We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC107: The Real Impact of the IMF and World Bank w/ Alex Gladstein and Sam Callahan (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. This week, I have a really powerful interview with Mr. Alex Gladstein and Sam Callahan. For most people that participate in financial markets, they've most likely heard of the IMF or the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But they're probably used to hearing stories about how beneficial they are for all these different countries around the world. Well, Alex Gladstein is part of the Human Rights Foundation, and he's about the

Starting point is 00:00:30 to tell you some insane stories in research he's done on these global NGOs that contradict a whole lot of conventional thinking. Additionally, Sam Callahan has spent numerous years researching the IMF and World Bank, and he joins me to help ask questions of Alex's research. This is an episode you're not going to want to miss. So with that, let's get started and thanks for joining us. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. All right. Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here with Alex and Sam. Alex, welcome back to the show. Sam, welcome back to the show. I'm very excited to get into this. Very happy to be here, Jens. Yeah, happy to be here, guys. Alex, this is for, I'm somewhat speechless. This article you wrote is an absolute whopper. I just recently tweeted it out. And I said, I think every world leader needs to read what you put out here. I mean, I, I, The first thing I did is I copied all of it over to, and people can see this on YouTube that are watching, I copied this over to a Word document. I printed the whole thing out and then I just started reading and highlighting everything.

Starting point is 00:01:53 Yeah. I think it came. It's like 55 pages in single space. Mine was more than, yeah, mine was more than that. I want to say I was close to like 80 pages when I printed it off. And the first thing I'm thinking is this is a book. This is a manuscript of everything that highlights and shows. showcases what has happened since inception of the IMF and the World Bank.

Starting point is 00:02:19 Yeah, I'm happy to share that. I will be making it into a book and really releasing it early next year. But in the meantime, I really just had to get out. You know, I didn't want to wait. There were a couple reasons for that. And I realized for the guests, we haven't even gotten into like what this is yet, but I promise we will. One of the reasons I really wanted to get it out was, number one,

Starting point is 00:02:39 we're kind of seeing a repeat of what happened in the early 80s. with the third world debt crisis right now. So you're seeing the IMF go in and try to bail out all kinds of governments, ranging from Egypt to Sri Lanka to Ghana, etc, etc. The dollar system is under duress. The value of the dollar versus the other fiats, as we all know, is shooting up just like it did in the early 80s. It's causing a huge, huge stress for these weaker fiat currencies.

Starting point is 00:03:08 They are unable to service their debt. and they, you know, quote unquote, need some help. So that's kind of when the IMF comes in, right? And you're seeing that and it just feels like deja vu from, you know, everything that I've read about what, you know, sort of started to transpire in their early 80s. So that's one reason I wanted to get it out there is that it just feels like where, you know, history rhymes.

Starting point is 00:03:27 It feels like we're entering into a similar time. And it would be really good for people to understand the dynamics behind that. The second thing is next week, you know, recording this December 1st, this coming weekend next week, I'll be in Accra, Ghana for the Africa Bitcoin conference. And I tried to, you know, basically concluded the essay in part by referencing Ghana, diving into Ghana's history a little bit. Ghana is a country in West Africa that suffered under British colonialism and then, you know, has had an interesting upsides, downsides, you know, rollercoaster story of independence ever since. But along the way, it had, you know, 16 IMF loans, essentially.

Starting point is 00:04:07 And as we'll discuss, that essentially means the country was sort of like, strong. structurally adjusted to 16 times. And we'll get into what that means, but it's kind of jarring for the people who live there. And they just got a visit a few weeks ago. And they're about to be bailed out for sort of the 17th time by the IMA. And, you know, that entails a visit by these, you know, bureaucrats to Akra, to Ghana, to discuss with the government, you know, a deal, essentially, where they're going to receive a loan. And in return, they have to sort of, like, change the economy of the country.

Starting point is 00:04:37 And, you know, there's a lot of conditionality there. And then it's such a really vivid contrast from the Africa Bitcoin conference where a bunch of us are also flying to Ghana. But instead of dictating to that country, how it can run its industries and imposing like all kinds of austerity measures on that country, we're going to be sharing information with people about how to use open source software to achieve economic freedom. And I just thought that was such an interesting kind of timely occurrence. So for those two reasons, I just really wanted to get the thing out there. But it's not like I rushed it. I've been working on it since the summer. And as far as like one single thing that's cohesive, it's the longest thing I've ever written.

Starting point is 00:05:15 And it's also just sort of the longest ever worked on something. My book and other things I've written have kind of been different stories tied together. This one is kind of one narrative that I worked on. And yeah, I'm super excited to release it. It's very dark and grim. But I do think there can be some change. And if anything, I hope our conversations today can just shed some light on this system and the history, there is no like solution to what the IMF and World Bank have done and what they

Starting point is 00:05:40 kind of stand for. But I think it starts with knowledge and it starts with us understanding what happened. And then maybe we can work from there. I think that's about as best as I can ask. I'll just, I'm just going to throw this out here. I think this is a masterpiece. I think the organization of it in which you go through and lay out, you know, line by line, And it is just so well constructed is what I guess is what I'm trying to say. So let's start here. We need to start off kind of defining what their objective or what they think their objective is.

Starting point is 00:06:17 And when we look at them, what we're really talking about, IMF, World Bank, working together, how you defined it in your article, you said their objective is to help raise living standards in developing countries by channeling financial resources from developed countries to the developing world is what they would claim. And so then immediately after that, in your article, you pose the question, what if the reality is the opposite, that they're actually doing the exact opposite of that? So walk us through why you pose that question. Because I think for a person who's hearing this from the outside, they're just like, come on,

Starting point is 00:06:54 there's no way that they're literally doing the opposite of what they're mandated to do. Yeah. So I'll give a little overview and then be, you know, we can get Sam involved. I'd love to hear, you know, his thoughts on this as well. But essentially, I began my journey as a curious observer of the IMF and World Bank. I, like many other people in the Bitcoin macroeconomic space, I kind of had a feeling they were up to no good, especially the IMF. I, of course, along the way over the last few decades had read things here and there. But I don't know what it was, but in late summer, I just started to realize that I didn't really,

Starting point is 00:07:29 understand, first of all, really the difference between the two very well, and I didn't really understand their history comprehensively. And I started to look around. What triggered my essay was the fact that I started to look around for books on the topic, and there just are very, very few. That was what was interesting to me. I'm like, wait a second. There seems to be, you know, so few books on this. And I was curious about that. And I did end up digging up some incredible books on the topic, but they're older. They're from the 70s, 80s, 90s. There isn't a whole lot from the last few decades. And I also found that, you know, interestingly, and maybe not surprisingly, most of the

Starting point is 00:08:07 critical thinking about the bank and the fund were sort of done from the leftist perspective, like the Marxist perspective, which I guess makes sense in some ways. There's also some good libertarian analysis, which we'll get to. But, you know, it had kind of been reaching, the analysis and the debate around the bank reached a crescendo in the 90s. And then it's really been very little ever since. And it just is not part of our disqual. course these days. And when I started to realize that there wasn't a lot written about it,

Starting point is 00:08:34 and then I started to realize when I started doing some kind of cursory reading of, well, what's the structure, how were they found it, what did they do? When I realized that they were bigger than ever before and that they were kind of more active than ever before, I was like, wait a second, I need to learn more here. So I guess to go back, and I appreciate your kind words about the structure, what I ended up doing is a process of just a lot of research in interviews that amounted to, I don't know, four to five times the volume of words that are in the essay. And just, I trimmed down for the final piece.

Starting point is 00:09:07 And I originally was thinking I could get it to like 10,000 words. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to write what I need to write. And we'll see how long it is. And it ends up being 22, 23,000 words. I was joking with Lynn Alden the other day that I kind of like, you know, tying her for her belongings piece. But yeah, I took my time and I think I'm happy.

Starting point is 00:09:25 I did so. Because you really need to allow for a lot of these examples. Yeah. So the listener, the reader, the listener can understand. Alex, the amount of sources that you provide to all of the examples that you throw out there, which you throw out a lot of evidence here, is just incredible. I mean, before you joined us, Sam and I were talking, and we were just kind of laughing. We're like, my God, this was insane. Two things.

Starting point is 00:09:54 I mean, what I was discussing today with my publishers, I want to do a really nice bibliography when I release this so we can have kind of all the books, at least in an orderly way, so the reader, when they're done, they can look at all the books. And I really want people to read some of these books. Some of these books are just amazing. And you're not going to agree with everything in these books, but they really are on to something. So I had the books. And then, you know, one absolute treasure that I encourage Bitcoiners to support is something

Starting point is 00:10:20 called SciHub. And SciHub has been like such a crucial thing for me. I know that this is sort of deep in Bitcoin culture because of Aaron Swartz and so many other people in Bitcoin who promote free knowledge. But, you know, TLDR, the academic, academia has a monopoly over research papers and they make you pay a ton of money to read them, which is so self-defeating from my perspective. So there's this communist woman in Kazakhstan who runs this website called Syhub, and she's got like every single J-Store research gate page.

