Jill Carlson: Open Money Initiative – Free Access to Finance as a Human Right (#288)

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought you by cosmos cosmos is building the intent of of blockchains an ecosystem where thousands of blockchains can interoperate creating the foundation for a new token economy if you have an idea for a DAP visit cosmos network slashed epicenter to learn more and to get in touch with the cosmos team hi welcome to epicenter my name is the best thing we do and my name is Sonny Agarwal so today we have killed Carlson on the show Jill is one of the

cofounders of the open money initiative formerly she was an employee at chain and the open money initiative is a body of sort of a research body that is looking into open financial systems and creating a space where you know more people can have access to open financial systems and so Jill is quite active and interested in the situation in Israel at the moment which as most of you know is quite dire and so with this over money initiative and with the help of partners they are educating people there to learn how to use Bitcoin cryptocurrency to do

simple things like you know potentially feed their families and so we talked with Jill for about an hour and a half about this it's really fascinating topic it gets it gets a little on the sort of like edge of the political spectrum when it comes to like our propensity to try to stay away from political topics but interesting nonetheless yeah a lot of history there too about what happened in ms well the last couple years Sebastian don't you think that cryptocurrencies are somewhat inherently a political topic yeah I I think so I mean she said something before the show which which resonated with me which is that you know

cryptocurrencies are about a regulatory charge to some extent I think that's true for some people I think there are others and I think I've put myself in that category as well that think that there are actually you know applications here that don't necessarily want to circumvent capital controls or regularly are into regulatory arbitrage but yeah there there is something quite political about cryptocurrencies to think generally yeah and Joe also runs a podcast called what grinds my gears and so you know people often ask me what which podcast I listen to and so basically this three which is obviously epicenter you know I listen to all the

episodes that I don't host myself planet money from NPR and then what grinds my gears I think their APIs I think their podcast is really cool cause like you know her she runs it with meltem two mirrors and it's very like you know they both have a deep history in like finance and so it's very interesting getting that perspective like you know our part destined to be very technical they approach crypto from just a very just like financial perspective and getting its really interesting pockets I definitely suggest people check that out yeah I've listened to a wonderful episodes and I I'm gonna add it to my my list so you were at New York blockchain week last week I was trying not to pay

too much attention to that because it just seemed like a whole bunch of craziness but yeah how was that what was that like yeah I was at New York blockchain week last week like a and it was a pretty you know interesting event or week you know lots of meetings and stuff I know a lot of people like think New York blockchain week has become somewhat of a you know craziness and like a lot of people don't like it I left so you know I like it a lot I think it's like the one week where you get the entire crypto industry in like one city together and even in like the same event right like you know so the consent coin desk consensus is like the centerpiece

of this entire thing and then around it you have other events like you have the magical crypto conference a very Bitcoin or s conference you had ethereal which is that consensuses thing you have token summit and and then at Point s consensus is kind of where everyone amalgamated together and like how often do you get like like big Bitcoin maximalist in the same room with like eath heads within the same room as like XRP army people and it's like when you get that you get this cool like you know for example I know many people may be familiar with that famous bet between Joe Lubin and Jimmy song about like you know in five years will there be I think they made it a like some high amount

like I don't know if I'm ahead like 60 Bitcoin or something about like will there be at least five etherium gaps with like over like a hundred thousand daily active users I don't remember the exact numbers but there like something like that and so it's like you know you get cool bets like that happening and just cool conversations across you know we get this all the time on crypto Twitter but like it's cool to get there was like real-life interaction you really only get when you get all the people in the same room and I also went to the magical crypto conference which like you know I know tend to find myself more at more like aetherium like events and stuff and it's really cool just

chatting with a lot of Bitcoin Bitcoin errs there and kind of like notice there's some things about the magical crypto conference that we're like the talks were really good and then there's some parts that were like oh okay they actually rented a live bull in the conference like there's there's a bull there no I think I saw this yeah yeah it was weird I don't know it's just like you know they were like no student discount tickets but we're gonna no we're gonna use all this money to like rent a bull I don't know in the middle of Manhattan some of some things are weird but the people they were really cool and it's very interesting just like a generally different crowds and I know they hang out with like a lot of people there didn't even know about cosmos like they had no clue what it even was and so

I'd actually often introduced myself with like epicenter because people actually know epicenter but not cosmos so that was very interesting oh that's funny like yeah in a room full of Bitcoin maximalists or people who are really into Bitcoin how many of them actually are aware of some of these other projects sometimes yeah I tend not to travel you know across oceans to go to conferences but if you recommend it maybe I'll consider it next year yeah yeah waitlist Lambos this year that was nice no van boo is outside yeah okay maybe maybe we need another bull run how that happens all right well thanks for that update and with that well let's go to

our conversation with Jill hi so we're here with Jill Carlson Jill is the co-founder of the open money initiative previously Jill was at chained and also worked at ASOS and so today we're going to talk about a whole bunch of things including her interest in financial regulation sir convention in viola or otherwise known as you know trying to help people in Venezuela who are struggling to put food on their table which is been in the news lately and how how crypto is is playing a role there so hi Jill thanks for joining us today hey thanks for having me so before we get started and start talking about things that will probably attract

unwanted attention by a lot of people online and sort of like people who don't agree with certain political views let's first talk about you and a bit of your background and how you got involved in crypto and got interested in this stuff in the first place yeah sure so um I let's see how far back do you want me to go as far back as you'd like to okay so let's see I grew up in Boston I went to school and studied history and then I did exactly what every good liberal arts major does and I went to work on Wall Street so my first job out of school was as a bond trader at Goldman in New York and specifically I was trading Latin

