BTC Sessions - The TRUTH About RECESSION: Simple TRICK to Predict Markets | Peter St Onge

Starting point is 00:00:00 Given how high equity valuations are right now, there's a lot more downside than there is upside. So I'm personally positioned for a storm. You can look at every recession sort of shaded in there. And you can see it's perfect. Every golden age that collapsed. Every single one had a monetary component to it. Kind of brings us to the separate question of, is the whole Fiat thing going to collapse? Long term is very, very bullish for gold and for Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:00:25 If you're already holding Bitcoin, you know it's more than just savings. it's your hedge against the chaos. But do you understand what's driving the booms and busts of economic cycles? Today we're joined by Professor Peter Sainaj, an economist who navigate to the dot-com bubble, and now sees Bitcoin as a global currency challenger to the U.S. dollar. We'll unpack the warning signs of a market shift, show you how economic cycles can sharpen your Bitcoin strategy, and explain why mastering these patterns could be your edge in maximizing your stack.

Starting point is 00:00:51 Stick around, you won't want to miss this one. Going beyond Bitcoin to give you the skills and insight you need to escape the Fiat Matrix, This is Mentor Sessions. Thank you, Professor Sanej for joining us today. Before we kind of dive into kind of business cycle and a few things I want to talk with you about, I was hoping maybe you can give me a little bit more of your backstory. I don't really know too much about the early days, the dot com and the 2008 area. And so for anyone that might not be familiar with you, can you tell me a little bit about your time then?

Starting point is 00:01:22 Yeah, so I studied economics. I graduated McGill. It was a terrible economy back then. That was 1996. And so I took any job I could, which was in marketing. for a big telecoms company based just outside of Montreal. And then I read an interview with Paul Krugman where he said that the internet wasn't going to amount to anything, right? Because, you know, specifically we were going to get sick of all talking about our cats.

Starting point is 00:01:49 And we would find that we had nothing left to say. And so it would fade out and be like the fax machine. And that struck me as so stupid that I thought, well, Paul Krugman is a reasonably decent IQ. So if he's that dumb, then a lot of people are that. dumb, who probably run trillions of dollars in money. And so as they realize their mistake, that money is going to pour into the internet and the internet's going to go up. So I put all my life savings in the internet in 94, which was not much because I was like 21. But anyway, I put everything I had into dot com, specifically Yahoo. And I learned how to use options. And so

Starting point is 00:02:25 I went into SoftBank. SoftBank was basically cloning all the American dot coms. They were cloning Japan versions. So I put it into there, made a million bucks, retired, partied in Thailand. I did that for about two years, and then it got boring. So I went back, got the PhD for lack of anything better to do. And then I went and taught for a couple of years. But anyway, at the university. But in between the two, I was running basically friend and family. So, you know, during the dot-com thing, at first, they they laugh at you, right? You know, they're like, you bought Yahoo at 60 bucks. You're an idiot.

Starting point is 00:03:05 And then, of course, Yahoo went up, split adjusted to like $4,000 or whatever. So at that point, everybody comes. This says, hey, can you run my money? I don't know how this internet thing works. And it was really very, very similar to the crypto or Bitcoin space where, you know, you see these kids nowadays who have like a million bucks and they're running around Thailand. And it's like, yes, I know exactly what that is like. And you're going to have a lot of fun.

Starting point is 00:03:30 for like a year or two, and then you are gonna have to figure out what to do with the rest of your life because there comes a point, like you wake up on a beach in Thailand, you completely let yourself go, right? You get fat, you drugged out, you know, you're drinking at, you know, nine in the morning,

Starting point is 00:03:46 your sunburned. I mean, at some point you're like, wait a minute, is this really, you know, gonna be my legacy for my entire life? So anyway, so that all brings us, I guess, to today. Well, actually, I actually wanna tease that out for a little bit because that's really interesting Because I had very kind of not, I didn't, wasn't struck it big, but I had a very similar kind of life during like, looking down the tunnel of time being like, oh, I can't do this forever. This is getting insane. And so I'm curious kind of twofold there. Was it your previous experiencing success with the dot com bubble that you think kind of set you up to see Bitcoin when you did? And then also was it this moment of realization that kind of pushed you into Austrian economics as a career path as a pursuit of knowledge. Because for me, it was like it was the Austrian and the libertarian school kind of the long term thinking that had the big.

Starting point is 00:04:29 click and I dove down the rabbit hole. Yeah, so I completely screwed up on Bitcoin and I blame Curtis Yarvin, unqualified reservations, Mencius Moldbug. He was, all right, so when I first heard about Bitcoin, I was like, damn, this is the thing, you know, this is the Friedrich Hayek, you know, this is roundabout the fiat system. I was, I was, I was hardcore Austrian economist at the time, so I was totally into this thing. And then I read Moldbug where he was like, nah, no, no, the government was going to ban it. And I was like, yeah, okay, fine. They had like a month previous the i think it was the um uh treasury went after bernard von not house so he was this like currency activist and he created one dollar coins that were made of silver

Starting point is 00:05:15 so i think i remember hearing about this yeah right so like the coins themselves had a market value something like 20 bucks just melt value right but it's it stamped on the front of it it said one dollar so this is obviously you know this would be like the work counterfeiter in history, right? You're like printing up $20 in coin and selling it for a buck. But, you know, Treasury played dumb and they went after them for counterfeiting. I thought, okay, if they went after this guy, and they threatened him with like 20 years, I was like, if they went after this guy, which was so obviously, number one, not a threat to the U.S. dollar, number two, is obviously on counterfeiting. So I figured, all right, they are absolutely going to go after

Starting point is 00:05:53 Bitcoin. Remember, early in Bitcoin, there had been a half-fitting. dozen attempts, right? You had, what was it, weigh money, right? There were like a whole bunch that had come out sort of on the road to Bitcoin. Unless we forget, all of those are zero. Yeah. So as tempting as it is to beat yourself over not buying early, there was a lot of evidence at the time, right? Between, so I remain mystified to this day that they didn't try to shut down Bitcoin. It's like they shut down all the previous ones. They shut down everything that was adjacent to it. They just never got around to actually trying to prosecute the people on Bitcoin. And you know this was a real risk, which is why Satoshi is anonymous.

