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Hey, so Lucas and I are here today. It's Christmas Day. Merry Christmas. Probably release this probably next day or so, I suppose.

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We're reading Broken Money, Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better.

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We're on to chapters 9, 10, and 11 today. So I'll do what we always do.

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I'll do a little kind of super quick introduction of the book up until chapter 9 and then a more belabored summary of the book from chapters 9 through 11.

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to get, so even if you haven't read the book to this point, hopefully you can watch this first

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part of the video, get up to speed, and then afterwards, Lucas and I will talk about, kind of

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analyze the chapter, break it down, what was significant to us. So part one of Lynn Alden's

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book, Broken Money, that was kind of, it began with this really vague question, broad question,

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what is money? And kind of the point of that was that there were two systems, credit and commodity,

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Credit money.

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If you think of money as credit, that's like money as the exchange of favors.

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If you think of money as a commodity, and this was anthropologically the case, that money was based on physical characteristics that made it suitable for use as money.

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Things that made it scarce, things like for a while, shells, and then later on, other sorts of things until finally settling on gold is the most scarce thing.

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And looking at these in part one, Alden deduced from these two systems that what is common, what constitutes money, the common characteristics of both credit and commodity money was that money is a ledger for recording transactions and ownership.

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Part two of the book, then she moved on from that question, what is money to the birth of banks. And we got this really fascinating kind of historical and technological portrait of the growth of early banking.

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specifically, this is the birth of banks in part two, they began as ways, banking began as kind of

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ways to provide layers of abstraction on top of commodity money like gold to transmute it into

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credit IOUs to make it more quick and convenient to actually use. Gold is not great for transactions.

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It's slow, risky to transport. Bandits can waylay you and steal all your goods, steal all your gold

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if you have it on your person, and you have to authenticate it.

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So gold wasn't great for daily transactions,

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although it did hold value.

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It's very scarce.

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Making gold into claims for gold through layers of abstraction,

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IOUs instead of actual gold substance,

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enabled it to kind of move quicker and be more convenient.

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So that's part of the birth of banking.

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So the historical trend in part two,

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as Alden kind of really detailed for us,

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was a trend for banks to issue more and more IOUs,

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claims for gold relative to the gold they actually had

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in a fractional banking system,

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and also to centralize more and more

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to go from a free banking system of many different banks

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operating their own ledger to a central banking system

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with one central bank operating a ledger

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that the other banks then used as part of their reserves.

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a big part of that historical story in part two, the birth of banks, was a need for speed.

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That's what motivated a lot of the growth of banking, this layer of abstraction on top of gold.

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It was a technological story, too.

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The development of telecommunications allowed for instantaneous updating of a ledger based on IOUs.

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So gold further tended to drop out of the system.

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telecommunications with you tend to telegraph and say, Hey, Joe made this transaction update

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his ledger with your bank, instead of having to transport a caravan of gold across the desert.

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So gold, again, does the further drop out of the system become more abstract claims for gold

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become more popular. Banks tend to centralize even more and more. So this is a single ledger

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that can be updated in this fashion, instead of having to settle transactions amongst the banks.

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And so we have part two, the birth of banking.

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We're now moving on to part three of the book.

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Chapters 9, 10, and 11 are the first part of part three.

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Part three is the rise and fall of global monetary orders.

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So the way I was thinking about this is we've been given kind of an anthropological and

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historical account of what money is, an historical account and technological account of the birth

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of banking as a layer of abstraction on top of money.

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And now we're kind of given a geopolitical account of what this development of banking means. That's the global monetary order. So chapter nine is printing money for war. World War I begins and all these countries are kind of dragged into war.

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We all kind of know the story, I think. It begins between Bosnia versus Austria-Hungary, but all these treaties activate. And before you know it, the UK is now this island country separated from the reason for the conflict is now dragged into it.

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Well, they say they need to enter the conflict in order to ensure that Germany doesn't defeat France and become the continental power.

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So imagine now UK is trying to sell its populace on the idea that it needs to enter a continental war about some obscure conflict emerging between Bosnia and Austria-Hungary.

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That's tough to do.

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So they say, you know, we want to enter this war.

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We're going to sell war bonds to fund the war.

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And they then say it was a massive success.

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We sold a bunch of – we oversubscribed.

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We sold all the war bonds.

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People are very for the war, and they continue into the war.

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But it's then later revealed in 2017 by the Bank of England that the bank just lied about that.

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It was actually the bank through its officials.

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They realized that only one-third or so of the bonds had been sold, these war bonds, to fund the war, which if they had revealed that at the time would have indicated that the war was very unpopular.

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Instead, the bank officials stepped in and bought those bonds that they were selling, which resulted in money being created to pay for the war by devaluing people's savings in an opaque and involuntary way, kind of in a tax that people don't realize is happening.

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So the result of World War I is kind of this rampant inflation, further government control due to high inflation because once there's high inflation, the government then steps in to try to stop the high inflation.

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They impose rent controls.

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They redirect production to the war effort from things that other people are making – that are being made that don't relate directly to the war effort.

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They say you can't buy certain securities.

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So inflation is used to tax the people secretly for the war and also as a justification to control the economy directly.

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At that time, also, because the UK was the world reserve currency, it being kind of at the end of its empire, it could also, by printing a lot of money, siphon value from all these developing countries as well.

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So World War I, in Alden's estimation, then demonstrated a power shift from those who use the ledger, which would be people who go to the bank, update the ledger to note transactions with other people, and those who control the ledger, which is now these nation states.

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So to quote Alden, throughout the war, countries around the world showed that their governments and central banks now had nearly complete control of the ledgers that people around the world used for savings and payment.

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Savings could be rapidly devalued in a non-transparent way and channeled toward what the government considers worthwhile to spend money on.

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And this control of the ledger by the government was permitted by what I mentioned in part two, kind of that increasing abstraction and centralization of the banking system.

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Gold resisted inflation, but claims for gold do not.

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That tech story, again, claims for gold were necessitated because of a mismatch in the speed of credit versus the speed of gold.

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and that need for speed led to decentralizing the ledger under the kind of control of the few.

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When that happens, human nature kicks in and they begin to manipulate that ledger.

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A part of this too is simply also that the governments demonstrated at this time,

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if you want to win a modern war, well, first, maybe if you want to drag your population into

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a modern war, you need to tax them implicitly. But also, if you want to really mobilize the

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entirety of society, take all that savings and value, then the country that inflates the most

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is going to have also some sort of military advantage in the short run. That's chapter nine.

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That leads us to chapter 10, the Bretton Woods system. So after World War I, now World War I

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has kind of demonstrated that new control of the ledger, but has led to rampant inflation.

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The UK does try to control that. They try to re-peg their currency to gold, re-establish some sort of stable currency. But the problem was after World War I, they kept the same redemption rate as before the war. So despite there being much more money in circulation, they said that it's still worth the same amount of gold.

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So this kind of – all the notes led to an artificially strong currency.

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People's wages were inflated, so they were making more gold per hour even though they were doing the same thing, which led to less people being hired because you really can't justify that.

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People's jobs weren't worth that much gold if they would now be paid for what they were doing.

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And this also affected global capital flows.

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And Alden says it affects the United States as well.

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In 1929, it encourages a credit and speculative bubble in the United States, leading to the Great Depression.

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And we now get to the U.S. government and its response to this inflation that's kind of global after World War I.

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The U.S. tries to deal with the Great Depression by declaring a bank holiday.

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These fractional reserve banks were failing across the U.S. because there were more claims for the reserves that those banks held than there were reserves.

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And so people trying to redeem the reserves lead to these bank runs.

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So the government closes the banks, the bank holiday, to allow the banks to be recapitalized, which basically just meant that the Federal Reserve was now going to step in to backstop with 100% deposit insurance.

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because the Fed Reserve backstopped failing fractional banks with more currency,

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it also needed a way to prevent people from redeeming those new IOUs for gold.

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Because once you create all this currency, as we saw with the UK,

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you can't just say it's worth the same amount of gold.

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And so people are going to redeem it, get all this gold,

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because they want to get rid of their paper.

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So the US, we talked about this last time.

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There's a little bit of history in the last part.

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The U.S., through executive order, seizes gold and through other law centralizes.

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So executive order 6102 seizes gold from private individuals, prevents them from using it to redeeming their dollars for gold.

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And they also shift gold from the Federal Reserve to the U.S. Treasury to take it out of the banking system.

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um they also the u.s also changed the dollar peg uh to gold to devalue the currency because

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to quote alden currency devaluation favors debtors over creditors and there was no bigger

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creditor than the u.s federal government at this time so that's the situation after world war one

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this rampant inflation and these attempts to control that inflation by devaluing the currency

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All of this kind of globally then leads to World War II, all the notes. Populism and extremism grow during the economic stagnation of the 30s. Currencies fail, savings are depleted. There's class enmity between the haves and have-nots, the working class and the elites.

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strong men arise who can kind of reductively state the problem by blaming it on some minority group

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and say we can fix this by taking away civil liberties and we get World War II.

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In this telling, it's kind of a repeat of World War I. Money printing occurs again to fund the war.

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There's interference in the market during the war to control that resulting inflation in the economy

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and redirect it towards military purposes.

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After World War II, there is then an attempt to establish a global monetary order.

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This is kind of the first historical moment where this type of thing occurs.

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44 sovereign nations meet at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire,

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to try to consciously design what the post-World War II global monetary order is going to look like.

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the problem. So here's the problem they want to solve, or they think they need to solve is,

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of course, countries need a way to trade amongst themselves when they don't trust each other's

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ledgers. Everybody's inflating their currencies, and so I'm not going to trade with you and your

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currency, and you're not going to trade with me and mine because they're worthless between these

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countries. The situation then seems to devolve into barter. So the Bretton Woods Conference

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wants to solve that for the post-World War II monetary order. Also, of course, gold is not

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fast enough. So that's kind of not on the table at Bretton Woods as like, you know, a solution to

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just go back to gold because we have, as we saw earlier, speed is a necessity in the telecommunications

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based era. And gold is not fast enough for most banking purposes, at least the way that it's kind

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of been used previously. So two visions of the future of the post-World War II global monetary

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order, two possible visions emerge at Bretton Woods, the Bancor versus the dollar.

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And we, of course, know the dollar is going to win.

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But what's the Bancor?

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So that was proposed by, it's a system designed by John Maynard Keynes, this kind of very

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intricate, complex, centrally managed, neutral settlement account system based on, it's like

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the perfect status stream, which is like this intricately designed mechanism.

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It's based on a basket of major global currencies.

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You adjust currencies up and down based on deficits and surpluses to make it easier for countries to balance their trade.

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There's punitive measures for countries who are chronic creditors or debtors.

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So it's just an attempt to fine-tune and have this neutral system, the Bancor, as a unit of account.

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It's not like a currency.

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It's just a unit of account for international trade amongst countries that's really centrally tightly managed.

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The other proposal is by the United States.

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Let's use the U.S. dollar.

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So the U.S. dollar, the United States proposes, would be the reserve assets. Countries then peg their currency to the dollar, and the United States is constrained because we are then going to peg the dollar to gold at a fixed rate.

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So foreign governments then can just redeem dollars for gold. Everybody's happy.

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The bankers problem, I kind of hinted towards it, very centralized. It's going to require like it would have required, and I think, an imaginable level of cooperation between all these different sovereign countries to keep it going.

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the dollar's advantages primarily all then i think as she describes it is primarily geopolitical

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that the united states proposes it it's the it's the major it's the world's biggest economy at this

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point it wasn't devastated by war like europe or even great britain um it has large amounts of gold

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other countries that shipped gold there during the war and the united states even made acceptance of

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its proposed dollar system contingent upon those other countries benefiting from the Marshall Plan,

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which is what, of course, the war-torn countries were going to need. It was a program of financial

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assistance to these war-torn countries. So for geopolitical reasons, that dollar system of

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foreign currencies pegged to the dollar, dollar pegged to gold, is what emerges from Bretton Woods.

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But this global monetary order decided after World War II is short-lived. It's agreed in 1946. It becomes fully operational in 1958 with the U.S. now the global reserve currency in this way, but it really only lasts from then until 1970.

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U.S.

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as soon as it kind of goes live

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U.S. gold reserves begin to

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decrease because

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number of dollars increases to satisfy

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global demand for them as a global

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reserve as a this reserve

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asset that everybody's going to use

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countries as

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dollars

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don't just there's a few

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ways that all the notes of dollars

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increase in this way so

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in part due to

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what she calls a euro dollar system. So a euro dollar, as it arises now, is just a dollar that's

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in a non-US jurisdiction. So in Europe or in South America, any of those dollars were euro dollars.

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These are dollars that are now arising outside of the US control, really, through the fractional

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reserve system, which was such that the Federal Reserve could loan money to US banks, increasing

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the money supply. U.S. banks then could loan to foreign banks who are now part of the system.