American debt and derivatives so I was trading the bond through the debt that these countries issued including Venezuela also including Argentina Mexico Brazil Colombia Latin America right so that was that was a good experience um it got me deep into the wild world of economics political economics I started to become acquainted with all kinds of issues that countries can have when they're experiencing inflation when they're defaulting on their debt when they can no longer pay back their loans very interesting stuff now how I got into cryptocurrency was

actually through this lens and through the same experience of trading trading sovereign debt so I had these colleagues who'd be on the ground in these various countries I would catch up with every day every morning they would give me kind of the local color what's going on etc and in particular I had a colleague who is based in Argentina in Buenos Aires and he calls me up one morning and at the time Argentina was going through a debt default they were also experiencing very high inflation not hyperinflation but high enough that it was having impact and he calls me up one morning and he says Jill you'll never

guess what like I finally managed to get my money offshore um this guy didn't work at Goldman so he didn't have like a US bank account and Argentina at the time also had very searched capital controls in place meaning that you couldn't move your money freely in or out of the country in or out of the peso if you lived there in fact there were people using suitcases to get it across the border like on boats out from Argentina to Uruguay at the time that was one of the four basic things that people would do to try and get their money out um and he says you know I found like a safer easier way to do this and this is back in 2013 and I'm like what you can probably see where it's

going and he says oh well I bought I bought Bitcoin with it and I at the time was very skeptical it's like this isn't backed by anything I don't think you want to trust this I don't think this is a good idea you know as far as I know this is just something that people are using to buy drugs the Internet but he pulled me kind of kicking and screaming down the rabbit hole I ended up buying some Bitcoin again this was early 2013 so I kind of rode it up in the first type cycle and went from you know a couple hundred dollars to over a thousand dollars I wrote it back down like I'm a huge idiot I was right all along

but more than anything else I was kind of inspired to say okay if I'm gonna own this thing I better understand actually what it is how it works and so that's when I started to really dive in and start to learn about it myself so that was kind of my intro story cool and so how did you get involved with the chain who at the time were just just starting off I guess yeah so actually before I joined chain I I went to grad school I pulled the old grad school rip cord and I want to go study development economics at Oxford um at the time I thought that I wanted to go to a master's degree I

thought that I was going to study a lot of this very straight and narrow stuff that I had been sort of experiencing firsthand from the trading desk about sovereign debt sustainability all of these sort of dry topics and economics but by the time I got there I basically I went into my professors and I was like so I know that I wrote up this proposal on sovereign debt sustainability and leftist countries in blah blah blah but really what I want to study now what I want to write my dissertation on is this Bitcoin thing and as you can imagine my sort of dodgy economics department professors at Oxford were less than impressed I got a lot of sort of rolled eyes and you know this is unprecedented

a lot of skepticism um but did it anyway realize pretty quickly as a tap eh do you is not in my future at least any time soon so started applying to pretty much every crypto company that I could find out there this was 2015 early 2016 and I didn't your back for most of them and then the ones who I did hear back from I got the classic like yeah you know you don't have any experience you're you're not technical um you know we're not really hiring for like bizdev and operations roles um you don't have any product experience full habla um so I I spent

about six months pain and went banging my head against the wall but one of the companies that I had my eye on the whole time was chain which at the time as you mentioned it was going through this sort of pivot from being basically Bitcoin developer tooling to being focused on blockchain for Wall Street blockchain for enterprise would felt like kind of a good fit given my background of working on Wall Street and it actually wasn't until I came across on Facebook of all places my one of my friends from college dan Robinson updated his like where he works on Facebook to attain that he had just joined chain and remember at the

time like I I was not working in the space I didn't really know people in the space um and so I reached out to Dan of course and I was like oh my god you're into this blockchain thing I've been really into Bitcoin like I wrote this whole dissertation on it um and he hopped on the phone with me he was like oh I I think Jane is actually hiring so they they brought me in and and the rest is history got to work with Adam and that whole team for it was only a little over a year um in many ways it felt like longer because I think I learned so much while I was there but ya had the pleasure of starting off my blockchain career at

chain and then you kind of left chain after a while and you're working on a couple other projects like you know you work on tezo's for a little while and stuff and so and I know kind of like you know I think what you also got like a lot of popularity as well within the time space with you you have you've written a column really yeah you had like a lot of really good posts I think that like you know kind of like took a lot of like stuff like especially it was like writing like 2017 there's lot of hype going on and like you kind of like broke down things and these blog posts are like really easy to understand and so you know could you like give us like a quick brief like what's your thesis on blockchains and you know you talked a lot about how like to think

about blockchain assets and stuff so what's your brief thesis on this yeah well I mean I guess first I'll give the background is of how I ended up with these C C's in these thoughts which is that I faithfully spent several years at this point going down rabbit holes I think mistakenly often of like oh I really want this thing to work and it feels like there's something here and having to sort of learn from first principles like where there is they're there and then where there's really not and actually during my time at Oxford I worked with a colleague we were hell-bent on starting a crypto company blocked a and startup or whatever and

especially for me being not coming from a computer science background or whatever like I had to learn everything right and so I think that that has that's been a huge detriment in a lot of ways but I hope that if anything it's given me the ability to think somewhat clearly about this base and also to be able to express it in a way that's accessible but so what is my thesis on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency I think that the first thing that people get a little bit confused about is it's very easy to want to apply this technology to anything and everything right like we're gonna have blockchain for healthcare

records and identity and um you know heads of lettuce being tracked on it whatever and I think fundamentally what you have to accept is it it really comes down to just seeing about assets it comes down to being about value and in particular it comes down to digital assets digital tokens or units of value um and write that in there you can rule out just like a lot of the use cases that people talk about now I think that there are aspects of blockchain technology that are applicable to these things like public private key systems um you know distributed computing like these are all

good things uh but in permission databases you know whatever you want like you can take aspects of this but probably if you're trying to solve a problem with healthcare records or identity what you're talking about is probably not sort of canonical blockchain technology as I would talk about it so that's kind of I would say my overarching thesis on the face so applications that kind of surround the use of assets like you know let's say we're talking about like Dex's for example do you think you know that's also on the right path or I I do yet Dex is the future sort of my catchphrase um so I think that all of

these applications built around assets become suddenly very interesting um now I think that they become interesting probably in still very sort of specific possibly very nice use cases today so use cases where you need some sort of censorship resistance or some level of openness that doesn't exist today ie the ability to move sort of across different siloed systems or else areas where you have sort of existing trust issues that exists today so I mean one example that I'll give and I'll steer this example a little bit

away from the sort of Venezuela's sin through censorship resistant stuff cuz I know we're going to spend a lot of time talking about that but as the junior kid on a trading desk I spent a ton of time actually dealing with our back office dealing with our middle and back office so these are the folks who do the real work at these big investment banks right there sitting there reconciling all of the trades making sure that the trace that you've done have gotten cleared and settled properly making sure that you have right counterparty on them making sure that you actually got delivery of the bonds that you're selling to somebody else and this stuff is a mess it's spaghetti and it all relies on one

central third party or at least in bond space it does which is the dtc see and for every country you have your own central securities depository or every region right now all these all of these central security deposit aureus they basically act as this third-party intermediary that every single trade has to be routed through there's never any such thing as JPMorgan and just giving direct delivery of the bonds to Goldman Sachs right or only very rarely and only in very bespoke cases and so this was one of the things that actually initially stood out to me about this technology is even forget the censorship resistance thing for a second if we

