The Breakdown of the Fiat World Order | Parker Lewis

**Parker Lewis** (0:02)
There will be an event, there will be a moment when confidence is lost in the currency. Stop using each other's currencies and adopt a neutral currency, and then the currency isn't a weapon, there's a much better chance of order that isn't dictated by one single power broker, you know, being the winner of a world war. Bitcoin is volatile because it's difficult to understand. Bitcoin goes up over time because more people do.

**Danny Knowles** (0:38)
Parker Lewis, welcome back, man. Yeah. I think, so I read Ray Dalio's piece on Twitter the other day, and it feels like the most important sort of macro geopolitical story right now. And as I was reading it, there's no mention of Bitcoin, there's little mention of like what's got us to this point, although it's obviously a chat from his book, so I think he probably lays that out earlier in the book. But in the article, at least, there was no mention of how we got here. And as I was reading that, I was like, I want to get Parker's take on this. Because he's basically setting this up as the sort of breakdown of the world order, complete loss of faith in institutions, potentially heading to war. I don't know, I know you were going to read it. Do you agree with his take, or do you think this is sort of peak doomerism?

**Parker Lewis** (1:25)
So, I want to pull something up from, I have a quote of his in my book. But I think that it's peak doomerism. It's not that it's not directionally on point. But, and I did go and read the whole thing, and it's like I'm not the closest follower of Ray Dalio, but I do follow him. Not just on Twitter, but just as an investor. And so, I'm familiar with Bridgewater and his background.
And I'm also familiar with people that used to be executives at Bridgewater. It feels like very, to me at least, non deep surface level thinking.

**Danny Knowles** (2:21)
Okay.

**Parker Lewis** (2:22)
Observing maybe symptoms, observing things that are happening, and trying to explain them at a very surface level without getting into cause and effect, I'd say. One of my takeaways from reading the piece, and I can't remember exactly how it was tiled. It was like the old world order is dead or something like that.

**Danny Knowles** (2:54)
Yeah, essentially, it was like the world order is broken down.

**Parker Lewis** (2:57)
Yeah, the world order is broken down, and the world order is over. And I was like, well, in his piece as an example, he didn't even define what the world order was. And so research that I did, I mean, he talked around it, but didn't... Whenever you're talking that way, he basically said, the existing world order is broken down without explaining what that exactly is and just saying that we're going from a place of more order to disorder and talked about big cycles, but also didn't actually talk about the cause and effect of why things are breaking down.
And so that was just a high-level take away that I had from it. And we can get into specifics about the piece, but it talked about there's various different kinds of war and economic war leading up to physical war, and really intimating, presumably, that it's like US versus China, but didn't expressly say that. And he also didn't really have, didn't mention gold at some part, and that bonds would deflate, again, without just getting into the root of what's causing it all.

**Danny Knowles** (4:31)
So, I mean, obviously, this was one chapter of his book, and I've not read his book. I've got it, but I've not read it yet. I wonder if there's also, he does some of that sort of preliminary stuff earlier in the book. But let's try and like lay out what the world order was or is at this point. Because like when I read it, what I took from it is, it's almost like the post-world war order of, you know, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, the UN, all these institutions that have been like the rules-based system for such a long time.
We're potentially transitioning away from that being as effective. But I guess the question that I would have is, when people say that things like the UN, NATO, IMF, World Bank are no longer working in the system that we're in today, like what has changed since the sort of 1940s when these institutions first came onto the scene?

**Parker Lewis** (5:22)
Yeah. So, I mean, one, like again, my observation is just that what it generally means is that the US has been the dominant world power, and there were alliances that existed post World War II. America was, the United States was in control of everything, and nobody would step out of line. And now we're going to a place where that power structure, like, and I think he might have even mentioned this in the book, or maybe I'm referencing other things where it talks about these big global shifts, is that once there's a up and coming power that is in conflict with an existing power, that power struggle exists, and once the rising power gets large enough, it doesn't, the order that previously existed that came from the existing, essentially, superpower being able to threaten and when is fractured. Again, he talks about symptoms on like, not really expressly how to position, but one of the things that he didn't address, at least I don't think, is the currency as a causal piece of the order breaking down. I think he like intimates that in other places. But like one of the examples, I just pulled this up from my book to like, not set the stage, but like an example of why like I just generally don't think of Ray Dalio as a super deep thinker. Again, like not in an insulting way. It's like there's a broad class of investors. Because I would say like Ray Dalio is someone who has said that he's allocating to Bitcoin, but nothing that he's ever said indicates that he really understands what's happening or how to evaluate it. He's like, he's around the hoop, right? Like he's not far off in terms of what I would call pattern matching of connecting things together, but also at the same time, not really understanding the core principle. And so let me just find this. I have a few quotes in the book. So this goes back to 2017 This was like right after for me, like I'd gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole in 2016 And I'm watching CNBC one morning, and I figured out both why Bitcoin is emerging as money, I've also figured out why they're always going to have to print money, and why they have to print money.