We're here with Safideen Amos.
We're going to talk about everything that's
happening in Bitcoin, whether El Salvador is the place to go,
what it's like to use Bitcoin with a lesser passport.
There's so much we're going to talk about.
We are here at Nomad Capitalist Live.
It's our sold out four day event.
Make sure you're here with us next year in Kuala Lumpur.
And Safideen, welcome.
You look great.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me, Andrew.
It's a pleasure.
You tell me a nomad by birth.
Yes, I'm Palestinian and spent my life
traveling around the world, lived in four continents.
So I was born in the West Bank in Palestine.
Then when I was about a year old, my family moved to Saudi Arabia
where my father worked as a doctor.
Then he wanted to become a plastic surgeon.
So he moved to Brazil, worked as a plastic surgeon in Brazil.
Then after that, we moved back to the West Bank,
to Ramallah, where my dad worked as a doctor.
But a lot of our families in Jordan
and we have Jordanian passport, which
is what allows us to travel a lot more easily
than if we didn't have it.
Then I went to the university in Lebanon.
And then I did my master's in London.
And then I did my PhD at Columbia University in New York.
Then I went back and worked in Lebanon
as a university professor.
And then I've lived for a while in the US and the Canada
and Jordan, where I live right now.
Were you born as a Jordanian citizen or did that come later?
Because people in the West Bank
get Jordanian citizenship.
It's a little bit complicated up until the 80s.
It was just regular Jordanian citizenship.
Then it became a sort of different kind
of Jordanian citizenship.
We were lucky that we kept the proper Jordanian citizenship.
So we are Jordanians and now I live in Jordan
and I love Jordan.
I'm very happy to be there.
It's a great place.
But how do you get to go to the US and Brazil
and all these places?
How did your family accomplish that?
You just need to apply for a visa.
It's not that difficult.
And a few years ago, my wife and I,
we'd considered the possibility of getting a Canadian passport.
She had the permanent residency.
She was very close to getting the Canadian passport.
We just needed to spend more time there.
And we also considered moving to the US,
seriously thought about it.
And really, yeah, we considered moving.
And we just decided it wasn't worth it.
The Canadian passport wasn't worth spending more time there.
Yeah.
Why was that?
Because like Jordan, TRC passport, to your point,
sure, you can get visas.
If you have a skill as your father had, a good job.
If you have some wealth, you can do that.
But I would imagine people would think,
oh, it would be easier to be TRA Canadian.
You can travel anywhere.
The reason is that applying for an American visa
once every four or five years and a Canadian visa
once every four or five years and a European visa
once a year, because you get it for about a year
when you start getting it regularly,
is a lot easier and better and a lot less hassle
than having to deal with all of the baggage that comes
with these passports.
Of course, with the American, yeah, with the American,
of course, it's because of worldwide taxation.
Which will be in other countries eventually.
Exactly.
So you have that in the case of Canada.
And in the case of Canada, for us, I mean,
if we just could take the passport
and not have to worry about taxation,
then it would be worth it.
But securing the passport would have required
is to spend a lot of time in Canada.
And that was in the aftermath of COVID.
A couple of experiences with the health care system
in Canada were absolutely shocking.
And so when we lived in Canada,
the coping mechanism was, well,
we were living on the border with the U.S.
You never had a problem in the U.S.
No, I have not.
Do they treat you well?
Yeah, I cannot complain.
I went, I did my graduate studies in Columbia University.
I've never really felt any institutional racism
or mistreatment because of my passport
or where I'm from to be clear.
You're the living embodiment of what we say
that not everybody wants to move to the U.S.,
wants to move to Canada, even though you're already there.
You know what?
Hey, you can keep your passport.
It's not worth the price.
But don't you think that in the West,
there are these things where everything has to be
more complicated than what it is in Jordan
or where it is in Malaysia or what is probably
almost like the rest of the normal world?
Why complicated?
Yes, I think this is a very, very astute observation.
I think it's just in the U.S.
and in these Western countries
and the way that I see it,
because I see everything through the lens of money
because of my books on Bitcoin and fiat,
I think it's just these governments
have a lot more leeway in terms of printing money.
So that allows them to finance themselves
and to keep coming up with stupid ideas
of things that they need to do,
which comes at the expense of people's lives.
And so they're just always coming up
with new bureaucracies and new reasons for you to do things.
Unlike the rest of us,
we often think about making sure we're making a living
and making sure we're building our savings
and protecting ourselves and protecting our assets.
And we go up, these governments, right,
they just push a button and they have the money
and they don't worry it.
So they find other ways to stay occupied.
Exactly.
