TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #313: The financial costs of war with Alex Gladstein

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Alex Gladstein to discuss how America has funded its wars over the last 70 years. Follow Alex Gladstein on Twitter Purchase Alex Gladstein new book, Check Your Financial Privilege Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off Fountain Podcasts

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don't have to meet at a big hotel in new hampshire we can just run a full node and vote vote with some software heady times in the world alex gladstein yeah i would say a historic day for me to come back on the pod. Really great to be here in Austin, the Bitcoin capital of the United States of America. Fabulous setup you've got here. And just such a great community. Grateful to Unchained for hosting a little book party for me last night and for the Human Rights Foundation and excited to dive into the topic du jour with you today. Well, the topic du jour, for any of you freaks who are unaware, I'm sure most of you are, At this current juncture, Saudi Arabia is in talks with China to begin pricing oil sales to China in yuan and allowing China to pay for that oil in yuan, which is a direct attack on the petrodollar system, which is incredibly prescient that this is happening today.

Again, like you said, because that's exactly what we were going to talk about today anyway, when we planned this recording weeks ago. So things are happening fast. Yeah, it's a disruption of the international monetary order. And as I was telling Marty before the show, what ended up happening wasn't planned, but it ended up happening was that I ended up producing a three-part series for Bitcoin Magazine, which is really basically a short book in itself. These essays are very long and they take me many months to research. And I go down various rabbit holes. Uh, but essentially, uh, if you look at the three-part series I've done for Bitcoin mag, starting with uncovering the hidden costs of the petrodollar and then moving on to the

end of super imperialism. And then my latest, which is the invisible cost of war in the age of quantitative easing, which, which we'll, which we'll discuss. Uh, the whole point is that the world financial system, uh, post Bretton woods, um, was kind of in two stages. the first one, 44 to 71, where the whole world used dollars as their savings account. Essentially, central banks would use dollars redeemable for gold at $35 an ounce. The system came under tremendous pressure in the 60s due to the United States' expenditures in Vietnam.

And essentially, there was a run on the dollar and Nixon decided to, instead of, he could have devalued the dollar, but leaders usually don't like to do that. It's very embarrassing. So instead he just closed the gold window and and the dollar devalued anyway but you know it was it was it was a new new era so people call uh 71 to today bretton woods 2 essentially where instead of a gold redeemability backing the dollar there isn't any sort of commodity fix in all now analysts that i agree with like luke groman have this theory that and lin alden and others have this theory that we kind of moved into sort of a pseudo-backing with a different commodity, with oil.

And in 73 and 74, as I discussed in my first essay, Nixon and Kissinger were basically like, oh no, we've lost the backing of the dollar. The dollar was devaluing really rapidly. It lost half its value against the mark in like three or four years. It's really crazy how weak the dollar got in those first early years in the 70s.

and what had what was happening at the time was that the the the oil exporting nations had become independent from their colonial masters and they had formed this thing called opec and saudi arabia was like the the swing producer and the kind of let's say the master of opec um and this this this coalition basically controlled more than 80 percent of all the oil that was being pumped out and they uh you know as a result or as a reaction to the united states supporting Israel and the Yom Kippur war in 73, they, they ended up raising the price of oil tremendously from, I think it was only a couple dollars per barrel previous to, to, to 73, 74. And it went all the way up to like $12. So they had just this enormous amount of new wealth coming in

and Nixon and Kissinger hired this dude off wall street, a bond salesman called William Simon to be the new treasury secretary and to figure something out. And they knew that he could sell bonds. And that's really what the United States needed to do. It needed to convince people that its bonds were still worth something. That was the national security goal of the United States. It remains the goal today. And he managed to go to Saudi Arabia. So Simon went to Jeddah. The crown prince came to D.C. There was a whole song and dance. Nixon went to Saudi Arabia. It was a huge, huge deal. And basically, the petrodollar pact was four elements. It was on their side, they would price oil in dollars. So you had to, if you were Malawi or, you know,

Bolivia or whatever, you couldn't use your own currency to pay for oil. You had to use dollars. So you had to go get dollars. So this created huge demand for dollars. And it also made a network effect where it just started to make sense to price everything in dollars. This is a huge, huge deal. And, you know, that was part one. Part two was that the dollars they would earn by selling oil, they would reinvest back into U.S. debt. So they would buy U.S. treasuries, things like that. And we would give them a discount on that debt. It was part of the deal that was originally confidential

and then it was later leaked and then not leaked, but it was made public in the 90s. So that was their side of the deal. And our side of the deal was we would A, sell them tons of weapons at lower than market prices and B, protect them. And we have done so. We did so after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1991.

And then we did so again, obviously, in 2003, you know, you can argue the Iraq war was really, again, kind of a protection of this system, right? So the externalities have been vast. And over time, the oil peg, we could say, started to come under pressure. Like basically it was pretty good from the seventies until the mid two thousands, like, uh, dollars and oil had a pretty tight correlation. Uh, essentially, you know, dollars were pegged to oil, but after like the mid two thousands, um, you know, the price of oil went beyond $30 and then it like never went back. And, and Luke Groman has a great conversation with, on the Grant Williams show that just came out that you should all listen to. It's excellent that where he breaks this down, but essentially like oil went to like a hundred, if you went to like $150 a barrel, it was insane. So it basically broke the peg. And this happened at a time when the United States had invaded Iraq. It was engaging in enormous new borrowing. There was like that kind of pressure on the dollar. And then the great financial prices hit. So instead of like raising rates to try and like peg the dollar back to oil, we actually went to, rates went to zero.

So as Groman says, we, you know, what Volcker did at the end of the 70s, early 80s was he sacrificed the American economy. For the world, meaning like we made the dollar the priority. So we raised rates all the way up to close to 20% to strengthen the dollar as the world reserve currency. And basically to back up what we promised the world that we would make the dollar strong. Bernanke in 08 did the opposite. He sacrificed the world reserve currency for the banks.