Starting point is 00:06:35 He's not anonymous, you know, because, you know, he wanted to gift the world for artistic reasons. He's anonymous specifically because they were hunting down anybody who remotely threatened money. So I didn't get into Bitcoin until like 2017, which was like in a big boom. So I think like I should have by rights, but on Bitcoin on day one. But ironically, anyway, I was not. As far as Austrian economics, at McGill, they didn't teach that. Yeah, I wouldn't expect them to. So, McGill is a very mainstream school.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Yeah, they didn't. I had never heard of Murray Rothbard. I'd never heard of, of Mises, not even like Menger. Hayek, you touch on him because of the whole knowledge problem that's kind of hit the mainstream. But the vast majority of Austrian economics, I'd never heard about it. When I was backpacking, I went into a bookstore in Tokyo. and they had a copy of what the heck was it, principles by Menger. And so I started going through that and I was like, whoa, this stuff makes sense.

Starting point is 00:07:32 That took me to Mises and then I got me to Rothbard. Rothbard is basically where I'm today. Like for my daily videos, I ask like what would Rothbard say? It's basically my muse. I try to channel the great man. Oh, that's fantastic. That's wonderful. And yeah, very much so myself.

Starting point is 00:07:49 He was, it definitely was, I think it was anatomy of the state was the first one that like really, really, really hit. I was like, oh, this lines up with my worldview and what I want my worldview to be. And so I became kind of engrossed from that point going forward. And even just because I want to do want, go for it. No, I was going to say, like the standard sort of sequence I use when I'm trying to orange peel somebody, I always start with the case against the Fed by Ralph Bard. Very succinct.

Starting point is 00:08:14 It's really the basis of Ron Paul's and the Fed. And that, like, it's approachable for regular people. I also use on like PhDs to like get them to start understanding like why is the Fed a problem. And then that logically takes you to Bitcoin. Beautiful. And actually I'll come back to that one a little bit later because I want to understand where you think the Fed is going in terms of things and what do you think the end result of them will be. But before that, I want to touch on the idea of the business cycle as a kind of an indicator for investment. So if you could too, when you talk about the business cycle, what are you kind of referring to just succinctly?

Starting point is 00:08:50 and then why is it necessarily important for investment decisions? And how does any of this relate back to Bitcoin? Yeah, so the business cycle is the observed boom bust, where we get these cycles of inflation and then we get a recession. And this is commonly accepted. It's not controversial that there is a business cycle. The question is what's causing it. And under classical economics, which is today known as Austrian economics,

Starting point is 00:09:14 what's causing it is interest rate manipulation, or more specifically, government intervention in, money. So today that tends to take the form of interest rate manipulation. So the Fed makes it too cheap to borrow money that gives you a tissue fire economy. You get growth, you get lots of jobs, you get job shortages, all the rest, or labor shortages. But that inevitably leads to inflation because of the cheap money in the first place. So the Fed looks at that. It wants to stay out of the newspapers. And so it hikes rates in order to end the inflation. Hiking rates then gives you the recession. You can look at a chart of Fed rates. They've got them tracked out over on Fred,

Starting point is 00:09:55 F-R-E-D. And you can look at, they also have every recession sort of shaded in there. And you can say it's perfect. The rates are hiked and you get a recession. The rates are hiked and you get a recession. I mean, it's like clockwork. And then people sit here and they're like, what causes for such? How can we avoid the recession? Don't hike rates. Yeah. So how do you not hike rates? Well, don't lower them in the first place. Right. So really, the recession. is caused by lowering the rates in the first place, the hiking the rates is effectively cleaning it up. But the problem, of course, is that millions of people get their lives destroyed by the cleanup process. So it would be super nice to not do that altogether. In terms

Starting point is 00:10:32 of investing, so in the various periods that I've run money either for myself or for other people, I don't pretend to have any insight, right? Like, is Tesla going to go up or down tomorrow? My God, you should ask Jim Kramer. Nobody freaking knows. All right? Like, the only only thing that you can really predict on timing on Wall Street is, you know, you have these like high frequency outfits that, you know, scrape off a hundredth of a basis point. That's a reliable business plan, but yeah, good luck with that. It's like, you know, having a machine that's, you know, eight inches on the other side of the wall, the federal reserve. Aside from that kind of crap, nobody knows what's going to happen day to day. So what I do in investing is that I zoom out and I

Starting point is 00:11:13 say, okay, it's a very, very good record that in the boom phase, momentum stocks, so can do great. In the bust phase, safe havens are going to do good. So gold, Bitcoin, things like that. I mean, Bitcoin, we're going to talk about Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is kind of funny, right? Because it's part gold. Its mom is gold. Its dad is basically a dot-com. So it behaves interestingly in both booms and busts.

Starting point is 00:11:40 I've never heard it described that way. It's very amusing. Continue. But in terms of general investing, so like all I've done when I've run money, I just say, okay, I don't care what the asset is. I barely know what the company does. I check it over to make sure it's not some fly-by-night outfit, but, you know, is it Rio Tinto, for example, has been in the 2000, going into the 2008 crisis. That was a super momentum stock. You probably know it because you're Canadian. It's a huge mining outfit.

Starting point is 00:12:08 You don't normally think of that as a dot-com, but it gets momentum every so often. So all I've done for investing is I say, okay, number one, are we in a boom or are we in a bust? And that has to do with, you know, interest rates, GDP growth, Fed. Once you've decided that, the rest of it is, you know, you just color by number, right? So you say, okay, give me a bunch of stocks. You can do this on GROC nowadays. Traditionally, you know, you would use screening tools. So you say, give me a bunch of stocks that have over $3 billion market capitalization,

Starting point is 00:12:37 so you're not getting the little weird ones. I don't want any drama in the stock price. I don't want any restated financials and things like that. Drop the drama. And then you say, okay, boom, I got a list and put 5% of your capital in them, put stop losses. If any of them do badly, you take them out back and shoot them and you replace them with whoever's on the list now. You just keep cycling, right?

