 And so the topic of today's panel is the absolute state of money. We're going to come from it from a few different perspectives, taking advantage of some of their different backgrounds. Patrick is going to address a little bit of some of the history of the Fed. And particularly, I think what's interesting right now is that the number one issue in America today is inflation. And there's no solutions out there being talked about in the political landscape. You get some lip service from a public and saying, oh, we're going to cut spending. And then they give $50 billion to Ukraine. So this is one of those areas where there has been a void, I think, in serious discussion of this issue. And so then obviously, us as Austrians, this is an area that we can fill. And so that intersection of money and politics, there's a historical perspective here that Dr. Newman's going to provide. So Patrick, if you want to start on off. Sure. But whatever you prefer. All right. Prices over the past 12 months, since April of last year, have really gone up much quicker than what people thought they would have much quicker than what people estimated. The economists, the government, the White House has continually underestimated the extent of this inflationary problem. Inflation hit a high of 8.5% year over year in March. Slightly came down this week. The numbers for April are about 8.3%. This was higher than what, I guess you could say, the establishment forecast at 8.1%. So this is a big problem, right? Because right now, everyone's worried about rising interest rates. For those of you who participate in the stock market, the past couple months has been a rude wake-up call, you can say. And people are now worrying more and more about recession. The odds of a recession, economists forecast last April is about 10%. Now it's at 30%. And we all remember the run-up to the housing bubble when they said, no, there's nothing wrong. There's no recession. This is not going to happen. And then everything fell apart. So judging by the track record of economists missing the inflation boat, they'll probably miss the recession boat as well for reasons that I'll talk about in a little bit. So why have prices been rising? Well, we're good Austrians here. So we know that prices have been rising due to this enormous increase in capitalist greed, right? As we've been told, apparently producers, corporations have gotten much more greedy over the past couple months. And they've been jacking up prices. This is, of course, if you're reading a Robert Reich op-ed or something from Senator Elizabeth Warren, there's something now in the House. The House will vote on basically price controls for gasoline. So it's good to know that we've learned nothing since the 1970s. But of course, we know the real reason for the increase in the money supply. And it's the subject of the talk today. It's money. We've printed an incredible amount of money over the past two years. Money supply growth for 2020 was 25%. For 2021, it was over 12%. We haven't seen an annual growth rate that high, even just 12% since the 1970s, coincidentally, when there was high inflation. And this has been due to the same old reasons. Governments have been spending more money. We had to print a bunch of money during the COVID lockdowns, finance the government. We've been increasing the money supply. The Federal Reserve has been increasing the money supply in different ways since 2008. And this has been driving up prices, right? In the Fed, the White House, everyone thought that these price rises wouldn't occur. Then they started to occur and they said, well, it's going to be transitory. Then they turned transitory to episodic. Then they said, well, it's going to be concentrated in goods. There's no inflation in services. Bear in mind, services inflation has been increasing rapidly over the past couple of months, worrying a lot of people. So again, again, again, they're wrong. And now we've been told that, well, the Federal Reserve will engineer the Goldilocks, right? The Goldilocks end to the business cycle, which is the soft landing. They're going to get rid of inflation from 8%. It's going to go down to 2%. And unemployment's actually going to continue to go down. So we're told. So it's like, wow, well, this is a great, this sounds amazing. And what's also interesting is that since the beginning of inflation increasing, inflation's always going to moderate drastically by the fall of 2022. There's some mysterious event occurring in the fall of 2022 where prices are going to now be under control and the economy is going to be great. And of course, this is the elephant in the room that's now becoming a bigger and bigger issue is the midterms. Because there's a myth that since the Fed's founding, it's independent. The Fed is outside of political discussions. And it's free of special interest influence. And that's a lie. From the beginning, the Fed has been a crony institution, beholden to New York banks. Jay Powell, for example, he was a former partner at the Carlisle Group, one of the world's largest private equity firms. Isn't that a little interesting that all of his immense money printing caused enormous bonuses for Wall Street? The connection is so clear. But the Federal Reserve is becoming incredibly politicized. Janet Yellen, Biden's Secretary of the Treasury, so a former Fed chair, Jay Powell, an Obama appointee to the Board of Governors. He recently just got reconfirmed as with some of Biden's new appointments. So the Federal Reserve doesn't actually want to contract significantly before the midterms because it's going to hurt the Democrats. And we've seen this before in history, most notably about literally 50 years ago, 1972, when Richard Nixon pressured Arthur Burns to keep the economy hot in time for his re-election, okay? So the Fed is going to contract, but they're hoping they only have to do it a little bit. They're just going to take credit for any sort of price fall that might occur from supply shocks easing, and then anything