← The Peter McCormack Show
The Peter McCormack Show
From the Petrodollar to a Bitcoin Standard with Alex Gladstein & Nic Carter - WBD353
01:10:35
Location: Remotely Date: Monday 24th May Project: The Human Rights Foundation & Castle Island Ventures Role: Chief Strategy Officer & Partner Bitcoin is in the midst of an immense cycle of FUD. In the last few weeks alone, Elon Musk has questioned the...
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- [00:03]
Alex Gladstein
It's reasonable to think that in the next 10, 15 years you'll start seeing a real shift, whether it's to a bipolar world or a multipolar world, or potentially a world where, you know, we no longer have the petrodollar as kind of the reserve currency, but rather maybe the bitcoin standard.
- [00:18]
Peter McCormack
Hello there from Chicago. How are you all doing? Pretty wild times out there right now. And if you were following Twitter a couple of days ago, we have just witnessed the birth of the Mining Council. Now this has seen a mix of responses from some who are very angry that this was a closed door meeting, to others who feel like this is a good move and it's not such a big deal. I myself find it hard not to think of similar times in the history of bitcoin. The New York agreement which the devs didn't attend, and the disaster that was the Bitcoin Association. My personal view is that we are potentially on shaky grounds where different people with different influence, perhaps billionaires, can prop up the energy narrative and influence market prices while also pumping a meme coin. I personally reject this and I've been trolling because of this and has been subject to some harsh criticism. Truth be told, with all my wealth held in Bitcoin, I am suspicious of certain people flexing influence and the slippery slope that this leads to. I'm going to cover this specifically in a show with Dan Held on Friday. But I do respect there are different people with different opinions on this and I'm going to try and speak to as many as I can to just try and get some consensus around it. I'm not a fan of it though. I just don't like what has been happening this last few weeks in the world of bitcoin. Anyway, how are you all? Welcome to the what Bitcoin did podcast which is brought to you by Gemini, the only place I'm using to buy bitcoin. I'm your host Peter McCormack and today I have an interview with Alex Gladstein and Nick Carter where we are going to be discussing the petrodollar. But before that, I do have a message from my show sponsors. And first up today it's Ledger, the world's most popular hardware wallet. Now, a hardware wallet allows you to take custody of your bitcoin and I've been a Ledger customer since early 2017 and I'm still using the same Nano s that I bought back then. Ledger makes it easy for you to safely manage your Bitcoin using their Ledger Live software which interfaces with your device. You can even connect your Nano S to an Android phone to manage your bitcoin on the go. Now if you want to find out more, please do head over to ledger.com which is L E D G E R.com Next up we have Gemini, my new exchange sponsor who I am using exclusively for buying and selling bitcoin. But I haven't sold any through Gemini yet because we're only buying we're in a bull market. I'm not selling my bitcoin. Now I've been using the Gemini app for buying the dips, but I also set up a DCA which allows me to twice monthly automatically buy bitcoin. And I and I'm yet to see a better interface for buying bitcoin. Now I do every week give a shout out to Cameron Tyler for spawning the show. I'm loving working with the Gemini team and I've had some great feedback from listeners who are now checking them out. But if you do want to check out Gemini, please head over to gemini.com, which is G-E-M-I-N-I.com also let's talk about Blockfire, the future of bitcoin and financial services offering a number of products for bitcoiners. Now with a Blockfi interest account you can earn yield on your bitcoin. I've been a customer of theirs using their interest accounts for nearly two years and I love my bitcoin working for me. Now with a bitcoin backed loan you can borrow against your bitcoin without selling. And you can also now register for the Blockfi credit card which launches imminently offering 1.5% rewards back on all card purchases in bitcoin. Pretty cool. If you want to find out more, please head over to blockfi.com, which is B L O C K F I. Okay, so onto the show today and I have a monster episode with two of my favorite bitcoiners. I've got Alex Gladstein and Nick Carter on the show to go through Alex's recent article the Hidden Costs of the Petrodollar. Now I say this all the time when I'm doing a show based on an article. You have to go and read this. It is truly a monster article. It is in the show notes. Please do go and check it out. In the article Alex goes about answering the question of whether having Bitcoin as the world's reserve currency could bring an end to dictatorships, inequality and our reliance on oil. It is an absolutely amazing article and once I read it. I hit Alex up and I said, come on, man. Come on the show. I want to discuss this with you. But we also brought Nick on as a guest as Alex gets into the history of reserve currencies back to the gold standard throughout Bretton Woods. And I think Nick is an absolute beast at breaking this stuff down. Now, if you have any feedback on this show, you can reach out to me. My email address is hellohatbitcoindid.com or you can jump into my telegram group. Okay, over to the interview. Alex, good to see you, mate. How are you doing?
- [04:44]
Alex Gladstein
Doing well. Thanks for having us, Peter.
- [04:46]
Peter McCormack
Always a pleasure. Nick, your 150th appearance on what Bitcoin did. How are you?
- [04:51]
Nick Carter
I'm doing great. I think this is number eight, man. I hope it might be nine. Am I on top? Is Lop ahead of me again?
- [04:59]
Peter McCormack
No Lops behind. Breedlove is on 8 now. The problem is I've got regular guests.
- [05:04]
Nick Carter
That's messed up.
- [05:05]
Alex Gladstein
That's unfair. You can't compare us to them.
- [05:07]
Peter McCormack
Yeah, they don't count. They don't count. I think this puts you back on top.
- [05:09]
Alex Gladstein
More importantly, the first podcast I've ever appeared on with Nick.
- [05:13]
Peter McCormack
Really?
- [05:14]
Alex Gladstein
Yes.
- [05:14]
Nick Carter
Yeah, it's our first.
- [05:16]
Peter McCormack
Well, I feel honored to have you both together because you're two of my favorite people to talk to. Okay. So, Alex, you know I'm a huge fan of your work. You produce, I think, some of the best content out there. I think the only person who rivals you for that spot is the man who's joining us, Nick Carter. But your recent article on the petrodollar, I think it's my favorite thing I've read by you because you educated me on something that I've heard about, but I didn't really properly understand the mechanics, and I certainly didn't understand the geopolitical mechanics. So, firstly, big thanks anyone listening. It will be linked in the show notes. You should probably read it before you listen to this interview. But, Alex, what was the background to this? Why did you decide to attack this topic?
