 Welcome to the Reason Stream. I'm Zach Weismuller, and today I'm speaking with Lynn Alden, an investment analyst and founder of Lynn Alden Investment Strategy and author of Broken Money, why our financial system is failing us and how we can make it better. This book is an incredible tour de force that lays out the history of money from its inception to present, takes you deep into the dueling schools of thought around money's origins and fundamental properties, offers a macro analysis of today's monetary and fiscal situation worldwide, and lays out a path forward for transitioning the world to better more sound money in the future. If you care about any of this and really who doesn't care about money, this one is a must read. Lynn Alden, I'm very excited to have the opportunity to talk about this with you. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for having me. I always happen to be here. The opening section of your book is titled, What is Money? Spoiler alert, your answer is that it's at its core, money is a ledger. How did you come to that conclusion and what do you mean by it? That's not something that appears a lot in literature. I've heard it said by a number of people, and I later found out that Ventes-Casares had a number of talks that he gave on that subject. It's not something that I completely made up, but it's something that I just does not really get a lot of exploration in literature anywhere as far as I can tell. The way that I interpret that, the way that I came to that is basically to realize that when we trade around physical commodity monies like coins, if you picture this from a high level, like if you could remove the fog of war and just had an omniscient sight into what's going on, we are basically updating a ledger of coins by physical possession and physical transfer, even though we don't think of it as a ledger. It's a ledger that exists that none of us know the complete ledger, and yet nonetheless it's still there. Really what it comes down to is when we are using money in some form, we're either relying on the properties of nature to basically control the parameters of the ledger for our savings, our payments, things like that, or we're relying on human-controlled ledgers, like more of what we think of as a literal ledger. Could be clay tablets in Babylon, could be a modern central bank, could be a normal banks, just their ledger, and so these are the different ways that we coordinate what units exist, how are new units of that ledger made, how are they updated between each party, and who ultimately controls the ledger, either in terms of being able to stop transactions, if anyone, or who can create more units, and if so, how. I think that that reconciles both the commodity money theory and the credit money theory by taking that broader view. That question of who controls the ledger is really central to your book. Why is that such an important question to consider? Because that changes over time based on the technologies and the ledgers that we use. Basically, we generally gravitated from commodity monies to bank and central bank ledgers, and so the answer basically used to be that before no one really controlled it, it was fairly decentralized. Then we get like small levels of control through, for example, coinage and slow to basement and seniorage, basically a little bit of kind of control over the money. But now in the modern form, when literally the money that we use is merely a central bank balance sheet, like a dollar is not redeemable for anything, it doesn't owe you any specific goods or services. All it is, is basically the central bank, the monetary base is the liability side of the central bank. So just basically by maintaining their ledger and trying to have that not grow too quickly is what we are using as money. And so the reason who controls it is important is because it's not always obvious who controls it. And if you're using a money for which it's controlled and you don't know who controls it or what parameters it's operating under, basically value gets siphoned away from you. And so what I kind of compare and contrast different types of monies in the book, I go through that step by step to each one because who controls it is one of the points of difference between different types of money. And a really interesting aspect of the book is you walk us through how we move from one to another. This is an example of kind of one of the earliest or earlier forms of money, these polished shells, commodity money where as you said, the ledger was controlled by nature in some sense. And then you say in the book that gold is the king of commodities. What is it that makes gold so special in the history of money? Basically it's got the highest stock to flow ratio meaning that the amount of gold that's out there in human possession, that's the total stock of gold that exists in that refined form. The flow of new gold is very low compared to the existing stock. So it's like 1.5% per year roughly and it's a pretty stable number in any given kind of multi-decade period. And what that means is that we don't dilute the amount of gold very quickly. In fact, it's been roughly in line with population growth historically which doesn't really have to be the case but just roughly has been. And so really if you hold a gold coin your rate of getting diluted in terms of your share of all gold that exists is very, very slow compared to many other monies compared to many other commodities. And basically as humans gain more technology so as we went through the Industrial Revolution or even before then just as we got more metal tooling went through those different eras of monetary technology we got way better at making certain types of money and we basically broke their stock to flow ratio. So if we find out that some culture uses shells as money and we have metal tools and like more advanced boats and things like that we can go and industrialize the process and just flood them with money and get whatever they were willing to sell that's scarcer for it. Sanding is true for there are people who try to use tobacco as money or cocoa as money a little bit hard to get to like copper as money but we find ways to like make a lot more of those things and can change the existing supply very quickly but what makes gold unique and to some extent gold and silver especially gold is that we even with our modern technology we still can't make it quickly. Even during the 1970s when the gold price in dollars went up by an order of magnitude if you just look at the percent annual supply growth of gold so not just the absolute tonnage but the new tonnage compared to the estimated existing tonnage you won't really notice the 70s on the chart looking any different than the 60s or the 80s or any other decade within the century. Basically it's one of those commodities where the price only slowly and not hugely affects how much we get out of the ground and that's because it's so energy intensive per ounce it's hard to find and develop deposits and there's a natural difficulty adjustment so as we've over time as our technology is better we get better at mining gold but also the easy deposits are already mined. I mean basically humans have spent thousands of years finding gold and so the deepest and most challenging deposits remain and so even as our technology does get better at least so far that's not really translated into us being able to break that money in a similar way that we can break almost any other money with the exception of these kind of more like very rare ones. So that intrinsic property of gold made it the reigning money for a long time. The story of how we and why the world moved away from a gold standard or gold as money is fascinating and important. You are kind of a technological determinist in this respect not that there's anything wrong with that. I come from a similar perspective actually but why was the demise of gold as money a technological inevitability in your view? I think so whenever we see something happen everywhere and nearly all at once we have to start thinking that it probably wasn't a specific political decision or some sort of thing that has a high chance of turning out differently. It's something that if it happens everywhere we have to really ask why. What incentive structure changed or what made the prior thing untenable? And what I argue in the book is that ever since the dawn of the telecommunications age so the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s but more specifically that the widespread deployment of it which really kind of kicked off in the 1860s that made it so that we were now an increasingly telecommunication connected world. Transactions could be done overseas within seconds and minutes and the physical