Starting point is 00:12:58 And if you want, you can cycle them out every so often for tax efficiency. So whatever your jurisdiction is, 12 months or whatnot. And it's just automatic, right? And booms are most of the time, right? booms are about 80% of the time. The other 20% when it's a bust, you know, you do something like a simple moving average. You can add that to your sort of big picture analyzing the Fed and the macro number. And then when you're in a bust, you just sit tight. You either park it in cash, park it and gold. Generally early in busts, even in gold, you're going to get a dip in it

Starting point is 00:13:29 because the market tends to regard cash as like the ultimate safe haven. It shouldn't, but it does. So anyway, even gold tends to dip very early on. Bitcoin also very early on at dips. We look at COVID. That was a really nice example of that, right? Early in COVID, everything got slaughtered. There's like February, I think February 19th when everything crashed, everything got slaughtered. But the thing is, at that point, because it was an obvious bust, and I mean, it was pretty obvious because they were shutting down half the economy. And then at that point, right, the key would have been pile into those risk assets, right? So, you know, buy options on gold, you know, plow it into Bitcoin. And then, of course,

Starting point is 00:14:10 You would have made a mint. Bitcoin gives you back your time, so why not spend it having a blast, orange-pilling your family and friends with the ultimate Bitcoin board game. Blockhunters is a fast-paced adventure that mirrors how Bitcoin actually works. Anyone from Bitcoin beginner to season hodler can play as one of 10 characters, each highlighting a real-world use case. You'll fill the mempool of transactions, mine like a pro, and fight to fill the block to claim your Bitcoin reward,

Starting point is 00:14:36 all while keeping your identity hidden. After all, privacy is important. important. Block hunters is a STEM.org, authenticated game, fostering critical thinking, problem solving skills, and exploring real-world applications. Turn off the screens and have a 30-minute exciting experience the whole family will enjoy. Remember, block hunters isn't just a game. It's your secret weapon to fight misinformation, spark understanding, and lead the charge toward a bright orange future. One play and your friends will be begging to set up a wallet. So what are you waiting for? Grab your copy of BlockHudders today and become the unstoppable Bitcoin evangelist. No preaching required.

Starting point is 00:15:10 Game.com by simply scanning the QR code or click the links below. Use promo code BTC mentor for 10% off. Interesting, interesting. And I'm curious then too, so with Bitcoin being this weird kind of bridge at the moment here, right? It's in a very, very unique spot. I'm wondering from even if we look at the lens of like people who's not necessarily in Bitcoin, does the price movement in Bitcoin have any value as an indicator for where we currently are in the cycle or what will be going on? So even thinking about like gold as if you see gold crashing, it's probably a liquidity indicator, right?

Starting point is 00:15:42 Everyone's scrambling to get to cash. It may be just too volatile at this point, but I'm wondering if there's any kind of because it's, for lack of a better term, it feels like Bitcoin is the least fucked with asset out there. And the sense that gold even still has some paper on it. We're going to get new issues from new mines coming online. Stocks would, you can I get where I'm going? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, both have a lot of noise. You've got questions about paper gold, obviously.

Starting point is 00:16:07 there's some question now about paper Bitcoin. Jameson Lopp had a thing out recently. There's a lot of noise in both of them. I think broadly speaking, gold is a heck of a lot more signal. That's mainly just because Bitcoin is still a growth asset. The liquidity is pretty thin. A lot of it has to do with adoption. The regulatory questions in Bitcoin are obviously much less settled than they are in gold. So I think that there's so much noise in Bitcoin that generally I use the two of them as confirmation. So if I see a move, in gold, and I think that that has to do with, you know, inflation expectations or growth expectations, then I'll check Bitcoin just as an insanity check. But in terms of, like, what price do you look at? Generally, I go with more commodities. So probably the two best ones on either side are going to be gold and copper, Dr. Copper, which is an indicator of growth. Oil prices as well, which are a really good indicator of global growth. Those tend to be dominated. Now that the U.S. is pretty close to self-sufficient in oil. We export some, we import some, but we're pretty much self-sufficient. So nowadays, oil prices tend to have more to do with China, East Asia. Those are kind of proxies for the U.S.

Starting point is 00:17:17 market in terms of exports, also with Europe. But yeah, I think those three commodities, oil, copper, gold, I think are probably the most informative. But obviously, with all of those, you've got tens of noise, right? If there's drama with the Houthis in Yemen, then that's going to do things to oil and so on. Very interesting. It's funny. Gary pointed out to me before we jumped on this call as well, too, calling it the business cycle feels like a weird sci-up because it's really the screw with the money cycle that we're just seeing over and over again. Yep, 100%. Yeah, it should be called the monetary cycle. The Fed cucks say that, no, no, we had business cycles back in the 19th century,

Starting point is 00:17:53 i.e. before the Fed, the thing is that back then, it was the same deal. So back then what they used to do is the government would come in and tell banks that they didn't have to exchange dollars for gold. Even though dollars were defined as gold, right? So in other words, they allowed banks to operate in bankruptcy. Right. So that had the exact same effect where, you know, banks would would dump out money as so-called wildcat banking. And then if they ran into trouble or when they ran into trouble with inflation, at that point, the government would come in and say, no, no, no, you don't have to redeem it. You would get these inflationary busts, which is basically just defaults, right? People forget that when a debt defaults that is equivalent to lighting money on fire, right? Because every debt was

Starting point is 00:18:36 treated as a quasi money by somebody. So that sort of goes to, you know, when the Fed says it's fighting deflation, it's not fighting the good, healthy deflation, which is us getting richer and then we have more stuff. It's not fighting that, or it's not supposed to be. It does. What it's holding up as the boogeyman of deflation is specifically that debt deflation. And the 19th century, because they would do that, they would effectively allow companies to operate in bankruptcy. They had the exact same boom-bust cycle for different reasons. But I love that, to call it the monetary cycle instead of the business cycle. Would that mean that QE is in fact not printing money, but just stopping the burning up and destruction of money? Yeah, you can look at that way. You know,

Starting point is 00:19:17 it's always a question of how much money is chasing how much stuff. And QE is money. Loans are money. You know, if you look at the money supply, only about a quarter of it is actually generated by the Fed. The other three quarters is in the franchised money printers in the banking system. And those are backstop fundamentally by Fed bailouts, which is very, very similar to the 19th century model where, you know, this sort of permanent access to a bailout would cause banks to lend too much. And then they would, you know, this would end in a debt deflation. Ray Dalio is probably the most famous guy with the debt deflation. He's not an Austrian. He's, you know, truth will be revealed in various ways, right? So he's, he's sort of stumbled on a number of Austrian threads, but I think

Starting point is 00:20:04 he hasn't actually studied it. Beautiful. Before I get to my next question, Gary, I've been absolutely hogging the mic. Do you have any questions for Peter? I guess I'm wondering on, you've been kind of on Jerome Powell's case lately on Twitter, you know, the Fed chair. And you've been on his case for not lowering interest rates. And I guess I'm just trying to square as Austrian economists, not that I'm one, but I appreciate, you know, the art of it. I thought the idea is we kind of don't want the government going hog wild on the money printer. So why do you believe he should be lowering interest rates? How does that help? Help me understand this. Yeah. So the, right, in the abstract, absolutely, you don't want the Fed bailing out policy mistakes. The Fed has been doing that ever since it was

Starting point is 00:20:46 created. So like today's video, I was talking about this. You know, they dumped out money for the Vietnam War. That was so-called guns and butter. They did it in the 2008 bailouts. They did it in 2001. They did it, you know, very famously in COVID. So in the abstract, you don't want the Fed to do this, right? You don't want them to jump in and put out the punch bowl whenever the government does something that crashed the stocks.

