Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #789: Stablecoins Are Replacing the Petrodollar with Michael Every

Transcript

#789: Stablecoins Are Replacing the Petrodollar with Michael Every · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

0:00
You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
0:10
If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
0:16
So it's all acting like safe haven.
0:18
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
0:23
currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
0:28
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
0:31
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
0:36
Michael Every, welcome to the show, sir.
0:38
Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
0:40
Well, like I was saying, I'm very excited to have you on.
0:43
I've been reading your research reports for years now.
0:47
And I think the one that you sent in the beginning of the year about reverse perestroika,
0:51
what's going on with Trump and his global economic geopolitical strategy in his second term,
1:00
really impacted how I viewed the world this year, particularly as things have been unfolding.
1:06
But I think to take a step back, correct me if I'm wrong, but the tenor of that piece to me was that
1:14
many people are stuck in viewing the world through a lens that existed for 50 years leading up to maybe 2020.
1:21
And we have tectonic shifts happening in the macroeconomic and geopolitical landscape that are going to force people, whether they like it or not, to view the world through another lens.
1:33
Another way of saying things are not what they used to be only a few years ago.
1:39
Is this a correct assumption of your perspective?
1:43
Completely correct.
1:44
I mean, I don't know exactly where you want to take this conversation.
1:48
I'm happy to go wherever you would like.
1:49
but literally in the background just before starting to speak to you I was just typing a
1:54
little update of you know what I'm seeing here this morning and on that basis I'm just plucking
1:59
a couple of different stories which all feed into the same thesis so one you've had the declaration
2:06
from open AI that they're ahead of anthropic and they now have a a new AI which is an AGI so an
2:13
artificial general intelligence which is your skynet moment if you want to believe the hype
2:17
Now, I'm not getting into the long grass on that because I'm not a tech guy, but I'm fully cognizant of the fact that once you pass that particular threshold, if it's true, it's a Manhattan Project moment where we've got something artificial that's smarter than we are that can teach itself.
2:30
So that's one to watch because there's a lot of implications on a lot of different fronts.
2:35
Elsewhere, we've got headlines that Putin said he might be interested in peace in Ukraine.
2:39
Yeah, right.
2:40
That's as everyone thinks the mobilization is more likely because it would be peace on his terms, apparently.
2:45
Then we've got, in the last 24 hours, Trump being reported that potentially he might want to say that the Iran war is over.
2:56
And again, I rolled my eyes saying, yeah, right.
2:57
And immediately another report coming out backing what my view has been all along, which is that he will actually restart the war again after the midterm.
3:04
So this is just a pause to refresh, if you will.
3:09
And South Korea is now in the background saying they may send military forces to Hormuz.
3:13
So all the pressure that he's been placing on them and saying, well, maybe I'm going to scale back support in Asia.
3:18
Maybe just maybe he's got his first actual ally to start sending forces to almost to help try and control it.
3:24
So another huge breakthrough there. At the same time, and I'm going scattergun, but it all feeds in together.
3:31
The Australian financial press, I think it was the day before yesterday, ran a op-ed.
3:37
Now, op-eds can say a lot of different things. The Wall Street Journal has loads of crazy op-eds all the time.
3:42
but it's not so common in Australia. They ran an op-ed arguing for negative immigration,
3:47
not lower immigration, negative immigration. Now, I've never seen anything like that.
3:53
That's in against a backdrop where you've got the Australian housing market really collapsing.
3:57
And yet the RBA, their central bank, is probably going to have to hike anyway. That's just
4:01
inconceivable for most Australians up until recently. And then in the Netherlands, you've
4:06
had the Netherlands, I think it's the Scientific Research Council for Government Policy. I may be
4:11
mistranslating that title slightly, the WRR. They've put out a policy paper saying that Europe
4:18
is really caught between a rock and a hard place between the US and China with their
4:22
neo-meccantilist trade policy, which is something I've been expounding on endlessly.
4:27
And that Europe needs to really start making very, very hard choices. And the world that
4:31
it understood is dead. They need to think outside the box. And they strongly imply that Europe should
4:38
either push for a China Plaza accord to push the renminbi down to what on the back of an envelope
4:43
would look like being around the four to the dollar level, or the three to the dollar level,
4:48
versus where it is now, which is never going to happen. Or they should mirror China one for one,
4:53
which includes the ECB pushing the euro lower. So the ECB's role would be to try and weaken the euro
4:59
versus the renminbi. Again, this is just mind-blowing stuff for people in markets.
5:03
Or lastly they need to put in place tariffs and capital controls to make sure that they can just match what China is doing on that particular front Now I not saying any of those will happen but you are seeing in just that two
5:20
little rant from me there, the unraveling of just vast amounts of the ideological and
5:27
intellectual superstructure that we've built the last 45 years with, all coming tumbling
5:31
down at once.
5:33
I mean, I'll add to that.
5:34
We have the Venezuela oil deal.
5:37
We have Scott Bessent getting as close to a droggy, whatever it takes, moment last week.
5:42
We had Chuck and Miller come out with an AI-written op-ed response to Secretary Bessent's moves in the Treasury markets.
5:54
And it's very discombobulating.
5:57
Where do we find any stability in this environment?
6:04
Should we even be looking for stability? Is this sort of like a Game of Thrones chaos is a ladder to climb opportunity that many people have to begin to view what's happening in that way?
6:17
and that's one of the most discombobulating things is you have the macroeconomic the
6:24
geopolitical and then the tech with the ai happening and on this show uh over the over
6:31
the last year i think the national um security strategy document that the trump administration
6:39
sent out last november if you read that it looks like they were making moves uh to to really
6:45
go after that strategy, which is like, hey, we're going to pack things into the Western
6:50
Hemisphere. We're not going to get in foreign wars. We're going to create allies in Latin America
6:54
and really try to re-industrialize the U.S. Maduro picking him out of Venezuela,
7:00
bring him to the U.S. Seemed like a move in that direction. But then Iran pops up
7:04
in February, and it's a complete sort of reversion of what they said in the National Security Strategy
7:13
document that really, I think, threw a wrench in what many people expected the plan to be.
7:21
And is the Iran situation like a situation that the Trump administration got themselves into
7:34
and are trying to unravel as it goes on? Or is it something that the U.S. and Iran
7:40
kind of like France? Did they like that the war is being extended because it gives them leverage
7:45
in different points in the world from the US perspective, particularly against China?
