BTC149: Parallels to the Roman Empire w/ Dr. Peter St. Onge (Bitcoin Podcast)

You're listening to TI-P. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. As the global macro site picture continues to unfold, we see quite interesting dynamics at play. We have the richest person on the planet, Elon Musk, literally tweeting things out that say, watching the Roman Empire collapse again, but this time with Wi-Fi and memes. We're seeing credit markets continue to sell off beyond levels that many didn't think were even possible without something very serious breaking. So to cover some of these current macro events, in themes while also talking about a few parallels to the previous global superpowers of the past, like the Roman Empire, we have Dr. Peter St. Onge with us today. Peter is a fellow at the Mises Institute and former professor at the Montreal Economic Institute. We cover all of these topics, the potential for Bitcoin to offer a solution and much, much more. So with that, stay tuned for my discussion with the thoughtful Dr. Peter St. Onge. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here with Peter and I'm really looking forward to this conversation because we're going to get into some of this America, Bitcoin, Roman Empire stuff, maybe in the second half of the show, but I've never had that conversation with anybody on the show. So I'm like super ecstatic to get into some of that stuff, Peter. So welcome to the show and sorry to drone on here with the intro. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. I've been a fan for a long time. Peter, I want to start off because we always have guests on the show and everybody's talking about inflation. We got Paul Krugman now literally extracting every single item out of the CPI index and saying that that inflation's gone. But I want to throw it over to you because you're great at explaining things and making them accessible to an audience. And I want to just kind of capture your broad brush overview of inflation and what, maybe a framework that people can kind of look at it. Why we're seeing it now and we weren't seeing it for the longest time for decades and now all the sudden it's back and it's back in style. Give us a framework. Tell us what you think is going on. Yeah, so kind of big picture. The central banks try to print as much money as they can get away with. That's why they create them. They essentially finance government deficits and debt in exchange for printing money. The trick and central banking is it's like being a gasoline fee. The trick in that gig is don't take too much at once. If you're ripping off all the neighbors, it's okay if you take a little half gallon a night for everybody. But it's for goodness' sake, do not drain one guy's tank all at once. He's going to notice that and then the gig's up. Central banks try to keep price spikes to a minimum. In practice, about 2% is what they have. If you're through trial and error, discover that voters are willing to put up with. That means that they typically print something like 6% of the money supply. Essentially 4% of that is soaked up in population growth or economic growth and they're remaining 2% leads over into higher prices. That they don't fear because they have these paid PhDs who lecture the public how this is just part of free market capitalism. The price of progress is that everything is going to go a little bit more expensive area. Where they really are scared is when inflation gets away from them and gets up into 5, 7, 9%, because they know that at that point voters could angry, voters could angry, Congress could angry, and then Congress could put a leash on them. Why did they get out of hand this time? The original sin here was in order to buy the COVID lockdowns, it was fantastic. Particularly expensive. This is really everywhere in the world that went through lockdowns. They had to absolutely pump out money in order to bribe voters into doing it. When the lockdowns first came in, I was up in Canada and they had these CERB, it's basically a universal basic income that was implemented nationwide, it was astoundingly expensive. The only way that they could have done that is by printing jobs of money. In the case of the U.S., it took about $6 to $7 trillion is how much the increase the money supply during COVID. It went from about $15 trillion to about $21.22. If you print that much money all at once, every school of economics, even Paul Krugman, even the Marxist, they all know that it's going to lead to extreme inflation. To a first approximation, that's going to give you something like 40% inflation. It's not going to happen all at once, but it's going to come all over time. Really we didn't see that because the economy was flat on its back, yet supply chains were choke, people were staying home to save lives. Once the economy started normalizing a little bit at then, you started seeing that jump up. So right around almost to the day that Joe Biden came into office, of course you can't cause inflation at six hours, so right around January of what is it, 21, inflation started picking up and then by about the middle of the year, we were at the point where it was really hitting 1970s levels. That was something that people didn't think was going to happen again for a long time that the Fed had learned its lesson back in the 70s and you can't let the money supply run so fast. That's really what got us into trouble in the first place. At that point, the Fed did panic. They are afraid of high inflation because it calls into question their own independence. They panicked, hyped, interest rates. If we sort of paused the story there for a moment, once inflation started taking off, the Fed really had two options. One option would have been that it identifies the source of the inflation, which was obscene levels of government spending and then it tells the government, you guys got to cut back, lower the spending, get rid of the deficit. In fact, Powell could have forced them to do that, if he simply said, I'm not going to buy government bonds anymore, I'm going to sell them instead, he could have actually forced the feds to end the deficits, but that's a politically costly thing to do to the people who rug the organization, right? The Fed exists that Congress is pleasure and they can always change the rules on that. Instead of doing that, he said, okay, the feds are spending, I'm not going to complain about that, that's probably going to continue. One of my other options, if I want to reduce the amount of spending in the economy, I want to reduce the amount of money that's out there chasing goods, then the only man left standing is to crush the private sector, and the way they do that is by hiking interest rates. Up they went, the fastest rise in about 50 years, so since the 1970s, since Paul Boker, so it was really an epic level of rate hikes, and then of course, a lot of us warned that if you do it that quick, you're going to break something, specifically something in the financial sector, which is very top heavy, so it's very vulnerable, and of course, that's what happened in March, when the banks started going under, they responded, by pushing out, I call them pre-vail outs, but they basically pushed out trillions of guarantees and open windows, they lent money based on pictures, asset values, they did a lot of things that in the private sector, you would get like a 20-year sentence for, but of course, this is par for the course, when it becomes too, to our ruling thieves. They head of that off with yet more trillions of money, that money doesn't immediately lead to inflation, okay, they knew that from 2008, because when you bail out banks, the banks tend to hold on to it, they don't go out and spend it on vacations or something, tends to stay put, so they knew that from 2008, they pumped out trillions in 2008, a lot of us said, you're going to see bad inflation, we didn't get the inflation, the reasons because the banks held on to it, so that's what they've been doing so far, and so where we stand at the moment is that for the past year, so inflation's been coming down, it has largely been coming down because of energy prices, so energy, usually energy falls whenever the world economy is slowing, and that's now happening really coordinated across the world, so even China is slowing, and then the other reason is that the world sort of routed around Mr. Putin's war, so initially there were some shocks to energy markets, you know, Europe wasn't buying, it was buying elsewhere, a lot of sort of energy supply chains had to get rejigged, and at that point, a lot of that has already been digested, so energy prices have been coming down, that was bringing down headline inflation, and so, you know, the administration was declaring victory, the Fed was not because the Fed could see the underlying numbers, which was the