So he saved the banks instead of reserve currency. So we betrayed the world. It's an incredible story, actually. and the the the reason i'm so interested in this process uh through all of my writing is that is that what you start to see is that the united states in order to achieve its foreign policy aims needs buyers of its debt and and that was done um pre-71 uh lbj would call the west germans and say basically you need to buy our debt um and if you don't we're going to pull out this is this happened. So it's coercion. Obviously the petrodollar pact, like you Saudis, all you guys,

OPEC, you're going to buy our debt. Then after they went broke, like basically the price of oil collapsed in the eighties, right? So we needed to find a new buyer, Japanese. So the Plaza Accord and the Louvre Accord and these things in the eighties were, were, were partially an effort to force the new world's second largest economy to buy our debt. So they started racking up our debt. And then as you, as you got through the late nineties, we needed a new buyer. We were getting, we were getting a little thin. So this explains partially the induction of China into the World Trade Organization. And then between when they got in and started doing business with us at this huge scale, right, that they didn't before. And we, and they, you know, we, they

basically started making all this stuff for Americans and started earning all these dollars. they started doing the recycling thing that i described before so previously you had the oil sellers recycling their profits back into u.s debt now you had the chinese doing it so between 04 and 11 the chinese uh went from having just like about a hundred billion dollars of treasuries to having more than a trillion they like quadrupled their holdings in a short matter of years But after the GFC, after kind of the Iraq war peak, Chinese other countries started to like balk at the dollar system.

They were like, wait a second, this isn't sustainable. So 2011 was kind of the turning point. After that, after people saw what the US government was willing to do during a crisis, that it was actually willing to sacrifice the dollar in order to please the banks and save the banks. And that this country was willing to borrow all this money to fight these wars abroad,

which we'll get into, what happened is that these countries stopped their like accumulation of treasuries. So you had basically foreign buyers in the early 2000s buying about 60% of our new debt that we issued for deficit spending. When I say deficit spending, what I'm referring to is just to be detailed here,

like each year, the United States government has a certain amount of revenue through taxes and other streams. And then it has a budget. And sometimes the budget's balanced, but other times we spend more than we bring in. And that deficit, which this year, our revenue is $4.3 trillion, and we're going to spend $6 trillion. So we're going to have about $1.7 trillion, give or take, of new debt. That goes on to the debt pile, which is now above $30 trillion, right?

And the essential idea is that this debt is very costly to service. So the argument of my latest article is that in this macro environment where you have less and less buyers of our debt abroad, less external pressure, you essentially have a situation where the world went from buying 60% of our debt to only 40% today.

So what has happened is that the Fed had to step in. Okay, and the Fed has engaged in this unbelievable intervention into the bond markets. So between 08 and today, Um, the last round of QE sort of quote unquote, just ended a few days ago, but you know, we all know it'll restart sometime soon. No, they bought $8.9 trillion of securities, uh, treasuries and mortgage-backed securities since March, 2020, they've been buying about $4.7 million of these per minute. So, you know, what would the price of a 10 year treasury be had they bought zero

instead of 9 trillion? Nobody knows, but definitely not 0.08%, which is the overnight rate today the fed funds rate i mean or you know it's around 1.7 percent for for a short-term treasury like these are artificially low prices due to government manipulation of the bond markets and this is very important for the national security state right because if it give you just to give you an example like if rates on a pile of 30 trillion dollar debt if rates rise by 1%, like let's say they go to 1% from zero, that's $300 billion of new money that we owe bondholders, right? That's $300 billion. So if rates go to 3%, which would be like historically reasonable, okay, now you're talking a trillion new dollars. So we only make $4 trillion a year

in revenue this year. So you're talking potentially if rates go to 3%, like let's say they keep hiking, like they say they're going to do, you'd be talking a quarter of all of our income going to pay interest. So this is why the U.S. government in the last 20 years, as the petrodollar system has been breaking down, has had to engage in all this bond market intervention. This is why the Fed has this massive balance sheet. And I felt that that was a good way to open. Yeah, no, the way you just described, essentially over the last three decades, the U.S. has just been kicking the can down the road going to japan like all right we'll work with you okay all right well ran dry here all right china come to the world trade organization we're gonna run with you and

2008 happens and like you said that was an inflection point on the international stage where everybody's like all right we can't trust these guys to to be the reserve currency and start moving away and this is where things get interesting and i had luke on you mentioned mentioned Luke Roman a few times throughout that explanation I had him on yesterday. And it's fascinating here in the United States. So the people, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, the academic economists who got us into this mess, they are either intellectually incapable, there's too much pride to recognize the position that they've gotten us. And I think they all understand the position that we're in. They're just, it would be career suicide to admit it

because essentially, if you're Janet Yellen or Jerome Powell, you'd have to admit that your life's work was all bullshit. And what Luke said yesterday that was very interesting is that he has contacts that are in the Department of Defense who are wargaming the game theory of these geopolitical chess pieces that are being moved in the monetary realm right now. And he said the people in the Defense Department realize that we need to make a bold move

and move towards what you would describe as Bretton Woods 3 and like pulling out a trump card. You have Saudi Arabia cozying up with China and it's obvious that they want to transition to a new reserve currency regime that either the yuan, the ruble, or a combination of all are a part of.

And America, if we want long-term sustainability, What we should do is pivot towards Bitcoin and say, all right, I know you guys want to do this, but we're going to go to this peer-to-peer distributed open monetary network that is free market. Yeah. And look, the writing's been on the wall for a while. I did the petrodollar piece a year ago, and even then, like, you could tell that, like, okay, India and China, India and Russia, the EU and Russia, they had started to think about doing trade in other currencies outside of the dollar. So you already, you know, you started to see the weakening. Obviously, Len Alden has a masterful piece on this. And now it's been expedited by two things.

And this is why people are saying Bretton Woods 3 started essentially in the days after Russia invaded Ukraine. And that's for two reasons. The first one and the most obvious one is the weaponization of FX reserves, which I would imagine that most sovereigns thought could happen. And we got a warning when we stole the Afghans' money, right, when we basically froze the deposits of the Afghan nation, right? This should have been a signal to the rest of the world that that's what the US was going to do. But it's still been shocking for the world to see America and its European allies freeze hundreds of billions of dollars

of Russian savings, essentially, right? So now, and this is what, this guy Zoltan from Credit Suisse came out with this kind of amazing, you know, note a few days ago that I thought was fake at first. You thought that was fake? Because he's such a respected guy on Wall Street. Everybody says he's like, you know, the most important person studying money markets and all these things.