7:52
So from my perspective, and that's all I can offer, Iran was always a target. I think ideally,
8:02
the US would have gone back after the midterms, so early 2027, and maybe even a bit later than
8:11
there, and with a lot more munitions behind it and a lot more pre-planning. But you don't always
8:17
get to pick and choose your moments. So Venezuela, it couldn't have been a more perfect example of
8:22
how economic and military statecraft can coincide. There's a lot of moral arguments and political
8:27
arguments and practical stuff. I'm not getting into the long grass on that. I'm looking purely
8:32
the big picture of a grand macro strategy, as I call it. That one was one we flagged. It was really
8:37
obvious that would happen as part of the Dunro Doctrine. Iran, I think, ideally would have been
8:42
later, but the dynamic there was that if you believe sources and people can quibble, whatever,
8:50
that things were moving too fast for them, and that Israel was already likely to attack Iran
8:54
anyway, which would have triggered the war that we currently have. Plus, there's some sources say
9:00
that Iran was much closer to a nuclear weapon than people would have wanted to believe. Now,
9:05
again, that's a very controversial claim. But if you put that on the table and you think you can't
9:09
afford to take that risk, you can't just sit back and say, well, we'll happily build the Dunro
9:14
Doctrine and we'll lose them at least in the meantime. Because as we are seeing play out around
9:19
us now, whether you're in AI or tech or whatever, oil and particularly diesel and refined product
9:24
prices really still matter. They matter for everyone, everywhere, for everything. And they
9:29
will continue to for the longest time to come. So that's where so much of that product still
9:34
flows from either directly or in terms of the refined products. And what we currently see in
9:39
the background, by the way, just as an adjunct for that, is the US probably is getting more oil
9:43
out of warmers now and via different pipelines than many people suspect. It's not as ugly a
9:48
picture as it looks just in terms of tanker trackers, for example. That's not showing
9:53
with everything turned off at night, ship to ship,
9:56
but it doesn't provide refined fuel.
9:59
Those refineries are not getting products out yet.
10:02
Won't do for quite some time, years potentially,
10:05
if this war drags on.
10:06
And in the interim, you have an enormous gap
10:09
between the amount of crude slashing around the world,
10:11
which isn't already itself,
10:13
not quite as much as people would like,
10:14
and the refined product, which is in really short supply.
10:17
And that's going to be a crunch everywhere.
10:21
That my answer in terms of where we around fits in with this because whoever ultimately ends up bossing this particular fight and bossing this region can turn around and say as I linked to in that reverse perestroika piece these are the hard commodities which are still the essential facts of life that we effectively have underpinning our system
10:45
So if the US loses all of them, sure, Dunro Doctrine with Venezuela, it's still a very nice cluster of countries and economies and natural resources.
10:55
But it's nowhere near enough if you're throwing all the Middle East into the Russia, Iran, North Korea, China axis.
11:03
It's not enough.
11:04
That's why they're there.
11:06
And I don't think you mentioned it, but Russia came out, was it yesterday or the day before, saying that they were going to put their full support behind Iran.
11:13
Yes, no, absolutely. Apologies for not mentioning everything, but I just gave you 24 hours headlines, or actually just five or six hours headlines, rather than the entire week.
11:26
Yes, Russia is openly saying they will back Iran. Now, again, that's no surprise to those of us who follow these things in detail.
11:32
Iran had given Russia the Shahid drones, which are striking Kiev, and more help beside.
11:38
and Russia had already helped Iran with some of the targeting of US forces in the region.
11:44
It makes perfect sense for Russia to escalate via Iran to take the US focus away from Ukraine.
11:51
Not that the US is focusing on Ukraine to a great extent compared to Europe,
11:55
but it ties down what they see as the collective West.
11:58
Whether they are collective or not is a different question.
12:01
And from the Iranian perspective, again, you want to help the Russians.
12:04
And both of them are being helped by North Korea.
12:06
And there are many fingers which point to at least dual use, if not more, help from China
12:13
to both of them too.
12:15
And China has very openly said they won't cooperate, but they're sent in this economic
12:19
war operation, economic outcast against Iran.
12:23
So I put out a theory paper, like a what if, I do a lot of these, back in 2018, talking
12:30
about the rise and fall and rise of the great powers and the great currencies.
12:33
And I said, what happens if one day China starts to move to blockade Taiwan, which is something people talk about a lot in some circles?
12:43
Russia moves on the Baltics.
12:46
I didn't say Ukraine.
12:46
I said the Baltics, which is, by the way, being mentioned again right now.
12:51
Iran closes Hormuz.
12:54
North Korea starts to move towards South Korea.
12:56
And Turkey grabs a few Greek islands all at the same time.
13:00
so what happens in that environment well the west and this was in 2018 i said is in no position
13:08
to fight on all those fronts it's ridiculous to to assume we could do that
13:14
so you either step back or you fight bloodily and badly on many of them
13:19
or you sit down at the table and say what do you want the world to look like
13:23
and you have a tehran yulter potsdam moment where you start drawing lines on the map so
13:30
That's been an operating principle of mine since 2018. It didn't work out quite that way,
13:36
because even within constellations of forces, for example, within the Iranian bloc,
13:41
when they attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, Hezbollah didn't fire at the same time as Hamas.
13:49
That was the plan. Hezbollah was supposed to fire 50,000 rockets and sweep over the border
13:55
down into the Galilee. The picture would look very different today if that had happened.
14:00
much to the detriment of Israel.
14:03
But that didn't happen because they weren't coordinating properly.
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And you haven't seen the same full coordination across the spectrum
14:09
from this axis up until recently.
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And it's now emerging piece by piece, step by step.
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Ironically, just as the West is starting to cooperate less and less.
14:20
But that is very much a viewpoint that one needs to have,
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or a lens one needs to be able to put in and out of one's glasses
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to understand that this is not individual countries.
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It is more and more block-based.
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And even within the West itself, much of the headlines,
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or most of the headlines that you're seeing where Trump is annoying Canada,
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Trump is annoying Mexico, Trump is annoying country X in Latin America,
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Trump versus Europe, Trump versus the UK, Trump versus South Korea, yada, yada, yada.
14:54
This is about what will a Western bloc look like?
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that replaces the international system we have now,
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where it isn't a Western bloc.
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It's a political Western bloc,
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where we all have powwows and dinner parties together.