difficult they'll do after the election if they need to. But their hand could easily be forced before the election, okay? We've already seen a huge correction occurring in the stock market, right? Inflation is looking like it's going to be very persistent. There's worries now that it's going to start to affect the labor market. The economy contracted, gross domestic product contracted last quarter. So all we need is one more quarter, and then we're officially in a recession, the recession that everyone said wouldn't occur. So there we go, we're halfway there, right? Conditions aren't looking good. Conditions are pointing more and more towards stagflation, okay? It could be not as bad as the 70s. It could be just as bad as the 70s. It could also be worse than the 70s. America is in a position it's much harder to deal with stagflation than before. So this is sort of the problem that we face, and I think it's a very serious problem. I think we've got to look forward to some turbulence in the markets in the coming months, in the coming year. But I know that a great way out of this mess is if every politician and every Federal Reserve official read Bob Murphy's new textbook. So again, I just want to say thanks so much for listening and congratulations and I hope we have a nice meetup today. And then obviously one of the areas that has benefited from heightened awareness of concerns about the banking system, the dollar, everything has been the crypto industry, though recent news there has been turbulent a little bit as well. So Demelza, if you want to talk a little bit from that perspective with your experience in the crypto sphere. Sure, okay, well since we're standing up to do this, I'm also going to stand up. So you might not know me. So my name is Demelza Hayes and I was a 2014 Mises Summer Fellow. And even back then my research topic was on Bitcoin and I'm lucky that I grew up in the Libertarian space because I read the Libertarian Reddit and found out about Bitcoin early on 2013. And basically I'm not going to get into the debate whether it's money or not, but I will say that normally I would think money shouldn't make you rich. And Bitcoin made a lot of people rich the last decade. So I'm not gonna say it's not money but it's very volatile, it's a very volatile asset. And there's lots of ways that people are working now to use what's called a stablecoin on top of Bitcoin. So basically there's ways to send Bitcoin through the blockchain. And there's something called the Lightning Network which is basically trying to bring down fees and increase the speed of transactions of Bitcoin. But still people don't wanna spend their Bitcoin because the price of Bitcoin could go up, right? It's the supply of it is fixed at 21 million and every year the inflation rate, the daily inflation rate drops. Every four years that amount drops in half. So if you have this kind of deflationary asset you don't really wanna spend it. I mean I know of course in the Austrian economics literature we do discuss how eventually you have to consume. Even on a gold standard you eventually have to consume and you buy the asset, you buy the laptop that you want, you don't just wait for the price to drop every year and never consume. So you do spend with your deflationary assets but people would prefer to spend dollars. They would prefer to spend the inflationary asset. So a lot of people would rather take out debt and fiat and put their savings in a deflationary asset like cryptocurrencies. So yeah, sorry a little backup about me. I am the director of research at Cointelegraph where the largest media company in the digital asset space and I'm also a fund manager. So I managed crypto fund from 2017 to 2019. Then I left that company and now I've just launched a new one based out of Switzerland. And I've lived in Switzerland for the last seven years well actually Liechtenstein but it's a close neighbor to Switzerland that most people have heard of here. And I don't have a structured speech like Patrick did but basically I was though kind of said let's talk about the US versus Europe. And my feeling is that the US entrepreneurs are scared. They don't want to go into the cryptocurrency space because they're scared the SEC is gonna come down on them or they're gonna be regulated somehow very tightly. And that's actually been the case. So a lot of companies in the cryptocurrency space in the US have gotten in trouble with the SEC. It depends what trouble means to you. Are you willing to just pay a fine and continue to do your business which is kind of what's happened so far. But there are other risks in the US. For example, even some entrepreneurs have released a decentralized software code which is not a company. They've not made a company that's a decentralized code that operates without them doing anything after day one. So the day one they release the code into the internet. People can use it however they want. And they don't have to do anything else to that code to be the company driving its growth or innovation. And so it's basically called decentralized software and even that is now have class action lawsuits against the developers that wrote that code in the US. So my experience here is that Switzerland and Liechtenstein and Dubai, there's a ton of capital going to these places. A lot of entrepreneurs, even the companies that have Americans in them, they set up their headquarters in the Bahamas or Singapore or Switzerland. So I mean I see actually a brain drain from the US, out of the US, which is shocking because I think the US, out of my experience living in like three continents in 10 countries, I think the US has one of the strongest labor forces in terms of skill set. Each individual in the US and how skilled they are, their ability to just be competent and read and write and get a good job, do a good job on what they are tasked with. And I see a big brain drain. One thing is like the crypto community in the US is kind of targeting Austin, Texas and Miami, Florida. Those are the two regions