And he writes this really breathtaking article, quick article about how it's Bretton Woods three, Bretton Woods two's done, you know, dollar based liabilities as a savings account for a nation is no longer an option for other sovereigns. They can't entirely rely on something that can be frozen. so he has this concept of inside and outside money and he's basically saying the era of inside money being savings for for competing countries is is coming to an end because they realize they need outside money and of course in his conception among classical economic theory that's gold so gold is outside money but as we know bitcoin is digital outside money it's the only digital

outside money every other digital asset has some sort of person in control or group in control or its issuance is going to change or whatever so so we have bitcoin as the digital outside money and indeed at the end of his note he basically says if bitcoin you know if bitcoin survives it'll it'll benefit in this thing which was a shocking thing to see from someone on who's that respected on wall street that's what i mean but so so we're at this moment where we have the the end of the petrodollar system is being expedited by the weaponization of fx reserves and and now like basically the the fraying of the the actual petrodollar mechanism itself and it's important worth you know worth noting that you know 25 of all the oil that saudi arabia sells is to china

so if all of a sudden you have and we don't know what's going to happen but like if it does proceed in this direction and they start pricing and selling 25 of their exports in yuan instead of dollars okay then you have a whole range of new contracts and derivatives that are going to be priced in yuan and i'm not someone who believes the yuan will ever be the world reserve currency it's not a freely tradable currency they don't have open capital markets yeah it can't work if you think the fed and the treasury are messing up the dollar yeah i can't imagine what the ccp well no but like no one would there's a reason why only two percent of reserves are held globally in yuan and and only about that much trade is done in it and it will increase but

it's because the markets don't trust the ccp you know like i don't blame them so you know what we're looking at in the in fiat land is just a you know a more of a balanced picture that probably more accurately reflects the size of economies and the size of trade as opposed to today where we still have the remnants of this dollar hegemonic hegemonic system where even though the u.s has only whatever 20 of gdp globally we represent um you know 40 of all debt and 60 of all reserves and 90% of all trade, like that system is coming, that system's coming to an end.

It's deteriorating, okay? And what we just have seen in the last few weeks are like, as Luke calls them, like really obvious signposts that things are starting to move more quickly maybe. I mean, it's definitely gonna, you're gonna have this gradually than suddenly thing. I appreciate the perspective of the dollar bulls

that they point out correctly that, look, at times of panic, people still want dollars. It's the best of all the fiats. But that is, you know, that's something that gets eroded slowly over time and eventually there's going to be a suddenly part you know and we don't know when that's going to be but we have to be paying very close attention to this at this point yes and so the dollar bulls you know respect and understand their perspective as well they focus on the technical mechanical aspect of it like pure demand for dollars but

they completely neglect the social aspect and that's what leads to a rapid decline in confidence and the dollar is the social aspect of it. Like, do I believe that the U.S. government is going to be able to pay back these treasuries? Well, our friend Nick Carter just made a joke about the dollar needs to find new tokenomics. Better tokenomics. Better tokenomics.

And it's true. Like literally what you need to remember is that the literal mechanism that has underpinned dollar hegemony since the early 70s is coming undone. Like, and not just theoretically, like the mechanism that I laid out, the four parts, the pact between the head of OPEC and the world's largest economy.

The key, key part of that is that they price all oil sales in dollars. We are potentially watching that just get wrecked. Like, so what are U.S. policymakers to do? Now, Biden was discussing going to Saudi Arabia. It doesn't look like he's actually going to go. And instead, Xi Jinping is going to go. So after Ramadan, so it'll be his first trip there since 2016. And I mean, it's a big, big deal. And I think this is sort of inevitable that like you start seeing China and Saudi Arabia and Russia and potentially India just doing more with one another.

Just, you know, makes sense. I mean, for them just to take a real, real, real politique view like that, that would make sense. So for U.S. policymakers, we'll see. But, you know, the picture I wanted to dig into a little bit here on the show today was this idea of like, you know, one of the reasons we've seen a decline in American power is that we misused it at our apex, in my opinion, by invading Iraq. Like, so this to me was, and you could argue Afghanistan, of course, is part of that. But really the invasion of Iraq is what sort of, I mean, I view it as an unethical, unethical war. And I view it as something that changed forever the course of not just the dollar, but also the United States. Not only, not just in how people view us as a nation, you know, like even the most like uneducated person abroad knew at the time that like, oh they're like going in for natural resources or money or something like it was we were not looked upon fondly for during that time like from abroad let's put it that way like americans when

they were traveling at the time at the you know pretend to be canadians like that's how unpopular we were because it was such a ridiculous war i mean to me it was it's similarly unethical to putin's invasion of ukraine like it's it's it's we sent more than a million young americans to the desert to fight for what? Like at the end of the day, as I, as I try to do in my research and writing, my, my, my argument is that it was, it was largely to protect this petrodollar system. But again, this thing is collapsing and, you know, what has happened is that, and this is where we'll get into the content of the third essay, the invisible cost of war in the age of QE. I read two books at the beginning of this year that really made me think. And I spent kind of two

months fashioning this thesis around these you know content from these two books um one was the lords of easy money by christopher leonard which is about basically green span economics and how the fed made this decision in the 90s to focus on three things um they would basically fight price consumer price inflation they would ignore asset inflation and they would bail out the economy whenever it collapsed and that easy money monetary policy um is is one piece and the other piece is a book called taxing wars by this uh air force veteran named sarah kreps who's at west point and teaches at other universities she wrote a phenomenal book about the history of war finance in the united states and basically like how through the first two-thirds of the 20th

century, Americans paid for wars in a way that kind of had a democratic character to it, like meaning that the people were very involved. Like the wars, World War I was paid 30% by taxes, World War II, 50%, Korea, 100%. So like Americans knew what was going on and they were paying for it. And these wars were, you know, popular is a tricky word, but they were generally supported by the public not just through taxes but also through war bonds or liberty bonds as they called them but i thought this was staggering the stat in world war ii americans 85 million americans half the country bought liberty bonds and the the the in 2022 dollars the amount it would be today about three trillion dollars so that's half of our you know basically half of our federal budget so

Americans really chipped in. They had skin in the game. They were involved. They knew what was going on. The government was more transparent. So if you if you bought during World War Two, if you bought if you contributed, if you bought war bonds, the government would report back to you on what it bought. So there's this amazing story on the New York Fed's website about New York Fed employees who at the time had raised, you know, back then about 80 grand to contribute to the effort that the army would get back to them. And it told them we bought like this plane and this missile with it, which is, you know, like, again, well, all war's bad, but look, there are existential wars. There are just wars. You can certainly argue World War II was one of

those. And Americans were, especially after Pearl Harbor getting attacked by the Japanese, Americans were generally speaking, willing to fight. Okay. You saw this recently, and there It was a great video of this young UFC guy. And he was like, listen, if Putin comes over here, I'm gonna fuck him up. Like, no question. But I ain't going over there. Bryce Mitchell.

Yeah, so, and that was the, I mean, Americans didn't want to get involved in World War II. But when the Japanese bombed us, totally changed the equation. People were absolutely willing. Not only did they go conscription, and they, like, my grandfather was over there, and like, so many of our families were there.