15:12
And yet internationally, from an economic perspective,
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we're all integrated with everybody else.
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So it's a polite political veneer on top of a structure
15:22
which includes everyone.
15:24
So the US is attempting to say, no, no,
15:26
this is going to be a dinner party only for invited guests
15:29
where we provide our own food, like a potluck,
15:32
but it not going to be everyone coming in And some people don want to do that and some people are jostling for position within that emerging framework So those are two parallel lenses you have to wear in left eye and right eye
15:46
This is a perfect segue into, I think we've been focusing a lot on the kinetic or chessboard moving with the wars going on.
15:54
And obviously there's economic variables at play.
15:59
I mean, very heavy economic variables.
16:01
And that's one thing I'm trying to discern is like how small is the head of the needle that the U.S. administration is trying to thread right now because you have multiple things on the kinetic geopolitical front with real politic.
16:15
But then you have very severe economic rejiggering going on at the same time.
16:21
And Scott Bessent famously in July of 24 in the lead up to the election at the Manhattan Institute explicitly said, I believe there's a grand economic reordering going on.
16:32
And I want to be in the captain seat with the president as he's going through that.
16:37
And so we're about two and a half years in to Trump's second administration with Scott Bessent at the head of the Treasury.
16:42
and it seems like the moves that they've been making on the monetary side of things have been
16:49
very deliberate, very relatively quick when you consider how slowly things typically move. But
16:54
you get the Genius Act, obviously the Clarity Act is a big point of contention here in the U.S.
16:59
And obviously, like I mentioned earlier, Scott Bessent is really trying to protect the long end
17:05
of the yield curve and really push people to the front end of it. How would you rate the U.S.
17:12
particularly their handling of the economic side of things, the monetary side of things.
17:18
Well, I try not to give ratings per se, because that's kind of implicit in the underlying projections that I make,
17:25
whether one side or another emerges battered and bruised as the victor or not.
17:30
I really do think it's in the balance in terms of how this works out.
17:35
But in general, I'll say I think the U.S. has got a two in three chance of managing to put it off,
17:40
and a one in three chance of failing dramatically.
17:44
And the outcomes there are so staggeringly different
17:47
that the spread that you have on any particular financial market asset
17:52
cross that you're looking at, or cross that you're looking at,
17:55
really bear considering.
17:59
This is not maybe there'll be one rate hike or two,
18:02
and you're therefore looking at a few basis points in the Fed Fund's futures.
18:05
We're talking about entirely different futures.
18:07
the problem is that everything they're trying to do as i've made abundantly clear and again in that
18:14
reverse perestroika piece is every bit as challenging as what gorbachev faced with the
18:18
soviet union and you have to do everything everywhere all at once so you have to win
18:23
kinetically because if you win kinetically it encourages people to do what you want financially
18:27
and economically financial and economic power also helps you win kinetically so it's it's a
18:33
closed loop. Everything has to work everywhere at once. And you can make a couple of mistakes on one
18:38
front, but only a few. And then you have to compensate somewhere else with something else.
18:45
I would say that if we're moving towards this area in particular, let's just unpack it.
18:50
In terms of the yield curve, clearly, US yields continue to march higher. And as I was just
18:56
writing in the background before, Dorothy, to talk to you, the world I think we're in now is this,
19:01
that we have a structurally higher inflation world for the moment because of this diesel
19:06
and refined product shortage. That's not going to go away short of two things or three things.
19:14
Number one, complete demand collapse. Okay, that's stagflationary. Someone somewhere is not going to
19:20
get the vital stuff they need, which is only done by higher prices. So then you're talking about a
19:24
collapsing growth somewhere alongside those higher prices. That's really ugly. Okay, so stagflation
19:30
is one outcome, and that's zero sum, because the poorer people will be the ones who don't
19:35
manage to consume anymore, or eat, et cetera, et cetera, or drive.
19:40
If you're not going to go that route, you need to magically create refineries.
19:45
So that's like a five, seven, 10-year project, depending on where you're building them,
19:49
and the permits and the environmental protections, et cetera.
19:53
That's not happening at the moment.
19:54
That's years away.
19:56
If you're not going to do that, then it's a geopolitical binary.
20:00
You are either going to declare peace on these two different wars, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran, at which point is peace on the other side's terms.
20:12
So you're going to give Ukraine to Putin, as if that could be done, right?
20:18
Because they're a sovereign country.
20:19
But effectively, you say, right, there you go, yours.
20:23
And you give Iran the Middle East, which again can't be done because not all the Middle East will go with it.
20:28
But you get my point.
20:30
If you're not going to do that because you don't want to or you can't,
20:34
you have to have more weapons than the other side to defeat them
20:37
to get energy prices back down again.
20:40
So you need to beat Russia and then good luck with that.
20:44
Or you need to beat Iran, which I think can be done but is trickier.
20:50
to me means you can't call this a cyclical inflation environment. It's a structured
20:55
inflation environment until you can geopolitically tell me we have refineries, not for years.
21:01
We have a decisive way to end both these wars, which are actually conflating into one and could
21:05
even spread to other fronts. So how does the central bank act? What do you do on the financial
21:11
front when actually you're recognizing that just as was the case for the longest time in human
21:15
history. To be a rates trader, you need to be an oil trader. You need to be looking at Brent
21:20
or WTI to understand where the yields are going. How does the Fed even start to model that? You
21:25
need to be looking at the geopolitics and how do you control energy? The finance becomes linked in
21:32
with the refineries, with the atoms, with the geopolitics. That's the first point.
21:37
But within just the finance itself, let's keep it siloed for the moment. Obviously,
21:43
you can't have long yields exploding because you can't finance your debt. You can't afford to fund
21:48
the Pentagon. You can't afford to do all the statecraft you want to do. Ergo, you're going to
21:53
move to the short end, which is what Yellen did, clearly what percent is going to do too. He's
21:58
openly saying it, more and more T-bill issuance. You do that, then effectively, it's liquidity
22:03
management at the short end of the curve. The Fed is still there as the Fed, but people are looking
22:09
at the short end, not the long end. And they're looking at the treasury. How many T-bills are
22:14
coming out? How many T-bills are coming out? How many T-bills are coming out? That's happening.
