UGO11: Fiscal Dominance, Dollar Power, and the Politics Driving Markets ft. Lyn Alden

[MUSIC] Welcome to You Got Options, an exciting series right here on Top Traders Unplugged, hosted by none other than Jim Carson, one of the sharpest minds when it comes to understanding what's really driving market moves beneath the surface. In this series, Jim brings his deep expertise and unique perspective, honed from years of experience on the trading floor to candid conversations with some of the brightest minds in the industry. Together, they unpack the shifting tides and underlying forces that move markets and the opportunities they create. A quick reminder before we dive in, you got options as for informational and educational purposes only. None of the discussions you're about to hear should be considered investment advice. As always, please do your own research and consult with a professional advisor before making any investment decisions. Now, what makes this series truly special is that it's recorded right from the heart of the action on the trading floor of the seaball. That means you might catch a little background bounce, phones ringing, trader shouting, as Jim and his guests unpack real world insights in real time. We wouldn't have it any other way because this is as authentic as it gets. And with that, it's time to hear from those who live and breathe this complex corner of the markets. Here is your host, Jim Carson. Welcome back to another episode of You Got Opt from the Seaball floor. Watch you by Kymia and Top Trainers Unplugged. Today we talk to Lynn Ols. She is known obviously for this train does not stop. And to that fiscal dominance, absolutely agree with that we tested a little bit with talking about authoritarianism. How it will play a role versus democracy AI, will that make a difference? And of course, crypto. Where does crypto stand is? Where are we going? And broad scope of things. I think you're really going to enjoy this one. Hey guys, welcome to another You Got Options. I'm here with Lynn Alden. Not only a fan favorite, one of my favorites, her work has been kind of something that's led me through the last four years, really been reading a lot of her stuff. I agree with a lot of it, you know, from a different angle sometimes, sometimes different path. But one thing you can't argue with is the depth that which she kind of looks through these things and the numbers and the analysis. It's always a pleasure. So thanks for joining me today Lynn. Excited to have a conversation today. How did it be here? Looking forward to it. So let's dive right in. I mean, what an amazing kind of time. The things we I feel like we've been talking about in terms of fiscal dominance and how you can't stop this train and the broad macro. It just seems to accelerate every week and every month. For those that aren't as familiar with your work and even for those that are, you might give it a little bit of a kind of background of how you see us at this stage. Maybe what's continuing to happen on path as you'd expect and also what are some things that might be changing in the broad macro path. Sure, it sounds good. Yeah, a lot of my work over the past several years. I'm really going back to 2019 as focused heavily on the fiscal aspect, especially in the US but also globally. And so a big part of my investment approach was kind of based on the observation that I think a large part of the market was kind of underestimating the power of fiscal and the amount of fiscal we were likely going to get. And both kind of covering current topics in fiscal but also learning a lot from history because we're going through what I, you know, I'm not the first one to use this term of fiscal dominance where we've shifted a lot of the leverage from the private sector up to the public sector. This has implications for nominal GDP, wealth concentration, inflation levels and sales market performance. It's got a number of kind of economic, social and trading, investing ramifications. And we have to really go back a long time in at least in the developed world to see similar market conditions. So a lot of the investing approaches of the past 40 years or so, we're not really geared toward fiscal dominance. And so a lot of my work is kind of focused on that importance. You know, my initial background is in engineering so I kind of have a systems engineering approach to capital flows as well as focusing on the reality of some physical aspects where there's energy, where there's supply chains as well that kind of round out my view. And so kind of my general view is that because we're in fiscal dominance, we have struck and a number of other things that kind of went into this situation. We have struck actually high fiscal deficits in the US. That tends to keep nominal things elevated more than at least many bears would think, but just generally more than the market participants would think. So you generally have pretty kind of a run at hot GDP environment. Nominal asset prices doing well, you know, they might not do well versus another hard asset like gold per se, but they're doing well in currency terms, at least over a multi-year period. And then you kind of get into that sort of persistent situation. And so I'm happy to kind of go where you want. Another big thing I focus on is kind of that we're shifting toward a more multi-pulled world over time. I mean some of the current headlines might be, you know, kind of along that path, but even just before, you know, the current kind of headlines, it's been kind of a structural approach that I focus on alongside the fiscal side. It's that kind of shift toward a more multi-pulled world. A gradual change in reserve currency practices. What does that mean good and bad? And I know my views and I've read a bit of yours, but I'd love to talk about why you think it's fairly inevitable, why this train doesn't stop, right? Why is the fiscal dominance happening, and why is it likely to persist in your view? Sure. So basically when we look at how debt cycles work in history, we're all familiar with like the credit cycle, the five to ten year typical kind of business cycle, credit cycle. When you string a lot of those together, especially in modern history, every time we have a contraction, you'll lower interest generally to a new lower low. You'll often have physical stabilizes kick in either automatically or due to intentional stimulus to kind of restart that next credit cycle. And when you string a bunch of those together over 40, 50 years, you get higher and higher debt levels relative to GDP and you get lower and lower interest rates. And historically, when you kind of run that all the way to the end point, you run into zero interest rates. You get very high private debt levels. The highest two kind of private debt levels in the US were basically 29 or early 1930s and then again in 2007, 2008. Those were kind of the two all-time private sector debt bubbles in the US. And the problem there is that there's really kind of nowhere to go. If you look at most metrics in terms of how much debt exists in the world in the country relative to the monetary base, how much debt there is relative to GDP, there's multiple ways to measure it. It's extremely leverage. For example, how much cash banks have on hand relative to all the other assets and just how much risk they're taking on. And generally speaking, when you get to that point, instead of kind of letting it all collapse, a country that controls its own unit of account, its own money will generally print. And so you start to see a shift from the private sector. You kind of delivers that through very large fiscal injections, backstops, monetization of debt when needed, and you kind of over a period of years rotate some of that onto the public sector. And so we shift from out of kind of that private sector, debt bubble, we moderate that, we shift that more to the public sector. And that has implications because when you get very high public debts, if you run into inflation for whatever reason, whether it's because you print it on extra money for a lockdown stimulus or because you have war or energy shortages or whatever the case may be, if you try to raise interest rates in response to that, you get a generally different outcome than say the 1970s. We're generally kind of trained to think that the antidote to inflation is higher rates, which is, which is sometimes true and it has some hardening effects on the currency. But the challenge is, and what makes this very different than the 70s, and more like it's some ways like the 40s, kind of the last time we were in kind of a public sector debt bubble is in the 70s, most of