core inflation, okay, that's excluding food and energy, that's really the number that the Fed sort of grades itself on, and core inflation has been stuck really for about a year, if we compare the absolute worst of the inflation last year or two years ago, core has only come down about half point, it's really pretty stuck, so the Fed is still concerned, that's why, you know, they've been sort of pouring cold water and saying that it'll be some time before rates come back down, and then just in the past two months now, sort of, you know, if we want to get the latest stories for what's going on in inflation, the past two months now in place to start at the rise again, largely because energy prices are starting to go up again, and so if that continues then, the Fed is going to be a lot more concerned, that's going to get people upset about, they're already upset about their grocery bills, but that'll get them upset about the gas pump again, and then that leads to congressional pressure, so the Fed is kind of back to the corner at this point, they won't say no to the government, that they're sort of stuck with these high rates, and they're just basically waiting for the economy to die, so that that'll cut down inflation, and if sufficient millions of jobs are lost, that at that point they can declare victory, and then they can go back to start to normalize rates, and that, not until that happens, are we going to see these sort of financial stresses, and the bank crisis stop? It's fascinating to me to see that the energy prices aren't up all that much, I mean, they're up, but they're not up like aggressively, and I just literally saw a tweet that there's more talk that they're going to go back into the strategic petroleum reserve to potentially release more, and the irony of this isn't just that they're immediately jumping into the SPR as if it's QE for oil, they want to create a recession, they need higher prices, they need things to slow down, but yet they're so quick to come in there, it just shows you how desperate, and how they wanted both ways, they wanted to have lower oil prices, they want interest rates to be down, but they also want to recession simultaneously, and it's just like I'm speechless. I was going to say, I really like that QE for oil, that's exactly what it is, and they have to keep their powder dry, because they used that SPR, at least Biden did, to buy the last election, so he flushed out a huge share of it, something like 30% or more of it, he flushed out and that gas price is low for the election. He's got to keep some of it, yeah, right, exactly for the midterms, and so he's got to keep some of that for the 2024 election here, so when they just added a tiny amount, like 600,000 barrels, just to drop in the bucket, I guess, to show people that they're prudent about such things, but yeah, they're going to try to take the edge off of any hikes by draining that out, and the problem, of course, is that the strategic controlling reserve is supposed to be there for wartime. It's like if there's a war and supplies interrupted, you want enough gasoline for the ambulances, okay, so that's supposed to be kind of the family jewels, you don't go selling that off for elections, but apparently that's what they're up to. People calling it the strategic political reserve. Bingo. Exactly. There's a lot of time left on the clock for them to be going back into that and draining it. There's a lot of time left. You said something very early on in your response to the inflation, where you said 6%. I'm assuming that you're looking at the M2 growth rate over multiple decades when you said the 6%, you said 2% comes out that we see in our inflation, and then 4% kind of gets washed out. Do you see that 4%, and I've done similar numbers. I think I've come over the last 20 years, I was around 7% on a compound annual growth rate. There you go. We're real close on the numbers. The 4%, do you think that that is manifesting itself in asset prices? Because people's houses are going up, equity prices are going up. How much of that amount are people attributing to their skill in markets thinking that they're actually outperforming markets or whatever you want to quantify that in nominal terms when in fact it's the printing. It's just the other 4%, it's not showing up in the CPI gauge. That's an interesting question. A lot of that money is going to be absorbed from the perspective of money printing, financial markets, occupied the money. If we zoom out, inflation is a question of how much money is chasing, how much goods. When people are taking some of that money and they're playing in a casino, for example, then the money is occupied and it's not chasing goods. Inflation, when money is going and being passed around on financial markets, it's not being saved, but it looks like savings. It comes out of the game temporarily. That's an interesting question. What percent of that extra 4%, because the economy hasn't grown 4% for a very long time. There is something like 2% or 3% overhang that's a mysterious. It's like you can detect that there's a hidden planet from its gravity field, but you can't actually see the planet. People usually assume that best may be foreigners, saving or maybe as cocktails would generally save a lot of dollars because they're apparently more prudent than the federal government. But anyway, right. That's going to be a big mystery is where the extra 2% or 3% goes. People usually assume that it bleeds overseas or bleeds into brain markets or black markets. That's an interesting question. That big amount of it may be soaked up into financial markets. What that implies is that that was 2% to 3% per year. That might be quite a large aggregate number. That's essentially occupied at the casino. If the casino empties out if markets decline and people sort of pull out of the casino and get back to the real world, it is possible that there could be a lot of money that floods out of that. Normally when people are looking at that sort of financial black hole, like where did all those extra dollars go? The other usual suspect is going overseas. If you're a rich Mexican, for example, you are not holding a whole lot of Mexican pesos. From a hard earned experience, you know that that's not where to park your fortune. You might have a little bit of pesos for monthly usage. To the extent you have cash or treasuries, which is a cash substitute, you might have those parked in dollars. That's absorbed a lot of those dollars. If the dollarizations, one of the big things people are talking about, if that advances, that a lot of those could also come back. But really, either those two scenarios are sort of black swans, they're not necessarily likely, right, that financial markets are suddenly going to become extremely unpopular, or that foreigners are suddenly going to dump their ballot. They're not necessarily likely, but they are interesting because they would catastrophically affect the dollar. They would both lead to enormous inflation because you have this massive overhang of dollars that are currently kind of out of the game and they would be coming back into the game and circulation in the US. Yes, let's take a quick break here from today's sponsors. There's a new standard in investing in Bitcoin and River is setting it. Not only can you easily buy Bitcoin with zero fees on recurring orders, you can have peace of mind knowing Bitcoin on River is held one-to-one in multi-sig, cold storage, all while being fully licensed and regulated in the US. Plus, the relationship managers are US-based and available by phone for you or your business. Additionally, River has built their own infrastructure from the ground up, which means they don't rely on third parties to function like other Bitcoin exchanges. And because River is a company created by Bitcoiners, I love that they actually encourage cold storage, which they make seamless with their auto withdrawal feature. Go to River.com, slash fundamentals, and get $5 free when you sign up and buy Bitcoin. That's River.com slash fundamentals. You want to speak a new language, but haven't quite got the hang of it. Meet your language learning match, Babel. You get a whole kit of effective learning methods that have been developed by real teachers in over 200 language experts. Your taught useful everyday phrases for everyday conversation and you can test your pronunciation too. Beyond the comprehensive lessons on the app, you can listen to podcasts or join live online classes with professional teachers to get the best speaking practice. Babel is designed for you to break down that barrier that makes you feel self-conscious and for your knowledge to become hard-wired. In that way, you feel comfortable and confident speaking the new language. With over 10 million subscriptions sold and 60,000 lessons on the app, conversations