22:19
Then, above and beyond that, you need to do two things in parallel. You need to be trying to ensure
22:25
that the Fed helps get productive investment up rather than financial speculation. So the way the
22:31
Fed operates, instead of being all about markets, which is all it's about now, it needs to be about
22:36
production. So you need Fed chairs and Fed governors who are literally in touch with the
22:43
physical side of their economy rather than the market side and are doing everything they can
22:48
through regulation to encourage people to lend productively. So that needs to be happening,
22:56
like into factories. And in parallel to that, and these two are linked,
23:01
you need to be getting people to buy more T-bills to make sure that they're short-end
23:05
is well supported. And I think one potential bridge between the two, and it's not been tested,
23:12
and it could go catastrophically wrong, or it could go amazingly right, but frankly,
23:18
we're running out of alternatives if you're the US at this point, is to then look at stablecoins.
23:24
Because if you wish a dollar stablecoins, and they take off internationally,
23:29
and you ration the amount that you're backing by T-bills versus offshore demand,
23:36
you can theoretically create a structure where you have a higher interest rate for US dollar
23:42
products outside the US than in, which is great because you want low interest rates and you want
23:48
other people to have a high dollar rate abroad to make them attractive. You can generate a couple
23:53
of trillion dollars worth of investment every year. That funds the Pentagon, that funds a whole
23:58
chunk of the budget. Within that, at the same time, externally, you can say to people,
24:06
we're going to start paying for US imports and stablecoins, which is what I mentioned in the
24:10
reverse perestroika piece, that you're basically taking the dollar and breaking it. You're taking
24:16
the Fed funds rate as a central interest rate for the world, and you're breaking it,
24:19
and you're hypothecating it into different buckets, which have different mechanisms,
24:23
because you can control them better.
24:27
And at the same time, domestically, and here's the final piece,
24:30
and then I'll shut up.
24:32
The Fed would be looking at banks and new startups
24:37
or new financing mechanisms because, frankly,
24:40
large US banks don't do lending to the real economy.
24:43
It's not what they're there for.
24:45
You know it.
24:45
I know it.
24:46
They know it.
24:47
Small banks do.
24:48
Local banks do.
24:49
But you'd be looking at them and new mechanisms,
24:51
new digital mechanisms to use stablecoin-backed lending into incentivized areas of the economy,
25:02
which are related to the military-industrial complex, like we need to get more movement,
25:06
the critical minerals. We need to get more movement on drone tech, et cetera, et cetera.
25:11
What financing mechanism could we use? Right, stablecoin-backed, there we go,
25:14
smart contracts, et cetera. If that works, we've just rewired everything all at once.
25:22
And the financial mechanism is more stable. The hard power, at least short-term, medium-term,
25:28
nothing works in the long-term. The physical power is, the hard power is there to impose
25:34
itself more on the world. And in a smaller territory, because it's not a global system
25:38
anymore, the US has to contract from a global role to a large, biggest dog in the pack,
25:44
role, you have like a new model.
25:49
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So many follow-ups there.
28:29
I mean, it started with stablecoins.
28:31
I'll just do rapid fire three off the top of my head.
28:34
Stablecoins, it's funny because I remember when Tether launched,
28:39
when Bitfinex launched Tether 10 years ago at this point.
28:45
and i've been following the development this is a bitcoin podcast i've been in bitcoin for 13 years
28:49
and i've been following what paulo and giancarlo and everybody at bitfinex has been doing and
28:54
it's funny the tether started out as this pet project where they didn't even think it was going
28:59
to have a hundred million dollar market cap and now it's become this geopolitically important asset
29:05
not only tether but now you have circle and other stable coins and obviously the genius act is
29:10
enabling as many people who can abide by the rules to spin up their own stable coins and it's crazy
29:18
to me how integral stable coins become in this geopolitical chess match that's playing out the
29:24
question i have though is can they get to the critical market cap quickly enough to to basically
29:30
to have enough liquidity to to manage all these things they're trying to do
29:36
on a large geopolitical international scale.
29:41
The second point I wanted to bring up
29:47
was in relation to the need for commercial banks
29:52
to invest in critical parts of the economy.
29:55
It seems like the executive is leading
29:57
with investments in Dell, critical mineral companies.
30:00
You have the executive in the U.S.
30:03
acting like wartime footing in world war ii where they're quasi they're not obviously they're not
30:10
nationalizing but they are putting they're buying equity stakes and companies that they deem to be
30:15
critical to the re-industrialization and basically sending a signal i think to commercial banks like
30:21
we're going to back these companies you should too uh so we'll just start with those two like
30:27
stable coins how big does the market have to get in what period of time for this um potential path
30:35
to be successful and then is the executive do you think sending an explicit signal to the
30:43
commercial banking system we're going to buy stakes in these companies this is where you
30:47
should be investing too okay so let's break them down um on the first one nothing succeeds like
30:55
success. So it needs to create its own momentum quickly and it needs to get big quickly.
31:03
If this is purely a market mechanism, purely markets, I don't think it works.
31:07
But if the US uses its state power in various different mechanisms and state craft to do what I just alluded to For example saying we want to pay for imports with them Great Everyone who exports to the US is either in or out
31:23
It's a gun on the table moment in the same way that this economic outcast is versus Iran.
31:28
With us or against us. Very high risk. Very high reward.
31:32
if you can flip the Middle East. And so, for example, Saudi, Qatar, which is more questionable,
31:38
but that would be a good one to flip on the gas front. You get them to say, hey, we want to be
31:43
paid in stable coins. That's the quid pro quo for us having, for example, nuclear power from the US.
31:50
Then you suddenly have a global nexus of countries who have to start getting stable coins to pay for
31:54
oil. Effectively, it's the petro stable coin rather than the former petrodollar, which is not
32:00
really a thing people think it is. It's the euro dollar now, which is much broader. You can put
32:06
policy-related frameworks in place, which would accentuate that and accelerate it.
32:14
I can tell you, having lived in nine different countries and emerging markets,
32:20
there's going to be a chunky appetite for people to hold what is a dollar equivalent
32:25
if the taxman locally can't see it.
32:28
And if you get paid what will not be a yield,
32:31
but an incentive,
32:33
which is what they're going to have to call it
32:34
under the Clarity Act, I believe,
32:36
which is not very clear,
32:37
but that's the, I guess,
32:38
the deliberate pun in it, right?
32:41
So if you're getting paid to have that
32:43
and you can keep it on an app on your phone
32:44
that no one else can see via VPN,
32:47
well, then every country is going to have to
32:48
close down VPN access and internet access,
32:53
et cetera, et cetera.
