In this week's episode of the podcast, we have a special guest on the show to talk about the current economic situation in the U.S. and whether or not we are in a recession. We also have an interview with economist and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, Michael Hyatt.
00:03:48.880So you'll, you know, cut out the laundry bill, you know, turn down the electricity, negotiate the rate.
00:03:53.780You'll do a lot else before you lay people off.
00:03:56.000When you start doing that, we're getting close to that point now.
00:03:59.360There's been some big layoffs announced recently.
00:04:01.980So that's another indicator that we're probably already in it.
00:04:05.220But hiring, new hiring stopped, as I say, six months ago.
00:04:08.540So there's some technical indicators, not to get too down in the weeds, but the yield curve is, the shape of the yield curve is one of the best economic forecasting tools out there.
00:05:46.000A downward sloping yield curve, and this is where, again, the big money kind of sets this, the market sets this, tells you that a recession is coming.
00:05:54.360And, you know, how do you draw that inference?
00:05:57.820Well, let's say short-term interest rates are 4%, and longer-term interest rates are 3%.
00:06:03.760Actually, the actual numbers now are closer to 5% and 4%.
00:06:09.260So, but you say, well, gee, I'll take a 4% coupon, 4% yield maturity, and a 10-year note, because that's going to look really sweet a couple years from now when interest rates are 1.5%.
00:06:18.760When the recession kicks in and interest rate collapse, that high coupon is going to look very attractive, number one.
00:06:24.720Number two, bond math 101 is kind of counterintuitive.
00:06:29.020But when interest rates go down, prices go up.
00:06:31.720And when interest rates go up, prices go down.
00:06:34.020So if you believe recession is coming and interest rates are coming down, you'll lock in the higher coupon now.
00:06:40.300And when interest rates do come down, you'll have capital gains on that note.
00:06:46.520But meanwhile, back here at the short end of the curve, 30-day bills or three-month bills or six-month bills or whatever, that really is much more subject to Federal Reserve control.
00:06:57.660It's about the only thing they control, this idea that the Fed can control long-term rates by manipulating short-term rates because this is just the value of a strip of short-term rates.
00:09:03.380So whether, you know, the Fed's going to, you know, whether they cut or pause at a given meeting, you know, I watch it, and it's pretty easy to forecast.
00:11:51.760So looking at it from the American perspective, what we're seeing is a return to something called the American system.
00:11:58.720It was invented by Alexander Hamilton in 1790.
00:12:01.520You know, his problem was first Treasury Secretary.
00:12:05.220We had revolutionary war debt and state debt that had kind of hung over from before the creation of the United States.
00:12:11.880And one of the first issues facing Congress is what do we do about all this debt?
00:12:16.480And so Congress said, well, that's easy.
00:12:18.400We'll just default as the American way.
00:12:20.680And Hamilton said, no, we'll borrow more, use that money to pay off the old debt, and then we'll just keep borrowing and just roll over the debt.
00:12:28.080And that was the creation of the government securities market.
00:12:51.320This can, you know, you had water wheels and looms and powering industry.
00:12:56.380But we need tariffs to protect us from primarily England because they were the leaders in that technology at the time.
00:13:04.160From 1790 to 1962, the United States grew economically, geographically, technologically, you know, telephone, telegraph, railroad, steam.
00:13:17.880I'm not saying we invented every one of those things, but we certainly applied them and invented quite a few of them.
00:13:22.620The greatest invention of all time economically was indoor plumbing.
00:13:28.040You know, 50% of humanity spent 70% of their time fetching water for 5,000 years.
00:13:34.640All of a sudden, women were free to do more productive things.
00:13:37.560So it's a little more powerful than the Internet.
00:13:40.780But my point is that whole regime, and there were very strong advocates starting, as I mentioned, with Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, Henry Clay, who was not president but was a powerful senator, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Calvin Coolidge, Dwight Eisenhower, all the way through, they all advocated tariffs.
00:14:02.240Now, the rap on tariffs, the Democrats ran this in the 2024 presidential campaign, and unfortunately, it kind of stuck.
00:15:01.140It is split between the producer and the importer, or it's completely pushed back down the supply chain to the producer.
00:15:09.560So the importer says, hey, I just paid 20% more.