But we paid for it, right? And the thing is, what Sarah Kreps realizes in her work is that politicians realized that taxing for wars was unpopular. Like eventually, Truman, like it was, you know, his downfall. And then when LBJ tried to do a war tax for Vietnam, it led to his downfall. He ended up not seeking another term. It was so unpopular. We never did another war tax after 67.

We haven't done one. So all of America's post-Vietnam wars, especially the post-9-11 forever wars, have not been financed by taxes or by war bonds. And that's just like a staggering thing to think about. Carl, I think it's a good time to pull up the thread on the screen. Yeah, we can start going through some numbers here.

We've got some hard numbers on this. And yeah, it's just... Yeah, so again, like the traditional way to finance wars was in large part through taxes and through war bonds. Today, we don't have either of those things. There was a short, there was a limited Patriot bond thing, but it, between 2001 and 2011, but it was a very, very minuscule part

of the overall war on terror. But when we talk about the global war on terror and these wars in Asia and in the Middle East, what's incredible is that instead of paying as we go, which has a cost, we're paying principal and interest now, okay? So the interest payments alone that we've made towards the money that we borrowed

to fight for these wars in Asia and the Middle East have amounted to $1 trillion. So Americans have paid a trillion dollars over the last 20 years only on interest payments. Now let's think about what else we could have done with that trillion dollars. I mean, God, I mean, forget like, you know, I don't care where you are in the political spectrum.

Maybe it's better domestic investment. Maybe it's tax breaks. Maybe it's God knows what. I mean, it doesn't, if you're a Republican, Democrat, You'll have different ideas on where to spend the money. But like the point is, that's insane, right? And just to give context again, the federal budget this year is 6 trillion.

So even if we stop these wars today, and I'll get into what those wars are in a second, but even if we stopped spending on them today, which is partly impossible because one of the biggest costs is veteran benefits. We had almost 3 million troops serve overseas during this time. I mean, they all are, you know, they deserve support from us for fighting for us.

So even if we disagree with the fight, so they're going to get these benefits and those are going to be in the trillions. So the deal is by 2020, rather by 2030, we'll have paid two trillion, even if we stop fighting today. And by 2050, we'll have paid six and a half trillion, which, again, is larger than our entire federal budget. it's it's crazy how just like the concept of trillions has become so and again normalized interest borrowing for the wars for i mean we that that leaves aside the whole like we don't know how we're going to pay for the entitlements yeah that's a security yeah all that shit um again these these these numbers to give the give the listener the the viewer context like again like war used to be something that was like consciously paid for people were involved like

there was a debate, there was oversight, there was like public knowledge about the wars. There was a vote. Yeah, there were votes. Like again, 30% of World War I paid for by taxes, 50% of World War II, 100% of the Korean War, 0% of Iraq and Afghanistan. Like, just think about that.

I think that's very powerful. And Kreps, Sarah Kreps notes that in her research that wars that are paid for with tax increases are 20% less popular than wars that aren't. That explains that those figures you're seeing there, like politicians during Vietnam realized that it was suicide, essentially, so much so that in 07 during the Iraq surge, a bunch of bipartisan group of senators and congressmen got together and said, we should have a war tax. And Nancy Pelosi was basically like, no way, no way. That's crazy. They were laughed away.

I mean, this is this is crazy. So, um, uh, again, no new war taxes, uh, since 6, 6, 68, none. Well, let's pause here and dive into, uh, there's no overt war tax, right? Where you're like getting your tax bill and it's like, all right, I got to pay 2% for the war. It would say, it would say it, but you are being taxed for these wars via inflation. I think that's like the important thing that is just hidden in the cost of inflation, which as you you are even though you're not consciously looking at a tax bill that says all right here's

your social security tax here's your health care tax here's your war tax and which would be it's so weird how social we are and how it's all perception like we are paying the tax but it's just not visible to us well we call we call them credit card wars this is the age of credit card wars and not only are they paid for by future generations by just pushing it off and and now now we're paying pni we're paying an interest we're paying those but yes you're right like so what's happened over time is these you know these green span monetary easy monetary policies have resulted first and foremost in asset inflation which causes huge inequality in society massive i mean if you look at um i'll get into the numbers in a second but causes big inequality

but also it opens the door for actual like what they call you know uh real economy inflation whenever the government has to do actual spending um like for example those stimmy checks like you know like you do trillions of dollars of that it's going to cause like the crazy cpi we're seeing now you know it's historic you know highest since 40 years since 40 years ago the qe itself doesn't necessarily cause that, but it causes like wild asset inflation and encourages stock buybacks and all these things. But when you mix them together, when you have a government that's willing to sell bonds to fight war and then have, with one hand, and have the other arm of its government, the other hand, the Fed, buy those very things from the private sector, over time this has

consequences. Like, you know, and the goal again is just to artificially, in a way, artificially quotes um you know drive the value up of u.s debt and drive the because with a bond the more valuable it is the lower lower the yield so like basically you want these the u.s government wants wants its debt to be really valuable so that that its borrowing cost can be very very low like in a world where its securities we only have to pay one or two or three percent on them we can fight a lot more forever wars that the public doesn't know about but in a world where we're going to go probably where our debt's not going to be at zero or one or 2%, but it's actually going to probably be at three or four or five or 6%. All of a sudden it becomes impossible

to fight these forever wars that nobody knows about. I mean, we just can't pay for them. And that's, that's, that's the kicker. Yeah. It's like each percent matters. And each hundred basis points is an enormous cost. We're mathematically backed into the corner. We cannot get out of this corner if the interest rate goes too high we essentially have to default on our dad tour just drive it lower into negative territory yeah and again some of these numbers like to give you an example of a war that's paid for in this way operation inherent resolve is a war that most people don't know about it's it's a war that's been happening in three countries libya syria iraq obama started it it's eight years old and it's cost tens of billions of dollars and