transfer of gold was a slow process especially when you consider auditing it verifying that you actually got the gold which can actually be surprisingly challenging. And so we had to increasingly abstract gold in order to keep up and by abstracting it we built these very layered sets of claims on it. And so one source that I cite in the book is William Stanley Jeven's 1875 Money and the Mechanism of Exchange. And what's interesting about that book is that he's looking at real time at the money system. It's still pretty early in the international gold standard. So plenty of countries had to be using gold but this was like after the Franco-Prussian War there was peace across Europe. They were basically on this like shared international gold standard that was operating very smoothly. And he was pointing out that it's almost too efficient for its own good. That basically gold rarely ever moves. All these paper claims and telegraph claims can move around and it's all basically just one giant central database in London at this point like this big central clearing house. And he's on one hand is like basically and this is great, it's hyper efficient. On the other hand he's saying that it's lever 20 to what? Because no one ever takes their gold out and we just assume maximum efficiency and we assume people aren't gonna take their gold out who would take their gold out because then you're pulling your gold out of this telecommunication connected super global ledger. But it's like, we have to can't forget that these claims are all redeemable for gold. And so, and of course what happened in World War I was all of that completely broke. And so I think the fundamental problem with gold is that it can't move quickly enough in the telecommunication age. And so it was the first time where speed became a variable in money. Prior to then we mostly just went up the hardness tree for different monies like how hard is it to make more of that money as our technology got better and better and we eventually ended on gold. But now in that world without centralization abstraction gold just doesn't keep up. And the problem is that when you centralize things that much and eventually the system blows up people to stick with the claims. They don't let the claims collapse 95% back down to the monetary base. They instead just break the peg or just disregard gold altogether and start using these inherently abstract ledgers that are just maintained by some degree of stability with the central bank and some divisions of powers that determine how is money created? What are the checks and balances? Obviously some currencies last longer than others. And so we've kind of found ourselves in a situation where we use a money that is for the first time a step back in hardness, but it's faster. And this has come with all sorts of challenges in the modern era. But I think if we were to rerun this multiple times the fact that we have a big gap between transaction speeds and settlement speeds is something that would recreate this problem probably over and over again. So one of the problems that you very quickly get to with that trade off of trading the hardness of the speed and this is 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 One and Britain as an example. How many things have gone differently? I know counterfactuals are hard but can you imagine what a different situation it might have been if fiat money had not come into existence around World War One? So I think that it's not that fiat currency came and existing around World War One. I think it's actually kind of opposite World War One. 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. 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, remelt 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, remelt 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 honey pots, 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 golds in the banking system and the banking system is centralized and basically the government 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 easily just create rules by 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 in this technology it 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 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. Yeah, that's interesting. It's almost a McLuhanite reading of history where the medium is the message. In this case, the change in media was telecommunications which allowed money which then reshaped history. And I think there's a lot that's compelling about that analysis. 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. Compel foreign countries to produce and 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 9-11 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. So 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 9-11 were false. What did you find compelling or illuminating about this speech? So what I find interesting is that the U.S. 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-based system. And so 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 effect supports 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. I also find that clip interesting. You included some other parts of it that were not in the quote I did, like the longer, basically the longer version of it. And what's interesting is it shows how powerful network effects are because he's talking back in 2006 about dollar hegemony coming to an end. And here we are, what is it, 17 years later. And it's still going quite strong. We see some fraying around the margins, I would argue. But it shows that these things move very slowly. And Ray Dalio in his work, a changing world order actually had a map that showed different kind of empires or hegemons over history. And it was mapping them by different metrics. So education quality, wealth, like economic size, military power, reserve currency status, all these different things. And what's interesting is that some of them are leading indicators and some of them are like lagging indicators. And so for example, education is a leading one, whereas reserve currency is a lagging one in the sense that it takes longer to get that network effect started. But then even when the country starts waiting on multiple metrics, the existing network effect of that reserve currency keeps persisting for a number of decades longer before it also rolls over. And I think that's what we're seeing with the dollar system now that based on, we're no longer the biggest commodity importer, we're now rivaled in some aspects by China. Even as putting China aside, if you just look at global percentage of GDP that the United States is, we're shrinking, but our dollar percent of that network is not really shrinking. And so it's been disproportionately strong relative to our economy. So then it's actually another interesting part of that clip is just to show that these things are not quick changes, but that some of these decisions to main, few actions very much are likely tied to the United States' desire to maintain the global reach that it has with its currency so that it can sanction any of these supply lines that it wants to and so that it builds in that monetary premium for its currency by having every country want to hold as much as possible on their reserve balance sheets. It also seems like there's not an obvious successor right now, I mean, in terms of national currencies or government fiat currencies, it's not gonna be surprised if we're the euro. I mean, I know you say China is rising, but it's not, it's hard to imagine that that's going to replace the US dollar. How do you see that shaking out? So I think in general, too many people have recency bias where they assume that the next system has to look very similar to the current system. So naturally people are going around saying, well, what single country's currency could be the World Reserve currency? And then they rightfully say, well, it can't be Europe, too slow growth, too fractured, not energy secure, it's not gonna be them. They look at China and say, well, their demographics are worse, their geography is not as strong, they don't have open capital controls, there's not a very trusted entity on the global stage. They don't have like the language projection that the United States in English does or that just the brand, that the cultural network effects are established. So a lot of people are ready to say there's no other currency that could just be attained a little diamonds that the dollar has. And my point is that basically the idea of using one country's ledger as the global reserve currency to tie all these other currencies together is largely an artifact of the era that we live in, which is this weird era where we have fast payment settlement, but not a fast, like we have fast payment