Starting point is 00:10:51 paper you can imagine. And you just go to SciHub and you paste in the link and you can read the whole thing. So this is the only way to learn about like what's going on in structural adjustment in Argentina in 1961. Like you're not, you're not going to, you know, unless you're willing to go to a library and do microbeche stuff. Like this is this is how you do it. SciHub. So I was able to read literally dozens and dozens and dozens of, you know, really terrific old detailed articles about the first five, six decades of the fun this way. So what's cool is. they take Bitcoin donations. So I would encourage Bitcoiners to support Sihub and open and free knowledge. But anyway, what this revealed to me was that at the beginning, you know, look, the bank and fund

Starting point is 00:11:31 were created in Bretton Woods in 44, as most your listeners probably know, as two of the key pillars of the new American financial world order. And initially, the bank was a development bank and it was supposed to fund infrastructure projects in Europe and Japan to help them rebuild after WorldWorks too. And the fund was supposed to address balance of payments issues. And this is usually a arose when, for example, a country's imports started to outpace its exports and no longer pay its step back. So the idea was that the IMF would step in, give them alone, try to get them back on their feet. So, you know, the initial creation, I don't really find anything kind of sinister there. For their first, let's say, 15 years, they performed this function reasonably well,

Starting point is 00:12:11 and they helped Europe sort of get back on its feet now that there's some red flags and exceptions there. But I'm willing to grant the institutions that. Let's put it that way. But what sort of ends up happening is like once Europe and Japan kind of recover like by the late 50s and are starting to really, you know, dominate again, the focus of the bank and fund shift to the emerging markets or what was called the third world. And I, you know, I used the third world as a term kind of loosely overlapping with the developing world and also poor countries. I mean, because there isn't really a good term, you know, there isn't really a perfect description of what I'm talking about. But what I'm really talking about is the country

Starting point is 00:12:50 that are outside of what was then the Soviet Union and the United States, Europe, Japan, and sort of, let's say, like former British possessions like Canada and Australia. We're talking about the rest of the world, and that was called the third world for a long time. So I'm comfortable using that phrase, I know it's still dated, but I think it's pretty accurate for us today, at least for our conversation, especially because so much of the work, the quote-unquote work that IMF World Bank did was during that time. But what I noticed was that the outcome of their policies really changed when they started to focus on the developing world. And one of the really striking things is that the research reveals that the world is not a free market.

Starting point is 00:13:35 I mean, that's one of the biggest things I learned from doing this. And I kind of knew that before. I mean, I've written about how the dollar became the reserve currency and how the U.S. government sort of killed gold and all these things. but this really opened my eyes in terms of just how sort of centrally planned everything is. And then you start asking big questions about, well, how, you know, what is what can capitalism be if everything is so centrally planned, right? So what I'm getting at is after World War II, all of the like industrial countries, all of the first world countries, they're often called the global north, the west, etc.

Starting point is 00:14:08 They used like a variety of protectionist, anti-capitalist, statist measures to protect their economy. these. So this happened in like the 40, late 40s, 50s, early 60s, especially. Some of these things have never completely faded away. Like, for example, the U.S. still has, you know, massive agricultural subsidies, all kinds of like tariffs on different kinds of goods from abroad, like steel. These kind of fade and they're cyclical, but they're always with us. But for those first few decades, these things were like super intense. And it was because these industrial countries, these power, the powers wanted to protect their economies as they were rebuilding. And the thing is, you know, I'm a free market guy at heart. Like I believe in the promise of capitalism. That's

Starting point is 00:14:54 like really what I believe in is free markets and free trade. But when you have the powerful countries closing their doors to trade, right, and erecting barriers. And then what they end up doing in the 60s and 70s and 80s is going to poor countries and saying, hey, you guys have to do X, Y, and Z, and we'll get into that to accept these loans, the IMF and the bank would go to these countries and say, look, you want this money, you can take it, but only if you do these things, if you restructure your economy in these ways. And basically, they were getting these economies to, quote, unquote, like liberalize it and open up, but it wasn't a fair ask because the Western rich countries weren't doing the same thing. So it's kind of like a stack deck.

Starting point is 00:15:34 It's not a fair playing field. So while I oppose the solutions, quote unquote, from a lot of the writers that I quote from because they tend to be socialist and Marxist folks. I think their solutions are bad. Like, you know, they tend to be like, you know, let's just give government all the power. And I'm like, wait a second, aren't you telling like, isn't your whole point that all these third world countries are dictatorships and corrupt and even rights abusers? And now you're saying we should give them all the power back. Like, I don't think they ever had a good solution.

Starting point is 00:16:02 Let's put it that way. But I think their observations are really correct in criticizing kind of what the bank and fund were doing. And the reality is, you know, these. countries were kind of stuck in between basically like austerity measures that would change these economies in these poor countries to focus on exports over consumption, almost like a private equity firm would look at a corporation when it's about to do a takeover. They'd be like, how can we reduce expenses, right? That's kind of like what the bank and fund do when they look at

Starting point is 00:16:32 a poor country. They're like, okay, how can we reduce expenses? And it's like they don't think about the social cost of that, right? Yeah. Yeah. So you have that kind of perspective. and you have all kinds of favorable conditions for multinational corporations from the West or the North coming in. So understandably, people don't like that. But the other option was like some socialist dictator or whatever. So that was also bad. So, you know, it was really tough for a long, long time. I think one of the reasons the system has never been stopped is because there really wasn't a good alternative.

Starting point is 00:17:06 and because every actor that had power wanted to keep it going. So these third world crooks and dictators were super, they were delighted to be adjusted and take the money because they weren't thinking 10 years, 20 years down the road. They were just like, you know, living in the now and buying weapons and palaces and, you know, Feronica states and car fleets and expensive wine and whatever with the money. And the creditors to the bank and the fund were very happy to make their money

Starting point is 00:17:36 and they didn't want any bankruptcies. They didn't want any of these governments to go bankrupt. They wanted to preserve their balance sheets. So everybody had an incentive to keep the lending party going. And I think that's still true today. And it's going to require a paradigm shift to change it. But that's kind of my overview of the situation. And for when I really, what I really,

Starting point is 00:18:06 started to discover was that, you know, again, once the bank and the fund were like, you know, retargeted towards the third world, they started to engage in behavior that resembled old school colonial dynamics, basically. And that's really what a lot of my essays about is the fact that for hundreds of years, old powers had this sort of conveyor belt of either free or cheap resources and cheap labor from these countries in the periphery. These core countries had all kinds of stuff flowing in to help subsidize the way of life in London and Berlin and Paris and Washington, etc. And then between 1920 and 1960, colonization really kind of like, you know,

Starting point is 00:18:51 it went extinct essentially, like true colonialism, let's say. And that was a really large resource flow that was cut off from, you know, societies that had become used to that. And there's an interesting theory I uncovered when I was doing the research from, again, some Marxists, so you know, take it with a grain of salt. But I thought it was really interesting that, you know, we always debated about what caused the Great Depression. And of course, it's usually, well, is it because we left the gold standard or is it because we didn't leave it soon enough, right? That's usually the sort of Austrian versus Kensian debate, right? Well, these folks say, well, it's also because the West just lost like a massive conveyor belt of resources that it was getting.

Starting point is 00:19:33 like essentially for free or for very cheap. And that resource low came to a halt, you know, started to grind to a halt after the 20s. And I thought that was, that's very convincing to me. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. So I think that that's also an interesting factor probably in the Great Depression that we don't, we don't quite think about too often. But in any case, the great powers at the time, you know, face this dilemma as they were pulling away from their former imperial possessions.

Starting point is 00:20:01 The 1960s kind of known as the official end of colonialism, right? And that's exactly when the bank and the fund shifted their attention to the third world. So they started basically doing, and again, I don't know if they sat around in a room and like planned this, but the outcome was similar in that, whereas before the British Empire would go to some country and, you know, lose the resources and bring them back to Britain. Now it was done without violence, right? but what ended up happening was a loan was extended, let's say from the World Bank to a similar country, for the construction of, let's say, a hydroelectric dam and a train and a rail system

Starting point is 00:20:42 and a port. And that would be to extract mineral resources from a remote place, put it on a train, bring it to the port, and ship it to international markets. So the loan would be extended to a poor country, okay? So meaning that government now all of a sudden eventually is going to know principle and interest, right? So they're saddled with that. Meanwhile, the creditor nation that had paid for this through the bank or the fund,

Starting point is 00:21:04 their companies come in and do the work, right? So this is called like a double loan. So they come in and they're like paying out of one hand into the other, right? So the British, for example, would, you know, make the loan and then British companies would take the money and build it all. And then with the outcome, the structural outcome of what just happened, they'd be taking whether it be box site or gold or tin or copper, whatever, like right out of this country with no benefits to the local population right back to international markets. So in a way, my argument is that the bank and fund recreated the colonial drain dynamic

Starting point is 00:21:42 but without violence, without straightforward violence. Instead, they use debt as the weapon. And I think that was like, that was really, that was jarring for me when I realized that. So they're using debt to extract resources from the- Yeah. I mean, the two kind of big playbooks were first extraction, which usually came alongside with a healthy serving of environmental destruction and horrible labor conditions, let's say, human rights violations.

Starting point is 00:22:13 And then also, agriculture is always big, right? Agriculture is a much bigger force in the world than we give it credit for. I know there's a rising interest among some of the Bitcoin community in food and where food comes from, I think that's really important and healthy. Like food is so, so, so important. It is very rarely talk. Like agriculture is like this boring topic, but in reality, it's so, so, so important and it doesn't really get enough attention. And the U.S. has really, you know, focused a lot of its energy on shaping the world's agricultural policy post-World War II. So it's benefit. And really what you end up having here is that if the bank, you know,

Starting point is 00:22:50 wasn't doing, wasn't financing resource extraction, what it was financing was what they called the modernization of agriculture. And what that would mean is you would be engineering a society that used to do consumption in agriculture where you had a bunch of people that were very poor, but at least could feed themselves. And they were, you know, independent, let's say. And it transformed that society to a country, which is probably still very, very poor, let's say, especially given, you know, inflation over the decades.