And there's voters don't know about this war. No. Yeah. I mean, I didn't know about the war and I'm like supposed to be an expert in this stuff. Didn't we used to have to vote to go to war? Like wasn't there? Well, the whole, and we can pause here for a second. The whole point of Krebs' book

is there's this thing called democratic peace theory. And the whole point of democratic peace theory, which I, you know, kind of used to subscribe to and still in a way do is that democracies are less belligerent than dictatorships because there is like this back and forth with the people that you kind of have to have. if your leaders do some unpopular war that you don't like, you're going to vote them out. That's

the whole point. That's what makes us different than Putin. That's the hope, right? The problem is the flaw of democratic peace theory is fiat central banking, basically, is my thesis. If the rulers can figure out a way to fight wars without taxation and without raising interest rates through QE, then it's kind of like the magic trick. They can pay for wars, you know, without really the population noticing. Right. Because it's as you as you say, the costs are hidden. Right. And, you know, that's something that, you know, would be shocking to people throughout history. Like basically, if you looked at Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill or even Keynes himself, they all said borrowing for war is a bad idea. They literally all say this borrowing

for war is a bad idea, especially if interest rates rise. But if you have to do it, you have to pair it with taxes. That was like their whole thing. Keynes had this whole book about how to pay for World War II and it was all about taxes. Okay. It was his vision to like have more taxes. And that's indeed what happened, right? During that war. But if you have like a world where there are no taxes, you start to disassociate these wars from the people. So if Americans aren't paying for the wars and if their children are no longer being conscripted into the wars, We don't we no longer have the draft. Right. And if more and more of the stuff's being done with robotics and AI and things like that, OK, drones, you start to have a population that's disconnected both in blood and treasure from the wars. And that's dangerous. And in my opinion, it erodes democracy, becomes abstracted in every way.

Totally. Like Q did all this polling like all of us. Some of us remember I was I was young. I was in high school when 9-11 happened. And I but I vividly remember the Iraq war and it was really unpopular among a certain segment of society for a few years. Like there were the biggest protests since Vietnam. It was constantly in the news. And then and you can be cynical about why, but like basically like 07, 08, it just started to. And a lot of this had to do with Obama being elected. Right. But like it just started to disappear as like a topic. And by 11, 12, when Pew would run polling, people would basically say that war was not a part of their lives and wasn't really even a part of their discussions anymore. It certainly isn't today. So I think it's dangerous, and I think that we need a monetary standard.

We need a financial system where governments basically have to have some sort of consensual process with their people to fight wars. That's what I think is the right thing. And we did have that at one point. And it meant that like it had things had to get real serious. Like imagine how willing today we are to like go fight these things around the world. We were unwilling to get involved with saving, stopping the freaking Holocaust basically until the Japanese bombed us. Like that's the threshold we had as a country because we weren't on this infinite fiat money standard. It's very expensive.

And we knew that it was a big sacrifice. Today, we're just in a totally different mind frame as a country, meaning our policymakers, they know they can go and do all this stuff and it's going to be hidden. And I just think this is such a huge problem for the United States. Well, then I completely agree. The warmongering, the war machine, the military industrial complex has gotten completely out of hand, in my opinion. I mean, the fact that there's essentially a genocide going on in Yemen right now that most people don't even know about that we're supporting. We are supporting Saudi Arabia.

We are the army of Saudi Arabia. I read a stat the other day that there's hundreds of thousands, I forget the exact number, hundreds of thousands of people died in Yemen over the last X number of years, 70% of them being toddlers or children. That's an externality of the petrodollar system. Yeah. um so well that that gets to the question yeah and this is something bitcoin are talking

talk about a lot yeah i mean bitcoin fixes this and then and does bitcoin fix this and then and this is where i think we have to be up front like bitcoin's not going to end wars but i think it brings back the transparent cost of war that you've just been describing that existed 70 years ago. Yeah. And this is a big debate, but here are some facts. Like the reason why Britain and Germany left the gold standard in 1913, 14 was to fight world war one, which was a monstrous war that really, I mean, it was just a total insane tragedy. There was no actual reason for these countries to fight each other and they killed millions. Right. Um, and then the reason why the United States left, like basically ended Bretton woods one and left the gold standard

formally was to fight the Vietnam War. So war and and constraint of money are very related, like like governments try to get around constraints in the same way that governments tried to get around the gold constraint. As I described in the last 20 minutes, they figured out how to get around the taxation constraint eventually by doing QE, which, by the way, as was pointed out by Saif in his book, The Fiat Standard, the whole idea of QE of like governments buying their own bonds was arguably invented by the British in World War I. They tried to do a bond sale

and nobody wanted to buy them. So they secretly bought it themselves, driving up the price of the bond and down the borrowing cost. And the US did this in World War II. If you want to look this up, yield curve control is this idea of not just controlling the short-term price of debt,

but also the long-term. And we essentially pegged all treasuries at a particular amount so that we wouldn't owe a lot. And what, what happens as, as Lynn Alden talks a lot about in her work is that this is what's essentially known as financial repression during times of yield curve control. If you hold any dollar based assets, you just lose money. Like you're, you're, you're, you're, you know, it's negative. It's basically when the, when the interest rates, um, are way below the inflation

rate, you're just getting eaten alive. So anyone holding bonds or dollars in the forties was, was toast. And that could be a very similar situation. You know, now, now is starting to resemble that in many ways because we have what cpi is about eight percent and the fed funds rate is zero so it's i mean cpi is eight percent and that's uh that's that's under that's understating things like we don't have to get like that's not rent that's not a costco basket that's just what they describe yes and it's i mean it's the melting ice cube that that sailor describes if you're holding these assets on your balance sheet. So my, and I get into this at the end of the essay,

but basically like, I don't think that any kind of monetary standard ends all wars, but I think that these like exotic forever wars in far away places that don't mean a lot to the American people in a system that had more constraint, I just think my argument is

they would be first on the chopping block. Like we'd be like, nope, we're not going to do that anymore. And if you, what's interesting is, you know you look at this from the progressive point of view and people are worried about well what about oh my god like what about entitlements well guess what most entitlements are paid for by taxes has had nothing to do with the monetary system out of the four point whatever three trillion uh income that the united states government makes every year most of that goes

to pay for uh entitlements straight away through payroll taxes and other things if you actually look at the mechanics of where all the money comes from i think that regardless of monetary standard when you have a nation or a community like they're they're basically going to want whatever taxes they pay to go towards things like entitlement and and domestic local infrastructure spending and not exotic forever wars that's the point um the forever wars as we know them would be impossible in a bitcoin standard that's that that's the thesis and we might be heading to a bitcoin standard yeah so let's talk to how how do you see this playing out like the transition to a bitcoin center so right now obviously we have saudi arabia and china talking russia's moving

away there's people are moving away from the dollar brent woods 2 is over as we've described and what i think is going to happen is you're going to have like this cambrian explosion of just fractured monetary like a fractured monetary system where people are buying things in yuan, rubles, dollars, pesos, whatever it may be

and then over time that's going to become so obviously filled with friction that people are going to be like okay we need to consolidate on something and then it's going to explosion out and then suck back into Bitcoin slowly but surely over the course of this decade. Yeah so there's

two forces at work Um, and you know, as I, I mentioned this at the end of my petrodollar piece, but like scholars have pointed out four, four potential visions of the monetary future. One is essentially like dollar continues to be dominant. One is that, um, we, we, we go back into like a bipolar, uh, world where let's say you want dollar. Okay. One is that we have like a bank or type money that we, we internationally managed altogether.