transactions, but not fast settlements. And so we've been relying on centralization and abstraction, one country's ledger to kind of tie things together. But I think going forward, we're entering a more multipolar world, either where you have separate currency blocks. So for example, the one becomes the currency of choice in Asia, for example, while the dollar holds much of the rest of the region of the world, basically split into two or three different major currency blocks. We're also seeing gold a little bit more emphasized in the core of the system. If you look at BRICS nations and BRICS and allies, they've been not really accumulating treasuries of the past decade, but they have been accumulating gold. And so that's been kind of a preference among a lot of them. And then over time, we'll see what happens with Bitcoin. Now we have this kind of distributed ledger rising liquidity, rising security right now it's still too small and volatile to play a role for something like that, but we'll see what it looks like in 10 years. This can be a settlement ledger and a savings ledger for some of these countries if it continues to survive various attacks. Basically, I think that the future world is gonna be more multipolar and based on neutral assets or neutral settlement pathways versus just one country hegemon running everything. I think that was inherently an unsustainable situation. We basically, when the United States founded this we were over 40% of global GDP. We were like last person standing last country standing in World War II. We had all the gold, basically like not only do we have a lot of gold ourselves, but like other countries even put their gold with us for safekeeping. Bestiography, we had a strong manufacturing base. We were still a surplus nation at the time. Now we're a deficit nation. So in multiple metrics, there's really no country big enough to be the only reserve currency issue including ironically the United States now. So it's not the EU, it's not China and it's arguably not even the United States. And I wanna get to Bitcoin in a few minutes but first just to linger on our current situation a little bit longer where we've got the basically the petrodollar system. You have a number of critiques of it both in the way that it affects developing countries and also us here in the United States. What are the biggest problems with our current system from your point of view? So if you look at the perspective of a developing country, one of the challenges is if you list out how many developing countries have developed in the past 50 years. It's arguably Singapore because the funny thing is FTSE and MSCI, they didn't even count Taiwan and South Korea as developed. Although I will say that they are. I mean, if a country has better internet than I have, I consider them developed. But so if we include some of them that are kind of gray zone developed, I fully consider them developed but it's still, you can count on one hand the number of countries that went from developing to developed. There's even a handful of countries that went backwards during this era and before like Argentina, arguably. You were one of the wealthiest countries in the world and you kind of gradually slide back into developing country status. If you look at it financially, there's one metric that really kind of defines whether countries developed or developing in the modern era and that is basically whether or not most of their debt is denominated in their own currency or not. There's other metrics, of course, like overall GDP per capita. That's really what we think of. But in terms of the monetary system, what makes a European country or America or Canada or Australia or Japan, what makes them different than the Brazils of the world or the South Africans of the world or other countries like that is that those developing countries, nobody really wants to lend to them in their own currency. And so they lend to them in dollars or euros, usually dollars. And so these countries have dollars-nominated debt and the challenge there is that anytime the United States can harden that debt, they can just jack rates from zero to 6% and do quantitative tightening and just kind of basically try to break that country and damage them and then get concessions from them. To do various things. Or if there's a lot of other countries that are saving in treasuries, they build up huge trade surpluses, we can devalue them. We can kind of rug pull the savings if we find that it's in the United States best interest. And so we kind of push a lot of this volatility out into the rest of the world. And when you look around the world, if I describe in one kind of phrasing why money's broken is that there's 160 different plus currencies in the world. Each of them is this little currency bubble. Most of them have virtually no currency acceptance outside of their own country. Like if I have Egyptian pounds with me in New Jersey, it'd be very hard to get them off my hands at anything resembling a reasonable exchange rate just because there's completely unsaleable. And so people are stuck in these currency bubbles. And for example, in Egypt, money supply is growing by 20% a year. So you're on this rapid treadmill trying to increase your wages to not get diluted. You're trying to do something with your savings to not get it devalued. You're sticking it into like an extra property that you just leave empty because what else are you gonna do with it? You're stacking, I know a physician in Egypt that really stacks physical cash dollars that he gets from the gray market. And that's in the 21st century, that's what he's doing for his savings. And so that's kind of the environment that a lot of these developing countries find themselves in. And in contrast, the downside for American perspective is that in order to supply the world with a reserve currency, there's only a few mechanisms that we get out. And the primary method that we do is structural trade deficits. And this part of the system kind of does it to itself. It's automatic because so many entities around the world want to hold dollars. And so that gives them a premium above what they would normally trade at in order to have somewhat balanced trade. And so it basically makes American import power stronger than it otherwise would be. And it makes our export competitiveness for lower margin things not very competitive. And so we kind of cracked open the structural trade deficit that never really resolves. And that starts hollowing out the country's industrial base that contributes to political polarization, wealth concentration, because if you work in New York, if you're basically, if you're in New York, DC or you work in intellectual property, tech, healthcare, high margin, stuff like that, those areas you're really benefiting from the system. But if you're anything with a basic blue collar manufacturing, stuff like that, this system has been kind of weaponized against them. We've, in order to have this system we basically shipped our industrial base gradually piece by piece to the rest of the world. On this question of trade deficits, and this chart is from your book that I pulled up a second ago showing the U.S. trade balance since the 1974 petrodollar agreement, obviously line go down there. What is, you make the point in the book that trade deficits on their own in a free market are not always a bad thing. That might be a, that it might just be a example of a strong currency and other countries developing certain manufacturing capabilities. How does, and you describe the U.S. as kind of a boxer who can't feel pain. Could you just expand on that metaphor a lot because that helped me really understand the point you were getting at? Sure. So basically trade deficits, as you point out aren't necessarily an issue. I mean, I use the example in the book if Brazil's developing and so they import a lot of equipment from Japan and they run a trade deficit for a number of years but then they use that eventually more productively to basically increase their commodity exports and recoup some of that. For example, that can be, it's not like every single year we have to worry if a country has a trade deficit but what does become an issue is if you have a, like an artificial trade deficit because there's some sort of top-down force on it that's this disturbing markets. And in this case, the basically the kind of the, the reach of the American empire or the network effects that we've established give this kind of constant bid for the dollar that is largely unrelated to the American trade deficit. So normally a country, if you run a trade deficit for too long, you're gonna correct in one of multiple ways. It was different under a gold standard in the current currency system. It's mostly because