00:15:12.620You need to lower your price 20% so that when you, or whatever the number is, so that when you throw on the tariff, it comes out about the same.
00:15:19.880Or the importer will eat it in the form of reduced margins or profits.
00:15:26.620The original exporter or the producer will eat it in terms of reduced profits or margins.
00:15:32.540The one party that does not eat the tariff is the consumer.
00:16:03.560There are a lot of, you know, and inflation generally, we're still, you know, the thing about the Biden inflation, they say, well, inflation went down from, it was 9.1% in June 2022.
00:16:14.280It's about 3% today, you know, give or take.
00:19:39.920But we respect you both and both really interesting people with interesting perspectives.
00:19:45.160Wouldn't if you force manufacturers to make things in America,
00:19:50.600I don't see how that wouldn't be inflationary because you have to pay people higher salaries here.
00:19:55.620So, yes, you're getting higher paying jobs into the US, but you're also pushing up the price of the things that those people make, aren't you?
00:20:02.560Do you have at least $50,000 in your 401k or another retirement account?
00:23:00.640I mean, Liam's working in a world of theory, but all these theories are badly flawed.
00:23:05.840And, again, I go back to the fact that this whole tariff idea scheme that I just outlined was how the United States operated from 1790 onward.
00:23:47.080Even David Ricardo knew that free trade, there was no such thing.
00:23:50.240The problem with free trade is they, you know, I had a really high grade point average in college, but I struggled a little bit with economics.
00:24:13.160So what they teach you is, you know, England is very good at shearing wool and textiles, and Portugal is very good at growing grapes and making wine.
00:24:21.720It makes no sense to grow grapes in England.
00:24:25.360It makes no sense to start a textile industry in Portugal.
00:24:28.500So why don't England make the textiles, Portugal make the wine, and just trade.
00:24:32.940Everybody's doing what they do best, and that's the theory of free trade.
00:25:06.760The problem is, and Ricardo actually recognized this, he said that the factors of production were static in that example, but in the real world, the factors of production are not static.
00:25:51.800They were very relaxed about, you know, if you were the hot programmer, developer in Taiwan Semiconductor and you wanted to spin out and start your own company, they would say, yeah, I'll give you the money.
00:26:01.020I'll give you the capital, you know, create a network of those firms.
00:26:04.040You know, maybe people were studying in Stanford or MIT, but they got back to Taiwan.
00:27:01.880Because there is there is the other aspect of it that I really want you to address.
00:27:06.180That is, we are in quite an antagonistic relationship with China at the moment.
00:27:12.560So that being the case, do we really want to slap these tariffs on or increase these tariffs by a significant amount?
00:27:20.540And that will be seen as an antagonistic gesture to China, which will then put China on more of a kind of war footing, which means that they will then look covetously, as we already know they're doing at Taiwan, but think to themselves, you know what?
00:27:36.880What is our relationship like with America?
00:44:00.480I went and listened to that interview.
00:44:02.260He says the exact opposite of what these people are claiming.
00:44:04.820So there is a lot of stuff lying about.
00:44:07.560That's not to say that all the people pro-Ukraine are telling the truth all the time.
00:44:12.280But I think that we've got ourselves into these very two polarized narratives when I think actually the truth is NATO expansion is not something that Russia likes.
00:44:24.940And to that extent, you could argue that they were provoked.
00:44:27.220The counterargument to that, which no one ever puts, and I think it's worth discussing, is if NATO hadn't expanded eastwards, where would Putin's control over Eastern Europe be now?
00:44:37.120Would it still be where it is or would it be further west?
00:44:39.680And my argument is, of course, it would be further west because every time that Russia can expand westwards and it's strong, that's what it does.
00:44:46.040Historically, that's why all these countries in Europe are concerned, because we know our own history.
00:44:51.340Why is the EU basically voided what would otherwise be a legitimate election in Romania?
00:44:58.580Well, again, it's another example of Europe's, you know, pretending to support democracy when, in fact, they support autocracy or anything that the leading, Carly Giordesco was the leading candidate in Romania who was, I won't say pro-Russian, but he was certainly against the war and willing to work with Putin or with, you know, Russian Federation.
00:45:24.780But, you know, Putin's in charge, as is the Slovak Republic, Hungary, Orban certainly has an open line there.
00:45:32.320So you're not seeing Russia invade Eastern Europe.
