Stacy Herbert: The Salvadoran Diaspora, Media Misrepresentation & Bitcoin as Hope
“Bitcoin plus Bukele equals boom times.” – Stacy Herbert
November 2022 sees the Adopting Bitcoin Conference returning to El Salvador. I partnered with the event hosts to bring you a 3-part interview series about three of the event speakers. To kick off the series, I spoke with Stacy Herbert!
Photo credit: Esaú González
Stacy Herbert is a bitcoiner, a storyteller and a powerhouse.
From an early career in film production to “Bitcoin ambassador” status (an ode to her arduous work in promoting bitcoin worldwide), it’s clear she’s had a remarkable life.
When Stacy was a college student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) she stumbled upon an internship with movie producer, Michael Phillips. Her first week there also happened to be the week his ex-wife’s (Julia Phillips) blockbuster “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again” dropped on Hollywood. And so began a spectacular decade in film and television production working on scripts before transitioning to international film sales.
Aside from the glamor of moviemaking (and possibly more impressive) is the fact she’s a leading reporter on global financial affairs having produced content for huge media outlets including BBC World, Al-Jazeera, and RT.
With RT, she made the Associated Press-produced program “Keiser Report”, which became the first global news show to cover bitcoin on a regular basis (fun fact: back in early 2011, bitcoin was still at parity with the U.S. dollar).
Today, she hosts the Max & Stacy Report alongside her partner and husband, Max Keiser. Always ahead of the curve, the show is the first bitcoin news program (in English) to come out of El Salvador – which just last year made bitcoin legal tender.
If there’s anyone that understands the intricacies of storytelling, the realities of our financial world, and the misrepresentation of Bitcoin by the media, it’s Stacy Herbert.
Preface: The Conversation
Having spent her career unearthing truths and connecting with people in unique ways, I wanted to speak with Stacy about one of the most misunderstood topics out there: bitcoin adoption in El Salvador.
In this conversation, Stacy explains how the media is failing to accurately portray bitcoin adoption in El Salvador, how economic turmoil created the Salvadoran diaspora (the dispersion of Salvadorans from their homeland), and how thanks to President Bukele and bitcoin, Salvadorans are returning to their beloved homeland.
She also gives a hint into her presentation at the upcoming Adopting Bitcoin Conference in El Salvador (hint: it’s at the end of this interview).
I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I enjoyed speaking with Stacy!
Listen to the whole conversation on Spotify or Fountain.
(Below is an excerpt of our conversation which has been edited for brevity. I encourage you to listen to the full conversation here.)
I know you moved to El Salvador at the end of last year. You said you had these expectations that it was going to be very dangerous, unsafe and the reality was completely different.
Stacy Herbert: It was very different than what the media had said. It just didn't sit well with me. I just felt annoyed that I had felt so scared of El Salvador. And in fact, when I arrived, it was super safe compared to what I thought from the headlines. So, you know, it felt unfair. It felt like an injustice that there was something like – a propaganda almost against the people.
[Max and I] started [hosting public events] just to show people that we're out in public. We're announcing where we're going to be in four weeks time. We feel safe enough to go there and announce it. When we did that, a whole bunch of other people came in from Europe and as far away as India. They were flying in just because they already knew about El Salvador as ‘Bitcoin country.’
It almost seems like you and Max became [Bitcoin] ambassadors.
Stacy Herbert: You know, we're kind of called that – like ‘the ambassadors to the United States.’ Milena Mayorga calls us unofficial ambassadors. Obviously we're not officially ambassadors because that's a diplomatic position. It'd be nice because then we would have some sort of immunity. But, yeah, we definitely, you know, [Max and I] kind of advise on Bitcoin policy here.
What's that process been like – advising on Bitcoin policy? I know you're also very connected to President Bukele and the government.
Stacy Herbert: The thing is, everybody's incredibly young and incredibly smart. So I feel like old and stupid, right? [laughs]. Now they're – just like all Salvadoran people – they're very warm, very nice. President Bukele and all of the people he has around him are crazy smart, and they're smart in a second language. I'm talking to them in English and they're so smart…
So you know, I'm such a big believer in the Bitcoin project here. It's totally Bitcoin maximalism and they understand exactly why bitcoin and none of those 22,000 altcoins… And you can see that with the finance minister, Alejandro Zelaya, what he just did with the bonds and buying back their bonds at a big discount and saving the country, in one fell swoop, $275 million. They're very bold and smart.