could find a way where you didn't have to have these literally like 10,000 people at every given Bank um who are keeping track of the books and records and making sure that the goldman sachs ledger matches the dtc cease letter matches the JP Morgan letter and so on so forth like I think that there's something there I think that we're still a long ways off from our technology the sort of next-gen financial technology blockchain stuff being anywhere close to being able to compete with the existing system but that's one of my sort of like galaxies brain visions of where at all could go oh yeah I think that makes a

lot of sense and having worked for for a couple of years at an enterprise startup I was working on and building traceability systems for for enterprise I've come away from that experience with having learned that perhaps the use cases that a lot of people are looking at that aren't in the financial space or aren't like tracking assets probably won't be the ones to pan out first maybe the maybe the deduce cases will start to emerge once the sort of more asset tracking five of use cases emerge and are stable but yeah definitely I think like defy and distribute plants and to some extent you know as you say

like simplifying these back office systems are probably the ones that are on our this is what like weirdest takeaways of working in this space is that it turns out the world has a really hard time keeping track stuff yes there are so many of these issues whether it's on Wall Street or in supply chain or you know other big enterprise issues like the world has a really hard time keeping track of ownership and assets who would have thought this episode of epicenter is brought to you by cosmos the Internet of blockchains cosmos is live and we couldn't be more excited to see so many projects already building on it

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cosmos Network slash epicenter for represent our listeners the cosmos team will reach out to answer your questions and help you get started we'd like to thank cosmos for those supportive epicenter so moving now to to the central topic here which is Venezuela so you mentioned that you were working at this training desk trading bonds in South America did you have an interest for you know Latin America and South America before this or did you sort of start to get involved and and interested in in the political situation there with with this experience it was really only through that experience I to be honest I don't even speak Spanish um I

didn't know basically anything about Latin America until I showed up for for the job and then of course I became intimately familiar with it but I mean even on the trading desk like there were a decent number of other folks like me who had no real sort of background uh or specific interest in in Latin America but there were also a decent number of people who you know were from Mexico or Chile or Peru or wherever right and the nickname for me on the desk actually just became gringa it means like white girl so no I I had no no real background in it but

obviously this is this is kind of a rabbit hole bit that I've now gone down with you and so how does that inform you know youryour views obviously you're you're dealing with financial assets that are being traded between banks and these banks are looking to you know make the best returns on these assets and at the same time you're looking at the situation and seeing that you know in some countries in Latin America or perhaps even the majority of countries Latin America people are by some extent struggling to get by how how does that inform then your political views and is

it common for people to come away from that experience and saying like this is kind of messed up like I need to do something about this I think yes and no so in in on the desk that I was working on is a lot in America desk that the sort of broader category is called emerging markets and there's certainly a lot of people who work in emerging markets in finance who feel very sort of mission-driven about the whole thing and there all of these charity organizations there's one called empower for example that does a lot of work there so I don't want to say that like you know people you just kind of sit there and do your job and don't think

about like the implications for folks on the ground also again a lot of people I worked with or from these places I sat across from a Venezuelan guy right so there's no way that he's looking at the situation just totally sort of impassively in stone-faced but I mean that's said there is I feel like it's almost probably not to the same extent obviously but like almost like a doctor who just sees like trauma patient after trauma patient right where you do become a bit numb at some point to it and I'll never forget there was at one point fighting that broke out in the Ukrainian

Parliament like actual violent fighting now this is the Ukraine so these were sort of my counterparties in Europe who were trading a Ukrainian debt because they were dealing with like the emerging European countries um but like I remember everyone just sort of like watching this and being like oh yeah another day another dollar another day another outbreak of violence in with inside of a political institution in one of these countries um and yeah it it can be it's it's very it's very odd odd saying um I mean the other thing that I want to emphasize though here is that like all of these countries are not created equal right

like you get these like very extreme moments in time right like Venezuela is experiencing today or clearly like the Ukraine was experiencing at that time but I mean that looks completely different from what's going on in Chile for instance right even though you know these the countries get sort of lumped together is like Oh Latin America and in my case a Latin American debt like completely different things and in fact um you know within within the bond world you tend to divide debt into two categories you have high-yield debt which is much more risky and therefore gives you a higher return and then you investment grade debt which is much less

risky and you would put say like Apple bonds in that category um now we were one of the few desks at the entire firm that traded both and in fact also traded what's called distressed debt which as you can probably figure out is like high-yield to the max like yeah going through default going through restructuring um so you know like you said so a lot of the current situation you kind of do have to understand like the context and the history of what got it there and it's probably why I sue of like you know your your history background is probably very useful for the trig ancient history and for silly elbow nothing I say is less so care could you

give us a little bit of history lesson you know brief like I'm sure we could write textbooks on this but could you give us a brief idea of like you know what happened in Venezuela in the past like you know maybe 20 years that led to the current situation cuz like I know 20 years ago you know Sebastian was actually just talking to me about it before the show like you know Venezuela was like under Maduro and stuff people were like oh wow yeah not much office people were like oh wow look at this lake you know this is like socialist country is like succeeding wildly and like like you know this is this is the future and whatnot so what exactly

changed yeah so okay I want to preface with to do this real justice you have to go all the way back to like the Spanish coming in conquering Latin America and and whatnot and this is I think actually where a lot of the sort of confusion and emotion often comes in is because depending on how far back you go like Chavez too many people was this total hero right who came in and sort of empowered the the people who had been you know in many ways kind of like oppressed by like these imperialist forces who'd been in the country for a long time but too many it was also

socialist dictator so again you you have to kind of frame this with a large degree of nuance and balance um but as you said you know if you look back let's go back just fifty years to start so in the 1950s 1960s sure at that time Venezuela was one of the wealthiest economies in the world and I think it's really important to emphasize that because people often miss that they look at it today and they're like oh like this you know developing countries it's like totally backwards and as all of these messed up policies and people are starving humanitarian crisis but not that long ago Venezuela was one of the wealthiest countries in the world even

now they have more in terms of oil reserves than any other country in the world and again people people do a double-take when I say that sometimes I even start to doubt myself because I'm like can that possibly be true but it's actually totally true like Venezuela is a very wealthy country in terms of its natural resources and that's not something that has just been sort of totally squandered it's actually something that has been used to build up a very modern country in modern society where if you look at the rates of online banking for just to take an example that exists in Venezuela there are more