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Now we have three levels of fractional reserve banking that are increasing the money,

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the dollar supply, including through the creation of euro dollars in foreign bank

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fractional reserve systems. The result now is many more paper claims for gold than actual gold.

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So the ability of, rather, all these paper claims mean that foreign countries could then

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suck all the gold out of the United States if they redeemed them all.

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At first, to manage this system from 1950 to 1970, the U.S. could kind of throw its

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weight around diplomatically and say, you know, if you want our aid and assistance,

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et cetera, don't redeem for gold.

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But over time, foreign leaders saw what was happening with the more and more dollars going

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into effect, tried to redeem them more and more often for gold.

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So finally in 1971, Nixon pulls the rug and ends foreign redeemability of gold, which is kind of the nail in the coffin of the Bretton Woods systems because that again depends on the dollar being pegged to gold and foreign countries being able to redeem their dollars for gold.

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now this is another world historic moment kind of the death of the post-world war ii global

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monetary order of the breton of this kind of consciously intentionally designed breton wood

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system to quote alden at that point in 1971 the world entered the modern fiat currency regime

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meaning the world reserve currency and other currencies are not redeemable for anything

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So that's the end of that global monetary order.

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Chapter 11, the rise of the petrodollar.

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We're going to see a new global economic order, monetary order emerge here.

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So again, the Bretton Woods system has now ended.

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US dollar is not redeemable for gold by foreign countries.

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For the first time, as Alden notes, we now have fiat on a global scale.

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previously fiat had occurred kind of nationally which makes more sense a nation can force its

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people to use a currency can say we're going to tax you in this currency we're going to impose

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taxes on other commodity monies to encourage you to use our currency and so within a nation people

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have faith in their own nation too it kind of made sense but how now globally in a global fiat era

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We're back to that problem of how do you get other countries to acknowledge the value of what a country can simply print.

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So the U.S. does this through the creation of the petrodollar system.

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So after the Bretton Woods rug pull in the 70s, we now get worldwide inflation because it's the money era.

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U.S. oil production also peaks.

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It had been increasing.

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It's now not really increasing in the 70s.

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To make matters worse, the Saudis restrict oil export in retaliation for support for Israel, putting the U.S. in kind of a really bad position and also globally a bad position for everyone.

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The U.S. Treasury Secretary goes to Saudi Arabia then, is sent to Saudi Arabia, and has two goals.

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Neutralize this use of oil as an economic weapon and find a way to finance American debt.

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So the resulting scheme that's developed with Saudi Arabia is the petrodollar system. The petrodollar is simply, in this definition, the Saudis' dollar trade surplus. When they exchange their oil, they end up with dollars. That surplus is the petrodollar. The dollars over in Saudi Arabia derive from selling oil.

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So here is the diplomatic solution that was devised as kind of a new economic order between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

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That is the petrodollar system.

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So the U.S. would buy lots of Saudi oil, sell them lots of military equipment, use naval power to ensure that the Strait of Hormuz remained open for oil trade.

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And on top of it all, keep this whole thing secret, even and sell U.S. treasuries outside of normal auction process, really increasing, encouraging Saudi Arabia to amass U.S. treasuries, keeping all this secret due to the negative optics of Saudi Arabia's perspective of them associating with the USA, given the support of Israel.

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In exchange, Saudi Arabia then is going to invest their trade surplus of petrodollars in U.S. Treasury securities, which is then going to finance U.S. deficit spending, and then only sell their oil to other countries in dollar terms, in $4, to increase demand globally for U.S. dollars, which then the thinking goes would cement the U.S. dollar as the global medium of exchange.

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Oil kind of being the blood that runs the world. And so if you have to pay in dollars for that from Saudi Arabia, the dollar then is seemingly in a way backed by oil, which is – I'll just quote Alda. She explains this very well.

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Quote,

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could buy oil when they needed it. This kept the global demand for dollars going strong,

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and therefore kept the overall dollar network effect going strong.

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So this kind of is the post-Bretton Woods global monetary order, in a sense, the petrodollar,

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encouraging the use of the U.S. dollar by pricing oil in that through this deal with Saudi Arabia.

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What are the effects of the petrodollar system?

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First, the U.S. had to stabilize its currency and kind of make it respectable again.

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So the U.S. in 79 and 80 imposed really 20% and really high interest rates, 20% interest rates.

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This brought down inflation, made the dollar stronger.

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But when you make the dollar stronger, you hurt debtors.

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And this had an effect, especially all the notes in Latin America.

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All these dollars are moved from circulation.

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the dollar is stronger. Latin America has large business and government debts in dollars.

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It becomes very, very difficult for them to repay their debt. And we might talk about this. I found

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this astounding. It's 70 to 80 is referred to as the lost decade. The United States is increasing

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its oil consumption. Developing countries are increasing their oil consumption. It actually

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decreases in Latin America, this substance that is so vital for any sort of economic activity.

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So that's one effect of the petrodollar system. Another astounding one is that it may have led to the invasion of Iraq. In 1999, Saudi Arabia begins – no, Iraq begins selling oil denominated in the euro instead of the dollar, which again, that's a direct threat to the petrodollar framework where we're trying to price oil in dollars to encourage other countries to buy our treasuries and amass our dollars.

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in 2003 of course as we all know 1999 that that move happens by iraq to reprice

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in selling oil in the euro 2003 four years later iraq is unilaterally invaded by the united states

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on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction which as we now know was bunk and even at the

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time north korea other countries had weapons of mass destruction none of the 9-11 hijackers were

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from Iraq, Alden notes all this. And so, you know, she doesn't go outright and say that to preserve

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the petrodollar system was the reason for the invasion of Iraq, but she does quote

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a senator talking about that this is one possible reason. He's saying this back in 2003. And of

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course, retrospectively, we begin to wonder why did this happen? And this seems like a pretty

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persuasive reason. It may also have led to the United States backing a coup attempt in Venezuela

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when Chavez made a similar move regarding Venezuela's oil supplies. And so the effects

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of the petrodollar system, devastating in Latin America, devastating to the Middle East,

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and because of the Iraq war and having all of these geopolitical ramifications.

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Who controls the ledger now, once we've kind of are in this new fiat era and geopolitics is so important?

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To quote Alden,

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The answer geopolitically is that in the telecommunication age whichever country has the most economic and military prowess is likely to have the primary control over the world ledger

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Unless or until there is a better solution or until no single nation is large enough to force its will onto the rest of the world.

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Who controls the ledger in the fiat era?

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power makes right or whoever has the power geopolitically controls the ledger.

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So all then ends this chapter and I'll end my summary with a summary of modern global monetary

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orders up to the States. This is a quick run through of what we talked about.

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Again, the issue is that it's necessary that there be a ledger to act as a trusted unit of

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account and medium of exchange for foreign trade to prevent the 160 currencies that there are

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devolving simply into a barter system internationally because no one trusts the other

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currencies. So before 1944 and up until 1944, there was the gold standard. 1944, after World

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War II to 1971, that's the Bretton Woods system. Foreign currencies pegged to the dollar, dollar

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pegged to gold. 1971, that's the Nixon rug pull. And then the creation of the petrodollar system,

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To quote Alden, from the mid-1970s to the present day, so this is the current order, the U.S. dollar has represented the primary unit of account and payment rail for international trade, with U.S. dollar deposits and U.S. treasury securities also representing the primary savings asset for foreign reserve holdings.

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other countries then have to manage the strength of their currency with respect to the U.S. dollar

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kind of pricing it in the U.S. dollar they have to fiddle with their own economies devaluing their

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currencies etc or making them stronger in order to be able to conduct international trade

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so that's the chapter that's the summary up until where we are now in the book I'll toss it back to

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Lucas with something that you noted before we talked that a lot of the story

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seems to be shared with the creature from Jekyll Island.

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And it's been a while since I read that,

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but of course this all sounded very familiar to me as I was reading.

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Do you, so was that, did you,

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did you find anything new in this reading that was not in the creature from

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Jekyll Island or anything specifically that like jumped out at you as some

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novel reading of history as Alden runs through the creation of our current global economic order?

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That's a good question. For people who are unaware, the book, The Creature from Jekyll

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Island, I believe the author is C. Edward Griffin, is often really thrown out into the wind by

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those who oppose it as basically this giant book of conspiracy

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where the author effectively lays out from the creation of the Federal Reserve

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all the way up until the modern system.

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That it was not an accident that things happened the way they did.

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that it was not only intentional, but it was intentional and secret and kept secret for the reason that it was known.

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It was known that they were doing something that was wrong, I guess.

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So it's a incredible book. I strongly write it. By the way, it's very well cited.

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This is what we were talking about previously was that I had made the note.

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I had made the comment that these chapters really read kind of like an overview of the creature from Jekyll Island, kind of like a fast summary.

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And I would recommend anybody read that, that the comment I made was that, well, you know, that guy had citations as well.

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Like he looked up things in history as well.

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And he's and the creature, it's not, you know, it's not directly cited by Alden.

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And I'll give Alden credit, too, by the way, of all of the books that I've read on this subject. She does more than anyone and incredibly intentionally, I believe, to stay above the fray, to stay out of the muck, to stay out of the mud.

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Yet you still cannot avoid having these things pop up that are that are very, very similar to what you read in the conspiracy rags.

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And so, yeah, let's let's get into that.

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What is something that I noticed in this that I didn't notice in the creature from Jekyll Island?

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And the one thing that I it may have been in there, but I don't I don't think it was or I don't remember it was the Bank of England.

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Well, actually, I definitely wouldn't. Because I think. Yeah.

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So 2017 was when the retraction came out by the Financial Times to say, hey, by the way, we discovered that England went into World War I on false pretenses by defrauding and lying to the public in order to make it seem as though the populace wanted to go to war.

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When truly, in fact, it was only a very, very small amount of people that concocted this travesty of an abomination of a lie upon the people.

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They put out a call for 350 million pounds, British pounds money.

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I have to say that, not wait.

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They put out a call for these war bonds that paid a higher percentage that, you know, hey, by all rights, if you wanted to buy bonds, that would be the bond that you would buy because it paid a higher percentage.

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And yet they only sold, I think it was like 80 million of that 300, 350 million.

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And so what they did was they created money out of nothing.

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And this to us sounds just commonplace, normal.

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It's an everyday Tuesday that you create money out of nothing. But back then, that was not the case. So this was like the first real, like real egregious example, I think, of the fiat phenomenon occurring, where they unilaterally decide that they're going to create this money out of thin air.

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They're going to put it in the names of some employees of the Bank of England.

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Those employees are going to purchase the remainder of the bank of the war bonds in order to finance the operation to go to war.

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And what happens, of course, is that they experience inflation.

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They go to war.

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The people have their wealth and their savings stolen from them.

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Just as John Maynard Keynes is quoted in the beginning of this chapter as saying, and this to me, I think this bears talking about, which this is one of my favorite quotes.

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This is in a presentation that I have.

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This is John Maynard Keynes.

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By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate secretly and unobserved an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

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By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily.

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And while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.

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I just tweeted out earlier today a post by the Fed, Federal Reserve, that shows the wealth distribution of the United States currently, which is the most unequal that it's ever been in history.

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And so this is a direct result of that type of inflation of being able to steal from from the populace and to do with it what you want.

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So I enjoyed these three chapters because they take me into something that I became really interested in.

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It's really a lot of meat on the bone, but it's also a lot of candy when you start down this path, which is the conspiracy theory angle of why did these things happen?

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Now, one of the things that they'll talk about that the creature from Jekyll Island talks about in much, much, much more detail was so Alden talks about how Britain got into the war.

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The way the United States got into the war was that the Lusitania, which was a U.S. flag merchant marine ship, was sunk by German U-boats.

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and they took it as, you know, oh, this was this unprovoked offense and they killed over a thousand people died.

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And that was the reason to go.

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The way that it's framed in The Creature from Jekyll Island talks about, well, actually, the public sentiment was not there.

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They did not want to go to war.

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There was absolutely no will of the people in order to engage.

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They knew that it was not their problem.

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They had no had no means. They had no reason to go to war.

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And those merchant marine ships were supposedly loaded with munitions and supplies that were going to help the British war effort, which was something that the United States was not allowed to do as someone who is not a participant in the war.

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They, you know, by doing that, what they're doing is they're taking sides and they are they're staking a claim.

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A couple of facts about that. So that ship sunk in 18 minutes.

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It was hit by one single torpedo. This is a massive ocean liner.

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It was hit by one single torpedo. There are eyewitnesses.

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There were eyewitnesses that said that it was hit by the torpedo and seconds later it blew sky high, suggesting that it was packed to the gills with explodable munitions.

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Um, there was also, um, reports that, uh, the, the ship, as it went through the submarine infested waters, it had, uh, patrols on his side there to protect it.

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And those patrols were called off and sent it through this, uh, this narrow strait that they knew to be, um, knew to be heavily patrolled by German U-boats.

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And not only that, I looked these up myself. There are pictures and quotes of the warnings that the German embassy in the United States placed in United States newspapers that said, look, don't get on passenger ships that are going to Britain.