start with Babel. Are you ready? Use Rcode Investor, spelled INVESTOR and get a 12-month subscription for the price of six months. Visit Babel.com slash audio to redeem your code now. That's Babel.com slash audio with code INVESTOR. You can also find all the info on this limited time offer in our show notes. Few investments make a better long-term hedge against inflation, depression, and economic downturns than precious metals like gold and silver. And that is why I'm excited to tell you today about noble gold investments. Noble gold investments is America's trusted provider of precious metals as they've secured over $1 billion in precious metals for their clients. They offer physical gold and silver coins and even let you invest in gold and silver through an IRA, allowing you to not only protect yourself against economic calamity, but also receive tax benefits as well. Noble gold investments isn't just a company. It's your financial guardian for life. It stands for integrity, efficiency, and the American way. In this month, with any qualifying precious metals IRA, you'll receive a free five-ounce solid silver America, the beautiful Boolean coin. That's right, a free five-ounce silver coin. Noble gold investments is here to help you if you want to invest in gold or silver. Just go to bilionairsgold.com. That's bilionairsgold.com to get this exclusive offer. All right, back to the show. Yeah, and I think that that's the big concern. Another thing that I think has lost in a lot of the way that we look at inflation and these growth rates. This goes to Jeff Booth's thesis where he's a technologist, and he's saying that when we invest in these technologies, it's like, where's the calculator? Well, it's all on your iPhone app, and so is everything else. Where's that captured in a CPI gauge as you continue to have this dematerialization effect that keeps compounding, but isn't necessarily captured in these numbers, just to further compound the six or seven percent M2 growth rate really not being captured in any of these inflation gauges. I want to talk about China a little bit. We had recently the country garden situation, we have the ever grand that happened probably a year and a half ago, maybe even longer than that. And it just seems like there's a deflationary force that's kind of hitting China right now, but I closely follow Luke Roman, and Luke is kind of like not having it. And so I'm hearing like all these different kind of competing narratives that are happening in China, and as everybody knows, it's really kind of difficult to piece through what's legit, what's made up, what's a strategic messaging narrative here in the US. I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts on China. The moment China is definitely deflationary, most of that is coming from manufacturing, they have over-capacity in a lot of areas. The Chinese government, like our own government, identifies industries that it wants to give capital to, so green above all. They have industrial policy where they look at semiconductors or other industries that they want to dominate, and so they give them preference for access to capital, as does our government, by the way, in all of those. And what's happening in China is kind of a concentrated version of what happens here, which is that those investments typically fail, because governments are really, really bad. It's not just that they're bad at picking winners. I mean, they are, but in addition to that, of course, the process gets corrupted, right? So the likelihood that the taxpayer money is actually going to go to the correct company is essentially zero, most likely it is just going to be lost. And so in China's case, they've got that problem in manufacturing. They have over-capacity a whole lot of areas. For example, in cars, so Chinese buy about 20 million cars, and China can produce about 30 million cars. There's a lot of extra cars. And so there's only two possibilities. One of them is that the lines go idle, and you lose all those millions of jobs. The other option, of course, is that you crank them out more or less at cost, or maybe even below-cost, variable costs, so that you're using the factory you've already amortized it. And then you just pump those things overseas, and you sell them potentially even below-cost, and you, quote, unquote, dump them. They're going through both of those. So there are a lot of, let's see, it was 20. The youth unemployment rate in China had a record high. It was about 20.5, or it might have crossed 21%. At that point, the government stopped reporting it to save money. And people, of course, interpreted that the way that you and I would. The numbers must have been really, really bad. There's actually shadow estimates that maybe the youth unemployment is like 50%. These are shadow estimates, because nobody ever really knows what's going on in China. But anyway, so many factories definitely in trouble. And many factories are much bigger part of the Chinese economy, famously, right? They stole all the jobs. So it's something like 25% of the Chinese economy. And then the other industry that's really in trouble is property. So China, again, preferentially channeled capital towards property. And something like 70% of Chinese household savings are in property. And a lot of what they'll do is find apartment. They don't intend to live there. In fact, I don't want anybody to live there because the apartment is worth more if it's never been lived in. It's like a new apartment. And they'll use that as a savings account. So just park their assets over there. And as long as you can get a really cheap mortgage from the government, it's a great deal, right? The property is going up 10% a year. You're paying, I don't know, 3% a new mortgage. That's free money, right? You're just basically printing money. The problem, of course, is that so much, I mean, 70% of household savings, that means that if that property starts crashing and you know, you name some of the major property developers in China that are now in trouble, they've got major debts. These are like 100 billion, I think, Amber Grande is like 200 or I mean, these are really large numbers. That's $23 billion. Yeah, these are potentially big enough that China can't necessarily be able to mount too big to bail out. So if that starts crashing, then that's essentially Chinese household savings. I mean, they don't get wiped out, right? Years and years of saving for the kids and for their futures. So there's the potential in China for a lot of unrest about those counts, right? If you have people, young people who are laid off from any tax ring jobs, get everybody losing their life savings, they're not going to have a sense of humor for just the government. And those two sectors, they make up about half of the Chinese economy, both much bigger than they are in the West because of all that preferential capital from the government. So if you've got half the economy that's in bad shape, that generally drains away from the rest of the economy. You know, all those assembly line workers, they don't have enough income to go by a scooter. The property price is going down. Means that households, they're not taking vacations or they're not investing in a car. And so that's really bringing down the entire economy. So China, I think, is definitely going through a rough patch here. But a lot of people in the West, I think, are taking a victory lap and sort of saying, ha ha, the whole Chinese miracle was built on sand. It's all fake. And that, I think, is shortsighted. We are committing all of the mistakes that China does. We're actually doubling down. We're getting a lot worse at it. So if you look at both the EU and the US are cranking out these trillion dollar green funds that they're going to invest in the future. And so they're going to be squandering the money over capacity. That's one of the reasons the UAW is striking at the moment because of this massive flood of government money is going towards forcing the car makers to switch over to electric vehicles. And those electric vehicles require much fewer workers. Plus, a lot of the components basically don't exist in the US at the scale. And so they're all going to have to be imported from China. So you've got all these disruptions that are coming from how the government is choosing the winners. So if you take that back to China now, before we celebrate and do our victory dance, in many ways, China is our future. I think it's more important than that. China, the economy under Xi has not been like the previous 30 years where China was kind of this free market paradise. So she is much more anti-market. He's much more suspicious of markets. He channels money to stay at own enterprises. He's definitely halfway between the free market paradise and like Mao Zedong. Okay, so he's a big part of China's problem. But the thing