people who use digital banking services in Venezuela in terms of percentage of population then there are in any developed country like think about that for a second right so like rates of sort of these common metrics of development or modernization are actually quite high in Venezuela and a large part of that is due to Chavez who you mentioned so Chavez came to power he came to power promising all of these sort of socialist policies that we're going to start to equalize things this was in the early 2000s late 90s um and indeed he acted upon those policies um pretty effectively if you ask him

certainly in terms of read repeating wealth in terms of coming up with policies and programs that would benefit some of the poorer populations of the country etc but of course all of these programs were funded by these oil reserves that I mentioned it exists in Venezuela and that was all well and good because at the time through the early to mid to 2002 2010s oil was going through huge boom right you know if you think about the global macro context of what was going on then the price of oil if you went to go fill up your car in 2003 2004 the price was going through the

roof right so that was working out quite nicely actually for Venezuela now that gravy train ran out around 2014 when the price of oil collapsed from around $100 a barrel to around $40 barrel and this coincided with like the shale boom the discovery frack and the sort of taking off of fracking the discovery of all of these oil reserves actually within the United States etc um but this had a really big impact of course on a place like Venezuela where not only was a huge source of their wealth and their economic growth based on oil but also

basically all the policies that had been in place for over a decade now were based on oil and the wealth and the price of oil um that could be derived from the reserves they have so they kind of assumed that there'd be this constant money coming out of the ground that they could redistribute and then when that money stopped flowing then yeah I mean I to be honestly I don't know if it was an assumption that this would last forever or if it was just a sort of short-term thinking I mean there are all kinds of great papers written about politicians and their economic policies and seems that they make in the short-term thinking that goes on because they basically just need it you know as a

politician you basically just need it to last until your re-election until your next turn or in the case of shubo Chavez until you died and Hugo Chavez died in many ways at exactly the right moment in terms of this crash right he died I believe it was 2013 um there was actually a long period where known was sort of sure if he was still alive or dead and it were potentially only B succession issues there was an election called um and it looks like the opposition candidate so the guy who would come in with sort of more conservative policies and try to reform um

this socialist system because you know there was some knowledge of the fact and discussion of the fact that this gravy train like I said wouldn't last forever um and it looks like the opposition candidate was going to get elected but then lo and behold uh Chavez's man so Nicola Maduro God elected and that is who is still in power today um and he your opinion has at a fair election or was that you'd like it it's to be knowledge it is very much debated it is less debated that the last election which occurred just this past year yeah of whether or not that was fair that is

by and large accepted by the international community as a fraudulent election I'll give the caveat the United Nations has actually stood behind that election um so again there's you know there's sort of nuance and gray area here that you have to acknowledge um but I mean I I don't think that it was a free and fair election like if you talk to pretty much any Venezuela and um my understanding anyway is that you'll hear just sort of nothing but complaints but you know there also is you have to be balanced here and you have to acknowledge that there are a lot of people who experience such poverty even under Shabbos for shop is that even with

what's going on today they might say like well it wouldn't be any better under any else um so you know there are still people for sure who believe that and will say that but that is not most of the people I've talked to again if you talk to Sebastian or most Venezuelans probably who you know they will either laugh or cry at that idea that statement so when we're talking about Chavez I mean we were talking about this before the show it's sunny in fact in my late teens early 20s right when I was a fresh college student I followed a friend to

invest basically all of my savings at the time and a Canadian gold mining company that had a potential contract to mine a whole bunch of gold in in Venezuela and you know we were big fans of Chavez and we thought like oh this guy's so great and then and then he nationalized the gold reserves and we lost all the money not that it was a lot of money but anyways yeah yeah that'll happen to you and your even you're investing in stuff in countries like this like so that's just getting nationalized all the time it's getting seized it's yeah but I had never a dull moment right it was it was a I openin for me when I lead years later you know having moved to France

everything met someone who was from Venezuela and actually met a few people from Venezuela who were like no this guy's a crook like you know Hubert Chavez is a horrible person and a dictator and from from that point on like my ideas about this guy my fresh college student ideas of you know socialism and everything were toppled um um is the thing and I talked about this with my colleague my co-founder guy named Alejandro um who is Venezuelan he says this all the time which is that the word socialism might as well be meaningless at this point because there's a subset of people to whom you say socialist and it means Denmark or it even means like Canada right it's like

not actually and then there's a certain subset of people to whom you say socialist and it means Venezuela which again that's like not really that's not really the intent like that is a kleptocracy right like that is a dictatorship there are tons of other problems going on there and it it's this very divisive word and you're seeing this play out now in u.s. politics of like aoc and the democratic socialist movement of Donald Trump of vilifying Venezuela and therefore using that as a means to vilify all of socialism and of course like the truth lies somewhere in this messy grey area in the middle it's not it's not one or the other but it is

extremely divisive and the amount of sort of political trolling that you get for even talking about this topic well we'll see in the comments section oh yeah this is definitely one of the most political I think topics that we've got yes probably so but before we get to open money in this shouldve because we're running a bit long I think we could talk about this for quite a while you know describe the situation now I mean I think most people will who are following this to some extent are aware of the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela obviously I've heard about - hyperinflation there so in your in your view what is the situation now is it is

it degrading is it getting better yeah so it's it's definitely integrating there have been sort of glimmers of hope over the last year that things might start to change for the better um but just to just the lace in context so Chavez implemented these socialist policies Maduro sort of came into power following him continued on with the socialist policies and spending programs and so on um but by all accounts has mismanaged the the economy um and that has led to all kinds of things so it's led to uh hyperinflation so there's ten million percent inflation

projected for this year now like what is ten million percent inflation look like I talked to a woman through my work with open money and we'll get to that in a moment but I talked to a woman who told me that she'd worked her whole life had her whole life savings she's working in a decent job she'd saved up enough money for her kids to go to college blah blah but when she left the country she left to go to Colombia and she converted her whole life savings she'd fold her car sold her house everything and it was only worth a couple of thousand dollars in pesos so that's what it looks like it looks like your entire life savings has evaporated into you know what you're going to need

to get by in the next month or two it also looks like your salary right which is set annually so your salary gets set annually but that number is inflating at ten million percent per year and so what that means is that by month two or month three of the year what you're getting paid is like not even a reasonable living wage even if you're a lawyer even if you're a doctor even if you're sort of a professional classic person because it's getting set at these intervals that just can't even come close to keeping up with inflation any reasonable way so its inflation it's shortages um one of the policies that