Starting point is 00:21:11 There's two caveas. So, first of all, my criticism of Powell right now hasn't been so much that the Fed does this in the abstract. It's been that the Fed appears to be very very. very, very selective in how this does that. So when it's got a president who it likes, then it, you know, it's just the sky is the limit, as much money as it'll take. On the other hand, Bill Dudley was a former Fed member. And he put out an app I had, I think it was 2019, where he was saying how the Fed should not enable Trump, right? That specifically they should not bail them out for the tariff war with China. That is a problem, right? If the Fed is doing this on one side, not the

Starting point is 00:21:49 other. There's also the separate question. I think that you could make a case that if the Fed is ever going to bail something out, government layoffs and mass deportations would be excellent things to bail out. In other words, these are extremely wealth generating for the country to get rid of 10 million largely welfare queens, including government workers. So, you know, if they're ever going to do something to help government. I'd like them to do it for those specific things. Teriffs, I think, are a little trickier. I think that you can make a very good case that tariffs are good policy if the goal is to pressure other countries to play a fair. Realistically, you know, China's not going, like, as much as unilateral tariffs may be good for the country, China ain't doing them on its own,

Starting point is 00:22:38 right? You need some kind of pressure on there. Demonstrably, what the U.S. has done with trade agreements, who's generally sold the Rust Belt down the river in exchange for IP, intellectual protection, meaning Hollywood, pharmaceuticals, finance. So we have this massive services surplus, things like finance, and then we have this massive goods deficit. Now, of course, finance is much better paid than the blue collars. Finance knows how to bribe senators. So I think that the whole thing is very sorted. I think that you can make a very good case that even with tariffs as leverage, the Fed should step in. The wider question on tariff is if Trump is really going to, you know, trying to re-industrialize the country, that I think is a lot more complicated. It will take years and

Starting point is 00:23:23 years. And, you know, there's a lot of moving parts. So I think probably the best thing you could put on that is that Trump has flirted with replacing the income tax in part or whole with tariffs. If we're doing that as part of the reindustrialization, specifically if Trump is and Congress are pushing reindustrialization, and as part of that, they cut red tape and they cut manufacturing taxes. There, I think the whole thing could turn out very well. You know, the history of using tariffs to actually reindustrialize a so-called infant industry strategy, that almost always fails. It's been tried in many, many countries in Africa and Brazil everywhere. It almost always fails. And the reason it almost always fails is that they don't actually make it attractive to produce

Starting point is 00:24:06 in that country. Right. So if you're Uganda or say, Brazil, which is a decent-sized market, and you're trying to benefit your domestic industries, you can manage it because your market's big enough. Your product's going to be crap. Your company's going to be crap because Brazil won't lower taxes. It won't cut the red tape. If that's where we're going, which is possible because Congress is doing everything it can to try to drag his feet, if that's where we're going, tariffs are a horrible idea.

Starting point is 00:24:34 On the other hand, if we're using them as an excuse to actually improve the business environment, then they're a great idea. But coming back to Powell, I think sort of the core question and Trump's complaint at any rate is why does everybody else get, you know, the choice cuts and then Trump gets resistance from the Fed? No, sure. I think that's a fair point. And as much as the Fed claims to be above politics, that's nonsense. We're all political animals to some degree. We all have our preferences. And it would not at all surprise me if they're doing something nice for blue team, but not for red team. I completely get that. But speaking kind of academically, I think all your points are fantastic. I think, yeah, obviously, if you're going to have the tariffs, but you're not going to

Starting point is 00:25:18 make yourself an attractive place for business, what go to the tariffs is going to do, especially if they think this is a temporary thing, as you've said in your videos, if China or anywhere else thinks that, oh, well, in two years when Congress changes hands or you have a new president in four years, is all just going to go back the other way. And it takes you three years to build up a company. Why bother doing it if we're just going to go back to where we're were before. So I guess on that practical sense, I wonder, viewing it from practical sense, what are the odds of our country ever really getting rid of environmental regulation red tape, labor regulation red tape, minimum wage laws, all sorts of things that raise the cost of doing

Starting point is 00:25:55 business, aside from just having a better economy where people have a higher standard and they're going to demand higher wages. I guess I wonder, academics versus the real world, what's the real chance of any of this succeeding? Yeah, so I think it eventually is guaranteed to succeed because you get the Soviet Union outcome where things are so bad that, you know, like, you know, they don't sit there and repeal them one by one, right? They just throw out the entire, you know, and specifically the way that that would look on the ground is that they would just stop enforcing it. The government wouldn't have money to enforce all these stupid rules. The vast majority of laws, you know, you see these articles every so often to talk about some, it's like a law in North Carolina that when your car stops in an intersection, you have to get out. shoot your rifle two times in the air.

Starting point is 00:26:40 Right? And so this is not enforced. Yeah, literally. And this is left over from the days when cars were novel, right? So like 1907 or something. But the point is that like we have many, many, many laws on the book that are simply not enforced. And everybody sort of understands that they're not going to be enforced.

Starting point is 00:26:56 So I think we're guaranteed to get there if we have a crisis. The question is, can we get there without a crisis? And that's really the goal. That's true in money as well, right? Like when people ask, you know, is gold going to be around what? Is Bitcoin going to do it instead? Are these things going to replace Fiat? What are the odds?

Starting point is 00:27:12 Well, on a long enough timeline, it's guaranteed. The question is, can you do it before the crisis does it for you? And that's, you know, in terms of like something useful for people like us to wake up every morning and do with our lives, that seems like a pretty useful thing to try to get these reforms without the crisis. But in the long run, you know, reality wins, physics wins, the market wins, hard money wins. That's interesting. I actually wanted to touch on something we talked about a little bit earlier. If we're trying to onshore manufacturing back to the U.S., is it even possible to do without

Starting point is 00:27:45 somehow destroying demand for dollars offshore? And wouldn't that necessarily likely involve a crisis? Yeah, so it would certainly reduce dollars offshore. There are trillions of dollars offshore that are either accumulated because of the trade deficits or they're held overseas in management of ongoing exports to the U.S., right? So if you have some Chinese company that exports a lot to the U.S., and they're going to hold a lot of treasury dollars, because dollars is the main unit that they're accounting in. So, yeah, there's a lot of demand overseas for dollars. It doesn't have to be that way, right?