- [05:58]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah, so I can credit Nick and a few others, actually, for persistently reminding the world that when we talk about Bitcoin's energy use, we're not talking about a comparison to, like, a Visa, which is what the media likes to focus on. In reality, when you look at Visa, of course, Visa is a fintech kind of sitting on top of the banking system, which is sitting on top of the dollar system. So transactions actually use a lot more energy than it sort of Seems on the surface. And my whole goal here was to dive down past the surface to the bottom of the monetary system and to fairly compare bitcoin per transaction or whatever to the existing financial system. You have to compare the full stack. So Bitcoin is like this open stack. You can see it all and we can kind of more easily figure out the externalities, the dollars that we spend on a daily basis today, usually through kind of like commercial banking and fintech. The full stack is hidden. Right. So my goal here was to dive all the way down and take a look at what is backing the financial system today. And then that way we could kind of have a fair comparison in terms of the negative externalities of the bitcoin system versus the dollar system. And the whole premise of this conversation that I want to have with you guys is this idea that the world reserve currency, or essentially what nations save in at a geopolitical level, has evolved over the last century plus from basically a gold standard to the Bretton woods standard, which we can get into, which was essentially governments now using dollars pegged to gold, then evolving to what we could call maybe the treasury bill standard, which is after 71, 72, 73. Since then, nations have basically saved in US debt, essentially as like the hardest money, quote, unquote. And then for the context of our show here, obviously my thesis is I think we're going to go to a bitcoin standard as the next kind of monetary revolution in terms of what do central banks and governments and sovereigns actually hold as like the hardest money. So again, we've gone from like gold to sort of dollars backed by gold to dollars slash treasuries backed by quote, unquote, nothing to, I think we're going to head to bitcoin. So that's the chronology here of what I want to kind of talk about.
- [08:23]
Peter McCormack
Fantastic. Well, you asked Nick to join us today because Nick is one of the world's leading experts on the history of the gold standard.
- [08:33]
Nick Carter
I'm not an expert, but I might be able to chime in here. But yeah, Alex, I mean, did all the. I learned a lot from Alex's piece. So, yeah, this is the Alex show.
- [08:43]
Peter McCormack
It's an incredibly detailed and well researched article and I, I will circle it amongst everyone I know. Again, but I do think an important starting point because even though I've covered this on the show before, other people won't have listened to all my previous shows. I'm. My producer, Ben was one of the contributors to the website WTF happened in 1971, but pre1971, it's probably good to just give an overview of the history. Nick, if you want to attack this from what happened after World War II leading up to essentially the Vietnam War, and how world powers decided to work together on a common monetary base.
- [09:25]
Nick Carter
Sure thing. Yeah. So of course there's a very long monetary history which we can't fully cover here. But the long and short of it is in 1944, when it was pretty clear that the US and the allies would win the war, effectively, the Allies got together at this hotel, the Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which is a lovely hotel, by the way. I was actually just there. It's very charming. It's kind of two hours north of Boston in the shadow of Mount Washington, which is pretty tall mountain. And they discussed a new international system. They set up a bunch of international organizations. And of course, the key thing that came out of that was the agreement that the world would unify on this monetary standard administered by the U.S. with the U.S. as the main arbiter and administrator of that system. And effectively what had happened during the war was a lot of these European countries, they had actually given or entrusted the US with their gold reserves for safekeeping. There's a whole story about European nations kind of fleeing with their gold, getting it to the US because that was considered to be the safe place. And effectively, the US in 44 took this bargain to the world and to their allies, saying, we will administer the monetary standard. It will be based on gold. We will, for the most part, hold everyone's gold. And all of your sovereign currencies will just be different weights of the dollar, which will be backed by gold and redeemable for gold. Keep in mind, at this point in US history, gold convertibility for individual citizens was still suspended, if I'm not mistaken. So had been suspended in the 30s during the Great Depression. So it was a tiered system. There was gold convertibility for sovereigns, but not for regular folks. And so effectively it was a gold based standard through the interface of dollars with other currencies just being different weights of gold or different weights of the dollar. And that persisted for a couple decades. That was known as the Bretton woods system. Of course, people talk about the IMF and the World bank as the Bretton woods institutions as well. So Bretton woods is kind of a metonymy for that entire system that the US used as it became the sole superpower, the sole nation that had really survived World War II intact with no destruction. And, you know, the U.S. embarked on the Marshall Plan to help rebuild the world. They issued a huge amount of credit and, you know, distributed capital globally to sort of help rebuild Europe effectively. And because they were the, you know, unmitigated victor there, they were able to effectively seize control. And there was discussion at that time around a Bancor style system. You know, Keynes had advocated for Bancorp, which would have been a global reserve currency, would be a mixture of different sovereign currencies to avoid the Triffin Dilemma. But that idea was actually shot down at the time. And instead we got this dollar based standard which ended up persisting for the next 30 years or so.
- [13:08]
Peter McCormack
Nick, can you just explain the Triffin dilemma?
- [13:11]
Nick Carter
So I want to make sure. Maybe Alex can chime in here. I want to make sure I get this right. As far as I understand it, it's this tension between domestic goals and international needs. As far as an issuer of the world reserve currency is concerned. If the world has a need for, let's say, dollars, and you're issuing dollars as a global reserve, that's this constant pressure on dollars and that foreigners need dollars to conduct commerce in, and that conflicts with domestic goals because it makes exports uncompetitive in the country that is issuing the global reserve. And so it sort of causes this negative balance of trade effectively. And so Triffin, who's an economist, I suppose, predicted this issue and people knew that it would eventually be an issue, which is the two goals are kind of intention issuing a global reserve, a currency that everyone can use, and then being able to sort of have a stable monetary framework domestically. I don't know if that's sort of a full explanation.