Maduro has in place is around controlling what can come in or out of the country what gets imported and so on and so you end up with these massive massive shortages of just basic goods like you can't find shampoo there you can't find body soap people we talk to a lot of people who use like dishwasher liquid as body soap because you just can't find it um if you're a woman like you can't find tampons you can't find just these basic supplies and you definitely can't find medicine so we also talked to a lot of people who have like elderly parents or you know children with it with an illness or whatever and they just need like basic

medicine and you can't find it anywhere um and then the last thing I'll touch on here is the price controls so price controls and capital controls so it's very limited what freedoms you have with your money with your financial life in Venezuela you don't get to choose what currency you use it's mandated by the government that you use bolivars if you're caught with US dollars or with another currency you could be fined you could be thrown in jail and then it's also mandated at what price you sell your goods and so for example we spoke to a farmer who sells coffee or sold coffee he really interesting guy he

loved being a farmer he lived in for a beautiful rural area Venezuela um and he would sell his coffee beans right but it was mandated by the government he would sell his coffee beans actually at a loss and he obviously realized this like immediately right like if I sell it at the government mandated price I'm not going to be able to continue ooh I'm not going to be able to make a living and so he would sort of sell it like on the black market at a higher price the authorities catch wind of this and the authorities would come to his house and beat him and threatened to rape his wife and like literal physical violence if he wouldn't sell it at the

mandated price and eventually he just walked away from the farm and he said you know what let it all rot like I would rather this just rot than me sell it at a loss at this insane government mandated price so these are just some of the dynamics that play overarching all of this is just like kind of a lack of rule of law at this point it's gotten to a point where people are so desperate even the police and the authorities you have to remember like they're desperate to and so it's very patchy enforcement of things when I first started doing research on this topic like I spent a lot of time actually being like are people misleading me like our people not

telling the truth here but the reality is is that everyone's reality there looks so different from the next person's because it just kind of depends on the day and it just kind of depends on on you know the policeman that you're interacting with or like who you happen to have access to and so that that that 10 million percent I you know I just off the top my head that sounds like you know like almost 100 50 percent inflation something something close to that let me like you know you wake up sorry 10 million percent inflation 10 million percent right yeah and so that means like on a daily that's about 150 oh yeah yeah because it gets compounded and then

so like you know that means I I can wake up today with like a dollar and by the end I'd have a go to sleep it's like 40 cents totally and so what you have is merchants running around their store on like less than an hourly basis updating prices and it's gotten to the point where everyone just kind of understands that whatever price is listed is garbage like it doesn't even make sense anymore because it's just constantly changing if people have like something that I got like a up on their phone that tells them like oh this is how much like you know the price oh well no so this is another issue is that you're not even allowed to list in Venezuela you're not even allowed to list the Bulevar to US dollar price which like everyone thinks

in US dollars there that is that is sort of the the default currency and under the table people will quote things and US dollars like Oh how much is that bag of sugar how much is it to get my car repaired like that'll be kind of quoted in u.s. dollars but that's risky right because again even even sites that put up what the rate is between bolivars and dollars like those are not allowed and so it's these very like underground informal systems um generally what people use is whatsapp and Instagram and in particular the stories features and so you'll be connected digitally on

whatsapp and Instagram with all of these people who are either acting as basically informal money changers so they may they might have access to US dollar bank account and they're acting again as as these sort of informal money changers they might have access to like Goods and food and medicine and they'll go in on their stories and list what they have access to and then the price that they're willing to accept or pay for it um so you have these varied litter quite literally decentralized digital marketplaces they've emerged around this right and so you know I think that for the entire I kind of to lead into like the open omi stuff in the

blockchain space like there's this like meme that I'm pretty sure I've said this sentence at some point before which is like oh Bitcoin isn't for like us in the u.s. it's for people in Venezuela whose money inflated away at ten million percent a year but Li how sure is that like is that just a talking point or is that like so what is the state of you know are people actually using Bitcoin in Venezuela like we're purporting or what's the state of adoption there yeah yeah so I'll give a little backstory on on how I ended up working on this um so about a year ago I basically to be honest had like a bit of

an existential crisis around crypto I was like I've been working on this stuff for like four and a half years and I still don't know if it's good for any of this stuff that I hope it is I still don't know like what you know what it's being used for like everyone around me is you know as that New York Times headline said getting hilariously rich um so you know I guess I should just be happy about that but like this doesn't this doesn't feel good this doesn't feel like what I got into the space to do um and so out of that was born a lot of soul-searching first of all for me it's like okay what do I actually still believe is true here and the thing I kept coming back to with that

conversation with my argentine colleague who used cryptocurrency as basically an escape hatch from his system that was failing him um and I came back to sunny exactly what you're saying like how many times have I set up on a panel some blockchain conference and said oh you know Bitcoin it's not for us for people in Venezuela hyperinflation and price controls and capital controls so on but to be honest I was kind of sitting there like I actually don't know if it's true and I was lucky enough to link up with a couple of people who were sort of having similar thoughts and coming at it from a similar perspective at the time so I

mentioned Alejandro Machado already um he is Venezuelan he's done a bunch of interesting work in the crypto space himself and then another guy named Jamal montasser who is a design research was until recently a design researcher at IDEO and the three of us basically just got together and we're like let's go let's go figure this out let's go see if there's something here and more importantly let's figure out what we as an industry not necessarily we the three of us but like we as an industry could build or do in order to make this be useful and so we started to sort of design the research that we wanted to do

we decided very quickly that this wasn't like an academic sort of quantitative research project the question to us is not like oh well what percentage of Venezuelans are using Bitcoin or you know what percentage of Venezuelans have heard of dye like the real question is how are people using it today in the cases where they're not using it how are they surviving how are people hacking the system and then how can we take a combination of these insights to develop some concepts and design principles and so on that could actually lead to real products and services and so with all that the open money initiative was born

so we run ourselves as a nonprofit we're very lucky to be sponsored by folks like cosmos and tezo's who I did previous work with as well the Z cash foundation stellar and then also the Z cash company Zuko Wilcox has been a huge part of the whole story um so we decided to undertake this research as I said to go and figure out sort of what what this looks like what it looks like on the ground we spent a bunch of time at the beginning of 2019 not on the ground in Venezuela but on the ground in Colombia um and spent a bunch of time on the border between Colombia and Venezuela

which is basically as good as you can get if you are a a citizen or if you are in a Honduras case a venezuelan who is not trying to get stuck back in the country um and we spent a lot of hours interviewing people doing sort of these like ethnographic most anthropological interviews with people both who use cryptocurrency and many more who don't um in their daily lives we also ran a series of studies so for example one study that we ran was we distributed Bitcoin to a whole group of people again a handful of whom had used so before most of whom had not because we wanted to see the hurdles that they