the inflation, the money creation we were seeing was from private sector bank lending. And of course, we had deficits at the top of that, but quantitatively, the private sector was the biggest component. So when you raise interest rates to slow down bank lending, that has a bigger downward push on money creation than blowing out the fiscal interest expense, the government interest expense. Whereas when you have over 100% or 120% debt the GP, and you have a lot of money creation coming from physical deficits, monetized fiscal deficits, and less so from a very quick bank lending. If you raise rates in the face of inflation, you do slow down bank lending to a certain degree, but then you blow out fiscal, you know, federal interest expense by an even greater absolute number. And so you kind of get into this loop that's pretty hard to slow down fully. And then on top of that, we have demographics issues, that's not new to everyone. But when you kind of lock that in, I mean that's you vote, you know kind of where a lot of things are, you know a lot of people are training to kind of think that aging demographics are Disinflationary which is which can be true if the if the older demographic is Impoverished if they're not consuming a lot but if they're also backstopped by you know very high medical cost per capita So security all this other thing That can actually be kind of inflationary at least for the things that that demographic consumes and so the combination of Basically just decades of debt accumulation and where that debt ended up demographics and then tell them to support them and then at odds that it's kind of more unique to the US than then say Europe and elsewhere Is that we're heavily financialized Meaning that can mean a number of things but in this context it means that our tax receipts are more correlated with like asset prices Than many other developed countries So you know if you're not kind of pumping the stock market with a 12 month flag or so you're gonna start to get you know materially weaker tax receipts you actually kind of add fuel to the deficit fire So we have a bunch of kind of flywheels that are all Very very very hard to slow down and ever quite to impossible but Nearly so so we definitely agree on fiscal dominance you can't stop this train I think this conversation about Why it's inevitable I think we slightly disagree on this I'd love to kind of dive in a little bit and think about it And there's no right answer right we're trying to tease this out but But I do think the why is important given how things are changing and how those wise might change um And by the way, I also agree this is different than the 70s even though I've highlighted 60 70s as the most Closely parallel recent time frame and I'll get to why but but I really I have a question that I'm a kind of a leading question for you which is What do you say to people who again five years ago you heard all about modern monetary theory right you heard about debts don't you know Debt don't matter if you're an exorbit privilege of the US dollar which is big asterix by the way Which we'll get to a little bit later, but There is a theory out there and I actually tend to think that's true as long as you have exorbit privilege of the US dollar That the debt itself doesn't necessarily matter. What is your view on that and and tell me why you feel that you don't agree with that because it sounds like you don't agree with Well, I think that it does matter. I wouldn't disagree that it that it matters It's just that it's not a complete immunization of the issue So if you take two extremes and if you take a developing country that does not have you know almost any external structural demand for its currency If they run very large deficits, especially monetized deficits are partially They're very likely to rapidly devalue their currency Whereas the US I mean you have trillions or realistically 10 to trillions of dollar-divided liabilities Outside of the US most and I even owe to the US mostly owe to other countries, but it's still just inflexible demand for dollars Uh, and and all of that kind of represents a really big absorption For dollars let alone just the demand for US assets Um, you know kind of a demand to to come and live here This is the experiment privilege of the US dollar to a great extent right yeah, uh, yeah, uh, and so basically you can that's also why I'm not in the like the two sides of the nothing stops is trained view is that one there's very little Method to slow down the deficits But also that it's not going to completely go off the rails and just just spiral like a troll anytime soon Because it's actually also quite resilient to upside shocks Because there is all this entrenched demand for dollars Um now, but I get I think maybe where we disagree is that the the effects still happen Uh, there there still are effects of running those fiscal deficits. I mean they I think they have effects on asset prices. I think they have effects on um, uh, you know the economy winners and losers in the economy Um, they have effects on a matter of things Uh, but they don't have the same effects as they would if say um, you know the UK ran a similar playbook and then especially if um, you know Egypt ran a similar playbook. There's a spectrum there for sure Yeah, I think obviously there's a dramatic difference right and a normal system we obviously agree that you know prices Of currency will will adjust to take into account right deficits and the issues at hand But obviously as we've seen this is not news right if the if the fatick at any point, you know print all the all the money at once Fix up, you know the cyclical problems as we go and then at some point just hit a button on a keyboard And make it you know monetize that debt Is it really debt right and and I'm actually generally the view as as long as again big asterix is the US has the exorbitant privilege of the dollar Right we we really can That doesn't matter Okay, now that's a big asterix and we'll have to kind of get to that in a second Um, but what it does mean is that the net result is a Actually would argue even more inflationary I would argue that ironically the more that uh you can print to avoid cyclical downturns right um It supports to a baseline non deflationary path as we've seen right you always have that tool that you can deploy at scale um The big component I really think matters is Populism is like who the money is going to right in our system right now and the reason that the 80 the 70s and 70s played out the way they did in my opinion Is not just because of debts. I actually think debts are secondary in our system as it stands Um with exorbitant privilege of the US dollar. It's about who's getting the money we keep doing and you've talked about this in your papers like uh You know, it's a very blunt instrument monetary policy and and the federal reserve Um has has a very limited ability to stop inflation when it gets going because usually what's causing the inflation is actually government sending money right or global conflict and tariffs and protectionism things that are driven by governmental decisions that aren't free market right that uh that are really driving kind of uh money Uh money to people who spend right and in my view the incentives there are really about Um like political incentives. We were just talking to Neil how actually at last month which was I think a apropos I don't know how much of you know how so The reality in my view is that the bigger driver is this populist impulse these bigger cycles and we just had Neil how on here Uh talking about the fourth turning and kind of generational political realities, but inflation I actually agree with um what's uh some monetary uh Theory modern monetary theory uh principles in the sense that I don't think as long as they gastric you have These are a privilege of US dollar that debts really matter right uh debts matter When when you're a force by uh, you know by the world to to pay the price But if we can print as much money as we want and drive outcomes right especially we're driving it to capital right That's uh creates a structurally deflaced rate for some technological development globalization right all those things that we've experienced for the last four years But my view is that really that this populism the political pressures that demand now money uh fiscal Goes to people which has a velocity one really can drive those structural and flesh your pressures And that makes and to your point uh this stop this train unstoppable because If people want it Politically you better give it to them. How are you gonna stop otherwise the whole you get knocked