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we will, you know, they're in danger

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because they are illegally supplying the war effort,

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et cetera, et cetera. And supposedly I couldn't find this one.

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Supposedly there was like a full page ad taken out in the Cleveland newspaper, which

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Cleveland at the time was arguably the most powerful city in the world next

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to New York. And there was a full page ad

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that was taken out by Americans that warned

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people, hey, there's conspiracy underfoot, they're going to blow up the ship, do not get on the ship.

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Obviously, that's how it turned out. But I enjoy this because it takes us down, you know, the road of conspiracy theory.

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And for those uninitiated to the subject who bandy about the world, the word conspiracy or the phrase conspiracy theory,

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It did not enter popular nomenclature until the Warren Commission, which was a report that came after the assassinated of John F. Kennedy by the intelligence agencies investigating themselves to find out whether or not they had anything to do with the assassination of Kennedy.

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And I just one of the things that I think is so fantastic to point out is that at the same time, while labeling that while labeling the idea that the intelligence agencies were somehow involved in the assassination of a sitting United States president and that there had been reason to tie to this.

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At the same time, they called that a conspiracy theory and they said, that's absolutely ridiculous. The theory that they put out that they offered for acceptance and said, this is the official theory is literally called the magic bullet theory. They literally invoke magic, which I find just utterly hilarious.

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And so Alden does a really good job of walking us through. So World War One, you know, was definitely entered into under completely false pretenses by Britain, probably by the United States as well.

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World War Two, there's the argument that the heavy the heavy war reparations placed upon Germans forced them to hyperinflate their own currency after World War One, which led to the rise of populism, which led to the strong man coming out and saying, hey, you know, it's these guys problem.

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If you get with me, we'll take care of this.

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And they rose out of it.

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The Germans really did rise out of it, become, you know,

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the world's most dominant industrial power yet again, which they were doing that.

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They were doing that World War I as well.

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Right.

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And they were competing with competing with Britain and Britain didn't want them to to be able to do so.

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And so possibly that's a great reason to oppose them.

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So possibly World War II maybe was.

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You may or may not say that it's false pretenses, but you can certainly say that it doesn't take a whole lot of head scratching and squinting in order to in order to say that it was a very predictable result.

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So and then you have, you know, we skip over, by the way, we skip over Vietnam where where Kennedy Kennedy orders home.

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I believe it was like 12,000 military advisors, the 12,000 military advisors that had been sent to Vietnam and said, you know, we're getting out of this is ridiculous.

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We've got Americans being killed on foreign soil for a war that's not ours.

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And they assassinate him.

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And a couple weeks or a couple months later, it's like 288,000 troops or something like that deploy.

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And we enter into a decade-long war that has no real justification that we end up effectively losing.

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Sounds a whole lot like Afghanistan, by the way. You know, it takes us to takes us to the late late 90s, early 2000s, where, again, you know, we we go and we enter into a war with a country that it appears on the face of it that we have no reason to go to war with this country.

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You know, none of none of the as you said, you know, none of these terrorists were Iraqi.

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There were no weapons of mass destruction.

377
00:42:58,455 --> 00:43:09,935
It seems as though seems as though this fall something else that that is, I think, of note that I think is just a wonderful, interesting coincidence and fact of history.

378
00:43:09,935 --> 00:43:25,135
So, you know, the justification for going to war, going to war in Iraq was that, you know, 9-11 was the terrorist attacks, even though none of the terrorists were from there, etc.

379
00:43:25,135 --> 00:43:31,515
etc. On September 10th, the day before Donald Rumsfeld, the sitting DOD secretary,

380
00:43:32,095 --> 00:43:39,315
confirms that the Pentagon has lost track of $2.3 trillion. And they have no idea where it's at,

381
00:43:39,475 --> 00:43:44,875
which, by the way, that represented about 40% of the entire United States debt at the time. So

382
00:43:44,875 --> 00:43:54,015
to put it in perspective, that would be like 17, 16, 17, 18 trillion dollars in today's money.

383
00:43:55,135 --> 00:44:04,215
Just all of a sudden, hey, we have, you know, must have fallen into the couch cushions or, you know, I had a hole in my wallet or, you know, I had no idea.

384
00:44:05,995 --> 00:44:17,155
And then there's also Building 7, which is another one of the buildings that went down on September 11th that probably most people listening to this have never heard of.

385
00:44:17,795 --> 00:44:20,455
Building 7 was one of the World Trade buildings.

386
00:44:20,455 --> 00:44:31,095
the CIA was housed on the 25th floor. It was one of the places where a lot of very sensitive and

387
00:44:31,095 --> 00:44:38,255
only copies of financial records were stored, including supposedly the financial records that

388
00:44:38,255 --> 00:44:47,995
proved where that $2.3 trillion went. Also Enron, where their money went and some other things

389
00:44:47,995 --> 00:44:57,075
there. So, um, it's that, that, that's to round this out. Um, because what you're asking, what

390
00:44:57,075 --> 00:45:01,855
you asked was, you know, was there anything in, in Alden's book that I learned that wasn't in,

391
00:45:01,855 --> 00:45:07,835
um, Jekyll Island? One, one thing is that she has the benefit of history where, uh, her book

392
00:45:07,835 --> 00:45:12,435
has been written after some more things have come out and she's able to tie a few, a few more things

393
00:45:12,435 --> 00:45:19,175
together, where if she wanted to, I'm sure she could go very deep in it, but it's just not her

394
00:45:19,175 --> 00:45:25,395
interest. But suffice to say that any one of these things, World War I, World War II, Vietnam,

395
00:45:25,755 --> 00:45:34,235
Afghanistan, Iraq, any of these things, you can look at individually and you can say, oh, okay,

396
00:45:34,235 --> 00:45:40,175
I can see, you know, I get the reason, you know, there's terrorism and there's, you know, there's

397
00:45:40,175 --> 00:45:44,255
genocide and there's a, but when you tie them all together, it does,

398
00:45:44,375 --> 00:45:47,455
you don't really have to squint at it very much to see that there's some

399
00:45:47,455 --> 00:45:48,955
common threads. Yeah.

400
00:45:49,155 --> 00:45:54,235
And those common threads are quite often involved with, um,

401
00:45:54,335 --> 00:45:59,055
what is the dominant monetary, uh, unit of account, uh,

402
00:45:59,055 --> 00:46:02,255
the dominant monetary system, how is it being used?

403
00:46:02,255 --> 00:46:04,615
And is there perhaps a,

404
00:46:04,615 --> 00:46:09,235
an attempt to get off of that and go somewhere else?

405
00:46:09,235 --> 00:46:24,775
So, yeah, I, yeah, I guess that's, that's kind of, that's kind of what I take away from it, which is just that I think she actually does an even better job of drawing lines between these things and being like, oh, look, here's bullshit.

406
00:46:25,075 --> 00:46:28,615
And there's horseshit and there's some more shit.

407
00:46:29,215 --> 00:46:37,855
It's just, let's back some shit on top of more shit and realize that possibly that there are some very clear lines to be drawn between these things.

408
00:46:37,855 --> 00:46:57,335
Yeah, even a final conclusion, who controls the ledger? I mean, she states it in kind of abstract terms that in the fiat monetary global regime, the answer to who controls the ledger is geopolitical, whichever country has the most economic and military prowess.

409
00:46:57,335 --> 00:47:26,235
And we see, therefore, like the United States exercising its flexing its economic and military prowess to head off any threat to its geopolitical dominance that allows it to control the ledger through first the Bretton Woods agreement to peg foreign currencies to the dollar, and then later to the petrodollar system to loosely tie it to oil by encouraging Saudi Arabia to stack dollars.

410
00:47:26,235 --> 00:47:43,355
So the stuff that the history that you run through, again, that can seem conspiratorial in any of its parts, you know, at least it does have a general explanation on paper that is very sober minded that fiat money is about power.

411
00:47:43,355 --> 00:48:01,955
It's about believing the issuer has the authority to issue it. And so in a fiat monetary, global fiat monetary regime, that country that exercises power and might is that country that then can dominate and control the global ledger, which has been the United States.

412
00:48:01,955 --> 00:48:16,335
And I think it's a really good point you make regarding conspiratorial thinking. And I think this is, I mean, we're less and less inclined to take conspiracy theory as a pejorative term because we've seen so many of them come true.

413
00:48:16,335 --> 00:48:44,075
And so nowadays it's like, you know, that worked for a while. You could shame us into having thoughts about what happened by making us seem like paranoid, schizophrenic fools. But now we're seeing all these things come to light. And we have two really great examples in this chapter. You mentioned the Bank of England. At the time, it would have been a conspiracy theory to say, oh, the Bank of England is buying all these bonds. It's not you and me. It's the bank itself.

414
00:48:44,075 --> 00:49:08,615
A person saying that at the time would have been looked at as not patriotic, all of these things. Now, it's just that's a fact that they operated in utter secrecy and they did sell war bonds to themselves to finance a war that would have been difficult to sell to somebody to send their son to go die overseas in a continental war to assert dominance over Germany.

415
00:49:08,615 --> 00:49:16,495
You know, incredible. And also regarding the petrodollar system, this is all the notes only now.

416
00:49:16,575 --> 00:49:23,355
So it was kind of an open secret in a sense, but the creation of the petrodollar system through this diplomatic mission of the U.S.

417
00:49:23,375 --> 00:49:34,515
Secretary Treasury to Saudi Arabia, a condition of that was that it remained secret so that Saudi Arabia would have plausible deniability that it's not helping out the USA, helping out the U.S.

418
00:49:34,515 --> 00:49:37,395
because of the tricky situation with Israel.

419
00:49:38,075 --> 00:49:40,535
And so these are like, these are conspiracies.

420
00:49:41,035 --> 00:49:42,535
Conspiracies are things that happen.

421
00:49:42,655 --> 00:49:44,615
People do conspire to do things

422
00:49:44,615 --> 00:49:46,375
and they conspire to do things

423
00:49:46,375 --> 00:49:48,855
on the condition of secrecy to make them work.

424
00:49:48,955 --> 00:49:52,615
And that's kind of the way the Federal Reserve operates

425
00:49:52,615 --> 00:49:53,635
is based in secrecy.

426
00:49:53,635 --> 00:49:56,855
A lot of financial and economic moves

427
00:49:56,855 --> 00:49:59,015
are done with intentional secrecy

428
00:49:59,015 --> 00:50:01,455
to prevent the market from being spooked

429
00:50:01,455 --> 00:50:02,395
and things like that.

430
00:50:02,395 --> 00:50:20,195
And so it's I like that you pointed out that if the creature from Jekyll Hyde seemed conspiracy minded and Alden doesn't, maybe it's just because more time has elapsed and historical record is resolving as it does to show us that conspiracies did in fact happen.

431
00:50:20,195 --> 00:50:29,215
And the most glaring example here for me, like personally, because I think maybe for you too, Lucas, and for some of our listeners is the Iraq war.

432
00:50:29,215 --> 00:50:33,095
Because like I was in high school and I came of age with that.

433
00:50:33,295 --> 00:50:45,235
I came of age. I was sold by my own government that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that there was some sort of nebulous tie with terrorism that was kind of hinted at.

434
00:50:45,395 --> 00:50:48,215
Even though none of the hijackers were from Iraq.

435
00:50:48,215 --> 00:51:09,575
And I was, I kind of had, I wasn't, you know, not a developed geopolitical worldview as a high schooler, but it was kind of default neocon because that's what the administration was. And, you know, looking back at myself, it's like, oh, how naive to just buy hook, line and sinker what the government was saying. And it's kind of like, you lose your political innocence at a moment like that.

436
00:51:09,575 --> 00:51:13,535
for another generation, maybe it's going to be COVID. They're going to lose their political

437
00:51:13,535 --> 00:51:17,195
innocence when they see the factual record resolve,

438
00:51:17,955 --> 00:51:21,435
maybe in this current administration, as more and more records come to light about

439
00:51:21,435 --> 00:51:25,575
why certain things occurred. And so Alden, as

440
00:51:25,575 --> 00:51:29,715
you know, she has a very sober-minded way of detailing things, and she doesn't sound

441
00:51:29,715 --> 00:51:33,355
in any of its parts like a conspiracy. She lays

442
00:51:33,355 --> 00:51:36,915
out why she thinks things happened, is not

443
00:51:36,915 --> 00:51:44,695
like to, she doesn't say the Iraq war occurred because it was trying to preserve the petrodollar

444
00:51:44,695 --> 00:51:48,095
system. She simply lays out the facts and say, this appears that it could have been one of the

445
00:51:48,095 --> 00:51:53,595
reasons. And then cites, you know, congressional record of a senator talking about it, that this

446
00:51:53,595 --> 00:52:01,755
is a possible reason. So yeah, conspiracies are real. And in the economic realm, they maybe are

447
00:52:01,755 --> 00:52:06,255
more prevalent than other realms because secrecy is encouraged.