- [14:24]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah, I guess I would point out that Triffin, he came out with his theory in the 60s and that's when the world, generally speaking, started to question the US's ability to hold the gold peg at $35 an ounce. Number one, the French, led by de Gaulle and other countries really questioned, especially after the assassination of jfk, the direction that the US went in. Number one, with just like huge war spending for Vietnam, but also the Great Society. So this was known as like guns and butter. And it was unclear to the world whether or not the US would be able to keep its promise to redeem their gold. And in fact, later in the 60s, French statesmen came up with this phrase like the dollar is an exorbitant privilege. And they sort of started to realize that in the Triffin Dilemma, it almost required the US to have this huge balance of payments deficit and essentially what the other countries would end up doing is financing U.S. debt. So when you got up to the late 60s, Britain actually kind of defaulted, let's say, and ended up having to devalue the pound in the late 60s as a result of a lot of poor fiscal policy and its colonial collapse. And a lot of the other powers started to really worry the same thing could happen to the U.S. so in the summer of 71, actually, the French sent a battleship to New York City in August of 71 to redeem their gold. And the British asked for, like, about 3 billion pounds of gold to be moved from Fort Knox to New York in preparation for withdrawal. So countries around the world were basically calling the US as bluff based on what they saw out of Vietnam and social spending. And they just didn't think the US could sustain the system. So they were ready to like, take their gold back. So Nixon, in a famous speech, actually went on TV and he. He declared this was a few days after the French sent the battleship. So literally this was like a reaction to this world demand for their gold back. And he said, no, we're not going to give it back. We're ending the gold window. Other nations can no longer redeem their dollars for gold. He also announced some wage freezes and some more import tariffs. And this was kind of pitched as a bid to save the economy as the US Was entering into a very inflationary decade. So the system that Nick described came under heavy stress at the end of the 60s and the early 1970s really set the stage for this transition to a new kind of world economy. Now, just a couple, couple big events I wanted to hit for the audience. As I mentioned, Nixon ended convertibility of gold in the late summer of 71. This immediately devalued the dollar by 10%. So the fears of the world were founded. The US was, at the end of the day, not to be trusted to guard the world's reserve currency. And its war in Vietnam and social programs made it sort of like impossible for it to guarantee the promises it once extended. Now the world kind of went into a very inflationary decade in the coming years. The next sort of big event I would, I would hit is in 73. We have like this dynamic in oil really shifting. So first of all, you have this change between, like, colonial powers kind of controlling oil to. To sovereign dictatorships controlling oil. So in the 50s and 60s you had this thing called the Seven Sisters. So these were like a handful of Western oil conglomerates that could really kind of determine the price of oil through kind of colonialist practices. So these folks were essentially kind of, kind of thrown out. Slash, they lost their power to nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Kuwait, et cetera in the 60s. And by the early 70s, this OPEC, this kind of association of oil producing countries, really, really had a lot of leverage and power, whereas they didn't before. Like when countries tried to do this previously, like get power over the west, like when Mexico tried to do this and when Iran tried to do this, like they got wrecked. So this was kind of like a historic shift where these oil countries could now actually hold a lot of leverage and power. So in 73, when the US supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war and we had put like a lot of pressure on basically the whole developing world through our agricultural policies, as a response, the Arab nations decided to both like jack up the price of oil by forex and announce an embargo on the United States. So you had oil kind of going from like $2 a barrel, where it was for like a long time, to 10, 11, $12 a barrel. Now this created an enormous flow of cash for the Saudis and the OPEC nations. This was a historic moment because it was so much money. You know, essentially the OPEC ran a surplus and the rest of the world ran a net deficit. I mean, I can't stress how much, just how much money came into the coffers of these Arab regimes. So basically Kissinger and Nixon and the US and the new Treasury Secretary Simon, they were like, what do we do? Like, how do we kind of save this? How do we prolong dollar hegemony? How do we get people to continue to demand and buy and use the dollar? This was their dilemma. And the petrodollar was like the solution. The petrodollar was like their mechanism for how they would solve this issue. And by the end of that year 73, the dollar had actually lost 20% of its value against other top currencies. And people called this like a peacetime redistribution of global wealth on a scale that had never been seen in living memory. So again, all this oil shifting from other countries to OPEC, to give another data point in 74, the oil exporters had an account surplus of 70 billion, up from 7 billion the year before. And the thing is, they couldn't. This wealth that they were getting, they couldn't. It was so much wealth, they couldn't spend it all. So there was like this mutual dilemma where like the Saudis and the oil states didn't know what to do with the money. And and the US had like a need for people to buy its debt. So through a bunch of meetings in 74 and 75, Kissinger and Nixon and William Simon, the Treasury Secretary basically figured out like a, like a deal like we maybe would call it a pact of the devil. Given, given, given the Saudis proclivity for human rights violations, tyranny, you know, later in history kind of destroying other nations and things like that. But essentially Simon and Kissinger said, hey, and this is a quote from Simon. If the OPEC nations put a larger amount of their accumulated funds into investment in this country, this was a way of saving the day. Because the other way to save the day would be if the American public spent less and saved more. And that was not going to happen with Nixon facing impeachment. So the idea is they were like we need to get other nations to finance our debt because we're not going to do it through raising taxes. There's no way. So you know, essentially the deal was in the petrodollar system that these dollars that these OPEC nations were earning that they would not only like force the sale of oil to be in dollars, so all oil sales were like now denominated in dollars but they would take the earnings and they would actually buy US debt with the profits. And this is what we call petrodollar recycling. And this mechanism really saved dollar hegemony I think would be my thesis. And it wasn't necessarily like a market decision would be the other thing I would just try to kind of hammer home. This was all ironed out through secret deals. The Saudis could have just pursued a broader portfolio of investment. They didn't have to go so heavy on US debt, they didn't have to price oil in dollars. These were decisions they made in exchange for protection. Okay, in exchange for massive amounts of weapons, mass amounts of protection. So essentially the Saudis became, you know, non market investors in US debt and the US became a non market seller of weapons to the Saudis. So you know, Nixon, Kissinger, Simon, they ended up kind of saving the day for the US in a lot of ways, at least for US elites by figuring out a way to keep dollar hegemony alive. And indeed it was even more strong in the late 70s and 80s than it was in the 60s in terms of the amount of kind of just total global trade denominated in dollars and amount of global reserves held in dollars. And this really helped us of course in the Soviet struggle with the Soviets because the, through this system we could print, you know, we could Print money to buy oil. Soviets had to literally dig it out of the ground or somehow get dollars in another way. And this gave us a huge, huge advantage. So, so that kind of brings us kind of into the 80s. There were a lot of other interesting things. I'll just mention one other item here. The euro dollar market is very related. The euro dollar market was essentially something that happened in the beginning of the Cold War where like eastern bloc nations needed dollar accounts and they kind of established ways to do that. In Europe outside of the purview of the Fed, it was kind of like, I wouldn't say niche, but it wasn't a huge, huge market until the petrodollar. So the petrodollar system really relied on these euro kind of these like, euro dollar banks so that, you know, the Saudis would plow all their money into them and then, and then from there either, either get Treasuries or the money would be lent out to like, what they called LDC or like developing world countries. And that was kind of another kind of sad legacy of the, of the petrodollar system was that essentially a lot of poorer nations were kind of like forced to, you know, import, you know, they all had to import oil, most of them at least. And now it was like, super hard for them to do that. They had to like, structure their economy in a way to like, get dollars, and they had to ignore domestic investment and spending. And this led to like, a huge number of like, debt crises in the third world in the 80s and 90s. So you had a system where the US and a lot of rich countries really benefited, but a lot of the world really, really, really suffered. And yeah, that's kind of like the first era of the petrodollar.