out of office I don't what are your thoughts about that? Did you agree with that or or or or by all means pick some bones with with uh with that view? I agree with that view. I just don't be I don't view it as mutually exclusive I think these things tend to feed on each other one of the things I put out in in a newsletter before Is that the long-term debt cycles correlate with the fourth turnings um And you know that there's there's build up in in the head of time in the kind of the second and third turning leading into that Uh, and I view that as kind of like the quantitative backdrop to what's happening socially So so I for example I've read the fourth turning because I find it instructive to know what's happening socially in addition to what's happening Uh from that more kind of financial engineering perspective um and part of I mean I think a specific catalyst for how this kind of came together was as you get those lower and lower Indistrates as you get that kind of rising private debt bubble uh, you know when they ran into kind of the the end of that leading into the global financial crisis they had you know Cut it trades all over the zero They had banks bad as leverage as you can get them. So I mean just just generally speaking there if you look at total debt in the system There was something like sixty dollars of debt for every one dollar of base money um and bank cash like cat like uh banks had three percent of their assets as cash And then the rest was was you know mostly loans So they were taking on basically a greater proportion of risk And you had kind of maximum fractional reserve in the system measured in various different ways And so when that started to crumble Um that's when industries are no longer cutting it Minus the most no longer cutting it That's when they shift more toward bank recapitalization You know the last time they jumped to the club thing of that scale was the early 1930s Um and so when they when they did that here in in you know 2008 and 2009 Um there was a big populist wave that came quickly after that You had you had the tea purer in the right you had occupied Wall Street more on the left Uh and a lot of that was a reaction uh to Once you bail out one group significantly There's like this obviously a big spreading of unfairness. It's like well, why did that group get bailed out Let's bail out other groups as well And he kind of more people say okay the systems rigged It all kind of blew up, but then we had selective bailouts And then I think you know populist started to build very quickly, especially from that point, because we kind of ran into financial bedrock. We ran into that peak of the private sector debt bubble, shifted it more to the public sector, and at that point, it's kind of everyone's problem, because now we're shifting it more toward the public ledger that we all care about. And so I do think that ever since then, we've had rapidly rising populism, but, you know, physically, socially across the board, and then, you know, so it's not an accident that when we had COVID, we had a very different type of stimulus, instead of just recapitizing the banks, it was way more widespread, because I think of where we are. So I do take that poplism account, and another way of looking at it is, I mean, in the 2010s, kind of like the Paul Ryan era of the Republican Party, it was more about, you know, trimming entitlement spending. There was attempts for a quote-unquote "grand bargain" between the Obama administration and the Republican opposition to say, "Okay, how can we kind of write size entitlements to some degree, how can we do some cause controls?" But when we're in kind of the current, you know, the Trump era of the Republican Party, for example, in the latest election, I think point 14 in the Republican platform was no cuts associated with security or Medicare, right? And so that, I mean, that used to be a Democrat position, just because that's, I mean, that's a type of populism. We've kind of exited the era of fiscal austerity in the U.S. because we have that more structural populism. And I think also that the trade, structural trade balances and things like that also contributed to it. I think the long-term debt cycle, the structural trade deficit, and then, yeah, the poppies and components is absolutely an element of that. >> But I actually would argue that it's all of it. And let me tell you why. I think all those things, the trade deficit as well, is driven by, if you're setting money to corporations, what happens, right? You get faster and faster technological development, right? It's a profit maximizing the seat machine. Clearly, that's going to lead to globalization. We don't care, corporations don't care about the people of the U.S. versus other countries. They don't, they're not profit, or they're not incentivized too. Right? And so the massive globalization wave, the building of China over the last 40 years is not a coincidence that that happened over the same time period. At the same time, you have global peace. Because if you're trading with other countries, you're helping them grow, you know, that is a past, this is the Pax Americana, right? That's what drives peace. It's what the lack of populism, sending capital to the top, right? Is what drives peace, globalization, and technological development, right? Because a profit, it's the free market system on steroids. And you could pump a bunch of oxygen into that system. And honestly, you could do it forever. What happened during the Bezos-Oik era? We got really big dinosaurs. You could pump as much cash as you want into that system. And honestly, if we were cogs, if you and I weren't human beings, we would do that. That system creates, and the words of Socrates, you give the best violin players, the best violin, or do you give the worst violin players the best violin? You know, his answer was you give them to the best violin players because you get infinitely beautiful music. The natural system is a system that creates more advancement, evolution, right? Survival of the fittest, if we pump more into it. The problem with that is nature is raw and tooth and claw. And it doesn't care about URI. And populism at the end of the day is when that system gets so endowed as human beings, we have a life isn't fair, but we have a sense of fairness. We all agree there should be some type of fairness. And that, which is the left and right dynamic, this is why since Roman and Greek times, they've talked about left and right. This is why the political spectrum is populism, equality, versus this free market, winter take-all kind of evolutionary system. So I think that's everything. It drives global, the lack of peace, it drives expansion and trade. It's also when commodities aren't scarce if we all trade and work with each other in a free world. Right? There's enough for everybody to go around. But when we break up that system and go talk about our people, protection isn't has to have. So we get global conflict, we get commodity scarcity. Anyway, this is my view and that this is the connective tissue, right? To why this train doesn't stop. And it's really political. And so I really think it drives all the way. I don't know, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Well, I agree. And I think, I mean, the way I would put it is, there are certain technological milestones that really matter. So for example, as global telecom systems gradually kept improving throughout the 20th century, when we finally got to kind of the early stages of the internet and just in general fairly high bandwidth communications, that obviously made globalization a lot easier. It's much easier to coordinate around the world when you have very efficient ways to communicate with your off-site operations. And then when you add to it, I mean, you had the opening of China from the obviously very, very anti-market approaches in the early 80s, they were kind of opening that up to the rest of the world, like late 70s, early 80s. Of course, the fall of the Soviet Union, you had all of this Eastern labor, Eastern kind of resources connecting with Western capital. And so this was this kind of disinflationary globalization boom because you had all these kind of things that were segmented to come together. And like anything else is when there's a loses from that. I mean, like prices go down significantly, you have all these efficiencies build up. But then you also have, you know, that we're a protected labor now has a lot more global competition. And that is perceived as quite unfair. And it kind of widened the gap between those capital and those rely on a labor. And I think that that builds over time. And