448
00:52:07,455 --> 00:52:14,995
There was one other thing I wanted to mention that based on what you said, you had mentioned

449
00:52:14,995 --> 00:52:21,415
that the kind of fiat money explosion and money printing after World War I historically

450
00:52:21,415 --> 00:52:27,075
unprecedented that wave of inflation after that money printing and the wave of inflation.

451
00:52:27,075 --> 00:52:37,755
And that's because like we, you know, reading all of them, we can say why it's historically unprecedented, this money printing during World War I and the resulting wave of inflation.

452
00:52:37,755 --> 00:52:44,155
It's because prior when you have, of course, a gold standard or even gold coinage, there is constraint.

453
00:52:46,455 --> 00:52:50,975
When you have gold coinage, if you debase the coins, it takes a long time for those coins to go out of system.

454
00:52:50,975 --> 00:52:59,855
Once you have paper claims for gold, those can be printed and replicated much faster than the gold is allowed to come out of the system.

455
00:52:59,855 --> 00:53:17,815
And so in 1921, so this is in the aftermath of World War I and all of this inflation, that's when Henry Ford proposes what Lucas and I encountered in another book, Jason Lowery's Soft War.

456
00:53:17,815 --> 00:53:39,315
He comes forward and says, we should use electricity as money to remove it from banker control. So this is happening in 1921. I mean, they were seeing that at the time that the bankers could not be someone smart, like Henry Ford could look at what happened in World War One and after deduce what had happened and said, you know, we need to get money out of the bankers hands.

457
00:53:39,315 --> 00:53:58,070
He proposing that electricity be money after World War I ends 1921 And again this is one of the historical kind of precedents or whatever kind of intellectually for something like Bitcoin coming along later on that is going to through its proof of work

458
00:53:58,070 --> 00:54:04,910
function, use electricity as an aspect of why it's a scarce resource and what is going to make

459
00:54:04,910 --> 00:54:18,530
it a viable money. Yeah. I would argue that they, at that time in the 20s, were probably far more

460
00:54:18,530 --> 00:54:25,530
in tune to what was happening. Looking back, you're like, oh, it's a crazy coincidence. It's

461
00:54:25,530 --> 00:54:31,770
insane how Henry Ford could have predicted, effectively predicted Bitcoin, could have envisioned

462
00:54:31,770 --> 00:54:38,310
Bitcoin by saying we're going to have this currency that's based off of money and or sorry,

463
00:54:38,390 --> 00:54:44,510
that's based off electricity. And countries will basically utilize their natural resources in order

464
00:54:44,510 --> 00:54:52,470
to compete and power their economies. And we think, oh, that's that's so outside of what you

465
00:54:52,470 --> 00:54:57,710
would expect from, you know, people that, you know, Babe Ruth eating hot dogs and flappers and,

466
00:54:57,710 --> 00:55:03,970
you know, prohibition and these things that we think about that are old age type of things.

467
00:55:03,970 --> 00:55:20,090
But they were so much closer in time through their chronological memory to the betrayal of governments and how they how they had been oppressed so much.

468
00:55:20,270 --> 00:55:25,210
And not only that, you know, the immigration population was much more fresh.

469
00:55:25,210 --> 00:55:40,950
You know, these people that were leaving the shores of whatever country only to arrive at ours to find something that was entirely different, that was entirely new from what they had ever known.

470
00:55:40,950 --> 00:55:47,430
So, yeah, I love the reference to Henry Ford because I'd kind of forgotten about that.

471
00:55:47,970 --> 00:55:53,390
But, yeah, that's the proper time frame for it where we're coming out of World War I.

472
00:55:53,490 --> 00:55:57,650
The United States experienced a ton of inflation during that time.

473
00:55:58,310 --> 00:56:06,850
And they experienced a lot of inflation probably for the same reason that China experienced a lot of inflation throughout the 2000s.

474
00:56:06,850 --> 00:56:33,630
And up until the current timeframe where you saw so many American companies and American investors investing in China, you know, take, you know, back things up and say, okay, World War I, that era, you've got Britain, which is kind of the falling dominant power in the United States, which is the rising world power, the kind of decrepit empire and the rising upstart.

475
00:56:33,630 --> 00:56:48,250
And then you look at modern day and you've got the United States, which is kind of the crumbling empire in China, which seems to be the upstart economy that, you know, the Chinese currently trade with like more than twice as many countries.

476
00:56:48,250 --> 00:56:52,370
They trade with all but like a handful of countries in the entire world.

477
00:56:52,450 --> 00:56:56,030
And the United States only trades with like a third of the countries in the world.

478
00:56:56,130 --> 00:57:02,950
Like we have a much smaller global footprint when it comes to having relationships, trading relationships.

479
00:57:02,950 --> 00:57:15,290
And so at the time, you can just kind of flip-flop the ideas of like after World War I, England has experienced a lot of hyperinflation.

480
00:57:15,430 --> 00:57:17,750
And so what are they trying to do in order to keep up with that?

481
00:57:17,930 --> 00:57:19,990
They're investing in the United States stock market.

482
00:57:19,990 --> 00:57:28,210
And they help to create this speculative bubble that burst on Black Friday with the stock market.

483
00:57:28,210 --> 00:57:35,290
leads to the Great Depression, which so now take a look at what's happening in China right now.

484
00:57:35,450 --> 00:57:42,030
I think I told you this. I can't remember. But so the Chinese have overbuilt so much in the real

485
00:57:42,030 --> 00:57:54,130
estate side that there there is no demand. There are huge complexes of like multi-story, say 40,

486
00:57:54,130 --> 00:58:02,190
50, 60 story buildings that are built for apartments and for commercial use. And there's

487
00:58:02,190 --> 00:58:07,570
no demand for it. And in order to create demand for that, they're literally imploding buildings

488
00:58:07,570 --> 00:58:14,350
that have never been used. Brand new buildings, billions of dollars being taken literally through

489
00:58:14,350 --> 00:58:22,390
rubble in order to artificially create demand. Kind of like the British artificially trying to

490
00:58:22,390 --> 00:58:29,490
strengthen their pound by re-pegging it to the original rate. They know they're trying to drop

491
00:58:29,490 --> 00:58:37,650
their real estate footprint back to the original kind of rate there. So yeah, it's just fantastical

492
00:58:37,650 --> 00:58:46,650
to think about how the roles have shifted. One of the things that I had, so there's this quote,

493
00:58:46,650 --> 00:58:57,410
I just looked it up. What was his name? Wheeler. As the shores or what is it? As the as the island of my knowledge grows, so do the shores of my ignorance.

494
00:58:58,930 --> 00:59:05,550
And and I remember when I first heard that as the island of my knowledge grows, so do the shores of my ignorance.

495
00:59:05,550 --> 00:59:21,430
Of course, you can relate to that. You could relate that to, you know, this idea that if you start to learn very deeply about any one thing, then you realize just how much there is to know about that one thing and how you'll never know everything about that one thing.

496
00:59:21,430 --> 00:59:39,830
And if you're not naive, then you extrapolate that to all of the other things that you aren't studying. And you go, I am becoming a world's expert upon how an inclined plane around a cylinder is a screw and how a screw does work.

497
00:59:40,670 --> 00:59:53,570
Also, it turns out that I should probably recognize that there are things that I will never understand about how a bird flies and how somebody sews a button onto a shirt and the way in which an apple pie is made.

498
00:59:53,570 --> 00:59:59,150
Like all of these things have an infinite amount of detail that you can put into them.

499
00:59:59,870 --> 01:00:02,690
But mathematically, it also works.

500
01:00:02,690 --> 01:00:09,130
if you've got you know assume an island is a circle um the growth of the square footage

501
01:00:09,130 --> 01:00:17,990
of the area of the circle grows faster than the circumference of the circle so the shoreline

502
01:00:17,990 --> 01:00:22,650
which if you're a company or sorry if you're a country and you're expanding your empire

503
01:00:22,650 --> 01:00:27,130
what you're doing is you're really expanding the amount of borders that you have to protect

504
01:00:27,130 --> 01:00:40,750
Yeah. And if you double the size of borders that you have to protect, then now you've like quadrupled the size of the square footage of the the the the actual land that you have to protect.

505
01:00:40,750 --> 01:01:00,950
This was noted in a book that I was reading about the Roman Empire and why they fell and the British Empire and why they fell, which was just that as you build an empire, you eventually build your borders out so far that it becomes economically infeasible to continue to secure them.

506
01:01:00,950 --> 01:01:06,110
and things just start getting through and you start seeing cracks in the armor.

507
01:01:06,670 --> 01:01:10,730
And at that point, the only thing that you can wisely do is to contract.

508
01:01:11,610 --> 01:01:13,090
But nobody ever does that.

509
01:01:13,190 --> 01:01:18,710
They just continue to try and expand, thinking as we've talked about in previous discussions,

510
01:01:18,910 --> 01:01:23,830
thinking along the false pretenses of scale and growth,

511
01:01:24,130 --> 01:01:27,630
that those things are what you need in order to be successful,

512
01:01:27,630 --> 01:01:33,690
which as we've seen scale and growth are things that just inevitably lead to

513
01:01:33,690 --> 01:01:38,030
bigger blowups. When you stay small, then you stay secure.

514
01:01:39,110 --> 01:01:41,170
So anyways, I know that's a bit of a tangent,

515
01:01:41,390 --> 01:01:44,330
but that was something that I just considered thinking about.

516
01:01:45,550 --> 01:01:49,570
We have continued to try to do that with the United States dollar where we're,

517
01:01:49,810 --> 01:01:53,650
we've got the petrodollar and we're trying to push it out, push it out.

518
01:01:53,730 --> 01:01:56,670
We have over 800 military bases in the world.

519
01:01:57,630 --> 01:02:04,010
at all these different countries. And eventually somebody just calls your bluff. Eventually somebody

520
01:02:04,010 --> 01:02:09,670
just says, you know what? Fine. Pull your base out. Fine. Pull your ships away. Fine. Do whatever.

521
01:02:10,010 --> 01:02:15,430
We're tired of whatever this situation is and we want something better. And if you're not going to

522
01:02:15,430 --> 01:02:21,270
give it to us, then we're willing to take our chances because it turns out in the end, there

523
01:02:21,270 --> 01:02:27,450
are more of us than there are of you. And a whole lot of small things can beat one big thing. And

524
01:02:27,450 --> 01:02:30,230
And so, yeah, you can drop an empire that way.

525
01:02:30,810 --> 01:02:39,390
No, I mean, one way to look at Alden's book is the rise and fall of monetary regimes.

526
01:02:39,390 --> 01:02:43,790
And so, like, you've given the paradigm of the fall of the Roman Empire.

527
01:02:44,050 --> 01:02:50,790
There's been an immense amount of literature that is speculated on why the Roman Empire fell, what we can learn from that.

528
01:02:50,790 --> 01:03:11,890
And so we can ask, you know, what can we learn from Alden's telling of why we've had a shift in global economic orders, or even first, the creation of an economic order that is global from monetary regimes that at first were interpersonal, then intertribal, then international, and then global.

529
01:03:11,890 --> 01:03:22,990
and one of the things that i mean of course is key that is her book is a book about how technology

530
01:03:22,990 --> 01:03:30,610
disrupts and so like why we've had these changes in economic orders which are going to probably

531
01:03:30,610 --> 01:03:37,710
if you map them overlap with the fall of empires and nation states is technological innovations

532
01:03:37,710 --> 01:03:43,850
like telecommunications that require new technologies.

533
01:03:44,250 --> 01:03:50,730
And then those that jump on those technologies are the ones that are going to survive into

534
01:03:50,730 --> 01:03:51,190
the future.

535
01:03:51,870 --> 01:03:58,790
So you can't, you know, once we have, this was from our reading last time, once you have

536
01:03:58,790 --> 01:04:03,490
the era, once you enter the era of telecommunications, you can't simply continue to naively use

537
01:04:03,490 --> 01:04:11,410
gold as it is without modifying it as a currency. It does not move quick enough. It's too difficult

538
01:04:11,410 --> 01:04:17,050
to authenticate for the increasing number of transactions there are. And the increasing

539
01:04:17,050 --> 01:04:23,190
dispersion geographically of those transacting parties make it so that you simply can't use gold.

540
01:04:23,590 --> 01:04:30,630
It's not a moral take then to say that speed necessitates a new type of currency that gold

541
01:04:30,630 --> 01:04:37,170
simply does not fulfill. And so we have the rise of IOUs of credit based currencies. And then we

542
01:04:37,170 --> 01:04:44,990
enter the eventually this, as a result of speed becoming the defining characteristic of modernity

543
01:04:44,990 --> 01:04:52,270
and interconnection globally, globalization, we enter the fiat era is the new global monetary

544
01:04:52,270 --> 01:05:00,610
regime because fiat credit money can move at the speed of light. And is the only way seemingly

545
01:05:00,610 --> 01:05:08,010
to allow us to satisfy that criteria of speed that we need to have in order to have an international

546
01:05:08,010 --> 01:05:15,270
economy. Until, as Alden hinted in the last chapter, we can have some sort of money arrive

547
01:05:15,270 --> 01:05:20,930
that is a bearer asset in and of itself, and that it allows for settlement instantly, so that you

548
01:05:20,930 --> 01:05:26,630
don't have that distance between transaction and settlement that allows for this arbitrage situation

549
01:05:26,630 --> 01:05:32,770
where many IOUs are created in lieu of actual redemption for the underlying gold asset,

550
01:05:33,090 --> 01:05:38,770
at the end of which the gold falls out entirely and we're left with this fiat money era.