would have to go through in order to even receive the cryptocurrency let alone to then use it to spend it so on um so I there's a lot of data there's a lot of nuance to all of this it's very hard to distill down into just a few key insights but if I were to try to to answer your questions honey I guess people are using it in Venezuela people are using specifically Bitcoin in Venezuela know the number of people using it is not nearly as high as our industry would like to believe no it's not pulling the country out of poverty in any sort of meaningful way but it is

serving as basically as I said an escape hatch right for a fairly small but nonetheless significant subset of people in the country um and so I started to mention it's really just Bitcoin that's being used there now and it's actually really just local bitcoins that's being used as the product um so in fact as we were doing this research we as open money got in touch with local bitcoins we were kind of like hey do you guys realize that like your tool is totally saving lives here um and we're actually now undertaking a whole sort of study and end project with local bitcoins as

well so and an interesting journey happy to dive into anything and everything yeah did you have an idea of I mean I guess maybe local bitcoins has some of this data but do you have an idea of the volume that's being traded there you know on a daily basis or yeah I I don't have the latest numbers from local bitcoins but my sense is that the local bitcoins volume is probably very close to the entire volume like people people aren't using at least as far as we saw it's not common for people to be using other tools there are some other tools that yeah now this I'm not these other kind of decentralized yeah

and then there's also like err TM which is in many ways a bit more centralized than local bitcoins but in a way that also allows them to provide kind of like better customer support customer service and they have a pretty big population in presence in Venezuela so there are a handful of others but today my sense is it's primarily that local bitcoins volume which is pretty substantial um it's consistently one of the highest volumes by currency that have that gets traded on local bitcoins period so that tells you anything who wants the bolivars like so is it that like

merchants are not allowed to accept Bitcoin like yeah wired to accept believers like who's trading we're selling the Bitcoin there yeah so this is one of the weirdest things um or to me was one of the most surprising things that I learned which is that it's totally true that nobody wants the Bulevar like nobody wants to hold on to that thing but you still need it just to survive your day-to-day life and so a lot of it as you just said sunny has to do with this government mandate that you can only use the Bulevar and that makes it so that many merchants it's the incentive is just not there to accept other forms of payment but now all of those merchants on their

back end they're figuring out how to get rid of those boulevards that they've just accepted from their customers as quickly as possible whether that's to buy more Goods whether that's to get it somehow into US dollars so it's basically this gigantic game of hot potato that everyone is playing with the local currency where nobody wants to hold on to it for too long but just to stay in the game you've got to hold it at some point the question I have here is is Bitcoin really the right solution to this like do people really want this like decentralized cryptocurrency that's like you know or do this or what they want really just access

two dollars which were kind of seeing now through these like stable coins that are being released like you know the Bolivar may have lost like ten thousand percent ten million percent in the last year but you know bitcoins still lost eighty percent which is you know not got quite on you come take pickling and anything yeah of course I say click on any day over the Bali bar but like you know I'd still prefer in that case I'd prefer died yeah USD C over a Bitcoin and so really is Bitcoin that what the solution that we should be looking for here or should we be figuring out how to get more access to global financial system to people there I think the answer to that whole question is yes

like both okay and you know this this question of what is it that people actually want your spot on like people don't want Bitcoin they don't want the local bitcoins wallet they don't want like decentralization the max what they want is a US dollar bank account to a person when we ask people this question that's what they said and one of the exercises that we did with the folks we sat down with actually was this card for exercise for rude give them note cards with all of these different assets on it we would have them rank them in terms of you know what would you most prefer to have your savings in what would you most prefer to be able to use in your day-to-day life so on and pretty much to

a person there was one young woman who ranked Bitcoin first but other than her to a person almost it was US dollars first and so what does that tell us to me that tells me that there probably is a place for a u.s. dollar pegged staple coin but then you ask the question why aren't people using that today and the biggest point that it comes down to is liquidity right because we're not yet living in a situation where people are going and spending their digital currencies directly like of those who have Bitcoin they're they're not going to their merchants and using Bitcoin to

buy bread directly they're cashing it out into their local currency and so the existence of local bitcoins and the fact that local bitcoins has a high degree of liquidity on it I think is what keeps Bitcoin as the sort of shelling point there and the thing that people are using over other assets that may have you know attribute that Bitcoin doesn't they want and it's for me it's really reframed actually completely how I think about money and how I think about what is and is not money because the question is never is this money it's how good is this at being money for my purposes right now and there are all

these different aspects to it whether that stability redeem ability convertibility how easily can I spend this thing uh what does the up time versus down time the actual system look like and you see this very explicitly for example in the US dollar presence in Venezuela and what I mean by this is the following which is that five $20 bills in Venezuela they're actually worth more than one $100 bill because it's divisible right you're more likely to be able to spend entire $20 bill and not have to worry about getting change back in bolivars then if you have a $100 bill and so there are all of these different knobs that you're suddenly turning

whether we're talking about Bitcoin and dye whether we're talking about different denominations of USD cash or whatever it is that really matter when you go to a scenario this is extreme is this you know there's another project you know I think coinbase kind of like heavily funds them called a give crypto and I think it was actually founded by a Brian Armstrong as well and so you know they tried to do this thing I remember last December where they were kind of like I don't know I'd call it air-dropping Z cash to some sort of some families in Venezuela I think it was like one dollar a day or something like that and so do you one do you think that's the right approach or and to you

know Y Z cash in that case like you know coinbase USD C is their product or partially their product and so on or you know like you said Bitcoin has more liquidity so what what do you think was the motive between behind like they're dropping Z cash so our privacy important it is there obviously concerns that like you know or is the Venezuelan government sophisticated enough to like know how to trace the Bitcoin and that's why I see cash is useful their privacy is definitely concern um we're not yet at a point where the government is like employing sort of chained Alice's style techniques to track Bitcoin transactions but certainly you know that company that I mentioned or TM they had they have

agents basically cash in cash out agents on the ground in Venezuela and at one point a whole bunch of them uh came under threat from the Venezuelan government had to get evacuated by the or cm team from the country um so there's definitely an issue of privacy but again we're not yet at a point where it's relevant to think about it sort of on chain privacy in most cases more likely you're going to be leaking through other through other methods and forms and ports of communication particular so you know I can't I can't speak to sort of the value of using sea

cash in in that scenario um I'm familiar with give crypto I'm friends with Joe who runs it like I think that a lot of what they're doing is great um I think that there's a lot of value in just sort of the more studies that we can run in these circumstances the more knowledge we'll have as to like what works and what doesn't and I appreciate that give crypto I think has been very humble in their approach to all of this is saying like we're doing a bunch of experiments and we're trying to learn right now so that when we roll something out in in size and at scale like it can have the intended impact which of course is this like very positive mission