then, you know, behind that, I do think, yeah, there are also these structural things that kind of build up these higher, higher debt levels, these lower and lower industries. The trade balance itself is fascinating because in order to run the global's own currency, it means the whole world has to have access to that currency. There's currency around that's being used. And the way the US gets the currency out to the world is we run these structural trade deficits. And the demand for the currency kind of fuels those deficits because basically most currencies, they trade on things like industry differentials, current accounts, you know, things like that. The dollar has this extra component where there's like this just as inflexible extra demand for it on top of all the normal things. We still have dollar cycles and things like that. But on top of all the normal things that matter for currency pairs, there's just the fact that just, you know, there's this constant kind of bid for it as a sovereign reserve asset as the place to store longer term capital. And so compared to all these other dynamics, the dollar ends up kind of being overvalued. So it boosts our input power. It hurts our export competitors, especially on lower margin stuff. So it doesn't necessarily, you know, we become experts in exporting dollars, securities, high margin tech and health care. But we kind of eats away at our manufacturing exports. And so these dynamics kind of reinforce themselves for a while. So you get the, you get, you know, we've seen a gravitation and wealth away from the rust belt and toward, you know, New York and Silicon Valley and all that because these imbalances build up over time. And that, I mean, as that happens, there also is that political element that grows as people are just enfranchised and it fuels on itself. >> Yeah, and this momentum effect, right, to everything. Like you mentioned, you just mentioned through a four, but there it goes across the board. It's the financialization, as you mentioned before too. It's the leverage in the system. It's everything is assumed to just, it will keep going as it goes. I think, I guess my point is it could, if, right, people were in the system and didn't demand fairness. And I think we started to see that to your point in, you know, in, in, in, in 20 2009, 2010, Lock your by Wall Street Tea Party. The differences, those people that were behind that movement were in their 20s. And why were they in the 20s? Because these are the people that were born in 1982 or so. Because that was the peak in interest rates. That was before this monetary policy supply side, Reagan, Federal Reserve Monetary Policy System. And so that generation, who is only now seen one thing. They didn't see the 60s and 70s, you know, into early 80s. All they've experienced is this one-sided, free market economic model, which isn't fair. And they're at 45% of the wealth creation, household formation of baby boomers, living at home at, at, you know, 30% of them are living at home and, you know, mom and dad's basement, right? And that creates a lot of anger and populism. Eventually, those people learn through what's coming, the cycle that's coming, that the opposite is also a problem. That even a more fair system then creates a much worse economic outcomes, much slower growth, much slower technological development, global conflict. All the problems we're seeing is kind of my view. So now the big asterisk, now that we've kind of talked to this, I think this is a great kind of back and forth conversation is, I did say there's a big asterisk. And I think it's more important than ever. I think maybe a year ago, maybe even, you know, or at least two years ago, before, you know, Trump came in the picture. I think we would have all said, sort of it privilege of the best dollar is not going anywhere anytime soon. I think it's a hard standing here today with what's going on in Iran, for example, to not least in the straight-up or moves, and you know about the petro dollar and the critical importance of that. Not least questioning that that timeline might be shorter. We've got hard to say, right? But how, now let's do a little thought experiment. I'd love to hear your thoughts about, now what, what does removing the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar due to this fiscal dominance to the picture. What is this dude, a macro outcomes? I think we know some of the scary big answers to that, but I'd love to kind of walk through maybe how that changes everything. Sure, I think I mean on the negative side, basically if there's less external demand for the dollar and you're running big deficits and issuing a lot of debt to fund those deficits, it means a higher ratio of that debt has to be bought domestically, which generally gives you the crowding out effect. It means more to just have to buy debt instead of buying equity or making loans and things like that. Or you have the central bank by it, in which case that can contribute to inflation. And so it takes away that extra structural, or at least it reduces that extra structural bid for the dollar and makes it so that the US starts to resemble many other developed countries in that regard. The upside of it is that having the global reserve status is an exorbitant privilege, but it does come with costs. Like as I mentioned before, you have to supply the world with dollars and the world has this extra bid for dollars. And so if you're in the business of selling dollars, like the government is, you know, government security, like dollar securities, or you're in the business of selling, you know, private securities, you know, in New York and Silicon Valley and all that, that's great. Basically, you know, we're in the massive kind of dollar export business. But if you're in the business of making things, especially lower margin things, doing that in the reserve currency country is extraordinarily challenging. And because you're kind of competing with this artificially valuable currency against countries that are running world-mechanulous type of playbooks. And it's just, the math is against you because, you know, you can still, if you're like a top tier performer, you can still make it work, you can still make the math work. But structurally, one way or another, we are sending dollars to us the world and to primarily through trade deficits, which means that on a trade basis, we have more losers than winners. Again, if you're outside of that kind of dollar export business. And so if you, another way of kind of looking at it is, the dollar status as currently structured is really good for, like, America the Empire. When you can sanction any country, when we have the advantage that we can kind of surveil things, so we can have this kind of global network of kind of financial surveillance that, you know, if Japan wants to do that, or if the UK wants to do that, if, you know, country like Brazil, or once do that, they don't really have that capability, where's the US says, well, you're all using dollars, so as long as you want to play good with our system, you have to say, do these reporting requirements, for example. So we give this a lot of kind of power and insight into the kind of, the whole kind of global financial system. But then the cost for kind of America, the country, or America, the republic, like our domestic economy, does have a cost to support that. It's kind of one way of thinking of is that in order to maintain that system, we're kind of shipping off a little piece of our industrial base every year, which is, you know, not infinite. And so there's, again, there's winners and losers of that system. And I think what happens when it kind of reaches its kind of stretching point, I think one thing that's happened in this part of the populism dynamic, is we just kind of kind of started to openly questioning, is running these structural trade deficits every year good, good for all of us, or is it good for a few? I think that it's not an accident that's become more elevated in political rhetoric. That's been a big component of both Trump administrations to kind of highlight that more than other administrations have. And so I think that there's upsides and downsides to having the global security status. And but the messier part is when it's kind of taken away from you unwillingly. I would push back a little bit, just kind of, for the sake of being polemically here too, I would say losing the exorbit privilege of the US dollar would be a massive problem for the US. And I actually think the benefits, the mild costs there are to your point, which is like trade deficits, et cetera, could in theory, you know, if we