your currency is eventually gonna have a probably significant devaluation. So your import power is gonna be harmed and your export competitiveness is gonna be stronger. And it's gonna kind of, usually painfully, but it's gonna likely kind of recoup itself whereas the dollar is basically prevented from ever doing that or at least for multiple decades at a time. When it hits a point where most countries would probably go through a devaluation and reset their trade balance to some extent and basically make it more competitive just to bring manufacturing back to the US or to reduce our ability to keep importing things. That just doesn't really happen because of the system we have now. And the result, and at first it sounds good to people because you think, okay, if we can just give pieces of paper and we can get real goods and services, that sounds like it's in our advantage. And of course that for some entities in the system that is a big advantage. The downside is to keep in mind step two, which is those countries can take those paper currencies and of course really they're mostly digital ledgers at this point, but they can take those currencies and then they buy American capital assets. They used to be basically becoming a creditor so they would own treasury securities and things like that. Now they increasingly own equities, real estate, private equity. They basically reinvest their trade surpluses into owning bigger and bigger percentages of American productive capacity. And eventually you get to a really weird point where the foreign sector owns a very significant amount of the properties here. And then part of the reason we see so much things like swap lines and other kind of central bank, alphabet, soup programs, whenever there's a crisis is because the system has become so imbalanced that whenever we have a recession, if the dollar gets stronger, all of these dollars on the debts around the world harden. And what some of these countries do is they start selling some of the assets they've accumulated and that can do things like freeze up our treasure market, break our treasure market and cause all these issues. So basically the hollowing out effect and the ability to kind of sustain that hollowing out for more decades than most other countries can make it so that whenever we do feel this, like whenever the world does change enough that the US dollar monetary premium goes away, maybe we enter a more multipolar world or something like that, we're kind of left holding a bag of having exported a large portion of our industrial base and then kind of getting hit with that sort of all at once. Just to pull up another chart from your book that illustrates this point. This is the US annual industrial production per capita, 1920 to 2022, normalized to 100 in the year 2000. You know, you say that the manufacturing base in America has been hollowed out. I mean, I see mostly an upward line and then sort of flattening around the year 2000 after a dip or and then a dip. What is concerning to you about this chart? That chart itself, I think understates the problem. It just shows, I use that chart to show the abruptness of the trend change. You have eight decades up and then two decades flat to down. When you look at things like the net international investment position and things like that, that's where you get the more concerning looking picture. It's basically the spillover is the fact that a lot of this is cumulative. So every year that we run trade deficits, year for year, decade after decade, these start compiling into foreign creditor nation hands. And then they start having significant sway over our assets, even our companies. And I think that's, it's just not healthy. And then when we see rising political polarization, a lot of it is tied to that hollowing out aspect. And it's not as though this just happened with natural market forces. This happened because of some geopolitical strategic decisions on basically how to use the currency. Basically the currencies, instead of being this open trade environment, it's like there's these different currency bubbles that kind of ebb and flow relative to each other. And those can create these distortions. And so you basically have this centralized issue. You have an opposite problem when a currency, a country is like a mercantilist model and they keep artificially devaluing their currency. And what China, for instance, right? That'd be China. And what you get there is that people's wages rise more slowly than the otherwise would. Basically their currency's not as hardening as strong as you'd expect it to. And instead, the country's printing a lot more currency so they can buy reserves. And a lot of that wealth gets stored up at the sovereign level and redeployed rather than letting that settle, that wealth accumulate among the private sector. And so different imbalances can be made when you have centralized kind of currency management decisions at these big scales. And you're arguing in a sense that the US needs to move beyond the Petrodollar system and give up reserve status or that it's not even really gonna be a choice. They might lose reserve status. What would happen to just average Americans if the US gave up or lost reserve currency status? So the way I describe it, I think, is that basically the benefits from having the reserve currency status are pretty linear. So they're about the same now as they were 50 years ago, whereas the costs of maintaining the system get a little bit more every year. And so eventually that hollowing out becomes a bigger downside than the upsides we get from it. That's how I think that how this goes is basically like we're holding this heavy weight and we're getting benefits from it, but we're slowly getting tired out from being able to do that. And it's not that I think the US should purposely give it up. It's that I think that the problem is that countries often assume that if they start losing it, they have to keep fighting to keep it. And that's the dangerous part because if we use a lot of resources to keep a system that we're not even really benefiting by on net anymore, that's where you get disaster. Instead, if you recognize the problem and kind of let that change more gracefully, then you can come out of it stronger and it can be painful for a period of time, but you can use that to accelerate and get the most out of it. Probably the biggest downside we'd see in that kind of more multipolar world is that the US would, one, basically have higher inflation than they otherwise would in this system. But two, the upside is that we could have a period of renewal for our industrial base. Basically it's as long as we hold together as a society and maintain good rule of law and are attractive at enticing capital and respecting capital and deploying that, that can fix this kind of structural trade balance and bring things back. There's also, I mean, the bigger things that are kind of drawn down by it are things that most Americans don't care about. Like for example, the global military reach of the United States would be impaired if it was no longer the globals of currency status. And that's why in the book I kind of separate America, the empire versus America, the country, because when you talk about what is good for America, it's very different depending on what perspective you're talking about. If you're talking about what would the Pentagon want versus what does a plumber want, for example, or what does a manufacturer of widgets want, right? So different outcomes affect different groups differently. But I think the main issue is basically that if resources are expended to fight for a system that is no longer benefiting from us, that's how we get things like the war in Iraq. That's how we get kind of these disastrous loss of blood and treasure that don't really go anywhere. If we look a little more closely at our current political and fiscal situation, we had the COVID shock. We had all the debts that accumulated during that. The Fed hiked interest rates to try to tame inflation after all the checks went out and the money went out. And this last year resulted in a testy exchange between Fed chairman Jerome Powell and Senator Elizabeth Warren, which you also referenced in your book. Let's roll that clip for a moment. Last week, you announced that the Fed would raise rates by three quarters of a percentage point, the biggest increase in nearly 30 years. So let's talk about what the Fed is and isn't doing when it raises interest rates to try to bring down inflation. Let's start with gas prices. The price of gas is up 40% since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Chair Powell, will gas prices go down as a result of your interest rate increase? I would not think so, no. Rate increases