where cryptocurrency is really big in terms of entrepreneurs. And most of them still have their headquarters in the Bahamas. So they're not like, they're trying as much as possible to work in the US and be, but actually everything official is going outside of the US as much as possible. So going forward, I think that the US is gonna continue to have a brain drain and capital drain as well, also capital. As long as the SEC and FINRA and the CFTC as long as they always come down hard on the cryptocurrency companies. Right now FTX is a large cryptocurrency exchange and they're trying to compete with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in order to basically reduce intermediaries when trading options and to make it more available to retail investors and the government's not having it. I mean, CFTC is not gonna allow FTX to start trading options on all sorts of assets. There's just hard stops in the road towards kind of financial freedom now in the US. And listening to Dr. Robert Higgs years ago, he said have a mobile skill set and kind of get out of the country. And that's basically what I did. If you live abroad and you're married, you have a $200,000 per year foreign earned income exclusion, which I took advantage of, you don't have to pay taxes in the US when you're married in abroad, up to $200,000 per year. And then when I came back here, I got hit with a huge tax bill and definitely it impacts my standard of living, right? Because if I'm living here and I have to pay 30, 40% of the government, including everything, all the taxes, when you add them up, it's really stifling for my own investment. I can't invest in my friend's company or startup or an innovative idea that I might have because I've paid off my money to the government. So I think the beauty though of this technology is that if you're willing to break the rules, you have complete freedom. I mean, if you wanna take your life into your own hands and be responsible for yourself and you don't care if you're breaking the rules, this technology allows you to do that. But I think that if you still wanna have your assets in the US and you're not willing to leave your family on a plane and get out of the country, and here it's very strict. So I'm a little bit, it's been a tough move for me to move back to the US and to see just how the cryptocurrency community is different here from Europe. But yeah, overall, I mean, we can discuss later on about money and whether Bitcoin's money or not. I'd say, you know, it's good, I'm not gonna say it's good investment, I can't say that. It's more of an investment for me. I would never use it as money. I use it as money once, which is what they say. They say, oh, we need everybody to spend Bitcoin. I spent it once on a hair blow dryer in 2016. And today that price of that hair blow dryer is $25,000. So never again will I ever spend Bitcoin ever again for me, that was it. So I'm not spending Bitcoin as money. It's for me, it's my digital gold. So, okay, thanks a lot for having me. And then next up, someone who could talk perhaps a little bit about the center for a lot of that pain that you're suffering from the Beltway. Peter, I think it's a reflection of positive trends that we have some East's Institute people embedded within heritage now. So I'm very excited about that. No, I was stunned when Heritage hired me I was like, did they look at my background? Do they know, do they know about Mises? And by the way, Heritage has a new populist president who refers to our current government as the Biden regime. So his very first talk to the organization that caused a stir in the room. Half of us were cheering. The other half were not as happy. Okay, a theme in Patrick and DeMels's remarks so far has been that our country does have enormous potential obviously. To a large extent the past 200 years has been the American centuries. We have dominated technology, everything, culture and trends, sometimes for worse. We have enormous potential. We have the workforce, the resources, legal, financial infrastructure, but this potential is threatened. And so I'm gonna talk a little bit about that threat. We are located up in Mordor, land of volcanoes and permanent night. In fact, we're located steps from the abyss. We can literally see it spew forth with the smoke from the top of the Capitol. So one of my favorite memes is the weak man hard times meme. And it's on my profile over on Elon Musk's new toy. It's actually millennia old. Polybius described it as key close, the political cycle. And the trick of course is to make the good times long and frequent and the bad times really short, right? It is inevitable that you will have this cycle of good and bad. The good makes people take things for granted. They don't fight as hard against the erosion, but there is hope, right? You can either stretch it out or if the bad times do come, you wanna make them very short. Now for the first time in many of our lives, many of us I think do feel like we're standing on the edge of those hard times. The edge of a very tall cliff, long ways down. We do have all the hallmarks of the 1970s, inflation. I agree with Jeff and with some of the speakers. It is certainly hitting double digits. They're playing games largely with shelter. So at least 10 to 12% possibly higher. The economy appears very healthy on the outside, but once you crack the surface, there's worms inside. GDP strength is largely a statistical illusion from the long lockdowns, sort of releasing it little by little. If you actually look back to the trend before COVID hit, we're nowhere near. We're still, we're about five million jobs down, which as a percentage basis that would drive unemployment to six, seven percent. We have millions of people who specifically dropped out of the labor market. Many of them are being paid to stay at home. Meanwhile, things are breaking one after the next. We've had clogged ports now for about seven months. They have not gotten better. The media has found other things to talk about, but they