driven impact my sort of philosophy on it is is a bit different which is that I think that you know if you if you give some if you just air dry up someone some Z cash or some Bitcoin or whatever it is like all you've really succeeded in doing is giving that person some crypto right and like you don't know what the end result is going to be what the end impact is going to be you don't know yet how that fits in to their life and their needs uh you don't yet understand the why of the decisions that they're making on a day to day basis um and that's really where I wanted to start was what do people's lives look

like today what are the problems that they're facing and then how can we think really critically about where the technology that we have be a cryptocurrency or not might fit in to the solutions that that can be provided um as you know potential tools in in what people are trying to do on a day to day basis um so it's just to sort of very different approaches but yeah you know there's there's actually a decent amount of activity going on around cryptocurrency and Venezuela whether it's give crypto - has done a ton of sort of marketing and education there um

there's there's a lot of these types of projects Randy Brito if you follow BTC than Bitcoin Venezuela very active on Twitter but also another great example of someone having a real impact on the ground and with him he accepts Bitcoin and cryptocurrency donations and then cashes them out I believe via local bitcoins although I'm not sure um cashes them out locally and then use this that money to buy food to to give away to people um so yeah lots of lots of activity lots of experiments and another crypto project that's kind of tangentially related to this whole discussion is the petrol and we want to

bring this up earlier but you know as we've got a couple minutes here left for the end of the show maybe talk about how the petrol fits in all this context you know so for those who don't remember the petrol was an ICO which was effectively done by the Venezuelan government I believe in 2017 as sort of you know push back on the US and on the US dollar specifically it sort of like the exchange currency for for petrol so yeah what's the story there and how is it related to all this and yeah the petrol is one of the more sort of insane dystopian stories to come out of crypto currency in in my view so as you mentioned the petrol was thought up

dreamed up and and created if you will back in 2017 shortly after Venezuela defaulted on their debt and also pretty long actually after sanctions had been put in place on the Venezuelan government those sanctions actually date back to Barack Obama put them in place and so the sanctions state that okay Venezuela the government of Venezuela on a can't go out into the world and raise money basically until they clean up their act now when the government of Venezuela defaulted on their debt this created a huge issue because normally when a country defaults on their debt what they do is they negotiate with their

bondholders and they say okay you know we'll pay you back the same amount but over a longer period of time and so on and so forth if you look at like the Greek debt restructuring that happened in like 2010 ish that's exactly what happened that's a great example of this but in the case of Venezuela because of the sanctions right they couldn't have those negotiations and so they suddenly found themselves totally locked out like country non grata with all of these investors and so they have no mechanism of financing themselves with outside capital anymore and of course this was 2017 this was the year of the ICO which to most means

initial coin offering but as my friend Casey coined to Venezuela meant initial country offering and so they decided to attempt to issue their own token basically I think in order to evade the sanctions that the United States had put in place and so the petrol was born um they they went I mean they took the whole thing pretty far right like they wrote up a white paper on it there are all of these very dystopian images of this dictator you know the the guy in charge of Venezuela is sitting in front of like this big sort of coin with pee on it stands for petrol they claimed initially that the petrol

was backed by oil reserves that are still in their ground then another point they said actually no it's backed by that and our gold reserves like they've they've sort of changed tactics a bunch of times on it at one point it was being built on a cerium and then they switch to nem and there's also been a lot of confusion around like what it's for and how much they've raised so the Venezuelan government at one point put out the number I believe it was like 700 million that they had raised another point they put out the number five billion dollars that they'd raised as far as any of us can tell they probably didn't raise anything actually Donald Trump actually came out with an

executive order and said that the petrol is also sanctioned so then suddenly like no one is going to touch it um you know I know so you can't even nuke a team and having like crypto exchange effectively because as no asset yeah it is subject well if you're if you're running a crypto exchange you're subject to kyc or your subject in your you're using to the KYC and so those users can yeah trade is not there so fact the Office of Foreign Assets Control which is the office within the United States that deals with sanctions enforcement like you do not mess with them so exactly they're not with so just on the amount it's a if they did an IC o---- or some

sort of a fundraise could we just a you know how do they raise this money presumably and can we just audit so watching something I mean if if they had raised in Bitcoin or eath say then you could do like the blockchain audit of like what was going into the venezuelan accounts etc um but that's not how they did it they had they put up like a web form that you could like fill out and like click by on things um as far as i remember they did have like some some form where you could go in and pay um although that came up later and like the website was down for a long time so there is like a lot of confusion around this um but if they did raise

anything those transactions were off chain right and so they're guys in really a good way but it also though it gets really sketchy if you look at the petrol blockchain I say that because like I don't know it's not actually decentralized but if you look at sort of the movements of these petrol tokens like it looks like it there's just like a lot of like wandering going on within the government's own wallets and that it's primarily just the government wallets that actually hold these things but then you also hear this very confusing conflicting information like I've spoken to people who told me that they logged into their pension accounts

their Venezuelan pension accounts that are obviously like related to government accounts um and that suddenly what was formerly denominated in bolivars in there is denominated in petrol but like no one has a really good sense of what a petrol is worth where you can spend it the Venezuelan government is said at various times that if you want to renew a passport you have to use petrol to be able to pay the fee to renew your passport but like again no one really knows like how to get a petrol or like what it's worth so it's just this very Kafkaesque nightmare of like monetary experimentation gone bad

so this all backfired the day that Donald Trump issue the things that could have order effectively making this an illegal asset and so therefore this whole plan to use the petrol to circumvent US regulation or US financial sanctions also backfired that's that's my take on it that's my sort of understanding of what likely went on here um but as with all things having to do with the Venezuelan regime like it's so hard to say what's actually going on um it's so hard to say what the actual intent was that yeah back when the petrol came out you know I was having some discussions with some

friends and you know we're we were like wait this is like very mind blowing in a way because you know the current instantiation was just like you know Venezuelan should point that there I see owing in order to fundraise but it got us thinking about like you know what a concept of a petrol seemed interesting something that's backed by gold and ORS are backed by oil or and so you know we were thinking like you know what if Locke change give the ability for all of these like different OPEC countries to like coordinate and launch a coin that's like a cryptocurrency that's like you know the prime you know it's it's