is that over that 30 year period, China has really built up a lot of expertise in their economic bureaucracy. So that China really in many ways looks like Singapore in terms of how it manages the economy. Now, in recent years, that was overruled by Xi's political bureaucracy. And that's why China is getting into trouble here. But if we sort of look on a 20 or 30 year timeline here, the US has almost nobody like in the bureaucracy. The US of Europe has almost nobody who actually knows how an economy works. Their point of view is to fleece the productive sector, squeeze out the eggs. You're not even waiting for the golden eggs. You're squeezing it to get more eggs out. So they're absolutely killing their economies. In China, at the moment, yes, they're going through a path. But I think the long run, they have a lot more people in the government who actually understand how to grow the economy. And so if they make corrections from what they've been doing, I think that they've got a pretty bright future ahead of them compared to the West, which I think is almost guaranteed to keep going downhill. Yeah, one of the points that Luke was highlighting, I guess with all the oil maneuvering that's been taking place ever since the Russia, Ukraine war kicked off. And he's expecting that they're going to be getting their energy prices at half the price of where it was at before. I'm not really well versed on it. But he's people that are that are counting China out here in the coming five years and saying, oh, they're going to have this massive deflationary. He's looking at them versus let's just call G7 NATO countries. And he's looking at their energy prices. And he's saying there's a lot more to it than what might appear on the newsweek cover right now that where people are doing the victory laps like you were kind of highlighting there. Yeah, he's absolutely right on energy but also on minerals like on raw materials in general. China has been much, much smarter than the US or the Western general. The Ukraine war sort of repositioned a lot of China's or a lot of Russia's oil now where it was aimed at Europe and now it's being a more towards China. That was an absolute unforced error. Once it's going to China, there's it's likely that it'll keep going to China. China's also been very smart about cultivating relationships with bathroom countries to get both energy supplies and mineral supplies. The and you know, this concerning for a West, which in general is trying to destroy its own extractive industries. So they're back for the environment, quote-unquote. Now, of course, the activists will say this while they're on their iPhone that uses cobalt and they can all these other wonderful things. But they just, you know, they don't want it to be happening at home. They wanted to be somewhere else where somebody else's problem. And China, Russia, the whole BRICS group is ready to be at somewhere else so that they can make a lot of money providing those things. And we're actually the point where mineral dominance, right? So the degree to which the China-led group of countries dominate the production of a lot of minerals is it's even higher than OPEC's domination of oil. So we are absolutely, you know, sort of giving away a hostage for the future. And China is, they still have enough bureaucrats who have their heads on straight and they see the opportunity and they're absolutely taking it. Something else, you mentioned earlier, Jeff Booth with deflation. And when people talk about China going through deflation, so I think certainly in the near term, they're going through deflation in manufacturing. And that's a very specific reason because they have over production and then they have to cut the prices. But it's worth noting that having deflation in your economy, that's not actually bad thing. Like deflation in general is not a bad thing. It makes people richer. The best periods of growth in American history or European history have been deflationary period. Really our golden age was the late 19th century in a so-called gilded age. Gilded came from socialist journalists who didn't like it. But that was really the golden age. Almost everything that we used today was invented in that period. We could about 1875, about 1910. It was basically Wilson who killed it with the fed, the income tax roll, or one, the whole progressive moment. Anyway, if you take that 40-year period, essentially everything that we today think of as high-tech was invented then. Now, you can go through every single thing Elon Musk does. And all of it was invented like in the 1880s. Computers, rockets, maglev, magnets, electricity, everything was invented back then. That was a deeply deflationary period. So deflation itself is not a problem. If China is going to go through 30 years of deflation, then we're doomed because they blow everything. Deflation is great. The reason why deflation has this bad name is because there's a very, very specific type of deflation that can happen. Central banks cause that. That's when you have a financial panic. All of a sudden, remember, inflation is money-tasting goods, right? So if you have deflation, it means that you got lots of goods. That's the good deflation. You got lots of goods. You got the same amount of money. What's bad for governments? It's really bad for governments. You're sitting in the government. It's terrible. Oh, for sure. Right. Yeah. Right. Because governments like the licensed counter-fridating operations known as central banks. Now, but the one type of deflation that is really bad is when your stuff stayed the same. You didn't have economic growth or anything. It's just the money suddenly went away. Normally, if you're printing about your money, then you have inflation. But if your money suddenly vanished, then you would get deflation. But the thing is normally, why would the money vanish? Why would that happen? And the answer historically is because you had some kind of financial crash or you had some kind of financial bubble that popped. And those bubbles don't form except for either central banks or precursor to central banks, which was species redemption and so on. But ironically, most people think of deflation as being a really bad thing. If you turn on Bloomberg or something, they'll say China is waiting for it going through deflation. And they sort of present it as if there's a really horrible thing. This is like the plague in economics. But in fact, deflation itself is not a fairly bad thing. It's just that very specific type of financial deflation, which we dodged it by a half inch in March. But that's always the threat. So, right, if China, I don't think they're going to go into a long-term deflation of the reasons that the Chinese government loves to print money just like ours do for the same reason. Counterfeiting is extraordinarily profitable if you're a counterfeiter. So China will just print their way out. So we're not going to see long-term deflation over there, but in the long or in the short run, I think it's likely because of manufacturing, also because of the government right now, doesn't want to do stimulus because it's afraid of the debt levels. So China's got debt levels that are actually higher than the U.S. If you want to feel good about something today. And so the Chinese government is they feel like that's unsustainable. And so they're trying to trim back on that. But in the long run, China sadly is not going to have deflation. I think it's important for people to wrap their head around just fractional reserve banking in general. So when we get these deflationary fits, it's a function of what we're calling money, which is everything is just somebody else's IOU. And because of that, I counter-party risk with every single piece of currency that people are sitting on that we call money and those explode. But if we actually have money, that's a bear asset. Meaning I give you a unit, Peter. And then you give me that unit back or you give me two units. Me having that like that can't become deflationary. It's a bearer asset. It's a monetary baseline unit in the currency, right? Which is and we're both Bitcoiners. We both like Bitcoin. That's what Bitcoin represents is if I have Bitcoin and I give it to you, you are now the owner of that unit. That is monetary baseline money. It can't be deflationary. You can't go poof and disappear. It's yours. So it's been so abstracted away from everybody. I mean, you go out and you ask a hundred people off the street there. And if I would say that to them, they'd be like, I have no idea what this alien's talking about. Like what is he saying? What are those words that he's talking about? I don't know. It's frustrating because there's so much that's been abstracted away from with the terminology itself. No, it has and you get right. A lot of that is intentional to make it confusing. Sometimes