00:45:35.000What you're seeing is Eastern Europe come to their senses about working with other powers and actually trying to get peace.
00:45:41.740But that's not true in Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, right?
00:48:27.940And they found some that were, like, a couple hundred thousand, I think, in Saudi Arabia that were, because the Czechs are very good at this,
00:48:44.160The U.S. has a little productive capability.
00:48:45.900So my point being, all of our premier, you know, advertised, all of these magic solutions, not one of them worked.
00:48:54.320And not only did they fail and allow the Russians to do what they've done, but it makes no sense to rebuild these things, to make more of them.
00:49:02.620We need completely, we need tens or hundreds of billions in R&D, completely new systems.
00:49:11.620But so the reason I'm talking about with the U.S. being the policemen of the world isn't just, you know, military interventions or supporting Ukraine.
00:50:56.540Obama and Biden gave Iran tens of billions of dollars, actually more than that, closer to $100 billion, left gold and pallets of currency on the runway.
00:51:08.780And by the way, they had to go to the Central Bank of the Netherlands to get euros because they couldn't give them dollars because they were kicked out of the dollar system.
00:51:14.980So when we gave them billions of dollars in cash on pallets, they were euros.
00:51:20.120But they put them to good use, financing the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas.
00:51:26.260And, you know, not as much on the West Bank.
00:51:27.760But that was the whole, you know, Shiite crescent.
00:51:31.160And by the way, one thing we haven't talked much about that is, let's go back to Samuel Huntington, is because we're so secularized, people don't understand the importance of religion in everything we're talking about.
00:51:44.580Now, and this is a huge factor in Ukraine, getting back to Ukraine for a second, but regardless of political sympathies, the eastern half is Russian Orthodox.
00:51:55.120They look to the Patriarch in Moscow, and the western half is more Catholic, and they look to the Pope in Rome.
00:52:01.760That's been going on for a thousand years.
00:52:03.220But my point is, there's no more natural solution than a peaceful division of the country, and even if it were still a separate country, an eastern and western Ukraine, one looking to the east, one looking to the west.
00:52:15.760And the people who did this, I was in the Slovak Republic.
00:52:18.980I was in Bratislava, and I was a guest of one of the members of parliament.
00:52:22.220And he took me onto the floor of the Slovak Republic parliament and spent a lot of time with them.
00:52:29.760And I said, you know, what they did was amazing, because they, Czechoslovakia, which is just this put-together thing, they realized themselves internally that this wasn't a good fit, that splitting the country down the middle, breaking into two republics, made a lot of sense.
00:52:48.760It was done peacefully with referenda.
00:52:50.880There was no, there were no riots, there was no color revolution, there was no mine on square, and there was no war.
00:52:57.200So a solution like that, but going to your point, Francis, that's an example of, oh, it's internal, so not diplomacy in the strict sense, but diplomacy and negotiation and good faith in action.
00:53:32.480They're absolutely off their rocker, mental, completely insane ideologues, Islamists.
00:53:40.760How much can you actually negotiate with somebody who is that insane, to put it bluntly?
00:53:46.740Well, they may not be open to negotiations for the reason you mentioned, but they do pay attention to financial sanctions.
00:53:54.260Now, Obama started a financial war against Iran, not shooting, but, you know, financial with sanctions and so forth, in late 2007, early 2012.
00:54:07.540His goal was to get to this joint comprehensive memorandum for the JCPOA, which was joint comprehensive points of agreement, I think it is.
00:54:21.060But be it as it may, this nuclear deal basically slowed down the nuclear enrichment process in Iran.
00:55:01.360Why didn't you dial up the pressure a little bit?
00:55:03.520And they said, well, our goal was to get them to the table, and we did.
00:55:07.140And I said, yeah, and you negotiated a really, you know, poor agreement.
00:55:11.540But when, so then when Trump came in, and that was it, then we started giving them money once they signed that, well, actually it was never signed, actually.
00:55:20.280And experts have looked at the Persian and the U.S. versions of it and got expert translators, and they don't match.
00:55:28.840So we didn't agree to anything, but we acted like we did.
00:55:31.600But when Trump got in, he instituted what was called the maximum pressure campaign, and that worked.