make it more likely that companies will fire people and slash hours to shrink wage costs. Rate increases also make it more expensive for families to do things like borrow money for a house. And so far, the cost this year of a mortgage has already doubled. Inflation is like an illness and the medicine needs to be tailored to the specific problem. Otherwise, you could make things a lot worse. And right now, the Fed has no control over the main drivers of rising prices, but the Fed can slow demand by getting a lot of people fired and making families poorer. And while President Biden is working to increase energy supplies and straighten out supply chain kinks and break up monopolies and bring down prices, you could actually tip this economy into recession. So I just wanna say, you know what's worse than high inflation and low unemployment? It's high inflation and a recession with millions of people out of work. And I hope you'll reconsider that. So it's worth noting that we have not entered a recession and unemployment is still under 4%. Is that evidence that Powell actually is steering the ship somewhat confidently? I think the overall challenge right now is that the inflation we're seeing now is fiscal-driven inflation. So if you look back over time at the inflationary periods and the sources of money creation, they can be very different. And so the 70s, that was a demographics bulge. And so you had a lot of credit creation, a lot of bank lending-driven money supply growth. That was actually bigger than the deficits we were running at the time. Whereas the 1940s, for example, that inflationary period was because of tons of money printing for the war. And so far what we've seen in the 2020s is the second type. We've seen very fiscal-driven inflation, not excessive bank lending. But the Federal Reserve's tools are exclusively designed to deal with either trying to accelerate bank lending or slow down bank lending as well as things like control the wealth effect and things like that. They're not really designed at all to deal with fiscal-driven inflation. The best they can do with fiscal-driven inflation is try to slow down private sector stuff so that it offsets the fiscal side. And so what we're seeing now is that the Fed is harming certain industries, for example, banking system, commercial real estate. Arguably a lot of this does need to be cleaned out. The challenge is that they're also blowing out the fiscal deficit with higher interest expense, which in the 70s didn't matter because we had 30% debt to GDP. But now that we have 120% debt to GDP, you actually, it becomes weird because the inflationary effect from those larger deficits from the higher interest expense can actually offset some of the slow down you get in the private sector from trying to squeeze those. So I think since then we've been stuck in this limbo. Senator Warren's concerns appear not to have materialized, but the reason I bring up the clip in that book is not to predict a recession because the book's meant to be read for many years, not really kind of talking about what's gonna happen next year. The reason I bring it up is to show kind of the somewhat cartoonish nature of the Fed's tools in either direction. Basically if they're trying to slow down inflation, they're literally trying to increase unemployment levels and hurt the wealth effect. And it's kind of a funny thing for what is basically the fourth branch of government to try and to be due. On the other hand, when we're in a recession and inflation's low or sometimes even negative, they specifically wanted to base currency, to base savings, to base wages, to try to recelerate more debt growth as though that's, because it's short time preference thinking. It says, okay, more debt can get us out of this recession. But then, okay, what happens when you just keep accumulating debt, recession after recession, decade after decade. And so the Fed has these very blunt tools that are just very powerful for centralized entity to have. Like we wouldn't want some sort of central agency determining the price of beef or a bunch of other things, let alone the price of money itself, the price of credit, arguably the most important price of all. And yet that's the system we have right now. And it's very kind of manual, they have models to guide them. But at the end of the day, it's basically 12 people in a room deciding what the price of money is. Yeah, you draw a real contrast between how you think about prices, which is a framework that's more in line with someone like FA Hayek, than do our central bankers. What is the main difference there between how you think about prices and the function that they are supposed to play and Jerome Powell or anyone else in the what you call the fourth branch of government? So I think there's two layers there. One is that when Hayek referred to pricing and that's what he's most well known for is that he focused on pricing as a signaling mechanism that basically it's a more efficient way to coordinate the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services than central committees because just the amount of bandwidth and decision points that are being done goes above anything you can do with a kind of a central steering committee. The other layer to that is kind of this unintuitive notion that the central bank is really trying to push back the tide, which is basically that in a functioning society, we should be making some non-zero progress towards better productivity, better technology. And so around the margins, things should generally get cheaper each year or at least certain things should get cheaper incrementally and on average in any kind of multi-year period, prices should generally be going down unless there's a war or some other shortage or problem that pushes prices up. But central banks, even though that's like the defining force of what prices themselves should do, central banks, by their mandates, want to override that. They want to have positive 2% price increases. So even though things are easier to produce, they want them to get more expensive every year. It's kind of like a Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill. It's like this constant effort. And the challenge there is that they're not working at 0% inflation, they're working against negative inflation. And so they have to have money supply go up by 5, 6, 7% in order to hit their CPI targets. And when that happens, we don't get prices going up in like a uniform way. You have things like software is still getting cheaper, electronics get cheaper, but things that are actually energy intensive or labor intensive, like beef and oil and house prices, something like that, that has to go quicker on average over the longterm than CPI because of this kind of constant monetary dilution effect. And kind of what I referenced in the book is that kind of like how bloodletting used to just be this like very common medical tool. It was just kind of assumed that if someone has a fever, this is what we do. And of course now with better knowledge, we know that the outside of certain conditions is not helpful. And I think that this era is gonna be looked back on in kind of an interesting way is like that central bankers were purposely trying to always smoothly grow the prices of things that are actually should be getting cheaper. It's kind of just a remarkable way that we handle things now. So the premise of what they're doing from my understanding is that there's a worry that if we're in this world where prices are actually going down all the time that this makes you more prone to what they call liquidity traps where people are just holding on or people are hoarding their money because they just are waiting for the prices to continually go down and then we get a real stagnant economy. Is there something wrong with that way of thinking about it? Yeah, I think that the technology sector shows that to be untrue. People get, Apple's the most valuable company in the world even though they sell a deflationary product every year, their phone gets a little bit better especially on a per dollar basis. And people don't just say, well, I'm gonna wait seven years to get a phone. Sometimes you might push it out three months to get the next model if there's a model coming up. But people need a phone. And so they go out and get a phone. People need a computer, they need a car, they wanna live their life, they wanna eat at restaurants, they wanna cook at home, they wanna have a house. And so there's really no evidence like literally the most valuable sector in the world is the most deflationary one. We also can look at time periods like the second half of the 1800s in the United States and Britain. This was a golden age of innovation and real economic growth