in Bitcoin, we talk about how or we sort of complain how difficult it is to explain Bitcoin to people. And the thing is, if you really sit back for a second and consider how difficult Fiat is to explain, right? Yes. There was this, you know, like, what is it? It's debt. And I mean, what? There was a professor in Switzerland who, as an experiment, his PhD, his monetary expert, he's widely known. I can't remember the guy's name. I want to say border. Anyway, he went out and asked a bank. He said, okay, I want you to make a loan for me. And I mean, I'm just going to repay it the next day. But I want you to go through step-by-step exactly how that loan was created. Because apparently, PhD monetary economists, they have not figured out whether banks, commercial banks, print the money they lend you. So like, and what he concluded is that when you go to the bank, you have to have an account at a bank in order to get a mortgage, right? Like, you would think, well, you know, I'm going to get a mortgage at your bank. Why can't I just pay you fees? And then you send me the mortgage to, you know, my account somewhere else. No, you always have to have an account at that bank. And the reasons because when you go on for a loan, they literally create the money on the spot. So that's very hard for people to grasp. Yeah, I mean, you know, when we compare and notably, that was a monetary expert PhD, he'd been doing money his entire life. He's all over the place doing interviews on money. And he had to go through that with the bank to sit down and figure out exactly how it's created. So when people talk about Bitcoin's complexity, you know, the good news for the perspective of Bitcoin is that, you know, if you take the complexity of Fiat, the complexity of central banking, fraction reserve banking, the relationships they have with the money printers. So you have kind of the mother printer over at the Fed and then you have the little baby franchise printers. All right, we just try to go through all that. And then you get a credit card and, you know, where does the credit card money come from? How is that born? You know, every time a child laughs, the new credit card balances before. When you actually try to go through all those things, it is very difficult to understand. And you compare that to Bitcoin, where you own it. Right? I mean, Bitcoin is literally like the way that your grandmother thinks money works. Okay, which is how you got a coin. And that's a piece of money. And if the bank puts a dollar on your, you know, past book, that's because they got a coin in the ball. That's literally how your grandmother thinks money works. And that is literally how Bitcoin works. So in a way, our job is extraordinarily easy. The only reason why people are able to use Fiat, despite how ridiculously difficult it has to understand, is because everybody else does it. Okay, so everybody else uses credit cards. And I can see how it works. You buy stuff. You don't have to pay for it. When you like 70 years old, that's kind of amazing. You're like, wait a minute, let me get this straight. Okay, so you buy stuff. You don't have to pay for it. And then in the mail, they're going to ask you to pay something else. And that's going to be pretty much the same deal. A little bit of fees. Okay, good. That's all people need because they can see that other people do it. They don't get eaten by lions. Okay, that process works. And so it's ultimately going to be in Bitcoin, where normal people using Bitcoin. Frankly, they're not going to need to understand it. It is much, much easier to understand than Fiat. But they're not going to care. Their question is, are other people using it? Are they using lightning or whatever other payment technology comes along? I hope there will be more. They're using lightning. They're paying almost nothing, you know, three SaaS per transaction, whatever the number is. Good, it works. That's really all they need to know. Yeah, it's amazing how you're already starting to see the difference between layer one layer two is lost on the user. I know cash app. You can go in there. You can buy Bitcoin. You can load a lightning. You can load a lightning address. You can load a layer one address. It doesn't matter and you just send it off and it just works. And I think that's where a lot of this is quickly progressing. But let's take a quick break here from today's sponsors. You want to speak a new language, but haven't quite got the hang of it. Meet your language learning match, Babel. You get a whole kit of effective learning methods that have been developed by real teachers in over 200 language experts. You're taught useful everyday phrases for everyday conversation and you can test your pronunciation too. Beyond the comprehensive lessons on the app, you can listen to podcasts or join live online classes with professional teachers to get the best speaking practice. Babel is designed for you to break down that barrier that makes you feel self-conscious and for your knowledge to become hardwired. And that way you feel comfortable and confident speaking the new language. With over 10 million subscriptions sold and 60,000 lessons on the app, conversations start with Babel. Are you ready? Use our code investor spelled i-n-v-e-s-t-o-r and get a 12 month subscription for the price of six months. Visit babel.com slash audio to redeem your code now. That's babel.com slash audio with code investor. You can also find all the info on this limited time offer in our show notes. If your business earns millions or even tens of millions of dollars in revenue, then you're in luck because it's your time to learn about net suite. We get it. All businesses run into their own issues. You fall behind, teams get buried and work and it feels like you're putting out one fire after another in your search for truth. If this is you, you should know these three numbers. 36,000, 25, 1, 36,000. That's the number of businesses which have upgraded to net suite by Oracle. Net suite is the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. 25. Net suite turns 25 this year. That's 25 years of helping businesses do more with less. Closer book in days, not weeks and drive down costs. One, because your business is one of a kind. So you get a customized solution for all of your KPIs or key performance indicators in one efficient system with one source of truth. Manage risk, get reliable forecasts and improve margins. Everything you need all in one place. Right now, download net suite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance. Absolutely free at net suite dot com slash study. That's net suite dot com slash study to get your own KPI checklist net suite dot com slash study. Hey everyone, I have to tell you about this super blend. I'm absolutely loving called Kachava. It's hands down the best thing I've found to feed my body, the nutrients, it craves. Kachava is an all in one plant based super blend made up of super foods, greens, plant proteins, antioxidants, adaptogens, and probiotics. In other words, everything your body craves to feel your best. I'll be honest, the first time I tried it, I fell in love with it. And now my brothers hooked on it as well after I let them try my chocolate pack. And I know what you're thinking. Something this good for me can't possibly taste any good. This is where Kachava really earns their thousands of five star reviews. It tastes amazing. It's creamy, smooth, and it comes in these five delicious flavors. Coconut, osse, and chocolate are my personal favorites, but it also comes in vanilla, chai, and matcha. Some people like to drink it as a part of a healthy breakfast or lunch, and others love it as a protein pack snack before or after a workout. Personally, I like to drink Kachava every day as a quick and easy breakfast or even an afternoon snack when I'm craving something healthy to help me fuel for my day. Kachava is the perfect solution for me as a busy professional who still wants to consume nutritious meals without sacrificing hours in the kitchen. We study billionaires is thrilled to partner with Kachava as they're offering our listeners 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash WSB. That's spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. Peter, I want to talk to you about what we had mentioned at the beginning of the show is the parallels between the US, the Roman Empire. When we look at the Roman Empire, they went through severe currency devaluation situations. There was a crisis in the third century. We had these recess, these debt jubilies that constantly were manifesting themselves from a very high level. Walk the listener through some of these parallels and some of the broader themes that you can kind of piece together. I had a sub-sac article on that recently and kind of going through, given his thesis on the decline of the