Starting point is 00:23:18 But they can no longer grow food that they eat and they have to buy it from the market and they become reliant on the West. So the outcomes of this are completely staggering. Like Africa imports almost all the food that it eats. That is insane. This is one of the richest continents in the world in terms of agricultural capacity. It should be the breadbasket of the world. Instead, you know, it's been shaped so that all these poor countries in Africa

Starting point is 00:23:42 export things like cocoa, coffee, tea in East Asia would be things like palm oil, rubber. So the World Bank Loons would basically incentivize farm. to pick up and leave from growing, whether it be grains or cattle or whatever, you know, things that people actually eat and refocus them on exports. Aquaculture is really big. I talk about that, obviously, you know, so shrimp, fish, things like this that are that are not to be eaten by the locals, but are to be exported to wealthy countries. So the agricultural capacity is changed to benefit others around the world.

Starting point is 00:24:18 And in, sort of, in, and as a response to that, those countries now have to import. food. And this was a very conscious policy by the U.S. and by Europe in the 40s, 50s, 60s, they really, really wanted to plan markets for their own agriculture. As we all know now, as we've been debating for the last year and a half, especially after the invasion of Ukraine, it's all about food independence and energy independence, right? So this has been known for a long time, right? So the U.S. and Europe, you know, really understood this. And they shaped the world accordingly. And it's just, it's been a devastating outcome. And you have all these countries that have, again, really rich

Starting point is 00:24:59 traditions of food and extremely productive ways to grow food, efficient ways to grow food. And they've been engineered to grow stuff for us to consume. So that was, that's, that's been a really big realization for me. Let's put it that way. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right, I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is.

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Starting point is 00:29:17 Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. One of the things that I got out of this that I'd never thought about when thinking about the IMF and the World Bank. So Sam and I were talking out at L.A. about supply chains and how they're breaking down and how there's so much consolidation around the

Starting point is 00:29:45 world because of central banking policies that have consolidated enterprise and there's only a few vendors now that can supply whatever part of the supply chain you look into. You talk about this idea of monocrops, which you were just talking about, right? What I find so fascinating is what we're seeing at a company level inside of unique supply chains, you're talking about at a country level that because of the manipulation that was happening through the IMF and the World Bank has caused these nation states to have a monocrop, like they're just exporting shrimp. And this is all through, and I think this term is really important. And as I look at your entire article, I'm saying this idea of structural adjustment, loans that have loans that have these ties back to things that your G7 nation states want into the global economy.

Starting point is 00:30:51 And I really want to go down this path of the first example you have in the story with shrimp in Bangladesh. Yeah. Tell people this story so they can really wrap their head around this idea of structural adjustment, the damage that it does to the nation state because now they got this monocrop and they have no robust biodiversity of enterprise and business inside of their organic country. And they're relying on everybody else and they can't be self-sufficient. Tell us the story of the shrimp. Yeah. I wanted to start with Bangladesh. I just was so moved. this story. I came across it in a bunch of books written in 94 because that was the 50th anniversary of Bretton Woods. So there was a lot of retrospective material written at the time. And I just came

Starting point is 00:31:41 across this story. It wasn't super fleshed out, but it was a kind of a testimony of a worker in Bangladesh. And again, this was 94, so a long time ago, but talked about how, and I quoted from her, and it's just her testimony of how her life has changed because of the shrimp farming. And that was so powerful. So I wanted to open the essay with it because it's kind of this like grimly perfect, you know, example of structural adjustment. But basically like here was a country that, again, poor country, but pretty independent, had a very rough history in the 60s, 70s. Not only did it suffer enormously at the hands of colonialists, basically the British, you know, in pre-World War II, World War II, I learned in my research that in what is now Bangladesh, the British basically

Starting point is 00:32:28 took all the wheat from the local population to use it in the war theater in World War II and ended up starving millions of people. And Churchill and Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, were responsible for this. I learned about this. I did not know this. So Keynes was literally an architect of a massacre, you know, a mass atrocity of killing. millions of people. It's crazy. But, you know, these are people who had constantly been under foreign pressure. In the 70s, they had a huge, you know, war. I mean, there was a breakaway of what was then called East Pakistan. And people suffered again. And they had another famine where the U.S. government was involved, actually. And, you know, it was all Cold War politics, right?

Starting point is 00:33:16 So Bangladesh had been selling stuff to Cuba and Soviet Union. America didn't like that. So we, this was all Kissinger stuff. Like, we, we withheld grains from them. You know, by this time, by the 70s, we had, we had been pretty effective at becoming kind of the dominant, like, kind of controller of a lot of the world's food. This was obviously a strategy we used in the Cold War, but, you know, they were, like, they were in a tough place and they were running out of food. And the U.S. just, like, did not let the food in.

Starting point is 00:33:42 and this killed, like, another million people in the mid-70s. So this society was, had been through a lot. And to make matters worse, they always, They're hit by these crazy cyclones. So there's one cyclone in the 70s that killed a million people. It's like a deadly storm ever. And this is a low-lying country on the coast of the Bay of Bengal, and it's kind of, the Bay is shaped like a tunnel.

Starting point is 00:34:02 So these storms come in and they gain power as they move north, and they send these massive waves out over the population. A third of the population lives along the coast. So in the 60s, the authorities built like these big dikes to protect people. And then they had these like mangrove forests, which were the natural protection. So, you know, this was all they had. These were the defenses they had. And what ended up happening is the World Bank and IMF, you know, kind of take a look at Bangladesh in the 70s.

Starting point is 00:34:32 And they basically say, you know, you're not exporting enough. They had started to lend the lot to the country's autocratic rulers. And they would send teams of analysts and try to figure out, well, how can we generate more exports for this country so it can pay its debt back? Basically, that was sort of a deal. So they said, look, let's do aquaculture, let's do shrimp, because you guys have a lot of shrimp off your coast. So World Bank loans financed this in Bangladesh at the same time that the IMF was extending these structural adjustment loans, which were also sort of targeted at shaping the economy this way. What ends up happening is you have all these farmers who traditionally grow, again, like rice, cattle, etc.

Starting point is 00:35:15 They're on these low-lying parts of land near the ocean. A lot of it had actually been reclaimed through the dyke system. And now they're being incentivized to take out loans to upgrade their farms, quote unquote upgrade, by drilling holes in the dikes to let water in and they make ponds. And then they go into this often freezing water and they spend all day catching little shrimp. They call it shrimp fry. And then they bring the shrimp into these ponds and then they wait for the shrimp to grow. And then when they get big enough, they sell them to these like shrimp lords who then sell them to the government.

Starting point is 00:35:47 And then those go out to the international markets. So this is the change that that happened in the 70s and 80s, 90s in this area, did a couple of things. It really impoverished a lot of people because, again, these people had very little and they borrowed the money to change their farm in this way. And in many cases, like, it took them a long, long time to even pay back that initial loan. I have some data in my essay about this, but it's like in some cases, essentially they were experiencing wage.

Starting point is 00:36:17 depletion, like they were just sort of getting poor over time. And they were also depleting the environment around them, like, not only were the mangrove forests that protected them getting cut down, about half of them got cut down as a result of shrimp farming. And the dikes were getting damaged. So this left them really vulnerable to these storms, which keep happening. But also, like, the farmland itself became super salty because of all the water coming in. So rivers were destroyed, you know, a lot of like crop animals died. Like so, so basically this is like a, this is like an environmental disaster now. It does one thing.

Starting point is 00:36:53 It raises shrimp and, and shrimp is the second largest export today in Bangladesh. I mean, it's gone from something that was like a couple million dollars a year to, you know, an industry where it was like 80 or something, 80 million or yeah. No, I mean, I, um, it grew, group, national shrimp profits grew from 2.9 million and 73, which when these things sort of just start, these loans, to 90 million 86 to almost 600 million in 2012. So it's sort of an exponential rise in these profits. And again, after textiles, it remains the second largest export of this country. And again, these loans were taken by autocratic governments for the most part, who were not accountable to the people.

Starting point is 00:37:33 And I just think that this is a really vivid example of what structural adjustment is. Now, that's kind of like a detailed example of one country. Now, Alex, people would hear these numbers. This is important. People would hear those numbers and say, well, what's wrong with the numbers going from 1 million up to these really high numbers that you just said? Now, you talked about the damage that was done to the farmland and everything else, but I think for a listener that would hear that, I don't think that they understand that you're

Starting point is 00:38:02 just talking top line. You're not talking other impacts and the payback that's associated with the interest on these rolling loans, right? Like, there's a whole lot more to those numbers. Well, so first of all, like, well, let me just do a brief overview of structural adjustment. Then I'll explain why those numbers sound a lot more rosy than they really are, right? Okay. So structural adjustment, again, are loans given out primarily by the IMF ever since its inception

Starting point is 00:38:28 and then since 1980 by the World Bank. Before 80, the World Bank largely gave project and sector-specific loans that didn't really have conditionality. But since 80, these structural adjustment loans have been a big part of the World Bank's policy as well. These loans are attached to conditions. So basically, classic example would be a country like Indonesia in the 70s would have balance of payments crisis. The dictator would call the IMF.

Starting point is 00:38:55 IMF would fly in first class, business class. They never flown a flu economy. They always had a lot of perks. They came in. They'd iron out a deal and they would say, okay, you can have what was called like a standby agreement, which is like a line of credit. And you can draw that down at certain milestones. But you need to like fulfill these conditions to do some.