Seeing what El Salvador is doing and hearing all the stories is giving me hope about returning to Latin America. [El Salvador] gives me hope that one day Venezuela might get better and I'll be able to go back because there's no place like Latin America in terms of the people, the culture, the history.
Stacy Herbert: It gives me shivers to hear you say that because this is like the process of me falling in love with El Salvador and President Bukele and his project.
My first interaction was with locals in El Zonte and just hearing Chimbera Roman Martínez tell his story about exactly what you're talking about – exactly that. Just the profound sadness and loss of hope. Nobody wants to leave their family or their culture or their friends [but they had to].
And the stories that Ramon Martínez told me about, like, he just got used to loss all his life. His best friend would leave, his family would leave, his aunt would leave, and uncle would leave, and ultimately, a cousin would leave. They were always going to America or Canada or somewhere else. And so you're constantly getting used to loss and the fact that people are always leaving and never coming back. It was just like a despair about here and there was no hope here in El Salvador.
That's why I'm so protective and defensive of El Salvador and President Bukele about what he has achieved. I know so many Salvadorans and I know their stories and I know that the hope they have is just so deep and profound and it's something that's so not quantifiable. You can't really measure that, that shift in consciousness and the psychology of a people…
The media sometimes tries to say that [bitcoin] is not a real change here in El Salvador, but it's beyond just bitcoin – the diaspora is returning [even with those] that aren't bitcoiners. But as soon as they arrive, they become a bitcoiner, right? They become a bitcoiner because all Salvadorans have bitcoin because it's legal tender.
The change happened because of President Bukele. He was already on that drive towards what he calls ‘a policy of economic liberty.’ But certainly bitcoin catapulted it globally, which is quite important for the story of what you're describing here for many Latin American countries, is that there's a huge diaspora.
So, how do you get outside the local media? How do you jump out to the international diaspora? Or how do you communicate a message instantly like that? That's what [Bukele] did by adopting bitcoin.
Of course, every global institution and the U.S., everybody was like: ‘you can't do that!’ But that caused media attention which caused [Salvadoran people abroad to] ask ‘why is everybody talking about El Salvador? Nobody talks about El Salvador and now they're talking about us. I want to go back!’
Imagine what a few decades will look like.
Stacy Herbert: I believe [El Salvador] is like Florence 2.0. When you think of Florence, you think of Michelangelo. You think of da Vinci. You think of the great architects and accounting and astronomy and all sorts of ideas and the flourishing of art and thinking and philosophy, all sorts of things.
That happened after the Florin, which was the most perfect money of its day. But they perfected it – the unit of account of it and the accounting system that they had in Florence – so the double entry of accounting. That led to the growth of trade…
The same sort of transformation will happen [in El Salvador] because of perfect money [in bitcoin]. And because, you know, Florence also had a very charismatic, confident, and bold leader like Lorenzo the Magnificent. All the Botticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo, all of them happened under his rule.
So, I think you're gonna see the same sort of thing here [in El Salvador]. And I believe you're already starting to see it. I think over the next few decades, you're going to see the results of what happens today [with bitcoin adoption].
That cycle of despair and exodus is over. And so as you have hope and [Salvadorans] return, who knows what that will set in motion. [Salvadorans] need to return. Those are the people that are going to build this new Florence 2.0.
In terms of the Adopting Bitcoin Conference, what are you hoping to talk about?
Stacy Herbert: I'm going to be on a panel. I don't know how much [they’re] revealing about that but we're going to talk about the representation of El Salvador in the media. What they get wrong and what I've observed.
I'm still here, you know. I stayed on because of that media misrepresentation… It'd be like, you know, if somebody was telling you: ‘hey, you have to go to Miami. It's got beautiful mountains and snowing and skiing’ and then you show up and you're like, wait, not a single mountain here. You can't ski like, what the heck. What is this place that everybody told me about? It was the best place to go skiing? You know? That’s what we’ll be talking about – that misrepresentation.
Listen to the full conversation on Spotify or Fountain.
**Don’t miss Stacy Hebert taking the stage live at the Adopting Bitcoin Conference in El Salvador from November 15-17. Get your ticket here. You can also join Stacy’s “Don’t trust, verify tour” where you can tour gang-related areas that are now safe while speaking with locals to learn about the impact of bitcoin in helping fight crime and improving their lives. You can contact Stacy for more information on the walking tour at StacyPublic@proton.me
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