about this.
And I think it's a really cool idea
because you almost want to incentivize people
to go out and protest and like take pictures on the street.
And if I saw that sort of thing on Nostra,
I'm zapping that all day long.
And the idea of them getting, you know, $50 to $100 easy,
they're going to get that every single time.
And like, if that little bit of support

(01:26:34):
changes the direction of a country, like it's insane.
I think Nosser is very cool for different reasons.
You know, it's decentralized.
You don't have a company that is owning the social media.
But I think something that is really transformative is the SAPs.
100%.
I mean, the SAPs can become something so transformational.

(01:26:56):
I mean, think about this.
People get obsessed with likes.
And likes is just a number with a hand, with a heart.
You know, a SAP is something that can materialize in money. It could be small amounts of money for the people giving, but it can be a significant amount of money for the people receiving.

(01:27:20):
And I think this can create also a way of linking people out in democratic and free countries with people who are fighting in the front lines.
And I think this type of globalization is not the state-to-state, company-to-company globalization, but this is something much more powerful. This is the citizen-to-citizen globalization. And if we make that about freedom, if we make that about a common hope that the world should be free, it could be very, very strong.

(01:27:54):
I love it, man. So you have a lot of hope, Venezuela. You think things will get better. I obviously hope you're absolutely right.
But the other part, just to not to dump this idea. So one, Bitcoin for resistance. But then let's think about the scenario of Venezuela transitioning to democracy.

(01:28:16):
Bitcoin can play a huge role.
And let me give you some examples.
Venezuela is the second largest hydroelectricity producing country in South America.
We are currently wasting 55% of the energy that is being produced for two reasons.
Because of the destruction of the transmission infrastructure and for the collapse of the industrial network in Venezuela.

(01:28:45):
That's not going to change anytime soon.
But the energy is being produced every day.
The water is going through the dam.
It's going through the turbines.
And that 55% of wasted energy is happening as we speak.
So it's a no-brainer to immediately reach out to the private sector and to build the largest Bitcoin mining in South America and maybe in the world in the Goody Dam.

(01:29:12):
And then we can do the same with the natural gas flaring. Venezuela is the country that flares the most amount of natural gas in its process of producing oil. Let me just explain this. When you have an oil field, most of the time, the oil coexists with natural gas.

(01:29:34):
So if you don't have the capacity to extract the natural gas and capture it, to use it, that natural gas, which is highly toxic, goes into the atmosphere.
And that happens at a huge rate as we speak.
So hydroelectricity and natural gas flaring are two wasted energy that are happening today in Venezuela that we can link to Bitcoin mining immediately.

(01:30:04):
then what do we do with the Bitcoin?
Well, I truly believe that one of the ways
in which Bitcoin can be adopted at a much faster rate
is if people start to be paid in Bitcoin.
Because if you think about it,
I mean, the people who listen to this podcast

(01:30:25):
are Bitcoiners, mostly.
And I am sure that everybody listening to me,
they have their own personal story
of how they became a Bitcoiner.
But it's mostly a kind of a process of being convinced
that this is something,
and then you were able to buy your Bitcoin as a store of value.

(01:30:47):
But if you are paid in Bitcoin,
then you start to see that Bitcoin is also a means of saving.
Nobody saves a penny in countries that are inflationary.
And Venezuela went through one of the toughest hyperinflation periods in the world only a couple of years ago.

(01:31:09):
And I think that that Bitcoin being produced can be part of a pilot program of asking part of the civil servants in Venezuela if they would voluntarily would like to be paid in Bitcoin.
So maybe 10%, 5% of the people say at the beginning, yeah, I would like to do that.

(01:31:30):
I'm sure that after six months, 50% of the people would be wanting to be paid in Bitcoin.
Maybe that won't be possible.
But I think that that will create a very fast adoption rate and it will create an ecosystem where Bitcoin is familiar to everybody.
Then another thing that can be done that it's a no brainer, super fast, making Bitcoin attractive for Bitcoiners worldwide. No capital gains. Make it legally safe for Bitcoiners to move to Venezuela, to move their businesses to Venezuela and to be a reference for the Bitcoin community.

(01:32:11):
So I think that Venezuela is positioned as one of the few countries that can have the fastest
adoption of Bitcoin if we do it in the right way. And these are just three things of many that we can
do. Yeah, as bad as it has all been in Venezuela, if you do manage to get rid of Maduro and rebuild,

(01:32:35):
you have an opportunity to just run this thing at light speed and get way ahead of almost every
country in the world. Well, that's what we hope. It's very cool. So what do you want people to do
in terms of finding out more about this World Liberty Congress that you're running, more about
you more about the projects you're working with? Well, I would invite people to go into our website,

(01:32:58):
worldlibertycongress.org. And next month, in November, we're going to have a huge event.
So last year, we were invited to give a keynote speech at the 35th anniversary of the fall of the
wall in Berlin. And basically, what Masi and I said was that you guys are celebrating this as

(01:33:18):
something of the past but we want to talk to you about the walls of the present in Iran in Venezuela and in more than 80 countries in the world So the mayor said I really like what you said What can we do So we said well in the same way that Paris has the Paris Fashion Week
why don't we organize the Berlin Freedom Week?

(01:33:40):
He liked the idea.
So that's going to happen next month in Berlin.
We're going to have our General Assembly at the Berlin City Parliament,
and we're organizing more than 80 events,
small, large, cultural, technical around the city of Berlin, which is a very cool city.
I think it's no better city in the world to do something like this. It's a very cypherpunk type

(01:34:04):
of city. It has a complete attitude for this rebellious attitude to it. And I think for those
people who are interested, you know, go into our website, look at the programming, reach out to us
and help us in any way and be part of this community.
It's a community with purpose, very cool people,

(01:34:27):
very motivated people, people with incredible stories
and people who wanna change the world We wanna change the world And we wake up every single day thinking of what are we going to do today to change the world Let go Leo I love that
I assume if Venezuela gets to the point
where you have free, fair elections, democracy,

(01:34:47):
everything changes,
would you go back and try and do something politically?
Or is that behind you now?
No, no. Of course I will go back.
I will go back immediately.
But would you want to run to be the leader of the country?
You know, we'll see what happens.
Now we have an elected president.
Yeah.
So he will lead the transition and I will be fully backing him in the process of the transition.
I first want to go back to my country.

(01:35:10):
I want to go around my country and I want to do what I like to do the most, which is to build a movement.
And I want to go around the country, just organize young people, organize community leaders, and again, strengthen a movement of leaders.
That's my real passion.

(01:35:30):
If that leads me to the opportunity of running for office again, yeah, I, of course, will
open that door when it comes But my passion is seeing Venezuela free and to build a very strong movement that will keep freedom alive because the fight won be over when Maduro is out The fight will

(01:35:54):
continue in a different terrain with different challenges, but we will need to have strong
movements, strong committed leaders, and a strong passion for freedom, democracy, and human rights.
I love it, man. It's very cool. I hope we see this world sooner rather than later.
I hope so, too.
I hope that next time we do an interview, Venezuela is a free country again.

(01:36:15):
Well, I hope in a couple of weeks we can do it.
Hey, as soon as it happens, we're doing it again.
But yeah, thank you so much, man. It's been cool to get to know you.
And your story is absolutely wild.
Thank you very much.
This has been great. And I will probably see you in the sea next time I see you.
Absolutely.
Thanks, man.

(01:36:36):
Thank you.

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