Roman Empire and that actually come, I did an interview with Charles Payne, Fox News, and Charles Payne is, he likes the big topics. I think most of the day he's chatting with stock talkies and we're like, yeah, yeah, you know, rates are going to do this and you know the next three days and if I'm wrong, then I'll bet you can be honest. He likes that big picture stuff. So anyway, he was actually the one who brought it up and I thought, okay, let me go back and look at Gibbon. Remember, what his stick was. And I actually got a paper on this as well about 10 years ago on sort of the Chinese version of the Roman Empire, which was the Song Dynasty. And the Song Dynasty is famous because they invented paper money. So they've recently invented woodblock printing and at that point you need to really achieve. If you have monks drawing out your money, it's not really going to work, right? You really need something assembly on this house. So the Chinese figured it out and they went through a similar process. But that got me interested in sort of the fall of empires, right? Specifically, what kinds of things we're doing today that are really imitating these empires throughout history. And when you look at the Roman Empire, the sort of first symptoms, what got the whole ball rolling on it was economic mismanagement. So you had a government that was spending way too much and then it actually become predatory on the private economy. Okay, so the taxes, the regulations, arbitrary seizures. There was one point where landlords and peasants were actually fleeing to the Germans, which I don't know, that would be like, you know, it'd be like Americans fleeing to, I don't know, what's the country? Everybody fell to Bangladesh because things are so bad in America. And that was sort of repacious government. What inevitably happens in the decline of every empire is that they will, one of the first things they come for is the money. You can almost trace, I mean, people do this with the Roman Empire and you can literally trace out on a chart the silver content of the Roman coinage. And this will give you almost like an exact marker for how bad things were getting. Now, of course, today, they don't have to clip the coins, they don't have to debase them. So what they do instead is just print money through Fiat money. And so again, the inflation rate really serves the same purpose now. So right now in the world, there's something like half a dozen countries that replace rates over 100%. These are very, very reliable markers for governments that have completely lost the plot. They have gone from the healthy parasite where the productive economy makes things and the government takes off a good school play with it. I don't like that. But anyway, that's the best you can hope for when it comes to governments. But when they go from that to actually, they're no longer parasite, not their predators. That is really the marker that you see in the money. And that's where we are now. And so you've got to run away deficits. You have the taxes have not increased yet. Not substantially. At least not in the US in Europe and Canada, they tend to be higher. But in the US, they really haven't come up yet. Mostly because they're still letting the inflation deal with it. When they get to the limits of inflation, which is really going to come out of the bond markets, then at that point, yes, they're going to go to the next man standing, which is going to be the taxes. But this progressive government takeover of the economy that has really been fueled by Fiat. Once the cancer gets above a certain size, not only it's very, very hard to get rid of, a lot of people at that point are depending on the government being large and generous. So it's hard to get enough voters together to try and reduce the size of government. And you do cross some tipping point where at that point, it's just a matter of time. You're fighting sort of rear guard to try and keep us left the product of economy. When you get to that stage, that's when what gives you sort of those classic hallmarks of Rome, the barbarian invasions, the corruption of the military. In the case of the song dynasty, there was one I thought telling episode, the army wasn't really doing its job. And they had all these Japanese pirates running around marauding in the countryside. And so they said, okay, well, let's go ahead and use incentive payments to try to get the army up off their butt and to take care of some of these pirates. So they decided to pay them whatever one coin per boiled head. And so you can guess what the army did, which is how it went to villages. You had to boil the head so they couldn't tell that it was children and women. Once you go down that path, it gets really, really ugly. So we are thankfully not at that stage yet. We are now at this, but we're coming to that tipping point where before that, you can still reverse it. In the 1970s, the government got really out of control and then he had Reagan come in. A lot of that, some of it came back down. A lot of it kind of leveled off and took a break for a long time. So up until now, I think things have not, they either haven't gotten bad enough that we get on that sort of permanent decline. Or they've gotten bad enough, but it happened so fast that the voters said, no, no, this is horrible. Let's flip right back, right? If we look at the world wars, for example, I was just going to say, so when we look back at the 1970s example, we we were able to negotiate through policy this petrodollar system. And we were able to kind of sidestep the disaster that was unfolding through this relationship where you had this hard commodity country that you're kind of hitching to. But now that that whole petrodollar system is literally falling apart and we could go down the path of bricks and start talking about the de-dollarization stuff that's taking place, you have to have some type of policy that would be akin to what we saw in the 70s that allowed the US to sidestep that. And I feel, and maybe I'm very biased here, but I kind of feel like we have nothing of the sort. If anything, we have anti-constructive, thoughtful diplomacy taking place with the US and the rest of the world, like literally anti-policy. Yeah, we absolutely do. And that's an interesting discussion. We're going to talk about the de-dollarization. There are a lot of people who say things like if Saudi Arabia starts using the Chinese Yuan or the euro that there'll be assassinations or something. And they're basically, I think, working off a playbook that may have been true like in the 60s and 1970s or something. But I don't think that's sure anymore that today, whether it's incompetence or just other priorities, US government is no longer defending the dollar the way they used to. So if you look at the old days, there were really two props that were holding up the dollar. And one of them was the petrodollar. So the US was essentially providing free security to Saudi Arabia in other countries, an unpaid mercenary. And in exchange, they would agree to price their product in dollars. And then that would provide a certain amount of international demand for US dollars. And then the price of oil then underpins a lot of other things. And so that was kind of a linchpin to making the dollar central to world trade. So that was one. And then the other was countries putting their official holdings into the US dollar. And so the dollar is dominant. I think it's still something like 60 or maybe 70% of official holdings all over the world are still in the US dollar. And they've really been throwing both of those away, particularly since the Biden administration came in. So I assume they had some break that didn't bring in the old, the old cons who would always emphasize that dollar demand is a policy goal. And instead they really throw them away. So in the case of Russia, the dumbest thing they did was they seized Russia's dollars. Okay, the dollars that were owned by the Russians and Trebek. That was about four billion worth of dollars. Now given the size of the Russian economy, that would be more like seizing four trillion in US terms. So that was that was a large chunk of dollars. And the reason they seized them was that they were trying to set off a bank collapse in Russia in order to presume they hoped to have Mr. Putin hanging by his ankles somewhere. And the problem there is that whatever you're feeling towards Russia, okay, during the Cold War where we had hot wars going on, all proxy wars going on all over the world, we never did that because the thing is you want your enemies to be dependent on you and on your system. What happened by seizing those dollars is that it put every other country in the world on notice, including China, including friends, including places like Indonesia, Brazil. And put them on notice that if we don't like what