- [25:04]
Peter McCormack
That's amazing. Thank you for, for that explanation, Nick. I also noticed on Twitter a few times when one of the bitcoin critics step up, you have occasionally stepped into the argument and raised the petrodollar before. You're. You're a strong critic of it as well.
- [25:24]
Nick Carter
Yeah, I mean, it's. Well, we've moved on, I would say, from like the first template for the petrodollar a little bit today. But it's just worth elucidating these things because part of the case for bitcoin, people often consider an isolation without considering what the alternatives are. And the alternative is this dollar system. And as Alex says, the dollars uses this tool of US hegemony. It's used to pursue political objectives. And obviously we see that with sanctions, but it has these Externalities and Bitcoin's externalities are pretty transparent. Anybody can quantify, you know, its energy impact and the emissions and so on. The dollar's externalities are much more diffuse. They're much more opaque. I would argue they're deliberately opaque. And the dollar externalities have much more to do with, you know, this military adventurism that we see worldwide that we'll probably get into later in the episode. They have to do with driving inequality within the U.S. you know, and so these things are genuine and they're real, but they're just much less perceptible, which is why we have to do this analysis of the petrodollar system. But I guess the. The broader point is this is a very imperfect system, and it pits the US against its allies in many cases, and also pits various social strata within the US against each other. And so the dollar is not sort of homogenously good for all Americans. In fact, you could argue that this system, as constructed, is actually pretty bad for the working classes, for anybody that depended on manufacturing jobs, for the sector of society that makes physical things. And it's very good for a smaller set of sort of globalized elites. And we can definitely get into that and expand on that. But that's the point is, look, we know Bitcoin's not perfect. It has costs, et cetera. The dollar system is also pretty exclusionary and causes these rifts in society that are worth pointing out.
- [27:42]
Peter McCormack
Yeah, well, we should definitely get into that because there's a number of points that Alex brings up in his article, the kind of negative externalities that come from the dollar system. But let's start, Nick, with that point. Let's start with the impact on manufacturing in the US I know Alex in his article alluded to what happened in the Rust Belt, the cost of exports for the US and the rise of populism. Do you want to touch on that?
- [28:08]
Nick Carter
Sure. Yeah. So this is kind of what we were talking about with the Triffin Dilemma. There's another phenomenon called Dutch disease, which is the idea that when you export a lot of a commodity, it sort of cannibalizes other sectors of the economy. In this case, the commodity the US exported was the dollar. So what happens when you issue the global reserve currency is foreigners need to acquire lots of it in order to engage in commerce. And this causes it to sort of trade at a premium to where it would normally be settling. And what this means is that your exports are more expensive than your competitor nation exports. And so everybody looks at the charts that show things going badly wrong in the 70s, right. What happened in 1971, et cetera. One of the things that started to go wrong was our manufacturing sector just started to structurally decline as US exports became less and less competitive and we started to run this huge trade deficit. And again, this wasn't actually unexpected. This was something Keynes pointed out in 1944 that would be a consequence of the dollar system. This is why the SDR or the bancor was proposed. But we got the petrodollar, we got the dollar as the global reserve. And so the US was effectively forced into running this huge trade deficit, which meant that we would engage in consumerism and import things from abroad, export dollars and export, you know, relatively little of our own, which meant that blue collar manufacturing would be structurally suppressed. And so effectively the US working class was sacrificed at the altar of the dollar. And you know, that's had really negative effects on society. That's why the U.S. it's no coincidence the U.S. is among the most financialized of the developed nations and it has some of the highest inequality of any sort of OECD developed nation. It's a direct consequence of this system. And now we see the political ramifications of that. That's why you see the growth of populism, this political enthusiasm for trade wars, things like that is because the dollar system does not work for everyone. And we're kind of reaching a tipping point here where people are sort of starting to rebel a little bit against the status quo.
- [30:34]
Peter McCormack
Thank you for that. One of the other areas I definitely want to dig into with you as well, Alex, is the destabilization of the Middle east through the petrodollar. There's two specific areas we can talk about. We can obviously talk about the support for the House of Saudi, their regime, the war against Yemen. But I also wanted to talk to you about some of the suggestions around the Iraq war, which was completely new to me. I said to you before we started recording, I watched the BBC four part documentary which I will also put in the show notes because it's excellent. But as you correctly asked me, did it touch on the finances or global finances? And it didn't. Can we start by breaking down how the petrodollar has destabilized the Middle East?