Starting point is 00:39:13 So, and these conditions were basically things that like would never fly in a Western country, right, would never fly like in a democracy where people could actually protest. But they'd be like, for example, currency devaluation, total kind of abolition of foreign exchange and import controls, shrinking of domestic bank credit, jacked up interest rates, jacked up taxes, and end to any sort of subsidies on food and energy, ceilings on wages, restrictions on government's spending and healthcare and education, favorable legal conditions for multinationals and then sort of selling off state enterprises that cheap prices. Now, some of your listeners may say, well, some of those things sound really good, like we're

Starting point is 00:39:51 free market people. But the problem is that is the double standards. Like, you have Britain coming into a country like Sri Lanka, for example, which used to give free rights to its people. Now, is giving free rights to your people a good economic idea? No, probably not. But, you know, you have a colonial power coming in or a former colonial power coming in and they give all kinds a free crap to their people. Not only do British enjoy free health care and all its other stuff, but a lot of their agricultural policy and stuff is basically subsidized by the government. So you have a total hypocrisy. You have a government that uses a lot of central planning to protect its economy, coming into a poor country and saying you can no longer do the same thing. And on top of that,

Starting point is 00:40:31 you have all the policies that Bitcoiners would find, you know, orifying like, you know, again, raised taxes, raised interest rates, currency to valuation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So essentially, the structural adjustment policy was meant to squeeze the poor country and to reduce consumption at the prioritization of exports. So when we go back to those numbers from Bangladesh, now that we know this, we're looking at, oh, like, there's a lot more exports happening. There's a lot more shrimp being sold. Well, what you don't realize, unless you dig into it, is that at the same time, there is a tremendous amount of debt being incurred. And the debt service is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So, for example, in the Bangladesh case, I'll just want to.

Starting point is 00:41:13 Because what's up here. Go ahead. What a people, where I think what people don't see is there is how many times the debt keeps getting rolled over. So it's almost like the first step. You had 10 structural adjustments. Yeah. Again, 10 times the government took got a bailout essentially and then agreed to restructure

Starting point is 00:41:30 its economy by the IMF between 72 to today. There's 10 times this has happened. So the debt, the foreign debt has gone from 140 million and 72 to almost 100 billion today, almost 100 billion. So yes, on one part of the balance sheet, you're seeing, you know, more profits from exports. But what you're not seeing, if you just look at that, is that a country is slipping further and further and further into an inescapable debt trap. And dependence on foreign imports for most of things.

Starting point is 00:42:04 foreign imports. So these governments, they were directed to focus on things like shrimp farming so that they could earn more hard currency. Remember, these countries can't do what the U.S. does. We can just print our Fiat Reserve global currency and buy whatever we want. But if Bangladesh wants to buy a tractor in the open market, they can't use their Fiat currency. It's not convertible worldwide. It's not, you know, convertible worldwide. So they have to get hard currency to buy that stuff. Oil, even. Same thing. Wheat, whatever. Like to buy stuff on the internet, markets, they can't use their own currency. They have to generate hard currency through exports to do it. So they're directed to generate more hard currency through exports so they can

Starting point is 00:42:43 pay back the debt service. That's the number of one line item of most of these poor countries when they sit down to pay their bill every month as a nation. It's debt service now. This wasn't the case 70 years ago. This is not natural. This is like the chart you have on it is crazy in the harder. Yeah. Yeah. I know. We'll get to that. But the point is that the income is not used to enrich the nation. It's not used to invest in infrastructure for the people. It's not used to raise living standards and become more prosperous. It goes to paying back debt to foreign creditors, number one. It goes to usually historically military stuff like these dictators were armed to the teeth. It goes to all kinds of graft to corruption. I mean, some of these dictators were notorious

Starting point is 00:43:26 for taking 20, 30 percent off the top of every loan they would receive. They would build palaces, have tigers and lions as pets, have 50 Mercedes, have yachts, castles in Spain, like the craziest corruption you've ever heard of. And also, it would be used to put down dissent. It would be used to build a big repressive police force because they didn't want people protesting against it. And, you know, again, you had this little dance between the IMF and World Bank, where the bank and the fund and their creditors, which were essentially the G5, like America, Japan, France, UK, Germany. They were making money and they were like really benefiting from extending these loans. And the local dictators, they were delighted to take the money because,

Starting point is 00:44:07 who knows, they probably weren't even going to be around when the debt had to be repaid, right? So the people who got screwed were the lower and middle classes in these poor countries in the third world, developing world. I mean, they were the ones who paid the price, but they had no voice. So again, that's why the system keeps going and going. So you literally have a global debt Ponzi bubble that's happened here. And the debt is exponential. So just for example, the debt incurred by, you know, these foreign countries is absolutely astounding. I mean, again, you go from, you know, a couple tens of millions of dollars of debt in some cases to, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of debt.

Starting point is 00:44:52 So, I mean, some of these numbers are probably going to shock people. But the external debt of developing countries since 1970 has increased from 46 billion for all of them. combined in 70 to 8.7 trillion. Okay. So they paid $4.2 trillion dollars on interest payments to loan. Okay. You know, and then there's one stat that... Those numbers are so high.

Starting point is 00:45:12 I don't think people can even wrap their head around how high there's... Yeah, I mean, it's a little intense, but one part of it that's incredibly difficult to understand is the fact that they kind of like approximate... If you think about the Marshall Plan, like, which helps... rebuild Europe during World War II, right? So you have the Marshall Plan, which, you know, was the equivalent of about $100 billion, I believe, today, right? So when you go ahead and look at the numbers for developing countries,

Starting point is 00:45:53 it's totally insane. So it's basically when you added up all of the flow of resources from poor countries to rich countries from 1960 to 2017, it's $62 trillion. So that's $620 Marshall Plans. So I think that the really big penny drop moments you realize is that the structural adjustment policies and these really engineering of these economies result in a reversal of the resource flow that you would assume. We're all brought up to believe kind of that like rich countries donate and they do charity

Starting point is 00:46:28 and they help out the poor countries. That's not true. actually happening is each year more than at this point by today, more than each year more than $2 trillion comes back to us. So for example, 2012, developing countries received $1.3 trillion. That's all income aid investment, but $3.3 trillion flowed back out to rich countries. So essentially, you know, like in any given year, you got developing countries sending like $2 trillion more than they received to the rest of the world. So this is them subsidizing our way of life, right? This is them supporting us. And I just don't think the average person in the West

Starting point is 00:47:06 understands that. And the actual like quantification of what that is is pretty jarring as well, like the drain itself. Like it's partly stuff and it's partly labor, right? So in 2015, the drain was 10.1 billion tons of raw materials and 182 million person years of labor. So that's 50% of all goods and 20% of all labor used by developed countries was drained from poor countries. So again, like, that's... And it's for monocrop type things that, you know, if you'd go into one of these countries, and I want you to frame how many countries we're talking about next, but if you would go into one of these countries, it would be almost like a plastic kind of economy. Like, here they are. They've got this one...

Starting point is 00:48:00 export or two exports that have been basically planned for them with a loan and a quote unquote gun to their head that they have to kind of go down this path because if they don't, they're going to go bankrupt, but here's this money. So you might want to start moving out on this. And so they build this whole infrastructure around this one thing. And then they become dependent on everything else. And I think that that was the thing that I took away from this that was just kind of mind-blowing for me as I'm reading scenario after scenario and example after example of how this is set up. Sam, did you have anything else that you wanted to point out on that particular kind of topic before we move on to the... Yeah, no, I think it's just so important what Alex said,

Starting point is 00:48:45 what happened in the 80s with the World Bank and the IMF during the Latin American debt crisis of how these loans started to... It basically changed from like project-based with the World Bank to influencing the policies of these governments. And how wrong that is. So you have this international organization who's influencing these sovereign governments and telling them what to do. And they're basically holding the money away

Starting point is 00:49:12 and they're in desperate need of these funds at this point. So they're basically negotiating with a gun to their head, essentially. And they're saying, oh, we're not going to give this to you unless you do this, this, this, this, this, and this. And what they're telling them to do is not actually good for their local economy. It's only good to benefit the multinational corporations as well as the foreigners, right?

Starting point is 00:49:35 So they're trying to open up their economies to allow foreigners to come in and buy things really cheaply. And so that's when things really started to change when the World Bank and the IMF in the 80s started to influence policy and basically push these neoliberal policies on these developing nations.

Starting point is 00:49:53 And so I just think that's such an, important point because it kind of led to all these other distortions and these developing markets and all of these problems and all of these riots and the amount of poverty that they caused, it was just tremendous. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer.

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Starting point is 00:53:36 We're working through a really large quantity of information here. So I appreciate the patience of the listener. But we're trying to hit the highlights here. But a couple of themes that I think are really important before you move on, credit. When we think of development economics and aid and assistance, I think people forget that a loan has to be repaid P&I, like the borrower has to pay back more than they got, right? And when you look at like that, I have a chart in an essay that's like taken from a book from the 70s and it's like an innocuous chart, it's just trying to show the life cycle of a

Starting point is 00:54:09 world bank loan. And what you see is that after a year, yeah, you're in the black like you're getting the money, you're getting the disbursement, right? And then all of a sudden, like for the next 20 years, the net resource for the world, flow is like really deeply sharply negative, right? So it's because these were high interest rate loans. Like I-NF loans were typically short-term, two, three-year loans that were very high interest rate.

Starting point is 00:54:28 And yeah, like the loan was meant to be a short-term thing. And then what ends up happening is these countries kept asking for like a rescheduling, a rescheduling, a rescheduling. And then the World Bank loans were longer loans. So you ended up having this debt pile that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And what really like helped the curve go exponential and it. It's a good kind of like addition to the WTF happened in 1971.com website. All of this, like the external debt of third world countries really starts to go exponential after that.