Starting point is 00:28:21 So, you know, in the short run, if companies are exporting less to the U.S., then you would expect to see a decline in the dollar, which we're seeing right now. I think we've lost about four or five percent since the tariff wars began. but in the long run, there's nothing absolute about it. Foreigners will demand dollars in general either. Like most dollar demand currently, it's not export related to the U.S. It's mostly people needing a safe haven. So if you're a rich guy in Egypt or Mexico, for example, you are not keeping your currency stores in the Mexican peso.

Starting point is 00:29:00 Yeah. Right? Yeah, you've got maybe like one month worth. to pesos, you know, to pay your mortgage or whatever, groceries. And everything else, everything else that's in currency is generally going to be in U.S. dollars, right? And so that is because the U.S. dollar is very liquid. It's accepted worldwide. Also because the Fed has not been bad. It's generally been kind of the cleanest dirty shirt, cleanest dirty shirt. Japan is tricky. It's sort of, it's had lower inflation rates, but it's also got higher

Starting point is 00:29:31 debt. So there's a lot of risk involved in Japan. Of course, the yen is. less liquid. So I think most of that has to do with whether the Fed continues being sort of the cleanest monetary shirt in the world. Interesting. And kind of jumping back to the business cycle, where do you currently see that we are? So the interesting point is we talked about essentially cutting rates is kind of that kickoff and then when they start to look. Oh yeah, cutting rates is a kickoff and then when they start to raise rates. That's when we get the recession. But we seem to have at least since somewhat, depending on how you're measuring it, gotten out of that, gone from cutting to raising back to cutting without at least a formal indication of a recession. So I'm curious where

Starting point is 00:30:10 you see things currently at, and then also if there's anything particularly unique about the situation. Yeah, so we've got a couple moving parts right now. So under late Biden, I felt like we were in very late stage or possibly early recession. And the reason was that the sort of dominant analysis there was just what was happening with rates, right? a few hike rates that hard. I think what they did in the past couple of years, that was actually the most extreme rate hikes since the 1970s. So it would be pretty shocking if that didn't lead to a recession. You put on top of that, that Biden himself, you know, there were some shenanigans where GDP growth looked good, but a lot of that was government spending on the regulatory front,

Starting point is 00:30:50 the tax front. It's not that Biden was making it worse that fast. I mean, yes, you had new regulations coming out, but that's pretty much been par for the course our entire life. It wasn't really getting bad that fast. But, you know, Biden certainly wasn't helping it. And then once Trump came in, I was optimistic there. I felt like we might stretch out this boom to try to get a couple more years on it. Like what happened in 2016. People forget in late 2016, the economy was slowing. Stocks were crashing. This was like July or maybe September 2016, in other words, before the election. What Trump did was, he had this crashing plane and he found some extra fuel tanks and they got another couple of years flying out of that until COVID. So that was sort of big question for me. And I think that's

Starting point is 00:31:38 what stock markets felt as well is that Trump might pull it off again. So he might take this slowing economy and then squeeze another couple of years out of that. Tariffs, I think right now, you know, you really have no idea of what's going to happen with tariffs. I mean, this has been hard as a content creator. So, you know, I generally make videos. like at least the night before. And I really never know. I'm like afraid to do a video on tariffs because I have no idea what he's going to do between like 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. So, I mean, it's tricky, right? Will he cut a deal with China next week? Will he cut a deal with the Europeans or Japanese? Is he really trying to do the reindustrialization thing, which is

Starting point is 00:32:21 possible because if you're trying to cut deals, you don't do the whole chaos thing, right? Like, it's very important to be reliable so that, you know, Japan feels like if it cuts a deal with you, that one's going to, you know, it's going to be written in stone for a couple of years. So what Trump's doing with this in, out, 20 up, 20 down, that is exactly what you would do if you are trying to do the reindustrialization thing. What you're doing there is you're basically intentionally making it impossible for anybody to trust the U.S. on trade deals such that chaos becomes permanent for all the overseas producers, and they have to move production to the U.S. So, you know, the question with Trump is always, you know, is it, is it 3D chess

Starting point is 00:33:07 and a 4D chess? Is it checkers? Who knows? Yeah, there's like all these different levels. If it's checkers, then you would say, I mean, who knows? So. So, you know, I think, I mean, where I'm positioned personally, not investment advice, is, you know, I definitely pull back on risk. I'm in Bitcoin all the time anyway, but I've got a chunk that I play with. The playing around chunk is generally towards gold. So I think for the moment, wait and see. There's too many unknowns. And given how high equity valuations are right now, I think that, you know, there's a lot more downside than there's upside.

Starting point is 00:33:48 So I'm personally at the moment positioned for a storm just until I see what the heck Trump is doing. Do you think there's any credence to the idea that they might also be trying to push the long end of the curve down in order to deal with the debt situation? I think it's more of a bonus. I can't, you know, so Trump does things, I think, on his own. But Scent sort of cleans up the mess, the Treasury Secretary. Every so often, he comes in and tries to influence Trump on something. But I'm not sure that Trump is playing that level of ADHD. I think it's more a happy benefit.

Starting point is 00:34:31 You know, there's also the related question of whether Trump is trying to crash market so that he can force the Fed to intervene. I think, again, you know, he's got his goals in life, which are mainly he wants to use the tariff weapon. one of the downsides of using the tariff weapon, as we've seen, is this massive crash in stocks. And so he's looking for the Fed to help him out on that, like his help out everybody else for 112 years. But I don't think he's playing 3D chess quite to that level.

Starting point is 00:34:59 I could be wrong. Interesting. I have a few more questions, but Gary, anything on your mind? No, I got two more. One sort of academics. I don't know if you want to save it for later, Nathan. Let's go for it. All right.

Starting point is 00:35:10 I'm going to throw this out to you here. I noticed even in your explanation of 2016, you were using kind of Keynesian, terms of referring to the economy as like a thing, like a plane, a machine that needs to be landed or taken off. And I get that because it's the way many, many people think. And that's how we talk about it. Even though from the Austrian school, the idea of having a heated up economy doesn't necessarily mean that people are doing well in the sense of spending their resources well. The heated up economy is just a lot of malinvestment. You know, it's like, okay, I'm just going to spend my money here just to spend it and keep it away because I have to spend or else inflation's

Starting point is 00:35:49 going to hit it, whatever. Is there a way that we can sort of describe these kind of Austrian school terms to the layman without using Keynesian analogies of like a car or a plane or animal spirits? Do you have any suggestions for us here? Yeah, so I think terms like tissue fire, boom, slowdown, speed up. I think those are relatively neutral. Those would apply. really in any school, right? They're basically just describing the scenario where you've got a lot of investment, a lot of business growth. The distinction, I think, you put your finger on it, which is identifying specifically what are bona fide investments. In other words, things that are going to make us richer in the future and then what are malinvestments. See, if you take 2008, for example, the iPhone was, you know, that came out in 2008. I remember at the time that people were like, RIP, Apple, man, you got like, like, this $800 phone, which was a lot of money back then. And it literally came out. Yeah, it came out like a couple of weeks before, after the crisis.