- [31:22]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah. And just to recap so far where we are, the US dollar as the world reserve currency was kind of propped up after Nixon went off the gold standard by the petrodollar system. And again, at the heart of this was this idea of what some people call a Double loan. So because the US through its military force was able to pressure the Saudis to only sell oil in dollars. Dollars. Dollars became the medium of exchange for oil. That meant the US government could literally just print dollars to pay for oil and the American economy didn't have to produce goods or services in exchange for the oil. That's like the first part of the double loan. The second part is that all the other countries had to pay dollars for the oil, but they couldn't print dollars. So they had to trade their goods and services for dollars in order to go pay opec. So, you know, all the US really had to do was export treasuries, meaning bonds. And you know, Simon, who was the Treasury Secretary who set this whole thing up, he was a bond salesman, so he was really good at this. And we basically got to sell bonds to finance all of our activities. So that's kind of the trick here. And that is what sustained the ability of the US to continue running these crazy deficits that have gotten like even more intense over time. In terms of debt to GDP ratio, I think at the time in the 70s it was about 30%. Today it's 130%. So a lot of this has been sustained by the petrodollar system. Now, when it comes to risks to the petrodollar system, I guess my thesis would be that the US has aggressively defended the petrodollar system. And some people say, I think David Graeber, who wrote Debt, said what I thought was quite sharp. He said that essentially he wasn't sure exactly to the extent, you know, today how important the petrodollar system still was. But as he noted, at least through the night, you know, the 90s and 2000s, American policymakers certainly thought it was very important. And that's kind of like, that's kind of what we need to focus on here. So the first threat to the petrodollar was actually back in the 70s. Apparently OPEC nations were thinking about shifting away from the dollar as the sort of unit of account slash like MOE for oil, to something called the sdr, which was like kind of like a Keynes bank horse inspired kind of unit of account that the IMF would kind of run and that would be collectively managed by all nations. So that would get rid of our exorbitant privilege. So in order to diffuse that first threat, the US actually did a deal with the Saudis, another deal where we got them kind of like into the IMF on the premise that they would never allow the SDR to become the World reserve currency. So that's kind of how we diffused the first threat to the sort of petrodollar system. The second threat came in the late 90s with the euro. So you had this like uniting of a huge economic structure. After the fall of the Soviets, we did not do another Bretton woods. Like the world did not come together to create a new financial system. We kind of remained on dollar hegemony. But the Euro really threatened that. I mean here you have a larger population than the US at the time, 500 million people in, is coming together, very powerful economies. So US policymakers were, were concerned about this. And if you read media from the time there was a lot of talk about the euro unseating the dollar. Like if you read any financial newspaper from like 99, 2000, 2001, this was like a big, big deal. Like people really thought the Euro would put a dent in the dollar. Maybe we would go back to like a bipolar financial system like we had in the 20s or whatever where we had the pound and the dollar. Well now maybe we're going to have the euro and the dollar. And one of the biggest threats was this idea of the petro euro. Right. The importance of oil is as I think needs to be unpacked a little bit. The first reason it's so important is because it's not just the oil itself and the currency that it's denominated in, but it's all the derivatives on top of it. So like the amount of, I can't remember the exact number, but the number of derivatives traded on each barrel of oil is astronomical. So the actual volume of oil based derivatives is so enormous. So the fact that the US is able to get all these things priced in dollars is hugely, hugely helpful. Not just for the volume of oil itself, but all the derivatives on top. And then what ends up happening is all these other countries that want to participate in either oil or the oil markets, the energy markets more broadly, they end up having, they're sort of forced to do business in dollars. So their currency pair with the dollar starts getting really strong. So the second order effects of this are key. So again, at this point it's clear to US policymakers that protecting the petrodollar standard is very important for keeping dollar primacy essentially and continuing to convince other nations to buy our debt. You know, we started with OPEC in the 70s after 82 when oil prices fell off, they started, you know, dwindling in terms of purchases or purchasers of our debt. But Japan and Germany took its place all throughout the 90s and in the 2000, you started to have the Chinese starting to buy our debt. But again, to sort of sustain and prop up this system where, where our debt was so desirable at the base, I guess is my case is you needed to have that, that link to oil, denomination of oil, and then therefore broader energy markets and derivatives and dollars. So something very interesting happens in October 2000. Saddam Hussein, who's obviously kind of very stuck in the Oil for food program. Bad guy. I don't want to defend him at all. He's a horrible dictator. But he did come out and say, hey, I'm going to sell my oil in euros. And by 2002, he was selling all of his 5% of the world's oil in euros to France and Germany through like UN brokered accounts. So the petro euro was like starting to be born, right? And this, this kind of screws up the, the US plan. If this continues, if the petrodollar becomes 10, 20% of the US oil, rather of the global oil market, it really puts a dent in our plans to have this nice little system. So it's worth noting that, that six months later, in March 2003, the US government invades Iraq. And by June 2003, that new Iraqi government is now pricing oil in dollars again. And outside of a couple rogue nations like you didn't have a threat to the petrodollar system for another 12 to 15 years. And we can touch on that in the conclusion, you know, because the system is now finally starting to come apart. But I guess my case is that I feel like American foreign policy makers believed that the petroleum system was important, even if it, even if it was like less so on an economic front. They thought it was so important that they wanted to defend it. And this is what, what I think Graeber does a good job of pointing out. And the US invasion of Iraq, you know, what other explanation do we have that's that that makes sense? What we know that it wasn't Operation Iraqi Freedom, it wasn't for human rights. We know that. We know that there was no connection to Al Qaeda and we know that there were no WMDs. And we also know that the idea that it was like to counter Iran doesn't make much sense because in the 80s we were funding Saddam to counter Iran. So none of the big explanations make a lot of sense. So today there's no consensus among, you know, mainstream thinkers, politicians, historians. No one really knows why we went to war in Iraq. They call it a war in search of a reason. And I think this is a very compelling explanation. It wasn't just to get oil. I mean, the US wasn't importing that much oil from the Middle east at the time. We get most of our oil from ourselves, from Canada, from Mexico, from Venezuela. So it wasn't about the loot itself. It was about the continued kind of system and making sure that all the nations in the world price oil in dollars. And I would say that American foreign policy has, has protected that to the extent it can. Now today, this is starting to dwindle and deteriorate. In 20, late 2013, 2014, China stopped buying new Treasuries. And I think, I think, as Luke Grumman has pointed out, the world has sort of like been like net negative Treasuries since then. So they're sort of dishoarding. And the US Government is now the majority purchaser of these Treasuries. And the Biden administration, you know, they talk about dollar primacy. It's still important, but there's just not much geopolitically we can do. Like, let's just put it this way, if, if the US was in its current state of affairs, I don't think we would have invaded Iraq back in 2003. Like we were at a very, we were at like an apex of hyper power at that point. We no longer have the same geopolitical power. And in the last few years, indeed Russia and China, all these other countries have started to do more business in their own currencies. And you know, we're watching the decline of the dollar. Like yes, it still is 60% of reserve current, you know, reserve holdings, but that's down from 80% plus. So we're on the, you know, downside. We're on the back nine of the petrodollar here. Now I'm not going to say it's going to end tomorrow because everyone who's ever tried to predict the end of this system always has egg on their face because it lasts a lot longer than people think, because there's a lot of inertia here. But I think it's reasonable to think and interesting to see what Nick believes, but it's reasonable to think that in the next 10, 15 years you'll start seeing a real shift, whether it's to a bipolar world or a multipolar world or potentially a world where we no longer have the petrodollar as kind of the reserve currency propping up US debt, but rather maybe the bitcoin standard.
- [41:13]
Nick Carter
I want to add Two more case studies to this military connection to the US adventurism connection. So Lyn Alden has this great quote. You know, there's no shortage of odious dictators in the world, but, you know, we choose to go after a few very specifically, and it's not a coincidence the ones the US has gone after. So obviously Saddam completely contrived war. No clear justification for it. Gaddafi, of course, he didn't try and sell oil for euros, he tried to sell oil for gold. And a few years later, Gaddafi was dead thanks to a U.S. airstrike and a local militia. There's another dictator that tried to sell oil for not dollars, which was Chavez. He threatened to do it, and we unsuccessfully tried to launch a coup. So there are three case studies of dictators saying we want to sell our oil commodity for something other than dollars. And in each case, the US successfully or unsuccessfully deposed that dictator. And there's dozens and dozens of odious dictators the world over. But we choose very specifically the ones we've gone after. And this dollar petrodollar connection seems to be a big part of the reason in many of those cases.