Starting point is 00:54:59 So yet another thing that changed when we went into the full Fiat, you know, world. But the petrodollar system is actually really key here, which I was interested to learn about. I kind of knew that a little bit, but diving into the details of it was interesting. Like basically like these countries were met with offers to take capital. from Western banks that had been stuffed with money from petro dollar earnings from the OPEC nations. These OPEC nations were recycling their money into Western banks, like their profits. And those banks had to do something with that money. And they found willing borrowers all across the third world, all these military dictators,

Starting point is 00:55:37 like almost every military, almost every government in the Middle East was a dictatorship, almost every 18 out of 21 countries in Latin America at the time were dictatorships. Like almost all the countries in Africa were dictatorships at the time south of the state or Asia, etc. So they went to these dictators and dictators again were delighted to take the loans, delighted. And you also had cheap borrowing in the mid-70s, as we know, kind of like, you know, negative real rate type stuff, right? And the head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, he was like all about just like more, more and more and more lending. Like they kind of realized that there's no way these poor countries could pay back the debt except in like, unless with new debt, right?

Starting point is 00:56:17 Like, the Ponzi really started to emerge. So there's some numbers I have in the essay that are staggering, but basically like the total amount of lending, even from not only from the bank and the fund, but also from private banks to third world in the late 70s and early 80s, when it was totally exponential. And it's sort of like, it's sort of like thinking about the subprime crisis.

Starting point is 00:56:35 Like you had all these like small banks in America in the Midwest making loans to like random countries in Southeast Asia. Like it was completely ridiculous. There was a huge bubble in this area, and it burst. It burst really badly, starting in 1982 when Mexico said it couldn't pay any of its debt anymore. Now, that decade was, as Sam mentioned, you know, you called the Latin American debt crisis. The third world debt crisis is probably better for us because it also included Africa.

Starting point is 00:57:08 But basically, like, I mean, you had, again, the cost of capital skyrocketing after all these all these countries had been encouraged essentially to borrow like crazy amounts of money. And these dictators were totally fine with it. They never asked the population ever. They were never consulting, you know, the people who had actually paid a cost, right, of these loans. And this bubble started to pop. And that was bad because the Western banks who had made the loans did not want their balance sheet affected. So the right thing to do would have been to let the debt expire.

Starting point is 00:57:41 It would have been to, would have been to just let the, countries go bankrupt. Like bankruptcy is a really healthy part of capitalism. Like it would have been a healthy thing to like let them go bankrupt, restart, or right off the debt. And this debt was all what we call odious debt. Like, you know, it was contracted legally. Like get the bad actors that's, that put all of this into play out of a leadership role. Yeah. In a free market system. If they went bankrupt, people would overthrow the guy and you'd have someone else come in and you start over again. Problem is the Western banks didn't want their assets on their balance sheet, these loans, which assets on their balance sheet, right? They didn't want those going to zero. So they would push

Starting point is 00:58:18 and bank and the fund as a system would push to bail out these countries. So you had these countries, which had no business getting bailed out. There was no economic sense to doing this. Mobutu in Zaire, Pugio in Mexico. I mean, these guys for crooks, Marcos in Philippines, they stole unbelievable amounts of money from their people and from the world. They would just get bailed out over and over and over and over and over again, Suharto and Indonesia. So you know, you had a machine where like the creditor didn't want to stop and the borrower didn't want to stop. It's almost like it's, I used the kind of metaphor of a drug addict and I think it's, it's really fitting like basically the bank and the fund are drug dealers and the these,

Starting point is 00:59:00 these sort of dictatorial countries taking the loans or the addicts and debt is the is the drug. And, you know, there's just no incentive for anyone to stop. All the incentives are just to keep going. But if you want to heal and you want to get better, you have to go to rehab, right? And there's just no way in the existing paradigm for that to happen. Like, again, as we're talking about, you know, it's not like things got better after the 80s. We spend a lot of times talking about the 70s and 80s because that was kind of, you know, I think when a lot of the like death and destruction was really at its peak in many ways. But the debt has gotten. It's loaded. These loans, like, I mean, the largest loan ever was $57 billion.

Starting point is 00:59:43 from the IMF to Argentina, just four years ago. Just four years ago. I mean, you bring it up. It is a windfall for dictators and for bad actors. This is a wind, like, they're crushing. What's funny is when you look at, what's really, you can go and look at, the IMF is very opaque about a lot of things. But what it's transparent about is that there's a website

Starting point is 01:00:03 where if you just Google like IMF history, Argentina, IMF history, Bangladesh, it just shows you quickly every single loan. And what you realize is that the loans get bigger over time. And all they're doing is just paying, back to other loans. Yeah. So the 57 billion from Argentina paid back all the loans that the dictators had borrowed in the 70s and 80s and wiped this like, quote unquote, clean.

Starting point is 01:00:26 And then all and then, but after that, there's like 30 billion of new debt. So even more debt than they had before. And so the debt is literally, it's just the Ponzi scheme. I mean, the debt is literally just going to pay back the old debt. Every single time, it's crazy. They go back to take another loan. it comes with more conditions. So each time they have to come back,

Starting point is 01:00:47 it says, okay, you can have this loan again, but you have to cut health care, you know, cut subsidies, cut, you know. No, and again, the dictators didn't care. I mean, they were happy to fleece the country and sell off the nation. Well, there's a lot of corruption and embezzlement, but I'm just saying in general,

Starting point is 01:01:04 when a country has to get another loan, it comes with new conditions each time. Oh, yeah. It's not like the IMF and World Bank have been charitable. Like, the conditionality guys has, has risen. So the average loan now has like dozens of conditions attached to it. And that's, that's gotten worse and worse and worse over time. Which makes the economy more plastic.

Starting point is 01:01:25 And I'm using this term, more. Yeah. More monoculture, more plastic, more export driven. Yeah. Less about sustaining and prospering locally and more about subsidizing civilization elsewhere. And these loans have just gotten so, so big. I mean, the loans in the. 80s to Latin America were big. The loans to Asia during the financial crisis in the 90s were even

Starting point is 01:01:49 bigger. And the loans, ironically, to Europe in the European debt crisis, the last decade, were even bigger. So, like, you look at like the total, like in, you know, let's say $20,10, these loans to Greece and to Poland and to Iceland, I mean, they were even bigger than the loans given to, you know, in some cases, whether it was, you know, Indonesia and Thailand or Mexico. And the same playbook applied. They would go to Iceland or they would go to Greece or Spain and just say, you guys have to, you know, austerity. You guys have to adjust.

Starting point is 01:02:21 And this just continues and it continues and it continues. And no one's ever done a reckoning of like what's been the actual social impact of this over these decades. And I was looking at some numbers and some claims by some people. And I try to present them here, but like in this piece. But especially in the 70s and 80s, like during a 20 to 25 year period of time, you had whole parts of the world contract. So their populations kept growing, but the economy was shrinking.

Starting point is 01:02:46 So the GDP, the per capita income was shrinking dramatically in some cases, 20, 30%. And, you know, what ends up happening is, like, the amount of, like, time it takes you to earn a certain amount of calories in these countries was going up dramatically. So the amount of time you had to work to earn 1,000 calories in Jamaica, in Brazil, in Nigeria, between literally between the 60s and the 80s went way up. You had to work more

Starting point is 01:03:16 to get the same amount of food. So that's like we can throw aside all of the like fiat currency stuff because it was all going crazy. But in terms of goods and services, your time was getting stolen. Like there was literal wage deflation. And that was the whole point of the system

Starting point is 01:03:30 and I argue like that was what colonialism needed that people in the West realized that their economies they would get really high inflation unless they had cheap import, cheap external, you know, external inputs from elsewhere. Like those can subsidize what we do over here and it could keep our costs down. So colonialism was all about getting cheap goods and cheap labor abroad to keep inflation down in our countries so our rulers didn't get overthrown. Okay.

Starting point is 01:03:57 So that's what this is doing. It's like over the decades, it was keeping our costs down at home at the expense of wages in the poor countries. This is how the system worked. And when you looked at the actual toll, like let's say the death toll, there are studies showing that for every 2% decline in GDP, you have a 1% increase in mortality rate, something like that. I mean, this is based on a study on Mexico,

Starting point is 01:04:24 which is a typical country that went through a lot of structural adjustment. I mean, when you take that number and you realize that some of these countries had a 10, 20, 30% decline in GDP over a decade, two decades, I mean, we're looking at tens of millions of people killed by banking fund policy. And look, the reality is that no one's ever going to go to jail. No one's ever going to be held accountable. It was, you know, quote, quote, in the past, even though some of the stuff still happening today. But I think it's important that we just realize, like, the toll of this, like, giant debt-ponzie bubble.

Starting point is 01:04:55 Like, it's going to keep going until something changes, right? And then maybe we concluded with what that something might be, which is probably obvious at this point, given that your listeners probably know what I am. what I'm interested in. But I just think that unless there's something structurally different in the way that the international economy works, this thing's going to keep going. It's a function of a fractional reserve system as far as I'm concerned that you have to keep growing the debt. You have to keep growing the credit in these fractional reserve systems.

Starting point is 01:05:27 You know, look, I was going to say, President, China has copied the IMF World Bank. They have their own thing, but it's not nearly successful because they don't have the World currency. They can't just print money to bail out countries. So when China goes in and, you know, gives money to Sri Lanka and then Sri Lanka goes bankrupt, like they have to basically pull out. They have to come and take their losses and get out of there. We don't do that. The IMF and the World Bank never to take losses in need. We just give another new loan. We do a bailout out. Because we can print the reserve currency. And if you notice, again, this is exactly sort of tied into it the collapse of the gold standard, the collapse of colonialism and the rise of this post-70

Starting point is 01:06:05 Fiat system, the post-71 political economy. All this is connected. And ever since then, we've had this growing debt bubble. And you talk about the dot-com bubble, the subprime bubble, the stimulus bubble. These just pale in comparison to the size of the sovereign debt bubble that has been created by the bank and the fund. I mean, we're talking trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of loans that were made.