Starting point is 00:36:52 I mean, it was just the perfectly worst timing in history. But, of course, we now know, right, when Steve Jobs came out with that phone, there was a lot of sort of ridicule. So I started my career in the cell phone industry, cell phone infrastructure. And all those guys, Eric Sinokie, all those guys were laughing at, you know, they were like, look, Steve, we've been at this. for a while, okay? You know, when he came out with the Jesus phone, they called it. Now, fast forward, I mean, actually, fast forward about two years and everybody copied the phone, right? Like, yeah, yeah, the Nokia candy bars. So, and then of course, if you look today, right, Apple has some obscene share of the market, 30% or maybe higher of cell phones. So it was obviously, I mean,

Starting point is 00:37:35 it was a trillion dollar product. It was an incredible product, but it may not have been funded all the enormous R&D that went into that without. the cheap credit in, you know, the 2006 to 2008 run-up. And so it's very hard to know exactly which, what was a malinvestment and what was just, you know, sort of a tailwind or even, you know, sometimes cheap credit can lead to useful products, right? Just like wars can lead to useful products. And so it's tricky after the fact, you know, I think one of the strongest arguments about sort of the concept of malinvestments. And I can't remember who came up with this. Stefan Levera quoted it, but I know he would give credit somewhere else.

Starting point is 00:38:19 But anyway, so in a recession, it's not that business has become dumb. It's that dumb people got funded or dumb people became business people. Yeah. Right. And so in other words, like in the normal state of affairs, a certain percent of business plans should not work out, right? People made mistakes. They thought, you know, there was market for this, but it doesn't turn out there is.

Starting point is 00:38:42 and that should be whatever. One percent of business a year should go under. This is a healthy situation. If zero percent of businesses go under, that's a problem, right? Because that's telling you that capital is so cheap that the businesses that should be going under are not going under. Right. So there are various indicators that you can use such as that. And, you know, of course, the mainstream press would say this is fantastic.

Starting point is 00:39:04 It's animal spirits. You know, everybody's making money. All boats are lifting. And, you know, sort of once you understand what a malinvestment, is and this sort of phenomenon where cheap money funds stupid businesses, then you would say, no, no, no, that's actually a red flag. And indeed, then a couple years later, you get this crash where, you know, 6% of businesses go under. Really, what we call a recession is simply a cluster of business failures, right? It's nothing more mystical than that. But, you know, and then the question

Starting point is 00:39:31 would be, so did everybody suddenly get stupid? No, the reason was because money would, you know, we sort of subsidized all these stupid ideas. Are you still keeping your Bitcoin on the exchange? Are you confident in your current Bitcoin setup? At Bitcoin Mentor, we've helped hundreds of people level up their security and fast track their Bitcoin understanding. If you find that you simply don't have time to go through other tutorials, the books, and the guides, you can book a free strategy session with me by simply scanning the QR code or clicking the link in the description down below. Discover how Ben, Gary, myself, the entire expert team at Bitcoin Mentor can help you accelerate your Bitcoin Journey. Simply scan the QR code or head to Bitcoin Mentor.io to learn more about how we can

Starting point is 00:40:10 help you. So talking about the subsidizing stupid ideas and all the cheap capital coming in or cheap credit more specifically, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the way things will progress in relation to Bitcoin and the Fed. And the kind of the thing I'm thinking about is that for me, and maybe this is just too hopeful, but for me, I feel like it adds pressure to the existing system and that ultimately it does win in the long term. And so at some point in time, I almost envision, like as they're grasping for control over the monetary system, like the Treasury and the Fed will just be one. Like the illusion of pretending that they're separate entities not working together will be gone. And so I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on over the coming decade even

Starting point is 00:40:49 necessarily what might transpire at the Fed or where this may be going. Yeah. So in a sense, they are already one when it's a Democrat president. But yes, you know, Trump right now is trying to impose the executive on the Fed and to turn it into an executive agency instead of a so-called independent agency. If he succeeds at that, And there's a possibility. There's a Supreme Court dealing with the question, something called Humphreys Executor from 1935. So it's an open question that he might achieve that. And if he does, then, right, the Fed would unite with Treasury. The question, I think, is what happens to inflation at that point? So you've really got two elements. One of them is kind of the day-to-day operations. So like if the Fed was directly controlled by the president, it was not independent. would it crank out more inflation day to day? The academic research says yes, but the fun part is that the academic research

Starting point is 00:41:49 is paid by the Fed. You get overwhelmingly. The Fed literally prints his own budget, okay? And it doesn't tell us what it is. So, I mean, it can literally, so in other words, there is no academic research on it. Not something money. Aren't they losing money right now, too?

Starting point is 00:42:07 The Fed, yeah, lost. Oh, my God. I think it's close to a truth. billion, something like that? You print your own budget and you're losing money. Between friends. I know, you would think that a money printer would be profitable. Like, you know, like if I got a money printer for Christmas, I guarantee you I would turn a profit on it. But anyway, yeah, there's the Fed. So in other words, we don't actually have any academic research on Central Bank. Like, if you're paying the researchers, that's not research.

Starting point is 00:42:35 So, you know, we don't actually know. So that's what the Fed claims is that day-to-day inflation would go up. I think we don't know. If you look through history, you know, the main constraint on the Fed is what I call the pitchfork standard, which is how angry are voters. And that pitchfork standard is going to operate whether or not the Fed is so-called independent, right? So I'm not sure that that changes so much. The other element of it is something I call the crisis industrial complex, right, was the idea that whenever the government does want to do something stupid, it knows that the Fed will jump in and bail it out. So we talked about that earlier with tariffs. That's true with wars.