printed up money, we could send it, it's a rebuild that manufacturing base, or to do any number of things, right? It's like, that's the core input. It's the more dominant force, which is that we have pure power to create unlimited resources. It's the golden goose, right? But I hear you that there are definitely general things that happen as a function of being the reserve currency. That can be, can undermine and have a momentum effect like we talk about. That can undermine long-term, kind of structural issues, and the reserve currency status. But to our earlier point, I think if we, you know, you mentioned that this might be actually want to go back to this point you made earlier, that this might be much more like the 40s than the 60s or 70s. I actually have a thought bubble here that I'd like to kind of explore with you, which is, I think, so really interesting fact, I think you probably know this, but in real terms, a 6040 portfolio, so broadly assets, think about it that way, perform the same from 1929 to 1949, as they did from 1962 to 1982, in real terms. Most people will be like, "That's crazy. I gotta go see a chart." That's true. One was a massively deflationary period. One was a massive inflationary period. And my view on why is because we did not yet live in a fiat world. The fiat reserve was still very nascent, not dominant, right? Monetary policy dominance did not exist yet, right? And the introduction and the ability, and the flexibility and maneuverability, of the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar, which really comes from that fiat world, right? It was introduced in 1971. And so I would argue, and you could argue it started a little bit before that, because even though things were officially kind of broken at that point, in 1971, it would have already started prior. But I think that's a huge difference. And just like if you take from the beginning of time, if kings could shave coins, they will. This idea of nominal illusion is important, politically important, right? And just like people feel like, "Oh, the 70s and 80s weren't nearly as painful as the Great Depression." Or so the 60s and 70s, right? The reality is in some terms, actually a lot of terms, asset wise, they were the same. So I'd love to hear your thoughts about that. And because of that, I actually agree, if we go to, if the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar is broken, I think this looks much more like the 30s and 40s, personally. I think the pressures were similar in both, put it that way, and that things become much more deflation, structural things break without the stabilizing power of Fiat and the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar in the dominant power in the world, which is obviously the US. So I think these two different scenarios are actually much more, I mean, there's other differences. I'm playing with a toy model here, but I think they're much more defined by Fiat exorbitant privilege versus not, necessarily that case, than anything. And that feeds into some of the analysis that you're seeing on the back end, like how things play out. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. That's hot, people. I do think a lot of things are different in the post-1970s environment. People will often say, before the dollar was the global reserve currency, that the UK pound was the global reserve currency, and they'll go back from there, but I generally disagree with that view, because before the dollar, really precious metals were the reserve currency, and all these other things were just like a layer on top of it. So the UK system never looked like the US system does today, and going back from there, to others into Spain and all that, none of that really looked the same as looks today, where the government bond is itself the reserve asset rather than gold and proxies. So that does put in this kind of a different environment than before. And I think one thing I would highlight that kind of goes along, because we might have disagreed a little bit about that trade deficit situation. One of the challenges is that these things are cumulative. And so for example, as we run these structural trade deficits, when people kind of look at that on the surface, they say, "Well, it's a good thing, because we're giving them devaluing dollars, and we're getting goods and services." It seems like we're winning from that. The challenge is that there's a second step to that, which is those foreign entities that get the dollars, or those that they trade those dollars too, then reinvest those into US assets. So they buy our equity, they buy our debt. In some cases, they buy our real estate, they buy our private equity, where the case may be. And so they actually buy, for the most part, our appreciating assets, from selling us depreciating assets. And so the cumulative factor over time is that the foreign sector owns a greater and greater percentage of total US assets, which also means their voting influence is material. They're basically their ability to influence things grows. And if that just goes on indefinitely, that obviously has a very big range of. Well, that breaks the absorbent approval in some ways. And that's kind of why I'm sorry, I did it right here. At some point, yeah. So I think that's the challenge at the absorbent privilege. It exists for a time and a place. And there are certainly actions that can be done to prolong it or shorten it. But that it's kind of on this like gradually Ticking clock. I mean, it's kind of like how you know aging right or like telomeres at the end of our DNA I'm not an expert on that but basically there's like a ticking clock that happens either way and there's certain things We can do to like prematurely age or we can there's certain things we can do To like to layer aging and I think that's I think that the the current system we have in places Like that of where you can it yeah, that's how I view it at least so I do think that While we can learn from history we are in many ways in a different environment and one of the Closer comparisons I think is the US looks more like the UK in the 40s than than the US in the 40s because in the 40s in the US we were a rising manufacturing power Whereas in the UK they had already kind of hollered ourselves their their sells out industrially in a similar way that we've kind of gradually hollered ourselves out here And it's just one of the challenges that kind of comes with with the these self-added aging metaphor and Let me just kind of put in my own words. Why it's you know entropy is the way of the world, right and things Will decay or break at some point and without reinforcement or stabilization Things that go faster and longer without a burning of the underbrush naturally create bigger and bigger Structural unthought about problems, right and these are all we listed four or five of them right that eventually undo You know power going to foreign sources because the assets running to them right like We went through the trade deficits and the hollowing out of the you know the infrastructure we could go through all of them again But but I think to your point the more that you accelerate and avoid the business cycle and Kind of push to more and more growth You ultimately kind of live faster and live shorter And I think there's some element of that I think we have Right that the Federal Reserve and and fiat the introduction of that was created to smooth the business cycle I found it fathers the US would be turning in their grave if they knew that existed Because the whole point was you need crisis to bring people together to pass and reinvigorate the system pass amendments and you know All kinds of other structural reinforcements, so the system does an entropy Now the systems take a look. It's an entropy, right? And and the reason is because of the Fed and monetary policy creating a Smooth like how much Re-evaluation to the structures of democracy? Did we do in capitalism in 0809 zero like almost zero and they lasted so short because the Fed swooped in and made it not a real problem All right, and so I do think anyway not to go on and on about it But I do think that's an incredible metaphor and and very relevant here given where we stand and I actually argue Crisis is the best thing we can hope for at this point because a short crisis might invigorate the system and they could go another 40 80 years As it is I'd like to kind of jump to the next idea now, which is Some authoritarianism versus democracy, right? I think a lot of the smooth if you look at you know, twarth turnings and the smooth like incredible precise Kind of in the US You know cyclicality to it