continued. One of my favorite examples out of that, many of you might remember a few months ago, they had something like 100 ships off the coast of Los Angeles. And all the news reports had pictures, right? People would go up on the hills and they would take a picture of all the ships out there. So what they did was, they didn't fix it. It actually got worse. They instituted a system where the ships have to ask for a ticket, like a place in line, and they have to do that back in Shanghai. So now what the ships do is they just drive slow, okay? So they steam, you can save money by running your ships slow. So rather than being off the coast of LA, they're now distributed all the way back to Shanghai. So they play games. We've got new surprises really every week. We've got baby formula at the moment running out. There's chatter about blood pressure medicines, medical images for cancer screenings. It's just one thing after the next, breaking. And moreover, even that illusion, even that illusion of prosperity is fading. So Jerome Powell, he's already announced that he's going to sacrifice the economy to ramp up rates. He seems to think that it won't have to hurt too much. Because he believes, but he has already told us. He's going to deliver the bust after the boom. Put it together and we are facing the 1970s. We even have the riots. We have the urban decay. We have the FBI arresting protesters. It's almost a complete trifecta. In fact, we are arguably in a substantially more dangerous place in the 1970s for money. Because in the 50 years since Carter, we've built astounding levels of debt. Total debt in the US is up to 88 trillion as a nation. This is not counting the unfunded liabilities that government has promised. That 88 trillion is 1.1 million per family of four. That's for the average American. That is insane. It's 370% of GDP. That's up from 1.5 trillion in 1970, the last time we were here. By the way, it's up 35 trillion since 2008. For the government, of course, it's even worse. You've got the 30 trillion in public debt. You've got the unfunded liabilities. Even the public number for the debt is about 100 times higher than it was in 1970. Our population is about twice as big. So the government feasts you starve. Put it together in Powell is a deer frozen in the headlights. He talks about Volcker, how much he respects Volcker for his bravery. But he feels unable to do this. He keeps talking about inflation as if it comes. It's already here. It's tearing off our legs. But Powell keeps talking about how maybe someday we'll need to go Volcker. And he knows that he can't dream of it. It would potentially be 2008 on crack. You would have the inflation, the increasing stagnation, which Powell was going to deliver. And then you combine that now with a financial crisis. They've already got a taste of that with the taper tantrum in 2013, when they started threatening to pull liquidity out. Another ghost in the machine, surprised them in 2019 in repo markets. In some, they're terrified. They don't know what's gonna jump out if they try to fix it and the storm is already here. The best they've got is excuses. So they've got the intellectual bodyguard in media conjuring up new scapegoats. They've got Putin, COVID, voters who need to spend trillions on unicorn farts, which will make energy free. So what got us here? So governments in the 19, or governments in general, they deliver this kind of crisis for the same reason drug addicts steal your television. It's in their nature. They have the power, they can spend, they can control, they can chase sound bites and sacrifice the economy on the way there. And so they do it. But what of course used to happen is that the money stopped it, right? At some point, your gold would start draining out. There was some constraint on this irresponsibility. Now of course it doesn't. Now Reagan, to his credit, he did put the fiat sword away, right? The 1970s ended. Carter, I think unintentionally had a big part of it, but Reagan kept with it. But he never pounded that fiat sword back into gold, into something that would actually act as a constraint. So now by the time we get to Trump, gold was so outside the Overton window, it was so outside of mainstream thought that the very few who even understood what a gold standard did were kooks. In fact, under the COVID regime, we saw the ultimate argument against fiat in the form of the lockdowns, right? Those would never have happened if we didn't have a fiat regime. Just imagine, right? A bureaucrat, he's contemplating a 50% reduction in tax revenue, okay, from lockdowns. He would say, it's impossible, it can't be done. He'd be thinking of the millions of bureaucrats who are gonna lose their jobs, all the budgets that are gonna be cut. Nope, impossible, it's unrealistic. It would have never happened. So fiat bought that lockdown, you bought it, courtesy of the Federal Reserve. All right, so that's the bad news. Where do we stand today? I'm actually extraordinarily optimistic because I think we have a heck of a moment. First, we have the best opportunity in a generation to radically transform money, possibly even better than the 1970s. Things like Bitcoin did not exist in 1970s. There were people trying to make them by the 1990s. They kept getting hunted down by men with guns. In Washington, the mood is indeed changing very fast. When I joined about a year ago, I was told, gold and Bitcoin are fringed, don't bother, it's weird. Now, we're getting questions about it. I'm like, Senate candidates wanna know what's up with the Fed? What is the Fed doing? Are they gonna wreck everything? There has been a huge shift. We're actually throwing a Bitcoin-only event, which is the first time for us. It's really, I think the first time for a large mainstream think tank in Washington. We've got senators from both parties trying to speak there. There is a big move. So what changed? Two things. Number one, inflation, obviously. Number two, financial censorship. Voters can see the inflation with their own