Starting point is 00:43:16 And I think that's really one of the most damaging aspects of the Fed. Of course, the boom-bass cycle is fundamentally a huge problem. It ratchets up the government. It, you know, causes, you know, millions of people's lives are destroyed to cause inflation and so on. But there's crisis industrial complex. So, you know, what will happen is that if the federal government decides it would like to invade Afghanistan and rule it for 20 years. If it presents that straight out as a cost to voters, voters are going to have second guesses about it, right? But on the other hand, they can deficit finance all of it because

Starting point is 00:43:46 the Fed ultimately stands ready to backstop treasury markets. And so at that point, they can essentially float it on credit, so they can float any war on credit, any, you know, COVID lockdowns, global warming. They don't even have to be real crises. They can float all of these on credit and use them to pump out debt. And especially in the case of war, they can finance that until the war metastasizes. It's very, very easy to metastasize a war. All you have to do is kill one of the guys on the other side. At that point, you got a war. It's on, baby. So, you know, I think that if they do unite, it's possible that the Fed becomes much, much more obedient on that. But again, that's probably like a red versus blue thing.

Starting point is 00:44:27 It kind of raises the question. It makes me wonder whether Republican presidents in the past have actually been relatively conservative about doing crazy things just because they weren't 100% sure if the Fed would play ball. But at any rate, yeah, I think those would be the main changes. But either way, the pitchfork standard, I think, is A, it's pretty weak. So, you know, voters put up with two, three percent inflation year in, year out. That's actually printing money closer to about six or maybe eight percent. because remember the inflation doesn't capture all the money printed, right? Like in other words, if the Fed was not printing money, we'd actually have deflation because

Starting point is 00:45:08 there's more humans in the world, the world economy is stronger and so on. So empirically, voters seem to put up with quite a bit before they actually vote on it. Let's we forget, you know, under Biden, we had double-digit inflation for a minute there, and then we had congressional midterms, and they didn't punish Democrats for that. So, yeah, voters are actually surprisingly weak. on the Pitchfork standard. And that makes me think that we're more or less guaranteed to, you know, continue having high inflation. We had a sort of brief interlude in the 1990s where the, we actually turned budget surplus, I think, for three years under Clinton and Gingrich.

Starting point is 00:45:52 I think it's possible we could have little periods like that. If we do, the 90s were brutal on gold. I mean, it was a terrible time to own gold. So, you know, if government gets temporarily sane, then, yeah, you can see a crash in gold. You can see a crash in sort of the monetary component of Bitcoin's price. But A, I think that's temporary. I mean, you know, if you zoom out again on gold, starting in 2000, once Clinton was out of office, gold's actually beat equities since then. Wow. It's pretty wild if you think about it.

Starting point is 00:46:21 Yeah. All you're doing in gold is bearing it in the ground. So all those guys getting on the subway, all those schmucks going to work and working their butt off with the, you know, the TPS reports, all those guys, all of their work was for nothing. You should have just taken the money and buried in the ground. All right. So, you know, whether or not we get this period of temporary sanity with governments, I think the long term is very, very bullish for gold and for Bitcoin. And then, you know, that kind of brings us to the separate question of, is the whole Fiat thing going to collapse? something like 4,000 fiat currencies have collapsed.

Starting point is 00:46:57 Today we're really down to one. Like in a sense, the U.S. dollar kind of props up the whole thing. So all of our eggs are in one basket. And that's the question. I would be absolutely shocked if it happened in the next 10 years. On the other hand, you know, if we're looking at a 30 to 15 year time frame, I think it becomes increasingly likely. That's also partly why I'm so bullish on Bitcoin. If the dollar is going to collapse in like two years, we're not going to Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:47:21 We're going to gold. The reason is because old people don't know anything about. Bitcoin, we have living memory of gold. If on the other hand, it's going to take 30 years, you know, anybody under the age of like 40 right now doesn't care about gold. They only care about Bitcoin. Right. So that mine share in 30 years, that's going to reach up to age 70, 80. Nobody will even be talking about gold in 30 years. Yeah. I mean, a lot of what you're saying makes sense here. And I'm sure, you know, Lynn Alden says nothing stops this train because just the math just doesn't work. And as you said, eventually the bill is going to come due and we

Starting point is 00:47:53 either do it in the Soviet style where the government simply doesn't have the money to pay to enforce the laws anymore or and all lot of other bad things happen in that process because we didn't try to plan in advance or we try to liberalize the economy, enforce property rights, lower regulation, all the things beforehand, which just based on politics, I don't envision happening in any sort of a wise way in any, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say the sort of dream scenario is Ronald Reagan, right? So in the late 1970s, people were convinced the gig was up. And there was absolutely no way that we were going to rest the fall of the dollar. That's really when the gold bug movement started. And, you know, gold prices in 70s were exciting. And I think nobody, really nobody expected

Starting point is 00:48:40 what Reagan pulled off. So, and Reagan bought us another, you know, depending how he counted 30, 40 years. So I think it is possible. But having said, you know, to fix it permanently, you need a lot of structural changes. You know, on the federal level, you would need like a balanced budget amendment. You would at least need some kind of budget mechanism that has teeth because of the filibuster that will not happen. So, you know, if you sort of go through the ways that you could delay it, I think that is a possibility. That's kind of the Reagan outcome. On the other hand, to actually reverse it to stop the train, I agree with Lynn.

Starting point is 00:49:20 That's not happening. Absent, a genuine crisis. Yeah. So I guess my question is, as we get closer to this cliff before government simply runs out of money, what kind of crazy things do they do out of desperation to try to grasp as much private wealth as possible to keep things moving? And what can people do about it? Is there safety going overseas?

Starting point is 00:49:46 I know you've lived overseas, but as we know, Uncle Sam will tax you overseas as well. do you have any suggestions for folks just trying to get away from the inevitable clawing and scratching of the desperate government? Yeah, they're already doing that. Europe, thank God for Europe. They're a canary in the coal mine. They're going after, what, something like 10.5 trillion euros of deposits. And their claim is that, you know, this is inactive money. And so it needs to be engaged. In other words, people are too stupid, you know, so they have too much money. So the government's going to figure out something to do it. So, yeah, absolutely, they're going to come grabbing for it. You can move assets. Well, I mean, of course, you can move into Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:50:28 This is one of the sort of key features of Bitcoin. Even so, you know, you still have physical vulnerability. So the wrench attack government version. So you have to physically remove yourself. So you would see a giant sucking sound from Toronto to Costa Rica or to El Salvador, more likely. But, yeah, I mean, absolutely. You would see people expatriating, starting with their assets and then with themselves. Fortunately, there's a vibrant market, some of it gray market in citizenships and

Starting point is 00:50:57 residences. So I can imagine people exploring those more and more. You know, countries sort of thank God for corrupt countries where they're willing to look the other way on a variety of things. True. Yeah. Having lived a long time in like Mexico and Indonesia, there are certain features of corrupt countries that are really fun.