you're doing, then we will destabilize your country and try to get you hung up by your ankles. Immediately after that movie, how is the international conferences? For example, you had the ASEAN, the Southeast Asian countries, President Indonesia, who has traditionally been open to the US. He's not a pariah state. And he got up on sage and he said, we have to move away from the dollar because look what happened to Russia. Now, you might say most countries don't invade their neighbors, it's true, but the problem is that this administration, they have been expanding the forbidden list that's going to get you in trouble. So, you know, now it's green stuff, it's potentially labor, potentially LGBT or other policy goals. Now, if you're Saudi Arabia or even if you're just somewhere like Uganda, okay, most of Africa's extremely socially conservative, they are not on board with the social policies of the Biden administration. If they are being painted into a corner where they have to approve certain social policies or have their entire banking system collapsed and ankle action going on, that is a fundamental problem, right? That is a danger for them. So, a lot of these countries who should be friendly, they should be on the dollar because the dollar is the most liquid asset in the world, kind of on the merits, they ought to be all unknown dollars. And they're actually trying to diversify away now because of that political risk. So, I think the idea that like the CIA is going to do in anybody who gets off the dollar, I think those days are going, I think the grown-ups, I'm not saying I like them, but they were very serious about their work at some point and they appear to no longer be, they're essentially throwing it away. It's almost like they've swung a scallop or so many times that it's just down to the handle of the sword. And that being nice, that being the US dollar. Let's go talk a little bit more about the Roman Empire and maybe some of the parallels. I'm curious if there if through some of your research, whether the wealth inequality was expanding or maybe some of the themes that are, I think are just starting to manifest themselves today, are there any of those themes that were very prevalent back then when they would go through these large? I don't know if calling them hyperinflation was maybe the right term, but significant basements that would manifest themselves every 80 years or 50 years. Yeah, they definitely had that. A lot of it is once the state starts intervening in the economy, it is inevitably going to be corrupted. It's like vice-police, okay? Once you put a bunch of nice decent beat cops on drugs, they almost to the man, they're going to go over the dark side. And so governments do go over the dark side and what happened in Rome, of course, is that you essentially had the auction on government policies so that certain people were getting massive benefits. They would then help their friends. It was sort of institutionalized corruption where they would have entire industries that would fleece the public. They would get rules passed that benefit their particular industry and that in poppers the rest of them. And then other industries, even if they are run by decent people, they have to participate to defend themselves. And so you kind of get this roar of all against all where you have a corporate system that you have to fight. And then the industries that can't muster the resources. So generally, that would be the industries that are most competitive. They don't have the extra profits lying around to bribe politicians. They tend to go first. And so you get this really twisted economy. And if we transpose that onto what we have today, you have kind of this hierarchy of industries in the United States that have pulled. You can see it actually, whenever we do a free trade agreement where we will protect certain industries and then other industries get completely sold down the river. Specifically, when you look at a U.S. trade agreement, it's going to be finance, pharmaceuticals, and Hollywood. Okay, three, very specifically. This has to be financial liberalization, which they claim is to make sure that you've enjoyed the boundaries of the developed world. And then the other two tend to be intellectual property. Okay, the U.S. will give you anything if you give them intellectual property because that is pharmaceutical patents in the Hollywood. And so they will sell automobiles down the river, electronics, manufacturing, all of those industries. Good luck. You're out of luck. Can't exchange for those industries. And so we're already getting that here. We have this hierarchy. I've certain industries that because they're so profitable, right? Any industry that involves intellectual property tends to be more profitable because you can charge more in charge of an monopoly. And so those industries are outbidding the other industries. And so if you sort of look at that out in the wild in the real world, you've manufacturing is increasingly characterized by a guy hiring seven people in some metal shop in Milwaukee or something. I mean, it's just kind of these tiny little, you know, probably really specialty products that's got relationships with their clients, just kind of a special reason they're around. And other than that, you know, who is starting new manufacturing ventures in the US. Generally, you either have to have government money or I mean, you can do a little bit of it by saying it's made in America and in a certain part of the market that's going to want that. But fundamentally, you would pretty much have to be insane enough to be a massacast to actually start a manufacturing business in the United States. On the other hand, finance, pharma, Hollywood, you have to be alluded to not to start those things. Because that's so massively profitable. Intangible assets. So that's exactly when I was studying Buffett, he had some amazing shareholder letters. I want to say it was like in the early 80s where he talked about why he was really trying to focus on owning intangible assets versus tangible assets. And when you look at the capex for any type of like manufacturing business here in the US, now that we're getting inflation, like when he was writing these shareholder letters, he was saying that intangible assets, you can adjust the price to keep up with the inflationary effects immediately, like a Disney movie is a great example of intellectual property or of an intangible asset. I can go on onto the internet and I can keystroke that now it's not $25, it's $30 or whatever and you can keep up with the pace of that. But if it's a factory and you got all these machines and you got to go in there and replenish the tooling and whatnot and you got tons of inventory and anything tangible, it's just destroyed and so difficult to keep pace with and it suits the comment that you that you just provided so well. I'm sorry to interrupt you, did you have some more? I don't know, yeah. I was going to say you're absolutely right and one part that Buffett's probably not going to get into is that those intangible industries also generate the kinds of profits he can provide politicians with. So I mean you can see it across those industries, for example copyright. I think now it's something like 75 years after the death of the create. I mean this is ridiculous. You would have both created content. The notion that like I'm not going to shoot videos unless I have exclusive rights for we do the math like 110 years is bonkers, right? But that's pure corruption. Okay, so if they get best up right then pharmaceuticals, I won't get into details there but everybody knows what happened these past couple of years in terms of government privilege. And then of course finance, finance has been at this for a long time. They get these special rules put in, they can chase out the competition. You take the 2008 crisis for example, which was caused by the major banks, right? It was not caused by hedge funds, it was not caused by you know small mom and pop bankers, that was made on Wall Street. And if you look at the number of new banks starting the US before 2008, you would have a couple of banks like 5, 7, something like that per year for memory. Okay, so you would have kind of the spinner pattern of new banks. It was hard to start a new bank because they had put all these rules in because they wanted to shut out the competition, but it was possible. You look at 2008, nothing. There's like no new banks started. It is, I think it might be zero over the entire time. I know Caitlyn long started a bank, but I mean it's just shot. She's trying to start a bank. She's trying to start a bank. There you go. Exactly. And you know, I mean, it just puts in relief. So these guys, they gamble, $3,000, they lose it, they keep all the winnings. And then when they scrub, we the taxpayers get the