551
01:05:39,150 --> 01:05:46,110
So I think that your speculation and thought to why the Roman Empire fell, it does tie

552
01:05:46,110 --> 01:05:50,350
into this and that this is a book that has a grand scope like that.

553
01:05:50,450 --> 01:05:53,850
Why do we have changing monetary regimes and orders?

554
01:05:53,850 --> 01:06:18,910
And we can look back and do a retrospective and autopsy and say speed killed the order we had, speed necessitated the new order, and whatever new order is going to supersede the fiat monetary regime is not going to be an atavistic recursion to gold as the monetary standard in itself because we had that.

555
01:06:18,910 --> 01:06:28,970
It didn't work. Every nation left a gold standard behind. Moving into the future, it's going to require something that has all the characteristics of what we know that Bitcoin has.

556
01:06:28,970 --> 01:06:51,670
And we're hearing today, I saw on Twitter that Russia has said it's going to conduct some international trade in Bitcoin. I mean, that's like, that is like, in a sense, similar to Iraq saying, we're going to sell our oil in the euro. Venezuela is saying we're going to sell our oil in the euro.

557
01:06:51,670 --> 01:07:08,610
Their unit of account, they're going to transact internationally in Bitcoin. That's one of the steps that is required for Bitcoin to become a unit of account globally to be the way that international transactions are denominated.

558
01:07:08,610 --> 01:07:26,110
That is the thing that prevents the 160 currencies from throwing us into this anarchy of barter internationally, either a fiat of dictated by U.S. or whatever nation's global geopolitical dominance or a neutral, uncontrolled asset.

559
01:07:26,110 --> 01:07:37,910
And I guess before I throw it back to you, Lucas, I'll just say the other solution potentially that could have happened to Bretton Woods, the Bancorp, is so ridiculous. I'm reading about that.

560
01:07:37,910 --> 01:07:59,470
To think that as much as all the previous wars and international conflicts there had been, that all the nations would somehow work together to perfectly manage an international unit of account, all these sovereign nations, when one nation itself can't do it without abusing that privilege of having its own currency.

561
01:07:59,470 --> 01:08:10,610
To think that there could be that sort of Bancor system requires a stunning amount of naivete and like a total ignorance of the human condition of international relations.

562
01:08:10,910 --> 01:08:18,890
It's the dollar won because it was the best system at that time in the Bretton Woods post-World War II economic order.

563
01:08:19,490 --> 01:08:23,490
And, you know, again, I think hopefully we're at the point where Bitcoin is the next best one.

564
01:08:23,490 --> 01:08:28,530
it's funny because that's what i was going to ask you when you when you turned it back to me

565
01:08:28,530 --> 01:08:33,590
because i was going to ask what your thoughts would have been had we gone onto this suggestion

566
01:08:33,590 --> 01:08:40,570
of john maynard keens that we make this thing called a bancor um the uh the global unit of

567
01:08:40,570 --> 01:08:49,930
account um i'll tell you my assumption um which is that so uh it appears looking back through history

568
01:08:49,930 --> 01:08:56,530
that no nation has ever made a bad decision that they didn't think could be fixed by a worse one.

569
01:08:56,530 --> 01:09:16,110
And so I think that very rapidly, I mean, incredibly rapidly, we would have been in a situation where the proposed solution was a one world government.

570
01:09:16,770 --> 01:09:18,010
Yes, absolutely.

571
01:09:18,010 --> 01:09:31,330
Yeah. Instantly, instantly what would have happened, which is so to recap this whole bank or idea. So the bank or was going to be this unit of account called a dollar, a coconut, a Sasquatch, whatever you want to call it.

572
01:09:31,330 --> 01:09:37,290
It was going to be this sort of fictional unit of account thing that they used for the ledger.

573
01:09:39,030 --> 01:09:47,750
And what they were going to do was that any country that had a surplus, a trade surplus, they could get penalized.

574
01:09:48,010 --> 01:09:56,190
So they would like have to pay basically like a luxury tax for being really good at for having a positive balance of trade.

575
01:09:56,190 --> 01:10:02,390
um now they could um they could uh after a certain time they could devalue their currency

576
01:10:02,390 --> 01:10:09,710
in order to um you know they could issue more of their currency um against the bank or in order to

577
01:10:09,710 --> 01:10:15,230
this is like it's like great britain saying uk saying let's freeze everything as it is now and

578
01:10:15,230 --> 01:10:20,890
say if you deviate from that going above or below it's like okay okay of course you want that

579
01:10:20,890 --> 01:10:26,710
100% right so yeah what this is like this is basically said it's like it's like the it's like

580
01:10:26,710 --> 01:10:32,190
the Yankees and the Red Sox get together and they're like okay so here's how this is gonna work

581
01:10:32,190 --> 01:10:39,690
yeah basically uh if you sell a lot of Yankee hats um then this will work out well for you if not

582
01:10:39,690 --> 01:10:45,590
yeah it's gonna tough but anyway so you know imagine 160 180 countries however many there

583
01:10:45,590 --> 01:10:52,370
worth time, each individually trying to do this with their ledger, very few of them are

584
01:10:52,370 --> 01:10:55,950
going to like instantly somebody is going to break the pact.

585
01:10:56,150 --> 01:10:59,290
They're going to break the pact and they're going to issue, you know, they're going to

586
01:10:59,290 --> 01:11:02,930
issue additional currency when they shouldn't, or they're going to tighten their currency

587
01:11:02,930 --> 01:11:03,630
when they shouldn't.

588
01:11:04,150 --> 01:11:10,670
And what's going to be the resulting summary from people looking at the situation from

589
01:11:10,670 --> 01:11:12,470
places of powers?

590
01:11:12,470 --> 01:11:19,110
they're going to be able. Obviously, the problem is that they have control over their own currency.

591
01:11:19,310 --> 01:11:24,230
So what should we do? Well, we should simply consolidate the power. We've already consolidated

592
01:11:24,230 --> 01:11:31,910
the money. So let's just consolidate the power into a one world government. And that would be,

593
01:11:31,910 --> 01:11:38,230
you know, straight to it's just really like, and for anybody that I really doubt that there's

594
01:11:38,230 --> 01:11:43,750
anybody that's stumbled onto this that is of a socialist bent, but I truly hope that there are

595
01:11:43,750 --> 01:11:50,130
for somebody to maybe be exposed to it. But if you are and you do believe in those things,

596
01:11:50,470 --> 01:11:55,590
then look at the proof of the proof of the pudding. Look at how in every instance that

597
01:11:55,590 --> 01:12:00,770
it's ever been tried, they get the exact same results, which is that millions and millions

598
01:12:00,770 --> 01:12:08,010
of people are killed for no reason. People starve, people die. Corruption goes to a level that makes

599
01:12:08,010 --> 01:12:14,310
what happens in the United States look just like, I mean, it makes the United States look like

600
01:12:14,310 --> 01:12:21,190
first graders trading pencils or something like that. It's crazy what happens in those instances.

601
01:12:21,610 --> 01:12:27,390
So yeah. Do you have the same kind of take on what would have happened if a bank whore had been,

602
01:12:27,390 --> 01:12:32,590
if John Maynard Keynes had been successful in promoting his idea?

603
01:12:33,130 --> 01:12:36,450
Yeah. I mean, I think it would have just been a forum for new conflict and would have led to

604
01:12:36,450 --> 01:12:40,590
probably World War III when we're trying to manage this thing together and then, you know,

605
01:12:40,850 --> 01:12:45,410
countries aren't doing what we want them to or we can't, you know, it's just it would break down

606
01:12:45,410 --> 01:12:51,030
and there would be something, it wouldn't have worked. And we kind of see how it would have not

607
01:12:51,030 --> 01:12:55,990
worked or how it would have been abused in the form of the IMF and the World Bank. These are

608
01:12:55,990 --> 01:13:00,850
actually created in, it's part of the Bretton Woods. I don't know if it was arrived at Bretton

609
01:13:00,850 --> 01:13:07,330
woods but these were created at the time to like complement um what if the bank core had been the

610
01:13:07,330 --> 01:13:12,210
solution these things are going to complement and help like manage those trade surpluses and

611
01:13:12,210 --> 01:13:18,310
deficits and we see like do would it have been great if the imf and world bank had been globally

612
01:13:18,310 --> 01:13:26,170
powerful institutions that were like you know directly dictating the unit of account and

613
01:13:26,170 --> 01:13:32,090
mediating between all international trade. Alex Gladstein has a phenomenal book. I think it's

614
01:13:32,090 --> 01:13:39,830
called Monetary Repression, but it's about how the IMF is used by dictating the terms of its loan

615
01:13:39,830 --> 01:13:44,510
to developing countries, requiring structural adjustments, the devaluation of currencies,

616
01:13:45,290 --> 01:13:51,930
how these developing countries are kind of kept in a state. First of all, their leaders are often

617
01:13:51,930 --> 01:13:58,890
dictators who want these big loans to then give it to all their cronies. The dictators deposed,

618
01:13:58,990 --> 01:14:04,870
the country is still saddled with that debt. The IMF imposes conditions on them to help them repay

619
01:14:04,870 --> 01:14:09,570
it. They take out new loans, the interest grows, predatory lending on an international scale.

620
01:14:10,710 --> 01:14:16,930
The Bancorp system would have been that on speed or whatever. It would have been that times 10.

621
01:14:17,070 --> 01:14:20,910
But I actually think that it just simply wouldn't have functioned. It would have broke down

622
01:14:20,910 --> 01:14:38,830
And there would have been probably, I think something like the petrodollar system would have arisen because, as Alden notes, in the fiat money era, geopolitical dominance is what is going to determine what is going to be the unit of account.

623
01:14:38,830 --> 01:14:44,550
geopolitical dominance as a result of alliance treaty, flexing of economic and military prowess.

624
01:14:45,010 --> 01:14:52,830
The UK's attempt to kind of freeze the de facto trade regime in place as it was at the time through

625
01:14:52,830 --> 01:14:57,630
the Bancorp, it just simply, you know, in the real politic of international relations was never going

626
01:14:57,630 --> 01:15:03,510
to function long term, we would have arrived at something like we have nowadays, because that's

627
01:15:03,510 --> 01:15:09,270
what happens when you have nations that are sovereign entities competing with each other,

628
01:15:09,270 --> 01:15:17,650
you know, and when you don't have recourse to some other neutral bearer asset that operates at the

629
01:15:17,650 --> 01:15:23,650
speed of light that provides for quick settlement, that satisfies the speed condition that has been

630
01:15:23,650 --> 01:15:31,510
placed on modern finance, banking, and international trade. Yeah, we do have the benefit of being able

631
01:15:31,510 --> 01:15:32,910
to look back on these things.

632
01:15:33,230 --> 01:15:33,750
Yeah, for sure.

633
01:15:34,330 --> 01:15:37,290
But for future reference,

634
01:15:37,410 --> 01:15:39,670
for anyone who is ever building anything,

635
01:15:40,270 --> 01:15:42,730
what has become clear through these talks

636
01:15:42,730 --> 01:15:45,550
is that if you optimize for speed,

637
01:15:46,150 --> 01:15:49,610
you are going to destroy everything.

638
01:15:50,130 --> 01:15:51,550
Like, think about if you optimize,

639
01:15:51,710 --> 01:15:53,410
like, think if you had a pizza hut

640
01:15:53,410 --> 01:15:56,010
and your only condition was,

641
01:15:56,010 --> 01:15:58,210
I want to make pizzas as fast as possible.

642
01:15:59,090 --> 01:16:01,090
And by the way, you know, every...

643
01:16:01,510 --> 01:16:08,250
every 30th one that you send through the oven explodes. Um, and you just accept that, um, you

644
01:16:08,250 --> 01:16:11,830
know, and what's going to happen to the quality of what, you know, you're not going to spin the

645
01:16:11,830 --> 01:16:15,690
pizza. You're, you're just going to flat and you're not going to take time to put the things

646
01:16:15,690 --> 01:16:22,610
in the right places. You're not, you're, I mean, every single thing dies at the expense of speed.