32:54
And you've already seen reports from even major European banks.
32:59
I don't mean commercial banks.
33:00
I mean, national central banks saying that, yeah, we can imagine there could be capital
33:04
flight on the back of this.
33:06
And in Europe, it will be limited to a degree because the euro works digitally so well within
33:10
Europe.
33:10
But in emerging markets and other economies in emerging markets, you could certainly see
33:15
a lot of money heading in that direction if the US is seen as winning.
33:20
If the US is seen as losing, and I don't want to get Trumpian, but yeah, you need to
33:24
to be winning bigly, that builds momentum, which of course builds momentum. So it either goes very,
33:30
very well or it goes very badly. Now, in terms of the second part of your question,
33:33
it was so blindingly obvious to me when Trump was reelected the day he won, that we would go the route
33:39
that we have. I published a paper on it basically saying, welcome to the world of economic statecraft,
33:43
which is not a new concept. I have that label tagged on me all the time. It's a hundreds,
33:49
if not thousands of year old concept. I was just merely banging the drum saying, guess what?
33:53
Everyone will be using these two words going forward, and everyone is.
33:57
They don't fully understand it, but they're all using it.
34:00
And the obvious part is big corporations have to do what's good for their national interest.
34:05
I mean, there's nothing new in that, except for big corporations who have forgotten all about it,
34:09
because they've got very rich in the past 45 years not doing it.
34:12
And I believe that there will be more and more phone calls, more and more golden shares,
34:16
more and more deliberate stakes, more and more stakes similar to the ones we've already seen,
34:20
where the government doesn't put any money down, but you just get 10% share.
34:23
And it's not that they want to monetize that on the way up.
34:26
Don't get me wrong.
34:27
This is America.
34:28
Everyone wants to make a buck.
34:29
It's more that they want to seat at the table when they're listening to the strategic decisions,
34:33
like should we shut down all of our plants in the middle of America and send them to
34:39
China or not?
34:40
You want a guy at the table saying, I'm voting not, rather than it happening and you finding
34:46
out about it when it's already happened, which is how we've done everything for 45 years.
34:50
Well, I think that's the big question, is that 45-year period, and maybe we don't call
34:56
complacency, but that lull in viewing the world through the lens that you have to view
35:01
it through now, how far does that set?
35:03
How quickly do you think the American economy, particularly around this idea of reindustrialization,
35:10
can reorient itself?
35:12
Do you think it's possible?
35:13
Look, it's possible, but all the radical mechanisms and more that I've just already
35:19
described to you and which I fleshed out in that paper you referred to. We can put a link to it at
35:25
the bottom or something. All that and more need to be done. I think at minimum, it's a 10-year
35:32
project. This is never a second-term Trump project. This is just the first foundations he's digging
35:38
here. Then you have to go up. It's probably another two terms after that. I think you can
35:43
start to achieve something real within that, which would be altogether, if you include the first
35:49
Trump term, which was kind of hot and cold, it would be 16 years on and off, which maybe if you
35:53
take away all the COVID distractions and everything, maybe a good 12 years of it was focused on that
35:59
to try and reverse 40, 45. I do think it can work, but it's by no means a gimme. And at every single
36:07
step of the way, there will be vested interests who have made a fortune from the past system
36:13
or who are ideologically still wedded to how things were done,
36:17
which I fully understand.
36:19
If you've grown up in a system when you press the red button,
36:21
you get a free meal you going to want to keep pressing that red button and getting your free meal You don want to have to go and cook your own lunch right Or pay for your own lunch And we going to fight it every step of the way
36:32
But I do believe that on balance, even though it's on a razor's edge at the moment, that
36:41
the momentum is with the US and that we are more likely to fall off on what for the Trump
36:47
agenda would be the right side of it than the wrong side of it.
36:51
But things can change.
36:54
You have to monitor so many things all the time to keep an eye on it.
36:58
And for example, that AGI news today, today in my time as I'm speaking, I don't know if that's hype.
37:05
It's quite likely to be hype, but I'm not making any kind of equity call.
37:09
But just imagine for a moment it's true.
37:11
Just imagine the US has managed to generate AGI years ahead of everybody else.
37:17
Who else is even close to that?
37:19
China claims to be.
37:20
I don't know if they really are or not.
37:21
Europe's nowhere. No one else is anywhere. What would AGI look like? Really? What would AGI look
37:27
like in 12 months if it really is AGI and can now improve itself at an expenditure rate?
37:32
What are the implications of that? Now, they're mind-blowing. But of course, you still have the
37:38
physical limits that you actually physically have to be able to have the atoms to do stuff. You still
37:43
need the diesel, you still need the metals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But who's to say AGI
37:47
can't find new production systems, that it can't find new processes to accelerate a lot of these,
37:56
frankly, 19th and 20th century mechanisms that we use to do certain things using chemicals.
38:02
I don't know. Nobody knows, but we could find out. It could be transformative,
38:07
or it could be hype, just to try and get one firm, get ahead of the other
38:12
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Well, that, and it's very clear to me.
40:33
So I've been in Bitcoin mining for 10 years.
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and in the industry in the bitcoin mining industry eight years ago and when when bitcoin
40:43
mining became somewhat prominent in the u.s and it's become very prominent i think still to this
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quickly the the grid system outside of ercott in texas which is a relatively free market
41:03
is a bit brittle and has been desperately
41:07
or has been critically underinvested in for
41:12
50 years. And I think that I would say
41:15
I would not be shocked if AGI is here. If Astro 6's
41:20
benchmark scores are what they're advertised to be
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like we are close to AGI. Sol 5.6
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was at 7.8% AGI. They're marketing Astro 6
41:32
at 98% so that that is an incredible jump.
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And if it is here
41:37
and we can utilize that tool to our advantage, it will be massive.
41:39
The question is, will we have the power to electrify the compute to actually effectuate the solutions that this AGI may be able to provide?
41:50
I still think that's an open question.
41:52
I do think American ingenuity and the entrepreneurial spirit has been reinvigorated in a way that makes me incredibly optimistic.
42:02
I'm sure you've seen it with Colossus I, Colossus II, this whole concept of bring your own generation.
42:06
Let's spin up a bunch of natural gas turbines not connected to the grid and just run these data centers without even worrying about having to interconnect.