even though we had pretty long stretches of outright deflation. And so I think that's kind of proven not to be the case. I think the real reason that they don't like deflation is because the one thing it is not compatible with is tremendous amounts of debt. And so they're models based on having a very highly levered system. And if you ever get kind of broad deflation, those liabilities start getting harder. Basically our system only works when those liabilities are kind of constantly growing and constantly getting mildly diluted. I think that's ultimately the real reason that's why when people hear deflation, they assume it's a bad thing. They think of recessions because that's in the modern context. It's the only time we ever really see it. Whereas structural deflation is good. We like the fact that TVs and computers and phones are structurally cheaper now, especially on a per quality basis than they were five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. And basically the idea that we have to centrally, through central decision making, keep people on a constant treadmill consumption by discouraging their savings and trying to get them to go consume faster, I just think it's very misguided policy. What people can and should subscribe to your newsletter if they want detailed investment advice, but for an individual just trying to save money for retirement, not get wiped out by all these centralized forces beyond their control, can you offer some general rules of the road or things to look out for in the environment when deciding what to do? So generally, in this environment where money's weak, we monetize other things. And so rather than investment being an optional thing that we engage in, it becomes a pretty necessary thing that we engage in. And so that can include obviously equities, it can include real estate, it can include just scarce things like gold or land, stuff like that. And of course the problem there is that all those things have various degrees of inefficiencies, right? If it's land or real estate that might be illiquid, if we buy something and hold it and sell something, we pay capital gains taxes on it. So we're basically getting taxed not just on the real growth, but on the, my apologies. So we're getting taxed on the dilution itself along the way, because we have these non-adjusted capital gains taxation. And so basically people have to hold their assets and other things, at least as long as we live in this world of kind of a constant currency debasement. And it's more challenging. So in the United States it's easier because we have some of the strongest capital markets in the world, but it's harder if you're in other countries. For example, in Egypt, the stock market is not just up into the right, especially in like international purchasing power terms. And so instead you have a very volatile and generally underperforming market. So not a lot of people just naturally put savings into the stock market every week like we do in the United States. And so instead they often buy things like second homes or add another layer to their home or again, hold like physical cash dollars under their mattress or buy gold, for example. There's many markets where it's hard to do something, but in general, you wanna hold scarce things and you wanna hold things where it's your share of that thing is not getting diluted very rapidly. Well, I think that might bring us to the final section of your book, which is about the rise of Bitcoin. We are just today hitting the 15 year mark of the white paper that launched Bitcoin. And in a return to your technological determinism, you say that it's solved a problem technologically that no other money in history has managed to. What is that problem and how did Bitcoin solve it? So it's the first credible technology that lets us send value quickly and long distances without using credit. And so it's the first time we can do a final kind of bare asset settlements quickly. And so it kind of solves this gap we've been in. So prior to the telegraph, transactions, information, matter, that all moved at roughly the same speed. In order to transact with someone, you had to go on a horse or a boat and go out and spread that information and come back with it. With the telegraph, especially when they were deployed in the second half of the 19th century, that changed. We now were able to enter this kind of new century and a half period where we can transact very quickly, but we can't settle very quickly. And so our ledgers become very abstract and centralized. And by extension, they became corrupted inflationary to varying degrees, the dollars workable enough. Whereas if you're in Argentina, you're having a rough time right now with their ledger. And of course, there's a big spectrum in between. And what Bitcoin does is it's the first way to say, well, here's a ledger that's decentralized and you can basically send units to another address in a way that's not based on someone's IOU. It's not reversible, unless of course, miners were to collude or someone were to capture half the network and then structurally start censoring it, reversing it over time. And that of course takes a ton of energy and supply chain stuff and all that kind of thing. So it's actually barring those edge cases. This is now a network for fast, almost real-time final settlement, which closes that speed gap and allows long distance money transfer and long distance efficient kind of monetary communication to happen without credit or with much smaller amounts of credit in the system. The other thing that it does is it pierces these 160 different currency bubbles. And so it used to be the case where really the only two ways to get money in or out of a country is either one physical ports of entry. And of course, they have that heavily surveilled. You can only bring so much cash or gold with you through an airport. The other way would be bank transfers, which are also very heavily controlled. And so countries can make it hard for their citizens to get things like cash or gold. And they can basically force their local currency monopoly with a lot of frictions to escape it. But what Bitcoin does, and to some extent what stablecoins do, is they just, it's like a machine gun. They just like put a ton of holes through that whole perimeter. It's just completely porous now where you can send money with a QR code over a video call. You can send money with an email, a DM. Anytime there's two internet connected entities, they can now send peer to peer value through this network that goes around that country's local banking system. In addition, the value density is unlimited. So for example, you can memorize 12 words representing your Bitcoin private key. And you could go through an airport with a billion dollars worth of it, million dollars worth of it, whatever the number you have. It's impossible to prove that you have or do not have it. You could write it down. There's multiple ways to do it. And so basically that starts breaking these monopolies if the liquidity and recognition of it becomes significant. And I think that really, so Bitcoin's 15 years old. It's really only been five or six years where it's had enough liquidity and kind of public awareness, stablecoins too. Only really the past few years has their liquidity been very big. And so this is just kind of like a new kind of era for monetary technology that really starts especially pressuring the weaker ledgers. So the Argentinas of the world, all the people there now have a lot more tools to get their hands on better monies either by holding dollars, stablecoin is kind of like a offshore bank account for the middle class. It's centralized, it's still devaluing with the rate of the dollar. But if you're in Argentina, you might say, well, I wanna hold some dollars and stablecoins give you an easier way to access that than physical dollars in the gray market. And of course, Bitcoin's even a different kind of beast altogether. Yeah, if it combines those best aspects of gold where it cannot be devalued at will and the speed of fiat, the concern that I have with its future is that the US government banned gold ownership for four decades because of it being a threat to the US dollar. How concerned are you that if Bitcoin ever presented a real threat to the US dollar that it would suffer the same fate? So I think in general, holding back technology is very hard to do. The United States and China are really the entities that have a lot of firepower to cause Bitcoin challenges. One thing to keep in mind is that the gold band in the FDR days was in an environment of super political concentration. So his party had like 70% of Congress, for example. And so you could stack the courts, you could override, you could just do super