And that just means more and more restrictions on your life.
I think a good metric that I've recently begun using
is I look at the exchange rate of the currency
against the U.S. dollar.
If your currency has been stable against the U.S. dollar
for the last 20 years,
that effectively means that your government
has not been financing itself with inflation.
You can't lie about that.
If the government has been using money printing
to finance itself,
its currency is going to decline next to the dollar.
If your government manages to keep the dollar
rate stable over 20 years,
that means the government is living off of taxes.
And if a government has to live off taxes,
it's a lot less wasteful and it's a lot more efficient.
Right.
It's an interesting way of looking at it.
Right.
Because I think when governments
have to finance themselves with taxation,
they run a budget.
They have income and they have expenditure
and they need to be a little bit more careful
than if they just have a magic money printer
where they come up with an idea,
hey, wouldn't it be great to go finance this country,
fighting that country for a war
because we've got some nice feelings about this country
and so let's go murder people.
In the US, you just click a button
and all of that money materializes
and you finance all kinds of carnage
and all kinds of horrific things.
I don't proclaim to be an expert on this topic,
but I'll take the United States, for example.
It's anyone who wants to come after us
must be jealous as the pretends
to whatever we're going to do
and maybe those are the things
that we're not here talking about.
Maybe that is military.
But it's the propaganda, it's the way people think
that hey, whatever the government says,
oh, they're jealous of us for our freedom
and then you go to all the places
that we're talking about
and you realize there's a pretty healthy amount
of freedom there and maybe not as much of it's written down
but maybe more of it is actually offered in practice
and you think jealousy.
Yeah, no, I think this is very true.
I think it's if you travel around the Arab Gulf
it's really stark.
One very interesting story is when I was a kid,
I was growing up in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s
and I remember we would go to vacation to Europe
and to the U.S.
and I remember going from a small city in Saudi Arabia
back then to Chicago and New York
and seeing the skyscrapers and being blown away
but just how amazing it was.
And then I remember a few years ago, a friend of mine,
her name is Natalie Brunel.
She went to cover a Bitcoin conference in Dubai
and I saw her social media
in the post that she was posting about it in Dubai.
She lives in LA or she lived in LA at that time
and it was shocking for me to realize that she went to Dubai
and she was posting pictures of Dubai
similar to how I would have gone to the U.S. in the 1980s.
Back when Dubai was two camels.
Exactly.
In the 80s, LA was what everybody in the world looked for
but if you've been to LA recently.
Was it ever as good as they said, do you think?
I don't know.
I didn't live in it extensively.
I think I may have gone for a couple of days
when I was a kid but I don't really remember it
but it's definitely nowhere near as good
as they think it is today.
And I think I find it hilarious that Americans think
that people are jealous of the Americans way of life
because realistically, if you live in Dubai
you pay very little taxes, you are safe,
the streets are clean,
you all have incredible services for everything.
Oh but it's too hot.
It's a little hot.
Yeah, well there's air conditioning
but putting the weather aside,
the most important thing for me is
in terms of quality of life is your safety
and your ability to own your property
and taxes are a big part of that.
Taxes are just the theft of your property.
So living in a place like LA or San Francisco
or Chicago or New York today,
you're paying about half of your income in taxes
depending on your income, depending on the state taxes
but you're paying something like half.
You go to Dubai, you go to Qatar,
you go to the Arab Gulf,
you pay somewhere between zero and three percent
or something like that.
If you're in Bitcoin, maybe a little bit more
if you're an entrepreneur as they raise the corporate tax
but for Bitcoin still.
Yeah, still it's a tiny fraction of what you'd pay there
and you get safe streets.
You can walk around, you don't have to worry
about your kids getting abducted every five minutes.
My explanation for which I discussed
in my last book, Principles of Economics
is that ultimately places that have to compete
for citizens are like businesses.
So even though it's a government
and you don't think of a government as a business
but the Gulf countries are businesses.
They've had to compete for the majority of their workforce
for the past 50, 60 years.
Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain,
Oman, these countries, the majority of their residents
are foreigners so they needed to attract talent from Europe,
from the US, from South Asia, from Africa,
from all over the world
and so that means they must offer something attractive.
Nobody forces anybody in Dubai.
They didn't have anybody, they built it from scratch.
In 20 years ago it was a punchline.
Dubai was a punchline.
And what Dubai did, which was really very smart
is that they basically copied the commercial law of Hong Kong
which was copied from Britain, from the city of London.
And so it's a set of ways of managing commercial law
that has evolved over hundreds of years
at the epicenter of global capitalism
where London had developed these codes
over common law tradition, over hundreds of years
to suit the needs of business.