647
01:16:22,610 --> 01:16:27,870
Um, you know, I, I compared it to taking like a paper airplane or a stick airplane and putting

648
01:16:27,870 --> 01:16:32,810
jet engines on it. And the thing is, after a while, you're like, well, why do we even need

649
01:16:32,810 --> 01:16:36,630
the airplane? We've just got the engine. And then you're like, why do we even need the engine? We

650
01:16:36,630 --> 01:16:40,910
can just blow the fuel up. And that's kind of what happened. You know, all we care about is

651
01:16:40,910 --> 01:16:45,350
burning the fuel at this point. You know, we just, we just need to make heat. We just need to make

652
01:16:45,350 --> 01:16:54,210
stuff go. And so that's really what you see. You know, it is, it really hurts. I get genuine,

653
01:16:54,210 --> 01:17:03,990
I don't know me as kind of an empathetic person, it genuinely hurts to look back and think about the position that people were placed in.

654
01:17:03,990 --> 01:17:09,930
So my parents, I was talking to my parents the other day.

655
01:17:10,110 --> 01:17:15,190
And so in like 1979, 1980, right around then was when they bought the farm.

656
01:17:15,690 --> 01:17:22,550
They bought a tiny little farmhouse and a little bit of acreage from my grandpa or great grandpa.

657
01:17:22,550 --> 01:17:32,510
And that was right when Volcker pumped rates to 20 percent in order to suck everything out of the United States economy to try and stabilize the petrodollar.

658
01:17:33,450 --> 01:17:36,650
And so, you know, at the time they just got married.

659
01:17:36,810 --> 01:17:39,090
They really didn't have hardly anything anyways.

660
01:17:39,750 --> 01:17:47,270
And my mom was saying that my dad was being paid eight hundred dollars a month and their mortgage was six hundred dollars of that.

661
01:17:47,270 --> 01:17:53,610
So, you know, that's no food, no clothing, no fuel, no nothing.

662
01:17:55,230 --> 01:17:58,330
And to think about how people really suffered.

663
01:17:58,510 --> 01:17:59,890
I had this thought.

664
01:18:00,070 --> 01:18:04,910
It was actually in relation to a relationship I was trying to talk to somebody about.

665
01:18:04,910 --> 01:18:13,690
But I think it applies here, which is that home is where the locks are on the inside and prison is where the locks are on the outside.

666
01:18:13,690 --> 01:18:28,170
And when I think about people being unable to, you know, citizens being unable to repatriate and exchange their money for gold, but foreign countries being able to, you know, that's what I think about.

667
01:18:28,170 --> 01:18:35,530
It's like, or you think about like the Berlin Wall, you know, like that was not meant to keep people out.

668
01:18:35,630 --> 01:18:36,950
It was meant to keep people in.

669
01:18:37,770 --> 01:18:40,750
And therefore, that's the lock on the outside of the door.

670
01:18:40,870 --> 01:18:41,750
That's the prison cell.

671
01:18:42,130 --> 01:18:43,310
That's the only difference.

672
01:18:43,310 --> 01:18:46,030
It's like that's what makes a home into a prison.

673
01:18:46,830 --> 01:18:56,370
And I feel like, you know, that's the true experience of what financial repression is,

674
01:18:56,750 --> 01:19:02,570
which is that the locks are turned and they're taken from the inside and they're put on the outside.

675
01:19:03,290 --> 01:19:04,530
And you're locked in.

676
01:19:04,630 --> 01:19:05,830
Your wealth is locked in.

677
01:19:06,110 --> 01:19:09,610
Your ability to leave a country is locked in.

678
01:19:09,610 --> 01:19:17,130
these things where you see, you just see things go bad as a result of people trying to,

679
01:19:17,650 --> 01:19:21,390
as Elon Musk says, trying to look good while doing evil.

680
01:19:23,010 --> 01:19:25,310
Yeah, so it's very unfortunate.

681
01:19:25,850 --> 01:19:30,530
But I really like that you're returning to the human element here.

682
01:19:30,530 --> 01:19:36,550
We talk about things like global economic orders and these broad historical trends.

683
01:19:36,550 --> 01:19:43,910
the individual human experience can drop out of that, like your parents trying to make their way

684
01:19:43,910 --> 01:19:51,050
in a time when interest rates are very high. And I really liked the part of this chapter that

685
01:19:51,050 --> 01:19:58,070
mentioned, because I found this astonishing, that the lost decade for Latin America, where

686
01:19:58,070 --> 01:20:07,550
70s 70 to 80 oil consumption declines but that's incredible i mean that's like a return to the

687
01:20:07,550 --> 01:20:11,370
stone age in a sense or a movement not i mean not return to the stone age but it's a movement

688
01:20:11,370 --> 01:20:16,830
towards the stone age whenever a country is not moving into the future it's moving into the past

689
01:20:16,830 --> 01:20:21,250
because every other country is moving into the future and to think that like i mean that's the

690
01:20:21,250 --> 01:20:27,950
horror, I think that a lot of families, the biggest horror is my, I'm going to be worse

691
01:20:27,950 --> 01:20:32,410
off than my parents and my children be worse off than me. And like, that's what that was

692
01:20:32,410 --> 01:20:36,290
like. The United States is able through these, um, you know, diplomatic gerrymandering or

693
01:20:36,290 --> 01:20:52,665
whatever come up with diplomatic solutions to keep the dollar strong um and to bolster the U S debt finance I guess is the end of the picture there Whereas Latin America holding largest amounts of debt is simply left to implode And I think we

694
01:20:52,665 --> 01:20:58,645
still see, you know, maybe one of the reasons we see so much immigration to the United States

695
01:20:58,645 --> 01:21:06,605
nowadays is as a result of U.S. economic policy and decisions that siphoned a lot of value out of

696
01:21:06,605 --> 01:21:12,245
developing countries into the United States because we control the world's

697
01:21:12,245 --> 01:21:15,225
currency. You know, I'm not, not to blame or,

698
01:21:15,365 --> 01:21:20,465
or what or justify anything, but I think you're totally right. You know,

699
01:21:20,645 --> 01:21:26,085
to try to try to return to that state of empathy,

700
01:21:26,085 --> 01:21:28,425
or at least if you don't like the word empathy,

701
01:21:28,845 --> 01:21:34,905
a recognition that behind all of this talk of economic orders and whatnot,

702
01:21:34,905 --> 01:21:40,845
There is the human experience and there was and is a vast amount of suffering that occurs due to economic policy.

703
01:21:42,025 --> 01:21:49,445
Yeah. An economic policy that is often unjustified in its basis.

704
01:21:49,985 --> 01:21:55,405
Yeah. That is, you know, it's simply I'm trying to find I can't find it right now.

705
01:21:55,405 --> 01:21:59,345
I thought it was called the Stone Mountain Report, but it might be something different.

706
01:21:59,345 --> 01:22:05,105
But so this this falls really, really heavily into the conspiracy thing.

707
01:22:05,205 --> 01:22:08,065
But there's this I think it's called the Stone Mountain Report.

708
01:22:08,185 --> 01:22:12,825
It was it was put together like a think tank in the 60s.

709
01:22:12,865 --> 01:22:15,265
I want to say 50s or 60s somewhere.

710
01:22:15,685 --> 01:22:24,025
And the goal of it was to try and figure out how can you control a population when you're not at war?

711
01:22:24,025 --> 01:22:29,745
you know because when you're at war then you have this outside thing that everybody bandies

712
01:22:29,745 --> 01:22:36,945
that everyone bands it up against and you have patriotism and you can talk people into some

713
01:22:36,945 --> 01:22:43,785
pretty crazy stuff if it's for everybody if it's for the good of the country if if you don't do

714
01:22:43,785 --> 01:22:53,285
this then the evil you know russians vietcong koreans afghanis you know etc etc etc

715
01:22:53,285 --> 01:23:04,145
somebody the evil whatever went and I remember reading it and or I you can't read it but you can

716
01:23:04,145 --> 01:23:10,205
find summaries of it then there's people that talk about it that were supposedly involved in it that

717
01:23:10,205 --> 01:23:17,825
they talked directly about what they discussed and anyways what they came out of it was that

718
01:23:17,825 --> 01:23:25,585
there are a number of ways that you could maybe get a population to band together and really be

719
01:23:25,585 --> 01:23:32,845
able to control them in any sort of way one of them interestingly enough was aliens and they

720
01:23:32,845 --> 01:23:41,845
apparently they tried kind of by really funding and promoting a lot of like alien type of

721
01:23:41,845 --> 01:23:45,465
of media and movies and stuff.

722
01:23:45,985 --> 01:23:49,805
And what they concluded was that even if aliens are real,

723
01:23:50,505 --> 01:23:55,325
that it's just so far unbelievable to the average person

724
01:23:55,325 --> 01:23:56,425
that you wouldn't be able to do it.

725
01:23:56,465 --> 01:23:59,765
Like you could literally land a alien UFO

726
01:23:59,765 --> 01:24:01,365
in the middle of Times Square

727
01:24:01,365 --> 01:24:03,325
and people would just kind of be like, whatever.

728
01:24:04,685 --> 01:24:06,605
You'd still struggle to control.

729
01:24:07,465 --> 01:24:09,165
And there was a number of other ones.

730
01:24:09,165 --> 01:24:20,545
But anyways, they supposedly the one that they settled on was climate control, was that if you tell everybody that the world is going to end unless you stop burning oil.

731
01:24:21,605 --> 01:24:24,385
Then you can start to control the population.

732
01:24:24,385 --> 01:24:53,565
And that was right before, you know, we go into this period where we have the lost decade, where we have gas lines, where we go from having beautiful cars and gorgeous, gorgeous automobiles that are just the most incredible dream of an automobile engineer to having, you know, the Mustang II and the rise of the foreign imports.

733
01:24:53,565 --> 01:24:59,285
these tiny little eco cars that are just hideous little blocks with four cylinders in them and

734
01:24:59,285 --> 01:25:09,265
um it's it's it seems very true like that um if you can convince somebody that um that by doing

735
01:25:09,265 --> 01:25:14,785
i mean we grew up in the we grew up in the era of um being hammered home with all of this

736
01:25:14,785 --> 01:25:22,405
reduce reduce recycle stuff um and uh i don't know i i just i just think it's interesting to

737
01:25:22,405 --> 01:25:32,245
see how all of that coalesces with what we do call this lost era, this lost decade.

738
01:25:32,805 --> 01:25:38,465
And again, yeah, to talk about the human condition of it, I mean, it takes me back to thinking

739
01:25:38,465 --> 01:25:40,626
about my parents and thinking about them.

740
01:25:41,045 --> 01:25:43,005
They both graduated high school in 73.

741
01:25:43,005 --> 01:25:45,165
They went to college and they started a farm.

742
01:25:45,165 --> 01:25:51,085
and to think about how they would have suffered under that system

743
01:25:51,085 --> 01:25:53,745
in order to prop up the United States dollar

744
01:25:53,745 --> 01:25:57,965
just so that we could continue to impose control

745
01:25:57,965 --> 01:26:01,185
on this ever-growing shore,

746
01:26:01,545 --> 01:26:04,765
ever-growing global border of influence.

747
01:26:05,985 --> 01:26:08,505
Yeah, you can't take the human element out of it.

748
01:26:08,565 --> 01:26:11,665
You can't take the empathy and even the anger out of it

749
01:26:11,665 --> 01:26:14,705
and being upset at the way it was done,

750
01:26:14,705 --> 01:26:28,285
Although you can look at it and you can go, look, I, I can see how, if you're in this situation that you're going to continue to double down, you're going to continue to double down and you're going to hope for the best.

751
01:26:28,285 --> 01:26:36,525
and it turned and and and to go back to um i think probably my favorite jason lowry quote ever he i

752
01:26:36,525 --> 01:26:42,545
heard him say it on a on a podcast it wasn't in software but just very simply technology does not

753
01:26:42,545 --> 01:26:51,785
negotiate um you know it we we created a technology the ability to do business electronically but we

754
01:26:51,785 --> 01:26:56,945
did not have a money that could do business electronically yeah and and there was simply

755
01:26:56,945 --> 01:27:02,865
no way to negotiate your way out of that. It didn't matter how many countries you held influence

756
01:27:02,865 --> 01:27:08,805
over. It didn't matter how high you abstracted the layer, you know, so that the Bank of England

757
01:27:08,805 --> 01:27:15,225
was just simply and the Federal Reserve, you know, those were just higher abstractions of

758
01:27:15,225 --> 01:27:19,665
what were already happening, you know, where we just continued to extrapolate, oh, well,

759
01:27:19,925 --> 01:27:24,605
if it's fast to do business between a couple of banks here at the local level, then it'll be even

760
01:27:24,605 --> 01:27:28,245
faster to do business between banks at the national level.

761
01:27:28,725 --> 01:27:34,305
And thank God that John Maynard Keynes' idea of, you know, if we just have a central, effectively,

762
01:27:34,845 --> 01:27:36,845
almost like a central bank for the world.

763
01:27:38,145 --> 01:27:39,685
Thank God that that didn't go through.

764
01:27:39,685 --> 01:27:44,085
Because I, you know, when I think about it, I think what would have happened would have

765
01:27:44,085 --> 01:27:44,905
been World War III.