This is like what Kane's proposed at the Bretton woods, like a massive SDR. basically yeah and then one would be uh essentially anarchy where like the we'd all kind of in a depressionary kind of environment all kind of retreat into autarky and like all would have our own thing what i think scholars miss is is the fifth idea which is which is the bitcoin standard right so that's that's my perspective is there's a fifth option um and it's driven by by one thing mainly not necessarily this like this thing you're seeing where sat the saudis are now dancing with the Chinese, like, you know, that, that would result that on its own would result maybe in a bipolar world, uh, in terms of currency or even in a more autarkic world. But the, the, the real

thing that happened that, that points us more to the Bitcoin standard is the weaponization of X reserves. Because if you're China or Russia, like if you're China and now you want to invade Taiwan, you know, that the moment you invade Taiwan, a trillion dollars of your assets are going to get frozen. So all of these other countries, whether they be large or small, or even if they're allies of ours, even if you're Europe, they're thinking now, oh, my God, like we don't actually own our savings. So inevitably, you're going to see a diversification in the coming decade of central banks into outside money, into something that someone else that is not a liability, into something that someone else doesn't control. Now, is that gold?

is that some sort of commodity flow is that Bitcoin, we will see. But my thesis is that Bitcoin makes the most sense due to how flexible it is. Like Putin's got all this gold, it's in a basement in Moscow. It's not very practical. Like what does he got to put on a truck

to send to India to buy something? Like he could email it with Bitcoin. It's just like, once you start grasping how revolutionary Bitcoin is, you start to see it fitting into this model. And look, the world's just, the answer, dear Bitcoiners, is the world's not ready for Bitcoin yet.

They don't get it. So even though we have these like, we were watching history happen, we're kind of like sitting here in our little bubble being like, wow, that would be a really interesting thing for Bitcoin to be used for. But like the world's just not ready for it yet. Bitcoin's not big enough.

There's not enough liquidity. Not enough people trust it. It's just not right. It's not there yet. But as you know, Parker says, gradually then suddenly, like eventually it's going to be there and it's going to take its place. And my general thesis would be eventually

central bank reserves are are probably either bitcoin dominant or even just fully btc and then everything else is built on top i still think there'll be of course bond markets stock markets all kinds of debt instruments all kinds of insurance that i think all that's still going to exist in a bitcoin standard it's just gonna there's just gonna be like a like a restraint yeah there'll be hard reserves that you can verify are there and restrain easily the expense and i I think the way it might pan out is I've learned a lot about this possibility from the research I did for the super imperialism piece, which is which is basically an essay about how did the U.S. government kill gold as a competitor to the dollar? And, you know, after World War One, there was this thing called the gold exchange standard, which really reflected what Bretton Woods would be. And that's the idea of like a handful of people issuing liabilities that are pegged to a commodity.

right? So don't use the gold itself, but you'd use dollars, which are pegged to gold, right? So what maybe happens here is like a Bitcoin exchange standard for certain countries. So maybe you would have a country whose liabilities are redeemable for some amount of Bitcoin. Okay. Just like, just like Bretton Woods, where let's say it's, you know, I'll just, you know, you think about something like this, like a thousand dollars per hundreds of Toshis, or you'd figure out some exchange rate, like $35 per ounce of gold. And, you know, dollars would have to be redeemable at that rate. And if, if, if this would be agreed upon, it would cause a natural balancing of trade and, and, and harmony among nations, really. I mean, that's, that was the dream of the bank core

that, um, and Luke describes this well, like, and so does Lynn and many others, but like the, The general concept of trade is quite simple. Like if you're a country that's, you know, basically if your exports are doing really well, you start to earn more money and then your money gets more valuable and then your exports start to become less competitive and then you sell less.

And it's all just a balancing act. Like international monetary flow is a natural balancing act, except for the reserve currency. This is the Triffin dilemma, except for the dollar right now. We are in this unique position where like the more powerful the dollar gets,

the more debt we have. It's the total opposite. For any other country, the more valuable their currency gets, the less competitive their exports get. And it's a natural balancing act. It's something that like ebbs and flows. It's actually kind of a beautiful thing

when you think about it. But this dollar structure has ruined that for us at least. And everybody else needs dollars. So we have this, you look at any of these graphs of like net import export position, and it's like, we're kind of balanced until the petrodollar system begins. And then it's like, it's insane. So, you know, we, the idea would be moving back to some sort of standard where there are still obviously dominant nations and there are still fiat's that are more dominant than others, but they're like kind of pegged to some amount of Bitcoin. so you know i think that countries like the united states china russia will eventually have to establish a bitcoin position potentially through a national mining um effort potentially through

just straight like they might just spend their fiat down and buy bitcoin this is this is what like you know what countries like russia would do the the reason so the government was printing rubles to buy bitcoin to buy gold off the private market right yeah so you might see that and of course we all know what happens to the bitcoin price in this in this circumstance but like i just view that as inevitable i think that that's so obvious that that's eventually going to happen i think so i think it's inevitable too however i don't think that in the u.s particularly again i don't think the treasury or the fed is ever going to muster up the the confidence to do that because they're so hubristic and egotistical and worried about their reputation but i do think so i so what

you just described there how finney wrote about it in december 2010 the free banking system essentially so i i think i would where i would sort of differ from the explanation that you laid out is i think we'll see the free market create these these basically uh currencies or monies on top of bitcoin like paper bitcoin in a free banking type system yeah they were you know the we've had free banking exist in canada in the 1800 scotland as well and bitcoin actually does provide the perfect reserve asset to try to restart a free banking system globally and and so what i think is going to happen here in the united states and already is happening and most people don't realize it yet is the energy sector is going to force the issue it's going to force

america to adopt a bitcoin standard because bitcoin mining like you just said we don't need a national mining effort. What we just need to do is keep allowing the private sector to integrate Bitcoin mining operations into their stack. They're going to start

getting Bitcoin as a treasury asset on their balance sheets. And then, particularly oil and gas companies are the ones that I've spoken to that are most open to this. They'll start asking to get paid in Bitcoin.