majority stuff. And that's not the world we have today. So I think the basic, yes, if we were to have a super majority of government that does not like Bitcoin, that really could set back Bitcoin for quite a while. It could damage the liquidity of the network. It could force institutional investors to discourage it. It could render it onto the gray market or black market. And of course, there'd still be foreign usage of it. There's plenty of hubs around the world that would happily say, okay, build your company's here and it's free to use here, but it would damage liquidity. But I think that those types of draconian things are harder to do if there's not that kind of super majority concentration of power. It's also why I do think that some political work's useful. I mean, I'm not really politically engaged, but there are other people that go out and talk to senators and congressmen and make sure they understand it. I mean, during this recent multi-week period where there was no Speaker of the House, the acting Speaker of the House, he's hosting the Bitcoin White Paper on Congress's website. And so the acting Speaker of the House. And for now, it's still there. He's not the acting Speaker anymore, Congress is hosting the White Paper. And that's the world we live in where there are senators that like it. There are congresspeople that like it. There are governors that like it. There are presidential candidates that like it. And we also have a somewhat independent judiciary and rule of law. And you can point to things like the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment. And there's contexts in that where, for example, in the 1990s, Phil Zimmerman got in legal trouble for introducing open-source encryption to the world. And the U.S. went after him, but they eventually lost because they couldn't get past the First Amendment once he published the code in a book. And I think that Bitcoin has similar methods to try to protect itself from the most draconian pushback. So what might a transition to a more Bitcoin-based monetary system look like? Like what are the main technical obstacles that need to be overcome to really get that widespread adoption? Because it seems like right now, what you were saying is that stablecoins are the big thing that people in countries with a weak currency are adopting. A stablecoin, just for anyone listening who doesn't know, it's basically a cryptographic token that is redeemable for national currency, like a U.S. dollar. So in a sense, people are still hungry for U.S. dollars. What would have to change for that hunger to turn to Bitcoin? I think a lot of it is just liquidity. And so when Bitcoin traded $1,000 a day, a millionaire couldn't just go in and put a million dollars into it without moving the price. The overall liquidity and saleability were low. When Bitcoin traded millions a day, someone couldn't just come and put a billion into it without moving the price. And even today, when it trades billions of dollars per day, there are very large pools of capital that if they're not careful, they can move the price. It's just not a big liquid enough market for them to really kind of go in significantly. It's still not, it doesn't have enough money properties for them yet. It has money properties at lower levels, but the bigger you get, the less liquid it is. And so it's still a tiny fraction of the overall dollar monetary system, which is much bigger, much more liquid, much more entrenched network effects. So I think that part of it is just going through a handful of more cycles. I mean, it has the benefit of absolute scarcity. So it's growing at a lower rate. In addition, developers keep building on top of it. So there's more layers that can be using it. There are better wallets, better user experience. Part of what, you know, I originally discovered Bitcoin in like 2010 or so. And it's one of those things where in order to get it, you had to like mine it. And then like I would revisit it a couple of years later, like I didn't buy it or didn't acquire it. And I would kind of look at the exchanges and they'd be really sketchy looking. And you had to like wire money to like, you know, Japan and then like it is like this whole thing. And then of course it became much easier to do it. And then the wallet technology became much easier to use. And so part of it is just the UX gets better over time, liquidity gets better over time. And then of course every year that goes by, people try to find more ways to break it or centralize it, things like that. So it's kind of like it's being tested for its hardness. You know, can someone find a way to, you know, break the overall technical capabilities of the Bitcoin network. And every year that goes by where that doesn't happen, the lindy effect on it is strengthening unlike most technologies that can be adopted very quickly and smoothly. So, you know, most technologies, you adopt like the smartphone, you never go back to not having a smartphone. You don't adopt electricity and go back to not having it. A new monetary technology is different because unlike those, it can be levered. And so if it starts to go up at a smooth pattern, people will realize that and leverage it. And then they will make it a bubble and it'll crash and then people will actually de-adopt it. They'll be like, well, I messed up. I should have bought Bitcoin. It's a scam and they get out. And then Bitcoin has to spend a few years rebuilding from people that actually, you know, deeply followed the network and understand what's going on there and say, okay, there was a local bubble and it's gonna work itself out. And then they kind of re-come into the network on the next cycle. So by its very nature, it's gonna adopt basically any cyclical and longer taking way. And I think really there's a challenge dollar one or two ways. Either just the sheer liquidity and size of the network eventually reduces the volatility of it. You know, if it's held by just, you know, building people around the world in some small way, that's less volatile network than one where, you know, some like guy with crazy hair in the Bahamas can like, you know, manipulate the price. It just gets harder. And two, the United States dollar does have some kind of long-term fiscal challenges with it now that we've not really seen in a very, very long time. And so eventually the dollar can enter a more structurally inflationary problematic period, kind of like what Japan would look like if Japan had a trade deficit and had these other kind of challenges. And so I do think that either the dollar can hurt itself or Bitcoin can just keep gathering liquidity and technical proof and just overall better UX. Assuming again that no one finds a way to hack it, centralize it, censor it or otherwise disrupt it. Right. It's pumped a bit lately on news that major firms like BlackRock are pursuing approval of a Bitcoin ETF. How significant do you think that is in Bitcoin's trajectory to have that kind of possible institutional adoption and acquisition? So there's tens of trillions of dollars worth of like RIA capital that doesn't really go into Bitcoin. Like it's not, it's not normal to hold it as part of a portfolio. Some of them are not, like some advisors are not allowed to give it to their clients. Other ones are, it depends on their or what network they operate in. And BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, making an ETF and then having the SEC approve the ETF would be a really big signal for some, that's kind of the, some non-zero amount of that capital could eventually find its way into Bitcoin. So I do think that overall these things that make it easier to hold in brokerage environments or just managed assets where a lot of capital is are useful and it allows basically larger portfolio types or more existing portfolios to hold it in a way. I think that to the extent that Bitcoin is going to keep monetizing, these types of steps are inevitable. This is like the step where, for example, like I said before, when it traded millions of dollars worth of volume a day, a billionaire couldn't really ape into it. Now that it's at billions of dollars a day, in order to attract these biggest pools of capital, like gigantic pensions or sovereign wealth funds or central bank balance sheets, it really has to kind of 10x to another level of liquidity, if not more. And so these kind of institutional steps along the way, I think are kind of the next phase. And it's also, it's harder to, that's kind of growing kind of defense against Bitcoin ever being like outright banned in the US because you have more legal precedent, legal momentum, people that own it, people that don't want it to be banned, people that like it, both among the public and people in positions of power. And