 When we look at the medium of exchange, the money, we went from shells to gold, to paper money, representing gold to paper money, kind of representing gold to paper money that's now tied to oil. Ever since the US broker to deal with Saudi Arabia to only sell its oil for US dollars. And since everyone needs oil, that maintained the US dollar as the reserve currency, and we call this the Petra dollar. I wanted to play a clip from a 2006 Ron Paul speech on the house floor called the end of the dollar hegemony, which you reference in the book. Let's roll that clip, and I have a question about it for you. After all these many years of great success, our dollar dominance is coming to an end. It has been said rightly that he who holds the gold makes the rules. That general rule has held fast throughout the ages. When gold was used and the rules protected honest commerce, productive nations thrive. Today the principles are the same, but the process is quite different. Gold is no longer a currency of the realm. Paper is. The truth now is he who prints the money makes the rules, at least for the time being. Although gold is not used, the goals are the same. It compels foreign countries to produce in subsidize the country with military superiority and control over the monetary printing presses. Since printing paper money is nothing short of counterfeiting the issuer of the international currency must always be the country with the military might to guarantee control over the system. It is now common knowledge that the immediate reaction of the administration after 911 revolved around how they could connect Saddam Hussein to the attack to justify an invasion and overthrow of his government. It's not likely that maintaining dollar supremacy was the only motivating factor for the war against Iraq, nor for agitating against Iran. Though the real reasons for going to war are complex we now know the reasons given before the war started like the presence of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's connection to 911 were false. What did you find compelling or illuminating about this speech? So what I find interesting is that the US has a pretty aggressive history of going after countries that sell oil in non-dollar currencies. There's a lot of dictators in the world and we don't really go after them. Some of them even actually do have weapons of mass destruction to some degree at least and we just don't really do much other than sanction them and stuff. But the ones where we tend to have a more aggressive role are ones that try to sell outside of the dollar base system. And so, you know, on some sense, the dollar network effect is self-sustaining. I mean, when it's tied to the largest economy that has an open capital market, it's got a very large existing debt base around the world and debt represents demand for currency. It's contractual demand for currency. So you have a built in inflexible demand source. These are all kind of existing network effects in the ports of the dollar, but they still feed the network effect from time to time, especially in the 70s is when they kind of resurrected it from having broken the Bretton Woods system. And some of these more recent ones, the reason I find this clip interesting is that it basically shows that the list of reasons that were given to invade Iraq and take some of these other actions were unjustified and therefore it basically argues that it had something to do with trying to maintain the existing money system. Something that you hear from many libertarians, especially fans of Ron Paul and ending the Fed is that once it's all about the money printer and the creation of money gets so centralized that that fuels war. You lay that out in detail using World War I and Britain as an example. How many things have gone differently? I know counterfactuals are hard, but can you imagine what a different situation that might have been if fiat money had not come into existence around World War I? So I think that it's not that fiat currency came in existing around World War I. I think it's actually kind of opposite of World War I. It part was a World War because that was kind of the first major war where this world now existed. This telecommunication enhanced gold standard system could be readily rug pulled. So prior to that point, whenever a country wanted to debase its current, so it wants to go to war, taxes are unpopular, it's hard to tell someone we have to raise your taxes to go kill these people on this other continent. You know, if you're being invaded, it's one thing, but if you're gonna go invade others or do things like that, it's hard to sell that. And so rulers have historically turned to debasement, but debasement is actually a pretty slow process with coinage. You have to physically pull the money in with taxes or other methods, and re-melt it into these debased forms, making use of the fact that you can get more coins with that. And so it takes time to pull that in, re-melt it, and then try to do it in such a way that it's not super obvious, and you just kind of boil the frog slowly, so to speak. What made this world different is that with everybody putting their money in banks, and banks then became big honeypots, right? So instead of going to get everyone's gold, a country could be like, well, there's like kind of 10 banks in the country, and we can just, with a stroke of a pen, we can be like, okay, so all of that has to be deposited at the central bank, and you're all gonna use the same ledger now. It's just very easy to, once something becomes centralized, it's easy for it to be centrally controlled as well. And so in that era where everybody's gold's in the banking system, and the banking system is centralized, and basically the central bank have most of the gold in their control, or even just on member banks, but they know where it is, and they can usually just create rules about who can redeem it, or if they have to turn it over physically, things like that. Once that's all in place, literally a stroke of a pen can just say, well, all those bank claims you have are now cut in half relative to gold overnight. It's a much faster debasement process. You can even debase foreign holders of your currency and bonds very easily. So basically it's the speed and the power with which you can rug pull people to allocate that value towards war is significantly enhanced. And so I think if you were to rerun the opening of World War I before this, and this technology just wasn't around yet, it's unclear that what it spread nearly as wide as it did because the number of entities that got in at the size they did was in the largest part due to that printing press. And that's something that it's hard to say what the world would have looked like had that not happened, but I do think that it's not a coincidence that they were somewhat conjoined in that way. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from my conversation with Lynn Alden about her new book, Broken Money. You can watch another clip right here or the full conversation over here.