And they'll realize the value of their natural gas getting converted into sats and see how much more value that's driving. Yeah, and then the equities in these companies will rise over time. Yes, yes. And then they'll, and then energy is the base of what we have today. And like, it's going to be extremely hard for the U.S. government to go to the people providing the country with energy and say, hey, you got to stop this Bitcoin thing. They're going to be like, hey, we're providing energy and this Bitcoin thing is really good for our business. You really do not want to prevent us from doing this. I think short term, you're exactly right that that will happen.

But let's be realistic. Not every country is a free market capitalist structure. And a lot of these countries are going to have coercive or not. No, we've already seen it in Venezuela. Yeah, they're going to have nationalized mining operations. Now, the other thing to think about is that... Yeah, that was a purely American perspective. Yeah, but also it could...

I mean, look, the EU didn't shoot itself in the face yesterday. and they did not ban proof of work. So maybe you'll see some European innovation, who knows? I think that this whole thing with the invasion of Ukraine has been quite instructive for the German people in terms of like, they need energy sovereignty and they need to innovate in this area. And I think people will figure out that

if they're just smart and self-interested, they will figure out that Bitcoin mining is a very important part of any innovative electric grid. Like this is just key. So, um, you'll see, I think more come online there as well. And, and, and we'll have to, we'll have to see, but that's, that's short term, longer term, you start thinking about taxation, right? So longer term, it's like, well, the state, um, at some point is not going to want, it's

not necessary. I mean, even though that the collection of taxation and fiat drives the value of that fiat, eventually it's going to also want your Bitcoin, right? So, so when we talk about a state, even a, even a, even the United States fed, like building up a reserve, I mean, it may do that in two ways. So, first of all, it's got all this Bitcoin from the Bitfinex hack. What is going to happen with that?

But, like, technically, that's currently on the US government's balance sheet. Like, are they going to give it to, you know, the Bitfinex company made his hole because of this Leo token thing. So, you know, it made people who chose to go that route hole. We'll see. There's a number of things

to consider with this. What is it? 90,564 Bitcoin, I believe. It's a massive amount. Billions of dollars of bitcoin yeah uh bitfenix and the u.s government do not like each other uh-huh they uh they are embroiled in in in battles over tether specifically like you said people were made whole i think bit like if we're just it's bitfenix is bitcoin they should get it back but i i do see it as a political chess piece that the u.s may just be like sorry bitfenix well i just it'll be so interesting to watch what they do because if they don't decide and this will happen probably

in the next 12 months if they don't decide if they decide for whatever reason they're not giving it back to Bitfinex okay are they going to sell it for their own fiat currency

which would be obviously you and I would think that would be a dumb decision for them but they might which would indicate they haven't figured it out yet

or they just hold it they've already done it before like the Silk Road coins they sold 30,000 of them at $300 yeah but look I will be

generous with people who didn't understand Bitcoin pre a couple years ago you know what I mean it was so risky then no I agree i'm saying hopefully the silk road auction is a massive lesson for these people and at that in

the government where they're like all right yeah we sold all this at 300 now it's hovering around 40k like either way what i'm saying is there's different ways that the us government may build a position it might be through confiscation and crime enforcement it might be through mining it might just be through taxation like again if you're a citizen and you have the option You're never going to choose willingly, though, to pay your taxes in Bitcoin, like I would imagine. No, that's... If you could, if you had the option of having fiat also. Yeah, yeah.

So they may offer a discount. What I generally predict is like, and the reason why I don't think that we go the fate of gold, like gold failed because it became centralized in the hands of custodians and governments and was unable to be a restraint on spending. The reason I think Bitcoin is different is because it's actually held by the people, not by governments. It's, it's, it's, that's why that not your keys thing is so important. That's why it was so ingrained in whatever Satoshi wrote. Not your keys, not your coins. Not your keys, not your coins. Get your Bitcoin off the exchanges.

Get them off the exchanges. I mean, we need you to, because this is how we defend ourselves from this happening again. But if we are sufficiently in control, the people, the users, the people, the world control this thing, then, then there is no possibility for demonetization. We, we have a shield to, to defend ourselves. And, and that's kind of what really drives this idea of the Bitcoin peace theory is that it's not this thing where the, you know, Europe and in America,

they were, oh, we'll just go off the gold standard. You won't be able to just go off the Bitcoin standard. That's not how it'll work because you won't own all the gold. You won't own all the Bitcoin. So you won't be able to do that. You'll be like actually limited. So we may actually live in this world

where policymakers are actually limited by the monetary system because they don't control it, which is a beautiful thing in my view. It'll force them to be better governors. It'll force them to be more responsible. And especially with regard to war, So that's kind of the thesis.

And I think what drives that eventually is merchant adoption. Like basically, we're already starting to see this, but what brings Bitcoin out of just a simple store of value technology into an actual currency, a money that we use is merchant adoption, is merchants saying, you know what? I don't want your dollars. I would rather have your Bitcoin. This is Thier's law.

It's like the opposite of Gresham's law, right? This is actually where the good money drives out the bad. We see this in dollarizing countries, right? And this is kind of where I see us eventually going is merchants saying, you know what? Like, I'll even take a discount. I'd rather have discounted Bitcoin than full price fiat. Like this is what may eventually start to happen

around the world. And at this point, you know, it starts to really be, things start to really move fast. You start to really think about what happens in a country like Venezuela, where people are like, oh, I don't really want the bolivars. I want to be paid in dollars. I don't care.

Like I don't want any, any, no amount of Bolivars will help here. Like not accepted anymore. Not even trillions. Yeah. You're going to have in the next five, 10 years, tons of businesses in the United States that basically are like, I don't want any dollars. I only want to be paid in Bitcoin, right? You know, pay me in Bitcoin is going to become like more of an obvious thing.

So that's, that's this long-term backdrop to what I've been trying to describe. But essentially, you know, the idea is that both state, state actors and non-state actors start moving more towards Bitcoin monetary standard. And I think it helps address the risks, the undemocratic risks of what fiat central banking has done to democracy with regard to these forever wars. And ironically, and a lot of Bitcoiners

obviously would disagree with me, but I think it actually strengthens democracy rather than dilutes it into some sort of like city-state thing. And I appreciate that perspective from a lot of people in the community. they think we're gonna go into like a kind of a fractured kind of localized thing, which may certainly happen.

I'm one of those people. Yeah, yeah. But like it also just, if we're gonna have democracies at scale, this makes them more responsible. Like it limits what they can do, which I'm quite excited about. So that's kind of the idea of Bitcoin peace theory

is it prevents unnecessary wars. Yeah. And for people saying like, Bitcoin can never do this. Bitcoin can't work. It doesn't work. What do they need to do? You read the book.

check your financial privilege yeah i'm happy to um say that i published this book again it has some of the in some of the chapters reflect some of the writings that we've been discussing here what's it like writing a book yeah i mean i know you participated in a little bitcoin book but yeah this is you know this was my book uh it's hard work it takes uh an enormous amount of time and it relies on the generosity of so many other people so when i wrote this book this is a book That's a collection of my reporting from around the world that looks at financial repression, monetary history and global Bitcoin adoption over the last two years.