eyes. They're angry. We don't even have to make them angry. We just have to run with it. It's the single biggest voter-ish, as Patrick mentioned. That's cross-party. For Democrats, global warming is almost up there with inflation. But for all the sane people, it is by far the number one issue. And the inflation keeps throwing up these crises. Baby formula, whatever horror comes next. And then there's that other big driver, financial censorship. So libertarians and conservatives feel hunted. We are hunted. Ask a Canadian truck driver. A J6 participant. Even moderates are coming over. So Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, these guys were left. They call themselves left. They are being red-pilled or gold-pilled, I guess, from a libertarian perspective. So people are coming over. They're coming over en masse. If you just look at the approval numbers of Biden, the entire information industry of the regime is dedicated to apologizing for this guy. None of it's working. So it's very encouraging. People for the first time are not believing what they're told. Now, I do love gold. I generally prefer Bitcoin simply because gold is centralized. It needs a bank. A hard bank, yes, but still a bank. And a bank has an address and men with guns can go to addresses and visit them and make them do things. So the financial censorship has specifically moved the needle towards Bitcoin, which, as Demelza mentioned, remains speculative. The main bet when you're buying Bitcoin is you're betting whether it will become a common money. And that's an unknown factor, and that unknowability fluctuates a lot day by day. So don't necessarily park the kids' college fund in it. The point is that there is a lot of attention moving towards those kinds of decentralized systems that are invulnerable to the state. Caitlyn Long's expression, it doesn't have a throat to choke. So that is sort of the middle finger that is bringing, of course, a lot of people in our movement. So I'll wrap up, and some inflation is putting hard money front and center. Financial censorship is putting Bitcoin or at least decentralized currencies front and center. The earth is moving politically. The stablecoin thing is going to get traction. Warren, Gensler, and SEC are trying to push that. It's a question of reserves. The reserves were lousy quality. This is pretty simple. But anyway, we'll see what they get out of that. But it's probably going to be relatively minor. At any rate, so that is the battle. Hard money, decentralization, power back to the people. If we win, we stop the cycle. The hard times delayed, possibly reversed. We have reversed them before. We have certainly delayed them. The Carter years gave us Reagan, gave us roughly 30 years of prosperity. Even Clinton was economically, he was nowhere near the previous Democrats. If we really win, if we succeed in killing Fiat, and using that to leverage massive amounts of power back to the people, we can think big. If we think of the dark days of Lincoln, you had hyperinflation, it was really a dictatorship. That then went into the golden age, the gilded age, the golden age of the Victorian era in America. It was arguably humanity's greatest era in just about every way. And that was only 20 years after Lincoln. It is possible. We can dream. It has happened. We've done it before. If we fail, we fall into the cycle. It marches on. The weak men make harder times. Economic depression, national bankruptcy, a regression to a time when survival was not taken for granted. It's not all bad. The pink-haired crowd will have to get jobs. They'll sober up. Bankrupt government stops micromanaging small business. It doesn't have the money. It even stops chasing down vigilantes. So that's interesting to explore. But it'll be very hard a couple of decades without a doubt, with many victims, some of them who will be our friends. So this is the battle. And I do believe that hard money is the cannon. Well, after a lot of the doom and gloom from the first two talks there, I was gonna ask for some optimism. And so I'm glad, Peter, you already came in there. So I'm gonna double down on the doom and gloom again then. I think one of the things that's become clear is that the regime recognizes the degree to which the next frontiers of political warfare are in the banking industry. You mentioned the way that American banks conspired with crashing dissent in the US, Canadian truckers. We've seen the way that the money system has been used with Russia and the Ukraine situation for geopolitics. What are your fears about, if we're seeing positive populist trends, we're seeing people recognize the state for what it is and increasing areas, what scares you the most on how this moment of crisis could turn even worse than what it is now rather than creating opportunities for kind of depoliticizing money? If anyone wants to start. Okay. Yeah, well, I'm worried that no one will learn from this experience, which seems to be a running theme. Again, I'll just reiterate, there's a bill in the House at least that the Congress is gonna vote on for again, cutting down on exploitative price gouging of gasoline companies, right? So this is the threat of price ceilings preventing gasoline companies, gas stations from raising the price at the pump. This is a very visible sign of inflation due to consumers. This is something that both parties are very concerned about, especially the Democrats. So we could easily just be, there's a significant amount of the population that yes does believe inflation has been due to greedy corporations and it's price gouging and it's taking advantage of people and they would support price ceilings with no understanding that price ceilings cause shortages, long lines. We did this before in the 1970s, Richard Nixon, price controls, Gerald Ford, win, whip inflation now, the long lines gas for Jimmy Carter. So we could see the same mistakes being repeated and thinking that the problem is due to something outside of the Federal Reserve, it's due to outside of having a