00:55:37.780No more gifts, no more palace of money, no more gold, no more, you know, it was maximum pressure, and the oil exports were greatly affected, and there was no money coming in.
00:56:18.540We're not talking about the 2020 election.
00:56:21.180Although you haven't heard the last of that.
00:56:23.340But Biden gets in and, again, turns on all the spigots, takes off all the sanctions, reinstates their access to banking, oil exports go up, and we give them more money.
00:57:03.000It has terrorist capability, no doubt about it.
00:57:05.220But they basically have taken over about 40% of the Iranian economy, and they just skim, and they – I don't know where all their mansions are, probably in Dubai.
00:57:13.400But they are – it's an utterly corrupt – whoever is not a theocratic extremist is a corrupt government official, not counting the everyday people in Iran.
00:57:25.200But the Israeli attacks last year did destroy most of the Iranian air defenses.
00:58:09.700If you listen to what – people whose business it is to know as much as we can about this, if you listen to them, they seem convinced that Iran is – it's more a matter of months than years.
00:59:38.000Jim, I want to come back to economics, because it's an interesting detail into geopolitics, and I think it's interesting to have a disagreement and discussion about those things.
00:59:46.060But actually, if someone's tuned into this going – I want to understand where the economy is going.
00:59:51.420We started with two interesting things.
01:00:11.960The kind of expanding economy – first of all, everything I described would take a year to two years to really show its effects in the best of circumstances.
01:00:31.980These things are going to take one or two years, even longer.
01:00:36.040I mean, semiconductor fabs are like incredible laboratories.
01:00:41.300I mean, they have to be built very slowly, very carefully because of particles and pollutions and all this.
01:00:47.400This stuff will take years, but it will happen.
01:00:50.260So I have a very positive outlook for 2026 and beyond.
01:00:54.640But 2025, we've got a hangover from Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.
01:01:00.740Well, it was really Pelosi's Inflation Reduction Act, which was not only misnamed.
01:01:05.540That was the Green News scam in disguise.
01:01:07.900The Inflation Reduction Act, so-called, which increased inflation, by the way, was the Green News scam.
01:01:14.340And they gave John Podesta a $900 billion slush fund and basically allowed him to allocate it.
01:01:21.880Now, if you look at the line items that the money went to, they sound good.
01:01:26.440You know, we're going to help rural people buy, you know, put solar cells or solar modules on their roofs and we're going to do this and going to do that.
01:01:50.960And that's all being demonstrated thanks to – people knew it, but Elon Musk has got the – I hate to use cliches, but he's got the receipts.
01:01:57.980I mean, they can actually show all that.
01:02:01.240The Green News scam has been a front for basically a massive multi-10 trillion dollar beyond wealth transfer from north to south.
01:02:14.220Well, if you're in the south, why wouldn't you want that?
01:02:16.280If you're the middleman, why wouldn't you want that?
01:02:21.540But people are waking up – not only waking up to it.
01:02:24.640I mean, the scientific evidence is very clear that no one – other than plant food, which is a good thing, no one quite knows what CO2 does.
01:05:01.460And then the thaw began in the late 19th century.
01:05:04.600And maybe it's been warming a little bit since.
01:05:07.060The best measurement of water levels – actually, you know, we're here in New York down at the Battery.
01:05:13.020There's a measurement, a gauge that's been monitored and recorded since the late 19th century around 1890, you know, give or take a few years – shows that the oceans are rising at a rate of 7 inches per 100 years, subject to reverse because these things tend to reverse over time.
01:05:32.880So 7 inches in 100 years, it's not going to get, you know, Anderson Cooper's feet wet anytime soon.
01:05:59.880But to your point, Constantine, that's the hangover.
01:06:04.340The inflation that we saw in 2022 and lingering, even today, it's not as high, but it's still there, was because of this pumping too much money into an economy that couldn't absorb it.
01:06:21.600It does have to do with fiscal policy and, you know, huge budget deficits.
01:06:27.080We had a – coming into Biden, we had a baseline deficit.
01:06:30.780Like, the deficits, they're just there.
01:06:32.160If you kept everything the same, a trillion dollars a year, which is a big number.
01:06:36.300But today, it's beyond $2 trillion a year.
01:06:39.160So even if you cut a trillion out, which is, you know, good luck, they're trying.