Starting point is 01:06:28 And they're all, again, their odious debt. Like, odious debt was invented by the U.S. 100 plus years ago during the Spanish-American war when we defeated the Spanish and American courts said to the Cuban people, you don't owe the money that the Spanish borrowed because they were subjugating you. And I resonate with that. That to me is legal. That's moral. I think those debts should be written off because they were illegal. Like those banks that let the Spanish borrow from them, screw those people. Like, that's awful, in my opinion.

Starting point is 01:06:58 Now, I know some people find that controversial, and ODIUS debt is controversial, but the reality is the bank and the fund never followed this legal precedent. So, again, you've got people in the Congo still paying back debt that Mabutu took out in the 80s. You've got people, again, in Argentina, still paying the price for stuff that military dictators did in the 80s. And there's never been any forgiveness of this debt, even though those people never agreed to take those loans. So, again, you know, this, so much of the.

Starting point is 01:07:28 of the sovereign debt bubble is illegitimate. These were loans and contracts made without the consent of the people. And that's, you know, as a human rights activist, that's where I get, you know, obviously really fired up. You got a quote in the article here that I think captures that last point really well. It says the IMF, they say, has rarely met a dictatorship that it didn't like. Let's move to, I've got one more theme that I want to kind of hit before we talk about the solution here. You hit on this a little bit about how detached the planners are from the IMF and the World Bank as they're coming up with their structural adjustment, things that are tied to the money.

Starting point is 01:08:12 And this is the quote from your article. You say, bank and fund policy is forged in meetings in lavish hotels between people who will never have to live a day in poverty in their lives. Fittlitz argues modern high-tech warfare is designed to remove physical contact, dropping bombs from 50,000 feet ensures that one does not feel what one does. Modern economic management is similar. From one luxury hotel, one can callously impose policies about which one would think twice if one knew the people in the lives that they were actually destroying. I love the analogy. I think it is so just spot on to, they're looking at it from, okay, what does the world need, right?

Starting point is 01:08:59 Oh, we need shrimp out of Bangladesh as going back to that example. So let's go down there. Let's give them a bunch of money. And then let's force them to just start pumping out more shrimp than they've ever thought that was imaginable, right? The whole ecosystem that's around that idea and how detach. those planners are from what's actually happening on the ground from those citizens. I could just imagine taking a hundred of those citizens and lining them up. And after they've experienced this for 10 years, 20 years, and asking those 100 people,

Starting point is 01:09:34 was this helpful? Has this improved your country? What would those 100 people say? No, and I'm glad you mentioned that. I mean, we think about the Bangladesh example, but really what we have here is like a structural issue where dominant countries are able to literally get the poor countries to pay for the restructuring of their own economies to benefit us at their expense of their people. That's really what it is what's happening here. And when it comes to what we call the development set, that's like what,

Starting point is 01:10:06 you know, that's what the leadership of the bank and the fund are called. Or Seifidine Amus calls them the misery industry, which is really great. I quote, I quoted at length from his, he has a wonderful chapter in the Theod Standard about the misery industry, which I loved, and I included here. But the reason why the misery industry can do what it does, and, you know, they sit, the World Bank and I'm at headquartered in Washington. They had these lavish conferences, you know, where they have champagne and caviar and million-dollar meals and all this crazy stuff. First class everywhere.

Starting point is 01:10:39 Christine Lagarde was making 500K a year tax-free. Meanwhile, she was imposing structural adjustment on countries and jacking up taxes for poor people. I mean, it's so crazy when you think about it, you've got the World Bank, which for a long time, I wasn't able to figure out if it's still the case today, but in the 70s and 80s, the workers who clean the toilets at the World Bank in Washington, who fled, who were, in many cases, refugees who fled from adjusted countries, you know, they weren't even allowed to unionize. Okay. So the hypocrisy is just so stunning. And you've got like these people who are living the life.

Starting point is 01:11:19 I mean, one of the reasons why there's so much inertia here is like working for the IMF and World Bank is awesome. I mean, they used to get three upgrades to the Concord. They would get five-star hotel visits. And so you have the banality of evil thing. These people, they don't think they're evil. They think they're helping out the poor countries. They probably don't even know this.

Starting point is 01:11:37 They haven't even probably zoomed out to think about the meta resource strain thing. Like, that's not something they probably do. They're just looking at what's in front of them. and they're just like giving out money to poor countries. And they're not thinking about the fact that the P&I's got to come back. One of the other reasons why there's inertia, I really wanted to mention this, is that the structure of the fund, the bank,

Starting point is 01:11:56 is basically a World War II structure, meaning the votes, meaning how are they controlled? The U.S. still gets 16% of the vote, essentially at the bank and the fund. So that's just enough to veto any decision. So you need 85% to do big, big changes. So the U.S. can veto any big change in the bank or the fund. And when you add up its allies, it can have control over any vote.

Starting point is 01:12:18 And I thought this was crazy. Some of these disparities between like economic power and population versus how much votes they actually have. So Britain has more votes than India today. Britain has more votes than India, despite having 20 times fewer population people and a smaller economy by this point. India is going to be the third largest economy in the world shortly. Switzerland, 8 million people. has more votes than, than Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia

Starting point is 01:12:47 combined despite having 90 times fewer people. Okay? You know, Italy has about the same as China. Yeah. You know, you know, et cetera, et cetera. We could keep, you know,

Starting point is 01:13:00 we could keep going down the list. The point is that this, again, like the people who are getting screwed don't really have a voice. And that's true at the microsense. It's true at the macro sense. And I,

Starting point is 01:13:13 again, I really think that it's all about changing the paradigm now. The people who criticize the bank and the fund over the years, again, their solutions largely were Marxist ones, which most of us here listening probably are like, that's obviously a bad idea. Like they wanted to nationalize more industries,

Starting point is 01:13:30 give more power to local leaders. And I'm sitting here looking at the fact that, well, when you had 18 and 21 dictators in Latin America, leaders in Latin America are corrupt dictators, how is that going to help anything? Like, that's clearly, like, that wasn't a good idea. And there wasn't,

Starting point is 01:13:43 really a better, I mean, you know, what I would say is, let's say, pre getting to Bitcoin and changing the monetary paradigm. I do like the idea of writing off some of the odious debt. I think that that's interesting. And I like the idea of abolishing the World Bank and IMF, but these are obviously like these are unrealistic. Like these things are, they would help, but they're not going to happen, right, because of the, because of the incentives of the system as we described. So there's no one, there's no like counselor who's going to come in and sit down and have a family talk. That's just that a person doesn't exist in this metaphor. So when we think about maybe Bitcoin changing the monetary paradigm in the future, and Jeff Booth and safety both really helping me think through this, like, and I'm grateful to both of them for their time for helping me think through this.

Starting point is 01:14:27 But basically, you have a situation where people are starting to go to the Bitcoin standard and the world starts to change in that way. These IFIs, the bank and the fund, let's say they continue doing their loans. Well, at some point, these countries, again, are going to default, right? And then all of a sudden, they won't be able to have the money printer machine to bail them out. And they're going to have to go, whoa, wait a second, like, this isn't working. What do we do? And, you know, maybe either if they continue to exist at all, like, I mean, one theory is they just hold. But if they stay in business and actually want to actually help, want to do what they say in their mission they're supposed to do,

Starting point is 01:15:06 maybe they'd change more to co-investment instead of loans at high interest rates. And they'd have skin in the game and they'd actually care about these enterprises being sustainable, these projects in these countries. So I think that's one really interesting impact that could happen. Potentially there is a shit. The other thing's just more kind of meta. It's like today currency is just segregated. So you have all these poor countries with these horrible fiats that can't print the fiat to

Starting point is 01:15:36 buy stuff. So they have to go into this, they're sucked into this thing of being an export-driven economy and selling non-edible crops that people can't even eat to rich people out here so we can have our tea or whatever. That sort of is because of the segregation of currencies. If we have one world currency where we're all using the same currency, then there is no global canton effect. Like we always talk about canlon effect in the Bitcoin ecosystem, right? We like to talk about it a lot and we're usually referring to the United States, Wall Street. etc. There's also a global cancelain effect. The global cancelain effect is the rich countries and the poor countries. The IMF and the World Bank get to borrow from the hose of the

Starting point is 01:16:15 fiat hose. They're sitting there sucking on it. They get the cheap capital and they borrow the cheap capital and they sell that capital for more to the poor countries. They actually make money this way. This is like something I was kind of shocked to learn. These aren't charities. These are loan giving banks. They have a business model. And they make their money off the cantalone effect. So if you no longer have the canceling effect, and there is no benefit to being in D.C., like you're not going to get cheaper dollars that way like you can today. And the system starts to shift a little bit. And maybe it becomes more appealing to hire those people in Nigeria if there is no kind of way to exploit the wage difference is so vast.

Starting point is 01:17:00 The stat I got in my essays today, I mean, the wage deflation thing worked. So the average worker in the developing world makes 20% of what the average worker in the developed world makes. And that really, I think that that's an arbitrage opportunity that closes in a Bitcoin standard. It doesn't close completely, obviously, but I think it closes pretty significantly. I mean, would you not agree? I totally agree with that. If we had one monetary standard for the world, you wouldn't have these crazy disparities in monetary inequality. You bring this up in your article where it's always a battle to find the sound as current.

Starting point is 01:17:35 so that you can repay the debt. Because if you're trying to do it in local currency terms, it's just like you earn it and it's just withering away because the currency is just so weak. And so they're constantly trying to scrounge for a sound currency. With Bitcoin, I think here in the future, it's going to be just so readily accessible for everybody. I think it already is readily accessible. And as you go through these boom cycles and hopefully we start to see some type of

Starting point is 01:18:04 price stability here in the coming 10 years, where it's not so volatile to what everybody's expenses are denominated in, it really drastically changes things, I think, for so many of these nations. Well, it's kind of a two-faced thing, right? Like, volatility could be here for a long, long time, right? We don't know that. But in the meantime, because this is just speculation. Like, we don't really know.