central bank in control of our money. That's what I'm worried about that we're not going to properly learn from this. The public isn't going to be educated correctly on this. We saw the same thing with the lockdown. So that's what I'm worried about. I'm worried about having to wait in line for gas this summer. Oh, that's a great point. When I moved back here, I thought, wow, there's all these lines in America now. Like I just, growing up, I didn't have lines in Tampa for stuff. And now there's stuff, I mean, we have a baby, we buy formula occasionally and there's none. And then it's locked up behind a gate and you have to get one per person. And I was like, is this socialism or what am I living through right now in Tampa, Florida? But yeah, for me, I'm not scared because I think that we just have a parallel, we have parallel societies existing next to each other. And you're not gonna learn in public school how to survive and thrive in America. You're just, you're gonna have to use the internet. It's only people that are willing to educate themselves every day that go online and learn and then join groups like this where they can discuss with other people to discuss ideas and how to navigate, living under socialism or going in that direction. So for me, I just see two societies, more and more the kind of mainstream news and ideas. And it's sad because where I lived in Europe, when nobody's tolerant in the European village, when you see somebody doing something that's not considered normal, you like bash them right away. Like the old grandma comes up and says, what are you thinking? What are you doing? And they like social pressure for you to do what's been done for thousands of years or whatever. And maybe you can say that's bad or good, but here everybody's like, oh, who knows what their background story is? Let's just be tolerant and just, oh, okay, well that's how they wanna live their life. Well, that's them. And I basically live here like that where I just don't get involved with other people's lives if they say that they have certain ideas. I just go on with my own ideas and I follow my own path. And it's kind of sad because I think it's the breakdown of society and I feel isolated. Like I can only come to a Mises event to feel community or go online in order to feel community. So for me, I just see two parallel societies and the decrease of the middle class here as the people basically do what they're told and do what they've been told by the media and by the public education system. And then there's a group of people that are just kind of completely skirting that and doing what they think works and they're doing all right in America. So yeah, I'm optimistic for the people that can use the internet now. It's widespread. Anyone with access to the internet can go online and learn about liberty and technologies that allow you to live a life filled with liberty. But for the rest of the average person, I don't think anyone's gonna help them out, at least not the government. Yeah, so revolutions are extremely risky for revolutionaries and they generally understand this. It's very common that a revolution backfires. You could argue it's actually standard. The left was, they were choking us. They had our throat, they have for arguably since the Pendleton Act, so 150 years. They were winning, man. We were down to our last couple of breaths and these idiots decided that instead of just finishing us off, they would launch a revolution. And we were talking about this yesterday. I mean, it's shocking. He was almost dead. Just keep doing what you were doing. They had every instrument, their brainwashing generation after generation. They held all of the commanding heights in our entire society, except for us. We're like the remnants. And that's when they decided to launch the revolution and God bless them. So at this point, the Overton window is wide open. And once you do that, once you crack that open, once we've been living this sci-fi world the past two years and a lot of people have opened up to a range of possibilities. And I think, A, this is the paddle. I mean, we need to be here right now. The stakes went up tremendously. We didn't ask for it. In retrospect, we probably should have. If you're losing, you may as well go for the final battle. If you're getting weaker and weaker every year, do it early. Don't wait. So they brought it. And so absolutely, I think that we actually have the opportunity now, because people see it with their eyes. It's getting bad so fast, baby formula, Biden's endless series of whatever it is he does. So if they bring the price controls, if they're going to bring all that, bring it now immediately. Because our side is woke. They've always burnt police stations. They didn't wake up from anything. Our side is the one that woke up. Patrick, you mentioned that one of your fears is that people are not learning the right lessons from this. I know one of the things that always comes up after meetings like this is, what can we do with this? And so I guess I want to get perspective from you three. How should we talk to other people about this money issue? I know some people, if the dancers, oh, we'll just buy a ton of gold or Bitcoin or whatever. How should we be trying to get other people to understand why this money issue is so important, and that there are ways out of it? What would be some suggestions you guys have? Well, yeah, I noticed it's easy to talk about it. I have, they know about the rising price of gasoline. Oh, it's back. They know about the rising price of gasoline. Some of them have had to pay higher rents. This is a rude awakening for many college graduates this year. They wanted to live in some dream cities. They're going to find out that's not going to be so affordable to live in New York City by yourself in a one bedroom or even in Tampa or anything like that. I really think the best way is to short articles, videos, just explaining, even when I've shown them, I've been on the news talking about inflation, just really hammer