And Dubai copied that
and that's why people from all over the world
want to get headquartered in Dubai today.
And I think that's a lot more conducive to business
than what you're seeing in the legacy of countries
where the, again, the money printer
just allows them to continuously treat their people
as a cattle to be sheared
rather than as resources to be developed.
I mentioned on stage last night
that as, whether it's loss of the power of sanctions,
marginal continual losses of world reserve currency,
whatever it is, anything we're talking about,
as the legacy brand countries, the US being the biggest,
lose little marginal pieces of power,
they're gonna have to become more and more aggressive.
Like a tiger, you corner,
and it has to eventually just come out and attack you.
What do you think about that?
I think that's the case, yeah.
This is also borne out by experience
in the last few decades.
You see tax rates constantly going up,
government spending constantly going up.
There, to borrow a phrase, there's no stopping the strain.
It's, the incentives are baked in at the political level.
It's too late, probably, yeah.
I think we've probably reached a very important
tipic point over the last year,
which is that the interest expense on the national debt
has overtaken the defense budget.
Yeah, and the defense budget is enormous.
A lot of people are being killed
by enormously expensive American weapons.
By the defense.
By the defense, exactly.
A lot of innocent people all over the world
are getting killed with extremely expensive weapons.
You know, these bombs that are being thrown at Lebanon
and Gaza, they're being thrown at houses
that are worth $50,000,
you're throwing a $5 million bomb
and it's killing 20 people.
Why would you, if that were the case,
and I've thought about this a bit,
why would you wanna be American at some point?
Why would you wanna live there?
I think there's, if I were to make the case for it,
I still think if you had a startup,
I think that's probably the best case I could come up with.
If you had a startup and you're looking for funding,
probably being in America is a great place
to secure funding, to secure venture capital for early stage,
and probably to list on IPO,
it's because it's the biggest, deepest capital market.
Don't those things just seem like a different,
maybe I'm thinking small.
Those things always seem like their own form of control.
I don't wanna be my own boss.
So I'm gonna get, I'm gonna raise money
so I can basically have a new boss,
or I'm gonna have the average person
buying shares of my stock.
I mean, look at the Trump media stock
with all the retail investors buying that.
It's down 30% in a week sometimes.
Am I right?
No, no, I agree.
I think-
I'd say start a business in Dubai
and don't take the funding.
Exactly.
I would strap my own business,
my website where I teach my courses.
I just decided from day one
I'm going to generate enough income
to manage my costs.
So much more sustainable that way, don't you think?
Yeah, I don't have to report to people all the time.
I can just do what I want
and I need to report for myself.
Obviously there are advantages to working with
venture capital, working with people
who have experience with this thing.
So I don't completely dismiss it,
but that for me is the best case
for why you would want to be in the U.S.
and I know several people who've moved there
for that reason.
Could you live with yourself?
If you said I'm gonna become an American citizen
because you live there, would you feel at odds
knowing that you are against how that money is spent?
Yeah, the moral aspect of it is very heavy.
Although to be fair, realistically the U.S. government
doesn't just rob American citizens
in order to finance itself,
it drops the entire planet with inflation.
So if you're using the dollar,
you're financing American government
and that's why you shouldn't use the dollar.
That's why I encourage people to have as much
of their money in Bitcoin as possible
because the more you hold in dollars,
the more you're providing value for the dollar,
the more they're able to print
and take that value away from you,
which is A, impoverishing you
and B, enriching them and allowing them
to do all of the horrific, violent criminal things
that they do all over the world.
Let's talk about El Salvador.
I know you were at Bitcoin Beach recently.
What are your thoughts on what they're doing with Bitcoin?
I am a huge fan of El Salvador
and a huge fan of President Buqueta.
I think he's been doing a tremendous job.
It's truly a miracle.
El Salvador was the murder capital of the world
up until a few years ago.
He took over and now it is the safest country
in the Western Hemisphere,
safer than the U.S., safer than Canada,
on course this year.
Crime statistics, by the end of the year,
unless something drastic happens,
the U.S. gets its act together
or El Salvador breaks out into violence.
The U.S. is in the bottom half of safe countries in the world
for violent crime.
Well, the Western Hemisphere is generally
a lot more unsafe.
So El Salvador is now, I think,
the safest country in the Western Hemisphere.
So this has been an incredible, incredible transformation
but also add to that the fact
that President Buqueta has been buying Bitcoin
and accumulating Bitcoin,
which I find to be enormously valuable.
I think a lot of people
have had a misconception about Bitcoin.