Starting point is 01:18:27 And safety team is cautious about that. You know, I was talking to him about mining and he's a little cautious about that. I was like, well, it wouldn't it be cool that these countries can just convert their energy resources to the reserve currency? And, you know, I think I think we just need to be a little cautious on that. I think it's an interesting idea. But what we know is that today, Bitcoin is a micro tool for the individual to escape financial repression. This is inarguable, right? So this is just going to keep growing as a phenomenon over time.

Starting point is 01:18:55 And then maybe eventually, as you say, once, you know, Bitcoin itself maybe becomes, you know, sort of stable enough to overtake. some of these fiats in terms of people in business and in finance wanting to actually use it as a unit account, then it starts to break entire nations free from economic oppression. That's, and that's just like really heady. Super exciting. And, you know, it is, it makes all the sense in the world. These countries are going to be the biggest countries in the world. Like, Nigeria is going to be bigger in the United States, you know, in several decades.

Starting point is 01:19:28 Like, they're going to have more manpower. They're going to have a lot of talent. and they're being held down. I mean, they really are being held down. You know, I always think about the fact that, you know, the bank and the fund are seen as, you know, there are a lot of people who see the bank in the fund as, I mean, some people think they're positive.

Starting point is 01:19:51 Some people think they're, well, you know, there might be some nasty stuff, but it's necessary. And some people are a little skeptical. You know, a lot of libertarian analysis of the bank and the fund is basically like it's a waste. Like, you know, Republicans in the 90s were like, Let's close it down.

Starting point is 01:20:03 It's like a waste of taxpayer money. I think Milton Friedman said something similar. But their critique was mainly that it was like a waste or was mismanaged or corrupt. See, I don't think that that's, I don't buy that. I don't think that this is a mistake. I don't think that when we talked about the resource flow earlier, since 1982, the flow of resources has permanently been in the direction of poor to rich. I don't think that's a mistake.

Starting point is 01:20:31 I think these institutions were intense. intentionally designed to create dependency on us as wealthy and to change their economy so they couldn't stand up on their own. And that they would continue to provide like depressed wages so that we could have the way of life that we want. As George H.W. Bush said that I quoted from him like, you know, we don't negotiate our way of life with anybody, right? And I think that it's it's something you can only appreciate when you really zoom out again.

Starting point is 01:20:58 And I'm not, I don't think there were like individual conspiracies here. But when you add it all up, you can't argue with the outcome, which is, again, poor country subsidizing the way of life and rich countries. And the tool that was used to do it was debt extended through the bank and the fund. So if the currency is equalized in the future and there's no more bailouts, then you can't do structural adjustment. And that's what a safe thing said to me. He said, you know, today it's easy.

Starting point is 01:21:29 Brazil wants $30 billion, which I think is essentially what they got a couple decades ago, you know, one's massive bank, IMF bailouts. You know, it's a political decision. Literally, it's a political decision. It's a political decision. Congress can just snap its fingers and boom, we've got $30 billion. Like, we send it through the fund and it goes. And we make money off that, by the way, right?

Starting point is 01:21:50 But in the future, if it's a Bitcoin standard, it's like you and whose Bitcoin is going to bail out Brazil with $30 billion. No, it's not going to work like that. It's going to have to be a business decision. The development banks and the IMF are going to have to actually think more about their sustainability. They're not going to be able to just extend loans over and over and over and over again to corrupt dictators who are buying palaces and stuff. That's not going to fly. The people making those loans are going to get fired, right?

Starting point is 01:22:18 The World Bank is not going to go and build these enormous white elephant projects in the middle of nowhere that don't help anybody. All they do is help the creditor nation. or the poor country and more debt. I don't actually do anything. If you don't have the bailout, that's not going to fly anymore. You know, the reason why we have this massive global Ponzi debt bubble is because it was called the IMF put on sovereign debt. Like, the private markets know that they can make loans to these countries and they're

Starting point is 01:22:46 going to get bailed out. They know that. And the companies working in these countries know that. So it's almost like insurance on getting involved in these countries. And that is a political dynamic that is not. a free market dynamic. Disasterous. It's imposed by violence.

Starting point is 01:23:04 So essentially, when you remove that from the equation, I'm not saying it's going to be pretty. I think we need to understand that if this thing starts to unwind, it's going to be brutal. I mean, it's going to be like going to rehab for these countries. But like there is no other way. Otherwise you die, right? Like if you don't go to rehab,

Starting point is 01:23:24 you eventually die, right? And that's essentially what's happened. You've had like loss of tens of millions. of people over these decades. But if we can, if the system can change, like you can have a new, like you can have a new foundation.

Starting point is 01:23:38 Like the, you know, bankruptcies can actually happen. And Western Banks have no choice. Then they're going to change their policy. And they're not going to make that loan to Mabutu next time. And if they actually care about helping the people in the Congo, they'll find another way to help the people of the Congo.

Starting point is 01:23:52 You know, I don't believe it's like, oh, then they're all going to starve. No, I think people who actually do care will find a better way. than to send a high interest, no strings attached loan to Mobutu in exchange for him promising to sell more rubber to Europe. Like that this is, that's just not going to happen in a world where we have a different kind of monetary system.

Starting point is 01:24:12 So I go through this really dark journey of doing this piece and I end up pretty optimistic because I really think we're building something here in the Bitcoin community that that is, that's going to help us fight back if that makes any sense. I love this chart. Sam, I don't, if you have a point here, go ahead. but I want to throw out the... No, that's a good one. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:31 Real fast before Sam goes. Okay. You have this chart in here, and you're showing Bitcoin ownership per capita versus countries that have taken IMF structural adjustment loans. And the correlation is... Yeah. Yeah, no, it's actually not even a subset. It's literally just the countries in the world that have the highest per capita Bitcoin

Starting point is 01:24:55 and cryptocurrency usage. Yeah. It's just that like eight of the top 10 are countries that have been hammered by the IMF. Yes. So the irony and in a way, the cleverness of as I don't know, Satoshi in some weird way, is that the people who got hurt the worst from the IMF and World Bank are the ones that are finding a way out. Figuring it out. It's really fascinating.

Starting point is 01:25:19 Again, it's like Turkey, Argentina, Nigeria, you know, you look at these countries that got crushed so badly. They're the ones who are, who are at least the people are finding a way out. And that's what's so inspiring, like, about Africa, Bitcoin Conference is like traditionally, again, these people had no way out. They were stuck in the currency system. You had people, you know, in the CFA zone in West Africa.

Starting point is 01:25:41 Like, they had no choice but to just take the 50% devaluation that the Ina proposed in 1994. They didn't have another option, you know. Today, they have another option on their phone. They can opt out to a different system. And I don't know when we get the meta changes, like when we start to get the really big meta shifts, but the micro shifts are good enough. I mean, at least he gives individuals a way out.

Starting point is 01:26:03 Sam, what was your thoughts? Well, on that point of the nations that have been, you know, hurt by the IMF the most, I'd like to talk about El Salvador a little bit. No, fine. Al-Savador has a pretty interesting story about the IMF. So in 1982, the IMF gave a $57 million loan to them, and it was extremely, extremely controversial because usually the IMF has to act like they're helping by like doing development work there.

Starting point is 01:26:31 They're going to do something that actually built up the economy. They act like it built up the exports. This was strictly during a civil war. And basically they picked aside and that IMF money was used to buy military weapons. So it's extremely controversial. And so the money didn't go to. But that's more traditional than you'd think. I mean, that's more common than anything.

Starting point is 01:26:49 Well, but like this was like blatant. Like they knew that it was going to help this. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. This wasn't, I know what you're saying, but no, this was like a controversy at the time. And they used it, they didn't use it for the development of El Salvador's infrastructure and a lot of it was used to purchase imports from U.S. firms. So this is a classic example. It benefited firms like Procter and Gamble and general. And so now you see El Salvador today and obviously with the Bitcoin. And once they talked about the volcano bond, that's when the IMF started to really get scared, I think. That's when they started to really attack them. And they told them a warning. They're like, you shouldn't do Bitcoin after they announced the volcano bond. And then the El Salvador Treasury Minister said,

Starting point is 01:27:34 no international organization is going to tell us to do anything. We're a sovereign nation. And so just recently, they're going to pass a bill to finally start this volcano bond. It's been slower than people think. I think the macro environment turned and it's probably a little bit more complicated than they thought launching one of these things. But it's really interesting because the World Bank and IMF basically have had a monopoly on the distressed sovereign debt market, which is, I think, part of the problem.

Starting point is 01:27:59 And so there's only like three choices when a country like El Salvador wants to borrow money. They can go to Wall Street investment banks to issue the debt, but they have to take a hefty cut, like an underwriting fee. They can borrow from the IMF and World Bank with all of those conditions that Gladson just talked about, or they can go to China. And it's kind of the same thing. You got critical infrastructure as collateral. And if they default on that, then China gets their critical infrastructure.

Starting point is 01:28:24 structure. But now, but now they can issue bonds on the liquid network and then cut out those expensive middlemen. They can keep 100% of the proceeds and use it any way they want. And they don't have to lose their sovereignty to the IMF or China. And so I think it's a game changer, this idea of raising money on Bitcoin. So it's just like another example of how Bitcoin could potentially take power away from these organizations. And it's like a proof of concept. We don't know how it's going to play out, but it's really, really interesting to think about how a nation can raise money with zero terms and conditions, use it however they want, and they can maintain their sovereignty while they do it. So I'm very curious to see what it's like. And so you talked about how the U.S.