a lot of that I think is tied because the political will and this left versus right and the fixing of the problems Is translated to policy more smoothly because of the democratic kind of structure and that was the whole idea To democracy. It's one of the benefits there are lots of problems with it, but like that's that's a huge benefit If we're moving to potentially period more authoritarianism and maybe just more broadly going from You know to to a to a more structural authoritarian regime here in the US even How does that change the potential Cyclicality and the fact that you know You know, maybe Nothing stops this trade is not the issue there maybe exorbit privilege Goes on longer or gets degraded. Let me let me know your thoughts about that I think it's an important part of the argument that people haven't thought much about because they assume that it couldn't happen much like the exorbit privilege He goes down I want to explore that given the accelerations and issues we're we're saying there Sure, and I think I mean of course the challenges that even authoritarianism and democracy can have kind of a spectrum And so along with these cycles we talked about their their obviously you know All the going back to like you know Greek philosophers. There's these cycles where you have democracy And then it kind of slowly poison itself and then you have a rise of like a tyrant and then they that kind of you know You kind of go through these cycles And but even in the more mild sense when you have this kind of like fraying situation And you get that rising populism you're more likely to get say a landslide and you kind of consolidate power And so for example FDR You know had an usual amount of power he had like 70% of congress You know he could he basically had a super majority he could potentially stack the court Press was under kind of fire. I mean they banned gold of ownership for 40 years Which is incredible in the land of the free They they could kind of to unilaterally do a lot of things And then that you know once that kind of period was over kind of that that power sort of decentralizing again Um and in recent decades we have had a strengthening executive branch once again And I you know I do think that we've kind of entered a little bit more of a mild authoritarian aspect here Which is you know just more is happening via say the executive order It actually is kind of like since since the time of FDR just the sheer rapidness of executive orders The kind of the challenge of the legal system and other things that kind of keep up with that The fact that we can have just so many military operations without Congress declaring war for example Which have massive effects I think we are in that kind of more it's not an accident that as you kind of Get that rising populism those rising balances you're more likely to get people to say I don't care what you know If it's bogus you know it's like burn it down right like that Yeah Exactly Uh and of course that if you pick depends how what way you go that can obviously backfire tremendously in many cases um And I think another challenge of course is that the the global structures is a slightly a slightly It's a very related but a slightly different thing than than the authoritarian democracy spectrum Is the rule of law spectrum basically in any given jurisdiction How strong is the rule of law was that independent courts or just kind of like that the rules don't change suddenly Um and you can have often the case it's it's a generally more democratic Uh environment will have rule of law because you know in a authoritarian environment the rule of law is what the ruler wants Um, whereas in that kind of more decentralized power the rule of law is kind of the highest thing in the land There are occasional kind of partial exceptions where you have something like Singapore Which has some authoritarian characteristics again because it's a spectrum But they also are a very attractive place for capital because they they generally do have pretty good rule of law It's generally kind of the among the closest you get to do something like a benevolent type of authoritarianism Um, and so they're not like perfect correlates But I think that what matters here is that one way or another we do have a weakening of rule of law Uh, you know not in the US I would say a big part of it but also elsewhere not everywhere equally Uh, and that affects one where capital wants to be uh, it affects it affects uh, how quickly capital conform and how efficient that capital gets allocated Uh, and in those more authoritarian environments or in those more kind of like fiscally dominant environments Um, when the state's kind of running very big interest expense when it's very indebted it doesn't usually just let that happen Passively it's it starts kind of fighting back Uh, and and you know we like in in the in the FDR era we entered industrial policy And now that's a term that's coming up a lot again recently it's like running industrial policy Uh, you know kind of just just being more open about some of these things and kind of taking on more Industrial and recant list policies I think it's not an accident that these things do Yeah, I completely agree I think another thing that to the kind of shift gears here that correlates I don't think it's a coincidence that people don't talk about very much is the growth of AI Um, my view is that You know we've gone through this 40 year period right of uh, uh, monetary policy driven what I call supply side economics Right sending money to plant at Palo Alto. I call it right which is a supply side Um, you know set of policies uh, you know borrowed money QE I goes to capital um And because of that we've created massive technological development right um, that's part of what's driven the inequality right This happens during every one of these supply side Periods and I think it's been on steroids the last 40 years and so You know since the introduction of the wheel everybody will think of this time is different But new technology Uh, and the speed of its development once you get to the kind of this point where policies starts turning to more fiscal uh uh, fiscal policy and populism Is exactly at the moment that that technology is almost that it's kind of unimaginable like exponential Ascent but it's actual ascent is a threat As all technology is to labor and to populism and to people And again, that's not a coincidence either So I actually see AI is this incredible accelerant Right at the end of this cycle right to the populism that's already there And again one of those momentum things we talked about That has is likely to actually undo itself Um and people everybody will think first order thinking that AI is incredibly deflationary It's going to create this deflationary force that's going to wash over Everything we do and yes, it technologies is beginning the time as deflationary and the growth of it is and I'm not arguing that, right? But I think what two people think about is how inflationary the response is to that deflationary impulse exactly at this moment where popularism is front and center. And I don't think that's a coincidence at all. Again, think about what led to the start of this inflation in 2020? I would argue COVID was probably other than the supply issues that were more short-lived was structurally deflationary. Well, it led to massive inflation. It led to the catalyst to that populism, which unleashed massive inflationary pressures. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on it again. I'm sorry to dominate that, but I want to get that thought out there and see your thoughts. Yeah. I agree with that. And one thing I would kind of characterize that is because the tech deflation and the response, one way to kind of look at that is that over the course of time, you got a money supply, right? And different types of money's grow at different rates. And we back in the 1800s, there was gold and silver and kind of the free bank system on top of it. In the modern era, we have central banking and the fractional service system on top of that. And so we had pretty good data going back to something like the late 1800s for the US, the UK, and many other countries of what money supply was doing and what prices were doing. And over that called it 150-year history. There were some periods of time where the gap between money supply growth and price growth was bigger or smaller than others. And that's pretty correlated to just how much productivity is going on, which partially-- a lot of its technology, until the time it's region. So for example, the late 1800s, you had a bigger than normal gap in the US between money supply growth and price growth, because we were literally expanding across a partially empty continent. There was very little shortage of raw materials. They had the gold rush. You literally were finding new money. Population was coming from the rest of the world here. And so you had all this kind of growth in the nominal money supply. But very little shortage of goods and services. Tons of labor was coming. Tons of land was available. Tons of literal resources like commodities. So you get that bigger than normal gap. Whereas if you look at the UK at the same time, the UK has already developed country. And you have a much tighter correlation between money supply and prices, because there's no massive source of just abundance. In a similar way, Japan, after World War II, hyperproductive, bigger than normal gap. Or Australia during the rise of China and their huge commodity demand. They're nearby neighbor Australia that was happy to supply them all their commodities. They had this bigger gap to money supply growth and inflation, because they're basically-- they have the China effect on them. And in the US, the other kind of big period of time was the '80s and '90s and early 2000s, where we had a bigger than normal gap between money supply growth and price growth. And a lot of that was automation. So we're automating manufacturing. We're globalizing. So we're hiring very inexpensive workers in China and Bangladesh and back then Taiwan, now Taiwan is wealthy. But you're hiring a lot of these foreign workers. So you're keeping costs down. You're keeping wages down, speaking of labor. And you're able to grow money supply a lot without that translating into a lot of price growth. Whereas the-- and finish up the inverse of that is when you have either slow productivity growth, you've run into tech ceilings. For example, temporary tech ceilings, we're just not getting much better very quickly. Or you've wore or shortages of raw material where you just don't have that abundant sink. So when you grow money supply, you get price growth that happens about as quickly, because you're not getting those productivity offsets. And so when AI represents the better it is, the more it is a productivity boost. And it's oppressed as kind of that white collar wage. And it creates so much more abundance and kind of white collar type of services in a similar way that the automation wave and the off-steroving wave did for blue collar type of work in the 80s and 90s. And it's a similar effect. We can get that-- I think it's really interesting, because it's one-to-one correlated to with the velocity of money. I mean, it's almost like a mag-- what your time out the productivity is a magnifier to the velocity of money. Because if we send money to capital, that money doesn't trickle down really into the system. It does, at first, very briefly. But then the real velocity of that is almost zero, actually some negative deflationary, ultimately, over a longer time period. Whereas you send money to the bottom, it's one-to-one velocity of money. But where the money is going also drives that productivity and that magnifying force on top of it. The two-to-one-- actually, they get just a magnifier. The one-to-one correlated. And the driver is who's getting the money at the end of the day. And so I completely agree with you. Again, there's other factors. You can't always over-- I mean, we're over simplifying, obviously. But we're talking about how the broad structures tend to work and the pressures in the system. So I think that's the thing that most people don't think about. I think about AI and technology. It's deflationary. It's first order. Like, this is going to change the world. But the reason that this is likely not to be that first order that everybody thinks is because it actually-- it's kind of a closed system with the pressures that then lead to the undoing of those exact pressures at the end of the cyclicality that we're talking about. I think that's so critical. It's interesting to hear. We really agree on a lot of things, but like, really kind of come to it slightly different. I think that's really, really, really powerful. So one of the last things I want to talk about here is one of the things you talk a lot about, right? And there's popularized a lot of your work as we're focused on crypto and its role in this system. I'd love to kind of have you speak a little bit to a broader maybe audience about your views on crypto. And then maybe go back and forth a little bit, because I have maybe some slightly different shading views on that. Sure. So I have two very different opinions on crypto, depending on what part of it we're talking about. There's two errors in crypto. One for me is that I'm actually bearish on most things in crypto. So I've been, for example, structurally bearish on altcoins. I mean, occasionally they're tradable, but structurally bearish on their overall use case, their overall kind of structural growth. I've written a number of pieces on that. Whereas the two areas that I have been long-term constructive on are Bitcoin and stablecoins. For somewhat two different reasons. So Bitcoin, basically I view it as kind of the invention of a decentralized ledger, which of course, when it comes into existence, the first question is can it work over a sustained period of time? Have the kind of variables-- is this system that's finally going to kind of function? Because there were some predecessors that of course didn't really last. And now that we're 17 years in, we kind of have at least some data on how it's working. And there is a never-cuff-effect aspect there, kind of like Ethernet, kind of like USB, kind of like simple mail transfer protocol, kind of like TCP/IP, where once you win a protocol war, you get this self-reinforcing effect. It's like you can come out with an Ethernet that's a little bit more efficient. But you're competing with the fact that there are 10 billion devices that already have Ethernet ports, for example, or a simple little trip for protocol, or even just a human language. It's hard to say, OK, we're all using English now, but here's this more efficient language. We're all going to shift to that. It's like, well, you're chipping into a never-cuff-effect. And so Bitcoin kind of has that self-reinforcing never-cuff-effect of security and liquidity, as well as being just kind of a simple design, the base layer, that kind of maximizes 40 centralization. So I view generally Bitcoin as a structural winner, not without risks and challenges, and of course, passive volatility, but it has been something I've been kind of multi-year bullish on. And the other one is just stable coins, which is when you're running a ledger like this, you can have tokens that are proxies for things. And so you can tokenize assets, and tokenizing the dollar has, of course, been the popular one, which is another way of putting it is that, for many decades, people have liked all sort of dollar bank accounts. So there's 180 currencies in the world. Most of them are not very good. Most of them lose value very quickly. Many people would like to store value in more stable areas. That's generally been accessible to the wealthy, because of all the overhead costs and all this. And stable coins are kind of like-- you use technology, you can press the overhead, you make an offshore bank account available to anyone with a smartphone. So anyone can just hold dollar proxies. You have to trust those dollar proxies. You have to trust that the US is not going to sanction those dollar proxies. But let's say you're in Nigeria, and money supplies growing by 15% a year, and you'd rather hold dollar equivalents. You say, well, it's centralized, but it's not controlled by Nigeria. It's controlled by the US and these other entities. So it kind of-- it breaks the borders of finance to some degree. And so ever since the market cap of stable coins was about 30 billion, I've been bullish on it. I mean, now it's in the ballpark of 300 billion, so we've had like a 10X, and I still think-- I think it's still thing it's got significant room to run. So those are the two areas that I've been constructive on. Both as a new investor and an analyst, and even-- I work in venture. I'm on some boards for companies, so I also see in kind of the development ecosystem. I love the nuance. And I've been to add some other layers of nuance here, and I love to kind of discuss. So I would agree 100% that DeFi is a-- incredible technology allows for a much more efficient system writ large. Blockchain, in general, I think, is a transformative technology, not just in finance, but across all. [BLANK_AUDIO] it'll permeate all technology