42:15
So I think there's a view to do that.
42:18
There's a way to do that there.
42:19
And I am a bit optimistic towards that.
42:22
But to your point, it is very high stakes.
42:26
It's like if you shoot for it, you got to hit it.
42:29
Because if you miss, the other side of that miss is pretty bad.
42:34
And bringing this back to, I'm jumping around here, but I want to touch on it too, because we mentioned the long end of the yield curve.
42:42
And I think it plays into this because we're talking about the financing of this infrastructure build out.
42:46
Everybody's focused on the long end of the yield curve.
42:48
One thing that I've been following as the 10-year and 30-year have been drifting up is the move index, the volatility index.
42:56
And I'm interested to get your perspective on that.
42:58
Like, do you think that's what Bessent is actually looking at?
43:01
He knows that yields have to drift higher just because of the state of the fiscal situation in the United States and the national debt.
43:09
And he just needs to manage that drift upwards by managing the volatility on the way up.
43:15
I'm not sure about that because the obstacles really, as you just mentioned, are physical.
43:26
I'm not an MMT advocate.
43:28
I'm a post-Keynesian in that I've always argued that MMT as it's sold does make sense if you've
43:38
got empty factories and unemployed people sitting around plotting revolution. Yeah, in that environment,
43:44
of course, print money and get everyone employed and start making stuff, right? But when you're
43:47
importing from everybody else, no one else can do it without the currency going down the drain.
43:51
And the US could do it for as long as it was hegemon, but could only do it for so long before
43:55
everyone else started to challenge that hegemony, which is where we are now. So therefore,
43:59
effectively, it's a zero-sum game. You can only do that if you run a trade surplus like China
44:03
behind a firewall, then you can do MMT, which is effectively what they're doing,
44:07
into the physical economy. And the US needs to replicate that. What I'm saying is effectively,
44:12
it's a physical challenge to try and get this stuff done. I don't necessarily see that it's
44:19
capital constraint in that we still are in, like it or not, a fiat system. We can still,
44:25
for example, you're talking about a 2 trillion valuation for stock X, stock Y, Z, not giving
44:32
any kind of recommendation. We have funny money figures flying around. And that two can become
44:38
three, can become four. In what way are we capital limited? We're not. We're not capital
44:46
limited. Now, you can say, okay, yeah, anything's unlimited depending on the price. And certainly,
44:53
in terms of the rate people are prepared to lend to the government, US government and other
44:57
governments, that is moving higher. But I reflect back, that's not moving higher because people are
45:03
necessarily worried about the term premium, which I don't think is that different in the US
45:08
from anywhere else yet. In fact, from Fed data, it's better than in Germany and Japan,
45:12
the long-end term premium. And even break-even inflation rates, yep, they're not particularly
45:18
good. They're not shocking either, right? Now, that says something about how we measure inflation
45:23
as well. And I think there are big question marks over inflation and how much you're really
45:26
asserting people. I'm a big believer that inflation is higher than people think because you say a
45:31
flat-screen TV is getting cheaper in real terms. Yeah, I buy one every five years. I eat three
45:36
times a day, right? So the periodicity of what you're looking at matters more for your conception
45:42
and you're purchasing power of inflation rather than something much lumpier.
45:46
I don't like the way we do the indices.
45:48
Sidebar.
45:50
The real problem is physicality.
45:55
So that is where I think we have to be looking at what is the yield,
46:00
what is the inflation.
46:01
If you don't have enough copper or nickel or yada, yada, yada to do it,
46:05
or as Elon Musk was saying recently, the big blades for these gas turbines,
46:10
right? If you don't have any of these things, that's your problem. And to say that that is
46:17
important is an understatement. To say that this is different from how we've had 45 years of
46:24
thinking, even with the greatest respect, what you were just alluding to about managing volatility
46:28
on the financial market front, markets, markets, I mean, they are important. Don't get me wrong.
46:34
It's stuff that matters. You can control the volatility of anything that you want. You can
46:41
control bond yields with yield curve control, then of course, the currency can go through the floor,
46:46
et cetera et cetera Any of these can be moved at another financial market variable cost but it doesn produce stuff So I already mentioned that if you want inflation to come down make peace with
46:58
Russia and Iran on their terms and lose global power, then you get cheaper oil,
47:05
or arm up and make sure that you can defeat them or do a deal with them on your terms,
47:10
at which point oil comes down again, and then bond yields come down, and then volatility comes down.
47:14
But that's just one crude, rude metric, right?
47:19
There are many, many other geopolitical supply chains and product markets that need to be looked at in their totality.
47:28
And I think that's what Besson is looking at.
47:30
I certainly hope that's what he's looking at.
47:31
Everything else I think is just damage control, you know, to try and make sure that the consumer isn't too shocked during this particular process.
47:42
well the former scenario that you laid out
47:45
with Iran and Russia particularly that would align with the national security
47:52
strategy that was laid out which depending on who you ask in America some people are like
47:58
just get us out pack it in let's focus on the U.S. and our hemisphere I'm not gonna say whether or
48:06
not that's popular opinion or not but I know for sure that there's definitely a number of Americans
48:11
are like i'd be fine with that um whether or not they understand the geopolitical knock-on
48:17
ramifications that is another thing but yeah and outside well outside of that again the other
48:23
big piece of the puzzle is china and basically piggybacking on what you just said how much
48:30
leverage does china have right now in this whole situation in this whole scenario considering they
48:35
have all the stuff they've built out their energy and for sure i look at the the chart of energy
48:39
generation growth in china in awe and um as an american jealous that that they've done this
48:47
but obviously they have a demographic uh problem and it's a bit opaque from a westerner looking
48:55
into what's going on in china a lot of people in our neck of the woods don't really have an
48:59
understanding of how china operates its position as this communist country but if you've ever worked
49:04
with chinese people they're some of the most capitalistic people you've ever met in your life
49:07
And I think that's the big unknown for many people who are just watching mainstream media in the US is what is actually happening in China and how much leverage do they have?
49:19
Huge leverage, obviously.
49:21
They're an incredibly important economy.
49:23
And they're massively more important in all the areas that America needs to be focusing on, which is the physical.
49:29
Because in the financial, America is the giant.
49:32
But this is no longer about finance.
49:34
As I said, you need that finance power.
49:36
Don't get me wrong.