766
01:27:45,145 --> 01:27:49,825
And it would have been, it would have been everybody.

767
01:27:50,165 --> 01:27:51,085
It would have been everybody.

768
01:27:51,225 --> 01:27:52,605
It would have been utterly devastating.

769
01:27:52,825 --> 01:27:53,845
You probably would have lost.

770
01:27:53,845 --> 01:27:58,205
I mean, just take what happened in World War I and World War II.

771
01:27:58,465 --> 01:28:04,465
I think World War II was about an order of magnitude greater than World War I, which was about an order of magnitude greater than the war before that.

772
01:28:05,045 --> 01:28:11,845
So take World War II and take an order of magnitude off that or onto that.

773
01:28:12,165 --> 01:28:20,805
And, you know, probably, you know, you could argue it would probably be like a third of the world's population, a quarter of the world's population, depending on who got itchy trigger finger.

774
01:28:21,265 --> 01:28:21,665
Yeah.

775
01:28:21,665 --> 01:28:27,065
Because by that time, there was a significant amount of the world that was nuclear armed.

776
01:28:27,465 --> 01:28:33,445
So, yeah, it takes us down a really interesting path, the bank or being this thing.

777
01:28:33,925 --> 01:28:34,965
Glad we didn't go there.

778
01:28:35,965 --> 01:28:40,165
Glad that we're in the situation we are now where we might have a solution with Bitcoin.

779
01:28:40,725 --> 01:28:48,465
But yeah, I don't know, just fascinating circle that Alden draws for us here.

780
01:28:48,465 --> 01:29:09,626
There was one final thing I wanted to end on. And this is something that gelled with me in this reading as an extension of our last conversation. We were talking about fraction reserve banking and if it was in a sense necessarily bad and was necessarily going to lead to a bad situation, I guess.

781
01:29:09,626 --> 01:29:27,125
And so I'm going to pair this with an Alden tweet that I read today. So if Bitcoin is the reserve asset in a fractional reserve system, instead of gold, do we arrive at a fractional reserve banking system with the same problems?

782
01:29:27,125 --> 01:29:43,245
And I think not. I think Alden says not. So we have this speed arbitrage between transactions and settlement that arises because when gold is the reserve asset, because it's too slow and costly to authenticate gold.

783
01:29:43,245 --> 01:29:51,825
so even if you have gold as a standard to settle transactions you create IOUs on top of that that

784
01:29:51,825 --> 01:30:01,545
can circulate faster and people are actually in a gold standard system are going to prefer to hold

785
01:30:01,545 --> 01:30:08,145
the IOUs and not gold because they can get rid of those much easier you don't have to authenticate

786
01:30:08,145 --> 01:30:14,945
them, they move quicker. So there's this prejudice or bias in a gold reserve system

787
01:30:14,945 --> 01:30:22,245
to want to hold the IOUs. And so people are, gold is simply too illiquid to hold.

788
01:30:24,185 --> 01:30:30,125
Fractional reserve systems, fractional reserve banking is not then just going to lead to more

789
01:30:30,125 --> 01:30:36,285
IOUs because they'd lend out this money. But also people are less likely to redeem for gold and so

790
01:30:36,285 --> 01:30:45,145
less likely to test the fractional reserve bank that is overextending itself. And so if when there's

791
01:30:45,145 --> 01:30:52,645
a run on the bank, then it occurs at a later moment. But if the fractional, but if the reserve

792
01:30:52,645 --> 01:30:58,605
asset in a fractional banking system is Bitcoin, this mitigates a lot of the potential problems

793
01:30:58,605 --> 01:31:03,705
with the fractional reserve banking system, because people are much more likely to redeem

794
01:31:03,705 --> 01:31:09,625
IOUs of Bitcoin or would be to redeem an IOU of a Bitcoin for actual Bitcoin because it's cheap

795
01:31:09,625 --> 01:31:16,545
and convenient and easier to hold and transact with in a way that gold is not. So this acts as

796
01:31:16,545 --> 01:31:25,145
a better check on a fractional reserve bank if people are more ready and eager to redeem their

797
01:31:25,145 --> 01:31:31,865
IOUs for actual Bitcoin. Again, when gold is that reserve asset, people are going to keep on holding

798
01:31:31,865 --> 01:31:36,745
the IOUs even as the situation gets out of control because it's just tough to hold and

799
01:31:36,745 --> 01:31:37,325
use gold.

800
01:31:38,945 --> 01:31:46,545
Also, you can't print more BTC, of course, so that alleviates the moral hazard of fraction

801
01:31:46,545 --> 01:31:56,165
reserve lenders knowing that they need to restrain the amount of IOUs against the claims

802
01:31:56,165 --> 01:32:00,505
against the Bitcoin because they know that they can be redeemed easily and people will

803
01:32:00,505 --> 01:32:04,645
redeem them more than they would with gold. And of course, they can't print more Bitcoin.

804
01:32:05,405 --> 01:32:11,165
So the resilience of a fractional reserve system depends on the nature of the underlying reserve

805
01:32:11,165 --> 01:32:16,245
asset. Gold, difficult to authenticate, difficult to move around and transact in.

806
01:32:17,945 --> 01:32:23,705
Bitcoin, almost as easy as an IOU, just as quick, can move around, easy to hold,

807
01:32:23,705 --> 01:32:29,885
stuff like this. So this is the quote, this is the tweet from Alden today that helped gel this

808
01:32:29,885 --> 01:32:36,085
for me, quote, without the ability to print the base layer, any excessive attempt to fractionally

809
01:32:36,085 --> 01:32:41,145
reserve it gets wrecked and likely in cascading fashion. So if you don't have the central bank

810
01:32:41,145 --> 01:32:48,105
that can backstop fiat banking with their infinite reserves, if you can't print the base layer,

811
01:32:48,885 --> 01:32:53,385
any attempt to fractionally reserve it is going to get wrecked and likely in cascading fashion.

812
01:32:53,385 --> 01:33:14,565
And if an asset gets verified 10 times more quickly than gold, that cycle of wreckage is likely to be way shorter. So in a fractional reserve system based on Bitcoin, there would be bank failures, but they would not be as catastrophic and they wouldn't be as extensive because people would be more quick to redeem their IOU.

813
01:33:14,565 --> 01:33:44,545
So you have less circulating claims for against the underlying reserve asset at the time that people go to redeem them. Does that make sense? Why Bitcoin is why fractional reserve, like why the riskiness of fractional reserve banking depends on the characteristic of the underlying money, commodity money held in reserve, and why Bitcoin as a commodity money mitigates or is a better fractional, better asset for a bank operating.

814
01:33:44,565 --> 01:33:47,945
on a, you know, fractional reserve banking, loaning money out. Does that make sense? Or

815
01:33:47,945 --> 01:33:55,285
am I not? Those are words and they're in English. Okay. And when strung together,

816
01:33:55,285 --> 01:34:02,525
one could say that they are sentences and paragraphs. Absolutely. Um, does it make sense?

817
01:34:02,865 --> 01:34:07,785
I not, not, not is first of all, two questions, not, is it right? But first, am I, am I saying

818
01:34:07,785 --> 01:34:11,165
something that makes sense? I think you've represented, I think you've represented Lynn

819
01:34:11,165 --> 01:34:19,485
Alden's claim very well, which is to say that because you cannot make more Bitcoin and because

820
01:34:19,485 --> 01:34:27,865
Bitcoin is quickly verified that any attempt to issue a abstracted currency on top of that

821
01:34:27,865 --> 01:34:35,165
in a fractional reserve type of fashion, when it inevitably blows up, will likely have a

822
01:34:35,165 --> 01:34:38,325
smaller blast radius and will likely explode.

823
01:34:38,465 --> 01:34:40,725
It will likely have a much shorter fuse as well.

824
01:34:41,165 --> 01:34:48,345
In that it will probably not be the global financial crisis type.

825
01:34:48,365 --> 01:34:49,665
It won't be too big to fail, right?

826
01:34:49,805 --> 01:34:50,685
Yeah, exactly.

827
01:34:51,825 --> 01:34:57,365
What I would push back on is fractional reserve is the moral hazard.

828
01:34:58,185 --> 01:35:01,725
It doesn't like putting Bitcoin at the base layer.

829
01:35:01,905 --> 01:35:03,885
I don't believe removes the moral hazard.

830
01:35:04,005 --> 01:35:06,805
I believe fractional reserve is the moral hazard.

831
01:35:06,805 --> 01:35:10,625
if I have a pie and it has six pieces and I tell seven friends,

832
01:35:10,625 --> 01:35:13,945
they can have a piece of pie. I have done something morally wrong.

833
01:35:15,005 --> 01:35:18,925
And it doesn't matter that instead of telling 7 million people,

834
01:35:18,925 --> 01:35:21,865
they can have a piece of my pie. I only told seven.

835
01:35:22,445 --> 01:35:25,965
If people agree with you that you can have, you know,

836
01:35:26,565 --> 01:35:31,945
I'm going to lend out this piece of pie because somebody else is going to put

837
01:35:31,945 --> 01:35:33,385
it to work and make more pie.

838
01:35:33,385 --> 01:35:42,265
And so you're agreeing to the risk that if you come back here, then Pi might not be here because it might not have returned the loan or the loan might have defaulted.

839
01:35:42,665 --> 01:35:53,085
But I mean it's not immoral because people can agree – they can accept the risk and as adults can acknowledge that and understand it and then consent to the situation.

840
01:35:53,465 --> 01:35:55,185
And if they don't consent, not enter into the agreement.

841
01:35:56,045 --> 01:35:58,185
But the fundamental flaw is that they can't make more Pi.

842
01:35:58,445 --> 01:35:59,545
They can't make more Bitcoin.

843
01:35:59,545 --> 01:36:00,885
When you make a loan –

844
01:36:00,885 --> 01:36:03,605
There's no making more.

845
01:36:04,185 --> 01:36:12,565
You can – if you – I mean you can make a loan to somebody and then that loan is capital for them to start a business and they can pay back that loan with interest.

846
01:36:12,565 --> 01:36:13,365
So then you can –

847
01:36:13,365 --> 01:36:14,425
Yeah, yeah.

848
01:36:14,505 --> 01:36:18,925
They can then pay off the loan with interest and so there's now more Bitcoin.

849
01:36:19,085 --> 01:36:19,885
They didn't print Bitcoin.

850
01:36:20,025 --> 01:36:24,365
They just went out into the world, earned some with this loan that they put to work and come back.

851
01:36:24,365 --> 01:36:32,385
And then that bank then does have more of the underlying reserve asset that it then pays out in interest to the people who agreed to enter that into that risky relationship.

852
01:36:32,905 --> 01:36:35,065
Yeah, that works when there's one system.

853
01:36:35,565 --> 01:36:37,345
But there won't just be one system.

854
01:36:37,465 --> 01:36:38,705
There will be competing systems.

855
01:36:38,865 --> 01:36:41,805
And when there's competition, then there are people that will take risk.

856
01:36:41,985 --> 01:36:43,725
And there are people that will take risk.

857
01:36:44,065 --> 01:36:49,765
And they will agree to take risk because they want to get a higher return.

858
01:36:49,765 --> 01:37:04,245
Or as is the case in the system that we live in now, we implicitly agree to the risk or we basically involuntarily agree to the risk because we have no choice.

859
01:37:04,825 --> 01:37:06,065
Right. So that's a separate issue.

860
01:37:06,065 --> 01:37:08,705
That's why that's why we enter into these risky.

861
01:37:09,265 --> 01:37:18,165
You know, that's why that's why everybody's buying equities that are valued at 50 to one earnings, because that's the only way to keep up with inflation.

862
01:37:18,165 --> 01:37:31,865
And nobody really wants to do that. And by the way, nobody really thinks that Facebook is solving the world's hunger problems. Nobody thinks that Tesla is solving the world's housing problem.

863
01:37:31,865 --> 01:37:49,485
Yeah, but these are all aspects of fiat currency when it's used as a reserve asset. Bitcoin, if people hold that and the fractional reserve system and a fractional reserve bank in and of itself is not the problem that you're describing there.

864
01:37:49,485 --> 01:38:19,265
That's a wider problem of structural inflation under a fiat system. So I think you can separate those two things and say, you know, if we have a free banking system with separate private banks that aren't backstopped by a central bank that can print the base layer, and instead each of these free banks relies on the Bitcoin that is deposited with them, any IOUs, any claims to that Bitcoin, any loans out that they issue is something that people have to consent to up front.

865
01:38:19,485 --> 01:38:26,025
they deposit their Bitcoin with them. People accept the amount of risk. This is 40% fractional

866
01:38:26,025 --> 01:38:31,525
reserve. I'm going to go with them. Or no, I want a higher one. I want 95. I want 99% reserves.

867
01:38:31,945 --> 01:38:35,125
And people can consent to those relationships. And if you get burned, you get burned. And that's

868
01:38:35,125 --> 01:38:38,045
at the end of the day, you lose your money if you get too greedy and want too much yield.