home the point about the Federal Reserve and the money supply. And it's in showing people how these actions resulted from the past. So just from two years ago, that this is something people have been arguing, what people said would happen, the lockdowns were, you couldn't finance them this way. You're going to see high inflation as a result. And I've just felt the basic communication teaching about the principles of monetary expansion, that at least for me has worked in just interesting some students, some people about inflation, where now there's just people who know about inflation. When there's people who know about inflation, there's people who are upset about inflation. And when there's people who are upset about inflation, they're going to notice that come the fall. So I already sort of consider that a little minor victory. The other thing I would say is make sure they read Dr. Murphy's book, right? It's a great way to learn about inflation and money. And so there's another plug, right? That's great. Yeah, definitely. On my side, I've already hired Mises alum in the company where I work. So I'm the director. So I've been able to put on my Facebook. Anybody that wants to get paid in crypto, live off crypto, come join us. And I had so many applications from Mises alum, and I try to get in new person one per quarter. And then they live off crypto. I mean, I think I'm sure they have other side hustles and everything, but a big chunk of their salaries paid in cryptocurrency. So I think a lot of young people are naturally going towards cryptocurrency because they can find jobs that are high paying. I mean, even if you work for Ethereum Foundation based in Switzerland, you get paid in Ethereum living in Tampa, Florida, you're earning a good salary, almost a Swiss salary. Or a salary that you could earn in New York if you worked in Wall Street. You could earn a decent salary, actually, without doing 80 hours a week at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. So there's a lot of people that would go towards the traditional finance route that are going instead towards the cryptocurrency market. And I think that once you get into the cryptocurrency market, you automatically learn about Austrian economics and sound money and libertarian ideas and the idea of liberty. So I think that just the money aspect is going to attract a lot of people to these ideas. Yeah, and so I would agree with Patrick, definitely. A lot of these topics are much more salient just because of the news cycle. So people actually care about inflation, whereas before, they just saw it as some abstract. If inflation is 2%, most people just do not care. You can try to do the long chart. Yeah, your money's lost. It just doesn't work. It's working a lot better now, particularly if their personal experience contradicts some official line. I mean, that's just pure magic. And you just want to grab that thread and pull that out of the sweater. The other argument that seems to be a lot more salient for people is the starve the beast argument, right? That fiat, I mean, it's pretty close to, I think, half of government spending at this point. It's the government has the ability to basically just take all of the pieces they want off the board. And so just sort of highlighting for people how fiat plays such a large role in that moving resources from the private sector to the public sector. And at the moment, people can, again, they can see it quite saliently. One of the things that makes, I think, the current moment, even more terrifying than in the 70s is that in the 70s you had Charles DeGaulle threatening the US by withdrawing gold, right? You had international power, people in power trying to compete with what America was doing. Where it seems now we have a global environment of central bankers that have all been following the same Kool-Aid, and in many cases going even further when the Fed has done and their craziness, which I think goes to why the dollar is still king. Are there any areas, whether it be within the US, be it internationally, where you think that you see some changes within the institutions in a way that might demonstrate that it's not simply the public waking up to the dangers of what government has done to our money, but that there are institutions at play that are taking significant steps to perhaps help pivot towards a de-politicized monetary future? And, Peter, since you've been nodding along, how long did you start with that one? Yeah, there are a couple of sort of interesting events within that. So one of them is the best performing, or one of the best performing currencies of the year has been the Russian ruble, because they have a sort of dirty backing with gold. It's not exactly backed by gold, but it stores that direction. And at any rate, the ruble, there's open questions as to what they'll do with it in the future once the war is over. But that's sort of prompt to add a little bit closer to the Overton window. Switzerland, of course, I think there's a large constituency in Switzerland. They just went off gold in, I think, 92 that they eliminated the last remnants of their gold backing. So point being that, I think gold is not as far away as we imagine if things get bad enough. There's also some other experiments like Bitcoin Legal Tender in El Salvador recently in Central African Republic. I believe that present there is actually a PhD economist, which I was not aware. But at any rate, those are rather interesting. Bitcoin is still a speculative asset, so that's not really having much of a money impact yet. But still, in terms of the Overton window opening up, it's quite interesting. Oops, okay, on that note, actually, I saw that Russia said that they are willing to accept Bitcoin for oil purchases. So there is a, in addition to two countries making Bitcoin Legal Tender, also many different parts of the US trying to do positive policies for Bitcoin and many countries around the world, I do think that there's a big push towards looking at what can the government