49:37
I don't dismiss finance. I work in finance, right? You need it, but you need it to do something
49:41
useful. So the fact that you can have a company coming to market and saying, we're worth 2 trillion,
49:46
maybe 3, maybe 4, and people from all around the world will be giving you their money.
49:50
That shows you that finance is important as a conduit, but it has to be into something that
49:53
generates power based on the physical. That's what I'm saying. So China understands the physical
49:58
part better than anybody. They have a whole stack of problems that aren't reported. For example,
50:03
Now, the clarity of their data is not that good.
50:08
The opacity is rising all the time.
50:12
And what you can see from some reports is that even the Wall Street Journal, no, so the Washington Post was reporting on this yesterday, that there's more and more automation of this incredibly productive system that they have upstream to downstream coming through, which is even starting to see job layoffs in China.
50:32
Now, they have huge demographic problems.
50:34
I mean, staggering to the point that if you ask me whose population will be larger in the year 2100, I would argue the US.
50:42
That's baked into the cake already, particularly if immigration were to pick up again, even moderately.
50:49
And if demographics, fertility were to pick up, which at the moment it isn't, but it could do, then yeah, the US will have a larger population than China in the year 2100, which people can't get their head around.
50:59
But it's already happening so much.
51:02
But within their current labor force, like, say, 750 million people, the Washington Post is reporting that around 350 million are going to be gig workers doing side jobs within the next year or two, because they're just being laid off from their factory jobs, because everything's now being automated.
51:20
Now, ironically, when you throw the word communist about, that's exactly what Karl Marx was arguing, was that we'd end up basically undermining capitalism, because effectively, there's no one to buy the products.
51:30
so you fire all the workers in the factory to make it more efficiently but you don't pay them
51:35
anything and as a result they can't afford to buy your product now that was debunked by economists
51:40
you know 100 years ago at least pointing out that it's very easy if you just share the productivity
51:45
gains so either people who are left in the factory you pay them really well and then they can afford
51:49
to spend a lot and that money flows down and employs other people etc etc etc so a distribution
51:55
or a global flow the circulation of capital and commodities as Marx referred to it doesn work in the current system That one of the reasons why things are breaking down So China is flooding the world with stuff with this incredible energy complex this incredible manufacturing complex but they can absorb it domestically because
52:14
people haven't got the money. And internationally, everyone is turning around and saying, well,
52:17
we don't want the stuff anymore because it means we're going to follow you down that path.
52:20
We will all be basically doing three or four part-time jobs without any industry
52:24
as these automated factories make everything and all the return flows to China, except
52:29
China actually loses money on most of what they're making. One third of Chinese companies now lose
52:33
money doing it. It's effectively been propped up by subsidies. The fiscal situation in China is
52:40
far worse than the US, far worse. They're just behind a firewall and you can't see it.
52:45
Again, I'm throwing in a lot of information. The point is, China is streets ahead of the US where
52:50
it needs to be in some areas, but the overall package has got massive Achilles heels that aren't
52:55
seen. But the US can't use what it would think would be a strength, like the financial muscle
53:00
against China, because it's built a system where it's ring-fenced. And we even saw that with Iran,
53:06
where the US thought they could show, look, we control Hormuz, you're not going to get any oil
53:09
from them the same way that you didn't get any oil from Venezuela. And China turned around and
53:14
basically showed the world, hey, first of all, we can cut our oil usage by like 6 million barrels a
53:20
which is just unprecedented. We're that electrified now. We don't need it. Wow.
53:25
And secondly, we've probably got a year's worth of reserves. So if you want to try that geopolitical
53:30
squeeze on us, we won't sell you X, Y, or Z for a year. See how you get on. So it's a standoff.
53:38
And both sides have huge strengths and huge weaknesses. And the US needs to take more
53:43
pages out of the Chinese book. And I don't think China is going to take many out of the US.
53:50
That's so fascinating.
53:54
And so how do you think the rest of the year looks?
53:59
Because as you're saying that, the interesting thing of,
54:03
one of the interesting variables of the U.S. is these election cycles,
54:06
and we're heading into midterms here.
54:09
In the next couple of months, and they typically throw a wrench
54:12
in trying to make these geopolitical maneuvers
54:14
because you're worried about the elections for the reps and the senators.
54:20
and governors, and so we have this
54:23
toss-up of who's going to win the House and the Senate,
54:27
and who's actually going to win the House,
54:32
and is the Trump administration going to be able to use Congress
54:35
to push through their agenda?
54:38
And does that slow down their ability to make the moves
54:42
they need to make at this particular point in time
54:46
with everything going on around the world,
54:48
which you've described for the first 50 minutes of this conversation.
54:52
So what should we be looking for throughout the rest of the year
54:57
in terms of the strategic moves that need to be made
55:01
and the position that the Trump administration is in
55:04
and their ability to make those moves considering midterms?
55:08
Sure. I'll try and be more concise.
55:09
So we have the physical, which we've discussed.
55:12
We have the geopolitical.
55:14
And on that particular front, the risk is that, as I said, after the midterms, which I'll come back to or move on to in a second, after the midterms, I think the greatest likelihood, my base case, is that the US escalates versus Iran again.
55:29
Because the economic war is working. It is to a degree, but you need to give it a push.
55:33
And Iran, of course, is more likely to try and escalate in turn if the economic war is biting.
55:38
It can start firing missiles at desalination plants or oil fields in the region, at which
55:43
point the US is going to get dragged in again.
55:44
So expect escalation there.
55:46
The word on the street is that even by the end of this month, potentially Russia could
55:51
escalate against Ukraine.
55:52
And again, this is just speculation, but you see people talking about not just massive
55:57
missile attacks on Ukraine, to deliberately try and break them over winter, which is really
56:02
going to hurt their economy and their population, but to do gray zone attacks on Europe.