bail them out. And then they say, so to make sure it never happens again, let's get a bill in here, really clean up Wall Street. And as always, that's the hustle. Okay, debankers always buy the regulation. They have the useful idiots who push for it. And then the useful idiots, the guys down in Zucati Square are complaining about the 1%, those are not the guys who write the bill. Because the guys who write the bill and pay $1,000 an hour, they're law firms and they are paid by Wall Street. And because Wall Street has guys in the Senate on a speed dial. And so the bills are always written by the guys who just fleeced us. And of course, they wrote the bills so that they get all the goodies. So next time around, we get the permanently bail them out. And there's no new entrance that they have to compete with. So we're already well down that path where the economy in many ways is captured by these profitable industries. They get a hold of the political process that they can shut out the new competition. In fact, they can sell the entire rest of the economy. They don't care about it, you know, housing, manufacturing, services, the gig economy, all this stuff. When they need to, all that stuff is ready to be sacrificed on behalf of these most profitable, most corrupt industries in the country. Peter, the last question I got for you. So most of the people listening to the show are Bitcoiners. They get it, they understand it. But there's also traditional finance people that listen to the show. You as a Bitcoiner, with PhD, you got all this background in macro and you understand markets at a very high level. Why Bitcoin? Why is this something that you're passionate about? Why is it something that you think is going to really kind of play a major role coming forward? Explain it for a person who's maybe hearing some of this for the very first time. So for the first time or I'd probably start leading with why hard money? Okay, so that's the first question. So why is our money today broken? Why is paper money a problem? And throughout history, hard money has been absolutely essential to prosperity. Because without hard money, governments will inevitably take over huge parts of the economy. They will then render that dead. Really, it's like an infection once it takes over your arm. You're done with that arm. Okay, that arm is written off. So it really does spread like an infection, which is fueled by inflation. On top of that inflation causes the boom bus cycle. So the whole central bank process of creating inflation, that's what creates the booms that lead to the bus, you can trace almost every catastrophe in history. You can link that to a boom bus cycle. World War One, the Civil War, the War of 1812, countries universally start wars. They have financial panics. They have collapses. That opens the so-called political over 10 window, which is when you get terrible things happen. You get changes in political systems and freedom and everybody is always at risk when you come in those moments. So inflation is very dangerous. It impoverishes us, and it creates a never ending series of crises. It creates a crisis industrial complex, which basically craves on those crises in each time, but ratches up, ratches up, and takes our liberties. So we have to constantly defend our liberties. Sometimes it's a little bit frustrating because fundamentally we have this in luxury regime. That's why hard money. And then the next question is, throughout history, the best hard money has been gold or silver. And so why big coin, you know, why not gold? And I think there, it comes down to, you sort of zero in on exactly what is gold's flaw? Because I do love gold. And the problem with it is that if you talk to a peon person and you're advancing gold, they'll say, okay, if gold is so amazing, why does anybody use it today? Why don't we have 200 countries in the world and nobody uses gold? It's a fair question. And I think the answer is because governments are very, very good at violence. Gold has a fundamental flaw, which is that you cannot have a gold back currency where you tell everybody, I have the gold, but it's hidden impossible. You have to be able to verify the gold. And the only way that you can verify the gold is that you have to know where it is. All right. And it's very expensive. If you tell everybody, I have a gold back currency and the gold to my house, you're going to get visitors at night. So now you got a, you got a higher guys, you got a book of the wall, you need the sharks, the lasers on their head, you have to protect the gold. So at scale, the only way that gold works is that you have to have a central depository where you collect that gold. And then you can't issue paper money off the gold as long as it's fully redeemable. That's perfectly stable. The problem is the gold is a fundamental vulnerability to any government that becomes interested in taking it. And governments do the darn thing because they will inevitably be interested in taking your gold. Because it's free well. Who's going to stop them? For an quote, monopoly on violence over their territory. If your gold is in their territory, then they can take it any time they like. This is how the world works. So that I think is fundamentally the question. Bitcoin solves gold's fundamental flaw, which is that it is always vulnerable to the state. And because Bitcoin has no instantiation, it can live without the state. It does not depend on any institutions. That I think is why ultimately Bitcoin wins. Now, if Fiat is going to be dying in the next three years, then, and we have to go to hard money, then I think we probably will go to gold. Because not enough people know about Bitcoin. There's still an institutional memory for gold, right? 50 years ago, our financial system was still operating on gold until Nixon. So it's kind of hard for people to grasp. But I mean, we had the entire menu of, you know, we have more users and credit cards. And we had the whole thing back in the 1970s. And so there's still a lot of memory of it. Central bankers understand it. People in general understand. So if the collapse is coming in 2026, which I think is unlikely, we'll go to gold first. And then I think we continue doing what we are, which is that more and more people understand Bitcoin and they can see why it's printed in gold. If on the other hand, the collapse is not happening for 30 years or something, that I suspect we skip gold. The first time in history, we skip gold. And we go direct to the coin. Yeah, I think something that's also important to your point where you're basically getting at gold requires trust and Bitcoin doesn't require trust is we could take a video camera. We could go into a gold vault and show everybody, oh, here's all the gold bars, but it's still use the person still has to trust us, the person with the video camera, the person who's managing the fall, because they don't know as soon as we walk out of there that all those gold bars now get sent to wherever or that the purity in the gold bars are even real. So like the ability that audit it from a sovereign level, it's very different from an individual standpoint versus a sovereign standpoint. But from the sovereign level, like it requires trust for the currency that rides on top of it. If the ratio is one ounce of gold for a hundred paper bills, well, you can change that to 200 or to 500 or whatever. And all excellent points, Peter, and definitely things hopefully that people will think more about if they're coming to this for the first time. But I really enjoyed having you on the show. This was a blast. And why don't you give people a handoff to use some of the content that you create and just give them some more information about yourself? Sure. Let's see. I do daily videos on economics and freedom. I use this backdrop right here. People ask me if it's real. Believe it or not, it is my wife put it together. So anything good about the product is hers. All the mistakes are mine. Anyway, those come out every day. I'm also very active on Twitter as all of us are nowadays. And I do a weekly podcast that gathers the videos and then also a sub stack where I do the longer form articles, including the fall of room one that we just talked about earlier. Awesome. Thank you so much, Peter. For coming on, it was a really enjoyable chat. And I look forward to chatting with you soon. Thank you for having me on. I enjoyed it and always love your content. 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 a 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 algorithms. 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. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses or forums, go to the investorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the investorspodcast network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or report casting.