actually take custody of themselves if they hold reserve assets? I mean, with basically the US freezing Russia's reserve assets, I mean, not the US, but the G7, I mean, that basically, you know, weaponized the SWIFT system and the US dollar. And I think that any country that wants to do anything the US might not agree with, they're first gonna have to get rid of all their treasuries and all their exposure to the US dollar before they do that, otherwise it's gonna be frozen and then it's gonna stop them in their tracks. So I think, you know, we're going towards a kind of, you know, two monies, you know, we're gonna have the countries that side with the US and do what the US wants, we're gonna have China and the countries that side with China and then there's gonna be all these countries in between that wanna do trade with both or they have reasons why they wanna stay neutral and they're gonna have to use the third monetary system and, you know, go back to kind of this idea of a third world, you know, not the Soviet Union and not the US, now it's gonna be, I think, China and those countries, I think, can look at Bitcoin and digital assets because you don't have to keep your assets in London or Switzerland or Singapore near a gold market, you can keep them in your own private wallet held in your own country, you know, and nobody has access to that. I also, you know, just set up my IRA here in the US for the first time and I can hold Bitcoin and keep custody of my own Bitcoin in my IRA, so nobody can touch my IRA, you know, I mean, that's amazing for me because I didn't want an IRA with stocks that the government could just say, oh, that's mine now or, you know, in a crisis, so I think there's a lot of opportunities for Bitcoin and other digital currencies, so, you know, overall, I think there's a huge momentum behind it, it's just a matter of time, really. If you go back and you look at statistically, you know, there was between 2014 and 2022, if you held on to your Bitcoin for at least three years, you had a 100% chance of positive return, so if you go in and out, you know, there's a lot of intraday volatility and intra-week volatility, but if you hold for the long term and just convert it into dollars that you need to spend, you know, keep the six-month savings of dollars and then keep the rest in long-term assets, you know, I think it's great for me, it makes me sleep sound at night, knowing I can get on a plane to Switzerland or, you know, go wherever I need to go and, you know, provide for my family with that asset with me all the time and it's not relying on anyone, so, and I think a lot of other countries are realizing that as now they've seen that the U.S. is willing to do whatever it takes to, you know, force their foreign policy. I think the Ukraine war has at least led to a fissure among nations where you're seeing maybe some potential movement to a separate currency block with China and Russia in the Middle East and India and then the United States and Europe and then everything else in between, so you're starting to see that emerge, even though the dollar has done very well, if you had to hold one asset this year so far, it's, you know, it's the green back, the dollar's done very well, but there was an interesting article that came out, believe it was by Barry Eichengreen, talking about how the share of dollars held as international reserves in central banks and other institutions, it has declined over the past 20 years from I think like 70% to 59%, something of that nature and it's not a drastic crash, but that's noticeable slippage, right? The dollar will have its ups and downs and it'll be up during these periods of economic uncertainty, but you know, the American empire, the Pax Americana, that's long gone, so people are waking up to the American institutions and they're seeing that okay, the dollar, the American economy, it's not immune to inflation, et cetera, you're seeing this more and more in Wall Street, Wall Street's realized this, that okay, they got inflation wrong and I think you're starting to see now the articles are popping up, which means it's gonna be the standard narrative that inflation's, the new target may be above 2%, right? The Fed could say, well, 4% is the best one, we were wrong all these years, so you know, all we gotta do is knock inflation down a couple percentage points from supply shocks easing and then, you know, this will be the new normal, right? And I think people are going to be more uncomfortable with that new normal, which could be a potentially positive sign. We got time for, I think, one more quick lightning round. I'm gonna put you guys on the spot. Do you think J-PAL has the courage to have a Volcker moment or do you think we're gonna end up seeing a pivot? So for all the blustering that they're getting really serious about inflation, do you think they're going to end up chickening out or do you think that we are gonna actually see some confidence from PAL for a correction, if you will? Necessity is the mother of bravery and so he is, no, he's gonna chicken out until things get bad enough and then at that point, he'll do what needs to be done but there's gonna be a lot of pain before here and there. No, I think he's gonna chicken out too. I mean, if you, and traders do too, if you look at the DXY index, it just flipped yesterday for the first time towards downwards trend. So I think that markets don't suspect that they're gonna keep raising rates. For me, you have to raise rates a little bit to show you're doing your job just so that you can lower them again because that's all you can afford. So I mean, it's just the bluff. I really don't think it's gonna be long-term interest rate increases but in preparation for that, I've done a lot of diversification and I also do market neutral strategies that can survive that market but I don't think it's gonna last. He'll chicken out at least until November. Excellent. Well, this has been the absolute state of money. So thank you very much for being out here today.