56:08
to maybe even transgress and do something against NATO, like the Baltics, just to see if NATO is
56:14
prepared to say we're going to fight. Questionable whether they actually would, that's the whole
56:17
point. Or even talk of a nuclear weapon, a tactical nuclear weapon, just to say, hey, guys,
56:23
we have these. We'll let one off in a field over there in Ukraine, just to show you that we've got
56:28
them, because that's how serious this is. I don't think China wants Russia to do that, but you can't
56:33
rule anything out if Russia keeps getting its oil refineries smashed the way that Ukraine is doing
56:39
at the moment. So that's geopolitically. And of course, the two would happen together. If Iran
56:43
escalates, Russia will at the same time, and vice versa, because you want to have that mess on two
56:48
different fronts. And then the real tail risk is it's only those two who escalate. There are other
56:53
players who could escalate. So it could be a really, really noisy end of year into the Christmas
56:59
period, potentially. Rumors of a Putin-Trump-Shea meeting November 19th at APEC. If that's true,
57:07
really really interesting what does or doesn emerge from that Politically no one knows what the midterms will look like All I will say is this We have had headline after headline fest for years saying it going to go one way or the other and they often wrong And I did see a poll yesterday for whatever it worth for the first time I think the
57:26
generic Republicans in the House, the likely voters were actually plus one versus Democrats.
57:31
And remember, we're looking at a series of local races, not national.
57:35
And while Trump himself, I believe, is unpopular, looking at the aggregate polling, that doesn't
57:39
mean that the alternative agenda is popular.
57:41
so it wouldn't be a complete surprise if the republicans retain both the senate and the house
57:47
not to me anyway uh but equally you know the mainstream view that they lose both cannot be
57:53
entirely ruled out either way i can guarantee you two things with the escalation from trump
57:58
because he'll just rely on executive orders more and more which he's already having to do congress
58:02
is doing very very little so just executive orders for the next two years or 18 months whatever
58:08
sorry two years
58:09
and at the same time
58:11
within the democratic camp
58:14
you will have a continual move to the left
58:16
because you've already seen
58:18
this week I believe AOC was rejected
58:20
by the DSA as a prospective candidate
58:22
the president in 2028
58:24
because she's not radical enough
58:25
so once a revolution
58:28
starts moving it eats its own young
58:30
and it will continue
58:32
moving leftwards
58:34
in the same way that politics in many other countries
58:36
is moving more and more
58:37
to the right. The center will not hold in that particular environment. I didn't ever think it
58:42
could because it doesn't produce policies that produce centrists. It produces policies that
58:47
produce people on the far left and the far right, given enough time. And that's exactly what we see
58:52
coming now. So I see instability politically, whatever happens. I see instability geopolitically
58:58
with a narrow chance of some great deal being done, but I don't think that's very realistic.
59:02
And so markets are going to have to adjust to that because it implies more problems in energy
59:07
markets and energy prices being uncomfortably high, particularly for diesel, et cetera,
59:11
going forward.
59:14
Everyone else will then have to try and find whatever coping mechanism they have got.
59:18
The US has got a much bigger bag of tricks than most in that respect.
59:22
RAOUL PAL, I want to end it on Europe.
59:26
What is going to happen with Europe?
59:28
We can tie this in to everything.
59:30
Obviously, you just mentioned Dark Horse, Russia, Baltics, Gray Zone area in Europe.
59:36
the financial side van der line coming out and again they've been beating this drum for years but
59:42
again explicitly saying there's x trillions of dollars or euros in savings accounts throughout
59:48
europe we need to tap into those to reinvest in the european economy you have canada going to um
59:56
a european parliament event you have mark carney going over there obviously we have the us canada
1:00:01
tiff going on right now um when we talked about the relative structural weaknesses that exist in
1:00:07
the us because the last 50 50 years of under investment in critical infrastructure it seems
1:00:13
like europe may be in an even worse spot and less coordinated in in solving their problems
1:00:20
is that how you see it yeah europe's in a very very tricky spot and as i alluded to at the beginning
1:00:28
more and more conservative with a small C,
1:00:33
centrist organizations and think tanks and politicians
1:00:35
are coming out and saying the same thing.
1:00:37
This is bad and getting worse,
1:00:39
and we really need to shake the box.
1:00:41
It remains to be seen how the box will be shaken,
1:00:44
by whom, and how many pieces realign within that box
1:00:50
were that to happen.
1:00:52
Because if Europe could manage to get out of its mess
1:00:56
with off-sites and working groups and acronyms and grand speeches, it would already be the world
1:01:01
hegemon. But it's very, very hard to get one country to change. It's incredibly hard to get
1:01:07
27 countries to change when one of them can veto just about anything. So it remains to be seen.
1:01:14
But I do think the pressure is building there, for sure. A key thing to watch, by the way,
1:01:18
is in October. So next month, Europe is supposed to tell China, okay, either you have changed your
1:01:24
trade policy towards us, because Europe's trade deficit with China is exploding. It's far bigger
1:01:28
than America's now, which is completely bloody obvious that would happen, because they refused
1:01:33
to tariff anything or anything large. Either you change, or we're going to start a trade war with
1:01:39
you. Watch that one. If Europe actually starts a trade war with China, if it does, then that
1:01:45
snowball is going to turn into an avalanche, because it will have to do so much more on the
1:01:48
back of that. If it doesn't, even when it's got an enormous and exponentially increasing trade
1:01:54
deficit with China, then I'm not sure what it can do.
1:01:58
Yeah.
1:01:58
I feel like they don't have a lot of leverage when it comes to trying to get into a trade
1:02:03
war with China.
1:02:04
Well, Europe doesn't have a great deal of leverage with China.
1:02:06
It doesn't have a great deal of leverage with America.
1:02:08
It doesn't have a great deal of leverage with anyone because it didn't build up an economy,
1:02:12
a political economy that created leverage.
1:02:14
It was built for an idealist, neoliberal, pacifist world that doesn't exist.
1:02:19
So, you know, that means it has to change.
1:02:21
And it accepts that.
1:02:22
The question is how it does it and when.
1:02:23
maybe you shouldn't have decommissioned all those nuclear and coal power plants
1:02:29
yeah
1:02:29
less. Well, I'm not giving policy advice. I'm just analyzing. But clearly, it's asking lots of
1:02:35
questions. Anyway, I hope that's covered everything you wanted to do today. We didn't even mention
1:02:40
Bitcoin. I apologize, but maybe next time. But there's so much to talk about, so much to cover.
1:02:46
And as I said, they're all integrated if you choose to try and see the bigger picture. I
1:02:50
understand many people don't because it's exhausting, brain busting, et cetera. But I do
1:02:55
genuinely think I'm not mad that there is a threat to all this. There is a pattern there.
1:03:01
And, you know, please, let's continue the conversation.
1:03:04
Would love to, Michael. Thank you for your time. This was an absolute pleasure for me.
1:03:09
Me too. Take care.
1:03:10
Peace and love, freaks.
1:03:11
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