- [42:38]
Alex Gladstein
You could also. Just one more thing, you could also add Iran, obviously, Iran has tried to sell, has sold energy goods in different currencies, and the US has put them under a lot of pressure, obviously, especially their efforts to sell to India. So generally speaking, yeah, the facts are pretty strong here in terms of American foreign policy trying to defend dollar primacy. And to bring it to today, obviously, we have this Nord Stream deal happening, which has gotten a lot of media attention lately. And it looks like, again, like, whereas maybe 10 years ago, 20 years ago, we would have fought it really hard, we're just in a different position now. And Biden has indeed said he's not going to pursue sanctions on the guy who's in charge of Nord Stream. So it looks like the Biden administration is now, you know, sending some signals that maybe they're not going to be defending the petrodollar as much as they used to.
- [43:34]
Peter McCormack
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- [46:27]
Nick Carter
U.S. well, I think theorists disagree generally and I think you have to consider the class issue here. So the dollar and just more generally kind of US capital markets is the center of the globe and the assets that foreigners use to store value in, whether it's treasuries or US bonds or equities. That has massively benefited the wealthy US globalized elites that own financial assets that work in finance. As we know finance has become engorged. Share of GDP has grown dramatically since the 70s. And so that globalized set of elites has been an enormous beneficiary of this system. So they have a strong incentive to keep it going. The US has this enormous ability to pursue sanctions via that highly integrated dollar system because they are the central nexus of all international trade. So it benefits a relatively small share of society. Of course the American middle and working class has been hollowed out and a median male income today is just not enough to support a household frankly in the US and we have an opioid epidemic in the heartland of America and we don't have any manufacturing anymore. So I think if we left that standard and strategically devalued the dollar and re onshore manufacturing in this country, that would shift the balance of power back towards labor as opposed to capital in this country. And that would be genuinely very good for a large share of the US population. It would also mean that the US would lose its ability to pursue these non military policy objectives via sanctions. So there's certainly slightly disempower those elites that benefit from their proximity to Washington to the dollar system. So it's kind of heterogeneous what the impact on society would be. But some would argue that it's kind of a necessary move that probably should occur.
- [48:38]
Alex Gladstein
And just to piggyback on that, yeah, I mean obviously if you look at these charts from what the fuck is happening, you know, has happened since 1971. I mean, yeah, elites have been enriched enormously. Anyone in finance, defense services, technology, I mean just the financial sector alone in the US has grown from 10% of GDP to 20% over the last few decades. So coastal elites have done really well, including people like me. I mean, so, you know, this is something I've been at this system I've been a beneficiary of for sure. But a US that's beyond the petrodollar would potentially, you know, be a lot less unequal, would have a lot less sort of like financial privilege for the elite. We would like lose this need to prop up these dictators. I mean, again, the fact that we propped up the house of Saudi for so many decades has had so many negative externalities. I mean, both Gulf, you know, both Gulf wars, we came in to defend them in different ways. You know, 15 of the 19, 9, 11 hijackers were Saudi. Bin Laden was Saudi. And yet we never went after Saudi. And in fact, every time the Congress tried to go after Saudi, it was snuffed out. We've never been able to investigate them properly for connections to 9, 11. And there's a bunch of other dictators as well who are kind of like propped up through this system. And then you have the fossil fuel industry obviously, which has been heavily subsidized in this way. In addition to fighting off nuclear energy across the world in the 70s, 80s, 90s, a lot of these nations saw what happened in 73. They saw oil quadruple in price. And they were like, we don't want to import oil and be at the mercy of these handful of countries. We want to be energy independent. Well, GUESS what, the U.S. and the World bank and the IMF did not like that. So we did not let countries become energy independent. So there's been a whole bunch of things that are the negative externality of the petrodollar. And don't forget this fossil fuel piece. The US Military is the single largest consumer of oil. And you have to really think carefully about what backs the dollar here. So we have a system now where I guess to sum up, the dollar is backed by a political pact that has really like determined the way that capital flows in the international economy. You know, there's not been a market kind of decision here. There's been political pacts and deals made. We've used our power and you know, the system is supported by our deals with dictators. Our wars abroad, as Nick has described very eloquently, are increasing inequality domestically and this sort of reliance on the fossil fuel industry. So I think like a petrodollar, America moving forward could be a lot stronger on all those fronts.
- [51:20]
Peter McCormack
And Nick, how do you Think this might affect other nations who rely on the dollar. I was recently in El Salvador. It's a dollarized country. Something Jack Mallor said to me, which is a real standout quote when I first got there. He said the US is increasing the M2 money supply, but there's no stimulus checks reaching the people in El Salvador. So do you think this might lead to these dollarized countries maybe moving off the dollar themselves or do you think it would just create a more stable dollar for them domestically?
- [51:54]
Nick Carter
What's interesting is there's this odd tension because on the one hand I'm very critical of Federal Reserve policy, but on the other hand, dollarization as a solution to monetary failure in emerging markets is often a great solution and one that I completely advocate for. So the Federal Reserve, as you know, as unstable in its mandate as it may be, still achieves monetary stability that far outstrips what we're seeing in much of the developing world. And I would say the dollarization happens too infrequently. I would actually advocate for it to happen much more. That said, the Federal Reserve has these tiers. It's got this kind of hierarchy with the central banks that it has swap line agreements with. And so they do exercise political discretion in terms of sort of who has access to sort of US based money, who has privileged access to that system and who doesn't. It's going to be interesting to see if we have another devaluation, 1970s style inflation and devaluation in the dollar, whether these dollarized countries choose to stay on the dollar standard. Oddly enough, I believe that the cryptocurrency industry, which makes capital incredibly liquid and accessible globally, in particular stablecoins and dollars, has been a tool which projects the dollar out to many of these emerging markets with net good effects, right? I mean, you give someone the choice between a rapidly depreciating currency in the dollar, they're going to opt for the dollar a significant percentage of the time.
- [53:42]
Peter McCormack
Nick, let me tell you something interesting. Sorry to interject. So I've been fortunate enough to travel a lot of the world doing this podcast and I've been to non dollarized countries where they still want the dollar. So I was out in Cambodia and they wanted the dollar, they didn't want the, the local currency. They also another thing I've noticed, they won't, people won't take any notes which are crumpled or got tears in. But that's a side point. But interestingly, when I was in El Salvador and I was in El Zonte, when I tried to pay with the dollar. They were. People were actually asking for bitcoin.