01:06:43.100But even if you cut a trillion out, which is almost impossible, you'd still have a trillion dollar deficit left over.
01:06:49.580But this Inflation Reduction Act, I mean, there are new studies coming out showing that the impact of it will add $6 trillion to the deficit over a period of about 20 years.
01:07:02.700And the way they – scoring is a term of art, but the Congress has to score a piece of legislation to figure out how you're going to pay for it, et cetera.
01:07:14.180But they have a horizon that's five years or seven years, depending on what the OMB wants.
01:07:21.120But it doesn't mean the law goes away in seven years.
01:07:23.400It just means that we're only going to count seven years.
01:07:26.160But as long as it's on the books, it goes on forever.
01:07:29.760And this new study from the Cato Institute shows that that actual cost is going to be, you know, in the tens of trillions of dollars.
01:07:38.980So can we get that amended or rescinded somehow?
01:07:43.260But that's – you've got to get rid of that inflation hangover.
01:07:49.260The tariffs will cause some supply chain – they won't cause inflation, but they will cause some supply chain disruption.
01:07:56.260That's a bit of a headwind for the economy.
01:07:58.660These government layoffs haven't – you know, terminations, whatever you want to call them – haven't shown up in the unemployment figures yet.
01:08:06.240They will – but that's probably coming this summer because, you know, you get laid off and you get severance or you get a notice period or whatever.
01:08:15.660So you can't actually apply for unemployment until a little further down the road.
01:10:12.680And he won re-election in 1984 with one of the greatest landslides in history because the economy was on that path.
01:10:20.200So when you have a real recession, you can come out of it gangbusters.
01:10:24.760I mean, it may be the case that the most of the U.S. – the U.S. is a mature economy, the most we can grow in real terms, maybe 3.5%.
01:10:34.840That's true over a long period of time.
01:10:37.380But for short periods where you're coming out of a recession, you can grow a 4.5% because there's a lot of excess capacity that gets used up.
01:10:46.080Now, the most important thing for anyone trying to analyze the U.S. economy, you've got to look at Scott Besson's 333 plan.
01:10:54.280There was some talk about it in late December, doing the transition, and then it kind of fell off the radar screen.
01:11:56.260Well, actually, if you look at the entire boom in the Russian economy under Vladimir Putin, it's basically been one thing, which is oil prices have gone up.
01:12:54.640Why haven't we just started making our own energy?
01:12:59.660Why actually blow up the Nord Stream pipeline?
01:13:02.080Well, my view on that is that the Americans blew it up because it's good for them so that they can export their energy to Europe.
01:13:08.820Well, I would say the Americans and the Brits blew it up to basically keep Germany from – keep Germany in line basically.
01:13:17.820Yeah, keep them dependent on US energy.
01:13:19.780But Biden did everything possible to keep the price of oil high, shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, took millions upon millions of acres of federal land off the table in terms of exploration for oil and natural gas.
01:13:32.840And then they – Karine Jean-Pierre, whatever her name was, she'd say, well, there are like 5,000 leases that were just given out.
01:13:47.400So some people might be watching this and there will be a lot of people who watch our show that agree with you about Ukraine, which is totally – people are right to have different opinions.
01:13:54.360Let's explore the argument that you're making so that people have at least heard it.
01:14:29.000They don't – you know, the people – Constantine, we're all kind of captives to our own upbringing in the academic sense.
01:14:36.220And what I mean by that is, you know, I got – I did graduate work in economics and international relations during the 1970s.
01:14:42.860The absolute height of the Cold War and I had a certain view of things.
01:14:47.400But the policymakers in the Biden administration talking about George Kent, George Kent, Fiona Hill, Victoria Nuland, and Tony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan, and the whole warmonger class, their formative years were in the 1990s.
01:16:35.920So, but Americans who were coming of age, meaning 20-something, 30-something, let's say 20-something, getting their graduate degrees in their Georgetown, you know, ticket punched and all that stuff, looked at that and said, Russia is a pushover.
01:17:59.700So my point being the warmonger class, the people who started this war and provoked this war, came up at a time when Russia looked like easy pickings.
01:18:10.220Putin pulled the rug out from under them.
01:19:43.340But it was a class of, you know, public intellectuals and scholars and so forth who grew up at a time when Russia looked like a pushover and they never got over it.