eventually, like that ability to be truly secure. If that is true, by the way, we always have the other arguments that it may not long-term be fully secure, but assuming that and that they'll solve those problems. My, and by the way, I am also bullish a bit coin and the core cryptocurrencies in some short to medium-term, meaning a couple years, maybe five years. And that is more though a function of this demand by this generation, as I mentioned, who has one experience, which is technological advancement inequality, right? And a belief in that a system should be more fair. I think that's what led to its rise, and they're rising to political dominance, right? Over the next decade, you know, is about when they peak. And I think so over the next five plus 10 years, I think that the demand and growth and political will to accept these things is strong enough to, to in a sense be, to support it politically. My biggest concern, a long-term, and I do think its structure has major problems as a currency or sort of wealth, because it threatens power, right? We just talked about the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar, right? And how critical that is the US, and it's standing power, in my view. I think I have a little bit nuanced view, you don't think it's all good, all bad. I definitely think if the US loses the exorbit privilege of the US dollar, it loses its power, it's greatest source of power in the world, is my strong opinion there. And Bitcoin threatens that. And so yes, we currently have a president, who for a number of reasons, which we won't get into, supports crypto, and it is politically popular to do so as well. But I do believe there is a core, and this is why China has had problems with it. And by the way, if China becomes world dominant, it will, crypto will also take a back seat to the system, to be clear, I've already kind of signaled that. They want that exorbit privilege. Everybody wants that exorbit privilege. Kings and queens want the ability to shave coins. They want the ability to control these financial outcomes and attacks the people around them, right? So I think long term, meaning 10 plus years, I think the power and the growth of crypto actually, Bitcoin, undoes itself as a currency. So I think it's use case as a currency, ultimately will undo itself. I think of the short to medium term, meaning five years, which is a pretty long term, that's all that matters now. I think supply, demand wise, and given the regulatory current pathways, I think it's a structurally positive path for it. But I do think long term, it has a major problem as a long term career. Unless you believe a utopia can happen, unless you believe that power, the law of the jungle ultimately won't hold true, and that those with power won't want to use their power ultimately in the world. It sets castrates power in the places where it exists. And that's kind of the whole point. That was the whole idea. Why I had political power to begin with. And I think that is, in my opinion, a wonderful ideal, but doesn't really live well in the real world. I'd love to hear your thoughts. - Right, I think it'll parse it, depend on how much they can convince the people of that narrative. And I mean, as an example, the US ban gold, but then 40 years later, unbanned it, right? And it's not because they stopped caring about power. It's just because over time, it became more untenable to keep making it illegal to own a benign yellow medal. The narrative just wasn't really there, compared to, say, the 1930s. And so, to the extent that a government says, at the end of the day, Bitcoin is based a decentralized Excel spreadsheet backed up by energy instead of just like a centralized thing. So when a government kind of finds itself saying a decentralized spreadsheet challenges us, it's really hard to sell that narrative to the people. - True. And one of the most bullish things is when China will ban Bitcoin mining a dozen times, and there's still a non-trivial amount of Bitcoin mining in China, for example. Like when China has trouble fully banning something, it's actually kind of resilient. And then there's the global element. So when China did their really big, like 2021 ban, unbinding, I would say it's actually, it was good for the network because you had something like 67% of known hash rate in China. And by banning it, they didn't get all of it, but they disincentivized and pushed a lot of it out. It actually decentralized the network further. And Bitcoin, because it's kind of got this decentralized, kind of self rebuilding, self correcting aspect to it, it can kind of route around to wherever the biggest friction points are. So you'd have to have a very coordinated attack on it and sustain it and get buy-in from the people so that it doesn't just become this massive gray market thing. In a similar way that many countries try to make it illegal to own dollars or add frictions to their citizens from owning dollars, dollars still get in there and still get used. And so I think that kind of like gold, kind of like dollars in emerging markets, it's gonna go through a test. I totally agree that many, you know, I mean, Europe's, one of the phrases is, we have to ban self-hosted assets, self-hosted digital assets. It's basically saying that it's too dangerous for you to memorize 12 words representing your seed phrase. There's too much power for our people to have. We don't want that. And of course, though, the narratives they will try to use is say, okay, it's used by terrorists, so we have to make it illegal. - It's always a narrative to sell it. That's what I always do. - That's what I always do. - Yeah. Yeah, if you can convince enough people, right? So if you have an environment where a lot of people, they really want that security over that freedom. They really do trust their leaders to a significant degree. Then yeah, they can push, they can make it much harder for Bitcoin enthusiasts or any sort of digital asset enthusiasts to be in their jurisdiction. And if you do that, you know, the top five countries managed you pretty persistently, it takes a lot of liquidity and size out of the network. But at that point, say five to 10 years from now, they'd be going up against a pretty big network, most likely. And I think, I mean, I think the smart ones, and I think the most likely outcome here is that they target more, 'cause like the biggest attack they have on it is they don't like privacy on digital assets, because that makes it harder for them to trace it and tax it. They'll rarely say that. They'll focus on, you know, the terrorism aspect or the, you know, the focus on that kind of thing when they talk about privacy, but they also really mean is they wanna make sure they know if someone owns it so they can tax it. Because from their perspective, you know, if someone's, you know, a Bitcoin billionaire equivalent, as long as, you know, when they sell it or when they transfer it, as long as the government's kind of getting its cut, I think that that's where it's easier for them to have the battleground than to try to make it so that you get China-like draconian bands on it in an environment we have the constitution or we have countries with some of your rule of law, it's just really challenging to get kind of brought by it. I think they're gonna try. - Yeah, I think the reality is, look, prediction for me has always been a function of incentives, right, like show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. And I'm just saying that the incentives of those in power is both from a tax perspective and a tracking perspective and a control perspective, right? As well as from the perspective of controlling money supply, right, because again, exorbitant privilege allows you to get better outcomes versus adversaries if you can control your currency, you know, countries lose that control. That's actually the whole point of it, that's why it's so popular, right? Those two reasons, the anonymity and the flexibility, and ability to move and not be completely, as well as, you know, not being subject to the, the fiat kind of constraint. So, I think ultimately that, unfortunately, it's a cynical view and it's a pragmatic view, but it's also a realistic view in my mind. So, but we agree that there's still some time from that. Hopefully we'll be talking in five, 10 years and we'll get to kind of, then discuss where we are at that point. But a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for coming on. I think we covered some really interesting points and then look forward to chatting more and having more conversations over time. 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