They think of it as being a replacement
for Visa credit cards
or a replacement for the Western Union
or a replacement for PayPal.
And what I argue in my book, The Bitcoin Standard,
which I think is what made the book successful,
is that I presented the case for it
as not being a payment technology
but being a financial asset.
And therefore, it's not out there competing
with Visa and PayPal
because Visa and PayPal can just use Bitcoin.
Visa supports 150...
You can get a PayPal account with Bitcoin.
Yes, and Visa has 150 currencies.
So adding one more is not a major issue.
And I think the interesting thing is,
if you keep extrapolating this over the next five years,
everybody who's got US government bonds
is going to be worse off.
Their assets are going to be less valuable.
Their government is going to be financed.
It's going to have financial problems
because your assets are being devalued.
Your government bonds are becoming worthless.
Whereas El Salvador is becoming,
as having its balance sheet increase.
And you know, Bitcoin's gone up tremendous amounts.
So they've held it now for three years.
Maybe next year we get a major bull run.
And then that completely transforms El Salvador's expenses.
And what President Buqueta said they're going to do next year
is that they're not going to have a budget deficit.
They're going to run a budget surplus.
So now if you start running a budget surplus
and you stop borrowing
and you start accumulating Bitcoin,
the entire model of government in the 21st century
is going to be different
from the model of government in the 20th century.
The 20th century was all about
governments borrowing as much as they can,
creating as much inflation as they can,
and taxing as much as they can.
All of that comes down to the fact
that they just can't have a good form of money
that would hold value.
Now that you have a good form of money
that can hold value over time,
I think the most successful governments
are going to do what Buqueta is doing,
which is we don't want debt.
We don't want to have our citizens taxed
to pay interest on the national debt.
Instead, we're going to keep accumulating
hard assets that are going to keep appreciating.
And we are going to spend less than we earn.
The country's so behind
because of lack of investment over the last 40 years
that if you provide the security
that's going to bring in that investment,
you can see the country growing enormously.
There's just an enormous amount of potential ahead of it.
And I think Bitcoin is going to help make this sustainable
because it's money that appreciates over time
completely changes the way
that people approach everything in life.
If your money is depreciating over time,
the future is insecure,
you become a lot more present oriented,
you have very high discounting rate for the future.
You're more likely to engage in reckless behavior
that endangers you for the future.
You're more likely to engage in criminal behavior,
immoral behavior,
because you don't care about long-term consequences.
Ultimately, the moral problem
is rooted in my opinion in money.
Once money is devalued,
once money is being destroyed,
then people find it very hard to provide for their future.
And therefore they discount the future more
and they behave in much more destructive ways.
So I think as El Salvador stacks more Bitcoin,
I think everybody in the country
from the president down to the Pupusa stand,
they're going to become more future oriented,
they're going to become more peaceful, more civilized.
And I believe it's a pretty sustainable improvement
and I hope it continues.
Real quick, Bitcoin Beach, you were there.
What's going on in El Santa, is it?
Yeah.
You're down there with Max Kaiser.
Yes, I was there with Max and Stacey.
It's a beautiful, beautiful place.
It's amazing.
Is he wearing the orange shoes still?
Always, I think.
It's attracting a lot of tourists from all over the world,
particularly Bitcoin tourists.
And I think Bitcoiners are becoming a significant part
of the tourism income of El Salvador,
because it's really put the country on the map for Bitcoiners.
And because of the way that Bitcoin appreciates,
Bitcoiners generally tend to have a lot of disposable income.
So it's probably demographic
that has a lot more money to spend than other demographics.
And more time flexibility in many cases.
And more time flexibility.
A lot of Bitcoiners just don't need to be
in the office 24-7.
What's the best hotel in El Santa?
Where would you stay?
Well, I stayed in a very nice place called the Garten.
It's a small place, I think it's only five rooms or so.
But it's right on the beach.
They've got a great restaurant.
And they have surf lessons there.
So if you don't know how to surf, it's a great place to go.
I took my first surf lessons there.
We'll have to go to Amman.
We'll have to do a Live Like a King in Amman at some point
and show people what it's like.
Absolutely. We'd love to have you.
We should maybe do a conference there.
It's a great place to have conferences.
They've got a lot of nice venues.
You can fly in at Real Jordanian.
And yeah, we've got Petra as well.
The Dead Sea, you've got to float in the Dead Sea.
And you've got to see Petra.
It's an incredible city that's all carved in stone.
Let's do the next conference in Amman.
Oh, well, we'll take it under advisement.
Save it, Inamos.
Good to see you here at Nomad Capitalist Live.
Thank you.