Starting point is 01:29:11 runs the IMF. It was really interesting also that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tried to pass this accountability for cryptocurrency in El Salvador's Act, the Aces Act, in respect to this, it's really crazy because, you know, they're saying it's El Salvador adopting Bitcoin, mitigate potential risk to the U.S. financial system. El Salvador is a tiny country, and to think that that's their excuse for doing this, and I think this is, you know, this is like a little bit tinfoil hat,

Starting point is 01:29:41 but if the U.S. runs the IMF, and now they're trying to push these AISS. to basically require the State Department to report on El Salvador's adoption of Bitcoin, you see how, like, this volcano bond, I think, really spooked them because it basically allows sovereign nations to skirt around them, and they don't like that. So I just wanted to add that, because I just, I think it's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I've been very critical of Buceli for human rights stuff,

Starting point is 01:30:09 but I've always supported giving the IMF a huge middle finger. I love the volcano bond idea. it might get botched, but the idea is amazing. And I love the idea of adopting Bitcoin as a second currency. I think this is something that is a huge challenge to the IMF system. I mean, I don't know. Like, you know, I don't want to sit here and we joke about Bitcoin fixes this. But I don't really, I can't think of really another way to really push back in an effective way.

Starting point is 01:30:35 But you've got these countries, all these poor countries have vast, in many cases, energy reserve, which they can, you know, they can essentially borrow again. and get Bitcoin mining going and then print the future reserve currency that way. And I think that that's just a really great outcome, whereas before they would have to, especially with renewable energy, I mean, before they would have to basically borrow against forests and national treasures and deplete minerals and cut things down and destroy things. And here you have an opportunity to take the flowing water of these countries or the geothermal power of these countries and convert it to, you know, whether it be

Starting point is 01:31:19 allowed, you know, debt financing, you know, powering debt financing or just straight printing reserve currency without permission of the great powers, I think is really cool. So I totally agree with you on all of that. I just think what you've said here is it's basically you can look at all of their decades of work and there's empirical evidence now. You can look at the outcomes. You You don't have to think about anything else and just ask if they're succeeding on their mission, right? Their stated mission. I have a study right here from 1997.

Starting point is 01:31:52 1965 to 1995 is the 30-year period they looked at. And 60% of these loans to recipient countries, in that 30-year period, the real per capita wealth decreased. And 32 out of the 48 of the poorest countries, their economy shrunk by an average of 15% over those 30 years. and now they have massive debt burdens. And that's just, that's exactly what we're talking about. They're worse off after they get involved with these. I mean, we're talking, and again, with 15% contraction of GDP.

Starting point is 01:32:23 Okay. So the mortality rate is going up a 7.5% on a population of 100 million people. I mean, you do the math. Again, we're talking about the deaths of tens of millions of people. We're talking about exponential debt that needs to be seen to be believed. And that is the outcome of the bank and the, fund. So I really look forward to dialoguing with some of these officials and I want them to explain themselves. I mean, again, I got into this because of the human rights stuff and I just

Starting point is 01:32:49 couldn't believe the affinity for not only dictators, but colonialists. I mean, the bank and the fund were funding all kinds of colonial operations in apartheid, South Africa, Rhodesia, helping the Dutch put down the Indonesians in the late 40s. I mean, from the beginning, they were totally corrupt in this way. They've never asked, structural adjustment. They've never asked for, by the way, free speech, human rights protections, reduction of police brutality. That's never been part of the structural adjustment thing. And they claim that they can't do that because they can't get involved with the politics of the countries that they lent to. But they're literally changing the lifeblood of the country.

Starting point is 01:33:28 Their structural adjustment. So the whole thing is just like total hypocrisy. And now we've got the green colonialism thing where we, as rich countries stole the fossil fuels essentially, or exploited at very cheap prices, below market prices, the fossil fuels of these countries for decades, for a century, but certainly for decades, and use that to advance our civilization. And now we're telling them they can't use their fossils. In fact, they have to use our windmills and solar that we make, right, or whatever. I mean, it's crazy. So that's the new, that's kind of the new era of the INAF and the World Bank thing,

Starting point is 01:34:06 is like we're trying to get them to reduce their energy consumption. Again, you know, totally in line with the Malthusian nature of the whole thing since the beginning is like you've got, you guys out there have got to reduce your consumption in poor countries so that we can keep our quality of life here. And I just think that a lot of people don't know this. They should reflect on it. I don't want to come off as like, look, I'm hugely grateful for Western civilization. I love individual rights and property rights and free speech.

Starting point is 01:34:34 And like, there are so many things to be proud of being an American and being part of this tradition, but we don't think about the other half. We don't think about the fact that the reason we're successful is not just the fact that we had free speech and democracy and property rights. It's also because we stole the labor and wealth of poor countries for so many decades and used the bank and the fund to do it. So I just think it's a fair shake to acknowledge both and think about a world where we could really focus on the former and get rid of the latter. Like if we had a world where Jeff Booth says we don't have the words to talk about this world yet, because we've never seen it before.

Starting point is 01:35:14 But he calls it forced cooperation where we basically be forced to cooperate with these countries instead of exploiting them. I just find that so people who also as a concept. I love that. I hope we can get there, man. I love that. Alex, people need to read this because we were kind of jumping all over the place talking about, you know, the finer points of the article. But I truly mean it. The way you laid this out was done in such a great way that it really walks the reader through

Starting point is 01:35:46 and educates the readers as they're going through it with example after example as they go along the path. The name of the article is structural adjustment, how the IMF and World Bank repress poor countries and funnel their resources to the rich ones. We'll have a link to this in the show notes, read this, share this, Take this podcast, YouTube or whatever, post it into every IMF tweet that they ever post online so people can hear the other side of whatever propaganda they're pumping out because I think that the world needs to hear this story. I think people need to learn these facts. And boy, oh boy, it's exciting to think about what Bitcoin could potentially do here in the future

Starting point is 01:36:32 for some of this stuff. And I love that quote that you just said with Jeff. booth about forced cooperation and what an exciting world that that leads us with. Alex, thank you for making time to come on the show. Sam, thank you so much for joining me in this discussion. Truly, truly amazing work. Thank you so much, Preston, and my honor to be here and hope folks can read the article and learn something. I learned a lot. So I hope I can give back a little bit and help you all learn a little bit too. Sam, give people a handoff to yourself. Both of you guys give a handoff to your Twitter feeds or anything else that you guys want to highlight. Yeah, I'm the lead analyst at Swan Bitcoin. We're an international Bitcoin financial services

Starting point is 01:37:14 company. So check us out at Swan.com for all your Bitcoin needs. You can go to Twitter and follow me at Sam Kala, S-A-L-A-H. And I just wanted to thank Alex. I went down this rabbit hole. It is a dark rabbit hole. And I read a lot of the same books he did, actually. And for somebody in your position, my man, it really, it makes me feel good that you know about this now and, you know, know about this stuff deeply now because in my mind, these two

Starting point is 01:37:41 organizations possibly committed more human rights violations than any of them. So the fact that you're on it, it makes me feel really good. And so thank you for writing this, man. It's a beautiful piece. And I just hope we can raise awareness about these organizations and potentially reform them

Starting point is 01:37:58 and maybe abolish them completely. Yeah. And again, I mean, it was painful process. And look, I know some people are going to say it's not intentional, but can't argue with the outcome. So then you're arguing that it's some sort of like, you know, unconscious outcome. It doesn't matter to the people who got screwed, you know, in the end. And I think we just need to pay respects to them and do what we can to learn about the system. I will be producing kind of more content around this. Like I said, hopefully a book, other kinds of media content around this. I want to really kind of hopefully bring to life

Starting point is 01:38:28 an understanding of exactly how this kind of dynamic works. I think that would be a great thing to put out to the world. I've done everything on the backs of incredible thinkers who did this before and saw this before, but they saw it earlier. And they saw it in 70, they saw 50 years ago. They saw it 40 years ago. They saw 30 years ago. So these people, whether it be Graham Hancock, who's by the way, now like, you know,

Starting point is 01:38:53 he's diving into like ancient civilization's got the show on Netflix. I mean, he's the one who really ripped open the bank. in the fund in the late 80s with his book, Lords on Poverty, which is such a must read. Cheryl Payer, whose debt trap is just such a classic. I mean, these people, they saw this stuff back then. They noticed it. And then they just, it just, the world just like turned away. Like, we just forgot about the fact that these institutions are exploitative.

Starting point is 01:39:17 And, you know, we need to get back and have this as a center of one of our, we need to have this as a central conversation just ongoing. We need to understand that this is the biggest bubble of all. is sovereign debt and so much of it is propped up in an illegitimate manner. So you can follow me on Twitter at Gladstein and you can follow the work I'm doing there at the Human Rights Foundation. I would recommend that everybody follow Sam. I think he's been really sharp on this stuff.

Starting point is 01:39:42 So I'm really happy he could join us here. And again, thanks for giving us the time, Preston, to dive into this. I know I came up to you a month ago and was like, hey, we got a jam on this when I finish. But I'm so happy to see that you agreed and that we've made this show. So hopefully people enjoy it. I learned a ton. That's all I can say. Thank you both.

Starting point is 01:40:02 What a pleasure. What an honor to sit down and have this conversation. And please share this folks that are listening and please share Alex's his article because it's amazing. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday. And I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I'll catch you again next week.

Starting point is 01:40:46 Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC107: The Real Impact of the IMF and World Bank w/ Alex Gladstein and Sam Callahan (Bitcoin Podcast)

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