And this book is is the product of, yes, a lot of my like burning the midnight oil or, you know, early in the morning, late at night, like whenever I can just reading books, taking advantage. Thank you very much for CyHub. CyHub is amazing. CyHub is a is a resource, just if you don't know, that is run by a communist in Kazakhstan, who makes it JSTOR articles

and research papers available for free to everybody. And I think it's an amazing gift to the world. And she runs on Bitcoin because she doesn't, her bank accounts got screwed up. So you should donate to Sci-Hub. I think it's important. But it gives me the ability to like, for example, I can read a paper on German macroeconomic policy in 1963.

Like I can, you can go and do that through JSTOR. Like it's impossible otherwise. They drove Aaron Schwartz to suicide for trying to democratize this information. People are monsters. So Sci-Hub, just many books, many, many JSTOR articles, and then interviews. Like the generosity of so many people around the world who gave me their time and perspective and told me about why money was broken and why did they turn to Bitcoin. So the book goes through stories from Nigeria and Palestine and Cuba and Sudan and Afghanistan

and El Salvador and so many other places. And I try to kind of basically pair this idea of like checking your financial privilege, which is basically like, you know, look, you're probably someone who was born into, you know, a premium fiat currency and everything kind of probably works for you. But like, that's not the case

for like most people around the world. Most people are either born into an authoritarian regime or a weaker currency. and for them like bitcoin is has been like very very very powerful and it will continue to be very very powerful i mean just think about like its impact in ukraine and russia right now so um the book is uh uh really proud to have it out uh again it's to the thanks of so many people who've supported me on the journey including you marty and matt and your team um and doing a book party and signing at Bitcoin 2022. And we'll be, we'll be, we'll be shilling it. One thing that's

really cool is that we're turning the opening chapter into an animated short, which will, I think, debut at the conference or around then. So we're working on that. And I have the voices of the actual people who are in the story. It's going to be, it's going to be very cool. So we've got that coming. And yeah, look, it's a book that's for curious minds that want to learn more about the actual impact this thing is having outside of our country. I do have a whole chapter about the United States. I interview Isaiah Jackson and someone who immigrated to our country recently. We talk about how Bitcoin is actually quite a really strong kind of affirmation of American values of free speech property, private property, and open capital markets. And we talk

about how Bitcoin is actually really American at its roots. America, the idea, not America, the execution, right? So, you know, this whole Nixon and Kissinger petrodollar bullshit, like that's not American. Washington and Jefferson would have said, fuck that. So, you know- We got Jefferson's the ordeal of liberty right here. Yeah, I mean, the founding fathers

were very suspicious of centrally planned money. So it's like, okay, you know, and I know Hamilton's been lionized lately through the play and everything. It's a great play. But, you know, he was in the minority camp, these people that wanted to have total control over all the money. A lot of the founders were like, nah. So I look in one of the chapters looks into this and we talk about how Bitcoin maybe can even improve some of the things that that America has have gone wrong here, too.

So it's not just, you know, in dictatorships far away. Bitcoin's having a huge impact in in cities across the United States and communities here, obviously. So so it's a global book. It's a global book. Yeah, go, you can pick it up on Amazon. Yep, it'll be out soon. In a couple of days, it'll be available on the Bitcoin Magazine website

and you'll be able to buy in Bitcoin, which obviously would be cool. And yeah, I mean, you know, this is a book that you can hand to people who refuse to see the value in Bitcoin, especially when we talk about Bitcoin mining. If you don't understand that Bitcoin is valuable, then you're of course gonna think

it's a waste of energy or electricity. So this is step one. You have to understand that Bitcoin is a humanitarian tool and it's being used by tens of millions of people around the world who don't have the privilege you do. Once you are there, then we can have adult conversations about Bitcoin, right? Yes.

Yeah. I mean, it provides desperately needed utility that does not exist outside of the Bitcoin. I mean, it's very simple. How are you going to send money to your family in Russia right now? You can't, okay? You can with Bitcoin.

So it's like, you know, I think it's just time for people to start acknowledging this stuff. But at the end of the day, it also, you know, it hits the margins of this story I've been telling, you know, today about the history of money and where we're headed. And ultimately, and what we can conclude with this, like, I think it's deeply unfair that 4% of the world's population controls the money for everybody. And Jack Dorsey said this in his recent interview with Michael Saylor. If you listen carefully, he basically said he didn't think it was fair for Nigerians that they'd be basically controlled by decisions

of a small group of elites in Washington. People who sit around the table at the Fed, people aren't even really elected essentially, and they get to set the price of money for the whole world. This is insane. So in a hundred years, we're gonna look back at that and say like, this was crazy. But it's how it works.

And it's, you know, it's deeply self-interest. Like they will do what the elites in America want. Screw everybody else. As Nixon famously said, I don't give a shit about the lira. He said that after when they closed the gold standard. So the book, like ultimately, yes, it's about like sympathizing

with your fellow human around the world, but it's also this deep reflection on what it's been like to be someone who's been a beneficiary of the dollar hegemonic system and knowing and trying to be humble about the fact that that's going to come to an end. Yeah. Where do we want to go moving forward?

Essentially, Bitcoin allows us to transition to a new incentive system if you really just want to distill to what it is at the end of the day, an incentive system that does not allow for the petrodollar system that we've lived under

over the last number of decades to proliferate and perturb the balance of the world the way it has. Yeah, let's go back to a system that Adams and Jefferson would have appreciated and not one that Nixon

and Kissinger came up with. And that's really what it's all about. Let's do it. Well, Alex, it's always a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a blast. Yeah, we're gonna have to do it again. We got the studio here now.

I'll be coming to Austin a couple of times a year. So we'll do a lot of live shows. Oh yeah. I know you guys are doing a presentation soon at South by Southwest, right? Yeah, we got a couple of panels here. We're bringing the topic of freedom to the crowds. and yeah, it's exciting to be here.

We come every year, but I intend to do more with the community here. It's just so supportive. It's great. I mean, Bitcoin Commons is an incredible space you guys have here. But, you know, thanks again and I look forward to seeing you in Miami.

All right. Well, I'll see you in Miami. Go buy the book. Peace and love, freaks. Okay.