- [54:16]
Nick Carter
Yeah. So you see the hierarchy of hardness, right. Cambodia. Cambodia became semi dollarized with the UN mission in the 90s, I believe. So that brought in a huge influx of dollars. And so you have these semi partially dollarized societies like Cambodia, but El Salvador is. They sort of ratified the dollarization, right?
- [54:37]
Alex Gladstein
Yeah. And what we could be very well moving to is kind of like a system where, as you're watching, starting to happen. Peter Bitcoin may become that ultimate monetary good at the very top of the money hierarchy. And it may be held by a lot of governments, but the difference here, and it's worth dwelling on, gold was captured, as Nick pointed out, like by the 30s, 40s, I mean, gold had been captured domestically in the U.S. it had been stolen and excavated from developing countries by colonial powers and it had ultimately been centralized in the hands of largely the US government by the 40s, 50s and 60s. Bitcoin is not as easily confiscatable. I mean, there's a reason why Satoshi chose April 5 as his or her birthday or whatever. I mean, this person who designed the system was thinking about 6102 and was thinking about the centralization and capture of gold. And they designed a system whereby, you know, the asset was invisible. It could teleport, it could be the signing device, could be kind of like broken apart and, you know, diversified. So, you know, I think we have a different, we have another shot here to create a new system where the ultimate monetary good is, is less centralized and less confiscateable. And I guess what it could look like is kind of like a Bretton woods kind of system where you may actually have the dollar and a handful of fiat currencies, still be really powerful, but they're kind of pegged to bitcoin at some rate. I mean, that's one possibility, I suppose. And that gives developing countries a huge bonus. Now if they can realize this before others, they can start mining bitcoin, they can start attracting bitcoin companies and they can get a leg up in the new world economy. So I think it's really important for people to think about what could happen over the next few decades. And even if assign a chance of the bitcoin standard like a, you know, 5%, you should be thinking about that 5% chance as a policymaker, as someone running a country, etc. So as we sit here, no one knows what's going to happen post petrodollar. I personally think it'll be good for the United States. I mean, yes, our, our war, our warfare state and some of our really extravagant welfare that we pay out at a very inefficient rate will have to decrease. But some of our exports will go up. You know, if the dollar becomes weaker, we'll be able to sell more to the rest of the world. I think you're already seeing that with supply chains coming back to our country. Hopefully we won't have to rely on like communist countries to create like medicines that we need and things like that. So I mean, I think there's a good case to be made here that moving to this standard where the US Dollar doesn't have this exorbitant privilege, but it's just sort of one of many currencies, maybe a more desirable one, but sort of underpinned by Bitcoin is like a really kind of nice, nice thing, Nice thing to look forward to.
- [57:19]
Peter McCormack
Well, a number of us are moving to our own personal bitcoin standards anyway. I'm essentially on one. I assume you both are. It becomes a lot easier once you've been in bitcoin for four years because you've had the hurdle of one halving. So you've gone through a market cycle. I would love to see nations move to a bitcoin standard, but I still think there is volatility risk. We can't ignore what happened in the last week. Yes, we can talk about diamond hands, et cetera, but that still has to make people consider, they still have to consider volatility. Do you worry about that at all, Nick, or do you think we will? If we got to the stage where maybe more nations had moved to a bitcoin standard, we would have higher trading volumes, higher liquidity, and therefore the volatility wouldn't be such an issue.
- [58:02]
Nick Carter
I view volatility as the market's expression of uncertainty. And so we clearly are in a very uncertain time. It's not clear how right now the volatility is partially state driven. People don't know how major powers like China are going to react to bitcoin or even the US for that matter. As we begin to understand that better, I expect that the market's expectations and hence the volatility will become more stable over time. So if we do see central banks adopting Bitcoin in their foreign exchange reserves, I think that abates a lot of the uncertainty. Right. You know, then we're on a path towards, towards stability. The other thing to note is that in the 70s, gold was extremely volatile. You know, is undergoing this financialization process. So I'd say we're in kind of in a similar situation right now. We have this commodity which is potentially very useful from a monetary perspective. It's interplaying with, you know, this very uncertain, you know, monetary backdrop. So, you know, fixed supply commodities tend to be volatile. That's sort of intrinsic to them. That's sort of the price you pay for the nice qualities that you get from that commodity.
- [59:13]
Alex Gladstein
So we're also, Peter, in this like price discovery phase where it took, you know, thousands of years for humans to figure out the value of gold. I mean, at first not everybody realized it was so valuable, but over time, kind of independently, across the world, different communities of people realized that this rock was something that they could use and was hard to make. And they tried alchemy and it didn't work. And it's held its purchasing power for a long time. But that was a process that stretched out over thousands of years and that's being shrunken into decades here with bitcoin. So we have this price discovery happening now. We're now entering the second decade. Now you're starting to see corporations start to realize that it might be a good thing to have like, you know, Ray Dalio coming out today, I would say, or recently is probably an interesting indicator, probably pretty significant. And you know, there's going to be short term volatility all the way up as we, as we go from what, 2% of the world is using this thing to 10%, 20%, 30%. But at the end of the day, I don't really view this as like a view. This is a very difficult phenomenon to stop as people realize that it's going to be the ultimate monetary good. But I do think that it will be a positive. And I think that the petrodollar system is again, not looked at closely enough in terms of what are the negative externalities of this thing. And I think we could, speaking as an American, again, I think we could be better off not having this exorbitant privilege. I think we could be a more dynamic country and I think we're pretty ready for the bitcoin standard. I mean, America has more and more infrastructure, mining, users, developers, holdings. I know none of these things control bitcoin, but I would say we are in prime position here.
- [61:00]
Peter McCormack
Yeah, I agree. And every attack seems to be batted back, which is good. Despite China FUD and Energy FUD and Elon Musk Dogecoin, we've defended $30,000 pretty well, which is, it's good But I guess one of the things, Alex, that you're looking out for is the first oil trade that settled in bitcoin. That would be super interesting to you. And do you think we potentially get to a petro bitcoin standard?