designed to be the primary way to buy oil whether it's like you know discounted or you know it's the only thing you can use to buy oil and you know what makes such a thing have the ability to like you know this term called the petro dollar which is like you know the US yeah gets its value by being the large value front by being the primary thing you need to buy oil with and so do you think that is like have you even heard any rumors of like such a thing and do you think that's actually a feasible concept so I haven't heard any rumors of such a thing I think it's really interesting though because you know for the first time we have the abilities just mint assets right like in this in this new sort of way where you

can um and all these nations in OPEC and coordinate to do that yeah exactly exactly and you certainly do have this dynamic of a lot of countries disagreeing with the dollars the US Dollars reserve status so you know for example you have China and Chinese entities issuing debt not in dollars or in another sort of reserve ish currency but denominated in Special Drawing rights or STRs which is like the IMF neutral basket of currencies so could I imagine a world in which you have a peg sort of doing something similar and trying to find or trying to create rather their own neutral asset to

be able to receive payments for for oil yeah totally totally I I think it's I think it's super interesting as you said very dystopian the way that it's been sort of playing out in Venezuela and also just very inept to be honest like the execution has been very poor but I think that I do think that there is something there and and I've long been kind of like beating this drum of no the petrol is actually really important to look at because you can start to view it as a precursor to a lot of these other sources like sovereign esque use cases of crypto um again whether that's like

good bad ugly totally up for debate and this is it to zoom out a little bit further actually this is something I want to bring up I always like to highlight it is like you know with the work that I'm doing with the open money initiative etc it's very easy for me to sort of like wax poetic about you know Bitcoin local bitcoins it's like it's helping the subset of people in Venezuela but like you know who else is using it is the government is like the corrupt government administration for sure are also mining Bitcoin using cryptocurrency to get their money out of the country etc um and so it's it's this real issue of like you know we can

Rema up all of these ideas and come up with all of these ways that these tools can be used but at the end of the day we don't get to choose who's using them or how they're getting used and yeah whether it's like Oh pecker Venezuela or whether it's you know people or the government or whatever it is like that is that is definitely something that keeps me up at night so I want to ask you one last question about money and should we wrap up here and and that is with regards to your political views and how they inform say ethics about you know the activities of that organization so in a country like Venezuela I think

we can all agree that the there's a human there is a humanitarian crisis there and people are in need and I think it's easy to defend you know educating people about Bitcoin and allowing them to do something as simple as like feeding their kids right like putting put it on the table but I believe your mission on your website or something to the effect that you you believe that open financial systems are a human right you know for Venezuela it might be clear-cut but in the future there might be other cases where you know helping people circumvent their country's capital controls is a bit more

of a gray area on capital controls some might argue are useful in some cases to help stabilizing the economy for instance like I'm not an economist but I could I could definitely see how that would be the case you know how do you how do you look at that and how do you make decisions about what is ethically okay and what is not if you know people if you're encouraging people to perhaps like break the law and circumvent their countries capitals yeah yeah I know there are a lot of considerations there um there are considerations that you just outlined but also there's the issue of like look using Bitcoin in Venezuela is a huge gray area right like it's it's very patchily enforced but like we

heard of instances where people have been punished either with fines or jail time or sometimes physically um with using any of this stuff and if or rather excuse me for using any of these types of products and tools and so there's also then the issue of like okay if we are if we are trying to build tools that make it easier for people to use this then is that potentially putting them in harm's way and so that's yet another aspect of this that is really hard and problematic um now I'll say for the open money initiative itself our aim is to just present the world as we find it we're

doing research right um our aim with that research is to be as neutral as possible um yes there is this underlying fundamental mission of trying to build a more free and more open and more fair financial system for people who don't have access to that today but we are not we are not like an activism organization we are not even a product or organization we're a research organization um so that's kind of my first answer yeah well I mean I I don't know if I fully agree with that I mean if if you have an organization like this gift crypto organization that you

partner with you know perhaps you're not being active in activism but you're partnering with organizations that kind of over line there yeah we're providing research to other organizations the human rights foundation which is very controversial give crypto um you name it local bitcoins as I mentioned earlier and so absolutely I mean we we consider who were working with and we consider whether or not the potential directions that they go aligned with what we believe and and so here I'll get into sort of what I personally believe which is that evasion of capital controls has

been around since capital controls have existed um this is actually what I ended up writing my master's thesis on was not just Bitcoin but evasion of capital controls in general now historically those who've been able to be capital controls and they're given countries it's been big multinational organizations it's been the executives of those types of companies it's been the government officials themselves it's been the sort of upper echelon elite classes of those countries who have the ability to get an offshore account and the Caymans or even in the United States whatever it is and that has left behind huge swaths of the population who not

always not like capital controls or not just blanket bad but very frequently get left behind um and so you know it's one of these things where you have to look not just at sort of in theory how does this play out but the reality of it and the reality of it is that there are huge groups of the populations who are finding ways with or without cryptocurrency to evade policies that they deem as not beneficial to them personally or to their company or even to their country as a whole um that's one big aspect of it and then you know the other aspect that I would point to

is just there is a reason why why we're starting in Venezuela here and of course you know our our vision for the research that we're doing in the project is not uh solely just about Venezuela but if I were to look at sort of the different places where these sorts of policies are playing out Venezuela is among the most extreme certainly and also to me among the most sort of clearly clearly there is a need here right and that comes back to the humanitarian crisis that's playing out um the refugee crisis it's now playing out more people the percentage of population more people

have left Venezuela in the last few years since the crisis began then even the population of Syria so the refugee crisis in Venezuela is actually bigger than that of Syria and to me like there is just this very clear dire desperate need there um and so that is one of the more clear situations as you as you yourself just mentioned and that is a huge part of why why that's where we're beginning that's a noble that will cost me work so yeah where can people find you yeah please plug your podcast as well yeah so uh for more information on the

open money initiative is just open money initiative org or on twitter at make open money will be coming out with a whole series of blog posts and papers and so on sharing the research that we've done sharing our findings um if you want to find me I am very much on twitter at underscore Jill Ruth is my handle and then I also yeah I also helped run my own podcast with meltem demurrers it's called what grinds my gears so by all means check that that out as well I'm not sure we keep it quite as professional as you guys do on this show but we have a lot of fun awesome well

thanks for joining us today and and it was great to learn about everything you you're doing with the open money initiative and also to dive into this this very complex topic which is Venezuela and I think is worth looking at you know depending of it regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum we're not a political show at all you know but I think it does you know merit some some attention at least from the perspective of you know the humanity the humanitarian crisis at least if anything yeah absolutely well thanks so much for having me on this is great thanks oh we released new episodes of epicenter every week click here to

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