Starting point is 00:51:18 But yeah, I think that, you know, any, a country-like country-like country-lawful. like Canada, was a relatively small country doing that, I think, is really shooting ourselves in the foot. Even Europe, I mean, in terms of like concentration of wealth, Europe is increasingly a small country. If you look at the number of billionaires, even if you put Germany, France, not only you put them all together, it's, it's substantially lower in the U.S. I think it's actually, it might even be lower than India. It's really not a player. And that's a reason why is because they've chased out so much wealth already. A lot of us gone to the U.S., which Americans may be shocked to know that the U.S. is a real.

Starting point is 00:51:51 relative tax haven in the world. It goes to Singapore, Dubai, places that are more than happy to play ball. Yeah. All right. Well, I mean, I guess like you said, in the Bitcoin thing, you could hide it there. But at the end of the day, like you said, with the wrench attack, if Uncle Sam wants to come to your house and say, hey, hand over your seed phrase or I will put you in a cage, I mean, I guess you got a choice at that point. You could be like, well, fuck you, I'll sit in the cage or I guess hand over the seed phrase. They'll either option is physically actually exit your body from the country and then hope they don't, you know, have extradition treaties and come to go get you.

Starting point is 00:52:29 Yeah, well, that's the, you know, the Bitcoin strategic to serve in the U.S. is really just kind of a bunch of trophies of wrench attacks where the U.S. government from people because they were too stupid to exit the country first. It's a great way to put it. That's exactly what it is. That's incredible. that's incredible. I want to quickly just ask as well, too, so besides Bitcoin, or maybe it is just Bitcoin, too, for anyone that's listening to all this information, what can they do? Where should they apply the kind of understanding of the business cycle, the investment knowledge? What's your best use case? In terms of resources that can read? No, in terms of essentially, if I'm thinking about somebody who's listening and understanding and they're looking like, okay, what are my next steps? What are great next steps? And maybe it is resources and places they can go and learn more.

Starting point is 00:53:15 I keep thinking about doing something on that. I swear to God, I'm not trying to pimp myself, but there is not a really good business cycle tracker. You kind of have to grab, you know, we were talking in the top like copper and gold and oil. You really have to piece them together. I mean, yeah, I've got a book and draft, but at any rate, you know, in terms of learning more kind of about how the process works. how business cycles run. Man economy and state is a good primer. It's a lot easier to read than Mises is, but there is not a super resource.

Starting point is 00:53:57 I have reached out to multiple hedge funds to try and get a, like a managed portfolio where it's being run on simply the business cycle. And they generally want to, you know, they want to smoke their own. Which hedge funds in general suck. I've been pretty straightforward. Like I've talked to guys where I'm like, you guys lose money. So listen,

Starting point is 00:54:22 I am not going to promote your work. Okay. We can work together. But yeah, honestly, I have not found a good fund manager. I don't want to name names, but there are a number who call themselves Austrian.

Starting point is 00:54:36 I have not found one that I could recommend in good faith. Interesting. Okay, cool. Last thing I want to touch on before closing out as well, too, there is anything outside of Bitcoin or Austrian economics that you're really passionate about, that you think is either helpful or that you wanted to share? Oh, God.

Starting point is 00:54:56 I think for understanding Bitcoin, the second most important thing after economics is simply understanding history. And there are so many resources now. Like YouTube has more freaking history show. There are not enough hours in a lifetime. There is so much good content on there. So, you know, reading through various historical episodes. Rome had a lot of money drama.

Starting point is 00:55:19 Song Dynasty China is interesting. I wrote a paper on that a couple years ago talking about how Song Dynasty China invented the printing press, which meant they invented the money printer. They collapsed. They did the standard fiat thing in double time. Rome was a lot slower because of how they debased. And then China collapsed so hard that the Mongols waltzed in,

Starting point is 00:55:40 which is kind of like the Sioux Indians taking over D.C. Like, it was so stupid. You're like, no, you've got to be kidding, right? Song Dynasty China was a third of world GDP, right? It was huge, and the Mongols were. But at any rate, yeah, so like going through those historical episodes, what's interesting, what's fun, is that every golden age that collapsed, of which, you know, depending on how you define it, there's hundreds,

Starting point is 00:56:05 every single one had a monetary component to it. Always what they do on the way out is they start. And there's like little clues, like they start melting down, coins to turn into, you know, pitchforks or something, right? There's like all these clues in there were like, ah, I see what happened. Okay. They debased the money at the point that it was worth more. So, but anyway, in terms of understanding, understanding Bitcoin, understanding kind of the long game on Bitcoin, which is ultimately the odds that it will replace fiat currency altogether. So you take $130 trillion in money, divide by $21 million, it gets $6 million. So that's sort of

Starting point is 00:56:42 top-down long game. I think there, the most fascinating is just going through those historical episodes, those golden ages that collapsed and what the monetary factors were in it. And I think a lot of people in our space are history nerds anyway. I certainly am. So that's probably more fun than like reading Manger. And Dan Carlin's a good one. I was listening to his Rome thing, like, you know, 15 hours worth of it. It's fantastic. A lot of the same stuff you just talked about, how they just plundered their own money. And that was it. Bye. Yeah. And it was hilarious, right? Like in Rome, people would would, you know, sell their first born to become a Roman citizen, right?

Starting point is 00:57:21 All these revolts that were based on, you know, people trying to become Roman citizens, like the social wars. And then you fast forward a couple hundred years. And when the barbarians come in, Romans are like, I'm free, free at last, take me. And so it's like, what happened between? So, no, it's good stuff. Well, I mean, I appreciate Peter. I don't know if you can hear my daughter's playing the piano in the room.

Starting point is 00:57:41 It sounds like she's playing us off now. So, Nathan. That's what it was. Yes. Can you please share where people can find you and your work? Yeah, I do videos every weekday on economics and freedom. Those go up on X. The artist formerly known as Twitter. So at Profstand, at P-R-O-F-S-T-O-N-G-E. And I also do weekly articles talking about more in-depth stuff. Those are over at Profstange.com. If you enjoyed this episode with Professor Sain-A-N-G, please like and subscribe and check out the previous episode with fellow Austrian-A-C-E-C-E-C-E. Dr. Bob Murphy up above.

BTC Sessions - The TRUTH About RECESSION: Simple TRICK to Predict Markets | Peter St Onge

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.