when you combine that with rule of law and government officials themselves, in many cases, liking Bitcoin, it just helps that asset entrench itself and remove some of the tail risk of other challenges. So lastly, you have in mind something like a Bitcoin future for if money is broken, that's one of the potential fix is something more market-based that incentivizes saving rather than debt. The other vision of the future is something of our money's future is something like CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currencies. You describe this as a surveillance and control mindset that is gripping much of our ruling class. Can you sketch out what that vision might look like and why it's something best avoided? So over the past century and a half and really more than that, most efficiencies we make with money come at the cost of centralization and more surveillance. So we make money faster and easier but it gets coalesced into banks and then central banks. And central bank digital currencies are kind of like the capstone of that where it's just fully surveilled, it's kind of fully locked in, it's programmable by the state. Privacy is basically just completely lost at that point. And so in that world, it kind of helps maintain the 160 different currency bubbles that countries have now. It makes it hard for people to kind of escape that system. Now, luckily in a world where Bitcoin and stablecoins exist, countries, assets can now pierce each other's borders, which are hard to stop. Stablecoins, the United States could stop easily but the question is do they want to? And certainly the Argentinians and the Nigerians of the world can't do anything about the fact that stablecoins exist. Bitcoin can potentially disrupt even the biggest currencies in the long arc of time. And so we'll see how, if it's up to that challenge. But basically we have one or two directions. Either we can embrace some of the open source technology and allow more market-based competition. And it's not necessarily a choice. I think there's some degree of technological determinism in the sense that if this technology is robust enough and desirable enough, it's very hard to overwhelm the market forces of people that would want these technologies. But if it's whatever reason that the technology is insufficient or if it's kind of like killed in the cradle before it can really kind of fully mature or set back a long period of time one way or another, then we enter a world of more centralized control than we've been accustomed to. And then you can, things like, you can use narratives around war, you can use narratives around the environment, things like that to control how people spend more on a regular basis, which is a somewhat dystopian future. And it's not hard to imagine that more places could be kind of like the direction that China goes in, which is to have a pretty significant top-down enforcement. And I think that should be generally resisted and that freedom of being able to use whatever money you want, basically freedom to protect your own savings, your own accumulated time and energy should be rewarded. And I think it's useful for people to understand these technologies, either potentially to use them themselves or to understand just the macro context, what the existence of these things means. So if things like Bitcoin and stablecoins can pierce financial borders in a way that hasn't been useful, it hasn't been possible before, what does that mean for different countries and their ability to maintain currencies? What does it mean for global assets? I think these are questions that investors and just anyone kind of interested in the subject should be familiar with. But I mean, there's a movement against CBDCs, against central bank digital currencies, but I'm not sure that the average listener or American exactly understands what it is, how it's different than just dollars being digital. There's a programmable aspect to CBDCs and that is the really dangerous privacy violating part. Could you just give a couple examples of why from your perspective, that would be an assault on liberty? So it used to be that transactions were naturally private, like handing over a banknote or gold coin or silver coin was a private act, but as things kind of coalesced onto bank balance sheets, we, and then there's like various laws that make those banks constantly give over the information to the government. We kind of, the natural assumption of what is normal has shifted kind of to be an anti-privacy stance and cash is kind of the last vestige of privacy. And of course, it's fairly controlled. I mean, try to go to your bank and if you've got $100,000 in the account, just be like, yeah, I'd like to take that out. It's my money. You're gonna get a lot of pushback trying to take out very large amounts of cash from the system because it's generally discouraged and because they don't like that much private value going around, even as some countries buying above a little bit of gold gets you basically KYC, like you get identified for having done that. And so there's a lot of, and I think this is like, to the extent that they attack Bitcoin, I don't think it'll be about things like banning it. It'll be about things like banning the private usage of it or putting restrictions on self-custiding it, saying, oh, just hold it in the BlackRock ETF, just fully put in these silos, don't hold it yourself, that's kind of the pushback I think that's gonna happen. Yeah, they're already saying that it was used to fund Hamas without any evidence whatsoever that that was a significant source of revenue. That always seems to be the vector of attack is like the terrorists, the bad people use it. So maybe a good way to close this would just, if you will make the case for, even if bad people use things sometimes, why is it valuable to have private censorship-resistant money? Yeah, it's good. So an example I use in the book is that in the 1980s when pages were becoming a thing, they were often used by drug dealers to basically signal each other. And of course, people were freaking out about this usage of it, even though they had legitimate uses by all manner of people that needed rapid alerts for them. And there were like serious discussions around how can we restrict this technology so only the good people have it, which is kind of laughable today because everybody has smartphones now. It's a hundred times more powerful than a pager. And we were worried about people having pagers if they were bad people. Basically, any sufficiently powerful technology gets used by good people and bad people, like luckily most people are good. And for example, the Human Rights Foundation is an organization that kind of kind of pushes back against authoritarianism around the world. People that are in particularly unfree countries and supports democracy advocates or just people that yearn for freedom and liberty and just human rights in general. And they find things like Bitcoin and stablecoins to be very powerful. So all you'd have to imagine is for your politician that you don't like having control over your money to be able to see all that you do, to go to program transactions that don't kind of conform to how they think you should be spending your money. I think basically there's a level of control that's inappropriate for governments to have. I think that, and I think the case can be made for people across the political spectrum, whether or not someone's like a significant libertarian or someone thinks that there's a pretty significant role of government in their environment, I think it's fairly easy to make the case that whatever part of the spectrum you're on, you probably don't want the government to have full control and surveillance over every single thing that everybody's doing with their money. And I think that's the risk of central bank digital currencies and why any technology that kind of provides an alternative or pushes back on that, I think it's really valuable, which is why I think encryption in general is valuable. It's kind of an inherently asymmetric technology. And then also any monetary system to make use of it, whether it's stable coins or Bitcoin or decentralized like information protocols, those I think are very important because I think that they serve as institutions in a way or just pieces of technology that kind of push back against the excessive concentration of power. The book is broken money. And like I said at the top, it's a must read for anyone interested in how money actually works or the future of money. Anywhere else I should point our viewers in order to find your work, Lynn? Then go to linaldin.com or yeah, just check out broken money and I appreciate the interview. Okay, Lynn Alden, thanks for talking to reason.