- [61:33]
Alex Gladstein
Well, I mean, I guess part of what my, what my hope is is that oil becomes less important. I mean like some, like some have pointed out that a lot of oil's value comes from the fact that it has this double use where it's kind of like it almost has the store of value property as well, in addition to like its industrial, you know, value and of course gold. Most of gold's value is from its store value, sort of monetary property as opposed to its actual kind of industrial, kind of, you know, ornamental value. So I hope that that oil becomes less important to the human race over time. I don't think it's good to be based on fossil fuels. That's at least my opinion. And I think bitcoin can pull us into a world where we're much more reliant on other kinds of either renewable or kind of nuclear energy. I think it's very dynamic and it fits into that world, whereas obviously oil doesn't. So. So yeah, I mean, I think you will eventually see like bitcoin settling all of these like major international trades. I mean look, the, the petrodollar took over gold as the way that nations settled balance of payment issues. And I guess my thesis here is that eventually bitcoin's going to do that. So kind of as that settlement layer. The cool part is though, that even though as citizens were like, again, they were stripped of their ability to use gold in many ways, that ain't going to be so easy for governments to do with bitcoin. And you know, we've got like the lightning network and we've got ways to like do final private settlement of bitcoin in ways that, that are really easy and can be done on a smartphone. So I'm very bullish about, about, about this future.
- [63:21]
Peter McCormack
And Nick, while I have you here, as we come into a close, I do want to just take advantage of your recent press conference and just talk a little bit about how bitcoin does promote investment in renewables and the energy fud that we've been experienced recently since Elon Musk decided to learn in public. So do you want to just have some closing notes on that? Because I think people would love to hear you talk about that.
- [63:52]
Nick Carter
So, you know, the great commonality here is that we're talking about monetary Standards which are backed by or based on energy, except one of them is hydrocarbons and the other one is any energy source that is suitable. And of course, bitcoin as this great property, which is totally distinct from other ways that we consume energy, which it doesn't care about when that energy is generated. Right. You don't have to match it to the grid peak times, like the way we have to actually match our normal energy generation. And it doesn't care about where that energy is produced. And it's a quirk. It's an interesting quirk of the CCP's overbuild of energy resources in their country in the last couple decades that so much bitcoin hash rate ended up in China. And like Alex says about political mechanisms as opposed to market mechanisms, this was a political mechanism. China had this sort of centrally planned grid where they just built a massive overcapacity of resources. It caused all this stranded energy to emerge. We're talking Yunnan curtailed 40 terawatt hours of hydropower in the year 2017 alone. That's like one third of the bitcoin network's worth. I mean, it's just a preposterous amount that's more than most countries produce in hydropower total. So because China had this pretty rough approach to energy resources, bitcoin hash rate ended up localized there wasn't that Bitcoin miners have some sort of affinity for China. And so now we're seeing this potential massive distribution event where the CCP looks to be discouraging mining in China and miners are aggressively looking to move outside of China. And this is, of course, going to reduce any dependence we might have had on the Chinese government. So that's great. And the other thing is that it's probably going to massively reduce the ecological impact of bitcoin production and bitcoin consensus because China has a very carbon intense grid. And so we're going to see this amazing migration, which is so exciting. And there's a lot of uncertainty as to where the hash power is going to go. But it looks like Central Asia, Russia, Pakistan, potentially even Nigeria, certainly the US we're going to see this distribution of the bitcoin network, the nexuses of production away from one centralized nation to a much more globally diversified patchwork. And of course, now miners have the strong incentive to seek out renewable, stranded, otherwise wasted sources of power. And I believe that the overall bitcoin network will get much greener as a consequence of this. And so a lot of people think it's a bad thing because, you know, maybe hash rate will drop in the short term, but quite the contrary, I see this as an amazing step in towards a progressing towards this genuinely globally generated commodity which no single country has that much influence over. And it couldn't contrast better with, for instance, the Bretton woods situation where the US had the vast, vast majority of the world's stock of gold and they had this tremendous influence to shape that system. By contrast, Bitcoin is, as Satoshi says, produced by the majority. It will now increasingly be produced globally at stranded and hopefully green energy assets on a global basis. So, really fascinating time and I'm incredibly optimistic about the next 12, 24 months here.
- [67:38]
Peter McCormack
Amazing.
- [67:39]
Alex Gladstein
Well, listen, look, one more thing, Peter. I just want to finish because remember, folks, I'm a human rights activist and I wouldn't be doing this or saying this or spending all this time with you if I didn't think that the petrodollar was negative for human rights and that we could improve upon it. And I think again, where we started with gold, gold was very like, you know, easily manipulated by colonial powers and by tyrants. I mean, it was very centralized, confiscate able. The petrodollar system, as I've tried to outline here, was, was also bad in many ways for human rights. It really empowered a lot of tyrants around the world and allowed, I think, the US to pursue policies which it may not have done otherwise, which were really bad for human rights. But now we have the possibility to move to this other system, or at its base, it's going to be very bad for tyrants. And you're watching that happen live partially with the Chinese government basically having an allergic reaction to this thing that's going to kind of deepen over the next few years as autocratic governments kind of realize what they're playing with here. So I'm again positive about the future.
- [68:39]
Peter McCormack
Well, I appreciate you both. I've learned so much from both of you. I can't wait to get to Miami and have a beer. It's been a long wait with this Covid stuff, so we're all going to get to hang out and talk bitcoin and maybe some other stuff. I will share everything for both you in the show notes, but I appreciate you. See you soon.
- [68:57]
Nick Carter
Thanks, Peter.
- [68:58]
Alex Gladstein
Thanks, guys.
- [69:00]
Peter McCormack
Okay. Did you enjoy that one? We had a few technical difficulties, but we got through it. You probably won't know it because of my amazing engineer, Danny, who fixes all these issues in post production. Also, the poor lad, he's in hospital right now. I hope he's okay, he's having his knee fixed. Good luck to you buddy. Right, it was a pretty mind blowing article and interview for me. Normally the stuff we're covering on the show I have a pretty good idea about, but this one was a bit of a history lesson and was definitely posed in a way I hadn't really thought about before, especially around the reasons the US went to war with Iraq and I can definitely see some credence in the arguments. There's a really good four part documentary by the BBC on the Iraq war which I would recommend going to see, but they didn't cover the finances which adds a whole new layer to this argument. Now I do love sitting down with these two and this time is no different and I hope you enjoyed it. As ever. If you've got any feedback, you've got any questions, you can reach out to me. My email address is hellohotbitcoindid.com or you can jump into my telegram group. Outside of that, if you want to support the show, please do head over to Apple Podcasts and leave me a review. I'm very grateful to everyone who does that. It really helps with the rankings. I'm in Chicago. I might be heading to LA tomorrow to do another interview which would be pretty cool if it comes off. Can't wait to tell you about that. Outside of that, have a great rest of your week and I will see you on Friday.