869
01:38:38,865 --> 01:38:41,025
Well, that's Celsius and that's FTS.

870
01:38:41,465 --> 01:38:46,825
Yeah. Yeah. Things go... Well, there was illegal stuff that happened in those two. And so those

871
01:38:46,825 --> 01:38:51,885
weren't like a fractional reserve free bank. If we had a free banking system, we had these

872
01:38:51,885 --> 01:38:57,125
different banks, they were audited, or they consented to be audited by some third party in

873
01:38:57,125 --> 01:39:01,085
order to prove to people, or they have proof of reserves, you know, that you can look at,

874
01:39:01,385 --> 01:39:06,505
which is easier to do with the Bitcoin system. And then also, you know, I think that's the free

875
01:39:06,505 --> 01:39:10,705
market of a free market system allows for competing free banks on that some of them want

876
01:39:10,705 --> 01:39:14,525
to be fractional reserve, some of them want to be pure custody. I think that's a good thing. I

877
01:39:14,525 --> 01:39:17,985
I don't think fraction reserve lending in itself is bad.

878
01:39:18,085 --> 01:39:21,925
And I think Bitcoin mitigates most of what is bad about it.

879
01:39:21,965 --> 01:39:25,345
And all that's left that's bad is simply risk that you can accept or not accept.

880
01:39:25,485 --> 01:39:30,985
And if you don't want the risk, don't do it and simply hold the stuff yourself or with a bank that isn't going to lend it out.

881
01:39:32,565 --> 01:39:38,205
Yeah, I just, again, I go back to, you know, if there's a hole in the fence, the cows will get out.

882
01:39:38,345 --> 01:39:39,585
And that's a hole in the fence.

883
01:39:39,865 --> 01:39:41,205
Like that is the hole in the fence.

884
01:39:41,305 --> 01:39:43,065
The fraction reserve is the hole in the fence.

885
01:39:43,065 --> 01:39:49,565
And then when you introduce the competition of different, you know, you're going to have free banks with the base layers, Bitcoin.

886
01:39:50,205 --> 01:39:53,705
When you introduce competition, then you're going to have this bank is going to do 10 percent.

887
01:39:53,785 --> 01:39:55,705
This is going to do 20. This is going to do 30.

888
01:39:56,645 --> 01:39:57,605
That's the free market.

889
01:39:58,065 --> 01:40:00,145
They are. They are. But yeah.

890
01:40:00,145 --> 01:40:04,205
And and and so I am I would say that there is.

891
01:40:05,545 --> 01:40:09,605
I don't think it's any more like to say that to say that that's more moral.

892
01:40:09,605 --> 01:40:29,225
I think you can make an argument for that just like you can make the argument that capitalism is more moral than than socialism. I think you can say that because the the losses in the social and by the way, inflation, inflating the monetary supply.

893
01:40:29,225 --> 01:40:33,965
That's a socialist concept where everybody shares in the losses.

894
01:40:35,585 --> 01:40:38,465
I think you could maybe make that argument.

895
01:40:39,185 --> 01:40:55,325
But I would say that that is kind of like saying that maybe it's better to die in a car crash than in an airplane crash.

896
01:40:56,505 --> 01:40:58,025
You're dead both ways.

897
01:40:58,025 --> 01:41:16,025
And the difference, by the way, is going to be that under a free banking system that allows fractional reserve banking using Bitcoin is that I would say it's probably more likely that people will lose everything individually.

898
01:41:17,005 --> 01:41:22,025
You know, there will be fewer people, but that group of people, they will lose everything.

899
01:41:22,185 --> 01:41:25,885
Now, this will, of course, create an insurance industry.

900
01:41:25,885 --> 01:41:49,885
And by the way, that insurance industry will be better than Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation. It will be better because that insurance industry will actually base their premiums upon risk, actual risk, as opposed to just a flat rate for everybody. You get the same as the next guy. I agree that that will be, you know, it will be better.

901
01:41:49,885 --> 01:41:57,065
better i i can i can i can kind of get on board with that i can kind of say that um but i would

902
01:41:57,065 --> 01:42:03,785
say that yeah um i i think that you're really just arguing about the degree of immorality

903
01:42:03,785 --> 01:42:08,445
when it comes to i think immorality i just think immorality is the wrong word i think the degree of

904
01:42:08,445 --> 01:42:13,285
risk is the better thing and people can judge for themselves their own risk tolerance and if they

905
01:42:13,285 --> 01:42:17,565
want to risk losing their bitcoin to gain some interest then good for them but i told you but i

906
01:42:17,565 --> 01:42:23,025
told you I had a piece of pie for you and you're hungry for that pie and you're without that pie

907
01:42:23,025 --> 01:42:29,505
you're going to starve and and I knew that when I told you so just because you agree to it doesn't

908
01:42:29,505 --> 01:42:36,685
I guess I don't know I don't think that absolves like to me that does not absolve the um the issuer

909
01:42:36,685 --> 01:42:45,305
from the immoral uh burden that I feel that they they should carry um so I I don't know I I uh

910
01:42:45,305 --> 01:43:02,385
I, yeah, I guess you can say, oh yeah, we're all adults here and everybody agrees to it. But, um, yeah, in my mind, I think it's just degrees. I, I truly, um, when I learned what fractional reserve banking was, I was working in lending and I was working, you know, I was working in a bank.

911
01:43:02,385 --> 01:43:11,485
And when I zoomed back out and I was able to see, you know, the money's created out of nothing.

912
01:43:11,745 --> 01:43:12,805
It's deposited here.

913
01:43:12,965 --> 01:43:13,765
Then it's 10x.

914
01:43:13,865 --> 01:43:15,085
Then it's deposited here.

915
01:43:15,185 --> 01:43:20,325
Then it's 10x again because of lending practices and creation of money there.

916
01:43:21,065 --> 01:43:30,045
It made me physically ill to think about the terror that is going to happen when that all comes crashing down.

917
01:43:30,045 --> 01:43:53,965
And by the way, it all comes crashing down. There is no way to stop it. So every single fiat currency that has ever existed is either defunct or down 99%. I can see that it may be a little easier to control with Bitcoin. I can get that. I get that. Still not in favor of it. Still don't love it.

918
01:43:53,965 --> 01:43:56,685
Yeah, no, I wouldn't either.

919
01:43:56,885 --> 01:44:00,325
I'm against, I don't enter into Bitcoin yield schemes,

920
01:44:00,465 --> 01:44:03,385
except for whatever scheme Mr. Saylor has going on.

921
01:44:05,065 --> 01:44:07,505
Except for combo itself.

922
01:44:07,885 --> 01:44:10,945
I think it's immoral to joke about that, as though it's a scheme.

923
01:44:11,505 --> 01:44:11,805
I do.

924
01:44:12,465 --> 01:44:14,865
You and your immoral were throwing this around, man.

925
01:44:14,865 --> 01:44:15,125
I know.

926
01:44:15,125 --> 01:44:21,005
Well, I think for the first time, you have an honest person

927
01:44:21,005 --> 01:44:23,905
telling people exactly what he's doing.

928
01:44:24,085 --> 01:44:25,045
No, I don't.

929
01:44:25,425 --> 01:44:28,885
I don't want to say that it's a scheme.

930
01:44:29,185 --> 01:44:31,265
I don't understand it, but I don't think it's anything.

931
01:44:31,265 --> 01:44:31,905
Scheme is a fair word to say.

932
01:44:32,065 --> 01:44:32,645
Scheme is fair.

933
01:44:33,005 --> 01:44:37,445
It's a plan of action that he's decided upon for reasons.

934
01:44:37,565 --> 01:44:38,205
Like it's a scheme.

935
01:44:38,525 --> 01:44:40,925
But no, I find it very interesting what he's doing.

936
01:44:41,045 --> 01:44:42,785
I don't know enough about it to opine on it.

937
01:44:43,205 --> 01:44:44,785
But I was just saying,

938
01:44:44,905 --> 01:44:45,625
I would generally,

939
01:44:46,085 --> 01:44:49,265
if someone's promising me more Bitcoin for my Bitcoin

940
01:44:49,265 --> 01:44:50,345
or something similar,

941
01:44:50,345 --> 01:44:53,045
I would want to look askance at that.

942
01:44:53,945 --> 01:44:54,865
And so like something,

943
01:44:55,005 --> 01:44:56,345
anybody that says Bitcoin yield,

944
01:44:56,965 --> 01:44:58,225
you know, I definitely,

945
01:44:58,425 --> 01:44:59,965
my eyebrows go way up,

946
01:45:00,045 --> 01:45:01,765
but he's definitely transparent.

947
01:45:01,985 --> 01:45:03,165
Sailor is about what he's doing.

948
01:45:03,585 --> 01:45:05,985
And it seems to be an arbitrage

949
01:45:05,985 --> 01:45:08,165
on the legacy financial system

950
01:45:08,165 --> 01:45:09,245
in a way that makes sense

951
01:45:09,245 --> 01:45:10,025
from what I understand.

952
01:45:10,345 --> 01:45:12,525
So he's giving you more pie.

953
01:45:12,825 --> 01:45:13,925
He is, he is saying,

954
01:45:14,065 --> 01:45:15,305
here's you now talking

955
01:45:15,305 --> 01:45:16,565
about the overall pie giving.

956
01:45:18,085 --> 01:45:19,665
But he actually is.

957
01:45:19,665 --> 01:45:28,545
And the way that he's doing it is because he's not selling you Bitcoin and then give me your dollars.

958
01:45:28,985 --> 01:45:34,065
You know, like he said, we're selling dollars for three dollars.

959
01:45:34,545 --> 01:45:37,585
I love it.

960
01:45:37,745 --> 01:45:40,765
And I am so excited to see what's going to happen.

961
01:45:40,765 --> 01:45:50,885
And I do think it's so fascinating right now, just like at this very moment, because there is this tiny little tiny little microcosm of people that understand Bitcoin.

962
01:45:50,885 --> 01:45:59,765
And there is a much smaller microcosm of that microcosm with a few people that probably have no idea about Bitcoin, but just know about micro strategy.

963
01:46:00,105 --> 01:46:07,365
But it's a fraction of a fraction of people that are looking at this and they're going, oh, this guy broke the system.

964
01:46:07,565 --> 01:46:08,405
He figured it out.

965
01:46:08,405 --> 01:46:29,325
He is making a speculative attack on the dollar by issuing shares that are being paid for in something worthless, a dollar, that is something that you have to suspend disbelief in order to find value in that only has value in certain areas.

966
01:46:29,945 --> 01:46:34,905
And what he's doing is he's using that and exchanging it for something that has value everywhere.

967
01:46:35,905 --> 01:46:38,105
Take it to Mars and it'll still have value.

968
01:46:38,105 --> 01:46:41,505
There's nobody to transact with there, but still has value.

969
01:46:42,665 --> 01:46:44,865
So, yeah, I find it fascinating.

970
01:46:45,305 --> 01:46:51,685
I, yeah, I, oh, man, I want to defend the guy so bad, but I watch him do it so well.

971
01:46:51,905 --> 01:46:53,305
I know, it's like, he doesn't need it.

972
01:46:53,905 --> 01:46:54,605
He does not.

973
01:46:54,825 --> 01:46:55,545
No, he needs.

974
01:46:55,625 --> 01:46:57,665
Stepping in to defend sailor is like, yeah.

975
01:46:59,365 --> 01:47:02,125
Some kid stepping in front of Superman, like, don't shoot.

976
01:47:02,545 --> 01:47:04,245
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

977
01:47:04,585 --> 01:47:05,885
No, it was great.

978
01:47:06,025 --> 01:47:07,005
I think that was a great place.

979
01:47:07,005 --> 01:47:07,445
That was great.

980
01:47:07,445 --> 01:47:08,565
Yeah, that's all I got, man.

981
01:47:08,785 --> 01:47:08,945
Yeah.

982
01:47:09,465 --> 01:47:10,765
Hey, this is fantastic.

983
01:47:11,145 --> 01:47:13,185
As again, this is Bitcoin Study Sessions.

984
01:47:13,345 --> 01:47:16,045
My name is Lucas and I'm on X at Lucas Matty.

985
01:47:16,405 --> 01:47:19,765
That over there is Grant and he is on X at The Whole Frame.

986
01:47:20,325 --> 01:47:25,045
I want to wish you guys a Merry Christmas and we look forward to continuing to go through

987
01:47:25,045 --> 01:47:32,325
Broken Money, Lynn Alden's wonderful book on how to view money as a technological progression

988
01:47:32,325 --> 01:47:32,965
through history.

989
01:47:32,965 --> 01:47:35,465
So have a great time and we'll talk to you guys later.

990
01:47:35,925 --> 01:47:36,665
Yeah, right on.

991
01:47:36,745 --> 01:47:36,985
Thanks.

992
01:47:37,445 --> 01:47:38,445
Thank you.