01:19:51.200I suppose the one counter argument to that, Jim, is wouldn't that class have learned from the disaster that was Afghanistan, Iraq, et cetera, particularly Iraq, where we had this grandiose idea that we were going to come in, we were going to overthrow Saddam, it was all going to be the land of milk and honey, democracies, blah, blah, blah.
01:20:09.980And it's turned into a hellhole and millions of people have died and it's been a tragedy.
01:20:16.180And the answer is no, they haven't learned.
01:20:18.880They're, you know, we wouldn't have had the war in Ukraine if they had learned anything from Iraq.
01:20:23.340We wouldn't have had, you know, the situation in the Middle East today if they had learned anything from, oh, Iraq was a good object lesson.
01:20:58.580And they believe in a kind of U.S. imperialism.
01:21:02.860It's not just the policeman of the world.
01:21:04.200It's the dictator of the world, if you want to put it that way.
01:21:07.460But anyway, getting back to oil, Biden did everything possible to keep the price of oil as high as possible for two reasons.
01:21:13.640One, they wanted to make solar modules and other substitutes, you know, the windmills and solar modules and all that stuff, more affordable.
01:31:13.640If I owe you a dollar, I owe you a dollar.
01:31:16.120It's interesting if it's worth 90 cents or $1.25, but it's a nominal number.
01:31:20.640So if you have 3% real growth, which is what Besson wants, but inflation is 2% or 3%, which it is, you're going to have 5.5%, 6% nominal growth.
01:31:30.640So if you get the deficit, the 3% of GDP, and growth is, nominal growth is 5% or 6%, 3% real, you know, 3 plus 2, 5 or 6% real, guess what's happening?
01:35:31.100We're going to go to Substack and ask you questions from our supporters.
01:35:36.060Before we do, we always end with the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?
01:35:41.700Before Jim answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our Substack.
01:35:46.800The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.
01:35:50.720What does Jim make of Trump's desire to economically subjugate Canada?
01:35:55.340What, in your opinion, are the safest investments in the current economic climate?
01:36:01.680Why is it quantitative easing in the U.S. and the U.K., but printing money in Zimbabwe and Vimar Germany?
01:36:09.460Well, I don't think anyone, we touched on this briefly, but I don't think anyone's talking enough about religion.
01:36:16.700And I'm not proselytizing, I'm not preaching religion.
01:36:19.600I'm just saying that to ignore the cultural value and the cultural impact and the behavioral impact of religion on people's lives all over the world.
01:36:27.360I just returned from two weeks in India.
01:36:37.560But 200 million Muslims, more than Pakistan, which was the original Islamic State, but there are more Muslims in India, more than any other country in the world, except Indonesia, which is somewhat more, but...
01:36:51.780Well, 220 million, and approximately 1 billion Hindus, very large, actually not so large, Buddhist population, but there are, well, six, Jains.
01:37:08.500I mean, I know in the past there, I understand the history, I've said it closely, but it's a very, very peaceful country, but there's not even, the notion of a separation of church and state kind of doesn't exist because there's so, religion is so much a part of what everybody does every day.
01:37:28.460You care about your religion, but you don't think about it as like, oh, something I do on Sunday or one day a week.
01:37:33.520Yeah, you go to the temple, et cetera, but it infuses the culture, the population, and one of the reasons that they're so adamant about not giving the states too much power, the history of India is just fractured.
01:37:50.860I mean, 1947 was the first time it was ever a united country, even under the Mughal Empress, there were Hindu leaders in the South and so forth.
01:37:59.880But we talked about Ukraine, we talked about the Slovak Republic, we talked about Putin and the church.
01:38:08.080It's a, you know, Samuel Huntington said, this is the early 90s, he said, take a map of the world, put a transparency on it, and draw lines every place there's bloodshed.
01:38:18.020And in Northern Ireland at the time, but fortunately not true today, but Middle East, obviously, but there were these, there was killing all over the world along these lines.
01:38:28.760He said, now take another transparency and draw the dividing lines among the major religions and put one over the other and you'll discover they're the same.
01:38:37.220That the explanatory power of religion in terms of where the world is fighting is extremely powerful, and yet we don't talk about it.
01:38:48.640So I would say that's one for the next time.
01:38:53.220Does Jim believe Trump is actively promoting cryptocurrency?